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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. 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University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Nineteenth-Century Literature. 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 433 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.