

William Buckland in 1843. Graphic: public domain

Victorian Britain saw a number of innovations still popular today: the postage stamp, the vacuum cleaner and, most successfully, eccentricity. One fairly typical example was solicitor William Quilliam, known as the Sheikh of Britain, who built the county's first mosque and kept a pet jackal in his house. To the west, famed Cornish poet Robert Stephen Hawker lived in a hut made from driftwood, dressed as a mermaid, and excommunicated his cat (the poor moggy was prone to mousing on Sundays).

Then there was Major-General Charles George Gordon, a British army officer whose day-job saw him fight a series of bloody campaigns across the Middle East and Africa, yet was almost as notorious for believing that the Earth was encased in a hollow sphere and that the Garden of Eden was located in the sea somewhere off the coast of the Seychelles.

My favourite eccentric, however, was William Buckland, one of Victorian England's premier geologists and palaeontologists. Rather impressively, however, and more than a century before Jeffrey Steingarten came to prominence, he really was the man who ate everything.

Buckland was born in 1784, a year in which famine in Japan claimed 300,000 lives and a massive locust swarm hit South Africa. Coincidence? Of course, but it fits the theme of this blog post nicely, so I'm leaving it in. After winning a scholarship to Oxford in 1801, he became the first person to read geology at the university, before qualifying as a priest and then becoming a lecturer, a job that quickly garnered him a reputation as a somewhat unorthodox teacher:

He paced like a Franciscan preacher up and down behind a long showcase ... He had in his hand a huge hyena's skull. He suddenly dashed down the steps - rushed skull in hand at the first undergraduate on the front bench and shouted "What rules the world?" The youth, terrified, answered not a word. He rushed then on to me, pointing the hyena full in my face - "What rules the world?" "Haven't an idea", I said. "The stomach, sir!", he cried "rules the world. The great ones eat the less, the less the lesser still!"

Buckland's obsession with the animal kingdom knew no bounds. As President of the Royal Geographical Society he published the first scientific study of a dinosaur skeleton, while his role at the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals allowed him to import all sorts of creatures into the UK in order to study their suitability for the dinner table. Rather conveniently, this coincided with his lifelong personal ambition, which was to eat an example of every animal in existence, like some kind of crazed, bloodthirsty Noah.

No living creature was safe from Buckland's mania. Mice on toast were a regular feature of his no-doubt popular soirées, while other animals to guest at these events included the porpoise, puppy and panther ... and that's just the 'P's. Once, when visiting a cathedral, he was told of a local legend claiming that fresh saints' blood was to be found on the floor. Buckland, never one to turn down the opportunity to try a new flavour, licked the flagstones and was able to dispprove the myth, immediately identifying the mystery liquid as bat urine.

Probably the most extraordinary of the great man's exploits came on a visit to Lord Harcourt, the Archbishop of York, at Nuneham Courtenay, just outside Oxford. Shown what was claimed to be the heart of Louis XVI, preserved in a silver casket (Harcourt was a collector of esoterica), Buckland immediately gobbled the fleshy artifact down, unable to resist the opportunity to chow down on the heart of a king.

The worst thing Buckland ever ate? Bluebottles, apparently. And mine? It's a tie: a decade ago I had a fish starter at Mezzo that haunts me to this very day, while an order of Wiener schnitzel at a shabby Moscow hotel in 2001 came on a bed of live maggots.

I left the table, but I like to think that Buckland would have got stuck right in.