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© 2015 Annaliese Jacobs © 2015 Annaliese Jacobs ARCTIC CIRCLES: THE FRANKLIN FAMILY, NETWORKS OF KNOWLEDGE, AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY ARCTIC EXPLORATION, 1818-1859 BY ANNALIESE JACOBS DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Antoinette Burton, Chair Professor Harry Liebersohn Associate Professor Dana Rabin Associate Professor John Randolph Professor Tony Ballantyne, University of Otago Professor Adele Perry, University of Manitoba ii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines how the women of the family of the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin (1786-1847) engaged with imperial and geographical networks of knowledge from 1818 to 1859. It argues that over this forty year period, the Franklin women (and especially John Franklin’s second wife, Jane Franklin, and his niece, Sophia Cracroft) drew on their roles as wives, daughters, sisters and nieces to lay claim to their moral authority to receive, evaluate, interpret and circulate intelligence from the field, to act upon it, or to compel others to do so. They built this authority up haphazardly over time and space as they “careered” along with John Franklin from circles of polite science in London in the 1820s, to the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) where he was the lieutenant governor from 1837 to 1843, to Britain in the 1840s and 1850s where they organized expeditions to go in search of Franklin after he disappeared in an attempt to chart the Northwest Passage in 1845. At each stage, the Franklin women actively engaged with (and derived connections, strategies and information from) dynamic networks of imperial knowledge across a series of colonial, metropolitan and extra- imperial sites. These included, but were not limited to, the changing circuits of scientific sociability, and trans-imperial networks of imperial humanitarianism, settlers, colonial governance and science. In the webs of imperial knowledge in which they were entangled and which they wove, the Franklin women’s authority was always gendered, precarious, and questioned, and this dissertation argues that they consistently shored it up by seeking to silence, calibrate, or otherwise reshape the characters and credibility of indigenous people from Inuit interpreters to Tasmanian orphans. In doing so, they consistently engaged with indigenous networks of knowledge, exchange, and resistance that were formed both within and outside imperial terrain iii from the Arctic to Van Diemen’s Land. The Franklin women also tried to either co-opt or to subvert the vernacular agents of imperial industry, commerce and expansion – whalers, fur traders, and settlers – who acted as intermediaries with indigenous people, and with whom the Franklin women both made and discarded alliances as it suited them. iv For my parents and grandparents, who loved me and told me stories, and for my baby daughter Harriet, who has so many stories yet to hear. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have accumulated many debts over the five years that this dissertation has been in the making, and what follows is a very incomplete account of them. This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the Social Sciences Research Council – International Dissertation Research Fellowship, which provided funding for my research in Britain in 2009-2010, the Graduate College at the University of Illinois Dissertation Fellowship, the Department of History at the University of Illinois (which supported me with several fellowships and teaching assistantships), the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship. I have spent an enormous amount of time in archives in Britain, Canada, and Australia and at every turn, have encountered and been indebted to learned, skilled, and insightful people from professional archivists to volunteers, many of whom took an interest in my project. There is not enough space in these acknowledgements to note every one of them, but my heartfelt thanks go out to each and every person who helped me at the Scott Polar Research Institute, the National Maritime Museum, the National Archives, the British Library, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Naval Museum, the Derbyshire Record Office, the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, the Orkney Archive, the National Library of Scotland, the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, the Mitchell Library, the Royal Society of Tasmania, and the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office. Special thanks are due to Naomi Boneham at the Scott Polar, whose presence warmed up a chilly archive and who shared 150-year old gossip with me, to Jackie Price who pointed me towards bibliographies on Inuit wayfinding, to Christina Adcock, with whom I had many wonderful conversations about epistolary research, and to Bryan Lintott who was my fellow researcher at SPRI for many months. Special thanks are also due to Sarah vi Strong at the RGS, who so kindly sought out the minute books and joined with me in my curiosity about the admittance of women to the RGS meetings, and to all of the volunteer archivists at the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, especially Fiona Barnard, who was so helpful with my limited time, and who kindly invited me to dinner at her home. Many thanks are also due to Adele Perry, who helped me to organize my trip to Winnipeg in the summer of 2010, found housing for me, invited me to her home, and was so generous with her time. I am also so grateful to my adopted family of the Simuyandis and Palmers in Sawston and Great Chishill, especially Mary, Little Mary, Rosie, Alex, Ben, Billie, Susie, Jessie and William. I cannot begin to express how much I treasure all of your love and moral support over the years, nor how much I miss each and every one of you, and how much I long to return to Cambridge to see you. Many people have generously given of their time to read and comment on the innumerable drafts of chapters. There is not enough space to thank all of them, but I am especially grateful for the very generous comments of readers at the Global Networks Masterclass at the University of Sydney in July of 2011, who kindly read an early version of Chapter 4. I am also very grateful to the participants in the New Imperial Geographies session and pre-session at the Royal Geographical Society in August of 2011, particularly for the helpful comments of Felix Driver, David Lambert and Alan Lester. They may not know it, but the organizers of the University of Edinburgh’s “Correspondence: Travel, Writing and Literatures of Exploration” conference in the spring of 2010 had a profound impact on me at a crucial time, and being asked to write the conference report caused me to process through some of the core ideas of a wonderful group of scholars – so to all the participants of that conference, and especially to its organizer, Charles Withers, I offer my most sincere thanks. In Illinois, the Illinois Program for vii Research in the Humanities Fellows’ Seminar pushed me to new engagements with borderlands, and whose participants were extremely helpful in crafting an earlier version of Chapter 4. I was very pleased and honored to be included in the GSLIS Information and Empires colloquium in November of 2011, and especially grateful for the kind comments I received on a presentation of Chapter 4 and for the thoughtful comments of Dane Kennedy and Harry Liebersohn. Members of the Britain-Empire-Knowledge reading group in the History Department very kindly slogged through an early draft of Chapter 5 and provided me with a great deal of insight and assistance. I am also very grateful to the members of the World Histories from Below reading group, in which I participated from 2011-2012, and to the participants in the WHFB Conference in April 2012, especially Tony Ballantyne and Marcus Rediker. There have been so many people who were generous with their time (and their ears) over the course of the last five years, of whom only a few are: Tony Ballantyne, Dane Kennedy, Marcus Rediker, Felix Driver, David Lambert, Alan Lester, Kirsten McKenzie, Robert Aldrich, Neil Safier, Philip Stern, Philippa Levine, Michael Bravo, Julie Cruikshank, and Janice Cavell. Alison Alexander not only welcomed me warmly to Tasmania in 2012, but also very generously shared resources with me from her biography of Jane Franklin and allowed me to read and comment on her (then-forthcoming) work. Our interpretations of the Franklins in Tasmania might differ, but mine could not have taken shape at all without her assistance and support, and for that I am deeply thankful. I have accumulated enormous intellectual debts in my time in the History department at the University of Illinois, which I cannot begin to encompass here. Both in my very early career as a Russianist and subsequent time as a British historian, I have been consistently challenged and nurtured by the department faculty, and saved innumerable times by the department staff. viii Mark Steinberg, Peter Fritzche, Diane Koenker, Harry Liebersohn, John Randolph, and Maria Todorova have all given of themselves and their time, for which I am deeply grateful. Dana Rabin has always had an open door and a kind ear for me, which she has combined with sharp insights and great suggestions. The members of my dissertation committee, Harry Liebersohn, Dana Rabin, John Randolph, Adele Perry, and Tony Ballantyne have given so generously of their time, their attention, and their expertise to shape this dissertation, often at short notice and from far away, for which I am eternally grateful. I find it difficult to put into words the gratitude and affection I feel for my cherished advisor, Antoinette Burton.
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