To the Small Museum with Jody Cooksley

Submitted: 18th June 2025

To the Small Museum with Jody Cooksley

The gothic world of Jody Cooksley is certainly one you need to visit. Don’t eat anything just before mind….it’s gorgeously gruesome at times….

Book maps by Jody Cooksley

The Small Museum Jody Cooksley

The Small Museum was initially inspired many years ago by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, a wonderful and strange collection with eccentric curation. I began to write the story following a visit to The Hunterian Museum in London, which is the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and the chapter titles are all exhibits from that collection.

Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford

Book maps by Jody Cooksley

Both Museums are well worth a visit. I’ve long been fascinated by nineteenth-century science and the Victorians’ urge to discover, collect and sort the natural world. It was a bold time of factories and steam power. It was a time of the possibilities of progress and an entirely new, educated middle-class. But as much as the Victorians were eager to exploit industry and dominate globally, they were frightened of the new evolutionary science and what it meant for religion. And they were obsessed with trying to understand it. It’s a rich context for fiction and the opportunity to explore dark motivations for character.

The Hunterian Museum

Book maps by Jody Cooksley

Almost every wealthy family of the time had a small museum of some kind in their homes. It was a place to display elements of nature. Those who considered themselves to be men of science went much further in their searches for the strangest and most unusual. There were cut-throat claims on discoveries. Furthermore, there were even outright fakes, designed to raise the profile of ‘finders’ with the Societies.

It’s these unnatural behaviours that I wanted to explore in The Small Museum. The idea that such megalomania could drive characters to very dark and twisted ends.

Book maps by Jody Cooksley

In the novel, Dr Lucius Everley is a ruthless scientist with a burning ambition to restore his father’s name – at any cost. He’s a collector of nature who has worked for years towards the discovery of ‘fish with feet’ and appears to be on the cusp of realising his dream. His young wife is a talented anatomical artist and is tasked with imagining his creatures in drawings. When she loses a child at birth, they travel together to Charmouth. A trip that she hopes will bring them together. But what she discovers about his work whilst they are there allows her to piece together the horrors of the reality behind his cabinet of curiosities.

Book maps by Jody Cooksley

A large part of The Small Museum takes place in London, but I needed a key location for the ‘discovery’ of a fossil creature. I knew it should be Dorset, the main rich seam of Jurassic finds and an important area for Victorian collectors. Charmouth may be less famous for fossils than neighbouring Lyme Regis, but its coast is just as beautiful and its cliffs are studded with history. It’s still quiet and unspoilt, much of its architecture is Victorian and the main street looks almost the same as it would have done in the 1870s. It was very easy to picture their boarding house and imagine the characters in it at the time, a seaside sojourn for the couple and the place where Madeleine, who has suffered a terrible start to her marriage, finally allows herself to believe that life will improve.

Charmouth

Book maps by Jody Cooksley

Boarding houses sprang up in great number along the Dorset coast at the time, catering to the race to be the first to discover and name new ‘great lizards’ and other finds. You can imagine their heyday when you walk along Charmouth’s streets, full of impressive nineteenth-century villas with balconies designed for taking the sea air. Dorset’s limestone is perfect for preservation, creating an attractive draw for amateurs with little knowledge of how to look for specimens. Fossils of all kinds could be found very easily. Victorian collectors were competitive and I wanted to explore the darkness in such contests because what Maddie discovers about his work whilst they are at Charmouth allows her to piece together the horrors of the reality behind his small museum.

Thank you Jody!