The Arctic exerted considerable influence over nineteenth-century British culture, forming a subject of literary imagination, artistic inspiration, scientific pursuit, and imperial endeavor. This book, the twentieth in the Pickering & Chatto series Empires in Perspective, follows directly from Frédéric Regard's The Quest for the Northwest Passage: Knowledge, Nation and Empire, 1576–1806. The book aims to present the quest for the Northwest Passage as a “central element of British culture,” but in practice the collection achieves much more than that, forming a novel site-specific study of selfhood and self-representation. The depth of scholarship evident in the individual essays is impressive, and they complement each other in obvious and unexpected ways.

Russell A. Potter introduces the volume with an essay on risk, sacrifice, loss, and gain. He presents “the curious mathematics of loss” (9) as a framework for exploration in the modern era, stretching from the nineteenth-century quest for the Northwest Passage to the more recent expressions of national hubris in mid-twentieth-century space exploration. Three thematic parts follow, each containing three essays.

Part 1, titled “Hubris, Conflicts and Desires,” opens with Ian MacLaren's engaging study of the human discord behind what is so often represented as a British national project. John Barrow's obsessive promotion of his “Darling Project”—the quest for the Northwest Passage—is examined alongside the mudslinging attending his favoritism for William Edward Parry and John Franklin and his naked dislike for John Ross. Regard picks up the thread of interpersonal relationships in his study of the dynamic among Ross, Parry, and Barrow, and the dialectic of Parry's hero to Ross's villain. Regard places these intense personal rivalries within Pierre Bourdieu's framework of the “field” or “structured social space,” which determined the extent of each one's successes and failures (37). Exploring strategies of self-representation, Regard demonstrates how Ross's greatest rival was “probably . . . no other than his textual self” due to his own failure to effectively fashion himself as an “ideal textual construction[s]” within the contemporary rhetorical strategy of the Arctic hero (38–9). Catherine Pesso-Miquel's essay continues the theme of rhetorical strategy by comparing the four surviving accounts of the Investigator's search for the Northwest Passage and the missing Franklin expedition in 1850–54. This fascinating and detailed study of the suppression of competing narratives identifies the literary devices they employed, such as Alexander Armstrong's use of passive voice to veil criticisms of Robert Le Mesurier McClure's leadership while the Investigator was icebound from September 1851 to April 1853. The dissension between the various accounts is utilized to deconstruct a key moment in the “myth of the Northwest Passage,” McClure's sighting of the passage from high ground.

The second part of the volume, “Sir John Franklin: Heroism, Myth, Gender,” forms a welcome addition to the growing literature on gender in polar discourses and exploration. Janice Cavell argues convincingly for Jane Franklin's fashioning of a polar wife persona modeled on her predecessor, Eleanor Anne Porden. Porden entered the sphere of Arctic endeavor three decades earlier as author of the poem The Arctic Expeditions (1818) before becoming Franklin's first wife. Porden is considered “an innovative, liminal figure who pushed well beyond the former boundaries of a woman's role in the gendered world of polar exploration” (80). Jane Franklin is herself the subject of Penny Russell's chapter, which explores the foundations of Lady Jane's devoted insistence on the continuation of the dangerous and increasingly costly searches for her missing husband and his crew.

Russell's examination of Jane Franklin's self-fashioning as a woman struggling to “supply [the Admiralty's] deficiencies” (126) is complemented by Catherine Lanone's study of the strategies of self-representation employed in John Franklin's expedition narratives. Lanone presents Franklin's second overland expedition (1825–27) as “a quiet expedition” that failed to recapture the level of public interest inspired by his first (1819–22). The role of the narrative of this second expedition in Franklin's self-fashioning as an Arctic hero is placed alongside his own negative portrayal of the expedition's interactions with the First Nations and Inuit, his dignified grief at news of the death of his first wife, and the expedition's failures.

Part 3, “The Northwest Passage in Nineteenth-Century Culture,” might be better titled with the inclusion of the word “British” (the same could be said of the volume title). Jan Borm examines Parry's enduring image as “one of the most likeable” British explorers, focusing on his “Christian perspective” as a key rhetorical device. Parry's maintenance of a demeanor of “cheerful endurance” in the face of expedition hardships—an earthly trial to be borne with patience—is argued to have presented a path toward conquering the sublime Arctic. Borm also usefully demonstrates the impact of Parry's Christian perspective on his accounts of his interactions with the Inuit.

Charlotte Ribeyrol's essay studies tributes to Franklin submitted in response to a £50 poetry prize offered by the University of Oxford in 1860, in particular the second-place entry of Algernon Charles Swinburne. The poem's classical and Romantic influences and its utilization of literary devices and natural imagery are examined in detail, as is its place in the cult of Franklin (with particular reference to its posthumous publication in 1916). The collection closes with the only essay to address visual sources—Laurent Bury's charting of the changing responses to John Millais's popular 1874 painting, The North-West Passage, from its initial reception as “a mixture of mythmaking, . . . living celebrity, virtuous indignation . . . and discrete patriotism,” to later critiques of its “embodiment of old-fashioned Victorian values” (171–72). More recently, the painting has provided fodder for the study of Victorian constructions of masculinity. Bury concludes that its continued ability to provoke discussion makes the painting “an iconic work for the mythic quest for the Passage, of Victorian culture, and now of the national British heritage” (183).

The volume's strengths lie in two important but often-neglected themes: narrative devices and self-representation in canonical exploration texts and interpersonal relationships. Russell's and Cavell's essays work toward correcting the absence of women from Northwest Passage histories (and exploration history in general); Lanone's and Borm's essays indicate an area ripe for further research in British encounters with the Inuit. Overall, the book forms a valuable and enjoyable addition to scholarship on exploration narratives and provides remarkable insight into the lives of the best-remembered participants in the nineteenth-century British quest for the Northwest Passage.