Background
Robert Godwin-Austen was born on March 17, 1808, in Guildford, Surrey. He was the son of Sir Henry Edmund Austen of Shalford House, Guildford, and Anne Amelia Bate.
Oriel College, Oxford OX1 4EW, United Kingdom
Godwin-Austen was educated in France and subsequently at Oriel College, Oxford, taking his Bachelor of Arts in 1830.
United Kingdom
Godwin-Austen was elected a member of the Geological Society of London in 1830.
United Kingdom
Godwin-Austen was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1849.
Robert Godwin-Austen was born on March 17, 1808, in Guildford, Surrey. He was the son of Sir Henry Edmund Austen of Shalford House, Guildford, and Anne Amelia Bate.
Godwin-Austen was educated in France and subsequently at Oriel College, Oxford, taking his Bachelor of Arts in 1830.
Godwin-Austen's first original work was devoted to the limestones and slaty rocks of southeast Devon, where he had settled after his marriage. Henry de la Beche, who in 1835 founded the Geological Survey of Great Britain, encouraged the young man by relying upon him for the geological lines on the map covering the district between Dartmouth and Chudleigh. Austen was, however, sufficiently independent of mind to resist the introduction, proposed by Adam Sedgwick, Murchison, and William Lonsdale, of the Devonian system.
After 1840, when he moved to Chilworth manor house, near Guildford, Godwin-Austen began to devote his considerable energies to the geology of Surrey. Here his interests included the fossil faunas of the Cretaceous rocks, the origin of the phosphatic deposits, and the succession in the Tertiary sands. His work on the structure of the Weald led him to conclude that the folding postdated the deposition of the lower Tertiaries. Now he was beginning to view the stratigraphical data in a wider context, to derive a picture of seas advancing and retreating over western Europe. Pursuing these conceptions, Godwin-Austen visited the coalfields of northern France and studied the structure of the Ardennes. In 1856 he produced what remains his best-known paper, suggesting a possible extension of the coal measures beneath southeast England. Maintaining, on theoretical grounds, that the coal-bearing strata of England, France, and Belgium once formed part of a continuous formation, he traced its breakup by folding and erosion, calling attention to the probability that in the east-west belt between the Ardennes and Bristol, coal measures basins other than those at the two extremities should exist. Godwin-Austen’s views attracted interest, and in his last paper, published in 1879, he was still advocating them. They were not, however, vindicated until six years after his death, when a borehole drilled at the foot of Shakespeare Cliff near Dover proved coal measures beneath the chalk and led to the development of the Kent coalfield.
Godwin-Austen was elected a member of the Geological Society of London in 1830. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1849. He was also a member of Lincoln's Inn.
In 1833 Robert married Maria Elizabeth Godwin, only daughter, and heiress of General Sir Henry Thomas Godwin, who commanded the British army in Burma. Upon the death of his father-in-law in 1854, Austen added the name of Godwin to his own by royal license.