Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818–1860, and: Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875 (review)

The notion of exploration as a literary project, a cause in which rather more ink than blood has been spilt, is a familiar one within Victorian studies. Publishers and editors in the vanguard of an ever-expanding print culture of exploration capitalized on the public thirst for geographical novelty and adventure during the nineteenth century, exploiting new possibilities offered by the proliferation of publishing opportunities from lavishly produced special editions to ephemeral columns in weekly papers. The crossings between genres that marked this culture—notably between adventure fiction and exploration narrative—have been the subject of much attention from literary scholars, notably in studies of writers such as H. Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad. In the polar context, more especially, the imaginative power of tales of heroism and disaster in frozen climes often has been treated as an essential ingredient in the making of potent myths of Englishness, empire, and masculinity. While this perspective on the imaginative geographies of exploration has yielded important insights, there has also been a growing sense of diminishing returns, as new questions emerge and older ones begin to creep back in. Maybe the “myths” surrounding ice and the English imagination were not quite so powerful or as coherent as they pretended to be; perhaps John Barrow was not after all the presiding genius of polar exploration, nor (more certainly) Clements Markham after him; maybe too there was something about the material realities of polar environments that always exceeded or escaped the gaze of empire.

Into this already thickly populated scene—augmented by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of explorer biographies (the latest John Franklin season is past, Markham’s is yet to come)—arrive two new substantial books. Both of them are concerned with the cultural footprints of polar exploration in what was once known as the “heroic” era (Geography Militant, I presume?). Janice Cavell’s book, Tracing the Connected Narrative, is one of the first studies of the literature of exploration to benefit from the revolution in the study of Victorian print culture represented in works such as James Secord’s Victorian Sensation (2000) (not referenced here yet surely an essential inspiration for this kind of work) and enabled by the digitization of increasing numbers of nineteenth-century periodicals. This is a study that looks well beyond the familiar terrain of the elite publishing house of John Murray for its materials in order to investigate the ways in which Arctic concerns insinuated their way into every nook and cranny of contemporary print culture, from the pages of popular newspapers to the penny press. The result is a sustained and richly nuanced study of a heterogeneous and highly fractious print culture in which stories of Arctic exploration became a means of making money in a variety of ways. In the process, Cavell challenges the rather attenuated version of the history of British naval exploration as a disastrous story of imperial self-delusion—as exemplified above all in the Franklin expedition—which she claims (somewhat provocatively) has dominated Canadian historiography in particular. Instead she seeks to understand the shape of British print culture “from within” (7), which means not only studying the published works and archival remains of well-known authors (Franklin, Barrow, Francis Leopold McClintock, and the lesser-known Sherard Osborn), but also placing their work in the context of a thriving periodical literature through which a “connected narrative” of British exploration was built and reinforced.

Tracing the Connected Narrative goes well beyond the clichés of a broad-brush cultural history of polar exploration in which, as Cavell puts it, “the Admiralty” means Barrow, publishing means Murray, “the press” means...