In 1827, Jane Griffin’s brother-in-law Mr. Simpkinson pulled her aside, and as she noted in her diary, “asked if I had succeeded in meeting Captain F. [Franklin] in arctic circles, that being the report, & whether some cape or bay was not christened in our name.”204 It was an open secret that the widower Franklin was on the lookout for a new wife and mother for his baby daughter Eleanor – and indeed, had christened a “Point Griffin” in Jane’s honor, and also stopped by her house “begging acceptance of reindeer tongues and 3 prs shoes made by native Ind. [Indian] women.”205 It was a courtship ritual that would be familiar to Isabella Stanley Parry, who had just married Edward Parry under a silken flag she sewed for his upcoming North Pole expedition, spent her honeymoon aboard HMS Hecla at Deptford, and received a wedding present from Franklin of a raccoon skin.206 Simpkinson’s teasing of his sister-in-law was pithy on several levels which may or may not have been apparent to Jane, but which, according to her habit, she faithfully recorded in her diary.
As Simpkinson, Jane Griffin, and Isabella Parry all knew well, the geographical circle at 66° 33’ N was echoed in several very different social circles in metropolitan London and in the Arctic, into which explorers and their families were pulled in the 1820s. One was the elite world of scientific sociability, linked into the rhythms of the London Season, the marriage market, the publishing market, and systems of patronage and government authority. Another was an equally important world of vernacular knowledge, associations, and patronage – the sailors, fur traders, whalers, and carpenters upon whose experience and connections (including mixed race families)
204 Quoted in F. Woodward, Portrait of Jane, 157-158.
205 Ibid., 158.
206 This raccoon skin rug did not fare well in the Parry household. Isabella recorded in her diary that when her sister and brother-in-law (also Edward) came to visit them in London, “Poor Ed., all the time she was making her
lamentations, he stood with his back to the fire, poking the racoon (sic) skin with his stick, answering her occasional appeals to him with a grunt.” Ann Parry, Parry of the Arctic: The Life Story of Admiral Sir Edward Parry, 1790-1855 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 128; Spufford, I May Be Some Time, 96-97.
naval explorers depended for survival. A third, related world was that of indigenous peoples who were being drawn into the orbit of the fur trade and global capitalism, and whose assistance or hostility could make or break an expedition. Explorers inhabited all three of these worlds, and to varying degrees their families did too. Men and women navigated these expanded circles as they reckoned with the transformations wrought by polar travels, and like Eleanor Porden, tried to reconcile them with their domestic households and lives.
This chapter sets the Franklin family into the broader contexts of elite sociability in the late Enlightenment (and the subculture of Arctic sociability in the 1820s), which were key to the circulation of scientific and geographical information and the seeking of patronage. 207 When explorers were at home, their experiences gave them entry into these rarified realms of polite society, which they and their families navigated as “lions.” I argue that within these “Arctic Circles,” explorers’ wives and families became important “gatekeepers” of information from the field, in the process entering into wider, developing networks of imperial knowledge. This was partly because the Franklin family encountered an extended group of knowledgeable, educated women who successfully negotiated the public sphere, and whom they could (and would) emulate. It was also partly because it gave the Franklin women experience in filtering, editing, and selectively sharing information from and about the vernacular agents and indigenous peoples who were critical to explorers’ success. When explorers were in the field, their private
correspondence to and from the Arctic mixed up geographic, ethnographic, scientific, and professional information with gossip, family news, and sentimental messages. Vernacular and indigenous knowledge and skill filtered through explorers’ correspondence from the field and gifts of “curiosities” to their families – like those slippers made by Indian women which Franklin
207 Gillian Russell, “An 'Entertainment of Oddities': Fashionable Sociability and the Pacific in the 1770s,” in A New Imperial History, 48-70; J. Secord, “Scientific Conversation,” 23-59.
used to court his second wife. Those letters and ethnographic objects were selectively circulated by family members in order to forward their absent relatives’ interests and bolster their
reputations. In the process, both explorers and their families minimized the importance of the other Arctic circles in which explorers moved and which were crucial to their success, those of indigenous and mixed-race societies and vernacular agents in the field. This period established the women of the Franklin family as keepers of archives and information, of expedition
correspondence, specimens, curiosities, and ephemera, in domestic and gendered counterparts of the naturalist’s cabinet, a reputation and set of experiences that they would later draw on as they struggled to find their places in colonial society.
On Being a “Lion”: Polite Science and Arctic Sociability, c. 1818-1828
The 1820s were a heyday for Arctic exploration. The climate, so to speak, was favorable, given both Barrow’s relentless promotion of Arctic expeditions and the proliferating demands of the scientific and geographical communities (see Chapter 1). Between 1818 and 1828 ten British naval expeditions were sent to the Arctic. They came relentlessly, one on the heels of another, all of them inconclusive and incomplete. In 1818, Buchan and Franklin tried and failed to reach the Pole via Spitzbergen. The same year, Ross and Parry tried the Passage, but turned around in Lancaster Sound when Ross sighted a mirage that he named the Croker Mountains. In 1819, Parry sailed over the “mountains” and made it as far west as Melville Island where he was stopped by ice. 1819 to 1822 were the terrifying years of the first Land Arctic Expedition under Franklin, detailed in Chapter 1. Parry went out again in 1821-23 with George Lyon in the Fury and Hecla to try a new eastern route via Hudson Strait. They did not quite make it to the Gulf of Boothia, but the ethnographic descriptions they brought back of the Iglulingmiut after two
winters fascinated the public (see below). In 1824, Lyon went out again in the Griper (which Parry described as “a vessel of … lubberly, shameful construction”) but nearly broke her to pieces in the ice and came home the same year; Parry meanwhile took the Hecla and Fury to try to descend Prince Regent’s Inlet from Lancaster Sound, but wrecked the Fury and returned in 1825.208 By the time Parry came back, Franklin and Richardson had already left on the Second Land Expedition (see below), with Franklin hoping to meet up with Frederick W. Beechey, who was trying the Passage via the Pacific in HMS Blossom. Finally, Parry made another stab at the North Pole via Spitzbergen in 1827, but failed again, marking an end to official expeditions until 1836 amidst a new climate of reform and financial scrutiny.209
The social world of polite science in Regency London thrived on these voyages and on the “curiosities” and “lions” they produced. This was a social scene that was the inheritor of the
“conversable” world of eighteenth century salons, offering a smorgasbord of information to be pleasurably shared and consumed as a part of the Season’s activities.210 It was an elite world of scientific sociability, a crucial sphere that historians of science now see as the genesis of the institutions, networks, and infrastructures of “professional” science later in the century, even as it coexisted with the proliferation of specialist scientific societies that would open up a gap
between “amateur” and “professional.”211 The newly discovered elements of the natural world (from the minisculae under a microscope, to the powers of terrestrial magnetism, to the
208 Quoted in A. Parry, Parry of the Arctic, 95.
209 For more thorough synopses of all of these expeditions, see Savours, Search for the North West Passage, 39-123;
M.J. Ross, Polar Pioneers, 23-108. For a detailed analysis of the expeditions and the print culture they generated, see Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative, 53-156.
210 The best and most succinct case against excessive reverence for a “golden age of conversation” and the idealized unitary public sphere that it conjures is in J. Secord, “Scientific Conversation,” 23-25. For an excellent discussion of pleasure in the consumption of scientific material, see Anne Secord, “Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge,” Isis 93, no. 1 (March 2002): 28-57. See also John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York : Routledge, 1997), especially Chapter 2.
211 Thompson, “Earthquakes and Petticoats,” 329-346; Endersby, Imperial Nature, 1-30, 249-275.
curiosities of the empire, to the wonders of the heavens) were opened to discussion and
examination in soirees, dinner parties, and salons.212 It was as true in the 1820s as it was in the 1770s that it was only by “circulating, talking about, and looking at” curiosities of voyages that the information produced by expeditions “could be properly assimilated and activated.”213 Travelers were also curiosities to be displayed, paraded, and interrogated by self-consciously refined fellow-guests. They were “lions,” in company with other writers, musicians and travelers, lending the aristocrats who invited them the ability to claim “intellectual leadership for the nation, while remaining distinct from the ordinary public.”214 This was an exclusive sphere marked by hierarchical rank and gentility. Access might be provided on the basis of talent, but it was a struggle, and this struggle was as marked for Arctic explorers and their families as it was for others who exploited their talents to gain entrance to Society, secure patronage, and establish their genteel footing (especially if they came from humble backgrounds).215
For freshly-returned explorers, making these connections was essential, but it was not necessarily pleasant. It meant consistently seeking patronage, currying favor, and being the center of attention as one’s person and experiences were put on display like other tastes, crazes and fads.216 John Franklin dreaded “being what is termed one of the Lions of the day,” as he wrote to his sister Sarah Sellwood on his return in 1822.217 That discomfort, as demonstrated in Chapter 1, only increased as he and Richardson worked on the narrative that would increase their fame. Neither, for that matter, did all the young women of their acquaintance enjoy the
experience; Jane Griffin recorded in her diary in 1824 that Mrs. Bowring, the wife of a
212 G. Russell, “Entertainment of Oddities,” 48-70; J. Secord, “Scientific Conversation,” 23-59.
213 G. Russell, “Entertainment of Oddities,” 57.
214 James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 178-80.
215 Ibid., 410. This was, for example, certainly the case with Michael Faraday who came from very humble origins.
216 David Allen, “Tastes and Crazes,” in Cultures of Natural History, 394-407.
217 John Franklin to Sarah Sellwood, Stromness, Orkney Isles, 10 October, 1822, in Davis, “Which an Affectionate Heart,” 202-204.
“celebrated radical author and merchant” thought that girls “ought to talk & say whatever they liked. There was no use in mere listening & asking questions, they should have exercise in the Art of Conversation – an art by the way which I have a particular dislike to.”218 Parry, however positively reveled in the experience, rapturously writing to his parents almost daily from London in 1820 (after returning from his first Arctic command) about the acquaintances he made and the scores of parties and clubs he attended. A typical example from 1820 went, “I have loads to say, but have no time to write more. I dine at the “Alfred” to day, at the Royal Society with Sir B. H.
tomorrow, at the “Travellers” the next day. The first and last of these Clubs are composed of the first society in London – mostly literary, and have done me and [Lt. Col. Edward] Sabine the honor to elect us honorary members, which many Noblemen would be glad to accept, if they could get it.”219
It was easy, however, to put a foot wrong in the search for connections. One way of securing patronage was, of course, by naming geographical features after notable men. Doing so never failed to cause pleasure and amusement; Peter Richardson (John Richardson’s brother) noted on one occasion in 1828 that “Capt Franklin has named two mountains, one after Professor Buckland a stout short man & the other after Copplestone a tall thin man – Copplestone on being told this said they ought to have been called Copplestone Crag & Bucklands Bluff.”220 It could, however, expose explorers to a degree of social censure: Mary Russell Mitford privately condemned John Ross in a letter to one of her friends after his failed 1818 expedition, writing,
“He a discoverer, forsooth! All that he did was to go about christening rocks, capes, bays, and mountains after all the great men, dead and living, whom he thought to gain by, and then to come
218 Quoted in F. Woodward, Portrait of Jane, 140.
219 Sabine was the naturalist on the Ross expedition and on Parry’s second expedition. SPRI MS 438/26/54, William Edward Parry to Caleb and Sarah Parry, 6 December 1820.
220 SPRI MS 1503/8/2, Peter Richardson Journal, 11 January 1828.
home and write a huge quarto about nothing.” Naming geographical features for persons (especially women) who were neither scientific luminaries nor potential patrons also inevitably gave rise to speculation. Franklin wrote to his sister Elizabeth after his first expedition, “You and I are the only two of the family who have not had their names placed on the map…. I could not call any place Franklin or I should have been charged with vanity or Elizabeth for fear of the big wigs should imagine it was the name of my fair friend, and conclude me to be desperately in love.” 222 He had, however, named several islands after the Pordens; after Eleanor’s death in 1824, he went on to name several more islands and geographical features “Griffin” after Jane Griffin and her father, which meant, as described above, that Jane experienced significant teasing.223
Geographical missteps were not the only cause of anxiety in this elite social world. Arctic officers had spent their adolescence aboard naval ships in wartime – experiences that had shown them the world, taught them how to take a correct observation, calculate longitude, chart a coastline and tack a sail, but had not prepared them for either the world of polite science or the broad scientific remit demanded in their official instructions.224 As Parry wrote to his parents in 1820, after he returned from his farthest West at Melville Island, “though I can write a tolerable Manuscript Journal, I begin to feel that a life spent at sea since 12 years of age does not qualify one altogether to write such an account as the public expect in print.”225 Socializing could, to a certain extent, remedy this (as could Barrow’s intervention as an assiduous editor). Before his second expedition in 1819, Parry attended a course of lectures on mineralogy given by Rebecca
221 Mary Russell Mitford to Barbara Hofland, 17 April, 1819, quoted in Mary Russell Mitford, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, as Related in a Selection from her Letters to her Friends, ed. Alfred Guy L'estrange, Vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1870), 68.
222 DRO D3311/28/10, John Franklin to Elizabeth Franklin, Stromness, 10 October 1822.
223 Gell, John Franklin’s Bride, 68; F. Woodward, Portrait of Jane, 157-159.
224 This was less the case for Richardson (who after starting out as a ship’s surgeon, obtained a medical degree from Edinburgh) than for Franklin and Parry.
225 SPRI MS 438/26/53, William Edward Parry to Caleb and Sarah Parry, 2 December, 1820.
Lowry, the wife of a famous engraver. He wrote to his parents that Sabine was also attending, and that Mrs. Lowry had been recommended to them by the mathematicians Captain and Mrs.
Kater; later, he asked his parents to send her one of the mineral specimens he had collected on Hare Island on the last expedition, as “I am deriving very great advantage from her lectures which I attend regularly three times a week.”226 By 1830, the acquaintances of Arctic explorers and their families included: the mathematician Charles Babbage, the geologists William and Mary Buckland, Captain (later Sir Francis) Beaufort, 227 the geologist Adam Sedgwick, the tidologist William Whewell, the astronomer John Herschel and his sister Caroline, the naturalist Robert Brown, the geologists Roderick and Charlotte Murchison, the scientists Mary and William Somerville, the mathematicians Henry and Mary Frances Kater, the geologist Charles Lyell, the Quaker penal reformer Elizabeth Fry, the Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, and the traveller, author and geologist Maria Graham, among many others. Whether at intimate dinner parties, evening soirees and lectures, or private conversations, these were opportunities to fill in the blanks on the “lion’s” education, an opportunity provided by his own efforts to fill in blanks on maps.
This was also the principal social scene in which the women of polar exploration circulated in the 1820s and 1830s, and Jane Franklin would draw on its vestiges and its connections in the 1850s during the Franklin searches. Like her friend Eleanor Porden, Jane regularly attended Royal Institution lectures, including Millington’s on mechanics, Michael Faraday’s on electricity and magnetism, and Peter Mark Roget’s on optics.228 Fascinated by
226 SPRI MS 438/26/30, William Edward Parry to his parents, 15 February, 1819; SPRI MS 438/26/38, William Edward Parry to his parents, London, 23 February, 1819.
227 Richardson had sailed under Beaufort in HMS Blossom to the coast of Africa in 1809 and then to Quebec.
Beaufort had replaced a particularly tyrannical captain who had court-martialed most of his officers, including Richardson. McIlraith, Life of Sir John Richardson, 23-33. In 1825, the Blossom was re-equipped and sent out under F. W. Beechey to Bering Strait, where it was intended to meet up with Franklin.
228 F. Woodward, Portrait of Jane, 134.
phrenology, she had her cranium “read” after she spoke to Charles Babbage about it, and when the opportunity afforded itself, she took flight in a hot air balloon.229 The first record of Jane meeting Franklin was when she recorded seeing him at a dinner at the Millingtons’ in 1824.230 She also frequently attended dinners at the D’Israelis’ (she would later count Benjamin Disraeli among her supporters during the Franklin searches in the 1850s).231 When she was introduced to Captain John Ross at a dinner in 1819, it was as a “fellow traveler,” for she had already traveled extensively on the continent with her father. She leapt at Ross’s joking suggestion that she accompany him on a voyage to Bering Strait.Ross reportedly replied that “I came 6th upon his list, for that he meant to take 12 young ladies with him.”232 It was also the social scene in which John and Eleanor Franklin’s favorite niece Mary Anne Kay “came out,” circulating
simultaneously through the marriage market, naval circles, and polite scientific society – an experience she would document for her uncle while he was away (see below).
Many of the connections that Jane, Mary Anne, and other members of polar families (male and female) made in this world were with learned women. This was an environment in which women could enjoy a degree of scientific and/or literary distinction – so long as they positioned themselves strategically, obtained the sponsorship of a male mentor (often their husbands or other close relatives), published (often anonymously) for children and/or the general public, and constantly, as Mary Orr has put it, “dressed [their] learning in the modesty of
Many of the connections that Jane, Mary Anne, and other members of polar families (male and female) made in this world were with learned women. This was an environment in which women could enjoy a degree of scientific and/or literary distinction – so long as they positioned themselves strategically, obtained the sponsorship of a male mentor (often their husbands or other close relatives), published (often anonymously) for children and/or the general public, and constantly, as Mary Orr has put it, “dressed [their] learning in the modesty of