Bending Time: The Function of Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Polar Naval Expeditions

When we think about the role of Victorian periodicals in the lives of their readers, we can easily envision a bespectacled middle-class family settling down beside the fire on a winter’s afternoon in a cozy living room opening the latest issue of Household Words, Punch, or The Illustrated London News, with expressions of pleasant expectation on ruddy faces. Alternately we might imagine a portly gentleman, comfortably seated in the wood-paneled library of his club, with gouty foot resting on a low ottoman, sleepily scanning the columns of his favorite magazine for mention of friends and familiar haunts of his youthful travels.

For these readers periodicals demarked the regular passage of time, a concern becoming in the nineteenth century a dominant aspect of daily life in Britain, and encouraged reflection upon what had passed during the past quarter, or fortnight, and what was to come until the next issue arrived.¹ Especially in mid-century, periodicals and newspapers were meant in part to reinforce the readers’ sense of belonging to a regulated, logical, and consistent Empire.² Like clockwork, the newspaper or magazine, with predictable sections of news and anecdote, births and deaths, crime and mayhem, was produced, delivered, and read by ever-growing numbers of Britishers. Newspapers and periodicals reinforced shared civic values and provided a sense of order to the daily comings and goings of British life.

Regular and timely appearance characterized nineteenth-century periodicals for most readers, but that was not the case for a subset of Victorians, the officers and men of the Royal Navy and other nineteenth-century polar travelers who brought and read plenty of newspapers and magazines, however outdated, on their voyages, and who in some cases produced their own newssheets and periodicals while isolated on expeditions to high latitudes. Especially when over-wintering, explorers of the frozen regions essentially lost touch with the rhythm of daily Victorian life. Rather than let their men give way to the ennui and despair of this dislocation, expedition leaders attempted to create artificial versions of life at home. Along with theatrical performances, musical evenings, sports, and games, periodicals played a major part in this process, both on shipboard and ashore. Their subject matter and tone were familiar and reminiscent of home, and their association with the regular passage of time, even when read sporadically, helped to bend the seemingly timeless time of many of these voyages. Periodicals, whether brought from home or produced aboard ship or base, shortened periods of boredom, gave rhythm to undifferentiated periods of darkness, and reduced the sense of distance from home ports.

The very question about bending time is a modern one, reflecting our current world view (incorporating a popular version of Einsteinian perceptions) rather than the assumptions of constant time that characterized the world view of our Victorian ancestors.³ The Victorian periodical assumed a constant regularity, but in fact the function of the published periodical, to mark the passage of time in society, could be fulfilled even when its appearance and its consumption occurred in an elastic and relative time frame.

During the period of the British Empire between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the end of World War I, British periodical coverage of exploration was extensive. Not only the tropical terrain of savannah and deserts received regular coverage, but also the British successes and failures in the high Arctic intrigued a wide audience in mid-century Britain. Late in the century the inhospitable exoticism of Antarctica also began to excite the British imagination. Although published in an earlier century and sited in the far south, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, first published in 1798, most clearly prefigured the Arctic “sublime”:

And thro’ the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen; Ne shapes of men nor beasts we ken– The Ice was all between.

The Ice was here, the Ice was there, The Ice was all around: It crack’d and growl’d, and roar’d and howl’d, Like noises in a swound!^4...