The Canadian Arctic was a space of significant British imperial activity in the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly as the site of the Northwest Passage, the maritime route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific. Each of the ten essays in this collection focuses on a prominent British actor and one or several of the texts they produced in relation to the searches for the passage, including for John Franklin’s lost expedition—some were direct participants, others were outside observers, representative of broader British society and culture. This collection is presented as a “sequel” to the 2013 collection, The Quest for the Northwest Passage: Knowledge, Nation and Empire, 1576–1806, also edited by Frédéric Regard and published by Pickering & Chatto—though Russell Potter, in his introduction, states that the two collections can be read separately.
The collection mainly covers the forty-year period beginning in 1818 with John Ross’ voyage to Baffin Bay and ending in 1858 with Leopold McClintock’s return to Britain with confirmation of the fate of John Franklin’s expedition. In general, each of the contributors makes a fine contribution to our understanding of British Arctic culture in the nineteenth century through careful readings of particularly significant public and private texts. Each chapter emphasises the ways in which the Arctic—its landscapes and its peoples—was as much an imagined as a material region, as well as an important element and stage for the performance of identities and relationships. Of the ten authors, eight are scholars of literature, two are historians and one author claims both disciplines.
Russell A. Potter, rather than the editor, introduces the volume with an essay exploring issues of risk, sacrifice, heroism, science and the idea of usefulness in exploration. Perhaps the weakest essay of the collection—especially problematic given a reader’s expectation that it might thematically and conceptually introduce the collection—it is an allusive and suggestive, if rather loose, attempt to frame “exploration”; pages go by without reference to the Arctic or explicit connections or justifications about larger issues.
Part I, “Hubris, Conflicts, and Desires”, opens with I.S. MacLaren’s close reading of two major books (from 1818 and 1846) on Arctic exploration by the second secretary of the Admiralty, John Barrow, the man at the centre of Britain’s official efforts to find the Northwest Passage. MacLaren carefully traces Barrow’s rhetoric, his faith in knowledge and people’s abilities rather than in God or providence, his foregrounding of British efforts in Arctic history and his attacks on John Ross’ efforts in 1818. Ultimately, he suggests that Barrow did not change with the times. Frédéric Regard’s chapter, among the strongest contributions, investigates the “textual strategies” of John Ross, William Edward Parry and John Barrow in justifying and legitimising, representing and misrepresenting their own and others’ actions in the fallout from Ross’ 1818 expedition. As Regard puts it: “[T]hose who failed both to fashion themselves as ideal textual constructions and to secure the textual support of their contemporaries were sure to be written off the list of official Arctic heroes” (38). Catherine Pesso-Miquel explores four accounts of Robert McClure’s “discoveries” in the Arctic (1850-1854), effectively explicating official and “clandestine” narratives.
The second part of the book, “Sir John Franklin: Heroism, Myth, Gender”, opens with Janice Cavell’s excellent chapter on Franklin’s first wife Eleanor Porden. Cavell unpacks the ways in which Porden not only actively built her image as the explorer’s wife, but created a new space for women in polar exploration, a place that Jane Griffin, Franklin’s second wife and eventual widow, would also fill. Indeed, Porden built her authorial image and polar interests even before she was engaged to Franklin. Cavell’s chapter portrays Porden as a feminine counterpoint to Barrow in her eagerness to paint Arctic exploration as a “British epic” as well as finding a role for women in that epic. Catherine Lanone’s chapter explores why John Franklin’s 1828 book regarding his second voyage was less popular than his first, suggesting that the death of his wife Eleanor cast a pall over the expedition (and his writing of it) as well as his failed encounter with the indigenous Arctic Other. Penny Russell’s essay elucidates Jane Franklin’s unceasing search for husband John and his men despite the end of the Admiralty’s search. Russell unpacks Jane’s February 1854 “remonstrance” to the Admiralty, showing how she “sought through the force of her own words to establish an alternative reality, one in which her husband’s survival could not be dismissed as an impossibility” (124). Jane’s highly public and self-conscious “performance of sacrifice” (126) was also, Russell contends, a conflict with her step-daughter Eleanor over money and inheritance. Russell masterfully shows how the Admiralty’s decree that Franklin and his men were dead “defied [Jane’s] position on public duty and private love simultaneously” (130).
The final part, “The Northwest Passage in Nineteenth-Century Culture”, explores broader public engagements. Jan Borm asks why William Edward Parry was “likeable” and finds answers in his organization of the crew’s life, his Arctic survival strategies, and his relationships with the Inuit (each framed by Parry’s Christian perspective). Charlotte Ribeyrol closely reads an 1860 poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne, which was awarded second prize in a public competition for poetic tributes to Franklin. Ribeyrol reads the poem as being more about Swinburne than Franklin and, compared to other entries, was a-historical with perhaps a greater debt to Dante and Chaucer than to heroic Greek works. The final chapter by Laurent Bury charts the critical reception of John Everett Millais’s famous painting The North-West Passage, from its popularity in late Victorian times to later critiques of the work for its expression of “old-fashioned” Victorian values.
The deep textual focus of these chapters gives the collection great cohesion and strength. Each chapter emphasises the ways in which Arctic exploration gained prominence and importance through texts, and the ways in which the assorted actors fostered their identities and built their relationships through textual strategies. This focus, however, becomes one of the collection’s drawbacks—or at least a high barrier to entry. While each of the essays makes a fine and novel assessment of its subject, there is an uneven engagement with either Arctic literary or historical scholarship or broader scholarship on travel, exploration, science and empire in the period. For readers not acquainted with Arctic history or broader literatures on exploration, travel and empire, engaging with this collection might be testing. For readers acquainted with these literatures, this collection can be very profitably read.
