Writing the Disaster: Franklin and Frankenstein Author(s): Adriana Craciun Source: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 65, No. 4 (March 2011), pp. 433-480 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2011.65.4.433 . Accessed: 03/08/2011 10:17
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http://www.jstor.org Writing the Disaster: Franklin and Frankenstein
Adriana Craciun
isaster shadows the Arctic explorer µ Robert Walton from the opening sen- tence of his first letter in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where he writes: “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”1 It continues to his final letters to his sister; icebound at “a very high latitude” and facing an impending mutiny, he confesses: “The cold is exces- sive, and many of my unfortunate comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene of desolation” (Frankenstein, pp. 56, 235). Walton’s polar narrative, which provides the outer frame of Frankenstein, is not one of disaster averted by his re- luctant submission to the will of his crew, though it is usually depicted this way.2 Walton’s narrative, which he apparently
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 65, No. 4, pp. 433–480. ISSN: 0891–9356, online ISSN: 1067– 8352. © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/ rights.htm.
1 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Version, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, second edition (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), p. 49. Further references are to this edition and appear in the text. The numerous deaths of Walton’s crew are mentioned in both the 1818 and 1831 editions. 2 Given that Walton is typically read as “a potential Frankenstein” (George Levine, “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein,” in The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1979], p. 18), Walton’s reluctant retreat, and the failure of his chastened ambition to match Victor’s, is central to readings of Frankenstein as
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NCL6504_02.indd 433 4/14/11 10:19:00 AM 434 nineteenth-century literature intends to publish,3 is one that seeks out disaster in the Arctic and finds it. Writing to his sister before setting out on his own Quixotic attempt to sail across the open polar sea, three months after the publication of Frankenstein, Arctic explorer John Franklin is content with the consolation prize of merely reaching the North Pole:
I shall not however consider the voyage by any means as useless should we fail in the great object of effecting a passage if we have the good fortune to reach the Pole. . . .4
Failing to find the Passage, Franklin may reach the Pole; Wal- ton had similarly confided in his sister that even if he does not attain the Pole he hopes to “[discover] a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite” (Frankenstein, p. 50).5 Passage and Pole, like real and fictional explorer, become interchangeable, with both men sharing an ambition that will just as surely lead to disaster (Franklin disappeared into the Arctic on a subsequent voyage in 1845, with all 129 of his crew). The two-pronged 1818 expedition in search of Pole and Passage failed in such unspectacular fashion as to have merited
an ambivalent but ultimately moral lesson advocating what Percy Shelley described in his Preface as “the amiableness of domestic affection” (Frankenstein, p. 47); see, for ex- ample, Levine, “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein”; Paul Sherwin, “Frankenstein: Creation as Catastrophe,” PMLA, 96 (1981), 883–903; Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p. 126; Marilyn Butler, Introduction to Frankenstein (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993; 1998), p. xxxv; and Michelle Levy, “Discovery and the Domestic Affections in Coleridge and Shelley,” SEL, 44 (2004), 699. 3 Walton is keen to preserve the narrative account (his “papers”) of his voyage, and recounts Victor’s interest in these writings: “Frankenstein discovered that I made notes concerning his history,” writes Walton; “he asked to see them, and then himself corrected and augmented them in many places. . . . ‘Since you have preserved my nar- ration,’ said he, ‘I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity’” (Fran- kenstein, p. 232). Levy also notes that “Walton eagerly adopts the duties of an author” (“Discovery and the Domestic Affections,” p. 705). 4 Franklin to Mrs. Booth (sister), April 1818, Derbyshire Record Office (hereafter DRO), MS D3311/28. Quoted by permission of the Gell Muniment Trustees and the Derbyshire Record Office. 5 On the persistent interest in an ice-free Arctic, see Glyn Williams, Voyages of Delu- sion: The Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason (London: HarperCollins, 2002).
NCL6504_02.indd 434 4/14/11 10:19:01 AM franklin and frankenstein 435 only one official publication, but Franklin promptly set out again for the Arctic in 1819.6 Like Walton, he returned with- out “many of [his] unfortunate comrades,” but he published the authorized Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1823) to great success. This tale of starvation, murder, canni- balism, and madness was tailored to please an audience already schooled in Gothic romances, captivity narratives, shipwreck accounts, early ethnography, and travel writings. The disaster over which Franklin presided offered readers new heights in suffering and danger, set in a geo-imaginary region enjoying unprecedented public interest since the 1818 resurgence in exploration efforts. John Barrow (Second Secretary to the Ad- miralty), together with John Wilson Croker (First Secretary to the Admiralty), joined the prestigious publisher John Murray at the Quarterly Review in launching an unprecedented series of Arctic publications and expeditions. In addition to publish- ing the Tory Quarterly, to which Croker and Barrow contrib- uted hundreds of articles, Murray was since 1813 the official “Bookseller to the Admiralty.”7 Barrow and Murray also worked closely with Earl Bathurst’s newly established Colonial Office, which was in fact the final authority on the Franklin expedi- tions, issuing the instructions and providing funding for the voyages that continue to this day to be represented as only “na- val” and “scientific.”8 The Colonial Office was closely involved
6 Many of the unpublished papers of officers aboard the four 1818 ships are avail- able in the Admiralty papers at the National Archives, Kew, and are notable in their uneventfulness. Franklin, in command of the Trent and en route for the North Pole, kept a log of “Observations,” all of them astronomical (National Archives, Adm 55). 7 Murray is named as such on numerous title-pages; the earliest record I can find granting him this privilege is a March 1813 note from J. W. Croker: “Mr John Murray is the Bookseller of the Admiralty & Board of Longitude” (National Library of Scotland, MS 42,128. Quoted by permission of the National Library of Scotland, hereafter NLS). Murray titles with this authorization began to appear in 1813, e.g., Ivan Krusenstern’s Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805, & 1806 . . . under the command of Captain A.J. Von Krusenstern, 2 vols., trans. Richard Belgrave Hoppner (London: John Murray, Bookseller to the Admiralty and the Board of Longitude, 1813). On the prac- tice of patents, see Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Mak- ing and Sale of Books (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1939), pp. 100–21. 8 Bathurst’s approval of the Franklin expedition plans and his official Instructions are reprinted in Sir John Franklin’s Journals and Correspondence: The First Arctic Land Expe- dition, 1819–1822, ed. Richard Clarke Davis (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1995), pp. 277–78, 285–88. The narrow focus on these expeditions as chiefly naval and scientific is evident in Fergus Fleming’s popular history Barrow’s Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring,
NCL6504_02.indd 435 4/14/11 10:19:01 AM 436 nineteenth-century literature because the overland Arctic expeditions of 1819 and 1825 were surveying territory and encountering people in Britain’s diverse “empire of influence”9—far from the colonies of Up- per and Lower Canada, but part of the Hudson’s Bay Com- pany’s expanding trading monopoly (of three million square miles), which the government was supporting as part of its own long-range commercial and political interests in British North America.10 How this unique consolidation of governmental,
Fortitude and Outright Lunacy (London: Granta, 1998); Jeanette Mirsky, To the Arctic! The Story of Northern Exploration from Earliest Times to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948); Peter J. Kitson, “Introduction,” in Volume 3, North and South Poles, in his anthology Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion, 1770–1835, ed. Peter J. Kitson, 8 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), III, vii– xxii; Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North-West Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909 (Toronto: McClell and Stewart, 1988); and Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004). In large part this focus is due to the rel- egation of Arctic exploration to traditional maritime history (or popular history) and the slowness of other historiographic traditions (for example the new imperial history and oceanic studies) to influence and be influenced by developments in the circumpo- lar North. Rare exceptions, incorporating the Arctic into the new Atlantic studies, are Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Com- munity (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986); and Michael Dove, “Plying the North- ernmost Atlantic Trading Route to the New World: The Hudson’s Bay Company and British Seaborne Empire,” in English Atlantics Revisited: Essays Honouring Professor Ian K. Steele, ed. Nancy L. Rhoden (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 174–205. 9 On the variant meanings of “empire” in the British context (including empire of goods, empire of influence, empire of territory, empire of the sea), see Kathleen Wil- son, “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 1–26; and P. J. Marshall, introduction to The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III: The Eighteenth Century, ed. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 1–27. 10 Between 1821, when the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) amalgamated the west- ern territories held by the North West Company, and 1869, when HBC sold its ter- ritories to the newly created (1867) Dominion of Canada, it ruled (as a commercial and legal administrator) roughly three million square miles of North America, nearly one-fourth of the total continent. Its original charter granted by Charles II in 1670 had given it a poorly defined and frequently disputed territory of approximately 1.4 million miles known as Rupert’s Land, the vast drainage basin of all the rivers flowing into the Bay (see John S. Galbraith, The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor, 1821–1869 [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1957], p. 3). The trading monop- oly that the HBC enjoyed from 1821 to 1867, while it did not involve the responsibili- ties of colonial government that the East India Company would assume, included “the responsibility for law and order and for the acceptance of duties towards the Indians”
NCL6504_02.indd 436 4/14/11 10:19:01 AM franklin and frankenstein 437 political, and publishing forces significantly shaped the condi- tions of authoring and publishing exploration narratives in the first half of the nineteenth century is the larger picture that I aim to illuminate in this essay. The exclusively naval and scientific tenor of modern ac- counts of Arctic expeditions is due in part to John Barrow’s self-serving presentation of them as such in the Quarterly Review and in his Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic (1818); Barrow’s numerous articles laying out his personal vision of this polar program included a fifty-page manifesto in the 1816Quar - terly announcing the four-ship 1818 expedition to reach the Pole and Passage, from which Franklin had written the optimis- tic letter to his sister quoted earlier. Shelley’s Frankenstein was in part addressing this post-Napoleonic climate of nationalistic hubris as voiced by Barrow, and indeed Shelley first submitted the novel to Murray, who rejected it.11 Had Murray published it, Frankenstein would have emerged among the eighteen first editions of Arctic exploration that Barrow shepherded through Murray’s press from 1818 to 1848. Frankenstein’s proximity to the center of polar print culture reveals new dimensions of the innovative models of authorship and publication in the early nineteenth century, reaffirming the significance not only of collaborative authorship (as in the Shelleys’ case), but also of more radically unindividualized authorship practices carried out across institutional lines. Thus, rather than asking how novels like Frankenstein were influenced by polar exploration,
(E. E. Rich, Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670–1870, 3 vols. [New York: Macmillan and Co., 1960], III, 405). This transcontinental “Great Monopoly” spanned from Hudson Bay in the east, across all of British North America, the aboriginal territories to the north, and to the Pacific coast. 11 Shelley sent Frankenstein first to Murray in May 1817, writing in her 26 May jour- nal entry that “Murray likes F.” Three days later she wrote: “Of course Gifford did not allow this courtly bookseller to purchase F.” (quoted in The “Frankenstein” Notebooks: A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley’s Manuscript Novel, 1816–17, ed. Charles E. Robinson, 2 vols. [New York: Garland Publishing, 1996], I, lxxxvi). Murray’s Recordbook records the novel as “R” (Rejected, presumably) on 14 June 1817 (NLS MS 42,632 f.1). The Shelleys also sent the novel to Percy Shelley’s publisher, Charles Ollier, who rejected it in August 1817. By 24 September 1817, Frankenstein was in proofs at Lackington’s (see The “Frankenstein” Notebooks, I, lxxxvi–lxxxviii), and it was published on 1 January 1818. Like all scholars working on Frankenstein, I am indebted to Robinson’s impeccable tex- tual scholarship on the novel.
NCL6504_02.indd 437 4/14/11 10:19:02 AM 438 nineteenth-century literature in this essay I broaden the field of inquiry to consider shared authorship and publishing practices across diverse domains, in- cluding corporate, governmental, and commercial. Frankenstein’s polar frame was probably added in the au- tumn of 1816, after the initial ur-text that Mary Shelley drafted during the ghost-story competition of that summer;12 it no doubt gained momentum from Barrow’s first Arctic account in October 1816 (published February 1817), when Shelley was reading the Quarterly regularly.13 Scholars have demonstrated how the novel’s critique of imperialism, masculinist Romanti- cism, and aggressive science is orchestrated through the inter- relations of its three nested frame-narratives, with Walton’s nar- rative issuing a timely warning against Britain’s Arctic fever.14 We know, as Francis Spufford and Jessica Richard have shown, that writers like Mary Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were inspired by polar exploration, and that, thanks to such literary writers, “the means existed to make of the data of polar discovery a stuff of conventional imagination.”15
12 No extant manuscripts of Frankenstein contain Walton’s initial letters to his sister. In The “Frankenstein” Notebooks, Robinson estimates that while the polar frame was not part of the ur-text (I, lx), it was started by August 1816 in Draft Notebook A (I, xxxv). 13 While composing Frankenstein, Shelley read the Quarterly Review in August and December 1816 and May 1817; see The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), II, 668. The Quarterly Review was typically published late, so that publication and title-page dates often differ; the October 1816 issue (vol. 16.1), containing Barrow’s review of Thomas Selkirk’s Sketch of the British Fur Trade defending his colonization efforts in Hudson’s Bay Company territories (and Barrow’s first Arctic proposals), appeared in February 1817 (Quarterly Review, 16 [1816], 129–72); see “Publication and Appearance Dates,” Quarterly Review Archive, ed. Jonathan Cutmore, Romantic Circles Editions; available online at
NCL6504_02.indd 438 4/14/11 10:19:02 AM franklin and frankenstein 439 Setting aside these useful accounts of the mutual influence of writer and explorer, and of the interplay of imagination and “the data of polar discovery,” I suggest a different way of re- lating nineteenth-century Arctic exploration and writing. To begin, we should reaffirm the predisciplinary and generic flu- idity enjoyed in the eighteenth century and before, and resist the temptation to reify the emerging category of imaginative literature, its distinction from scientific writings, and its origin in an autonomous author. Exploration writings retained the disciplinary heterogeneity found throughout Enlightenment- era exploration writings—those “totally involving corporeal” ac- counts by “traveling naturalist[s]” that Barbara Maria Stafford argues were replaced at the end of the eighteenth century by a Romantic disassociation of literary and scientific sensibilities.16 Departing from Stafford’s unsatisfactory opposition of Enlight- enment objectivity to Romantic subjectivity, however, historians
Fred V. Randel, “The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” ELH, 70 (2003), 465–91. See also Chauncey C. Loomis, “The Arctic Sublime,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1977), pp. 95–112. Jen Hill’s White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2008) was published after I completed “Writing the Disaster,” and discusses both Frankenstein and Franklin’s Narrative. Like Spufford and David, Hill draws largely on Victorian popular sources and contends that for “the nineteenth-century British imagi- nation,” “the Arctic is important as a geography that is not a geography (because per- ceived as blank), as an imperial space that is not part of empire (because there are no economic and colonial goals in its exploration), and as a place that is everywhere . . . because it is nowhere” (White Horizon, p. 16). Because “Writing the Disaster” is part of a forthcoming book that begins with seventeenth-century materials, and because I am interested in corporate and commercial print culture and manuscript practices, rather than a collective “British imagination,” my conclusions on questions of the North American Arctic’s specificity are different from those of Hill, Spufford, and Da- vid, which, while illuminating, privilege Victorian (post-1818) perspectives. Focusing on the Victorian literary “British imagination” has obscured the larger transnational, economic, colonial, missionary interests in the Arctic well known to Europeans from Martin Frobisher onward, including established relations with, and knowledge of, na- tive peoples that before the Victorian era of “blank spaces” were easily visible in Euro- pean accounts. The seventeenth-century whale oil rush in Spitzbergen and Greenland, the international interest in the lost Norse Greenland colonies, the eighteenth-century Moravian commitment to Arctic missions, and the larger colonial framework of the Franklin journeys that I discuss here are brief examples of the Arctic’s economic, impe- rial, and colonial significance known to diverse nineteenth-century Europeans. 16 Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), pp. 299, 381.
NCL6504_02.indd 439 4/14/11 10:19:02 AM 440 nineteenth-century literature of literature and of science of the early nineteenth century in- creasingly emphasize the continuities enjoyed across the grow- ing divide that formed the twentieth century’s “two cultures.” Looking more closely at polar print culture specifically—by which I mean an inclusive field of fictional and factual, authen- tic and spurious, literary and scientific writings, maps, illus- trations, and observations—reveals a heterogeneous domain in which “modern” disciplinarity remains inchoate. The heterogeneity of polar print culture in the first half of the nineteenth century was the product of an unprecedented “center of calculation,” publication and exploration that I will call the Murray polar print nexus. Drawing on both the “social nexus” model of literary production developed by Jerome Mc- Gann and others, and the “centers of calculation” in Enlighten- ment science described by Bruno Latour, my overview of the Murray nexus allows for the imbrication of the literary and the scientific in this innovative convergence of print culture, explo- ration, and governmental agencies.17 The multidisciplinarity and collective authorship central to polar print culture were also present in other theaters of exploration and publication: for example in Alexander von Humboldt’s massive Voyages aux régions équinoxiales (1805–34), and Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin’s Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. “Adventure” and “Beagle” (1839), and were coeval with the multi-authored miscellanies and magazines that proliferated in the early nine- teenth century, attempting to reach increasingly fragmented reading publics.18 Unique to the polar print culture that I discuss here is how this often chaotic multiplicity is ordered and authorized through a regulated and hierarchical institutional network.
17 See Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982); and Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987). Nigel Leask has recently argued, and I agree, that Latour’s helpful model of “centers of calculation” leaves largely unexamined the complex practices of writing within such centers (see Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: “From an Antique Land” [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004], pp. 18–23). 18 See Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madi- son: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987). My thanks to Ian Duncan for this connection.
NCL6504_02.indd 440 4/14/11 10:19:03 AM franklin and frankenstein 441 I want to emphasize both the heterogeneity of the agents in- volved in this unprecedented nexus (hence I will avoid the term “center”) and, simultaneously, the heterogeneity char- acterizing its actual publications and modes of authorship. Polar print culture makes visible the pressures to individuate and autonomize authorship—to endow “explorers” with the aura of individuality increasingly identified with “authors.” In polar print culture we see how an author must travel across heterogeneous domains, embodied in a proliferation of com- posite, multidisciplinary texts only nominally reigned in by the authorial unity expected of “literature.” Simultaneously, this unruly multiplicity of authors and discourses comprising early- nineteenth-century Arctic accounts was subject to formalized naval and state controls, prepublication censorship, and Mur- ray’s would-be monopoly—measures that appear anachronis- tic according to current accounts of print culture, which make it seem to evolve uniformly across intellectual domains. Thus, both its disciplinary heterogeneity and its formal links to cen- tralized authority set polar print culture on a significantly dif- ferent trajectory than that of contemporary commercial print culture, and particularly of Romantic literary print culture, retrospectively identified as one origin of expressive, autono- mous, and subjective authorship.19
19 In one important respect, Murray’s would-be Arctic monopoly coincides with the strengthening of monopoly practices in publishing that began with the extension of copyright in 1808 and 1814, following the “brief copyright window” (the end of perpetual copyright) opened in 1774 by Donaldson v. Becket (see Williams St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004], p. 121). Key studies of Romantic-era British literary authorship include Jerome J. Mc- Gann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983); McGann, The Beauty of Inflections; Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998); and Ian Duncan, “Authenticity Effects: The Work of Fiction in Ro- mantic Scotland,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 102 (2003), 93–116. Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay “What is an Author?” remains central to studies of authorship, including my own. There is an immense body of cross-disciplinary work on authorship, from which I cite a few titles below. For overviews of authorship studies incorporating both literary and legal aspects, see Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Represen- tation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); David Saunders, Authorship and Copyright
NCL6504_02.indd 441 4/14/11 10:19:03 AM 442 nineteenth-century literature Considered in this larger institutional framework, this nineteenth-century polar print nexus resists evolutionary mod- els of the history of authorship and of print in Britain, which, whether drawn from literary, legal, or sociological disciplines, unfold competing but uniformly linear lines of descent lead- ing from prepublication censorship and state licensing, to com- mercial proprietary authorship, and eventually to the autono- mous and expressive “Romantic author.” The polar print nexus is one domain into which we should extend the insights of scholarship on early-modern and eighteenth-century print cul- ture: increasingly, authorship and books are seen as the prod- ucts of “heterogeneous collectivities,”20 located in social sites (e.g., the literatory, or print shop) instead of the imaginations of autonomous individuals, and formulated with complex legal and social consequences for both writers and booksellers. Yet within this same, innovative work outside the field ofR omantic studies, outdated models of a Bloomian “Romantic author” are
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992); and The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaczi (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1994). For a review of more recent cross-disciplinary work on the history of authorship with reference to “the Romantic author,” see Christine Haynes, “Reassessing ‘Genius’ in Studies of Authorship: The State of the Discipline,” Book History, 8 (2005), 287–320. On the regulatory functions of proprietary author- ship, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); and Jody Greene, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Prop- erty and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–1730 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). In The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, William St Clair provides a major reassessment of the relationship of book publication and copyright (displacing “authors” and “texts”) to literary study of the Romantic era. While histories of author- ship and print culture often speak to different questions, one example of an overview that integrates these aspects (as well as readership) is Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). For a revisionary account of exploration and authorship histories, see Adriana Craciun, “What Is an Explorer?” in Eighteenth-Century Studies (forthcoming). 20 See Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the Lon- don Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); on women’s roles in manuscript culture that persisted well into the age of print, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999). On the “literatory” specifically, see Adrian Johns,The Nature of the Book (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998); and David Saunders and Ian Hunter, “Lessons from the ‘Lit- eratory’: How to Historicise Authorship,” Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991), 479–509. For an overview of work on early modern authorship, see Heather Hirschfeld, “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship,” PMLA, 116 (2001), 609–22.
NCL6504_02.indd 442 4/14/11 10:19:03 AM franklin and frankenstein 443 still blamed for the demise of earlier polyvocal models of au- thorship; alternatively, the “Romantic author” serves as the na- ive origin that must be superseded by more complex Victorian and Modernist models of authorship, despite the revisionary work of Jerome McGann, Jon Klancher, Anne Mellor, Clifford Siskin, and others revealing the diversity of Romantic author- ship practices. Building on their work, I aim to show how this unexplored polar print nexus can demonstrate the persistence of practices like collective authorship and prepublication state controls well into the nineteenth century, and how these prac- tices coexisted with the visible pressure to individualize author- ship and, by extension, exploration. This polar print nexus thus has a dual significance—both for appreciating the under- estimated role of print culture in driving Arctic exploration and ultimately disaster, and for revealing divergent paths within our collective histories of authorship and print in the nineteenth century.
I. Voyaging with Frankenstein in the Arctic
“The act of writing was considered to be an indispensable part of making voyages” from the Renaissance onward, as Philip Edwards and Mary Fuller each argue in their respective studies of early exploration writings.21 Yet according to Fuller, despite its origins in the necessity of commercial record keeping, early- modern exploration writing of the New World served less as a documentary record and more as a means to recuperate the “years of waste and catastrophe” through a heroic self-fashioning (Voyages in Print, p. 15). By the eighteenth century, exploration
21 Philip Edwards, “General Introduction,” in Last Voyages: Cavendish, Hudson, Ralegh: The Original Narratives, ed. Edwards (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 8; see Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). I am not interested in reading these Arctic voyage texts in ques- tion, and their complex modes of authorship, within a teleological generic account of “travel writing,” though this approach is prevalent. See for example Barbara Korte’s influentialEnglish Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. Cathe- rine Matthias (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 2000), where she misreads the 1823 Franklin Narrative (believing Franklin to be the author of Richardson’s interpellated account of the cannibalism episode) because she reads it for narrative content and its evolution of the “suffering hero” (pp. 91–92).
NCL6504_02.indd 443 4/14/11 10:19:03 AM 444 nineteenth-century literature writing reached unprecedented levels of profitability, for ex- ample, in the narratives of George Anson and John Hawkes- worth. Hawkesworth’s Account of Cook’s first expedition earned its author/compiler an unprecedented advance (£6000), its publisher high profits, and everyone involved unanticipated controversy due to Hawkesworth’s imprudent reflections on Polynesian sexual freedoms and British violence, written in a fictionalized first-person voice attributed to Cook. According to Fanny Burney, her father Dr. Charles Burney and the actor Da- vid Garrick had recommended the self-taught writer Hawkes- worth to the Earl of Sandwich (First Lord of the Admiralty) at a dinner; Sandwich (Cook had already sailed on his second circumnavigation) then provided Hawkesworth with the per- sonal journals of Cook, Banks, and others, seemingly without guidance or restrictions. The ensuing publication controversy, as well as that surrounding the second narrative (Voyage Toward the South Pole [1777], authored by Cook with the aid of a ghost- writer) and its numerous unauthorized countertexts, has been the subject of excellent studies by Philip Edwards, Jonathan Lamb, Nicholas Thomas, and others.22 The era of Cook, Sandwich, and Banks witnessed a grow- ing awareness of the importance of controlling more aspects of “authorized” exploration writings than ever before, because of the unprecedented popularity and controversies that these authorized and unauthorized productions generated. This late- eighteenth-century network of publication and exploration relied on the quasi-governmental connections of Banks (presi- dent of the Royal Society) and his political patrons, the Earl of Sandwich and Constantine Phipps, later Lord Mulgrave (ex- plorer/author of the ghostwritten Voyage Towards the North Pole [1774]). Banks and the (ostensibly apolitical) Royal Society
22 See Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 80–124; Jonathan Lamb, Pre- serving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001); Lamb, “Circumstances Surrounding the Death of John Hawkesworth,” Eighteenth- Century Life, 18, no. 3 (1994), 97–113; Nicholas Thomas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2003); and Bibliography of Captain James Cook, R.N., F.R.S., Circumnavigator, 2d ed., ed. M. K. Beddie (Sydney: Library of New South Wales, 1970).
NCL6504_02.indd 444 4/14/11 10:19:04 AM franklin and frankenstein 445 had advised the Admiralty on scientific expedition goals (for example, on Cook’s third voyage for the Northwest Passage and on Phipps’s quest for the Pole), and had helped arrange for key exploration publications (e.g., those of Hawkesworth, Matthew Flinders, and Phipps). But as John Gascoigne has shown in Science in the Service of Empire (1998), these turn-of-the- century connections between the Royal Society and the British state were informal and fluid, dependent on ties of class patron- age that would increasingly give way to more formalized and transparent systems of civil service. And, significantly, the books generated by these earlier Admiralty voyages emerged from di- verse booksellers.23 The nineteenth-century nexus discussed here was qualita- tively different from this earlier generation’s model in the for- malized controls that it placed on the polar publications that would emerge under its scrutiny and imprimatur. In the first half of the nineteenth century, polar publication and polar ex- ploration were inseparable, coeval, and mutually generative. As we shall see, they covered a broad discursive terrain, shared un- easily with irreligious fiction, evangelical tracts, and emergent scientific disciplines. Looking closely at how the writings of the 1819–1822 Franklin disaster and Frankenstein emerge in relation to this nexus of polar print culture, I suggest that we should no longer think of Franklin and Walton as authentic and fictional Arc- tic explorers, respectively. Today Frankenstein is considered the most famous literary work of polar exploration, and yet, as far as is known, no contemporary polar explorer referred to Fran- kenstein as a novel of polar exploration. Instead, the novel en- joyed an afterlife in the popular imagination as a supernatural Gothic romance about an overreaching scientist and politicized
23 See John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State, and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). Phipps’s Voyage Towards the North Pole was published by J. Nourse; Flinders’s Voyage to Terra Australis was published by G. and W. Nichol (1814); George Vancouver’s Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and round the World was Printed for G. G. and J. Robin- son and J. Edwards (1798); the three official Cook voyage narratives were published in some association with Strahan: Hawkesworth by Strahan and Cadell, Cook by Strahan and Cadell, and John Douglas by Strahan.
NCL6504_02.indd 445 4/14/11 10:19:04 AM 446 nineteenth-century literature specter seemingly adaptable to any political crisis, from Irish in- dependence to parliamentary reform.24 Indeed, Frankenstein’s enduring popularity is largely thanks to nineteenth-century theater and twentieth-century film, which until very recently eliminated the Arctic frame altogether. But Frankenstein did in fact register in one account of “authentic” Arctic exploration within the Murray nexus, and its presence in polar writing il- lustrates how, in the early nineteenth century, authentic and imaginative polar accounts, and their author/explorers, trav- eled in the same circles. The end of Franklin’s Arctic expedition of 1845—all hands lost, evidence of British cannibalism, dozens of fruitless search expeditions—continues to haunt the popular imagination into the twenty-first century. But it was Franklin’s first Overland Arc- tic Expedition, setting out in 1819 to help map the Northwest Passage, that set a new standard for transmuting polar disas- ter into commercial success. Along with Captain Franklin, sur- geon/naturalist Dr. John Richardson and midshipman George Back would emerge as influential “Arctic Officers,” serving on a dozen Arctic voyages between them and collaborating on nu- merous influential writings and images. Franklin’s responsibility for the disastrous outcome of the 1819–1821 expedition is now widely acknowledged, but, as with his final voyage, British national pride prevented most contemporaries from critiquing the mission’s imperial hubris, poor planning, and other inadequacies.25 Naval officers setting out on land, Franklin’s crew had no Arctic experience and no hunting skills, relying entirely on Canadian voyageurs and Na- tive people to bring them to their destination—the northern coastline of the Arctic Ocean, following the route through the so-called Barren Lands established by Samuel Hearne in 1771 and described in his popular Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1795).26 Hearne had spent over two years travelling with
24 See Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Cen- tury Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 25 A useful account is Berton, The Arctic Grail. 26 Hearne’s Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea was published posthumously by Stra- han (the publisher associated with all three authorized Cook narratives). One month before Hearne’s death in poverty in 1792, he made an agreement with Andrew Strahan
NCL6504_02.indd 446 4/14/11 10:19:04 AM franklin and frankenstein 447 Chipewyan Indians, who led him through the Barrens to the Arctic Ocean, where he apparently watched as his companions massacred a group of sleeping Inuit men, women, and children. Hearne’s remarkable voyage, and his gripping Journey in which he described the massacre at Bloody Falls in graphic (perhaps fictionalized) detail, would continue to shape British Arctic exploration for the first half of the nineteenth century—as an inconceivably difficult Arctic trek shadowed by doubts of its veracity, as a foundational episode of violence from which Brit- ish Arctic exploration would never sever itself, and, last but not least, as an influential publication whose success future explor- ers would also need to measure themselves against. Franklin and his officers were obsessed with duplicating Hearne’s achievements as explorers and writers, and their un- published writings often refer to Hearne’s Journey, which they carried with them as a travel guide (and which Franklin had ex- amined in manuscript at the Admiralty).27 “With regard to the
granting him £200 for publishing the Journey; the contract was witnessed by the astron- omer and mathematician William Wales, who had wintered in Hudson Bay and had traveled with Cook aboard the Resolution (and had been Coleridge’s teacher); Wales is widely assumed to be Hearne’s ghostwriter (see contract, October 1792, British Library Add. MS 48901 ff. 51–54). Hearne did not publish his account earlier because he had traveled as an agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who regarded its agents’ explora- tions as commercial secrets to be circulated publicly only under external pressure, as was periodically the case; see Williams’s Voyages of Delusion (pp. 215–36) for a good ac- count of Hearne’s relationship to HBC politics. 27 Doubts as to the veracity of Hearne’s remarkable journey were rife in that age as well as in our own, specifically relating to Hearne’s graphic description of his re- luctant participation in a massacre at Bloody Falls, the latitude of the Arctic Ocean, and the general feats of survival that Hearne endured. Barrow was most concerned that Hearne’s reaching the polar sea above the Arctic Circle meant that any Northwest Passage would have to be found at much higher latitudes than he hoped, and so he expected the Franklin expedition to discredit Hearne’s claims. Before setting out in 1819, Franklin wrote to his father: “I have read a copy of Hearne’s original journal, the details are somewhat similar to his printed book—but by no means given in that style and though I am not prepared to go to the length of some persons and doubt his statements altogether—I yet think he has left a tolerably wild field for observation and if we are so fortunate as to reach beyond him I hope we may add something to the Geography and Natural History of that unknown part of the Globe” (14 June 1819, Stromness, DRO MS D3311/40). The Admiralty held a manuscript copy of Hearne’s field notes, currently in the British Library (the British Library has two Hearne manu- script versions, neither of them autograph: Stowe 307, and Add. MS 59237). I have compared the two extant manuscript versions to Hearne’s published Journey and agree with Ian MacLaren (and Franklin) that the significant differences between the MS and
NCL6504_02.indd 447 4/14/11 10:19:05 AM 448 nineteenth-century literature Country North of Churchill,” admitted Richardson, “we have no information whatever beyond Hearne’s Route.”28 Franklin, Richardson, and Back also brought with them their culture’s prevailing model of picturesque travel, a tradition suitable for the gentleman on the Grand Tour or on the pedestrian tours of Britain popular with the middle classes. Setting out for what he called a “pedestrian excursion” into the Barren Lands,29 Rich- ardson, like midshipman Robert Hood, filled his unpublished journal with the picturesque allusions of the well-educated trav- eler in the Lake District. But there is no such thing as a “pe- destrian excursion” into the Barrens. This is why Hood did not survive, Richardson barely made it (after probably resorting to cannibalism), and an unfit Franklin would lie down to die, only to be rescued by indigenous people within hours of his death. The extent to which the Franklin officers’ aesthetic (mis)- education helped doom the expedition (by choosing their win- ter camp for its picturesque prospect) is well documented by Ian MacLaren.30 Disorientated by the unfamiliar landscapes, op- tical phenomena, and acoustic distortions of the Arctic tundra
published versions raise doubts about the reliability of many of the most-commented-upon features of Hearne’s Journey, including his participation in the massacre, the degree of ethnographic detail provided, and his own role in and relationship to the native group he joined (see I. S. MacLaren, “Samuel Hearne’s Accounts of the Massacre at Bloody Fall, 17 July 1771” Ariel, 22, no. 1 [1991], 25–51). Hearne’s work is well known in Anglo- American wilderness and exploration writings; for a good reading of its significance, see Bruce Greenfield, Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790–1855 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 15–69; and Kathleen Ven- ema’s feminist reading, “‘Under the protection of a principal man’: A White Man, the Hero, and His Wives in Samuel Hearne’s Journey,” Essays on Canadian Writing, 70 (2000), 162–90. 28 Richardson, quoted in Franklin, Sir John Franklin’s Journals and Correspondence, p. 317. 29 Richardson, Arctic Ordeal: The Journal of John Richardson, Surgeon-Naturalist with Franklin, 1820–1822, ed. C. Stuart Houston (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1984), p. 6. Hood and Back’s journals from this expedition remained un- published in their lifetimes but like Richardson’s have been published since: see Arctic Artist: The Journal and Paintings of George Back, Midshipman with Franklin, 1819–1822, ed. C. Stuart Houston (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1994); and To the Arctic by Canoe, 1819–1821: The Journal and Paintings of Robert Hood, Midship- man with Franklin, ed. C. Stuart Houston (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1974). 30 See MacLaren, “Retaining Captaincy of the Soul: Response to Nature in the First Franklin Expedition,” Essays in Canadian Writing, 28 (1984), 57–92.
NCL6504_02.indd 448 4/14/11 10:19:05 AM franklin and frankenstein 449 and subarctic taiga, these British explorer/authors record per- petual disappointment with the land’s bewildering resistance to their aesthetic expectations: that of the Alpine sublime (or alternatively, the sublime of Arctic seascapes and icebergs), the beautiful of the Italian campagna, or the Lake District pictur- esque popularized in William Gilpin’s Three Essays (1792). Brit- ish travelers to India at this time were similarly frustrated by India’s lack of “tropicality,” a consequence of the dominance of temperate and tropical paradigms in the formation of Britain’s globalizing vision, a problem persisting today in the humani- ties’ widespread failure to include the Arctic in its paradigms.31 Complaining of the “sameness,” “blankness,” and “featureless” nature of the Barren Lands (a vast region of tundra and taiga west of Hudson Bay, so-called by Europeans since the seven- teenth century), Richardson and his fellow explorer/authors struggled to reconcile their experiences of the land with their European aesthetic expectations of landscape. It would be in the Narrative’s accompanying illustrations that Hood and Back (who had been selected for their artistic abilities) would cre- ate the variegated landscapes that British audiences expected to find, especially the sublime and picturesque.32 Their con-
31 On the British “tropicalization” of India by the early nineteenth century, see Da- vid Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2006); and Ian J. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c. 1756–1905 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003). I address the problem of the Arctic’s invisibility in current discussions of planetarity and globalization in my “The Scramble for the Arctic,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 11 (2009), 103–14. On the transplantation of British ideals of “im- provement” to the Arctic, see Michael T. Bravo, “Mission Gardens: Natural History and Global Expansion, 1720–1820,” in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 49–65. On the misapplication of critical paradigms from other regions (e.g., Orientalism, or Spufford’s “Borealism”) to the Arctic, see Robert G. David’s discussion in his The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2000). A second problem is the tendency to conflate the Arc- tic and Antarctic, visible in Fulford, Lee, and Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era; and in Kitson, ed., North and South Poles, vol. 3 of Travels, Explorations and Empires. 32 Thirty engravings of Back’s and Hood’s drawings were included in the first edition (twenty-four in the main text, according to Franklin’s wishes), engraved by Finden, and some hand colored. Barrow and Murray’s correspondence discuss the plates in detail in December 1822 (NLS Acc. 12604/1058). There has been useful
NCL6504_02.indd 449 4/14/11 10:19:06 AM 450 nineteenth-century literature trapuntal visual archive of the expedition satisfied their elite readers’ expectations much better than did Franklin’s method- ical recital of daily chores, or Richardson’s descriptions of geo- logical features and zoological specimens. But as we shall see, it would be Richardson’s descriptions of the disaster’s nadir that would be incorporated into this composite text to provide read- ers with its Gothic climax. John Richardson (1787–1865) was an important figure in nineteenth-century British exploration and natural science: he was a leading officer on Arctic expeditions in 1819–21, 1824– 27, and 1848–49, and he published important works in Arctic zoology and geology. Encouraged by Robert Burns in Dumfries, he was a student of the Wernerian geologist Robert Jameson in the Edinburgh Enlightenment, and, as senior physician of the naval hospital at Haslar, he trained Thomas Henry Hux- ley and established a natural history center visited by Darwin and Lyell. Alongside these impeccable scientific qualifications, Richardson also enjoyed and quoted both from contempo- rary literature by Walter Scott, Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and William Gilpin and, intriguingly, from Shelley’s Frankenstein. Richardson is an exemplary figure of predisciplinary intellec- tual curiosity and practical versatility, spanning the Romantic and Victorian eras: surgeon, naturalist, geologist, explorer, ad- ministrator, Scottish Enlightenment luminary, and evangelical Christian. Richardson, as encountered in his eclectic unpub- lished writings, encompasses the full range of early-nineteenth- century intellectual and social pursuits, and it is because of his exceptional status that his take on Frankenstein is significant. As explorer and natural scientist, inspired by both cosmopolitan literary sensibilities and a sense of spiritual purpose, Richard- son is uniquely able to inhabit all three distinct roles that Shel- ley carefully separated in Victor, Walton, and Clerval. He can
work done on the visual materials of these early-nineteenth-century exploration texts, chiefly comparing the extent of the visual and verbal materials’ allegiance to normative notions of the picturesque and the sublime; see for example Ian MacLaren, “Retain- ing Captaincy of the Soul”; Ian MacLaren, “Commentary: The Aesthetics of George Back’s Writing and Painting,” in Back, Arctic Artist, pp. 275–310; and Richard Davis, “Vision and Revision: John Franklin’s Arctic Landscapes,” Australian-Canadian Studies, 6, no. 2 (1989), 23–33.
NCL6504_02.indd 450 4/14/11 10:19:06 AM franklin and frankenstein 451 do this because the roles of explorer and author, seen today as mutually influencing, did not exist as distinct entities in the early nineteenth century. Writing to fellow officer George Back while they were in different subarctic camps in June 1821, just before the Frank- lin expedition would turn deadly, Richardson offered some playful reflections on the extraordinary people and sights he encountered: My Dear Back, Gilpin himself, that celebrated picturesque hunter would have made a fruitless journey had he come with us—we followed the lakes & low grounds, which . . . were so deeply covered with snow that it was impossible to distinguish lake from moor.33
Gilpin’s “On Picturesque Travel” had advised on how to cope aesthetically with that “barren country” that extended for forty miles from Newcastle to Carlisle, but what must Richardson have thought recalling such advice while in the Barren Lands, stretching for thousands of square miles of some of the most remote terrain on the planet? In the same letter, Richardson abandoned Gilpin’s picturesque for the Gothic, and specifi- cally for Frankenstein, in a remarkable description of one of their Copper Indian guides that merits quoting in full: So much for the country—It is a barren subject and deserves to be thus briefly dismissed. Not so, the motley group of which we were composed—it afforded ample scope for the most able pen- cil or pen—. . . The most prominent figure . . . of the whole, because the most unearthly, was mother Adam. She came strid- ing along supported by a stick which towered over the heads of all the others; a pair of red stockings and various other articles of her garb heightened the peculiarities of her figure; and as to her gait, it was similar to nothing I had ever before seen. Some- times I was tempted to compare her to Hecate, sometimes to Meg Merrilies. Not that she had mind enough to be a powerful
33 Richardson to Back, 9 June 1821, Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) MS 395/60). Quoted with permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI). I am grateful for Archivist Naomi Boneham for her help in accessing a large number of materials at SPRI.
NCL6504_02.indd 451 4/14/11 10:19:06 AM 452 nineteenth-century literature sorceress, or majesty sufficient for a commanding presence, but because she appeared to be rather a creature of the imagination than a reality—I think however that she might have been more aptly considered a fit companion for Frankenstein’s [monster] chef d’oeuvre, as she had this in common with that vision of By- she Shelly [sic], that every member of her body seemed to have belonged to different individuals and to have been formed by a random association into a sort of semblance of the human form; but from the want of proper animation the extremities never acted in concert, and the distorted spine which composed the centre, now bent to this side, now to that, according as the leg which described the greater or the smaller circle was in motion, while the arms played up and down to preserve some- thing like equilibrium, but with the involuntary and convulsive motions of the most fantastic of Shakespeare’s weird sisters in the height of her frenzy. There was another figure of a different gender, with an un- washed face, matted locks, and moustaches of the colour and strength of straw; equip him as you please and place him in any part of the file you choose.
Subjecting this unnamed indigenous woman to a gaze at once ethnographic, aesthetic, and medical, Richardson in this ex- traordinary letter abstracts her entirely from the complex “socioecological web”34 in which she labored, and relocates her in the Eurocentric domain of monstrous women, found in the popular fiction of Shelley and Scott (via Meg Merrilies, from Guy Mannering [1815]). Richardson’s Victorian biogra- pher, Rev. John McIlraith, who was Richardson’s nephew and a Presbyterian minister, reprinted this letter in his biography but deleted the sentence connecting “mother Adam” to Victor Frankenstein’s masterpiece.35 All subsequent polar histories
34 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2d ed. (1992; London: Routledge, 2008), p. 63. 35 See John McIlraith, Life of Sir John Richardson (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1868), pp. 82–85; see also p. 59. McIlraith’s version reads: “she appeared to be rather a creature of the imagination than a reality. Every member of her body seemed to have belonged to different individuals” (Life of Sir John Richardson, p. 84). Arctic Or- deal reprints the edited letter directly from McIlraith (see Houston, “Introduction,” in Arctic Ordeal, pp. xxix–xxx); in the only modern biography, Robert E. Johnson also relies on McIlraith (see Johnson, Sir John Richardson: Arctic Explorer, Natural Historian, Naval Surgeon [London: Taylor and Francis, 1976]).
NCL6504_02.indd 452 4/14/11 10:19:06 AM franklin and frankenstein 453 rely on McIlraith’s censored version of Richardson’s writings, thus failing to find this shared terrain in Frankenstein between “fictional” and “factual” Arctic exploration. When Richardson departed for the Arctic in 1819, the anonymously published Frankenstein was still assumed to be the work of the atheist Percy Shelley (Scott identified him as the au- thor in his Blackwood’s review), and thus McIlraith’s biography carefully removed the irreligious associations found in Richard- son’s letter. Richardson’s letters include other overtly Gothic and atheistic speculations (imagining “a being rising from the grave” while terrified of being forsaken by God in an “absolute solitude,” a vision surpassing anything imagined by “eminent poets” like Coleridge or Robinson, he confessed)—all censored by McIlraith.36 Richardson in his letters had bravely associated himself with an outsider tradition of Arctic exploration and natural science, that of Frankenstein and the Shelleys—and that is precisely the irreligious convergence, available and interest- ing to Richardson, that McIlraith erased fifty years later. Frankenstein—its creature and his bride—appeared in the midst of an infamous polar expedition, but just as quickly disap- peared from history once the expedition turned toward mutiny, murder, madness and cannibalism, as sensationalistic as Shel- ley’s romance. While Victor Frankenstein had been horrified
36 Richardson’s beautiful letters to his wife at this time are remarkably revealing, including the following passage alluding to Robinson’s “The Savage of Aveyron” and Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” (the atheistic speculations were either revised or excised by McIlraith): “Winter clothed in her unspotted livery still besets us—The snow covers the ground to the depth of three feet. . . . If we pass the threshold of our hut and enter the forest, a stillness so profound prevails, that we are ready to start at the noise cre- ated by the pressure of our feet on the snow—The screams of a famished raven or the crash of a lofty pine rending through the intenseness of the frost, are the only sounds that invade the solemn silence of the scene—When in my walks I have perchance met one of my companions in this dreary solitude, his figure emerging from the shade has conveyed, with irresistable [sic] force to my mind, the idea of a being rising from the grave—I have often admired the pictures our eminent poets have drawn of absolute solitude, but never felt their full force until now—What must be the situation of a human being “alone, on the wide, wide sea”—How dreadful if forsaken by his God! An atheist could not dwell alone, in the forests of America. I must not however go on writing in this strain. There are yet two months of winter to come . . .” (Richardson to Mary Richardson, 10 March 1820, [SPRI MS 1503/2]). Excerpts from the Richardson- Voss collection (MS 1503) appear by permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute.
NCL6504_02.indd 453 4/14/11 10:19:07 AM 454 nineteenth-century literature even to contemplate the existence of such an unsexed female monster, his more open-minded naturalist contemporary play- fully refers to her as “a fit companion for Frankenstein’s chef d’oeuvre,” having crossed out “monster.” Richardson’s female creature, suggestively named “mother Adam”37 (perhaps the matriarch of a “new race of Devils” that Frankenstein had feared), exhibits the racial otherness of the male creature, but transplanted into a New World context. Richardson imagines the godless forests of America populated with Frankenstein’s race of Devils, in an alternative outcome to Shelley’s romance, wherein the creature had made good on his promise “to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world” (Frankenstein, p. 190). Richardson transfers the racial otherness associated with Frankenstein’s creature38 to the Native American ignoble sav- age, a connection far from Shelley’s intentions but resonant with her novel’s anti-imperial logic, as well as with Britain’s ac- celerating public debates over the uncertain future of its Cana- dian colonies and the Arctic aboriginal territories beyond them. In her size, strength, and organic disorder, Richardson’s gro- tesque “mother Adam” also shares the female creature’s threat of sexual aggression, the full dimensions of which are invisible without the Frankenstein reference. Richardson follows up the sexual threat that Frankenstein’s creatures unleash by moving on in his letter to a “figure of a different gender,” which Back would probably have recognized as the “Hermaphrodite being” among their native guides.39 In “the deserts of the new world,” and in particular in the extreme sensory and cultural disori- entation unique to northern exploration, Frankenstein and its creatures take on significance—sexual, racial, psychological— not otherwise visible in the novel’s initial literary reception. The ephemeral appearances of Shelley’s beings risen from the grave
37 Her name is unrecorded but she was the mother of Jean Baptiste Adam, a Cop- per Indian interpreter. 38 See Howard L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stan- ford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996); and Anne K. Mellor, “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 23 (2001), 1–28. 39 Richardson also mentions this hermaphroditic guide in his journal (see Arctic Ordeal, p. 53).
NCL6504_02.indd 454 4/14/11 10:19:07 AM franklin and frankenstein 455 in Richardson’s on-the-spot writings are strikingly different from the nineteenth-century appropriation of Frankenstein’s monster in British and Irish metropolitan culture (especially the theater), as described by Chris Baldick, Stephen Behrendt, and others. Resituating Frankenstein in polar print culture, not merely attending to the polar theme of its outer frame, reveals that key twentieth-century preoccupations—the two creatures’ threat of sexual and racial disorder, and the ambiguous appeal of Victor as scientist antihero—were powerful enough to one bewildered scientist in the Arctic to imprint themselves onto the landscapes, people, and phantoms he encountered. Richardson’s projection of European fears and desires onto indigenous people is typical of explorers’ Eurocentric rhetori- cal violence, making possible the actual violence that such ex- peditions set into motion. But the specifics of this encounter—of Frankenstein in the New World, and in particular in the writings of an Arctic explorer and scientist—are unique. Richardson was more than an explorer and scientist—he was also a killer and probably a cannibal, in the literal sense of having eaten human flesh to survive.40 These controversial dimensions of Richard- son’s position as Arctic hero help explain the erasure of Fran- kenstein from Richardson’s (and Franklin’s) illustrious history, and from that of Arctic exploration as a whole. Soon after Richardson wrote his Frankenstein letter, the exhausted expedition reached the Arctic Ocean, and Frank- lin pushed them on to chart the northern continental coast. Richardson’s private journal chronicles the voyageurs’ growing resistance to Franklin’s command: “The fears of our voyageurs have now entirely mastered their prudence and they are not restrained by the presence of their officers from giving loose
40 The large body of scholarship on cannibalism largely ignores the Arctic specifi- cally and survivor cannibalism in general, focusing on European projections of can- nibalistic fears onto Native peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific (e.g., Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 [London: Methuen, 1986]). Survivor cannibalism (as opposed to cannibalism as a social practice) was an omnipresent threat, often a reality, to all who lived and traveled in the Arctic, unlike in the Caribbean and Pacific. See also W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979); and Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).
NCL6504_02.indd 455 4/14/11 10:19:07 AM 456 nineteenth-century literature to a free and sufficiently rude expression of their feelings” (Arctic Ordeal, p. 110). “Indeed,” he writes, they “deem any at- tempt to proceed farther as little short of madness” (p. 110). Franklin incorporated large parts of Richardson’s unpublished journal into his officialNarrative , but he omitted the above and numerous other references to a looming mutiny. Accustomed to the “thoughtless”41 obedience of British seamen praised by Franklin, the officers struggled to control the independent voyageurs, who knew they were heading for disaster. Frank- lin’s party pushed on in two birchbark canoes unfit for ocean sailing, without food, relying on the voyageurs to hunt at each landfall, and did not allow the expedition to turn back until it was too late for a safe return. Of the sixteen men on the expedi- tion, only six returned alive, four of them British—nine of the eleven voyageurs perished. Walton’s eleventh-hour return when faced with open mu- tiny among a foreign crew closely parallels Franklin’s resistance to turning back, and I suggest that real and fictional explorer shared the same motivation in returning short of their stated goal: i.e., to publish their narratives. Franklin and Richardson were obsessed with superseding Hearne’s record, as explorer and as best-selling writer. Hearne had turned back after trek- king over two thousand miles and two years, a record that re- mains legendary today. His second great achievement, without which the first would not exist, was his popular Journey, pub- lished by a ghostwriter after his death in poverty and obscurity. Widely reviewed and excerpted for decades after its 1795 publi- cation, it remains influential today in travel writing, wilderness writing, ethnography, and as a foundational text in Canadian history. Franklin and Richardson traveled several hundred miles farther than Hearne, but more importantly they matched Hearne’s success in their writings, reaching an even larger au- dience and living to enjoy both fame and fortune. Both Walton and Franklin turned back in the face of growing mutiny in or- der to transmit to readers their written accounts, but only after many of their crew had died in order to make this possible.
41 John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (London: John Murray, 1823), p. 6.
NCL6504_02.indd 456 4/14/11 10:19:08 AM franklin and frankenstein 457 In so doing, they outstripped the achievements of the most fa- mous victim of Arctic mutiny, Henry Hudson, who may have had an inland sea named after him, but did not return from the Arctic to publish his account. Seeking access to this same polar print nexus in which Franklin and Richardson would outstrip their predecessor Hearne, the Shelleys submitted Frankenstein to Murray for pub- lication in May 1817. Murray was their first choice because he was Byron’s publisher, as literature scholars typically point out, but also because he held the unique title of “Bookseller to the Admiralty,” assuming exclusive rights to prestigious Arctic pub- lications akin to a patent. Murray rejected the novel, and it was instead published by Lackington, a firm known for supernatu- ral fiction. The subsequent eclipsing of Frankenstein’s Arctic di- mension (in popular culture and academic scholarship) is in part due to this undesired distance from the center of polar print culture. In other words, Murray’s status as Bookseller to the Admiralty, enjoying a virtual monopoly on Arctic voyages for an elite readership, may have been as important to the Shel- leys as his role as Bookseller to Byron.42 Frankenstein would have appeared amid the officially sanc- tioned Arctic publications that Barrow shepherded through Murray’s press from 1818 until his death in 184843—Eleanor
42 The British Critic’s review of Frankenstein placed the novel alongside the first two Arctic publications of the Murray nexus, Porden’s Arctic Expeditions and Barrow’s Chron- ological History of Voyages into the Arctic: according to the review, Walton “has had his imagination fired by an anticipation of the last number of the QuarterlyR eview, and is gone out to the North Pole, in quest of lost Greenland, magnetism, and the parliamen- tary reward. In justice to our author, we must admit that this part is well done, and we doubt whether Mr. Barrow, in plain prose, or Miss Pordon herself, in more ambitious rhyme, can exceed our novelist in the description of frozen desarts and colliding ice- bergs” ([Anon.], rev. of Frankenstein, British Critic, n.s. 9 [1818], 433). 43 With the death of John Murray II in 1843, that of Barrow in 1848, and the disap- pearance of the third Franklin expedition after 1845, the polar print nexus unraveled, and with it its Arctic monopoly. John Murray III would continue publishing the Navy List, expanding his travel and scientific titles (including Charles Darwin’s Origin of Spe- cies [1859]), and publishing the proceedings of the populist British Association for the Advancement of Science. But the severance of Barrow’s official connection to Murray and the Quarterly Review dissolved the increasingly anachronistic publishing nexus, and made possible the explosion in popular Victorian writings on the Arctic, by a wide range of professed identities, including journalists, missionaries, hunters, and, increas- ingly, tourists. For a discussion of journalism’s increasingly important role in financing
NCL6504_02.indd 457 4/14/11 10:19:08 AM 458 nineteenth-century literature Porden in 1818; John Ross in 1819; Franklin in 1823, 1828, 1829; William Parry in 1821, 1824, 1825, 1826; George Lyon in 1824; Edward Sabine in 1821; George Back in 1836 and 1838; Richardson in 1829–37; and Barrow himself in 1818 and 1846.44 These eighteen first editions by nine authors on the Arctic alone represent an attempt to monopolize the publica- tion rights on an entire geo-imaginary region, an analogous practice to the contested monopoly on Arctic exploration long held by “adventure capitalists”45 in the Hudson’s Bay Company. And to a significant extent, publication began to precede ex- ploration: Barrow’s Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic launched not only the heroic age of Arctic exploration, but also the Arctic publishing nexus: this book, he hoped, would serve “as a proper introduction to the narratives of the present voyages, which, whether successful or not, will be expected by the public” (Preface). While Murray published the first two cantos of Byron’s scandalous Don Juan in 1819 (without Byron’s name appearing
and popularizing Arctic exploration in the Victorian era, see Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). 44 The relatively large print runs (for such expensive books) of the early Arctic pub- lications reflect the ambition of Barrow’s efforts: his own Chronological History was is- sued in 1,500 copies (197 remained on hand in 1822), and the North Georgia Gazette in 1,250; Parry’s Journeys had the largest print runs (the first Journey printed 1,500 copies for the first edition, 500 for the second edition; and for the second Journey, 2,000 for first edition, 500 for second edition). Porden’s Arctic Expeditions poem, in contrast to these voyage narratives, had a small run of 500 copies, 336 of which were still on hand in 1823, after 90 copies were given to the Stationers Hall and for presentation (Mur- ray Copy Ledger B, NLS MS 42,725). This attempted monopoly ended with Barrow’s death in 1848, which coincided with another surge in Arctic publications surround- ing the Franklin searches. These searches generated numerous publications from mul- tiple publishers; in 1850 John Barrow Jr. wrote to Murray complaining of Longman’s domination of Franklin search publications, adding: “I am not without hope that you may once again acknowledge your child—& patronize Arctic Adventure & Discovery” (National Library of Scotland, MS 40055). By 1852 Barrow Jr. wrote to Murray, de- spairing, “I believe you have no great predilection for anything Polar!” when the latter declined to republish Barrow Sr.’s Arctic essays from the Quarterly (MS 40055). All quotations from National Library of Scotland manuscripts are quoted with permission, with thanks. 45 The expression is Michael Nerlich’s (see Nerlich, The Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, 2 vols., trans. Ruth Crowley [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987]).
NCL6504_02.indd 458 4/14/11 10:19:08 AM franklin and frankenstein 459 on the title page), he may have had more to lose financially in publishing an irreligious, “inauthentic” polar narrative while contracted as official Admiralty publisher. Barrow was notori- ously vicious in reviewing both “unauthorized” polar accounts like Bernard O’Reilly’s Greenland (1818) and authorized ac- counts like John Ross’s Voyage of Discovery . . . of a north-west pas- sage (1819) that contradicted his pet theory of an open polar sea.46 Among its many transgressions, Frankenstein as an Arctic narrative was inauthentic, unauthorized, and in violation of Barrow’s theory of the ice-free Pole. The Murray nexus could not afford to associate Frankenstein with their nascent Arctic publishing industry, and instead positioned the Franklin Narra- tive in the same legendary company as Hearne’s Journey. Rather than leading with Frankenstein, the 1818 literary launch of the polar print nexus was represented by the patriotic poem The Arctic Expeditions, written by Eleanor Porden, who would be- come Franklin’s first wife.47 Before setting off for his second Arctic land expedition in 1825, Franklin was already discuss- ing plans for collaborating with Porden on the next narrative, but she died a few days after he sailed. Porden and Franklin’s short-lived collaboration, cemented in their mutual ties to the Royal Institution, the Admiralty, and Murray, forms an intrigu- ing Tory counter-circle to that of the exiled Shelleys and their radical politics, one deserving fuller investigation. Given this divergence of Frankenstein from the polar print establishment, Richardson’s glimpse of Frankenstein’s female monster in the Barren Lands was even more remarkable than at first appears. The publication of Franklin’s authorized Nar- rative in 1823 coincided with the beginnings of Frankenstein’s new life on stage, in Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, first performed in July 1823 at the Eng- lish Opera House. Frankenstein reached a wide audience on the stage, and later in film, but it did so stripped of its Arctic dimen- sion. While Peake removed the polar frame and concentrated
46 Ross’s Voyage had an initial print run of 1,250 copies, and sold for 3 1/2 guineas; he received £667 12s. 7d. from Murray (see M. J. Ross, Polar Pioneers: John Ross and James Clark Ross [Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1994], p. 58). 47 Eleanor Porden, The Arctic Expeditions (London: John Murray, 1818).
NCL6504_02.indd 459 4/14/11 10:19:09 AM 460 nineteenth-century literature Shelley’s multivalent text into one centered on the impious presumption of monstrous science, Arctic subjects flourished in visual culture following the 1818 and 1819 expeditions, with touring panoramas opening in Leicester Square (1819, fea- turing an image of Franklin) and Glasgow (1822), as well as exhibits featuring Arctic peoples, like Bullock’s “Laplanders” displayed at his Egyptian Hall in 1822.48 William Parry’s trium- phant return from the Arctic in 1821 (at the same time that the Franklin disaster was unfolding, unbeknownst to the British public) had generated the greatest amount of national pride and interest in Arctic subjects, and so perhaps Shelley’s 1818 warning against Arctic fever as its own kind of “presumption” would have fallen on deaf ears as far as a populist dramatist like Peake was concerned. Building on the success of Parry’s triumphalist firstJournal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage,49 an enterpris- ing Murray printed 1,500 copies of Franklin’s Narrative in 1823, and it reached three editions (all with the same large print run) by the following year, as well as several translations, enjoying good reviews and wide circulation through lengthy periodical extracts.50 In contrast to Franklin’s success in popular print,
48 See David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, pp. 148–50; and Russell A. Potter’s more detailed discussion of the London panorama in his Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875 (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2007), pp. 37–70. 49 William Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (London: John Murray, published by authority of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, 1821). 50 Murray Copy Ledger B (NLS MS 42,725). Franklin made 500 guineas from the first edition, 170 from the second, and by 1825 had made at least 930 guineas from Murray (NLS MS 42,725). He remained dissatisfied however, because Parry had ne- gotiated higher payments (£1050 for the first edition and £500 for his second edition of the 1821 Journey) based on his even more popular Journeys; see Agreement between Parry and Murray, 25 April 1821 (NLS MS 42,688); Richardson to Franklin, 10 March 1824 (DRO MS D3311/55); Franklin to Richardson, 10 February 1824 (DRO MS D3311/11/53). Of the first Franklin edition’s 1,500 copies, 1,000 sold for £2 14d, while 445 sold for 3 guineas (the price that Barrow had set from the start) (NLS MS 42,725 f.57). Richardson initially received £150 for his contributions to the Franklin Narrative, and was due to receive £150 more by the end of the year (Richardson to Franklin, 1 June 1823 [DRO D3311/55]). Franklin’s naval salary for the 1819 expedition totaled £1,794 (House of Commons, Estimate of Amount Required for Civil Contingencies, 1823 [London: printed for House of Commons, 1824], p. 7). Hepburn, their English servant
NCL6504_02.indd 460 4/14/11 10:19:09 AM franklin and frankenstein 461 Frankenstein, often described as a “bestseller,” was printed in an initial print run of only 500 copies, and, as William St Clair argues, “During the first fifty years of Frankenstein’s existence, the readership was largely confined to a narrow constituency of men and women at the topmost end of the income scale” (The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, p. 365). The 1824 French translation of Franklin’s Narrative alone numbered 500 copies.51 Frankenstein’s spectators numbered in the thousands, however, as did Franklin’s, himself the subject of multimedia interest like the panoramas and, posthumously, the stage. Dis- located from Murray’s polar print nexus and then from its po- lar setting altogether, and censored from the records of the Franklin disaster, Frankenstein as Arctic narrative was lost in dis- tance and darkness.
II. Fort Enterprise: The Abode of Misery
Lacking Frankenstein’s supernatural horror but also revel- ing in shocking incidents, the Franklin disaster narrative made up for in authenticity what it lacked in literary flair. The mas- sacre at Bloody Falls had been the controversial selling-point of Hearne’s Journey, while for Franklin and Richardson it was the violent deaths of Midshipman Hood and the Métis voyageur Michel Terrehaute, and the cannibalism at the center of the violence, that earned the survivor/authors a large public audi- ence for their Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea. That Franklin, Barrow, and Murray were together able to trans- form this disaster into a commercial success, and to transform Franklin into the darling of London society, is a testament to the degree to which polar narratives were already part of the same polar print culture, whether we call it Gothic or natural- istic, fictional or factual. In other words, it is difficult to write a popular narrative of polar exploration that is not a disaster nar- rative with details as formulaic as any Gothic romance: madness,
whom the Admiralty publicly commended for his devotion to his superior officers, re- ceived £220 (Hepburn to Richardson, 18 February 1823 [SPRI MS 1391/1–4]). 51 Franklin to Richardson, October 1823 (DRO MS D3311/53).
NCL6504_02.indd 461 4/14/11 10:19:10 AM 462 nineteenth-century literature mutiny, murder, and cannibalism. Frankenstein indulged in the first three and, despite its vegan monster, evoked fears of can- nibalism in its popular political transformations. The murders and cannibalism in the authorized Narrative were described in even more intense terms in the officers’ un- published letters, for example Richardson’s letter to his wife preparing her for his return: I shall not attempt to describe the miseries we endured in this journey for no description can convey an adequate idea of them, and the bare detail would be too harrofing harrowing to the your feelings of humanity.52
He alludes to the murder of Hood, his own killing of Terre- haute, and his own resorting to cannibalism (unwittingly on one occasion, perhaps deliberately on another). The returning officers were aware of unauthorized accounts of their disaster filtering from the North American press into the British press before the publication of the official narrative.53 They could not afford to have a British venture associated with the murder and cannibalism revealed in the 1816 case of the French frigate Méduse, visualized in Géricault’s shocking painting displayed in Piccadilly in 1820.54 In his letter above, Richardson at first
52 (April 1822, SPRI MS 1503/4 f.3). Richardson also adds: “I feel at least ten years older than I did two years ago”—another passage that McIlraith cut in his edition. 53 See for example, Richardson to Mary Richardson (wife), 1 December 1820 (SPRI 1MS 503/2/1–10); and Franklin to his mother, 8 April 1822 (SPRI MS 248/305). The Times for 4 October 1822 carried a story from the 17 August Montreal Herald report- ing the deaths on the expedition, and its failure to reach far beyond Hearne’s furthest point. Hints of the British survivors’ conscious resort to survivor cannibalism emerged in the 18 October 1822 Times, as excerpted from the 11 September Montreal Herald: “In this struggle betwixt the love of life and the dread of a death that must be terrifying to all mankind, Mr. Wood [sic], nine Canadians, and an Esquimaux, fell untimely and regret- ted victims; and had not the survivors, who for several days were driven to the necessity of prolonging a miserable existence by feeding upon the tattered remnants of their shoes, and we fear, upon a more forbidding and unpalatable fare, exerted themselves by a super-human effort to reach the Great Bear Lake, it is probable that they would have all suffered the most exquisite and appalling martyrdom” (“North-West Land Expedi- tion,” Times, 18 October 1822, p. 2). See also The Times, 5 November 1821. 54 An account of the Medusa disaster was published in London in 1818; see Mar- garette Lincoln, “Shipwreck Narratives of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Cen- tury: Indicators of Culture and Identity,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 20 (1997), 161–62.
NCL6504_02.indd 462 4/14/11 10:19:10 AM franklin and frankenstein 463 writes “the bare detail would be too harrofing to the feelings of humanity,” using an idiosyncratic misspelling of “horrifying”55 that he revised to “harrowing to your feelings,” suggesting that he endured not the inhuman horror of cannibalism, but an or- deal that would shock the tender feelings of a wife. The revised version is printed in his nephew’s Victorian biography, which removes the cannibalistic dimensions of Richardson’s ordeal altogether, as it had his reference to Frankenstein. But it was these glimpses of British cannibalism that led to high sales and, per- versely, fame for the returning “heroes” of the disaster. “Croker & Barrow are quite hot for an early publication of our journals,” enthused Franklin to Richardson a few months later, boasting that “Barrow had told [Murray] the narrative was the most painfully interesting of any he had ever read.”56 And Barrow should know. A nineteenth-century Hakluyt with not only the power to inspire new exploration by cultivating a mar- ket for their narratives, but also the institutional power to help commission the expeditions, Barrow in his Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic sharpened Hakluyt’s nationalism into an aggressive imperialism. Franklin understood the importance of appeasing Barrow, Croker, and Bathurst as state authorities, but equally important to him was pleasing them, and Murray, as readers and publishers. Only they could transmute the di- saster over which he had presided into a success, earning him fame and fortune. And that is what they did. What had been for Richardson an indescribably horrifying experience entered the Murray nexus of publication/exploration, and emerged as “the most painfully interesting” Arctic narrative yet. The nature of the suffering merited such superlatives, but it is striking how quickly Franklin came to conceive of the ordeal as narrative, and then as commodity.57
55 He used this spelling elsewhere, referring to the lasting effects of the massacre at Bloody Falls described by Hearne: “[T]hese poor people [the Inuit] have been so har- rofied by the Indians that they are very timorous” (18 July 1821, SPRI MS 1503/4). 56 Franklin to Richardson, 24 October 1822 (DRO MS DC3311). 57 By 1824 Franklin wanted to add more portraits of the officers to the new quarto edition but was persuaded not to by Barrow, so as not to offend the owners of the first edition, who were “principally possessors of libraries and men of the first distinction in the Country,” and the reviewers, who “would say it was complete book making an
NCL6504_02.indd 463 4/14/11 10:19:10 AM 464 nineteenth-century literature In contrast, Richardson in his unpublished journal strug- gled with this difficulty of putting into words what he found unspeakable. Having split into separate parties on their death- march across the Barrens to Fort Enterprise, Richardson and Franklin in their reunion offered readers a glimpse of the horror through mutual reactions of shock. Richardson recorded how one voyageur, upon seeing Richardson, turned away in despair on beholding our ghastly countenances. He recovered however, in a short time, sufficiently to welcome us to this abode of misery, but the disappointment had evidently given him a great shock. The hollow and sepulchral sound of their voices, produced nearly as great a horror in us, as our ema- ciated appearance did on them. (Arctic Ordeal, p. 161)
Again we see that shades of beings risen from the grave have become all too real, as Richardson himself reports how “the ghastly countenances, dilated eye-balls, and sepulchral voices of Mr. Franklin and those with him were more than we could at first bear.”58 Like Shelley, who signaled her creature’s terrify- ing appearance through the reactions of spectators, the Frank- lin crew in their mutual expressions of horror gesture toward a vision of human degeneration impossible to represent. “Travel decomposes civilized man,” according to Anthony Pagden,59 and in this case the decomposition is a literal one, transforming the emaciated bodies of the starving men into revenants and cannibals. The devout Richardson, already gripped with atheis- tic doubts, experienced this disaster as a horror approachable only in Foucault’s “language to infinity” that Gothic uniquely provided, and thus it was his journal that was incorporated into the officialNarrative to describe the nadir of their ordeal.60
imputation which I should abominate” (Franklin to Richardson, 9 June 1824, DRO MS D3311/53). 58 “Dr. Richardson’s Narrative,” included in Franklin, Narrative, p. 461. 59 Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), p. 162. 60 The relationship of the unpublished manuscript materials to the official Narra- tive is complex. Only two of Franklin’s manuscripts written during this Barren Lands crossing are still extant, both of which I have examined: part of his field notes in the National Library of Scotland (“The original notes of Captn. Franklin,” Oct. 9–Nov. 9, 1821, MS 42,237), and his private journal, held in the Derbyshire Record Office (MS
NCL6504_02.indd 464 4/14/11 10:19:11 AM franklin and frankenstein 465 Richardson’s account in the Narrative, enthused the New Monthly Magazine, is “replete with horror.” The Literary Gazette and the Gentleman’s Magazine excerpted the most sensationalist Gothic passages in their glowing reviews, while simultaneously praising the volume’s high production values and patriotism: “Of the costly and superb manner in which this interesting work has been embellished, we cannot speak too highly,” gushed
D3311/48). Both manuscripts are damaged and impossible to read in full; Richard Davis offers partial transcriptions of the field notes as an Appendix, and a thorough explication of the relationship of the extant Franklin manuscripts, in his important edition, Sir John Franklin’s Journals and Correspondence: The First Arctic Land Expedition. Davis’s edition also includes the official manuscript Journals (composed after return- ing from the field) submitted to the Admiralty, held in SPRI (MS 248/277, 248/278). I am able to improve on Davis’s careful transcriptions of the Barren Lands manuscripts in a few instances (e.g., the full phrase “Poor Hood dead” on 29 October [NLS MS 42,237 f. 10]; see Sir John Franklin’s Journals, ed. Davis, p. 438); what is significant in these additional fragmentary transcriptions is the amount of time that Franklin de- voted to confessional and evangelical effusions in his official field notes. Facing im- minent death, he concluded most daily accounts with long religious effusions—which tend to be the text omitted by Davis, in part because largely illegible (these passages often occur near the frayed bottom of Franklin’s notebook). Thus, the material decay of this fragile text unfortunately contributes to the critical neglect of the role played by Franklin’s zealous faith in these documents of geographic and scientific discovery. Franklin’s officialNarrative incorporated Richardson’s journal, revised for publication, for the conclusion to the disaster, and relied on the journals of Back and Hood as well, because of the gaps in Franklin’s extant papers for the journey (see Davis, “Introduc- tion,” in Sir John Franklin’s Journals, pp. xxxv–xlii). There is a second extant version of Richardson’s account of the killings, the “Narrative Report” he wrote for the Admi- ralty, accounting for the deaths of Terrehaute and Hood (reprinted in Arctic Ordeal, pp. 148–60). There also exists correspondence between Richardson and Franklin about the two killings, wherein Franklin passes on legal advice from the Admiralty on how to revise his account of killing Terrehaute for subsequent editions of the Narrative in order to prevent any criminal investigation. Franklin passed on advice that Richard- son should add sentences “which would attach first the fact of the murder of Hood stronger on Michel [Terrehaute], and secondly, those which would convey a further idea of Michel’s expressions and conduct to you” on the day Richardson killed him (in particular, “his expression of hatred towards the white people”) (Franklin to Richard- son, 11 August 1823, SPRI MS 1503/5/4). On 1 August 1823 Franklin had similarly passed on Barrow’s wishes that for the octavo edition Richardson would “[dwell] a little more on the necessity” of killing Terrehaute, and noted that he was holding back from Murray’s press the relevant section until Richardson decided (DRO MS 3311/53). The first, second, and third editions of the Franklin Narrative do not make these additions. Richardson’s published account of Terrehaute’s “expressions of hatred towards the white people” had also mentioned Terrehaute’s explanation that “white people . . . had killed and eaten his uncle and two of his relations” (“Dr. Richardson’s Narrative,” in John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, 3d ed., 2 vols. [London: John Murray, 1824], II, 341–42).
NCL6504_02.indd 465 4/14/11 10:19:11 AM 466 nineteenth-century literature Gentleman’s, praising the “noble and enterprising spirit [of] the British Government.” The Literary Gazette agreed: “The spirit and character of the whole,—tables of science, typography, charts, plates finely executed of scenery and costume, render it, to use the bookselling phrase, one of the best got up volumes that has appeared even in these improving times.” The Literary Gazette then went further, praising the visual “embellishments” especially when “compared with Hearne’s and Mackenzie’s works.”61 Here was progress where it mattered, where someone like Walton would agree it was worth risking lives for—outstrip- ping the published Journeys of legendary explorers like Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie, and thereby attaining one of the expedition’s true goals. The Gothic dimension of their ordeal, by far the most “pain- fully interesting” to readers and largely the work of Richardson, was thus embedded within the heterogeneous materials—ethno- graphic, zoological, meteorological, geological, geographical, pictorial—that elite audiences consumed as “embellishments.” Franklin confided that the expensive Narrative (at 3 guineas) was “speedily commenced and executed with all the expedition possible” in order to prevent “the public mind [losing] interest in its contents,” and to forestall any “unauthorized” accounts like those that had preceded Parry’s Journal in 1821.62 In October
61 See the reviews in New Monthly Magazine, n.s. 7 [1823], 399; Gentleman’s Magazine, 93 (1823), 432, 428; and Literary Gazette, 12 April 1823, pp. 225–26. 62 SPRI MS 248/298/13. Franklin warned his family against believing or discussing unauthorized newspaper accounts of the expedition deaths (Franklin to his mother, 8 April 1822, SPRI MS 248/305). The unauthorized book-length accounts of Parry’s recent voyage were also ever-present in their minds; see Eleanor Porden, letter to John Franklin, on her diminished enjoyment of Parry’s Journal, which appeared after the un- authorized accounts (23 May 1821, DRO MS D3311/8/1/12). The unauthorized ac- counts included Letters Written during the Late Voyage of Discovery in the Western Arctic Sea, by an Officer of the Expedition (London: printed for Sir Richard Phillips, 1821) and the octavo A Journal of a Voyage of Discovery to the Arctic Regions: In His Majesty’s Ships Hecla and Griper, in the Years 1819 and 1820 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), attributed to Alexander Fisher, Asst. Surgeon with Parry. Fisher had also contributed to the onboard newspaper on Parry’s expedition, published that same year as The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle (London: John Murray, 1821). The Literary Gazette (which praised Franklin’s expensive authorized Journal [1823]) complained in its review of Parry’s Journal of the great expense of the volume and Parry’s personal profit as author, given that Fisher’s account was already in print and
NCL6504_02.indd 466 4/14/11 10:19:11 AM franklin and frankenstein 467 1822 Franklin was still waiting both for the Admiralty to release the officers’ journals, so that he could begin writing, and for the Colonial Office to agree on the engraver; by April 1823 the book was in press.63 While Gothic horror was crucial for sales, it also had to be contained within a socially redeeming framework for its elite audience, one befitting the scientific and nationalist register of the voyage’s stated goals. A religious dimension served this redeeming purpose, coded conventionally through provi- dential shipwreck literature, and more controversially through a submerged evangelicalism. One reason that the Admiralty’s Barrow and Croker would have been content to banish Shelley’s Frankenstein from Mur- ray’s Arctic panoply was the radical implications of its irreli- gion. While Croker in the Quarterly Review attacked Frankenstein for its amorality, Barrow, in his review of the Franklin Narra- tive, lingered over the passages in which Franklin described the comfort that the starving officers took in their evangelical faith. Carrying numerous religious books with them, Franklin piously insisted that they never succumbed to despair: “Read this, ye Hunts and ye Hones,” exclaimed Barrow, “and if you be not as insensible to the feelings of shame and remorse, as to those con- solations which the Christian religion is capable of affording, think of Richardson, Hood, and Hepburn.”64 The returning
that the expedition had been paid for by public money: “Captain Parry’s reward ought to have been found in his promotion, and the parliamentary grant for his services, and not in a joint levy in the book market. On the contrary, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, under whose authority the Journal appears, should have given the read- ers of England as cheap a history of the discoveries made with public money, and in as popular a form, as the necessary cost of printing . . . would permit” ([Anon.], “Captain Parry’s Journal and the North Georgia Gazette,” Literary Gazette, 14 July 1821, p. 438). After Fisher’s unauthorized Journal appeared, and while Murray was preparing to publish a Supplement to Parry’s first voyage (1824) and Parry’s Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (1824), Murray wrote an angry letter to the Admiralty Lords insisting that he had been granted by them “exclusive right of first Publication” on the subject of Parry’s voyages, and expressing his “mortification” to see “the unex- pected and as I conceive illegal publication of another account of the same Voyage” by Fisher (3 May 1823, Murray Letterbook, NLS MS 41,908). 63 Franklin to Richardson, 24 October 1822 (DRO MS D3311). 64 [Anon.], rev. of John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, Quarterly Review, 28 (1823), 399. Upon learning of the Peterloo Massacre and related unrest, Richardson wrote to his wife of the “madness & disorder” that had “taken
NCL6504_02.indd 467 4/14/11 10:19:12 AM 468 nineteenth-century literature voyagers were enlisted in the intensifying fight against domestic reform precipitated by the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, and rep- resented by scandalous figures such as Leigh Hunt and William Hone, fellow-travelers with Percy Shelley, the reputed author of Frankenstein. It is significant that all four officers of the 1819 Franklin expedition were, like William Parry, evangelical Christians, at a time when evangelicals were a Protestant minority still open to charges of enthusiasm. While a discussion of the neglected evangelical dimension of Arctic exploration and publication is beyond the scope of this essay, it is important to keep in mind that individual members of the nexus, such as Franklin, Back, Richardson, and Parry, were privately devoted to an intensify- ing evangelical “Missionary Spirit”65 in their roles as explorers, which non-evangelical Church of England agents in the Ad- miralty, Colonial Office, and Royal Society quietly supported for instrumental reasons.66 This evangelical undercurrent goes beyond the Christian metanarrative of providential salvation redeeming the disaster of the Narrative (in itself an orthodox feature of shipwreck literature). It is clearest in the officers’ neglected correspondence with family and missionaries, but it was also made deliberately visible in the third textual com- panion, alongside Shelley’s Frankenstein and Hearne’s Journey, that the Franklin Narrative used to establish its tragic hero and its socially redeeming purpose. This third text transformed the murder of Hood into a martyrdom for the shared faith of the British officers and for the embattled Christian faith of the na- tion after the crisis of 1819.
possession” of Britain, hoping that she “suffer no inconvenience from the folly or rage of the deluded multitude—who [trample] under their feet the blessings that the inhab- itants of other lands, burn to enjoy” (1 June 1820, SPRI MS 1503/2/1–10). McIlraith did not include this letter in his biography. 65 John Franklin, letter to his sister Henrietta, from Greenland, 11 July 1845: “Every ship in these days should go forth to strange lands bearing among its officers and crew a Missionary Spirit, and may God grant such a spirit on board this ship! It is my desire to cultivate this feeling, and I am encouraged to hope that we have among us some who will aid me in this duty” (DRO MS D3311/40). 66 On Joseph Banks’s strategic support of missionary efforts, see Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire, pp. 183–84.
NCL6504_02.indd 468 4/14/11 10:19:12 AM franklin and frankenstein 469 On the verge of starvation, Hood had been apparently shot in the back of the head by the half-Iroquois voyageur Mi- chel Terrehaute, after Terrehaute was suspected of killing and eating two fellow voyageurs. Richardson described how he dis- covered Hood’s body: “Bickersteth’s Scripture Help was lying open beside the body, as if it had fallen from his hand, and it is prob- able that he was reading it at the instant of his death.”67 Sev- eral days later, Richardson shot Terrehaute in the head with- out warning, claiming he feared for his life. Of the four British crewmembers, Hood was the most physically frail, the youngest, and the most Romantic in his journal writings. At the moment of his death, Hood was also the most devoted Christian. Read- ing A Scripture Help Designed to Assist in Reading the Bible Profitably, by Edward Bickersteth, the Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, offered a nonverbal sign of the “good death” that evan- gelicals sought.68 Hood’s reading at the moment of death pro- vided the Franklin disaster with the Christian closure that swept into oblivion the deaths of nine voyageurs, British cannibalism, Hood’s own shocking end, and the senselessness of the entire enterprise. Consistent with centuries of rationalizing European violence in New World exploration, Franklin and Richardson publicly considered Hood as the sole casualty of the disaster. Hood’s death in 1821 echoes the death in exile of a more famous young man, a contrasting exemplum of British genius prematurely extinguished in that same year—John Keats (Hood was twenty-five years old, Keats was twenty-four). It also prefig- ures a famous Romantic death while absorbed in reading—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death in exile in 1822. Edward Trelawny had fa- mously identified Shelley’s disfigured body by the two books in his pockets, by Aeschylus and Keats.69 Like Hood unidentifiable
67 Richardson’s account, in Franklin, Narrative,, pp. 456–57. Richardson made a point of specifying that Terrehaute, unlike most Iroquois, had not converted to Chris- tianity (p. 459). 68 See Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), p. 59. In fact, Hood’s death exemplified the evangelical “bad death” that “allowed no time for spiritual preparation and contrition” (p. 59). 69 Trelawny’s account popularized the notion that Shelley died virtually “in the act of reading,” making possible nineteenth-century depictions of him as Matthew
NCL6504_02.indd 469 4/14/11 10:19:13 AM 470 nineteenth-century literature by the defining feature of human individuality (the face), Shel- ley is identified by, and dangerously absorbed in, the books he read at the moment of death. Shelley and Keats’s popular ex- amples of being consumed by their love of books are corrected by Robert Hood being lost in his book—an evangelical scriptural commentary written by the Secretary of the Church Mission- ary Society, whose controversial new Canadian mission at Red River the Franklin officers were quietly aiding.70 Whereas Keats and Shelley were associated with a dangerous combination of political reform and paganism, Hood’s piety made him the per- fect alternative to his controversial peers for Croker, Barrow, and Murray, whose Quarterly Review had famously attacked the two poets. Thus the sensationalist retelling of the Franklin di- saster also offered a reactionary antidote to the irreligious in- fluence of Hunt and Hone specifically, as Barrow had argued in the Quarterly Review, and of Keats and Shelley implicitly, tes- tifying to the importance of the nation’s embattled Christian faith from metropolis to colonial hinterland.
Arnold’s ineffectual angel: “The face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless. The tall slight figure, the jacket, the volume of Aeschylus in one pocket, and Keats’s poems in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to me to leave a doubt on my mind that this mutilated corpse was any other than Shelley’s” (Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, 2 vols. [New York: Benjamin Blom, 1878], I, 189–90). For a good discussion of this passage, see Karen Swann, “Shelley’s Pod People,” in Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic, ed. Forest Pyle (February 2005), para. 16, available online at
NCL6504_02.indd 470 4/14/11 10:19:13 AM franklin and frankenstein 471 Conclusion: Aggregate Author, Publishing Nexus
The chance meeting of three books—Hearne’s Journey, Shel- ley’s Frankenstein, and Bickersteth’s Scripture Help—in an Arctic disaster transforms our understandings of early-nineteenth-cen- tury exploration and authorship. These books from seemingly disparate domains—Enlightenment travel, Gothic romance, and evangelical theology—help us to outline more generously the remarkable ambition of polar writings like the official Frank- lin Narrative. The Narrative had highlighted its connections with Hearne and Bickersteth while suppressing its affinities to Frankenstein, even while evoking the novel’s revenant horrors to commercial advantage. Amid such strange textual bedfellows, the Franklin Narrative begins to resemble the heterogeneous assemblage of Frankenstein’s creature and its competing nar- rative frames: the Narrative encompassed the writings of five named authors—Franklin, Back, Richardson, Hood, and Ed- ward Sabine—segmented into seven scientific appendixes (in subsequent editions moved into a second volume) and embel- lished with over thirty engravings based on the paintings of Hood and Back. Franklin’s name appears on the title page as author, but the Narrative is the product of what I would call an aggregate author—not of multiple, unified coauthors, but of an unindivid- uated “author” comprising an uneven aggregate of individual and institutional agents, obeying a strict hierarchy. Among the most important was Barrow, who made possible the Narrative not only by commissioning the expedition, brokering the pub- lishing contract, and publicizing the book and the expedi- tion in the Quarterly Review, but also by revising and authorizing “every sheet” of proofs.71 While such a radically deindividualized aggregate author may seem out of place as a contemporary of Romantic literary genius, it is recognizable in a predisciplinary
71 For example, Franklin writes to Richardson that “Barrow has handsomely offered to revise every sheet, as he did Parrys and make Such additions & corrections as he thinks necessary” (24 October 1822, DRO MS D3311). On Franklin’s revisions of his journals, see Richard Davis, “History or His/story? The Explorer Cum Author,” Studies in Canadian Literature, 16 (1991), 93–111.
NCL6504_02.indd 471 4/14/11 10:19:13 AM 472 nineteenth-century literature longue durée as an early-nineteenth-century corporate version of the “literatory” models of collective authorship described by Adrian Johns, David Saunder, Ian Hunter, and Paula McDowell. The aggregate author also included Earl Bathurst, whose imprimatur appears on the title page between the names of Franklin and Murray. Bathurst founded and was in charge of the Colonial Office (1812–1827), under whose jurisdiction these Arctic expeditions and publications ultimately fell. In 1823 Bathurst took a personal interest in the engraver to be used for the Franklin Narrative, and even in the animal speci- mens collected;72 for the subsequent 1825 Franklin expedi- tion Bathurst’s Colonial Office paid nearly £10,000 toward their expenses and salaries, issued the official Instructions, and subsidized Murray’s publication of the Narrative of a Sec- ond Expedition by £400.73 Clearly, then, we need to stop pre- senting nineteenth-century Arctic exploration as “naval” and “scientific,” and somehow peripheral to the colonial and mis- sionary efforts found in every other region of Britain’s impe- rial activity. In fact, the coincidence of the Franklin expeditions with the Colonial Office’s unprecedented 1820s campaigns for state- assisted emigration to British North America is no coincidence at all. Instructed by the Colonial Office to “amend the very de- fective geography of the Northern part of North America,”74 the Franklin expeditions helped map the hinterlands of Brit- ain’s most remote territorial interests, the aboriginal lands be- yond its existing North American colonies, whose boundaries and legal status remained contested throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. While for British historians and liter- ary scholars the American Revolution, the territorial empire of
72 Franklin to Richardson, 24 October 1822 (DRO MS DC3311). 73 See D. M. Young, The Colonial Office in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Pub- lished for the Royal Commonwealth Society by Longman’s, 1961), p. 158. Bathurst’s Under-Secretary for the Colonies was Henry Goulburn, a zealous evangelical; he was succeeded by Robert John Horton, known as Wilmot-Horton, the chief architect and advocate of the 1820s state-sponsored emigration schemes to Upper Canada. For both the 1819 and 1825 Arctic expedition, it was largely with Goulburn and Wilmot-Horton, not the Admiralty, that Franklin corresponded regarding developments en route. 74 Bathurst, Instructions to Franklin, in Sir John Franklin’s Journals, ed. Davis, p. 286.
NCL6504_02.indd 472 4/14/11 10:19:13 AM franklin and frankenstein 473 the East India Company, and Britain’s African endeavors have all overshadowed work on British North America and Hudson Bay trading territories, in the early nineteenth century this vast transcontinental region and its maritime routes were consid- ered pressing concerns by the Colonial Office.75 Increasingly hailed by Bathurst’s expanding Colonial Office as part of the solution to the growing problem of a “superflu- ous” population of dissatisfied and radicalizing poor, Upper Canada (Ontario) was the destination of several state-spon- sored emigration schemes between 1815 and 1826.76 The Co- lonial Office’s underwriting of the 1820s Arctic expeditions to the north of the Canadas is inseparable from its simultaneous intensive involvement in its postrevolutionary North American colonies and territories: its support of the creation of an un- precedented transcontinental Hudson’s Bay Company trading monopoly in 1821; its role in secretly attempting the union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1822; and its role in the heated public discussions (and 1819 Parliamentary inquiry) into the legal and sovereign status of the Canadian provinces and ab- original territories through which Arctic expeditions traveled. All of these efforts were in part designed to strengthen the British North American colonies militarily and numerically, and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s commercial interests and influence, as counter-forces to hostile republican and French Catholic
75 For a recent overview of how the Canadas require new historiographical frame- works in relationship to New Imperial history, Atlantic studies, the British Second Empire, and the “swing to the East” paradigms, see Nancy Christie, “Introduction: Theorizing a Colonial Past: Canada as a Society of British Settlement,” in Transat- lantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Experience in Post-Revolutionary British North America, ed. Nancy Christie (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 3–41. 76 See H.J.M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy, 1815–1830: “Shovelling out Papers” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Barrow’s Arctic debut in the Quarterly Review had been a response to Lord Selkirk, founder of the embattled Red River colony (home to the evangelical mission supported by Franklin), itself the subject of an 1819 Parliamen- tary Blue Book examining the government’s involvement in an unfolding legal contro- versy following the 1816 Seven Oaks massacre. Johnston estimates that from 1815 to 1825, thirty seven thousand British people immigrated to the Canadas, “a significant part” of them through the state-funded emigration schemes (British Emigration Policy, p. 1). The schemes were largely the work of the political economist Wilmot-Horton, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1822 to 1828.
NCL6504_02.indd 473 4/14/11 10:19:14 AM 474 nineteenth-century literature populations.77 This occulted colonial dimension was central to “scientific” Arctic exploration, which for too long has been described as a naval solution to the post-Napoleonic problem of underemployed officers and ships. It is readily visible in the heterogeneous polar print nexus that I have described, indeed even on the title page of the Narrative itself. Richardson’s trans- portation of Frankenstein’s creature to the North American aboriginal territories had situated Britain’s Arctic fever within this same pressing debate on empire, with which contemporary readers were closely engaged. The writings of returning explorers were scrutinized care- fully by the Colonial Office and the Admiralty, another regula- tory feature of aggregate authorship in this publishing nexus that was absent from literary writing. Included in all officers’ in- structions were requirements to keep a journal and then relin- quish it, along with all maps and charts, upon their return—a policy of secrecy not only rigorously enforced by the Admiralty and Colonial Office, but followed as well in commercial explo- ration financed by the Hudson’s Bay Company and East India Company. Typically, only the commanding officer was subse- quently authorized to publish, but there were notable excep- tions and ambiguities the further back in voyaging history one goes. The most spectacular precedent for transforming a naval disaster (in which nearly 1,400 of 1,900 crew died) into a pub- lishing success had been George Anson’s ghostwritten Voyage Round the World (1748), which reached five editions in its first year alone. But it had been Anson’s plunder of the Spanish galleon, and his personal prize money of £93,000, that had converted the deaths of 1,400 men into a wild success.78 The
77 See Johnston, British Emigration Policy; Galbraith, The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor; and Rich, Hudson’s Bay Company. 78 Anson’s estimated 3/8 cut of the total prize money (approximately £243,000) was a staggering sum in the eighteenth century, as calculated by Glyn Williams in The Prize of All the Oceans: The Dramatic True Story of Commodore Anson’s Voyage Round the World and How He Seized the Spanish Treasure Galleon (New York: Viking Press, 1999), p. 218. Anson’s overtly imperial aim in capturing the Spanish galleon and fomenting rebel- lion in Spanish colonies was in fact part of a two-pronged effort, synchronized with a naval attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage, by Christopher Middleton, who was in- structed to meet Anson in California (see Williams, Prize of All the Oceans, pp. 11–13). As with the well-known La Condamine expedition to South America in the 1730s, which
NCL6504_02.indd 474 4/14/11 10:19:14 AM franklin and frankenstein 475 Admiralty had allowed officers to publish their own competing accounts of controversial episodes of the debacle (notably the wreck of the Wager) before Anson’s official narrative appeared, using rival presses. In the publishing scandals of the Cook expeditions thirty years later, the Admiralty and its allies like Banks tried to sharpen the distinction between “authorized” and “unauthorized” writings, and to close the temporal gap between exploration and publication. They used one publisher (Strahan, who held the King’s patent and the law patent) for all three Cook narratives, but they failed to enforce the ideologi- cal constraints that the Admiralty imposed on its authors, or to suppress embarrassing “unauthorized” writings. Only in the first half of the nineteenth century would exploration writ- ings be tightly controlled from a central network, operating for the first time through one authorized publisher, the house of Murray. The fact that the first two Franklin Narratives ap- peared without any “unauthorized” competing accounts is a rare distinction, and a testament to the efficiency of this in- novative nexus. The cooperation of numerous agencies and agents in this unique cross-institutional network made possible, indeed re- quired, such a model of aggregate authorship. Aggregate au- thorship also reflected the interdependent nature of shipboard life and scientific enquiry, with the Captain’s authorizing name indicating the strict hierarchy that the naval men obeyed. On these early examples of “floating laboratories” commanded by Franklin, Parry, Back, and Ross, the officers practiced a collabora- tive form of research and writing still in use today in the social and hard sciences,79 but one at odds with the individualization
was synchronized with Maupertius’s expedition to the Arctic circle in Samiland (Lap- land), the Atlantic and Pacific orientations of modern scholars tend to obscure the sig- nificance that the Arctic Ocean held for Enlightenment-era exploration and imperial efforts. See Johnston, British Emigration Policy; Galbraith, The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor; and Rich, Hudson’s Bay Company. 79 I review authorship studies in footnotes 19 and 20 above. Since completing this essay I have read the excellent collection Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science, ed. Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison (London: Routledge, 2003), which begins to address exactly this unexamined terrain between studies of author- ship in sciences and literary writing. The essays collectively attest to the significance of Foucault’s “What is An Author?” lecture in extending this line of inquiry, but also
NCL6504_02.indd 475 4/14/11 10:19:15 AM 476 nineteenth-century literature of authorship we associate retrospectively with the domain of expressive literature. The collaborative nature of Arctic exploration and pub- lication was also at odds with the growing investment in the celebrity of individual explorers like Parry and Franklin (and above all Humboldt), an individuating force promoted by Murray and Barrow for commercial and ideological ends. Pre- decessors like Cook and (posthumously) Hearne were also recognized as individual heroes of their published polar nar- ratives, though both had relied on ghostwriters and both had died before they could enjoy any benefits of fame. In the first half of the nineteenth century it was the self-financed Alex- ander von Humboldt who embodied this emerging Romantic ideal of “autonomous” author/explorer, a fellow-traveler of Robert Walton and Victor Frankenstein, whose revolutionary books represented precisely the liberal, cosmopolitan, secular, and Romantic antithesis to the authorized productions of the British polar print nexus. A heterogeneous, multidisciplinary text by an aggregate author, produced by an unprecedented centralized nexus of publication and exploration, the Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea obscures distinctions between authentic and imaginary exploration, scientific and religious epistemes, naturalistic and Gothic modes, and, finally, authors and explorers. In sharing the same, impossible terrain as the Shelleys, Hearne, and Bickersteth, Franklin and Richardson can truly be said to “travel in their predecessors’ language,” as Michel de Certeau writes.80 When these predecessors are also polar explorers— Robert Walton, Samuel Hearne, the Ancient Mariner, Franken- stein’s creature (last seen heading for “the most northern ex- tremity of the globe” [Frankenstein, p. 243])—these words are of disaster redeemed through its retelling.
offer important challenges to his dating of and limitations upon the author function in the natural sciences (along these lines, see in particular the essays by Roger Chartier, Adrian Johns, and Peter Galison). 80 De Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 145.
NCL6504_02.indd 476 4/14/11 10:19:15 AM franklin and frankenstein 477 By no means an organic synthesis, this polar nexus rippled with internal contradictions (glimpsed in the violence of its sen- sationalist strands and the tensions between the multiple per- spectives amassed in the texts), and with the revelations of dis- sidents expelled from its fold, such as John Ross and Richard King, who publicly criticized this monopoly. Those who persisted in publishing their Arctic narratives outside this formidable nexus would have to either devise innovative publishing strat- egies (Ross hired a door-to-door salesman), inhabit divergent traditions (Frankenstein as a supernatural romance, minus polar frame), or invite the wrath of this state-sponsored network—as was the case with Richard King and Bernard O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s Greenland, the Adjacent Seas, and the North-West Passage to the Pacific Ocean (1818), incorporating meteorological observations, engravings of optical phenomena, travel journal, and ethnographic and historical chronicle, had brazenly set out to steal the thunder of Barrow’s 1818 expeditions. Writing in Murray’s Quarterly Review, Barrow slammed O’Reilly’s “unau- thorized” and therefore “inauthentic” polar account, incensed by O’Reilly’s dismissal of Barrow’s ice-free pole theory as a “uto- pian paper-built plan of sailing to the north pole.”81 How dare a mere ship’s surgeon publish a “frothy quarto” for a full 50 shillings, fumed Barrow: he should have stuck to a “sensible and unpretending . . . small duodecimo” appropriate to his station.82 O’Reilly had positioned himself as an authentic polar hero because he was an unauthorized outsider: he had success- fully evaded the polar nexus’s policy of relying on official jour- nals and archived documents, and offered the public instead “a complete idea of the actual situation of the polar world” taken from “on the spot” observation, in the highest tradition of the
81 See O’Reilly, Greenland, the Adjacent Seas, and the North-West Passage to the Pacific Ocean (London: Baldwin, Craddock, and Joy, 1818), p. 243. O’Reilly’s publishers also republished Mark Beaufoy’s edition of Daines Barrington’s The Possibility of Approaching the North Pole Asserted (1818); Barrington, a member of the Royal Society, was a friend of Sandwich and an advisor for the Phipps expedition to the North Pole, aboard which had served both Olaudah Equiano and Horatio Nelson. 82 [John Barrow], rev. of Bernard O’Reilly, Greenland, the Adjacent Seas, and the North- West Passage to the Pacific Ocean, Quarterly Review, 19 (1818), 208.
NCL6504_02.indd 477 4/14/11 10:19:15 AM 478 nineteenth-century literature Enlightenment “great cause of science” (Greenland, pp. iii, v). He had also trespassed into the expensive terrain of the illus- trated, multidisciplinary quarto that Murray and Barrow tried to monopolize, using the expensive quarto format itself as an “authenticity effect” also signaling authority.83 Richard King, the naturalist on Back’s 1833 Arctic expe- dition in search of John Ross, similarly defied the polar print nexus and published his Journal of an Expedition with Bentley, revealing the systematic abuse and “extermination” of Native peoples in British North America, as well as a massacre of In- uit by Back’s crew, covered up by the Admiralty.84 He received twelve copies as payment, while Back’s sanitized account gained him £700 from Murray.85 Ross was the most entrepreneurial of all after spectacularly falling out with Barrow and Murray in 1819—he sold 7,000 subscriptions to his 1835 Narrative of a Second Voyage via a door-to-door agent, and even designed his
83 See Duncan, “Authenticity Effects.” For influential theoretical approaches to tex- tual studies and bibliography, see D. C. Greetham, Theories of the Text (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999); D. F. Mckenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999); and McGann, Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. 84 King blamed on the fur trade, European colonization, and missionaries the wide- spread “barbarous warfare, treachery, bloodshed, and extermination” of the native peo- ple that he observed (Richard King, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Arctic Ocean, 2 vols. [London: Richard Bentley, 1836], II, 55). King revealed the Admiralty’s cover-up of the unprovoked killing of three Inuit near Mount Barrow, Point Ogle (King, Narra- tive, II, 68–71). Back’s authorized account, Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition . . . in the Years 1833, 1834 and 1835 (London: John Murray, 1836) was reissued in a 1970 facsimile, in which the editor distinguished this expedition for its lack of fatalities: “Un- like so many other expeditions where deaths and dissentions marred the results, that of Back stands as a major achievement” (William C. Wonders, “Introduction,” in George Back, Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River, and along the Shores of the Arctic Ocean, in the Years 1833, 1834 and 1835 [Edmonton: M. G. Hurtig, 1970], p. xxv). Back’s correspondence denying the sworn affidavits that his crew killed three Inuit is in SPRI MS 395/77; during the day in question, Back in his Narrative described the returning crew party in question as “fagged and depressed,” noted that they shot three deer, and made some aesthetic observations, later producing a striking painting of the area, Point Ogle, engraved for the book (“Thunder Storm near Point Ogle,” in Back, Narrative [1836; 1970], pp. 405–8). The manuscript draft (not a field journal) of Back’s Narrative (SPRI MS 395/7/1–2) differs in interesting ways from the published version, but not in the account of the killing of the Inuit that took place on 4–6 August 1834. 85 Agreement between Richard King and Bentley, 28 May 1836 (BL Add MS 46612 f.257). John Murray Ledger C, NLS MS 47,727 f.106; 2,500 copies were published, of which only 276 remained on hand in 1838.
NCL6504_02.indd 478 4/14/11 10:19:16 AM franklin and frankenstein 479 own panorama. Franklin was so appalled by Ross’s demystifica- tion of Arctic publication that he refused to subscribe when the agent called at his house. These renegades, along with their companions in fiction like Frankenstein, both delimit the reach of Murray’s polar print nexus and illustrate the unpredictable consequences of publishing outside its orbit. Modern Arctic exploration was indeed a “paper-built plan” developed by Barrow, Croker, Bathurst, and Murray, and pub- licized through the Quarterly Review—a unique convergence of texts, nascent disciplines, genres, people, professions, religious and intellectual domains, and governmental agencies, no less formidable for being paper-built. State-sponsored investment in the cult of the heroic individual explorer such as Franklin and Parry was to a great extent carried out in their ceaseless and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to cohere under a central Author, and in a substantial quarto volume, a babble of voices (officer and crew, European and Native, scientific and reli- gious, terrified and self-assured, individual and institutional), a multiplicity apparent in the heterogeneous texts themselves, wonderfully rife with contradiction. Transmuting human di- sasters into commercial success and ideological ammunition for further exploitation, this paper-built polar nexus helped expand Britain’s imperial and colonial reach by selling a care- fully controlled, yet unavoidably unwieldy, illusion of the uni- fied author as explorer. Writing the disaster, for “Franklin” as for “Walton,” but more so for Murray and Barrow, meant transforming it into success.
University of California, Riverside
abstract Adriana Craciun, “Writing the Disaster: Franklin and Frankenstein” (pp. 433–480) The occasion for this essay is the surprise meeting of three texts from distinct traditions— Gothic romance, evangelical theology, and Enlightenment exploration—during the course of an Arctic disaster. The essay explores the relationship of the official disas- ter narrative (John Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea [1823]) to these heterogeneous textual companions, particularly Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Published by the Admiralty’s official bookseller, John Murray, the official Franklin Narrative emerged from a highly centralized governmental and publishing
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network, one that attempted a virtual monopoly on prestigious Arctic publications from 1818 to 1848. The essay uncovers the complex institutional connections of this publishing nexus, and the strong centripetal pull exerted upon them by governmental authorities, while simultaneously considering a range of fugitive writings—chief among them Frankenstein—that escaped the pull of this formidable nexus. Frankenstein’s prox- imity to the center of polar print culture and its highly regulated discursive practices reaffirms the widespread persistence not only of collaborative authorship into the nine- teenth century, but also of more radically unindividualized authorship practices car- ried out across institutional lines. Thus, rather than asking how novels like Frankenstein were influenced by polar exploration, this essay broadens the field of inquiry to con- sider authorship and publishing practices across diverse domains, including corporate, governmental, and commercial.
Keywords: history of authorship; Frankenstein; John Franklin; Arctic exploration; print culture
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