An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 175-185 9780812291858

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction. Blank Spaces on the Earth
Chapter 1. Polar Speculations
Chapter 2. The Language of the Sea
Chapter 3. The Regions of the Air
Chapter 4. Underworlds
Conclusion. “Dislocated Progress”: Atopias in Urban Space
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
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M
N
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P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Z
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

An Empire of Air and Water

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A N E M PI R E OF A I R A N D WAT E R Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850

S IOBH A N C A R ROL L

u n i v e r s i t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr e s s p h i l a de l p h i a

Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carroll, Siobhan. An empire of air and water : uncolonizable space in the British imagination, 1750–1850 / Siobhan Carroll. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4678-0 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Space in literature. 4. Geography in literature. 5. Place (Philosophy) in literature. 6. Geography and literature. 7. Nationalism and literature—Great Britain— History—18th century. 8. Nationalism and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. PR447.C37 2015 820.9'32—dc23 2014028856

For my family, with love and appreciation

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Contents

Introduction. Blank Spaces on the Earth Chapter 1. Polar Speculations

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Chapter 2. The Language of the Sea Chapter 3. The Regions of the Air Chapter 4. Underworlds

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72 115

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Conclusion. “Dislocated Progress”: Atopias in Urban Space

Notes

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Bibliography Index

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279

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Blank Spaces on the Earth

In 1749, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville erased the world. Born into a century full of elaborate illustrations of distant places, the French cartographer (1697–1782) became famous less for the beauty of his maps than for what they excluded: centuries of accumulated stories, maps, and travelers’ tales concerning distant places on the globe. As Alfred Hiatt observes, d’Anville’s cartographical predecessors had followed the tradition of including mountain ranges, rivers, and tribes that were rumored to exist in spaces that had yet to be explored by Europeans, producing detailed maps of a world that was already known and merely awaited rediscovery: a world such as the one depicted in Giacomo Gastaldi’s (1500–1566) famed 1564 map of Africa (see Figure 1), full of the locations described in medieval travelers’ tales and the work of classical geographers.1 D’Anville’s 1749 map of Africa, however, marked a decided shift away from the world of the ancients (see Figure 2). A determined participant in what Christine Marie Petto has described as the French drive to “ ‘perfect’ the work of . . . geography and hydrography . . . in the service of the state,”2 d’Anville included on his map only what had been empirically verified, thus creating a continent dominated by a novel and, to the imperial eye, an attractive set of blank spaces.3 D’Anville defended his use of blank space by referring to French Enlightenment historiography, which, as Voltaire would argue, proposed to eliminate “all the fables with which fanaticism, the romantic spirit and credulity have at all times peopled the theatre of the world.”4 Just as a “faithful historian” finding “a vacancy or interruption in any series of events” should not “supply it by his own imagination, even though he might do it with probability,” d’Anville argued, so a cartographer should leave a “blank . . . in a map [to] denote a want of intelligence.”5 In defending his use of blank space, d’Anville

Figure 1. Giacomo Gastaldi, Il disegno della geografia moderna de tutta la parte dell Africa (Venice, 1564). © The British Library Board. Maps 189.c.1. Note that the interior of Africa, which at the time European explorers had yet to penetrate, is depicted as thoroughly mapped.

Figure 2. Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Afrique (Paris, 1749). © The British Library Board. Maps * 63510.(47)

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thus likened his cartographical practices to acts of writing that, like his maps, fundamentally shaped their audiences’ perception of their nations’ situation in the world. Both were forms of representation that should be purged of “fables” impeding rational understanding and, in the case of d’Anville’s map, the French state’s ability to exert control over territory.6 As J. B. Harley has argued, the “silences” of blank space had social consequences.7 In erasing the names of tribal groups and rumored kingdoms, Europeans swept rival ethnic identities from the map. The white space that took their place offered, in the case of the Americas, “a promise of free and apparently virgin land—an empty space for Europeans to partition and fill.”8 D’Anville’s blank spaces replaced visions of populated territory with a visual terra nullius, a “no person’s land” invitingly open for colonial appropriation. And d’Anville’s map also erases stories: the details gleaned from centuries of speculation concerning the African continent. In their place, we are presented with empty paper, which on one hand tantalizes us with the promise of future inscription—we, too, can write on this map; there is now space for us to do so—but on the other hand testifies to the fragility of fiction in the face of the Enlightenment’s pursuit of knowledge. The Africa of d’Anville’s map is no longer occupied by polyphonic tales of monsters and strange peoples: There is, the map asserts, only one master narrative of African space. There is only one Africa, and d’Anville’s map is the authoritative voice on what it contains. The publication of d’Anville’s 1749 map marks a seminal moment in the history of European spatial thought, and it provides a useful starting point for examining the impact of a new phase of state-sponsored exploration and cartographical representation on geo-imaginary spaces. D’Anville’s erasure of story points us to some of the tensions inherent in the rise of scientific cartography, indicating not only the colonial ramifications of this new era of exploration, but also the challenge posed to fiction makers, as areas previously open to all types of speculation now appeared roped off to all but the most realistic representations. When we see British authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Sophia Lee attempting to set limits on the nation-state’s penetration of blank spaces, I suggest, it is in part because the literary imagination itself can appear threatened by such expansion.9 This book takes as its subject not the blank space of continents like Africa—which, as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow notes in Heart of Darkness, was destined not to remain blank at all but to become “a place of darkness,”10 dark with the ink depicting European claims, black with the names of colonial ventures—but a set of spaces that, even into the early twentieth century,

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retained their association with blankness. On global maps, areas such as the poles, the ocean, the atmosphere, and the subterranean were either depicted as mostly empty spaces or evaded such representations altogether. They were imagined as harboring within themselves marvelous unknowns such as the deep sea and the inner earth, but also as resisting, because of their climate or material character, their conversion into colonizable forms of space. On one hand, these atypical spaces often played an important role in imperial ideologies, recognized, in the case of the ocean, as the foundational space of Britain’s maritime empire, and depicted, as in the case of the poles, as spaces illuminating Britain’s national character. But on the other hand, these spaces were also perceived as challenging imperial ambitions by virtue of their intrinsic resistance to cultivation and settlement and, thus, to territorial appropriation and state control. As Carl Schmitt observes of the sea in The Nomos of the Earth, certain spaces exist outside the “terrestrial orientations” of the “great primeval acts of law . . . appropriating land, founding cities, and establishing colonies”; even in Schmitt’s own day, they are “not considered to be state territory.”11 These are the uncolonizable spaces of imperial imagination, planetary spaces over which the metropole aims to extend its power but that recalcitrate their conversion into national property: the types of geographical regions that Lauren Benton has recently dubbed “anomalous legal zones” of empire.12 They are, for the purposes of this argument, “atopias,”13 “real” natural regions falling within the theoretical scope of contemporary human mobility, which, because of their intangibility, inhospitality, or inaccessibility, cannot be converted into the locations of affective habitation known as “place.”14 As spaces presumed to lie at or beyond the fringes of everyday life, atopias dialectically construct the inhabited places of home and community, providing a contrast to the familiarity, stability, and security implied by idealized sites of dwelling. Unlike the wilderness of Turner’s frontier, the unsettling nature of atopias is imagined as a permanent affair: They await neither improvement, nor inevitable wide-scale settlement, nor seamless incorporation into the domestic space of the nation.15 To voyage too far or stay too long in an atopia is considered hazardous, a perception reinforced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by explorers’ descriptions of the bodily disintegrations they experienced in such regions: blackouts, snow-blindness, scurvy, madness, suffocation, and poisonings. And to be rendered immobile in an atopia—to be becalmed at sea, to be trapped underground, to be blizzard-beset in a polar camp—is generally considered a dangerous affair. Occupation of atopic space,

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if it happens at all, is therefore imagined as temporary and is usually associated with mobile peoples—explorers, exiles, refugees, bandits, and mutineers— who have no place in, or who have been physically dis-placed from, the space of the nation. While atopias resist integration with the national domestic, they can be overlaid with global space and, indeed, often served as geo-imaginary coordinates in Britons’ conceptions of the globe. In the case of the ocean and atmosphere, they can enable the kinds of extra-national flows of goods, people, and information often portrayed as threatening to overwhelm the local. But they are simultaneously, to borrow Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term, “planetary”16 spaces—sites of natural alterity—that might, at a stroke, undo, arrest, deviate, or destroy the human systems of global circulation with which they become associated. It is not uncommon to encounter them linked in imagined concert, as, for example, in a 1785 reader on Geographical and Astronomical Definitions, which promises to “search the poles” and move from these abstract, as-yet unvisited ends of the earth to the “Dark caverns”17 that might otherwise seem to elude such an all-encompassing vision. Thomas De Quincey similarly invokes atopic spaces as essential points in his mental map of the global city of London, orienting his dislocated urban self in relation to “a north-west passage,” “the cave of Trophonius,” and “the sea.”18 In such instances of geoimaginary invocation, atopias help establish the sublime vastness of the globe and, in the case of De Quincey, its associated flows of capital, culture, and people. At the same time, atopias’ association with impenetrability and the sublime hint also at the failure of such acts of mental vision and the imminent reemergence of a planetary space that the global cartographer only pretends to master. The terms “atopia” and “atopic” might thus be extended beyond the scope of this book to apply to other forms of space deemed penetrable but inhospitable, such as mountain peaks and, as of the twentieth century, outer space. Such spaces were omitted from this project for reasons of period focus and, in the case of mountains, two factors that appeared to significantly differentiate them from the atopias analyzed here: the presence of large settlements on mountains and the fact that even “unconquered” mountain ranges were represented as fully assimilated terrestrial spaces on eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury maps.19 Regarding these other potential geographical outliers, it should be stressed that, while the atopic nature of a space may be informed by its material conditions, atopias are cultural constructs. Spatial categories such as deserts, so often portrayed as empty, uninhabited parallels to the ocean by

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the British Romantics, might be constructed very differently in the imagination of the Saharan Garamantes.20 Atopias become visible at the historical moment at which unknown regions—formerly the untroubled settings of romance, myth, and early utopias21—begin to appear vulnerable to the logic of state possession and control; the moment at which the storied ink occupying what Yi-Fu Tuan calls “mythical space” is replaced by a blank space inviting penetration.22 Assertions of sovereign power over polar, subterranean, atmospheric, and oceanic spaces appeared newly plausible by the late eighteenth century, the consequence of a series of technological and political developments that made these spaces accessible, and chartable, as never before. Britain’s contested claim to “rule” the waves had been bolstered by technological developments such as the invention of the H4 chronometer, which, in allowing the accurate measuring of longitude at sea, made the practice of oceanic cartography safer and more accurate than it had ever been. Other spaces portrayed as bearing a resemblance to the anomalous ocean became newly visible around this time, their exploration often spearheaded by the same sailors whose labor and skills were extending Britain’s empire into foreign seas. Nineteenth-century Britain’s renewal of its search for the Northwest Passage brought the unimaginably distant poles into view as a character-defining challenge to the British Empire. The Montgolfiers’ 1783 invention of the hot air balloon suddenly made the transparent atmosphere visible as a new locus of continental imperial ambition. And the eighteenth century’s invention of better light sources and adoption of rope ladders in cave exploration made the thorough charting of subterranean systems a possibility. Not only the ocean, in other words, but also poles, caverns, and the hitherto unexplored atmosphere could now be conceivably brought into standardized space. The spaces I dub atopias thus occupied a visibly recalcitrant juncture in what Henri Lefebvre describes as the Romantic period’s crucial transition into “abstract spatiality,” highlighting, and often seeming to materialize resistance against, the spatial transformations that are characteristic of modernization.23 While Europeans had certainly explored, written, and read about most of these regions prior to 1750, the increased accessibility of these spaces in the late eighteenth century prompted Britons to rethink the relationship between the sovereign state and areas that appeared to lie outside its domain. And rethinking spaces such as the ocean and poles also, I suggest, frequently involved rethinking literature’s relationship to the emergent imperial dimensions of the British nation-state.24 Two works in the burgeoning field of maritime studies

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have recently made similar claims regarding the relationship between literature and that ur-space of atypicality, the ocean: Samuel Baker has linked the British Romantics’ construction of the idea of culture to the British project of establishing hegemony over the waves, arguing that the Romantic idea of culture arose in part as a response to the challenge of conceiving of a property that could be cultivated at sea.25 Baker further contends that the Lake poets “embraced what they came to call ‘culture’ as an elite practice of orchestrating a full repertoire of ways of life and putting that repertoire at the service of a British state whose divinely ordained mission they believed to be a realization of such synthesis overseas.”26 Culture, in other words, becomes both an enabler of, and a justification for, maritime empire. Margaret Cohen, in tracing the novel’s roots in the transnational world of maritime labor, observes that the term “technology”27 was first coined to describe what I, in my second chapter, call the “language of the sea”: the nautical language that mediated the sailor’s relationship to the dangerous sublimity of his oceanic environment and that, Cohen argues, shaped the development of the novel. Cohen, in making an argument for the literary significance of the mariner’s “craft,”28 thus similarly recognizes an alliance between literature and Britain’s quest to rule the intransigent waves. When examined against atopic backdrops, literature itself can emerge as a technology via which Britain can exert control over the anomalous spaces of its empire. Whether literature (by which I mean poetry, plays, novels, and other forms of “fictional” representation) ought to be used in this manner was, for many of the authors whose works I examine, a different matter. For authors who, like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, were wary of the ramifications of an alliance between literature and the state, representing atopias provided an opportunity to set limits on Britain’s imperial ambitions, pushing empiricist exploration back from provinces of the imagination. Authors such as Frederick Marryat, on the other hand, recognized in the challenges of the atopia a platform from which to assert the importance of literature to Britain’s national and imperial future. Spaces that the empire could not successfully colonize were spaces that literature alone might claim, and so, I argue, individual authors’ representations of atopias during the period that William Galperin and Susan Wolfson have dubbed the Romantic Century (1750–1850) reflect not only their attitudes toward the growth of Britain’s maritime empire, but also the part they saw texts playing in that expansion. The authors I examine in this project adopt different stances toward the sovereign state’s attempts to discover, explore, and exert control over atopias.

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Nevertheless, a general historical trend can be observed in which earlier authors such as M. W. Shelley, William Falconer, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Sophia Lee compose works that try to reimpose limits on imperial expansion, whereas later authors such as Charles Dickens and Marryat use atypical spaces as the backdrop for stories asserting the ability of literature to maintain national cohesion in environments that science and military force alone could not claim.29 Arguments for texts’ importance in mediating between individuals and atypical environments thus also become arguments that highlight literature’s importance in constructing Britons’ imagined relationship to the globe. Such arguments are even, as I will argue in the final chapter, imported into the domestic space of Britain’s great cities. As viewed through the lens of metaphorical comparisons to polar, maritime, atmospheric, and subterranean spaces, urban spaces begin to look atopic themselves, appearing as alien landscapes that, according to authors such as G. W. M. Reynolds, must be “read” to be understood. In making this argument, I aim to contribute to at least four ongoing critical conversations. The first of these conversations has mainly been conducted by cultural or human geographers, who, working in the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger or in the cultural-Marxist tradition of Lefebvre, have focused on the impact of the Industrial Revolution’s spatial transformations on human behavior.30 The concept of “place” as a bounded location rooting individual and communal being emerges from the work of Heidegger, who influentially suggested a tension between the idealized place of dwelling and the alienating spaces of modernity. The threat posed to “traditional” place by modern forms of construction and mobility has since been extended in the work of critics such as Edward Relph and Marc Augé, and constitutes a familiar theme in discussions of place and globalization. Studies of “space,” on the other hand, tend to take their cues from Lefebvre’s work, which emphasized the socially produced nature and ideological function of the abstract spaces of capitalism.31 For critics interested in the political function of exteriors and urban space, Lefebvre provided an important model, as well as a means of thinking through the constitutive elements of “space”: the material space experienced and reinscribed by the “spatial practice” of everyday life, the geometric “representations of space” measured and designed by geographers and architects, and the “lived” or “representational”32 dimensions of space that speak to and are shaped by the imagination. From this extensive and ongoing conversation on the evolution of different forms of space and place, I inherit the following assumptions: Space is

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socially produced; place is a form of bounded space ascribed the power to anchor identity; dwellings constitute a foundational and preeminent form of place (topia); literature both registers and is an active participant in the construction of the imagined dimensions of space; and the Romantic period represented a significant epoch in the history of Western spatial perception. Regarding the latter, scholars historicizing spatial concepts have, from Lefebvre onward, tended to single out the Romantic era as a time in which urbanization, new technologies of measurement, and dramatic political revolutions collided to crystallize the modern construction of space. My work aims to bring an underexamined set of spaces into this discussion of the historical transformation of spatial perception, adding a new dimension to Romanticism’s revision of space. Moreover, in limiting the scope of the term “atopia” to natural spaces resistant to large-scale human settlement and colonization, I am trying to avoid the charge of inutility and nonspecificity leveled at concepts such as Edward W. Soja’s “thirdspace,”33 producing what I hope will be a useful means of describing the operations of related geo-imaginary regions within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British imagination. As my use of the term “geo-imaginary” may signal, I am also contributing to a history of British identity formation and empire building constructed in the wake of Edward Said’s work on the cultural manifestations of imperialism, Benedict Anderson’s theorizing of imagined communities, and Linda Colley’s scholarship on the formation of British national identity. To speak of a “geographical imaginary” or “geo-imaginary” is, on one hand, to harken back to Said’s work on the imaginative geography of the Orient. It is also, via one’s invocation of “the imaginary,” to situate the term’s subject (such as the imperial geo-imaginary) or object (such as the geo-imaginary Tropics) within a discourse of identity formation and maintenance—a discourse that can escape as well as reinforce the boundaries of such traditional units as the nation.34 Like other scholarship produced in the wake of Said’s, Anderson’s, and Colley’s works on Britain’s national and imperial identity, my project owes a great deal to these scholars’ attention to the role played by texts in mediating Britons’ relationship with peoples and territories located within and without the nominal bounds of the nation. My project, however, attempts to add a new spatial axis to theories of British identity formation, calling attention to the ways in which Britain was imagined, not only in opposition to a continental or colonial Other, but also in relation to supposedly empty spaces. Analyses of geo-imaginary spatial categories have often turned to literature as a source of information on the imagined dimensions of such spaces, a

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move suggested by spatial theorists such as Lefebvre but deployed with particular visibility by Said.35 Unlike the modes of literary spatial analysis employed by Franco Moretti and Mikhail Bakhtin, studies of geo-imaginary spaces primarily seek to answer not how representations of a particular space characterize a society’s relations with a particular genre, but how representations across several genres serve to characterize a particular geographical region.36 While in this book I draw on texts ranging from voyage narratives to board games, my argument emphasizes the cultural work performed by overtly fictive forms of text—the spatial representations of poems, plays, and novels—and on the ways that such imaginings inspired authors to reflect on the communityshaping influence of print culture in general and literature in particular. As Suvendrini Perera has argued regarding the Victorian novel, “The ordering of empire in fiction . . . prepared for, or made possible a climate for receiving and accommodating empire.”37 While other forms of text could also perform variations on this work, what Bertrand Westphal observes is the powerful influence of “fictional representation . . . over the [geographical] ‘real’ ”38 is marked by an overtly imaginative form of engagement with space. Voyage narratives, panorama guides, and newspaper articles might ask their readers to imaginatively situate themselves within spaces and historical events, but the relationship they offered to these spaces and events purportedly bore an authentic relationship to a material reality. Fictive forms, in other words, could make peculiarly visible the gap between the empirical experience of location and the mental exercises that invest sites with meaning, a phenomenon that, as we shall see, often inspired a certain degree of self-reflection on the part of their creators. While I will turn to various textual forms in illustrating and elaborating my arguments, then, the focus of this book is on literary contributions to the imagining of these spaces and, more particularly, on the ways that such imaginings inspired the authors of canonical and noncanonical texts to reflect on print culture’s implication in the same. In my analysis I therefore engage with works that, by virtue of their contemporary popularity or their cultural longevity, can be considered among the most influential British representations of these regions, and also with works that, while obscure, make overt some of the geo-imaginary patterns threading their way through more familiar objects of study. The third conversation to which this project aims to contribute emerges from Romantic scholarship’s engagement with the history of imperialism, colonialism, and exploration. On this front, Said’s observations on British

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imaginative geographies have been strikingly developed by critics such as Saree Makdisi, Nigel Leask, Alan Bewell, Tim Fulford, Peter J. Kitson, and Debbie Lee. This project is particularly indebted to Fulford’s, Kitson’s, and Lee’s scholarship on the intersections of scientific exploration and colonialism in the period and might be said to revisit Makdisi’s analysis of the heterotopic function of the Wordsworthian “spot of time” via a path cleared by histories of science and exploration. Like the spaces described by Makdisi— Wordsworth’s Nature, Byron’s Orient, and Scott’s Highlands—atopias are frequently depicted as “threatened . . . by incorporation into that reorganization of spatial and temporal practices and institutions called modernization.” In its resistance to possession, however, the atopia is imagined as escaping colonization and the subsequent “fall which erases, or . . . rewrites it by weaving it tightly into the history of the outside world.”39 The atopia continues to dialectically construct modernity, as well as serve as a touchstone for authors trying to leverage their own craft to shape the processes in which they recognize themselves as implicated. Finally, in focusing on literature’s role in mediating atypical spaces to the British public, I also attempt to complicate our received understanding of the Romantic turn toward the local. As described in works such as David Simpson’s “Literary Criticism, Localism, and Local Knowledge,” the Romantic poets—particularly Wordsworth, Goldsmith, and Clare—retreated from the emergent industrial city into an idealization of the countryside, becoming in the process the exemplary practitioners of a national cult of localism that celebrated particularized rural communities at the expense of an “abstract” urban scene of “commerce, cosmopolitanism, and universalist ideas.”40 In An Empire of Air and Water, however, I examine a literary turn toward the distant, uninhabitable, and abstract and toward landscapes that were often depicted as more—not less—threatening than the globalized cityscapes of London and Manchester. In making this argument I hope to open up a new set of questions regarding British imaginings of the globe during the long Romantic Century. I want to reassess the analytical move exemplified by Edward Said’s seminal argument in Culture and Imperialism, in which he asserts that discussions of imperialism are intrinsically also discussions of “habitation.” Declaring that “uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist,” Said dismisses in a sentence the planetary regions examined in this book in order to justify his focus on “conquests over land and the land’s people.”41 But to acknowledge the socially produced nature of spaces deemed not only uninhabited but also uninhabitable should not preclude us

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from recognizing their importance in the history of colonialism. Atopias served as antagonistic spaces against which Britons “tested” their technology and national character, and therefore as spaces that not only enabled maritime empire, but also justified extensions of power over more tractable forms of space. Recent scholarship on the poles and the ocean has done much to rectify this omission regarding these areas, but in tending to consider such regions in isolation, we have, I believe, inadvertently downplayed the scope of their resonance in the cultural imagination. In recognizing these spaces—in addition to sites such as the atmosphere and the subterranean—as belonging to a shared spatial category taking many of its cues from imaginings of the ocean, we can better see not only the inland manifestations of the geo-imaginary ocean’s political and social connotations, but also the concerted cultural work performed by these settings across a range of genres and media. In reinserting the category of the atopia into the dialectical relationship between “home” and “colony,” then, I hope to open paths of further inquiry into the cultural operations of blank and wild spaces and also invite new questions regarding the construction of colonial and domestic identities. What would it mean, for example, for us to read Victorian explorers’ portrayals of African space as both colonizable and un-atopic? Or to consider how the oceanic and polar horizons that flicker through the pages of Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre define the habitable space of the home, with its un-oceanic gardens and un-subterranean attics? Or to consider how the potentially cultivatable forms of Romantic nature celebrated by William Wordsworth oppose themselves to the hallucinatory shapes of unseen atopias he imagines in the space of the city? In examining British imaginings of atopia, in other words, this book is also gesturing outward toward the forms of space, identity, and mobility that the atopia was used to construct. This study brings together four atopias that have not previously been considered alongside each other, beginning with the space farthest from the British domestic—the poles—and traveling toward the metropole of London by way of the connective space of the ocean, the less-familiar atmosphere, and the increasingly urban-implicated subterranean. In bringing together these four spaces, I am, of course, engaging with the work of scholars who have examined these areas in isolation. Thus, in Chapter 1, “Polar Speculations,” I concur with the arguments of critics such as Jen Hill and Robert G. David regarding the significant role occupied by the high Arctic in the construction of British imperial identity. I depart, however, from previous scholarship in portraying the poles as spaces frequently conflated with the imagination, which became,

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during the long Romantic period, sites of contest for authors struggling to assert the independence of their fictive speculations from those of global commerce. Pairing close readings of fictional and poetic texts with analyses of periodical articles and explorers’ correspondence, I follow the geo-imaginary poles’ evolution from sites safely divorced from colonial profiteering to atopias around which literature’s role in the development of the British Empire was acknowledged, rejected, and promoted. James Cook’s 1773 nondiscovery of the “imaginary Lands”42 of Terra Australis Incognita, I argue, prompted authors such as S. T. Coleridge, Benjamin Bragg, and M. W. Shelley to insist on the ongoing resistance of imagined territories to the empirical intrusions of the nation-state. As the British state began to draw on literature to promote its polar expeditions, however, the groundwork was laid for an alliance between imperial state and literary speculation that would later be successfully promoted by Charles Dickens in The Frozen Deep (1857). Often invoked as a spatialized province of the imagination, polar space thus became not only a space thought to define British national character, but also an atopia in relation to which literature could reflect on its own implication in Britain’s imperial ventures. Chapter 2, “The Language of the Sea,” examines the process by which the unfathomable ocean of the eighteenth century—a space often depicted as fundamentally antithetical to civilization—became the foundation of Britain’s maritime empire. Adopting a narrower focus than the previous chapter, “The Language of the Sea” interlocks with the works of Marcus Rediker, Margaret Cohen, and Hester Blum in its analysis of the literary compositions of British sailors. Predisposed by their exposure to the atopic ocean to view language as a technology that could preserve the self and community at sea, these authors promoted literature as a tool that could either successfully extend the British state’s power over the waves or fundamentally undermine it. This chapter begins with one of the earliest and most influential attempts to use literature to speak for an alienated maritime community, William Falconer’s The Shipwreck (1762). Falconer, I argue, exploits the tension inherent in Britannia’s claim to “rule” the atopia of the waves to set limits on Britain’s imperial ambitions and to argue for land-based Britons’ increased attention to the concerns of their maritime counterparts. Later works such as Marryat’s The Naval Officer (1829) and The King’s Own (1830) revisited this plea and articulated, with varying degrees of conviction, Falconer’s belief that learning “the language of the sea” through literature could help strengthen the relationship between Britain and its internationally circulating workforce. While Marryat, unlike Falconer, was

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an unqualified supporter of Britain’s imperial efforts, his surprisingly harsh criticisms of military institutions position the maritime community—a community that, as my argument reveals, increasingly saw itself as unified by the literature of the ocean—as a separate, atypical entity within the British Empire. Turning from the ocean to its upstart rival, Chapter 3, “The Regions of the Air,” examines the shock that accompanied the sudden appearance in 1783 of a new type of traversable space: the atmosphere. Transformed by the ascension of the Montgolfiers’ hot air balloon from a transparent medium barely noted by geographers into an atopia that threatened to supersede Britain’s maritime empire, the atmosphere became instantly available to writers as a space via which they could examine Britain’s relationship to a cosmopolitan world unimpressed by Britain’s naval power. Whereas scholars such as Srinivas Aravamudan have examined flight as a fantasy of imperial extension, this chapter explores the ways in which the balloon, perceived as a threat to British sovereignty, inspired a series of poems, novels, and plays depicting atmospheric explorers as reluctant discoverers of Britain’s global weakness. As the threat of militarized air balloons faded, Romantic authors such as M. W. Shelley nevertheless continued to invoke eighteenth-century representations of the atmosphere as a planetary, extra-national space that potentially endangers the nation. Given the long-standing association of balloons with print culture and of the regions of the air with the insubstantial productions of poets, works such as Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and Poole’s Crotchets in the Air (1838) use the atmosphere, I argue, to meditate on literature that fails, or threatens to undo, British sovereignty. Moving still closer to the metropole, Chapter 4, “Underworlds,” analyzes the evolving ideological function of subterranean spaces during the long Romantic period, arguing that even as geology, engineering, and tourism opened up spaces previously thought sacred and secret, works like Lee’s The Recess (1783) and Byron’s The Island (1823) insisted on the continued existence of dark recesses, caves, and passages that could help individuals evade the allencompassing gaze of the imperial state. These works are, I suggest, linked to the ideological perspectives on display in subterranean tourist narratives, which, from 1750 through roughly 1850, not only associated caves with the minds of poets and philosophers, but also depicted caves as reservoirs for “grotesque” histories of the nation. No longer merely speculating on preexisting atopias, but now actively inventing atopias within spaces already mapped by the state, Lee and Byron undermine both standardized cartography and

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national history by imagining spaces and histories “at war with . . . known fate.”43 In doing so, Lee and Byron invite readers to reflect on the author’s power to manipulate genre and to shape imagined communities. This chapter concludes by considering the transfer of subterranean discourse to the space of the city during the 1840s, observing the ways in which descriptions of newly exposed subterranean spaces in urban environments continued to empower writers to imagine alternative histories of Britain and its colonial relationships. Revisiting the previous chapter’s discussion of the overlapping representations of caves and cities, the Conclusion, “ ‘Dislocated Progress’: Atopias in Urban Space,” examines the metaphorical relationship of polar, atmospheric, subterranean, and oceanic space to labyrinthine cities in nineteenth-century literature. Drawing together works such as Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805), De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), and Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844–46), I argue that the remote space of the atopia was used as a way to mediate individuals’ social relationships to overwhelming urban environments. “ ‘Dislocated Progress’ ” weaves together the themes of previous chapters, examining literary works that put the specter of the atopia into conversation with the city and that use such imagery as a means of interrogating the ability of texts to manage the spatial transformations wrought by Britain’s imperial expansion and the increased global circulation of capital, information, and people. As these overviews indicate, while the period of British spatial development between 1750 and 1850 lies at the heart of this project—a period bookended on one end by d’Anville’s 1749 display of blank space and on the other by the Great Exhibition that enabled Victorian Britons “to locate themselves in the context of their empire and of the broader world”44—individual chapters stretch and shrink these historical parameters in recounting the transformations of their respective spaces. The story of the traversable atmosphere, for example, does not begin in earnest until the invention of balloon flight in 1783. The story of the transition from Romantic to Victorian polar speculations, on the other hand, cannot be adequately told without referencing the disappearance of the Franklin expedition and Charles Dickens’s 1857 deployment of literary speculation in the service of British national identity. Moreover, several of these chapters conclude by gesturing toward the future of atopic space in their analysis of the return of earlier versions of atopic discourse in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature. In adopting these expansive temporal and geographical parameters I am trying to

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highlight the sympathetic connections between spaces and literary works often considered separately: between Coleridge’s indeterminate Antarctica and Byron’s inassimilable island cave; between M. W. Shelley’s destructive atmosphere and William Falconer’s annihilating ocean; between the fantastic polar lands described by Robert Paltock and the unsettled metropolitan spaces described by Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Reynolds. Such connections reveal the similar function of these related forms of space in the British imagination, and their important role as sites in relation to which British identity, the nation’s global and environmental engagements, and the cultural utility of literature was defined. I am also, in describing the transformations but also the stubborn persistence of certain imagined facets of atopic space, suggesting the continued relevance of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geographical imaginary to the twenty-first century. Indeed, the challenges that come with trying to exert sovereignty over atopias can still be seen today. The poles remain a site of imperial ambition, and elements of nineteenth-century literature’s construction of polar mythology can be seen in the competing political theaters of Canada and Russia, two nations trying to claim sovereignty over the uncultivated North Pole. The opposition between inhabitants of the “uncivilized” ocean and land-based national powers echoes in the speeches of Somali pirates who, as inhabitants of what is effectively a stateless stretch of water, not only prey on international shipping but also claim to constitute, in themselves, a new national body. The threat posed by a global atmosphere to the space of the nation is invoked frequently in discussions of climate change. And even as new records in subterranean descent are set—a Czech team descended 2,170 meters into the Krubera-Voronya cave system in 2007—the limits of subterranean depths have yet to be charted and thus continue to appear as frighteningly unknowable spaces in speculative fiction and horror movies such as The Descent (2005). In exploring the literary representations of atopias described in this book, then, I am still only making an initial foray into the blank spaces of the earth, full histories of which, as signaled by the uninscribed paper left in the center of d’Anville’s map of Africa, remain to be written.

Chapter 1

Polar Speculations

What, then, were the wonders that might lie between me and this speck of distant world! What the caverns, the lakes, the glaciers, the people and the monsters! I was lost in a dream of speculation and desire, as I gazed long and lingeringly over this expanse of regions unexplored. —R. P. Gillies, Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean, 1826 I shall not go in search of it . . . and am only sorry that in searching after those imaginary Lands, I have spent so much time.” —Captain James Cook, Journals, January 3, 1773

Searching After Imaginary Lands On January 21, 1840, Joseph Dubouzet, the first lieutenant of the French expedition ship Zélée, wrote that he had followed the “English custom” and “added a province to France” by planting a flag on the Antarctic territory he christened Terre Adélie (Adélie Land). In doing so, he reported, “We did not dispossess anyone, our title was incontestable,” and best of all, this new land would “never start a war against our country.”1 Dubouzet’s bold assertions regarding this “incontestable” possession—a territory that, despite its desolation, prompts him to briefly contemplate the specter of colonial war elsewhere—ran counter to his expedition’s subsequent actions. On sighting the ships of its American competitors, the d’Urville expedition rushed to Australia to establish the primacy of its discoveries through the medium of print. Rather than solidifying the French claim, however, the texts that rippled out

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from this announcement confused it: Errors introduced by typesetters extended the Adélie Land coast “by about 150 miles or by more than 2000.”2 In the debate that followed, some questioned whether the French had “discovered” land at all.3 Meanwhile, the members of the rival United States Exploring Expedition (sometimes called the “Wilkes Expedition”) left written notices on a barren whaling island that suggested that they were rival claimants to the French discoveries. On discovering this challenge, d’Urville erected his own sign to counter that of the Americans. He then departed the remote island, leaving behind him two narratives dueling for the attention of readers who might never arrive. The story of the discovery of Adélie Land illustrates two important dimensions of polar space. The first is the entanglement of both the North Pole and South Pole with habitable forms of blank space, a counterintuitive connection that has its roots in Europeans’ early conceptions of the ends of the earth as potential colonies. As Dubouzet’s remarks indicate, polar territory was often portrayed as a terra nullius unproblematized by histories of conflict—the idealized object of an idealized imperialism—which could be invoked to clarify the moral character of other, bloodier, colonial projects. And yet this characterization of polar space as the “ideal” colonial possession was informed by the very factors that make polar territory difficult to possess: Adélie Land will “never start a war” with France because, Dubouzet presumes, it cannot be successfully colonized. The harsh environment that renders polar space an uninhabited “no person’s land” in the eyes of the European observer also makes it immune to permanent settlement and thus, ironically, to possession under the doctrine of terra nullius.4 Like the atopia of the ocean, with which it had become closely associated, polar space thus occupies a peculiar double position in the nineteenth-century imagination, illuminating colonial space while also being imagined as permanently outside such space. The story of Adélie Land’s discovery also illustrates the important role that writing played in the history of polar exploration. Unlike the ocean, polar space could be—and was—written upon by explorers eager to stake claims to atopic territory. They wrote on rocks, left signs on beaches, and described their discoveries in voyage narratives, capturing the reading public’s imagination with accounts of regions most of their countrymen would never see. But the blankness of the poles had a disconcerting tendency to reassert itself. Signs were torn down by the elements; discoveries were challenged by other explorers; and the histories of expeditions were lost along with the men who perished, as did John Franklin’s expedition, in the abyss of the polar unknown.

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The poles also seemed more prone to undoing European knowledge-claims than other remote territories. Optical illusions such as iceblinks (phenomena produced by the reflection of ice on the clouds) and Fata Morgana5 were frequently encountered in polar regions, and these illusions, together with the “landlike” appearance of icebergs, notoriously fooled polar explorers into claiming territory that did not exist.6 Like the treacherous ice that filled its reaches, blurring distinctions between land and sea, polar space thus appeared as a curious hybrid of the inviting terra nullius of uninhabited land and ungovernable oceanic space, offering an illusion of fixity that might, at any moment, melt away into confusion. And thus, as in the case of the ocean, Britons felt compelled to repeatedly reinscribe their relationship with the poles in writing, producing in nonfiction what Janice Cavell has called the endless iterations of a polar “romance of exploration,”7 and in fiction a sense of affective connection to unseen landscapes loaded with symbolic meaning. Via their reading, Britons, like Jane Eyre at her window seat, came to profess a heartfelt connection to “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space”8 that, for many, existed more as regions of the imagination than as locations on the terrestrial globe. Indeed, from the seventeenth century onward, I argue, the poles were often conceived of as a type of fictional space, as areas over which the imagination reigned supreme. These marvelous, unseen spaces at the ends of the earth had specific symbolic functions when deployed in literary texts. Lying beyond the contemporary scope of human mobility, the inaccessible poles provided authors with both a providential limit on scientific, military, and commercial endeavors, and, associated with what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a “ ‘desert island’ feeling,”9 a terrestrial location in which one could conceive of individuality outside of a state apparatus. The poles also offered authors a grotesque space free of the demands of Enlightenment rationality, a geo-imaginary region in which mythological creatures could be imagined as integrated into the terrestrial sphere. But, during the late eighteenth century, when explorers began to empirically document polar space, the imaginative possibilities offered by the poles appeared in danger of being foreclosed at the instigation of the British state. Authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge reacted against this encroachment on the domain of the imagination by imposing limits on the knowledge-gathering projects of empire. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley went further, taking the historical opportunity offered by the state’s renewed interest in polar space to impose limits on the literary imagination’s involvement in imperial projects. Later in the nineteenth century, Charles

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Dickens saw opportunity rather than threat in the alignment of state interests and fiction creation, and, in The Frozen Deep, he stepped forward to implicitly position literature not only as a supporter but also as an essential participant in national polar projects. The poles, in short, were contested geo-imaginary ground during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In defending these spaces against the intrusions of explorers, the British authors surveyed in this chapter also negotiated the relationship between the literary imagination and the scientific, mercantile, and colonial strands of British imperialism. In making this argument, I take as one of my keywords the slippery term “speculation.” Derived from the Latin participial stem of speculārī —“to spy out, watch, examine, observe”10—the word “speculation” frequently surfaces in period discussions of polar exploration, referring, sometimes within the space of a single newspaper article, to the financial risk taking that underwrote the exploration of distant lands, the conjectural geographies that lent these projects plausibility, and the stories spun about events occurring in polar space. Overlapping in some of its connotations with the verb “imagine,”11 the verb “speculate” usefully captures the vexed intersection of economic interests, scientific aspirations, and literary conjecture in a geo-imaginary region where the line between fact and fiction often appeared hopelessly blurred.12 In making “speculation” a keyword in this chapter, then, I hope not only to signal the long Romantic Century’s wary consciousness of the problems attending the drive to “know” polar space, but also to suggest a genealogical link between polar texts and the spaces depicted by “speculative fiction” in the twenty-first century. As David Stam and Deirdre Stam indicate in their introduction to Books on Ice: British and American Literature of Polar Exploration (2005), the world’s growing awareness of the political and environmental fragility of the poles has led to a corresponding interest in the body of literature that is responsible for shaping cultural perceptions of these spaces. Recent years have seen the publication of some excellent studies of polar literature, including Elizabeth Leane’s Antarctica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far South (2012), a comprehensive survey of narrative responses to Antarctica that, like my own project, posits the South Pole as a space of the imagination, and Jen Hill’s White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination (2008), which argues for the Arctic as a “blank page”13 on which Britons composed narratives both promoting and critiquing the masculine geographical projects of empire. These works, like this chapter, owe a debt to the pioneering work of critics like Francis Spufford, Robert G. David, and Eric G. Wilson, whose observations

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regarding Arctic and Antarctic myth making are essential starting places for any analysis of polar literature. My own project hews closest to Hill’s in its interest in the constitutive role played by Arctic narratives in the construction of British national and imperial identity. However, while this chapter will occasionally touch on the ways that polar space reinscribes gender roles, its focus is on the ways that authors used polar space to reflect on the literary imagination’s relationship to nation and empire. In tracing the emergence of polar atopias as spaces prompting texts’ reflection on literature’s role in the promotion of imperial expansion, this chapter aims to contribute not only to ongoing critical discussions of the evolution of imperial spaces, but also to scholarship on the role of literature in community formation.14 While the texts that I examine here are frequently contradictory and fraught with ambiguity, they are all staging grounds for ideological battles that continue to shape our view of polar space. Indeed, as E. C. H. Keskitalo notes in Negotiating the Arctic, the perception of fundamentally different Arctic and Antarctic regions as comparable “polar spaces” is itself a legacy of nineteenthcentury exploration,15 which tended to represent these disparate regions as part of a unified polar landscape. This confusion of Arctic and Antarctic space was aided by artistic representations of polar atopia, which, as we will see in Coleridge’s Rime and Shelley’s Frankenstein, were inclined to conflate the mythological connotations and literary representations of one end of the globe with the other.16 This legacy of nineteenth-century exploration has had ongoing repercussions for scientists and indigenous Arctic peoples, who struggle against definitions of “Arctic” that continue to portray their region as a sublime, uninhabited wasteland.17 In this chapter I have tried to respect this difference in my own language by using “polar space,” the “high Arctic,” and the “poles,” to what, in the nineteenth century, did indeed appear as an uninhabited extreme, reserving “the Arctic” for that inhabited northern space into which polar connotations can shade.18 My eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources are less concerned with this distinction, and in their willingness to blend polar space with the lower Arctic, one can witness the emergence of a problematic geopolitical phenomenon. Evidence of continuity between nineteenth-century literature and twentyfirst-century rhetoric continues to appear in documents concerning the recent International Polar Year (IPY). The U.S. National Committee’s A Vision for the International Polar Year 2007–2008 (2004), for example, echoes the nineteenth century in its pairing of an ethos of disinterested scientific inquiry with an appeal to the public’s “inherent interest in the region, especially when it is

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linked with exploration, discovery, adventure, isolation, self-reliance, passion, history, and exotic landscapes and biota.”19 Citing “the popularity of adventure literature,” the National Committee recommends recruiting “authors, artists, and filmmakers” to help advance the IPY’s goals.20 Not only does the committee’s rhetoric recall what Jessica Richard refers to as the nineteenth century’s “improbable romance”21 of polar exploration, but it also frames itself in Romantic terms, introducing the main body of the report with a quotation from Goethe and prefacing a chapter on public recruitment with lines from Byron’s Don Juan: “Words are things; and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.”22 In addition to contributing to ongoing discussions about the intersections between literature, space and empire, the following pages will, I hope, reveal something of the rationale behind the persistence of a peculiarly nineteenthcentury vision of polar space in millennial politics.

The Imaginary Poles: A Brief History For much of their history, the geo-imaginary poles were thought by Europeans to be habitable. The English language preserves this history in the words “Arctic” and “Antarctic,” both of which derive from the Ancient Greeks’ association of the northern part of the earth with the constellation “Arktikos.” Observing that this constellation circled the northern sky without setting, the Greeks theorized that the lands beneath those stars were also characterized by unusual longevity. Greek myth accordingly populated the Arctic with the Hyperboreans, an immortal race who feasted daily in a land of plenty. The notion that the polar regions hide tropical lands—an idea that repeatedly surfaces in polar folklore, including in modern Canadian urban legends23—finds its roots in these tales of Hyperborean paradise. By 1577, the notion that the north contained habitable territory—an idea that had become entrenched in medieval travelers’ tales—prompted Queen Elizabeth to have a British claim to polar territory drawn up. John Dee obliged her with the first official British claim to polar territory, a claim that was predicated on the supposed colonial efforts of King Arthur, who, according to Dee, “even unto the North Pole . . . did extend his Jurisdiction: And sent Colonies thither.”24 Visions of potentially colonizable paradises were also, however, accompanied by visions of monstrosity and bleak wastelands. These negative tales were particularly prone to being associated with the lands surrounding the South

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Pole, which Aristotle described around 330 BC as a counterbalance to the perfection of Arktikos.25 Writers like Strabo (64–18 AD) expanded on Aristotle’s notion of counterbalance, suggesting that the inhabitants of the southern lands were exactly opposite to those who lived in the north. This vision of the “Antipodes” (literally, “with the feet opposite”) informed medieval depictions of the South Pole, leading Lambert of St. Omer (ca. 1050–1125) to depict the southern zone of the world as a blank space “unknown to the sons of Adam, having nothing which belongs to our race.”26 Other medieval geographers went further in their imagining of southern difference: The Hereford map, drawn around 1280 by Richard of Haldingham, depicts eleven races of Antarctic monsters, including people who have eyes and mouths on their breasts, men with the heads of dogs, and serpent-eaters. These early visions of profitable, if monstrous, territories at the ends of the earth, attracted the renewed attention of Europeans during the Age of Discovery, and this led to polar space being imagined as a region that could bring significant wealth to its claimants. Northern Europeans looked to the Arctic for a Northwest Passage that could convey ships more easily to the South Seas and to the Antarctic for a continent that would rival that of the Americas. Britain in particular was enamored of the idea of what John Campbell called the “maritime Philosphers Stone”27 of the Northwest Passage, which would transform their gray northern waters into golden trade routes.28 As for the Antarctic regions, fifteenth-century European explorers had ventured past the equator and found tropical lands rather than antipodean reversals, leading many to look south for new sources of colonial wealth. “Terra Australis Incognita,” the fabled Southern Continent, appears on maps throughout the sixteenth century, testifying to contemporary hopes that a fertile southern land was on the brink of discovery. Formed out of the musings of speculative geographers, Terra Australis Incognita offered a panacea for European economic woes, promising its eventual discoverer both exploitable territory and, potentially, a huge new market for national goods. However, despite their debt to classical geography and travelers’ tales, the capitalist myths of Terra Australis Incognita usually ignored or sought to exclude imagery of grotesque monsters from this land, fearing, no doubt, that tales that contained within them markers of the fantastic risked exposing the capitalist dream of infinite colonial expansion as the fiction it was.29 Capitalist visions of highly profitable polar lands coexisted with speculations that infused the intangible ends of the earth with other values. Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666),

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for example, draws on the mythical associations of Arctic and Antarctic spaces in a utopian fantasy depicting the poles as gateways to the imagination. Cavendish’s “piece of fancy” originally appeared alongside her philosophical observations, the two genres joined, as Cavendish notes, like “two worlds at the ends of their poles.”30 Indeed, the image of two pole-joined worlds—one recognizably our own, the other fantastic—is described in the body of The Blazing World, which depicts the progress of a young woman snatched from her home by a foreign merchant. Driven by winds to the icy regions of the North Pole, the kidnappers quickly succumb to the harsh cold, while the lady drifts with the boat into the mythical space of another world. For, explains Cavendish, it “is impossible to round this world’s globe from Pole to Pole, so as we do from East to West; because the Poles of the other world, joining to the Poles of this, do not allow any further passage to surround the world that way.” Anyone who sails to either of the poles is thus “either forced to return, or to enter into another world.”31 Here, Cavendish’s imagery of the poles provides a distorted vision of polar space as depicted by explorers, who were either turned back by icy barriers to the north and south or vanished from contemporaries’ knowledge. She also replaces Britain’s cherished dream of a Northwest Passage with a polar passage leading to fantasy rather than to colonial wealth. In the realm beyond the North Pole, Cavendish’s heroine discovers a land filled with both hybrid creatures from polar mythology and the riches of capitalist fantasy. However, the greatest advantage this fantastic landscape confers on its discoverer is a strategy for using the imagination, rather than warfare, to satisfy imperial desires. Coming to despise military conquest, Cavendish’s heroine instead embraces her imagination’s ability to make her a ruler of fictional territories without resorting to bloodshed. She learns to create “a world within” and thus becomes the “mistress of two worlds, one within, and the other without me.”32 This image of two connected worlds replicates the novel’s opening image of worlds united at the poles, strengthening Cavendish’s image of polar space as a gateway to the imagination. Cavendish’s novel thus anticipates nineteenth-century representations of polar space as the domain of a literary imagination that rejects the more brutal strivings of sovereign power: In Cavendish’s polar space, one can enjoy an empire without conquest and can envision oneself as a sovereign while simultaneously embracing the fictionality of this vision.33 Marvelous depictions of polar space enjoyed remarkable longevity, appearing well into the eighteenth century in histories of Arctic voyages like The

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Naval Chronicle’s account of “Hudson’s Voyage of Discovery Towards the North Pole” (1760). Henry Hudson, the seventeenth-century explorer, made three Arctic voyages in search of new routes to Asia. Today, he is best remembered for the disastrous outcome of his 1610–11 voyage in search of the Northwest Passage, which ended when Hudson’s mutinous crew set Hudson and eight others adrift in an open boat, never to be seen again. But despite the later importance of the Hudson story to British national identity, The Naval Chronicle’s description of Hudson’s voyages focuses mainly on the wonders he encountered while passing through Arctic waters. Indeed, one of the lengthiest sections of “Hudson’s Voyage of Discovery” is devoted to Hudson’s alleged encounter with a mermaid: “On the 15th of June . . . one of our Company, looking overboard, saw a Mer-Maid. . . . From the Navel upwards, her Back and Breasts were like a Woman’s, her Body as big as one of us, her skin very White and long Black hair hanging down behind.”34 Of what is now the most famous aspect of the Hudson story—the third voyage on which his crew mutinied—The Naval Chronicle has nothing to say, observing that of the “Differences between Hudson and his Men . . . which cost him his Life, we omit Particulars; especially as this Voyage affords no new Discoveries, only that he proceeded 100 Leagues farther than any man had done before him, and gave new Names to several Places.”35 This last sentence reads almost as a parody in its casual dismissal of what would be, in a later era, acts of polar heroism: progressing farther than “any man has done before” and, like a new Adam, naming the places added to an ever-expanding map. Those, indeed, would also be the acts of James Cook, the explorer who, in failing to “discover” Terra Australis Incognita, ushered in a new era of polar literature. Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750), the last notable work to draw heavily on the myth of Terra Australis Incognita before its nondiscovery by Cook, warrants close examination. Arguably the most influential eighteenth-century vision of an undiscovered Southern Continent, Peter Wilkins synthesizes the speculations regarding the geography of the South Pole in a revision of Robinson Crusoe that challenges that novel’s visions of colonial profits. As with most early accounts of polar space, the polar realm is depicted as populated by beings with fantastic, hybridized bodies that implicitly challenge strict classification systems. Even as it embraces marvels, Peter Wilkins urges its readers to reject chimeras of a different sort: the dreams of infinite foreign wealth that fueled the speculations of early eighteenthcentury capitalism.

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Escaping the Global Marketplace in Peter Wilkins Peter Wilkins has long resisted classification. On its first appearance the Monthly Review declared it “the illegitimate offspring of no very natural conjunction betwixt Gulliver’s travels and Robinson Crusoe,”36 using the novel’s own imagery of hybridity and illegitimacy to place it outside of the growing canon of English novels. In The Progress of Romance (1785), Clara Reeve placed Peter Wilkins in the category of the “Original and uncommon,”37 and there it has remained, drawing the praise (and, occasionally, puzzlement) of authors such as Leigh Hunt and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Peter Wilkins’s obsession with subterranean grottos, polar spaces, and hybridized bodies, indeed, its very resistance to classification, indicates its affiliation with the grotesque and suggests its significance to Romantic authors such as M. W. Shelley and S. T. Coleridge, whose polar works reveal a similar interest in compromised bodies and alien spaces. Conceived in the wake of the South Sea Bubble, Peter Wilkins rewrites Robinson Crusoe as fantasy, casting a skeptical eye on the latter novel’s validation of commercial speculation. In the first part of the novel, the titular protagonist is drawn into ever-widening circuits of mobility by his misplaced trust in the profitability of international trade. Disinherited by his unscrupulous stepfather, Wilkins hopes to gain back some kind of financial independence by adventuring as a sailor in the global marketplace. Instead he experiences a series of disasters: first, his capture by a French privateer, then his drift in an open boat, and, finally, his enslavement in Africa. Rather than restoring Wilkins’s agency, his attempt to become “a Man for myself ”38 deindividualizes him (the use of “I” almost disappears from these passages) and reduces him to a helpless pawn of global mercantilism. This lack of agency is most apparent in the section that immediately precedes Wilkins’s enslavement, when he is hired by a Portuguese captain to undertake a “secret Enterprize”39 reminiscent of the South Sea Bubble’s infamous “undertaking of great advantage.” Although Wilkins elects to participate in this voyage, “not understanding Portuguese” he comprehends “little of the Business we went upon.”40 Neither, it seems, does anyone else in his expedition. On being captured by African slavers, Wilkins is gloomily left to reflect on his mission, which appears metonymic for much of his experience of the world of maritime trade: “I never knew the Meaning of it; nor did any of us.”41 Far from enhancing Wilkins’s prospects, the mobility he undertakes as

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part of a system of economic speculation instead loses him his family and his freedom. On being reduced to the ultimate disempowered object of maritime trade—an African slave—he begins to revise his priorities. On witnessing a fellow slave’s happy reunion with his wife, Wilkins, who has come to admire the “Genius” of the “Blacks in Africa” and reject slavery as an immoral system, realizes that his present unhappiness stems from his decision to abandon domesticity in search of economic prosperity abroad: “Is this the Way to make a Fortune, to get an Estate? No surely, the very contrary.”42 Instead of departing to unknown lands he “ought to have made the best of my bad Circumstances, and to have laid hold of every commendable Method of improving them.”43 Investing one’s energies in the domestic sphere, rather than pursuing the chimera of foreign profits, is, Peter realizes, the way to enhance one’s prospects. In these passages, we can see Paltock laying groundwork for an attempt to separate the imagination from what Ian Baucom has observed is its implication in the speculative economy materialized, most horrifically, by the African slave trade.44 The opposition of “mobile property” and “ ‘real’ property,” that is, “the imaginary value of stocks, bonds, bills-of-exchange, and insured property” and “the ‘real’ value of land . . . and other tangibles,”45 is on full display here as Wilkins renounces the intangibilities of maritime trade, instead investing in a model of social advancement rooted in the cultivation of landed property and immediate social relations. Such a turn is, however, difficult to imagine the disinherited Wilkins making in Paltock’s Britain. To present a fiction of individual advancement without validating the economy in which such tales are usually implicated, Paltock must turn to a land that lies safely beyond the scope of contemporary mobility and its attendant economic circuits of abstract, mobile property. He must turn, in short, to polar space. The hapless Peter Wilkins thus finds himself shipwrecked by a magnetic rock near the South Pole. Here, in a land safely insulated from the market economy, he is finally able to put his new resolution into practice, building himself a kingdom that resembles Crusoe’s in all but its telling exclusion of money. Not only does the terra nullius of Terra Australis Incognita enable Wilkins to gain the “Estate”46 his stepfather denied him in Britain, but when fate introduces him to Youwarkee, a winged woman from a nearby kingdom who quickly becomes Wilkins’s new wife, he is also able to reconstitute his domestic sphere. In the tight compass of Wilkins’s new domain, labor and domesticity are reconciled: The act of cultivating his own territory allows Wilkins to stay close to his new home and, in “improving” his Estate, he learns to perform tasks normally gendered as female, while his flying wife becomes

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the partner who ventures forth and brings back goods that can be transformed into clothing for their children. Lying beyond the scope of contemporary mobility, polar space provides a setting in which the relationship between labor, economics, and gender can be reimagined; it is a land in which one can imagine escaping the economy altogether. While Paltock pays homage to mythological images of the Antarctic in his depiction of magnetic mountains and grotesque creatures such as the BeastFish, the most memorable element of the novel is its depiction of the Glumms, the flying people who inhabit the polar continent. The flying people who fascinate Wilkins (and Peter Wilkins’s readers) are naturally mobile, perceiving vast “Distance [as] but a Step to them,”47 a step that moreover does not require economic exchange or much manual labor. Youwarkee, the flying woman whom Wilkins marries, draws attention to the discrepancy after Wilkins takes her sailing for the first time, remarking that “to be labouring thus at an Oar . . . is in my Mind a most ridiculous Piece of Slavery.”48 For those who, like Wilkins, are born without the “property” of flight, labor is both necessary for and a cause of mobility. The aristocratic Youwarkee, born free from Wilkins’s concerns, can only view with bewilderment her husband’s laborious progress, observing in all innocence what Wilkins has already learned through bitter experience: that labor for the sake of mobility inevitably leads to “slavery,” one’s possession by the market forces that enable circulation. In England, once Wilkins began pursuing social mobility, physical mobility and dispossession followed. Only in the fantastic, near-Edenic space of a polar island can labor and mobility be imagined as detached. But can this Eden remain unfallen, or is Wilkins, in introducing English culture to the Glumms, paving the way for the polar lands’ incorporation into a flawed British Empire? In the last third of the novel, Wilkins, who has effectively “gone native” by marrying into Glumm society and becoming embroiled in its politics, expands his project of domestic improvement to the shores of his new nation. In doing so, he undertakes what might be read as a typical “civilizing” mission: He instructs the Glumms in Protestantism and persuades them to abolish slavery. He also begins the process of integrating the Glumms’ island into the Enlightenment world by having them adopt standard measurements of time and a written language that can represent their island to outsiders. In doing so, of course, he starts to convert the Glumms’ island into an English-looking colonial outpost. One of the Glumms unwittingly hits on the potential threat of Peter’s improvements when he questions Peter about the social contract implied in committing the name of the Glumms’ island to

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writing: “How could your Countryman, who never knew what Strokes you would set down for Arndruumstake, know that your Strokes meant that very Country?”49 The Glumm’s confusion stems from the fact that he naively supposes Peter can accurately translate Glumm society to European outsiders, not understanding that the representational system the Glumms are joining is one in which Europeans can and will decide the nature of their “Country” without reference to the natives’ conception of the land. This exchange feeds a subtle undercurrent in the novel that, while it mostly celebrates Wilkins’s attempts at improvement, also questions whether his innovations aren’t harming Glumm society. Notably, Wilkins regrets introducing the Glumms to the concept of money, fearing that he has brought to their polar paradise the destructive seeds of a consumer economy: “All the Riches they possessed were only Food and Slaves; and . . . they know the want of nothing else: But I am afraid, I have put them upon another way of thinking, tho’ I aimed at what we call civilizing of them.”50 As Peter’s influence over his polar society becomes more profound, in other words, he begins to worry about the potential negative impact of European civilization on the Glumms, and he hints at an unease over what might attend Terra Australis Incognita’s transition from a landscape that realizes imaginative speculations into one that might now become the object of disreputable economic speculation. The novel resolves the danger posed by the potential integration of polar space with imperial markets by killing Peter Wilkins before he returns to England. In the novel’s conclusion, an English merchant ship shoots down Peter Wilkins’s flying contraption, killing the Glumms who accompany Wilkins on his return to Europe and reinforcing the undesirability of contact between Terra Australis Incognita and the outside world. Taken up from the water by the ship, Wilkins narrates his story, only to expire the day the ship reaches England, leaving behind him no trace of the wealth he accumulated in his adventures. At the close of the novel, Terra Australis Incognita thus remains safely preserved within the blank space of the imperial map, and the financial “gain” produced by Wilkins’s voyage appears in the form of a marvelous story, not colonial territory. As Robert Markley has argued, imaginary lands fulfilled an important function in the ideology of eighteenth-century capitalist expansion: Belief in their as-yet-unproven existence, the plenitude of their resources, and the eagerness of their populations to buy English goods were cornerstones of speculative schemes, and they lent an aura of rationality to the South Sea Company’s “incoherent plans and abortive projects.”51 However, even as imaginary lands

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were used to justify economic speculation, plans for their “discovery” remained vague, for, as Markley has argued, “to discover them would bring them into the logic, and the economy, of scarcity, self-interest, and commercial competition.”52 We could therefore read the “loss” of Terra Australis Incognita at the end of Wilkins’s tale (a loss that, as Defoe’s depiction of Crusoe’s island reminds us, is not inevitable) as demanded by the cultural logic of eighteenthcentury capitalism. But the novel’s suspicion of international trade and financial ambition invites us to read Peter Wilkins differently, as a novel that, far from contributing to the cultural machinery of an insatiable capitalist system, instead wishes to retrieve the speculative possibilities of imaginary lands from the marketplace. The novel’s conclusion differentiates it from the acquisitive dreams of Robinson Crusoe. Ultimately, Peter Wilkins’s adventures are not financially profitable: he dies penniless and he leaves no plantation colony behind him. Moreover, the novel’s readers would not harbor any serious hopes of making money off the marvelous lands of the South Pole. Rather than giving literary expression to capitalist desires, Peter Wilkins seeks to detangle imaginative and economic forms of speculation, inviting its readers to enjoy the pleasures of imaginary lands without being lured into the risky, and morally suspect, investments associated with the South Sea Bubble. At the end of Peter Wilkins, a new symbolic value has come to be attached to polar space: The polar landscape can contain marvelous works of the imagination, but it also lies safely beyond the corrupting influence of the marketplace. Perhaps this is one of the novel’s elements that Romantic readers found appealing: the notion that the space of imagination, as identified with the space of the South Pole, could remain free of the taints of commercialism and corrupt imperialism. As Nora Crook has observed, Peter Wilkins was frequently cited as a favorite of Romantic authors.53 Both Percy and Mary Shelley reread it in 1815, as William Scoresby’s campaign for a new British polar expedition was under way. Indeed, the Retrospective Review claimed Peter Wilkins as a proto-Romantic novel, composed in an age when “the imagination, lying as it were torpid, awaited the moment when it should be again called into life and action.”54 Citing its influence on Robert Southey (who had praised Peter Wilkins in a note to The Curse of Kehama), the Review asserted that Peter Wilkins had laid the groundwork for the “renovation of our literature,” which in turn had produced such ostensibly un-polar authors as William Cowper and Jane Austen.55 Leigh Hunt was similarly enamored of the novel and, in an 1834 essay, argued that its Romantic appeal had less to do with its marvelous

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imagery and strong female characters than with its depiction of flight. “The wish to fly seems to belong instinctively to all imaginative states of being. . . . The furious driving of royalty is an unconscious parody of it. Flying seems the next step to a higher state of being.”56 Like The Blazing World, in other words, Peter Wilkins did not confuse a drive toward transcendence with one toward power. The polar space it depicted was one in which imaginative speculations, imperial territorial ambitions, and the suspect world of maritime trade could be imagined as unattached.

Captain Cook and the Curse of Speculation The moment of Peter Wilkins’s late eighteenth-century rediscovery roughly coincides with the publication of James Cook’s bestselling A Voyage Towards the South Pole (1777), the book that represented the official demolishing of the myth of Terra Australis Incognita.57 Aimed at discovering the vast Southern Continent, James Cook’s voyages instead proved its nonexistence. In its place, Cook introduced two new continents—Australia and Antarctica—to the European consciousness. While Australia would be colonized within a decade of Cook’s landfall, the second continent, Antarctica, would remain distant and forbidding, an inaccessible supposition. In his refutation of the methods of an earlier generation of explorers, in his demolition of legends of “imaginary Lands,”58 and in his dismissal of polar exploration, Cook articulated a view of the poles that later writers—including those who wanted to claim Cook as a heroic precursor—would argue against.59 Terra Australis Incognita, the continent James Cook was sent to find, was a geographical “certainty” almost entirely created—and verified—by print culture. The most iconic depiction of the continent could be found on the sixteenth-century map of Gerardus Mercator, who had carefully collected preexisting maps and synthesized them with sailors’ observations. Mercator was, as W. A. R. Richardson notes, a victim of a too “literal acceptance of the printed word.”60 Believing the continent to have been sighted (a belief that the common wisdom of his day supported), Mercator worked at providing more and more accurate illustrations of a coastline that had never existed in the first place. He also failed to take into account the potential for the publishing process to corrupt his information, and as a result any “elementary error made by a manuscript copyist, a printer or an editor”61 could—and did—shape the outline of his continent. These errors continued to impact the navigational

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charts of the late eighteenth century, including the charts that Cook carried with him on his voyages. In the case of Cook’s expeditions, two factors enabled Cook’s discoveries to supplant the contradictory data that preceded him. The H4 chronometer enabled Cook to map coastlines more accurately than ever before, in a manner that could be readily integrated into standardized cartographical practices. But more important still was the person using the chronometer. As Cook himself noted in his journal, when complaining of the cartographical practices of previous explorers, “I have known [seamen] lay down the line of a Coast they have never seen and put down soundings where they have never sounded.”62 Cook held not only explorers but also “Compilers and Publishers”63 responsible for the perpetuation of myths like those of the Southern Continent, a belief that added insult to injury when Cook’s first voyage was presented to the public, not in Cook’s own words, but in those of John Hawkesworth, who approached the task of describing Cook’s voyage with the eye of an author constructing a narrative for readers’ “entertainment.”64 In remapping the South Atlantic, Cook not only demonstrated but also helped shape the values of an increasingly empiricist age. Holding himself to “vastly higher standards of precision than were common on most charts of his day,”65 Cook embodied one possible reaction to a world in which the standardization of technology enabled the verification of reported evidence and in which explorers were increasingly conscious of themselves as the vanguard of their nation rather than as advance scouts for commercial interests. Indeed, Cook’s journals insist on the accuracy of his work while criticizing that of privateers like William Dampier and practitioners of “speculative geography”66 such as Alexander Dalrymple, whose charts, Cook implies, seek to satisfy the desires of commercial speculators rather than to depict an empirical reality. Cook’s journals thus juxtapose a state-aligned empiricism with the suspect effusions of geographical and commercial speculation, and they validate the utilitarian knowledge-production of the former over the myths generated by the latter. Cook’s voyages were seen in Britain as establishing a new gold standard in ship management and nautical cartography, and officers who honed their craft under him were, like the notorious William Bligh (discussed in Chapter 4), perceived as members of a new order of maritime explorers advancing the interests both of the Admiralty and of Britain’s scientific men. The positive reception of Cook’s narratives can thus also be construed as a symptom of a shift in thinking about how national interests might be best pursued overseas, registering the rise of an increasingly professionalized class of

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nautical explorers and also reflecting the rise of centralized state control over what had been a loosely monitored system of dispersed trade networks. Cook’s superiors were not satisfied by his dismantling of Terra Australis Incognita, however. During the 1770s, Britain’s desire for new territories was exacerbated by American rebellion, and this desire finally outweighed the skepticism expressed by Cook and his fellow explorers. Cook was sent three times to search for the continent the ancients had insisted was needed to balance the earth and that their intellectual descendants insisted was needed to expand the empire. In 1773, having sailed farther south than any other explorer, a frustrated Cook wrote in his journal that he was “sorry” to have “spent so much time” “searching after . . . imaginary Lands.”67 He’d sailed far enough to establish that Terra Australis Incognita was not in the locations where it had been charted. The Southern Continent might well exist, but Cook was increasingly convinced that it lay still farther to the south and was uninhabitable. In January 1773, Cook became the first European to penetrate the Antarctic Circle. Dodging icebergs in “the first and only Ship that ever cross’d that line,”68 Cook looked to the south but saw only a frozen ice pack that (he surmised) extended to the pole itself. In his 1779 edition of A Voyage Towards the South Pole, he defended his decision to turn back from the South Pole on the basis of the cost-benefit ratio of Antarctic exploration. Portraying Antarctica as “a country doomed by Nature,” Cook dismissed the possibility of future exploration of the South Pole. “I can be bold enough to say,” he wrote, “that no man will ever venture farther than I have done; and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored.”69 If by chance some future explorer ever did manage to reach the South Pole, the polar continent, if it existed, would grant its discoverer no fame, for “the world will not be benefited by it.”70 Significantly, Cook argued from a utilitarian perspective that later proponents of polar exploration such as John Barrow and Charles Dickens would condemn: “It would have been rashness in me to have risqued all that had been done during the voyage, in discovering and exploring a coast, which, when discovered and explored, would have answered no end whatsoever, or have been of the least use, either to navigation or geography, or indeed to any other science.”71 Cook’s prophetic assessment of the human cost of Antarctic voyages would be ignored by later supporters of polar exploration, who criticized cynical perspectives on the polar realms even as they invoked Cook’s name in their construction of the North and South Poles as the ultimate geographical grail.

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Europe’s introduction to Antarctica was thus borne out of the ambitions of empire and the demands of a rapidly improving cartographical science, both of which threatened not only the imperial hopes that had motivated Cook’s expeditions but also the speculations that had spent centuries accumulating within the southern spaces of world maps. Instead of utopian visions of future colonies, Cook had presented Britain with an ice-doomed land that held no imaginary creatures, no mythological potential, and no future. This version of polar space was one that would be disputed in fiction and propaganda alike. Terra Australis Incognita, used as a setting for imaginary voyage literature since 1605, may have been eliminated from European maps, but it had not been completely eliminated from the European imagination: Authors such as Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne continued to set stories in Terra Australis Incognita as late as 1781. In Britain, however, authors increasingly focused their speculative gazes on the blank spot beyond the icy fringe documented by Cook, setting their tales of wonder closer to the pole itself. The continued resonance of polar legends is indicated by works such as A Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1792), which represents the southern polar region as a place of antipodean inversion, an unimaginably distant setting that, like the polar land of Peter Wilkins, is invoked as part of a critique of the forced mobility of slavery. Traveling toward the South Pole, the Baron is shocked to discover that “a fleet of Negromen,” having tasted “the sweets of our luxury, had formed colonies in several new discovered islands, near the south pole, where they had a variety of plantations.”72 There, they “formed the diabolical project of getting Christian slaves to work for them,” proceeding “with their cargos of human flesh to the other end of the world . . . where [the slaves] were flogged into obedience and made to work like horses all the rest of their lives.”73 The Baron reports that his “blood ran cold” at the thought of this carnivalesque reversal of power but, “except by open violence, it was found impossible to destroy the trade, on account of a barbarous prejudice, entertained of late by the negroes, that white people have no souls.”74 Drawing on ancient traditions that depicted the Antipodes as the region in which things were “opposite” to those in the northern regions of the globe, this satirical episode derives part of its effect from the South Pole’s status as the literal end of the earth, a location that highlights the extremity of the slave trade’s cruelty.75 While on the one hand, then, Cook’s elimination of the myth of Terra Australis Incognita was a blow to the imaginary voyage genre, it had by no means ceased speculation—either geographical or literary—about the poles.

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The Ancient Mariner’s “Pre-occupied Ground” First published in 1798, S. T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the most significant depictions of the South Pole to emerge in the wake of Cook’s expedition. Its vision of an obscure but menacing polar space would return to haunt not only subsequent British polar fiction but also nonfictional accounts of polar space.76 A decidedly post-Cook work, Coleridge’s poem finds no warm islands or plantations near the South Pole, instead borrowing, as John Livingston Lowes has noted, the Cook expeditions’ descriptions of an Antarctic landscape where “Ice mast-high came floating by / As green as Emerauld.”77 But while lines such as “We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent Sea”78 recall Cook’s declaration that the Resolution was the “first and only Ship that ever cross’d that line,”79 they also render such accomplishments nightmarish. Unlike Cook, the Mariner and his shipmates do not desire any “firsts.” They suffer them, and they are as helpless to direct their course as they are to relieve their suffering. Whereas Cook’s voyage was a triumph in improved mobility—the H4 chronometer allowed Cook to chart his discoveries more accurately than ever before—Rime depicts an uncontrolled, unfathomable mobility through a polar space that cannot be recalled, let alone charted, with any precision. Coleridge’s depiction of the Ancient Mariner’s journey—a voyage that Bernard Smith has suggested reproduces the course of Cook’s second expedition80—re-infuses Cook’s Antarctic with marvelous potential, introducing into an age of scientific exploration a vision of polar space as fundamentally resistant to empiricist representation. And in depicting the wondrous events that befall sailors who, having entered oceanic space as laborers in an unspecified pursuit, find themselves at the mercy of mysterious global circulations, Rime reimagines the tropes of polar works such as Peter Wilkins for a post-Cook age. Coleridge was a great admirer of Peter Wilkins, a book he praised as “a work of uncommon beauty.”81 “It would require a very peculiar genius to add another tale, ejusdem generis, to Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins,” Coleridge reflected on July 5, 1834, adding that “I would try the marvelous line of Peter Wilkins, if I attempted it, rather than the real fiction of Robinson Crusoe.”82 While Coleridge did not write a Peter Wilkins–esque island novel— “I once projected such a thing; but the difficulty of a pre-occupied ground stopped me”83—in Rime he plots a course through fantastic polar territory that can be seen as continuing Peter Wilkins’s genealogical and navigational

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“line.” That said, Rime does not feature a terra nullius that can be acquired through occupation: Far from gaining possession of the polar landscape, the Mariner and his companions’ penetration of the Antarctic Circle instead leads to them becoming possessed—him by Life-in-Death, and his companions by spirits. In that respect, Rime is one of the first literary texts to depict the South Pole as an atopia and to abandon the assumption that polar space can be readily claimed by its discoverers—a departure that was, I suggest, triggered precisely by the fact that such possession had now become a possibility. In Coleridge’s remarks on Peter Wilkins we can also see the imaginative overlap between territorial and literary claims to polar space. Coleridge’s desire to write a novel like Peter Wilkins was thwarted, he claims, by the “difficulty of a pre-occupied ground.”84 Without a terra nullius to labor over, improve, and assert a Lockean claim to, Coleridge faces the possibility that his original labor would be represented as an outright theft of already-occupied literary territory. Indeed, despite Coleridge’s attempts to craft an original poem in a polar space that many regarded as “unoccupied” both literarily and territorially, Thomas De Quincey charged Coleridge with plagiarizing sections of Rime from, among other sources, travel literature.85 In this respect, Coleridge’s comments remind us both of how physical space could be seen to stand in for the Romantic imagination and of the manner in which debates over literary creation sometimes resemble the disputes over polar sovereignty that arise later in the century. For, despite their inherent resistance to possession, the poles could also be seen, literally and figuratively, as “pre-occupied ground”: land already mapped by explorers, land already described by authors, land already claimed for a nation or a literary genre, or as space in which the anxieties or “preoccupations” of a culture might be articulated. In creating, in Rime, a vision of the South Pole as an undomestic atopia, a site both maddeningly blank and refractive of the fragments of mythology once attached to its textual representations, Coleridge reconfigures polar space as a preserve of the marvelous imagination in an era of empirical investigation. Coleridge’s 1800 revisions to the Argument of the poem reveal his attention to the connotations of the geo-imaginary locations the Argument depicts.86 The 1798 version describes “How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by Storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole.”87 Recognizing the sense of spatial transgression implied by a crossing of the “Line,” Coleridge replaced this phrase in the 1800 edition with a reference to the ship “having first sailed to the Equator” and for the first time specified that the Ancient Mariner’s crime is his killing of “a Seabird” rather than his crossing of a

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geo-imaginary border.88 In both the 1798 and the 1800 versions of the poem, “the South Pole”89 continues to anchor the Argument’s first sentence and the Mariner’s “own Country” the last, stressing the distance between these geoimaginary opposites. Indeed, the Mariner’s violation of the laws of hospitality sends him, physically and spiritually, to the antipodes of the domestic. Marked by his encounter with atopia, the Mariner loses his ability to dwell, and instead he becomes an ever-moving carrier of a supernatural tale excluded from the domestic sphere and realist narrative of the wedding party. Unlike Cook’s Voyage, Rime highlights rather than forecloses the “marvelous” and indeterminate nature of polar space. The Mariner introduces the South Pole in the line “Mist and Snow, / And it grew wond’rous cauld,”90 beginning not with the land itself but with the weather that shields it from perception. Even the cold, the most empirically measurable element of the Mariner’s polar encounter, is experienced not as a phenomenon to be documented but as a “wond’rous” marvel. The polar land itself can only be experienced through the veil of snow or through the confusing phenomenon of an “iceblink”: “thro’ the drifts the snowy clifts / Did send a dismal sheen.”91 The iceblink allows the Mariner to “see” the polar land without actually laying eyes on it; he is, in effect, seeing a representation of the polar land, which, because of its distortion, cannot be relied on. What the Mariner perceives in that representation is, again, unclear. “Ne shapes of men ne beasts we ken,”92 he declares, using a word, “ken,” that, in denoting either “to know, to recognize” or “to see,”93 suggests two contradictory interpretations: that the Mariner saw nothing on the Southern Continent or that, like Peter Wilkins, he saw “shapes of men” and beasts he did not recognize. Ambiguity, in other words, haunts the Mariner’s tale, constructing a polar space that resists being documented and classified. In the absence of empirical certainty, the speculative possibilities of Coleridge’s pole are left open. The pole may (or may not) be inhabited; the sailors may (or may not) be dogged by a vengeful spirit; and the Mariner may (or may not) have the supernatural experiences he describes. Within the poem, attempts to “fix” meaning and bring stability to the signs and symbols of the polar landscape are doomed to failure. In greeting the albatross as if “it were a Christian Soul,”94 the sailors are, as Eric G. Wilson observes, desperately projecting a familiar aspect on an unfamiliar creature.95 The Mariner’s killing of the albatross serves, I suggest, as a lethal extension of this attempt at meaning making: By killing the bird with his crossbow, the Mariner appears to temporarily stabilize the sailors’ Christian interpretation of the bird by converting

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the avian visitor into its close symbolic equivalent (the pelican/Christ figure). The Mariner’s attempt to “fix” the meaning of the polar creature he has encountered is then mocked when his ship becomes dangerously fixed in both space and representation, as “idle as a painted Ship / Upon a painted Ocean.”96 Just as the South Pole offered no comprehensible shapes of men or beasts, the sailors now begin to be plagued with incomprehensible forms, the “slimy things” that “crawl with legs”97 and phenomena that defy the sailors’ ability to impose a rational meaning on them. The sailors’ predicament is explained, not through analysis of external evidence but through the analysis of “dreams” and voices heard in “a swound” (the latter recalling the ice-voiced “noises of a swound” the Mariner had earlier heard at the South Pole).98 The landscape of the South Pole in Coleridge’s poem gains meaning through the interpretation of dreams, swoons, and nightmares, not through rational interpretation of external evidence. In September 1817, as Britain was contemplating a return to polar exploration, a new version of Rime appeared in print that strengthened the earlier versions’ resistance to empiricist views of polar space. Famously, the 1817 version of Rime opens with an epigraph taken from the writing of Thomas Burnet: I readily believe that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe. But who shall explain for us the family of all these beings, and the ranks and relationships and distinguishing features and functions of each? What do they do? What places do they inhabit? The human mind has always sought knowledge of these things, but never attained it. Meanwhile I do not deny that it is helpful sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as on a tablet, the image of a greater and better world, lest the intellect, habituated to the petty things of daily life, narrow itself and sink wholly into trivial thoughts. But at the same time we must be watchful for truth, and keep a sense of proportion, so that we may distinguish the certain from uncertain, day from night.99 This epigraph acknowledges the existence of an invisible universe but specifically challenges a scientific perspective that would enable an observer to classify, document, and integrate these species into a preexisting body of knowledge. As critics such as Frances Ferguson have noted, it undermines the authority claimed by the 1817 gloss, which does indeed insist that the invisible

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world can be understood. Burnet’s quotation also frames Rime as a poem about imagination or, more specifically, about the authority of images generated “in the mind” as opposed to those gathered from the external world “of daily life.” The epigraph’s final lines suggest that readers should try to balance empirical and imaginative perspectives, so that they become neither mired in trivialities nor lost in delusions. Notably, the last sentence also hints at the failure of this balance, for it calls for precisely the acts of distinction that polar space was known to complicate. As Erasmus Darwin notes in The Botanic Garden (1791), the pole is ruled by “Grey TWILIGHT”;100 it is the region where the regular alternation of day and night was suspended and where explorers’ ability to distinguish between land and ocean, observation and mirage, is sorely tested. Burnet’s insistence on the necessity of grounding imaginative flights of fancy by policing the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the “certain from the uncertain, day from night,” thus prefaces a swift plunge into a region commonly understood to make such distinctions impossible. Appearing at a moment when polar exploration was once more a topic of discussion, the 1817 version of Rime implicitly calls into question the feasibility and consequences of exploring one of the mysterious regions of the world. Is knowledge of polar space attainable, or does the fearsome polar ice represent a providentially prescribed limit on human endeavor? If humans succeeded in penetrating the poles, can preexisting empirical systems accommodate the information gathered there? What might be lost in an attempt to fill in that significant blank space on the global map? What is lost when a singular, authoritative narrative tries to occupy what has previously been a site of speculation? The marginal gloss that accompanies the Mariner’s narrative attempts such an occupation. It insists on (and, many critics have argued, imposes) moral meaning for the events the Mariner describes, attempting to close down the multiple speculative possibilities offered by the original poem. But the gloss’s authority to interpret the Mariner’s tale is questionable. As critics such as Martin Wallen have argued, the gloss adds “another competing version to the already heavily overladen text,” a version that, moreover, “can make its moral interpretation only because it maintains a faith in a moral universe.”101 At points, the gloss seems to render the horrors by the Mariner banal; at its most evocative, its summary of the Mariner’s experience nevertheless seems to miss much of what the Mariner’s fey repetitions convey. Stressing the limitations of the gloss’s attempt to interpret the Mariner’s

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narrative is Coleridge’s own admission of a mistake made in previous versions of Rime, a mistake that hinges on the difficulty of interpreting shipboard phenomena from the shore. A new footnote to line 104 notes that “in the former edition the line was, The furrow follow’d free: But I had not been long on board a ship, before I perceived that this was the image as seen by a spectator from the shore, or from another vessel. From the ship itself the Wake appears like a brook flowing off from the stern.102 This footnote is the only place in the 1817 version of Rime where Coleridge draws attention to one of his revisions, and it serves as a useful reminder that Coleridge is not opposed to empiricism per se; rather, he wants readers to be aware of empiricism’s limitations. The note draws readers’ attention to one of the difficulties inherent in interpreting observations, reminding us that a spectator “from the shore” can interpret the same object differently—and no less accurately—than the sailor at sea. Like the poem itself, which shuttles the reader between the land-bound perspective of the Wedding Guest and the perspective of the Mariner, Coleridge’s note highlights the difference between the perspectives of land and ocean, reminding us that neither perspective encapsulates the whole of the phenomenon being observed. This problem of perspective has implications for the 1817 gloss, which claims, with far more confidence than the Wedding Guest, to have understood and correctly interpreted a tale from the sea. It also has implications for the imperial project of knowledge accumulation advocated by men like Joseph Banks and John Barrow, reminding readers that the metropole’s interpretation of information gathered at the fringes of maritime empire should not automatically be trusted.103 While not conceived as a response to the Quarterly Review article described in the next section, then, Coleridge’s 1817 revision strengthened its suggestive insistence on the unassimilable nature of polar space and, in developing what Mary Shelley would later recognize as a poetic critique of polar exploration, ushered in a new age of polar literature.

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John Barrow and the New Age of Polar Exploration Forty-four years after Cook turned back from the South Pole in the belief that “the world will not be benefited by it,”104 John Barrow, Second Secretary of the Admiralty, began a campaign aimed at convincing the British public that polar exploration was not only useful but also imperative. Motivated by the pragmatic desire to keep naval men and ships employed in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, Barrow carefully crafted both his books and a series of anonymous articles in the prestigious Quarterly Review to build support for the government-financed polar expeditions he helped organize.105 He appealed to readers’ curiosity about the land of marvels they knew only from literature, argued against opposition to the expeditions, and, perhaps most influentially, portrayed polar space as the blank space against which Britain’s national character could be most clearly defined. Although Barrow attempted, in early arguments, to portray polar exploration as financially beneficial to Britain, he increasingly emphasized the scientific importance of polar exploration, stressing the national prestige that “the pursuit of science for the sake of science”106 would confer. He consolidated his arguments in 1818’s A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions, contending that, in mounting expeditions to apparently unprofitable territory, Britain demonstrated its disinterested commitment to scientific progress and its desire to work not just for the benefit of British subjects but for “the general benefit of mankind.”107 Of all the justifications Barrow marshaled to support the Admiralty’s polar expeditions, his claim that polar exploration revealed the purity of Britain’s character would prove to be both the most popular and the most problematic, laying the groundwork for a Victorian perception of the “Unspotted Snow” of the poles as a defining space of British imperialism.108 But Barrow was not without his critics, particularly after his behind-thescenes ouster of William Scoresby, the highly respected scientist and whaling captain who had campaigned for the resumption of British polar exploration since 1815. Barrow, determined that the 1818 Ross and Buchan expeditions would be commanded by naval officers, quietly excluded Scoresby from any major involvement in the expedition that his observations had instigated.109 Fury over Barrow’s prioritization of Admiralty interests over scientific meritocracy ran hot in Edinburgh, where Scoresby had first presented his plans for a polar expedition during a meeting of the Wernerian Natural History Society in March 1815. Unable to refer to Barrow’s maneuvering beyond allusions to the “jealousies or official punctilios”110 that had interfered with Scoresby’s

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employment, Barrow’s critics, led by John Leslie of Edinburgh University, instead focused their attacks on the rhetoric of Barrow’s Quarterly articles. Beginning in February 1818, they attacked Barrow’s climatic and geographical “speculations,”111 suggesting that he had cynically used “poetical description”112 to build support for his political agenda, and singling out for ridicule his deployment of a politically advantageous vision of British climate change “that would scarcely be hazarded even in the dreams of romance.”113 Barrow, they implied, either had a poor grasp of scientific theories, or he was a shameless exploiter of scientific and literary rhetoric; either way, he should not be entrusted with the organization of a scientific expedition. While these attacks resonated less with the public than did Barrow’s portrait of the national importance of polar exploration, they foregrounded the political charge now attached to representations of polar space. In an era in which polar exploration had once again become a British pursuit, and in which descriptions of the behavior of northern ice were thought indicative of a writer’s political leanings, the act of imagining polar space would not be perceived as a neutral activity.114 This would prove true even of fiction published prior to the 1818 controversy. The advertisement for Benjamin Bragg’s A Voyage to the North Pole (1817), which I discuss later in this chapter, was revised in 1818 to stress the ammunition the children’s novel would supply Barrow’s critics.115 It would definitely be true of works such as Frankenstein (1818), which appeared while the Leslie-Barrow clash was in full swing and whose portrait of polar space was snidely linked to the controversy by John Wilson Croker in his famous review of the novel.116 The 1818 Leslie-Barrow clash, in other words, announced to the public at large what, as I explore in the following section, Barrow’s Quarterly articles had more subtly indicated: that polar speculations of all varieties had become political lightning rods and that the imagination’s role in constructing representations of the future frontiers of imperial endeavor had become freshly controversial. The highly charged nature of “speculation” had already been indicated in Barrow’s first Arctic article for the Quarterly, “A Sketch of the British Fur Trade in North America.” Printed in February 1817, “Sketch” was the first of Barrow’s essays to hint at the possibility of a new government-financed expedition in search of the Northwest Passage.117 Significantly, Barrow focuses the forty pages that introduce this “important problem”118 of geography on two examples of bad applications of the imagination. The first appears in the article’s opening pages, in which Barrow suggests that Lord Selkirk’s attempt to settle dispossessed Scottish Highlanders in Canada was encouraged by the

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impression left by Walter Scott’s Waverley novels on Selkirk’s “ardent imagination.”119 Driven by the “ruling passion of reviving, in North America, that species of feudal system which was finally extinguished in Britain about ‘seventy years since,’ ”120 Selkirk has, Barrow implies, like Waverley’s naïve protagonist, been lured by his devotion to romance into illegal acts such as the seizure of Fort William. A man unwilling to “await the decision of the legislature or the executive government,”121 Selkirk, inspired by his reading to pursue his private dreams of colonizing the north, has risked, and lost, a large number of the lives under his command and has triggered what the American Monthly Magazine calls a series of “transactions . . . disgraceful to the national character.”122 Sympathetic though Barrow is to a man who eschews the “schemes of a sordid narrow-minded calculator,”123 he represents Selkirk as one type of dangerously credulous reader: the Romantic individual who, impatient of the constraints imposed by society, hurls himself into a project that rebounds violently on himself and on his community. Barrow’s characterization of Selkirk thus not only implicitly asserts the need for centralized government control over Arctic exploration and settlement, but also lays a suggestive track for Mary Shelley’s portrait of Captain Walton in the Quarterly-influenced 1818 edition of Frankenstein. Barrow follows his review of Selkirk’s history of the fur trade with a second account of uncritical reading, this time concerning Amoretti’s credulous reception of Captain Maldonado’s A Relation of the Discovery of the Strait of Anian. A careful, informed reader like Barrow, the article implies, holds himself back from the imaginative appeal of travel narratives and views them with a critical eye. By comparing what may seem like minor details from a voyage to a preexisting body of geographical and scientific knowledge, it is possible for the informed reader to distinguish between real voyage narratives and “geographical impostures,” even as other readers prove “capable of believing any thing, however absurd.”124 Both of these examples of credulous reading prepare the ground for Barrow’s call for a renewal of polar exploration. “We firmly believe,” he states, “that a navigable passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific round the northern coast of America does exist, and may be of no difficult execution.”125 Having established that he is not one of those “speculative fabricators of geography”126 but a grounded reader of texts, Barrow constructs an entertaining history of exploration aimed at persuading readers of the importance of supporting a renewed search for both the Northwest Passage and the North Pole. The details Barrow chooses to include—Martin Frobisher’s discovery of a “horn of a

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sea unicorn, into which some spiders being put immediately died”; accounts of harrowing mutinies; and lines from a “curious poem”—indicate that Barrow is trying to enlist the support of his readers first by capturing their imagination, and then by appealing to “those who have the interests of science at heart, or the national honour and fame, which are intimately connected with those interests.”127 Just as Barrow seems to approve of some forms of financial speculation only to bemoan others,128 so does he disapprove of Selkirk’s and Amoretti’s imaginative engagements with the Arctic, only to solicit a similarly imaginative engagement on the part of his readers. Barrow’s conclusion, “in which in the absence of all knowledge, we should deem it preferable to leave blank . . . those coasts and islands which fancy alone has created,”129 reminds us of the purposes underpinning Barrow’s dismissal of competing narratives of polar space. In presenting the high Arctic as a fascinating blank, Barrow erases with one stroke of his pen the potential physical barriers barring Britons from the Northwest Passage, and he creates the blank page on which his own “fancies” will be written. Advocating an empirical practice that he claims will destroy the imaginary geographies of his opponents, and dismissing as unworthy representations of Arctic space that do not accord with his own speculations, Barrow reveals a determination to control the ways in which the Arctic can be represented. The only speculations that can be entertained regarding Britain’s polar prospects are those authorized by Barrow and, by more distant implication, his government—and these speculations will not be acknowledged as such. Similarly, the imagination fired by poetry, novels, and travel narratives is to be respected only if is employed within the parameters of what Barrow considers to be useful to the future development of the British Empire. Barrow’s February 1817 Quarterly article thus not only signaled to authors that Britain might shortly return to polar exploration but also that the role of imagination would prove controversial in this new era. In his critique of Selkirk, a man whose reading has inspired him to pursue a disastrously independent project of northern colonization, Barrow provides suggestive material for the portraits of Romantic readers-turned-polar-explorers soon to appear in Bragg’s A Voyage to the North Pole and Shelley’s Frankenstein. But in his invocations of Elizabethan encounters with mythology and in his condemnations of speculations not his own, Barrow also opens himself to the charges of hypocrisy that would be leveled at him in 1818, inviting critical readers to view him, the armchair navigator, in a less-favorable light than even the misguided Selkirk: Worse than the deluded reader is the cynical rhetorician who refuses

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to acknowledge his own debt to speculation. Finally, Barrow’s intolerance toward rival geographical speculations and romances invites readers to question whose speculative visions would come to occupy the blank area around the North Pole—and perhaps to feel some disquiet over Barrow’s confident erasure of lands that “fancy alone has created.”130

Bragg’s Voyage: A Scientific Expedition to the Marvelous Pole Barrow’s articulation of the national importance of polar exploration triggered a sea change in British polar literature. Prior to 1817, British polar tales depict their characters as arriving at the North or South Poles by accident: The unwilling polar traveler is driven to the end of the world by strange winds (The Blazing World; Rime of the Ancient Mariner), magnetic forces (Peter Wilkins), or shipwrecks on icebergs (A Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen). In 1817 and 1818, however, before Britain’s return to polar exploration had been announced or even officially proposed, stories begin to appear depicting Englishmen organizing their own expeditions and setting out for the North Pole in a deliberate attempt to gain knowledge of the ends of the earth.131 Barrow’s arguments regarding polar exploration, in other words, appear to have significantly shaped not only the reception of subsequent works of polar literature but also their construction. However, this new wave of polar literature is characterized by a refusal to imagine characters actually reaching the poles: Sites that Peter Wilkins and his imaginary contemporaries penetrated with ease are now depicted as lying frustratingly beyond the parameters of the text.132 This new reluctance to imagine the ends of the earth appears, at first glance, counterintuitive: Why, at the very cultural moment when human penetration of polar space seemed plausibly imminent, did authors start depicting the poles as inaccessible? One answer is that authors were probably influenced by a mixture of popular science (in the wake of the infamously low temperatures of 1816’s “year without a summer,” the Comte de Buffon’s gloomy prediction that the North Pole had been forever claimed by impenetrable ice weighed heavily on European minds), nationalist ideology (“Raymond the Romantic,” an 1826 short story, analyzed in Chapter 3, suggests that, by the end of the following decade, polar space will be reserved as the site of national, not individual, endeavor), and a fear of preemption. Just as twentieth-century science fiction writers turned away from fictional depictions of Mars in the wake of the Viking missions of 1976,

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Romantic writers turned away from fictional depictions of the poles when their speculations seemed at risk of being undermined by scientific discovery.133 However pragmatic this latter decision may have been, it does not seem to have sat entirely well with authors of works such as Voyage and Frankenstein, which seem determined to preserve the possibility of the marvelous in an age of scientific exploration. Benjamin Bragg’s A Voyage to the North Pole captures some of the ambiguities of the new era of polar literature in its portrait of an Englishman who, inspired by his childhood reading, forms a “romantic project of taking a plan of the North pole.”134 Published under a pseudonym, this minor children’s novel delights in sharing scientific theories with its young readers, alerting them, for example, to Buffon’s famous theory that “the earth is gradually cooling from the Poles,” and discovering in its imagined polar landscape evidence of future apocalypse.135 But the narrator also weaves the iconography of fantasy into his lessons on natural history: In voyaging into polar space, Bragg expects to encounter the marvels spoken of in ancient legends, and the creatures he claims to find are identified accordingly. Like the Elizabethan explorers, Bragg and his men see a “Sea Unicorn” and “mermaids,” the latter being seal-like creatures “with small eyes, and a most disgusting appearance, being that sort of mixture that might be fancied to hold the space in Creation between men and fishes, which the monkey supplies between men and quadrupeds.”136 In this description, Bragg updates the marvelous by situating the grotesque body of a legendary creature within a contemporary classification scheme. In doing so, however, he diminishes the wonder that the name “mermaid” invokes. Inspired to go to the pole by the sense of wonder invoked by his childhood reading, Bragg seems to unconsciously fret about the danger he, the empiricist explorer, poses to his source of inspiration. This anxiety surfaces in Bragg’s references to the progressive extinction of the marvelous: He follows his attempt at mermaid classification by noting that “we have every reason, from the poems and histories of the ancients, to believe, that the species was much more common than it is now,” an indication that mermaids are becoming “extinct.”137 He is privately pleased, then, when the mermaids he encounters prove wary of these emissaries of science and, in their “sagacity,” dive “if we only raised a hand,” so that it was “impossible . . . to take aim if we desired to shoot one.”138 These remnants of the marvelous, at least, will not be converted into un-fantastic specimens of scientific inquiry. While Bragg wants to penetrate polar space and open it to the explanations of modern science, then,

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his narrative also hints at a desire to see the marvelous survive his project, even if this means the failure of some aspects of his expedition. Bragg’s surprising equanimity when confronted with the evasive marvelous may recall the early eighteenth century’s reluctance to actually discover the undiscovered lands that spurred dreams of capitalist speculation. Indeed, Bragg’s narrative testifies to a disappointment with the annihilation of his polar dreams when he finally discovers the empirical reality of his longed-for polar continent. Immediately prior to the moment of discovery, Bragg’s language infuses the undiscovered landscape with the allure of a Hyperborean paradise: After penetrating the “enchanted ring” that protects the pole from discovery, he reports, “we seemed about to make some new discovery of unknown countries, which should reward all our exertions, and satisfy all our desires.”139 But, Bragg gloomily reveals, his crew’s speculations are about to be brutally disappointed: “This fairy prospect vanished on closer inspection; and whatever might have been the case when the world was young, it was now clear that it wanted energy and warmth to break forth into life.”140 To actually discover imagined lands is, as Markley has observed, to “bring them into the logic, and the economy, of scarcity”;141 Bragg’s polar land of wonders, once discovered, is promptly stripped of its fantastic appeal and revealed as an inhospitable landscape that cannot be converted into a productive colony. But if the novel appears enamored of the marvelous and warns its readers about the disappointments inevitably attending the attempted penetrations of imagined lands, it also remains wary of the consequences attending an unregulated imagination. In the aforementioned passage in which Bragg and his men finally sight the polar continent, Bragg draws attention to the ways in which their imaginative interpretation of the distant landscape misleads them: “Our eager eyes painted this prospect equal to Paradise: one could point out waving forests, flowery meadows, and fine streams of water in the green vallies.”142 Rushing forward in search of their imagined land, Bragg’s crew therefore does not attend as much as they should to the dangers they will face “in our return.”143 These passages, which portray the imagination as investing the polar landscape with a deadly allure, are buttressed by Bragg’s anxieties regarding the mental health of his crew. As they approach closer to the North Pole, the center around which their speculations have turned, Bragg fears that their prolonged immersion in atopic space is inducing “some degree of insanity in the men.”144 Bragg’s concerns appear borne out in the extraordinary suicide attempt of a Scottish Highlander, who, finding that the sublime desolation of the polar continent “reminded him of his native scenery,” steals away “with the

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intention of dying upon the spot.”145 This overemotive attachment to the idea of north—an attachment that perhaps resonates with Barrow’s critique of Selkirk’s Scotophile imagination—proves dangerously appealing to some of Bragg’s crew who “found these arguments very cogent, and wanted but little of sitting down beside him.”146 Bragg manages to manhandle his men out of their Ossianic paralysis, and, shortly afterward, they abandon the pursuit of the North Pole for the sake of survival. It is only on his return journey, when Bragg is desperately trying to raise the spirits of the men, that the imagination suddenly appears in the text as a force that can sustain explorers as well as luring them to their deaths. Tracing the shapes of “Gothic towers” in the surrounding ice, Bragg reports that this application of the “imagination . . . prevents the mind from absolutely sinking under the impression of those frightful solitudes.”147 By projecting imaginary features onto the polar landscape, Bragg and his men are indulging in the same kind of activity that earlier caused them to mistake the polar continent for a verdant paradise. But now, because they are voyaging southward, back to documented lands and the genre of realism, Bragg and his crew are able to recognize their fantasies for what they are and thus to experience the beneficial aspects of imagination. The “enchanted ring” protecting Bragg’s pole, in other words, not only represents a limit on human physical endeavor beyond which it is dangerous to pass, but also demarcates the border between reality and fantasy, beyond which the explorer risks being consumed by his own mental excesses. By Voyage’s conclusion, polar space has emerged as an atopia par excellence: an inhospitable territory that appears immune to its incorporation within imperial cartographies. Having entertained hopes of discovering a profitable terra nullius at the pole, Bragg and his men are forced to renounce their hopes of exploiting the landscape they discover, recognizing the polar continent as both uninhabited and “uninhabitable.”148 Having begun his journey with the aspiration of leaving his mark on undiscovered lands, Bragg concludes his imagined voyage by turning back from a polar land that remains unaltered by his efforts. Despite raising the specter of a thoroughly penetrated pole, then, Voyage depicts the polar continent as an atopia that resists both its conversion into place and its possession by empire. Beyond the continent’s maddening shores, the pole itself lurks in safe obscurity, a bastion of nonmercantile speculative possibilities that will endure, and perhaps even outlast, an age of scientific polar exploration.149

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Frankenstein and the Dangers of Speculation Frankenstein is perhaps the first work of British polar fiction to reflect overtly on the role of literature in building Britons’ affective relationship to the poles.150 In the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley highlights literature’s problematic role in building the allure of blank spaces by having her dauntless explorer, Robert Walton, explicitly attribute his interest in “the land of mist and snow”151 to Coleridge’s Rime. But for all his professed respect for the poem, Walton appears to have heeded none of the warnings in Rime regarding the invasion of polar space, instead citing its marvelous imagery in an attempt to downplay the dangers attending his project. Moreover, his poetically inspired vision of the high Arctic jars with his professed commitment to scientific geography: Neither Walton’s Rime-induced conflation of South and North Poles nor his professed desire to discover a potentially colonizable continent “surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe” suits a Cook-like explorer aiming “to execute with perseverance and labour”152 the accurate charting of polar seas. Emerging in an era in which, as discussed in the next section, the narratives of Barrow-organized voyages not only attempted to portray polar space as colonizable, but also advocated the use of literature to stimulate explorers’ acquisitive imaginations, the 1831 edition’s portrait of the recklessly speculative Walton expresses a deep suspicion of the enlistment of literature in geographical enterprises. While, as Jessica Richard has argued, Frankenstein’s critique of the intersection of imagination with polar exploration originates in the 1817 controversy surrounding John Barrow’s Quarterly articles, the 1818 Frankenstein’s portrait of Walton also supports Barrow’s implied argument for the “nationalizing” of polar exploration. Walton’s actions suggest that he is putting his own quixotic ambitions before the interests of a scientific or national community: As newspapers observed of William Scoresby’s plan in 1815, a polar expedition was not considered “an object that can be taken up by an individual,” but one that ought to involve a network of “men of science” and, potentially, “the Government.”153 Not only does Walton not discuss his plans with “men of science,” but also, despite his paean to the scientific importance of his voyage, he seems to record no observations—a notable omission in an era in which scientific observations from polar voyages often appeared before the public in the form of letters from explorers to the women they had left at home.154 Without such communications, if Walton’s ship is lost, all the insights that

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might be gleaned from his voyage are lost along with him. Like Victor Frankenstein, in other words, Walton appears to be operating in the mode of the secretive alchemist rather than as a responsible contributor to the advance of science. But if Frankenstein participates in the delegitimation of the private explorer, Shelley’s novel also appears wary of the imperial consequences that might stem from a national adoption of individuals’ Arctic goals. Frankenstein seems, as Adriana Craciun observes, presciently alert to Britain’s growing, post-Selkirk interest in the potential solution offered by its Canadian territorial holdings to the problem of its “superfluous” population—an “occulted colonial dimension . . . central to ‘scientific’ Arctic exploration.”155 As Frankenstein reminds us regarding his own project, his scientific ambitions are of the same kind that spur imperial conquest.156 While supporting, therefore, the dawn of an age of national polar exploration, the 1818 edition of Frankenstein looks warily on literature’s enlistment in the Admiralty’s construction of a post-Napoleonic vision of the globe and attempts to head off the excesses of empire by insistently terminating speculative dreams of “imaginary lands.” Concerns over the future directions of empire appear to underpin Frankenstein’s concerns over the intersection of the domestic imagination with foreign spaces and its insistence on the bankruptcy of the eighteenth century’s speculative visions of colonial acquisition. The former surfaces, albeit obliquely, in Victor Frankenstein’s description of Elizabeth’s domestically circumscribed (and perhaps “feminine”) imagination: “The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy; which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”157 Victor here contrasts two different ways of imagining the world: as an unknown space to be penetrated and discovered and as the imagined terra nullius conceived of in pre-1780 imagined voyages, populated by imaginary peoples and available for the colonial fulfillment of the author’s fantasies. Mary Poovey has argued that Mary Shelley distrusts the creative imagination as manifested by Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, for it allows “the individual’s self-absorption to fill the entire universe, and, as it does so, it murders everyone in its path.”158 In contrast, the imaginative activity of the self-abnegating Elizabeth seems harmless enough. However, Shelley’s use of the phrase “sought to people,” with its connotations of biological reproduction and colonial expansion, resonates with Victor’s destructive hijacking of female reproductive power and his fear that his Creature will “people” the wilds of South America with a “race of devils.”159 The language that Victor uses here to describe Elizabeth’s acts of imaginative peopling reveals the

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potential for seemingly harmless acts of imagination to be usurped and translated into brutal imperial nightmares—a possibility also suggested by Walton’s use of Rime to justify his risking of men’s lives in polar wastes. Evoking Selkirk’s plans to address the problems of dispossessed Highlanders via schemes of Arctic “colonization,”160 Frankenstein revisits the question of property rights raised in Peter Wilkins but asks what happens to property-less individuals in a system where colonial acquisition is not presented as a viable solution for European inequalities. The Creature recognizes early in its life that its lack of property poses a serious barrier to integration into European society: “I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood. . . . I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches . . . without either [a man] was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave. . . . And what was I?”161 Whereas in works like Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins, the return to a property-less state of nature was presented as a potential solution to economic hardship, the Creature faces the challenge of having been born into what is effectively the state of nature in a land that is already occupied. Finding itself on pre-occupied land with “no money, no friends, no kind of property”162 and therefore no means of admittance to the complex society that surrounds it, the Creature faces the hard prospect of being, at best, a possession (a slave) and, at worst, a wanderer with no home to arrest its endless circulation. The Creature’s lack of clear property rights is reinforced (and perhaps preemptively signaled) by the Creature’s monstrous body, which not only links it to what Wolfram Schmidgen calls the “mixed”163 body of the bastard, but also signals that, like the European land in which it finds itself, the Creature’s body has been “pre-occupied”—each body part taken from a different owner whose life (and presumably soul) has now fled the flesh in question. Legally, the Creature has no inherent property—even its body is only debatably its own—and it can thus act as a cipher for all “Others,” European and otherwise, whose personhood and property rights are not recognized by European sovereign power. Victor’s rejection of the Creature, in effect, bastardizes it, turning it into yet another polar wanderer, “a monster . . . whom all men disowned,”164 without a lawful claim to property, family, or nationality. Recognizing that its “natural lord and king” is reluctant to legitimate its existence, the Creature offers to pursue the colonial solution of Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins and to go “to the vast wilds of South America,” where, with the help of its mate, it hopes to build the society it desires.165 But

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Frankenstein recognizes this solution as implausible or, at the very least, highly problematic: As the Creature’s encounter with Volney’s Ruins of Empires reminds us, the “American hemisphere” has already witnessed bloody conflicts between European colonizers and its “original inhabitants.”166 Even if the Creature does find an unoccupied swath of land to colonize, Victor knows that, in an increasingly connected world, blank space will not remain remote. He therefore anticipates a day when the Creature’s “race of devils” will compete for resources with “the species of man.”167 In rejecting the Creature’s proposal, Victor is acknowledging the limitations of the globe he inhabits; his thought processes suggest that the terra nullius can no longer be seen as a panacea for the problems of a capitalist system. Emblematic of the emptiness of Robinson Crusoe’s island dreams, the icy landscape toward which the property-less Creature finally turns serves as a dark mirror of the Torrid Zone, exposing the object of imperial speculation to contain not endless sources of wealth and a chance for individual reinvention but “darkness and distance.”168 Frankenstein sounds the death knell of dreams surrounding the undiscovered terra nullius in its depiction of Walton’s defeat in polar space. At the outset of the narrative, Walton outdoes Barrow’s most sanguine visions when he imagines himself “wafted” toward a Hyperborean paradise in the far reaches of the north, a “habitable” land “surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered.”169 Like Terra Australis Incognita, Walton’s polar land promises to satisfy the desires engendered by European financial, geographical, and fictional speculation. However, in the novel’s conclusion a disappointed Walton finds himself instead “wafted towards England,”170 driven back from the panacea of imagined lands toward a Europe plagued with inequality and injustice. Able neither to confirm nor deny his earlier speculations, Walton leaves behind him an unseen pole that serves, as it did in Peter Wilkins’s day, as a repository for monsters. But even as it preserves the marvelous pole from empirical annihilation, Frankenstein indicates that its readers should turn their gazes away from the imaginary solutions of far-off lands, toward the un-utopian space of the national domestic. Shelley’s pole thus challenges both characters and readers with a series of unpleasant “realities,” reminding us of its traditional role as the ultimate imagined limit on all human ambitions, whether they be literary, scientific, or imperial. Both the property-less monster and the space of the pole remain remote at the end of the novel, evidence of an “outside” to a system of exchange that, despite the promises of Robinson Crusoe, resists integration into the system

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itself. Polar space defeats not only Captain Walton’s attempts to reach the pole and Frankenstein’s attempt to destroy his monster, but arguably also the conventions of narrative in denying both Frankenstein and his creation a final confrontation. Unlike Paltock’s Peter Wilkins or Bragg’s A Voyage to the North Pole, Shelley’s Frankenstein concludes leaving us no wiser regarding the nature of the North Pole, the safety of its explorer-protagonist, or the method by which this manuscript has come into our hands, all of which must remain subjects of speculation. Instead of depicting the inevitable surrender of polar legend to the twin forces of imperial expansion and scientific inquiry, the novel instead depicts the survival of both Frankenstein’s fantastic Creature and the mystery of the pole, while renouncing the imaginary solutions offered by distant lands. The marvelous is not in danger of extinction in this text; rather, it’s those who cite literature and a “love for the marvelous”171 as justification for questionable actions who are threatened with annihilation by the forces that— despite their claims to the contrary—are out of their control.

William Parry’s Polar Culture Works such as Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bragg’s A Voyage to the North Pole were rapidly absorbed into the 1817–18 controversy surrounding Barrow’s Quarterly Review articles. In the wake of intense criticism of Barrow’s “chimerical speculations”172 regarding climate change and northern geography, some of Barrow’s supporters took the unusual tack of admitting, rather than denying, the imaginative nature of their engagement with the high Arctic. One such response in the New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register takes issue with “some learned professors, who by being nearer the pole possess less ardent imaginations than we southern inquirers, have in the plenitude of their experimental wisdom, positively determined that a barrier of ice of eternal durability forms a solid continent.”173 Drawing attention to the equally speculative nature of the Edinburgh circle’s statements on polar geography, this government sympathizer reverses the position taken by Barrow’s first Arctic article and claims the “ardent imagination” as a virtue in matters of scientific uncertainty. The author further attempts to settle the debate by referring his readers to the explorers themselves, who, being currently engaged on the voyage, are the “best source”174 for information about the North Pole. Quoting letters that indicate that the ships have not so far encountered any significant obstacles, the newspaper rests its case. This strategy of attempting to silence on-shore

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criticism with reference to the texts produced by explorers—texts selected for dissemination by the Admiralty—anticipates the significant role that authorized voyage narratives would subsequently play in what Adriana Craciun has argued was Barrow’s attempt to “monopolize the publication rights on an entire geo-imaginary region.” As Craciun observes, this attempt at geo-imaginary monopoly was an “analogous practice to the contested monopoly on Arctic exploration long held by ‘adventure capitalists’ in the Hudson’s Bay Company”:175 an attempt, in short, to control polar speculations. Unfortunately for the government, the two 1818 expeditions failed and were back in England within the year—an embarrassing outcome that both disappointed a curious British public and underscored the difficulties and dangers attending polar exploration. The expeditions had done relatively little to expand Britain’s geographical knowledge of the north. Indeed, the Northwest Passage expedition promptly reopened, rather than settled, debate over polar geography, as controversy flared up around Captain John Ross’s decision to turn his expedition back from the area now known as Lancaster Sound. Ross claimed to have seen a chain of impenetrable mountains blocking the expedition’s path, but some of his junior officers—including one William Edward Parry—correctly judged Ross’s mountains to be, at best, an optical illusion. Despite the grand hopes attached to Britain’s first nineteenth-century assault on polar space, by December 1818, the epistemological uncertainty associated with the poles thus remained frustratingly intact. Determined to redeem itself after the embarrassments of 1818, the government sent out a new polar expedition in 1819 under the direction of William Edward Parry, whose methodological innovations would have a significant impact on how Britain imagined and approached polar space. Parry’s expedition was the first to spend the winter in polar waters rather than fleeing south, a development that briefly suggested that polar space, far from remaining an uninhabitable atopia, might yet be brought within the domain of the British Empire. Parry promotes this line of reasoning in his best-selling Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific (1821), observing with pride his crew’s “feelings of pleasure to see a British flag waving, for the first time, in these regions, which had hitherto been considered beyond the limits of the habitable part of the world.”176 By enduring a winter in this harsh environment, Parry’s expedition had pushed the border of the “habitable” northward and thus opened polar space up to future British occupation—a trajectory also suggested by Parry’s description of his ship’s winter camp as “our little colony.”177 As Alan Bewell observes, the word

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“colony,” with its connotations of imperial settlement, has its origins in the Latin word “colere,” to “cultivate.”178 Parry is thus drawing on the familiar, empire-justifying language of Romantic agricultural improvement in observing that he has “planted” this “colony” in what appears to be the polar opposite of “the landscape of a cultivated country.”179 If Parry invokes the rhetoric of agricultural improvement in his proud vision of his winter “colony” in the high Arctic, however, he also appears to associate the northward march of civilization with a nonagricultural form of “culture.”180 Toward the conclusion of his narrative, Parry revisits his earlier imagery, noting that, on returning southward, the expedition discovered that “this coast, which had hitherto been considered, by the whalers, as wholly inaccessible . . . had become a fishing station.” Parry’s repetition of the “hitherto been considered” formulation rhetorically links the whalers’ northward advance to his expedition’s earlier planting of the British flag, suggesting that the frontier of civilization has advanced in his expedition’s wake. For Parry, however, the telling indicator that civilization has moved northward is not the appearance of farms on the horizon, but his ability to exchange national news, “despatches and letters” at this high “latitude of 73°.”181 Coming on the heels of Parry’s suggestive callback to his expedition’s early triumph, this extension of British communication flows into the high Arctic is also positioned as a development for which Parry’s expedition has metaphorically cleared the way. Parry’s association of the geographical progress of civilization and textual circulation is a strategic response to the problems attending his attempts to adapt the rhetoric of colonization to polar space. For while Parry clearly wants to view polar space as subject to agricultural improvement, his attempts at actual agriculture in the high Arctic were exercises in frustration. He reports personally sowing and tending “a small garden . . . with radishes, onions, mustard and cress” on his icebound ship, but he notes that “notwithstanding every care and attention which could be paid to it, this experiment may be said to have wholly failed.”182 Unable to support his rhetoric of colonization with anecdotes of successful agriculture, Parry instead describes how he sustained his “colony” through a polar winter by using a different form of “cultivation”: the frost-proof “culture” of literary production and news circulation. The 1819 expedition’s ability to successfully endure a polar winter is due in part, Parry declares, to his deployment of writing and literary production in the service of community. In his description of the procedures implemented to ensure his “colony’s” winter survival, Parry emphasizes his officers’ creation of “a weekly newspaper . . . called the North Georgia Gazette and Winter

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Chronicle”183 to bind their community together. Taking his inspiration from the Napoleonic naval tradition of ship theater—an oceanic practice that Parry adapted to polar space—Parry also directed his officers to produce a series of theatrical entertainments, “the readiest means of preserving among our crews that cheerfulness and good-humour which had hitherto subsisted.”184 Given the “scanty” number of scripts available to the icebound sailors, this meant that Parry’s officers also had to compose original works to entertain their community. Parry singles out for particular praise “a musical entertainment, expressly adapted to our audience . . . to stimulate, if possible, the sanguine hopes which were entertained by all on board, of the complete accomplishment of our enterprise.”185 The play in question—a speculative history called “The North West Passage,” whose manuscript still survives among the expedition’s papers—foresees Parry’s men discovering and successfully navigating the Northwest Passage, then represents them returning to England “covered with glory! Pockets filled with Prize-money—all the world coming to see them.”186 By representing the expedition’s triumph in fiction, Parry’s officers obviously hoped to lay a psychological track that would help them accomplish their goals in reality. Productions such as “The North West Passage,” Parry argues, serve as examples of the “utility of theatrical entertainments”187 to British polar explorers. This claim, along with Parry’s effusive praise for the “service” of the ships’ “poets . . . to the community,” positions literature as a useful tool in the arsenal of the nautical man looking to “cultivate” hostile “regions . . . hitherto . . . considered beyond the limits of the habitable part of the world.”188 Parry’s introduction of literary production as part of the “duties” of a polar expedition was embraced by both the navy and the public. The winter routines established by Parry became, as Clive Holland puts it, “almost entrenched tradition in British wintering voyages.”189 The image of Parry’s expedition whiling away their time by performing plays and composing poems and articles proved very popular, as did the concept of the “literary polar explorer,” two images that, when taken together, reinforced nineteenth-century Britain’s association of polar space with the creative imagination. Articles and poems from the North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle were published in regular newspapers, synchronizing the community of polar explorers with the imagined community they’d left behind them. The story of Parry’s polar expedition infiltrated the everyday lives of ordinary Britons: The young Brontë sisters, for example, found the story of his expedition inspirational, and their characters “Parry” and “Ross” were major figures in the imaginary world depicted in their juvenile fiction.

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There are suggestions that the Parry expedition also found its way into fiction in the public realm. The anonymously published Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean (1826), a collection of short stories interspersed with “real” descriptions of a polar voyage, prompted one reviewer to frame his review by asking “Is the author one of the late companions of Captain Parry? Are the tales a part of those identical ones which, doubtless, along with balls, theatricals and masquerades, formed part of the recreations of our adventurous discoverers during the long night and winter of the Arctic Regions?”190 Demonstrating the degree to which distinctions between fact and fiction could collapse in discussions of polar space, the reviewer continues by wondering whether the Voyager is “the actual pursuer, or the actual pursued, of whom we have heard in Mrs. Shelley’s history of Frankenstein’s equally monstrous and disastrous man-making?”191 This theme continues in the reviewer’s praise of the book’s juxtaposition of Gothic tales with descriptions of polar space: “Our admiration is continually divided between his facts and his fictions: many of which are, in their strength of coloring and knowledge of the human heart, near of kin to facts.”192 He then quotes at length from a passage that evokes both the fictional and “real” marvels of the Poles: “What, then, were the wonders that might lie between me and this speck of distant world! What the caverns, the lakes, the glaciers, the people and the monsters! I was lost in a dream of speculation and desire, as I gazed long and lingeringly over this expanse of regions unexplored and I turned to the things around me with contempt and mortified ambition.”193 If Cook had argued that Britain’s exploration of distant oceans and lands should be the province of empiricist servants of the state rather than private speculators, passages such as this one display a new cultural comfort with an alliance between the state and literary forms of speculation. The image of the speculative, rather than the empirical, explorer had returned and been embraced as a hero. The impact of Parry’s depiction of polar space as “colonizable” territory was less pronounced, and it gained only fleeting purchase in the British imagination. It had a minor impact in literary culture, informing, for example, J. T. Haines’s “North Pole, or a Tale of the Frozen Regions,” an 1820s melodrama that includes a fictional “Captain Parry” in its cast of heroic characters and that depicts the North Pole as the territorial object of competing British and Spanish imperialisms. But Parry’s own 1821 expressions of alienation in the face of the polar landscape—his occasional references to its possession by “the death-like stillness of the most dreary desolation, and the total absence of animated existence”194—resonated more with the British public. This “deathlike”

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image of polar space was strengthened when John Franklin, the commander of the landbound portion of Britain’s 1819 quest for the Northwest Passage, published his shocking, and highly popular, narrative of suffering, cannibalism, and murder.195 In Franklin’s narrative, the site of the “Bloody Falls” massacre described by the eighteenth-century explorer Samuel Hearne—an infamous episode that had gained legendary stature in histories of the Arctic, despite widespread doubts concerning Hearne’s veracity—serves as the geoimaginary dividing line between a habitable Arctic populated with First Nations tribes and an icy atopia strewn with human bones, in which the emaciated explorers find even their own voices growing frighteningly “sepulchral.”196 On one side of Bloody Falls is a populated landscape that can indeed be both inhabited and known, and on the other, a land of death in which European histories and narratives become increasingly uncertain. It was an image of the high Arctic that would gain yet more cultural power following the disappearance of Franklin’s 1845 expedition later in the nineteenth century. The horrifying results of Franklin’s 1819 overland quest for the Northwest Passage—he lost eleven out of twenty men on a journey that found no promising northern waterway—and the comparative success of Parry’s had significant geo-imaginary consequences. After 1821, all British polar expeditions would journey by sea and would winter, as Parry had done, in the polar ice. Whereas the voyage narratives of Hearne’s and Franklin’s land expeditions had depicted an Arctic practically bustling with First Nations tribes, Britain’s embrace of oceanic polar exploration and the practice of “wintering” would produce Arctic narratives dominated by accounts of polar winters, in which encounters with Inuit tribes were relatively rare. While Robert G. David is persuasive in arguing that the disappearance of Inuit from British imaginings of the Arctic was influenced by the midcentury Franklin controversy described in the next section, 197 it is also evident that the British image of the Arctic as an uninhabited wasteland— a geo-imaginary representation that had tremendous negative political consequences for northern peoples—is strongly influenced by this transition from land-based to sea-based Arctic exploration. For his part, Parry’s subsequent voyages seem to have diminished his optimism regarding the British Empire’s ability to triumph over polar space. Parry continued to use the production of print culture and literature during polar winters, and, back in Britain, he embraced his own image as a “literary” explorer, delighting in positive reviews of his writing craft. In an 1826 letter to John Murray, he differentiated himself from an older generation of “Naval Officers . . . [more] accustomed to act more than to write,” declaring that

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“both are expected from us now.”198 Tellingly, however, while Parry wrote additional narratives describing his 1821, 1824, and 1827 polar expeditions, after 1821, he stopped using the word “colony” to describe his winter campsites. His references to the polar landscape’s habitability diminish, and his descriptions of it grow increasingly oppressive. In his third voyage narrative, for example, Parry observes that “all is dreary, monotonous whiteness. . . . Whichever way the eye is turned, it meets a picture . . . of inanimate stillness, of that motionless torpor with which our feelings have nothing congenial; of anything, in short, but life. In the very silence there is a deadness with which a human spectator appears out of keeping.”199 Whereas his 1821 narrative gestured toward a hopeful future for the high Arctic via the “colony” on which Parry’s gaze rests with pleasure, his 1826 description offers no visual relief from the deathlike landscape of the pole. Instead, Parry presents the reader with an alienating landscape with which “our feelings have nothing congenial,” in which even the explorer-spectator seems out of place, a site that, far from serving as a locus of prospective cultivation and dwelling, seems on the verge of ejecting the human spectator from its environs. For Parry, the colonial promise of polar space has been revealed to be illusory, and the hostile landscape that confronts him is now, indisputably, an atopia.

Staging Polar Speculation in Charles Dickens’s The Frozen Deep By 1845, polar expeditions had become almost routine. If the British public was no longer swayed by Barrow’s assurances that the next expedition would be the one to discover the Northwest Passage, neither was it particularly disturbed by newspapers’ token references to the dangers of polar travel. As Barrow had noted in 1840 while promoting yet another expedition, “In the whole of the expeditions and their numerous winterings in the ice, not more than three lives were lost.”200 Few newspapers reporting the departure of Franklin’s 1845 Erebus and Terror expedition therefore made much of its attendant dangers. Even the Illustrated London News, delighting in its first opportunity to cover an Arctic expedition, confined its allusions to “tempest’s” to a poem apparently composed for the occasion and devoted most of its coverage to the domestic arrangements of its officers, paying particular attention to John Franklin, “the gallant Commander of the Expedition,”201 whose portrait heads its page. His fame well established by the tribulations he’d piously endured on his 1819 Arctic expedition, Franklin seemed to exemplify many of the qualities

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the Victorians expected of their heroes: fortitude, loyalty to his mother country, and a strong sense of Christian virtue. Remembering the fate of the Franklin expedition in an essay published in 1926, Joseph Conrad described the international reaction to the expedition’s loss as one of shock and horror. The disappearance of Franklin’s expedition and the subsequent search for the missing explorers raised international interest in the poles to a fever pitch. So when Dr. John Rae, a seasoned Arctic traveler and amateur ethnographer, reported that he had encountered a group of Inuit who claimed that members of the Franklin expedition had turned to cannibalism before dying of exposure, the news sent shockwaves through Europe. The high hopes attached to the 1845 expedition made its disappearance that much more of a blow, the suspicion of cannibalism that much more terrible. But according to Conrad, what Europe found most disturbing was the fact that the expedition’s history had unfolded in a space that resisted epistemological certainty: a space that, moreover, revealed the vulnerability undergirding the British habit of “speculating” about polar space: As gradually revealed to the world this fate appeared the more tragic in this, that for the first two years the way of the Erebus and Terror Expedition seemed to be the way to the desired and important success, while in truth it was all the time the way of death, the end of the darkest drama perhaps played behind the curtain of Arctic mystery.202 Conrad’s recollection of the “darkest drama” of Arctic exploration alerts us to the way that the Franklin expedition shifted the public’s experience of the narration of polar space. If, as Janice Cavell has argued, the Victorians had come to understand “arctic exploration not merely as a series of intensely interesting events, but as a story which had naturally and of its own accord taken a literary form,”203 the disappearance of Franklin’s expedition would challenge the narrative conventions of this literary form. Since 1818, the public had become accustomed to reading letters from expeditions in progress as well as waiting for the official voyage narratives that were published soon after an expedition’s return. Franklin’s disappearance, however, denied the public an authoritative account of the voyagers’ adventures, and it denied them also any insight into the explorers’ characters at their moment of greatest trial. Frustrated in their access to information and their access to the vanished explorers’ interiority, the reading public would remember the story of the Erebus and

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Terror not as a novel or romance but as a literary form that permitted no glimpse of interiority and one that, moreover, was frustratingly staged “behind the curtain of Arctic mystery.”204 The national polar story had, suddenly and unexpectedly, switched genres. While the poles had always remained outside the boundaries of British geographical knowledge, the Franklin expedition’s disappearance marked what was arguably the first time that the British nation felt a pressing need to know what was unfolding behind the polar veil, a need that newspapers could not satisfy with factual news reports. With public interest raised, many popular newspapers attempted to fill the void of information available on the search parties with “speculations”205 on what might be happening to the absent explorers. An 1849 edition of the London Journal, for example, provides its readers with a “description of incidents likely to have been met with by Sir John Franklin during his perilous undertaking.”206 The Journal bases its description of Franklin’s trials on the “accounts of preceding navigators,” but—in a move that perhaps breaks the illusion of verisimilitude—enhances them with the poetry of “Mrs. Radcliffe.”207 The Journal interrupts its description of the high Arctic to praise the excellent “lady poet,” for her “correct” imagining of “the effect of sound in the dreary ice-fields of the north,”208 which had been verified by one of Captain Parry’s expeditions. It is possible to read some selfjustification in the Journal’s praise of Ann Radcliffe’s perspicuity, given that the Journal is itself engaged in imagining for its readers the sublime trials that Franklin and his men have endured. In a similar vein, the Illustrated London News published an article accompanied by illustrations that supposedly depicted “the perils to which our adventurous countrymen have been exposed.”209 While the fictional component of the illustrations was acknowledged in the prose, the author notes that the engravings had been copied from similar sketches made on previous expeditions. This nod to veracity legitimizes the reader’s imaginative participation in the national expedition, allowing the engravings to be “received as faithful illustrations” by the reader, who in turn will thus be enabled to mentally “follow through such icy regions the paths of the daring navigator.”210 If readers of official travel narratives had long enjoyed imagining themselves “following in the footsteps” of national heroes, however, those footsteps were now taking a turn into decidedly fictive territory. In the speculations of the Illustrated London News it is thus possible to glimpse some of the stress that the Franklin expedition’s disappearance placed on the imagined community of the British nation. Not only was the Admiralty’s slow response to the expedition’s

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disappearance a source of national shame, but the lack of news from the expedition denied British readers the illusion of mutual, simultaneous connection to their “adventurous countrymen,” an illusion that newspaper “speculations” alone seemed able to maintain. While many periodicals prefaced their articles with ostensible refusals to speculate—the Quarterly Review, for example, declared that it dared “not indulge in speculation, still less in prophecy, as to the fate and fortune of those brave men”211—they found the temptation hard to resist. Sometimes, as in the case of an 1849 Literary Gazette article, the results were damaging. On receiving an official report from the Admiralty containing what the Hampshire Advertiser & Salisbury Guardian referred to as a “glimmering of hope”212 in the form of an Inuit sketch of what might be the missing ships, the Literary Gazette excitedly and prematurely declared that Ross had rescued the expedition: “We believe that the gallant Ross has succeeded in discovering, and no doubt in saving, his friend of many a toilsome and dangerous service. . . . This is a glorious consummation; and we are proud to say that, from the first, we foretold it, and though anxious enough, never countenanced the apprehensions and idle speculations with which the public was from time to time afflicted.”213 In its reporting of the hypothetical as though it were fact, the Gazette reveals its desires not only to “scoop” its rivals but also to provide the reading public with a satisfactory conclusion to the polar romance. Of course the high Arctic’s disruption of the national community will be repaired, first on the domestic level, in the reunion of old friends, and then on the level of the imagined community, in the restoration of the information circulation that polar space has so visibly interrupted. Indeed, in reporting the news before it has actually left the Arctic, the Gazette is taking a step toward restoring British synchronicity. While the Gazette expresses full confidence in the truth of its Arctic prophecy, however, it also lays the groundwork for its defense by placing the responsibility for the truth of its statements on the Inuit. In what would prove a significant move in light of later events, the Gazette admits that “much depends on the accuracy and authenticity of the Esquimaux account.” The Gazette therefore substantiates its own account of Franklin’s expedition by providing its readers with “a facsimile of [the Esquimaux] sketch,”214 which inspired the Gazette’s vision of rescue. Placed once again in the imagined position of explorers, this time in the position of the voyagers seeking Franklin, readers are invited to contemplate the Arctic object reproduced in the Gazette’s pages and judge the Inuit information for themselves. This is a strategy

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that newspapers would also employ a few years later regarding the “relics” of the Franklin expedition, albeit in much grimmer circumstances. In 1854, Dr. John Rae reported that he had met a group of Inuit who relayed to him the fate of some members of the Franklin expedition. The controversial report that Franklin’s men had turned to cannibalism before perishing might have been easily ignored by Victorian readers, given the disappointment that had followed the Gazette’s eager embrace of Inuit testimony in 1849. But this time the Inuit had provided physical evidence to support their story: a collection of forks, spoons, and other articles from the expedition that Rae was able to purchase, images of which were subsequently reprinted in newspapers. Controversy swiftly followed, as critics attacked the credibility of the Inuit on racial grounds. How could a people living in the “state of nature,” who, in Dickens’s words, had a “domesticity of blood and blubber,”215 presume to accuse Britons of savagery? Living in a terra nullius, the Inuit were assumed to have no concept of property, no ability to make distinctions between what was theirs and what belonged to another; they were (Dickens’s argument implied) far more likely to be cannibals than a disciplined group of British seamen. In contrast, Franklin was a national hero, the leader of an expedition that sought, among its other goals, to demonstrate that the essential virtues of the human race were not only “independent of climate and geographical position” but also “frost-proof.”216 The Inuit allegations of cannibalism not only threatened Britons’ view of themselves as a superior race but also, in suggesting that British virtues depended on climate and geographical location, threatened to breathe new life into eighteenth-century climatological arguments against imperialism. The disappearance of the Franklin expedition exposed the vulnerability of British communication in more ways than one. “Communication,” a word that refers to the transmission of information, but could also, in the nineteenth century, refer to a line connecting a ship to shore, had been severed between Franklin’s naval expedition and Britain. Unmoored in a polar sea, had Franklin’s men really become so detached from their domestically instilled virtues that they had violated one of the ultimate taboos? Dickens thought not, and he argued for the constancy of English character in the pages of Household Words, citing Franklin’s previous experiences in the Arctic as proof that he and his “band of British naval officers” were immune to the temptations of extremity. As a novelist, Dickens would have been well aware of the potential for Franklin’s autobiography to misrepresent character, but he attempts to sidestep this evidentiary problem by suggesting, first, that an

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Englishman’s written history should always be privileged over “the chatter of . . . uncivilized people” and, second, that Franklin has simply told a better story. Franklin’s narrative, Dickens declares, is the “most explicit and enthralling in the whole literature of Voyage and Travel. The facts are acted and suffered before the reader’s eyes.”217 Clearly, this thrilling tale is to be preferred over “an incoherent Esquimaux story.” Yet in claiming that the “facts are acted . . . before the reader’s eyes,” Dickens is clearly stretching matters. In 1857, Dickens addressed this problem by supplying what the missing Franklin could not: a theatrical performance of British heroism in the face of polar adversity.218 In The Frozen Deep (1857), Dickens provided his final word on the Franklin controversy, not only arguing for the constancy of British character in the polar regions, but also attacking idle speculations that, unlike Dickens’s carefully crafted fiction, give credence to idle chatter of “uncivilized people” and damage the domestic community. The Frozen Deep was composed during 1856 and was first performed in January 1857 by Dickens’s theatrical company, with Wilkie Collins and Dickens in the lead roles. Although Dickens cowrote the play with Collins, direction of the stage production was left to Dickens, and revisions made to the final copy of the play reveal that Dickens’s vision and rhetorical agenda took precedence over Collins’s contributions.219 The play describes an imaginary expedition and avoids references to the outré subject of cannibalism, but Dickens’s depiction of the moral triumph of British manhood over Arctic savagery has clear implications for the Franklin controversy. While The Frozen Deep revisits previous polar works’ concerns regarding mobility, Dickens’s play asserts the power—and claims the necessity—of a kind of literary speculation regarding polar space that falls into line with the government’s vision of the Frigid Zone, while condemning “false” speculations and prophecies. The Frozen Deep represents the fullest Victorian articulation of what had become the standard relationship between speculation and polar space: The pole, which had in works such as Frankenstein been portrayed as unknowable space, could only truly be “known” in fiction, and moreover, the knowledge asserted by fiction could take precedence over the testimony and physical evidence gathered by Rae. It was a reversal that would have given eighteenth-century empiricists like James Cook conniptions. Dickens attacks the validity of nonauthorized speculation through the character of the Highland Nurse, whose pretensions to “Second Sight”220 are exposed as false by the end of the play. The fact that a minor Scottish character and her “Scotch song (new and original)”221 were objects of concern for

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Dickens mere days after he conceived the idea for the play indicates that this character (and her nationality) was important to Dickens’s ideological project. As Jen Hill has observed, Dickens was most likely thinking of the Scottish John Rae when he created this character,222 but the nurse’s Highland, lowerclass origins also associate her with “uncivilized people” like the Inuit, while the play’s reference to her “second hand eye”223 recalls the “second-hand”224 Inuit testimony that Dickens attacked in Household Words. Furthermore, Nurse Esther’s self-representation as prophet also associates her with the prophecies and speculations made by British newspapers regarding the vanished Franklin expedition, particularly those that, like the Literary Gazette in 1849, relied on the “accuracy and authenticity of the Esquimaux account.” In portraying the nurse’s visions not only as misleading, but also as possibly created in order to improve her position with her employer, Dickens suggests that a financial motive underpins these false prophecies. Nurse Esther’s suspect testimony comes under attack in The Frozen Deep, and so does the English characters’ urge to speculate aloud in the absence of “News from the Expedition,”225 without considering the impact their speculations will have on the community around them. Crayford, for example, a polar explorer who is present on the expedition, falsely believes that he knows and can tell what events have taken place behind the polar veil. But for all that his speculation is based on evidence and experience, it fails to take into account the unassailable virtue of British men and, if freely circulated, threatens to damage the domestic community. In revealing Crayford’s conjectures to be false, Dickens implies that evidence-based speculation is just as damaging as the story constructed by the Scottish nurse. Only speculation that prioritizes the interests of the British community (such as Dickens is, by implication, engaging in by writing The Frozen Deep) is legitimized by the conclusion of the play. The Frozen Deep opens with a scene of newspaper reading, featuring a group of women who are trying to resist the urge to speculate about the fate of their relatives. As in Frankenstein, The Frozen Deep juxtaposes domestic and polar space in this scene, which is set not in the frozen waste described by the play’s prologue but in an English country house in Devon. In his stage directions, Dickens specifies that the “prospect is supposed to be seen shortly before sunset.”226 If the polar waste represents the place of extremes, the veritable “end of the world,”227 as Wardour calls it in Act 2, then the play opens by presenting the audience with an England about to fade from view and the clear light of English civilization—the kind of moral illumination provided by the women conversing in the opening—about to be lost to the male explorers

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plunging into the primitive darkness of the polar night. The women in question are disturbed by the contents of the shipping news, which, in addition to revealing nothing new about the fate of the expedition, supplies accounts of other maritime losses to fuel their imaginations. In particular, the report of a ship called “The Sisters,” bound from Liverpool to California, found “drifting among ice at Sea, waterlogged and abandoned”228 upsets the women. This scene illustrates the degree to which Britain (as exemplified by these women, the flower of English womanhood) is enmeshed in a global maritime network; also here, as elsewhere in the play, an encounter with ice is presumed to be the most devastating experience an ocean-going nation can encounter, threatening to sever and part familial ties—in this case the aptly named “Sisters,” a ship meant to cross the fraternal divide between America and Britain, only to be destroyed by its icy sojourn. When the play moves from the domestic realm to the North Pole, it reveals that, despite the dark speculations of Clara’s Scottish nurse, the missing explorers’ trial by ice has been passed with flying colors. Near the beginning of Act 2, Crayford recounts the polar expedition’s adventures so far: Without recalling all the hardships we have suffered for the last three years—the loss first of one of our ships, then of the other, the deaths of some of our bravest and best companions, the vain battles we have been fighting with the ice and snow and boundless desolation of these inhospitable regions—without dwelling on these things, it is my duty to remind you that this . . . [place lies] far beyond the track of any previous expedition. 229 Crayford acquaints the audience with the history of the lost expedition by first denying that he will do so. His overt refusal to “recall” their adventures, followed by a vague list of polar trials, may at first seem like a crass rhetorical maneuver; but the presentation of the explorers’ experiences as a hyphenated afterthought, at a time when they are no longer capable of conveying news to the outside world, is significant. Having waited in Act 1 for news of the expedition, the audience discovers in Act 2 that the history of the expedition is more or less what was expected: The expedition suffered accidents but has endured. In The Frozen Deep, the history of the poles is profoundly generic and thus does not need to be discovered or recalled; by extension, news dispatches are not needed to write the history of polar expeditions, because as long as the characters of the explorers are known, their history is already written. In the end,

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Dickens suggests, what is required to understand polar history is neither news nor unlicensed speculation, but a firm faith in the character of British men. Polar space may cause the memories of the explorers themselves to fail and their histories to become incoherent—“I have lost all memories,”230 says the dying Wardour—but their innate nobility testifies for them. Charles Dickens’s production of The Frozen Deep met with resounding success in its London and Manchester stagings.231 Dickens won rave reviews for his performance as Wardour, the man who, in the depths of polar space, resists his murderous impulses and sacrifices his own life to carry his romantic rival home safely. Recalling the effect of his death scene on spectators, Dickens proudly declared that “it was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one’s hand—as at Manchester— and to see the hardened Carpenters at the sides crying and trembling at it night after night.”232 Even if Dickens was exaggerating the success of his spectacle—and other contemporary reports indicate he was not—the scene he describes gives insight into his ambitions for The Frozen Deep. Just as the characters onstage are reknit into a homogeneous sentimental community by the pathos of Wardour’s death, so does Dickens’s performance refute doubts concerning post-Franklin national identity and reforge a sense of British community through communal tears. Dickens’s success in the role is all the more remarkable because, when repeated by professional actors, The Frozen Deep met with a lackluster audience response. It was Dickens the audience had come to see, the great novelist in action, creating before their eyes a fiction of British heroism defining itself against the polar limits; it was literature’s power to shape and define national identity that they wept to see embodied on stage. Dickens’s The Frozen Deep transformed speculation into spectacle and, by doing so, gave new legitimacy to fiction as an interpreter of polar space and as a powerful shaper of Britain’s imperial identity. When, on July 4, 1857, Dickens performed The Frozen Deep before an audience that included Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, as well as literary celebrities such as Hans Christian Andersen, the timing and nature of his performance—a Christmas play performed at the height of summer—emphasized literature’s claim to bring home the experience of the “Land of the Midnight Sun” to domestic audiences. Performed on the anniversary of the loss of one of Britain’s greatest colonies, and set in a land where the sun not only set on the British Empire, but set for months at a time, Dickens’s performance provides the end point for this chapter’s discussion of the imaginary lands of the pole.

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As performed in front of a who’s who of the Victorian Age, Dickens’s play crystallized some of the major changes that had overtaken British conceptions of polar space by the mid-nineteenth century. First, the main objective in polar exploration was no longer colonial territory per se. The dream of Peter Wilkins’s mysterious island paradise had died a hard death, and the elusive object of the polar search was now not land but people: the bodies of missing explorers and, on a more abstract level, the character of the British people themselves. In fulfilling Barrow’s dream of scientific discovery, British polar expeditions helped prove to Britons the disinterested objectives of their own empire; Dickens’s The Frozen Deep depicts British morality as an innate characteristic of nationality, asserting that no matter how far the circuits of empire might transport Britons, their essential character will remain unchanged. Second, The Frozen Deep enacts an alliance between literary speculation and polar exploration, positioning fictional representations of polar space as the most appropriate forum in which to speculate about polar politics, while at the same time asserting the importance of literature to Britain’s imperial destiny. While in the eighteenth century the speculative territory of Terra Australis Incognita was disproved at the instigation of the very imperial dreamers who hoped to see its existence verified, a version of “imaginary” polar space thus outlasted the age of empiricist explorers to become a touchstone for the identity of a later imperial age. The alliance between literary and imperial speculations on polar space proved a powerful one. Dickens’s and Barrow’s claims that polar exploration represented imperialism at its finest took hold in the British imagination, gaining power throughout the nineteenth century and creating a troubling legacy in the form of generations of children (not only British, but European and American as well) raised on the notion that polar exploration was imperialism distilled into its purest form. Few of those who grew up to participate in imperial ventures wound up visiting polar space. Instead, what for some began as a vague dream of disinterested imperialism in semifictional polar wastelands was soon transformed into an experience of a very different empire, mediated by the perceived chaos and savagery of the ocean, an atopia that (as I will explain in the next chapter) became the object of a slightly different form of literary community building than that enacted by Dickens’s The Frozen Deep. By way of a closing snapshot, I wish to turn to Joseph Conrad’s poignant and ominous recollection of the effect that The Voyage of the Fox in the Arctic Seas, a children’s rendition of the Franklin story, had on his younger self.233 Steeped in the rhetoric of Barrow’s and Dickens’s visions of polar space,

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Conrad remembered feeling that the poles represented a midpoint between places of pure fantasy—“mere imaginary ends of the imaginary axis”234—and sites where real heroism could still be demonstrated. On finishing The Voyage of the Fox, a book that had been “translated into every language of the white races,”235 Conrad was captured by the story that had been laid out before him and in which, as a reader, he had been participating. In the fierce light of revelation, he saw that his destiny lay in helping this story continue: He, too, wished to become one of those marvelous “polar explorers . . . whose aims were . . . pure as the air of those high latitudes where not a few of them laid down their lives for the advancement of geography.”236 Polar space and the men who explored it appeared “free from any taint”237 of commercial pursuit, and it was this ideal that inspired Conrad’s youthful imagination and inspired him to seek out the closest equivalent he could to the blank space of the poles. Conrad turned first to the atopia of the ocean, becoming a sailor circulating in the transnational world of maritime labor described in the next chapter. And then, unable to voyage to Antarctica, Conrad (according to his own reports) instead transferred his ambitions from “the frigid to the torrid zone.”238 He moved his speculative gaze from lands explored out of “pure,” scientific motives to Africa, which, filtered through the lens of the polar literature that had become his obsession, seemed to a young Joseph Conrad to have a “heart” that was equally “white and big.”239

Chapter 2

The Language of the Sea

But it has occurred to me, that although the whole earth has been so nefariously divided among the few, that the waters at least are the property of all. No man claims his share of the sea—every one may there plough as he pleases, without being taken up for a trespasser. Even war makes no difference; every one may go on as he pleases, and if they meet, it is nothing but a neutral ground on which parties contend. It is, then, only upon the ocean that I am likely to find that equality and rights of man, which we are so anxious to establish on shore. —Frederick Marryat, Mr. Midshipman Easy, 1836

A Share of the Sea The first glimpse we have of maritime space in Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), Frederick Marryat’s nautical classic, appears in a speech given by a naïve youth, who, safely ensconced at home, describes to his father the ocean as he has been taught to imagine it.1 Steeped in cosmopolitan ideas, Jack Easy waxes eloquent on the international ocean as described by Hugo Grotius: an exceptional space immune to enclosure; a commons accessible to all mankind.2 Disillusioned by the reception that his Jacobin theories have met with on land, Jack looks to take refuge in the atopia of the ocean, believing this space a better base for the construction of an ideal society than the hopelessly lawbound nation he currently inhabits. But an atopia is not a space for dwelling. Rather than rising into prominence as Jack journeys away from land, the ocean instead becomes a menacing

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shadow to the ship-space of Jack’s new naval society. Its presence is asserted only in moments of disorder, as when it surges onto the page as the “sea . . . crimsoned with . . . blood”3 that claims the lives of the mutineers that Jack has unwittingly encouraged to rebel. Even the one scene depicting the sea as an object of aesthetic appreciation turns within the space of a sentence into an encounter with lawlessness, as Jack, admiring “the sea . . . with the full moon silvering the waves,”4 sees silhouetted against it a group of bandits attacking a carriage. One senses that, in Marryat, to admire the sea is to admire lawlessness, chaos, and rebellion. However attractive the sea, or Jacobinism, might seem from a distance, it represents forces that, if not resisted, would annihilate British society. Yet, when a disillusioned Jack exclaims that “anyone is welcome to my share of the ocean . . . the devil may have my portion if he chooses,”5 his statement is loaded with a peculiar irony. For Jack’s presence at sea is required by the ordered society the ocean seems to endanger. Britain not only demands that Jack and his fellow naval officers enter this unstable space, but also does so in order that Britain can claim the very thing that Jack is ready to renounce: its “share” of a space that no nation can truly possess. Marryat’s Mr. Midshipman Easy thus illustrates some of the tensions inherent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of oceanic space. On one hand, the sea was a dangerous atopia, a space antithetical to civilization, and the antipode of the stable, ordered space of the nation. On the other, it was the space of global transportation, the medium of Britain’s interface with the globe, and the international space to which Britain must expose its imperial agents, even as it fears the disorderly consequences of such exposure. If Jack’s initial description of the sea is an imagined construction, it is one that has its roots in legal and physical realities. As Robert Harrison observes in The Dominion of the Dead, the solid, stable earth “is inscribable, we can build upon its ground,” but “the sea offers no such foothold for human worldhood.”6 This “hostility to architecturally or textually imprinted memory” contributed to literature’s figuration of the sea as “the imaginary agent of ultimate obliteration”:7 the world-devouring sea of Wordsworth’s Prelude; the blank space of Byron’s Childe Harold Pilgrimage, into which human history disappears “unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.”8 It was also foundational to the ocean’s legal status as a supranational space, a concept that has its roots in Hugo Grotius’s 1604 arguments for the freedom of the seas. Grotius’s vision of the sea as a kind of international commons gave rise to a vision of the ocean as a special “nonstate arena”9 into which, as Cornelius van Bynkershoek

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influentially argued in 1703, a nation’s territorial power could extend only as far as the three-mile range of a cannon fired from shore.10 Beyond those three miles lay what Margaret Cohen calls the “wild spaces” of the seas, in which “might made right, and the only freedom was the ‘freedom of the seas,’ an amoral freedom of movement.”11 This perilous zone of freedom could, as Jack Easy suggests to his father, offer an escape from the framework of the nation. It was the space into which rebels like the Bounty mutineers could disappear,12 the element that shipwrecked sailors argued dissolved their social contract to obey their captain,13 the site of global circulation that made possible disaffected Britons’ relocation to other countries.14 It was, in short, a space where national bonds were tested. Yet the ocean was also, of course, a key component in Britain’s national mythology—albeit a component undergoing transformation during the Romantic Century. It was one thing for the ocean to stand as Britannia’s bulwark against Europe, marking, as supporters of the 1707 Act of Union had argued, the providential borders of Britain. But if the ocean marked Britain’s borders, then what would befall the maritime empire that attempted to expand beyond the divinely sanctioned limit on imperial expansion? Would the loyalties of Britain’s subjects survive their distancing from the metropole and their exposure to the atopic freedoms of the sea? And how would England itself be affected by its increased entanglement with the international ocean and the mercantile and cultural circulations that this space enabled? Such questions help explain why, even as Britons professed confidence in their ability to “rule the waves,” many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary works portray the ocean as a space that troubles rather than supports Britain’s pretensions to imperial power. However much British patriots like William Mountaine might insist that the “Monarchs of Great-Britain have a peculiar and Sovereign Authority upon the Ocean,”15 Britain’s claim to “rule the waves” was far more tenuous than James Thomson’s patriotic song declared.16 This claim, moreover, relied entirely on the Royal Navy for any pretensions to truth, a force that, despite the mythology surrounding it from the eighteenth century onward, was never as strong as British propaganda made it out to be.17 From 1760 to 1850, the British state strove to realize Thomson’s vision by arriving at ever more thorough understandings of the space of the ocean and the spaces of its navy. Even as devices such as the chronometer brought new precision to nautical charts, the Royal Navy underwent a series of reforms, influentially articulated, as Roger Morriss has observed, by Samuel Bentham, Inspector General of Naval Works. Influenced by his brother Jeremy’s

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theories, Bentham brought to the Royal Navy an appreciation for the power of surveillance to shape individual action, as well as a belief, new to naval bureaucracy, that individual rather than collective responsibility should lie at the heart of the reformed system.18 The year 1800 serves both as a marker for the Benthamite unification of British naval power and for the onset of what Michael S. Reidy has argued was Britain’s desire to learn how to manage oceanic space in the first half of the nineteenth century. From that point onward, the newly unified naval system collaborated with “the maritime community and the scientific elite . . . to bring order to the world’s seas, estuaries and rivers,” transforming “the vast emptiness of the oceans into an ordered and bounded grid.” The Admiralty’s new interest in the laws and nature of the sea was characteristic, as Reidy has argued, of nineteenth-century Britain’s desire to learn how “to manage the oceans,”19 a desire that could only be fully expressed once it had first learned how to manage its navy. It is in this context of Britain’s drive to “manage the oceans” that I suggest we consider the work of British maritime writers such as Frederick Marryat, who, knowing all too well the challenges posed by oceanic space, argued for the merits of literature as a technology that could extend British national cohesion into the atopia of the sea. These arguments emerged out of a maritime culture in which language, as Greg Dening has observed, was esteemed as “sacramental to a sailor’s skills and his control over his dangerous environment.”20 Familiarity with the vocabulary of martlets and lifts was a prerequisite for a tall-ship sailor’s ability to interface with the ocean, and it could mean the difference between life and death at sea. Already inclined to view language as essential to survival in hostile spaces, maritime workers were thus attuned to the utility of linguistic productions such as novels, poetry, and newspapers to Britain’s project of extending power over the anti-empire of the ocean. Like the American nautical writers described by Hester Blum, the British authors examined in this chapter used the maritime jargon essential to shipboard life as the foundation stone of a literary culture that aimed at justifying “the value of their labor . . . [and] their cultural perspective . . . to their land-based readers.”21 Literature, as I shall explore in this chapter, is promoted by these sailors-turnedauthors as a technology of communication, deployed, like cartographical technology, to render visible previously uncharted spaces and thus to make Britain’s dream of ruling the waves a manageable reality.22 In making this argument, I support Margaret Cohen’s description of the intertwined history of literary and nautical craft, and I trace into the sphere of maritime writing what Samuel Baker has observed was the Romantics’

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construction of the ocean as “the threshold across which national culture dissolved and the expanse that would constitute absolute culture’s ultimate domain.”23 But in this chapter I also emphasize the ways in which works of maritime literature, emergent as they were from a community identified with the extra-national space of the ocean, critiqued the institutions of the British Empire. In constructing the sea as a dangerous atopia into which sailors were thrust, writers such as William Falconer and Frederick Marryat called into question the ethics of Britain’s maritime ambitions by highlighting the high human cost of “ruling the waves.” The works examined in this chapter thus occupy a peculiar double position: Remembered by subsequent generations as uncomplicated contributions to the British imperial project, they also critiqued aspects of that project and advocated for the reform of British maritime systems, speaking not from the perspective of exploited colonial peoples but from the perspective of an alienated community of imperial labor formed in the blank space between imperial center and colonial periphery. Examining these works against the backdrop of maritime space not only complicates our understanding of the development of the imperial adventure tale, but also serves as a case study in the way that the atypical spaces of empire—in this case, the unstable ocean—highlighted the importance of the printed word to communities imagined within, and outside of, the nation.

The Atopic Ocean: An Overview The threatening ocean glimpsed in Marryat’s Mr. Midshipman Easy has a long cultural history. This history is primarily informed by the ocean’s atopic fluidity: the sea’s perceived opposition to building, dwelling, and place. What Robert Harrison calls the sea’s “hostility to architecturally or textually imprinted memory”24 contributed to the ocean’s figuration as a space antithetical to land; indeed, as the negative space that, as the ancient Greek geographer Strabo argued, “gives the earth its outline and its shape.”25 To early Christians it figured as what Alain Corbin describes as a “demonic” region that, in the sixteenth century, was still being routinely characterized as an “unruly dark side of the world . . . an abode of monsters stirred up by diabolical powers.”26 Certain seas could, it was true, be turned to good purposes, conveying epic heroes to their homelands and Christian saints around Mediterranean lands. But the ocean that dominated the early European imagination was primarily a generator of “horror.”27

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As Corbin has argued, this European view of the sea shifted dramatically during the period from 1750 to 1840, as the rise of seaside resorts reflected and contributed to a new appreciation for the ocean as a sublime natural space that could inspire health and introspection in city dwellers. For those who engaged more directly with the waves, the retreat of the demonic ocean had begun much earlier, instigated by a rise in long-distance voyaging that required the representation of the ocean as an abstract space rather than as a myth-infused menace. In the sixteenth century, European navigation was, as Fernand Braudel observes, still largely a matter of “hugging the shore,”28 a practice that requires “pilotage” (the art of maneuvering a ship based on visual observation of a coastline). To strike out into the high seas in the pursuit of colonial wealth required not only the suppression of one’s fear of the deep, but also the cultivation of a different set of navigational skills. As Ulrich Kinzel observes, the open sea lacks landmarks to aid in the differentiation of one location from another. To orient oneself in this disorienting space, one must therefore superimpose onto the undifferentiated waves the “virtual reality” of cartography. The rise of long-distance oceanic voyaging was thus accompanied by the routine implementation of new technologies and practices: the astrolabe, the map, and the logbook, the latter of which would have an immense influence on the maritime literature that used such logbooks as references.29 As informed by these new technologies of representation, the geo-imaginary ocean increasingly wore two Janus-faced aspects: the abstract global blank that could be “ruled” via cartographical line drawing, and that blank’s unpredictable planetary reality. On land, the rise of long-distance voyaging in the pursuit of colonial wealth triggered legal debates that ultimately reinforced the atopic nature of the ocean. In Mare Liberum (1604), Hugo Grotius famously argued for the ocean as an exceptional space that could not be converted into property. Observing that “things which cannot be occupied . . . can be proper to none because all propriety hath his beginning from occupation,” Grotius argued that, like the air, the sea “cannot be possessed”30 but served instead as a natural commons for the human race. The English lawyer John Selden challenged Grotius’s argument, arguing that the division of the sea by “Latitude and Longitude . . . [and the] Equatorial Line”31 demonstrated that the ocean could indeed be treated as a bounded location and thus could be claimed by British monarchs. Ultimately, however, Grotius’s ocean survived Selden’s challenge to become what Christopher L. Connery has observed was the “world’s first wholly global space”32 in the European geographical imaginary.33 Stripped of

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much of its religious menace, the ocean thus nevertheless continued to be imagined as an exceptional form of space opposing the stability and social order of land. Britons’ familiarity with the geo-imaginary ocean as a paramount space of atypicality would provide an influential frame for their representation of other atopias. Debates over the sovereignty of the seas had, for example, caused seventeenth-century lawyers to invoke the as-yet-outlandish idea of a sovereign claim to the atmosphere. When the 1783 invention of hot air balloons made the atmosphere traversable, Europeans did not, therefore, have to stretch far to conceptualize airspace in terms of oceanic geopolitics. The fact that, as Corbin points out, the ocean had been imagined as inseparably linked to the subterranean also established the sea as an imagined point of comparison to caverns. As for the poles—one of which, we now know, is essentially a chunk of frozen ocean—they, like the equator, were already visible coordinates in what Kinzel calls the “virtual reality”34 of maritime cartography, a status that led to their frequent invocation in maritime poetry’s unexamined claims of a British ocean rule that stretched “from pole to pole.” Even before we consider the number of sailors involved in the exploration of these other forms of space, then, it is possible to see how the British might have been predisposed to view atopias such as the poles as regions analogous to the ocean. Like these other regions, the ocean not only resisted conversion into place, but also retained a degree of epistemological uncertainty in the face of its cartographical abstraction, continuing, for example, to harbor beneath its surface the “folkloric” realm of the deep sea and to frustrate hydrographers with subversive phenomena such as “disappearing islands” and the elusive deep-water hazards called vigias.35 The most important point of contact between the nation and oceanic atopia was arguably the space of the ship. Legally, the high seas could not be owned, but they nevertheless could become the site of a state’s potential jurisdiction as implemented by ships, those pieces of “quasi-territory sailing in the legally undefined vastness of the sea.”36 By the early eighteenth century, the image of the ocean as extranational space thus coexisted with what Lauren Benton calls the “shared understanding of ships at sea as law-bearing vessels tied to sovereign sponsors, tracing through their movements corridors of potential jurisdiction.”37 This is the world into which the naïve Jack Easy plunges when he enrolls in the navy: a world of power on the move, in which Britain’s ships must continually trace the avenues of British power across the ocean’s characterless, ever-changing, and often antagonistic surface. It is a world of

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tension, in which a fragile zone of shipboard order is poised above the annihilating, planetary chaos of the ocean, a space corrosive not only to the ship’s wooden structure, but also to the social bonds that tie sailors like Jack Easy to his homeland. Given the importance of ships to a state’s ability to interface with the ocean, it is unsurprising that ship-space is the point of focus for many of the influential genres shaping Britons’ imaginings of the sea during the Romantic Century. While Corbin persuasively identifies the rise of the seaside resort as reshaping European perceptions of the littoral zone of the shore during this period, it seems fair to assume that British imaginings of the high seas were informed by Britons’ consumption of texts such as popular voyage narratives, shipwreck narratives, and the maritime fiction discussed in the remainder of this chapter. Voyage narratives likely popularized the image of the blank ocean with readers who were not eager consumers of navigation manuals or maritime law. Shipwreck narratives, on the other hand, often represented the ocean as a highly visible space of planetary menace. Both genres continued to promote the image of the ocean as a space of inherent disorder—if not always visible disorder—that must be kept at bay through careful management of the space of the ship. The abstraction of oceanic space described earlier in this section has been identified by scholars such as Philip Steinberg and Lauren Benton as lying behind the near-invisibility of the ocean in the influential genre of voyage narratives.38 Narrativized versions of the information recorded in logbooks and journals, voyage narratives tend to omit descriptions of the ocean unless the ocean is characterized by some remarkable detail (as with the phosphoric “illuminated” sea encountered by James Cook’s expedition in October 1772)39 or when it poses a danger to the ship (as with the “large hollow sea pursuing”40 the ill-starred participants in Anson’s 1740 circumnavigation of the globe). When contrasted with these narratives’ exhaustive descriptions of the places and peoples encountered on a voyage, the ocean thus serves, most of the time, as a blank backdrop to accounts of incidents and landmasses. The ocean could become still blanker in abridgments and compilations of voyage narratives. As James Burney observes in his esteemed A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean (1803), abridgers aiming to entertain a land-based readership might well omit even the abstract representations of oceanic locations, citing the irrelevance of fixing the “exact geography of a spot in the middle of the ocean, where no mark exists by which it can be ever recognized.”41 This was a practice that Burney, a former naval officer, resisted,

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reflecting that it risked creating a narrative “chasm”42 into which the routine experience of sailors, and the space of the sea, disappeared. In Burney’s description of the narrative chasm created by landsmen’s willingness to overlook the abstract sea, we may, perhaps, detect a different version of the complaint heard elsewhere in this chapter: that in an era of oceanic voyaging, the sailors who temporarily lived in the “unlivable space”43 of the sea were in danger of being ignored by their countrymen. Voyage narratives’ representation of the ocean as an empty space punctuated with danger seems a likely factor in the gradual disappearance of the “demonic” ocean in the British imagination. Their influence was extended, moreover, by the similar reliance on logbooks and journals by the works of maritime fiction described in this chapter. The tendency of Mr. Midshipman Easy’s ocean to become visible at moments of danger, for example, echoes the sudden appearance of dangerous seas in voyage narratives but is promoted in this case by metaphorical rather than meteorological considerations. That said, in the interest of not omitting the experience of seamen, it should also be noted that these descriptions of the ocean accord with the phenomenological experience of tall-ship sailors at sea. To contemplate the ocean is a privilege of passengers and shore-dwellers. The sailor at work may glimpse the ocean, but for safety’s sake his attention must be focused on hands, on his knots, and on his craft, in both senses of the word. Officers, similarly, must keep an eye on the actions of the crew and the behavior of the sails. Maritime laborers can thus pass hours without focusing their gaze on the sea. The ocean’s presence is nevertheless always felt in the heave and pitch of the ship underfoot: a constant reminder of the instability and power of the element that lies just beyond the ordered space of the sailor’s craft. When the dangerous ocean surges onto the pages of sailor-authored works such as Mr. Midshipman Easy, in other words, this does not necessarily represent a Gothic return of a force that has been forgotten, but the always expected appearance of a danger outside the field of one’s immediate vision. The genre most directly associated with depictions of dangerous seas is that of the shipwreck narrative. As the title of the first shipwreck collection suggests—James Janeway’s Mr. James Janeway’s Legacy to His Friends: Containing Twenty Seven Famous Instances of Gods Providences in and About Sea Dangers and Deliverances (1674)—in its earliest incarnation, the shipwreck narrative was used for religious edification, chronicling tales of miraculous rescues from the demonic ocean in order to illustrate the hand of Providence in human affairs. As shipwreck narratives multiplied, however, so did their apparent

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purposes: Some were clearly written as interventions into the political or legal situation created by the loss of a ship; others clearly aimed to induce sensation rather than moral improvement in their audience. The ocean in such narratives is assumed to be an antagonistic force whose capacity to destroy is taken for granted; in “official” disaster accounts, attention is paid not to the sublime force of the sea but to the failures of craft that made the sea’s triumph possible. Only when the fates of the dead are contemplated do references to the “dread abyss”44 of the ocean that claimed the Earl of Abergavenny or the “furious ocean”45 that haunts the memory of the survivors of the Méduse appear. In the more lurid examples of this genre, which tended to circulate in pamphlet form, the ocean is often highly visible and appears arbitrary in the terror it inflicts. Insofar as this hideous ocean’s ravages reveal moral or immoral character on the part of the survivors, that character was, by the close of the eighteenth century, associated—as in the case of the infamous 1815 wreck of the Méduse—with the nation-state.46 The Dangers of the Deep, or, Interesting Narratives of Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea (1836–44) provides a representative sampling of the more sensational excesses of this genre. Eschewing the tales of providential rescue found in seventeenth-century anthologies, Dangers of the Deep espouses patriotic sentiments while displaying a keen fascination with the carnivalesque social disorder represented as accompanying the ocean’s triumph over the space of the ship. Tributes to the “generous and noble acts . . . [that shed] glory and honor . . . around the name of the British sailor” appear alongside depictions of societal breakdown and role inversion, narrative moments that establish the shipwreck as a site where normal hierarchies of class, race, and gender disintegrate.47 These moments of nautical crisis usually form the subject of the chapbook’s plates, suggesting that the chapbook’s creators believed the spectacle of oceanic disorder—the sight of fathers unable to save their daughters and white men savagely attacking and cannibalizing their black shipmates—to be readers’ main attraction to these tales. The illustration inspired by the wreck of the Francis and Mary (see Figure 3), for example, which, due to its placement at the opening of the anthology, visually frames all the stories that follow, emphasizes the inversion of gender roles that accompanies a de-masted ship’s passengers falling prey to the influence of the ocean. The ocean’s waves peak behind the heads of the two central cannibals, suggesting their vulnerability to its influence. Three hands raised in ambiguous excitement draw the eye upward to a sky that seems empty of divine

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judgment and a broken mast that encapsulates the shipboard society’s loss of direction. The illustration’s caption directs the reader to the narrative moment at which a young servant, learning of her fiancé’s death, “cut her late intended husband’s throat and drank his blood, insisting that she had the greatest right to it.”48 This dark parody of connubial rights is echoed in the other role inversions alleged to have taken place on the drifting ship, many of which feature women upending their place in the gender hierarchy in the wake of the ship’s crisis. In this and other nonfiction accounts of maritime disaster, the ocean is assumed to corrode social order even when the physical frame of the ship remains intact. Prolonged exposure to this atopic space is to be avoided, lest, as

Figure 3. Frontispiece to The Dangers of the Deep (1836), showing a scene from the wreck of the Francis and Mary. Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

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in the case of Anson’s voyage around the world, the body and mind be affected by scurvy, thirst, or some other inevitable consequence of a long “continuance at sea.”49 And yet in describing the inevitable horrors of shipwreck, as when describing the seamanship employed on a successful voyage, the authors of both shipwreck narratives and voyage narratives would often suggest that others might learn to better negotiate the ocean through reading. William Mackay, for example, in his memorable recollection of the 1795 wreck of the Juno, reports processing his experience of disaster through his prior reading of shipwreck narratives and conducting himself accordingly: “I recollected . . . having read in Captain’s Inglefield’s Narrative, that his boat’s crew had received great benefit from lying down . . . in a blanket which had been previously dipped in the sea. . . . This practice I adopted. . . . It was the means of saving my life.”50 Even the trauma of shipwreck, in other words, could be absorbed via narrative into the pragmatic discourse of practical reason that Margaret Cohen calls “craft.”51 The very act of narrating a shipwreck, then, becomes a strategy for engaging with the menacing ocean and for dealing with a form of disaster that, to eighteenth-century Britons, was often characterized as being “felt by the whole community, the republic itself . . . convulsed by the shock.”52 That said, Mackay’s narrative of the Juno also alludes to the difficulty faced by sailors in communicating nautical experience to their fellow countrymen, laying their technical understanding of the ocean before “the public eye.”53 In the pioneering shipwreck anthology of the early nineteenth century, Archibald Duncan’s The Mariner’s Chronicle (1804), the editor acknowledges his land-based readers’ presumed difficulty in engaging with sailor-authored texts, the language of which he portrays as a potential barrier to the patriotic Briton’s duty to imaginatively share in “the fate of the adventurous seaman, undauntedly bidding defiance to his country’s foes” while “exposed to the multiplied perils of the ocean.”54 To address this challenge, the editor follows his preface with a small dictionary of nautical terms, and he promises to annex to his account of sensational shipwrecks a labeled “engraving, representing an elevation of a merchant ship.”55 The origins of this strategy are suggested by the epigraph to the preface, which quotes the well-known poem The Shipwreck (1762). In wrapping himself with the mantle of “FALCONER,”56 Duncan is performing what, by 1804, had become a standard rhetorical move of signaling respect for sailors and their labor. It had also become a cultural expression of the desire to grapple with the presumed alienations of oceanic space through narrative, a strategy attributed, as Duncan’s allusion suggests, to the nautical poetics of William Falconer.

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William Falconer and the Language of the Sea William Falconer’s The Shipwreck (1762) was one of the first and most famous attempts to use literature to represent to land-based Britons the concerns of their maritime countrymen. Popular in its day, The Shipwreck went on to leave a significant footprint in British popular culture. Much loved, oft cited, and reprinted well into the twentieth century, Falconer’s poem also continued to have a political purchase in later decades and was quoted, for example, in nineteenth-century petitions to increase the number of lighthouses in Britain.57 During the last decade, Falconer’s 1762 Shipwreck has attracted the attention of scholars interested in the class politics of the poem and the degree to which it illuminates the linguistic politics of nation formation.58 Most recently, Margaret Cohen has positioned Falconer’s poem as a significant anomaly in the evolution of representations of the ocean, a work that attempts to “retain the sea as the theater of craft” even as it anticipates Romanticism’s conversion of the ocean into a sublime site of artistic inspiration.59 But while these studies have gone some way toward correcting a scholarly perception of Falconer’s poem as merely the bathetic exertions of a minor writer—G. P. Landow, for example, dismissed Falconer as a barely competent poet grappling with a subject “too large for the poet’s intellect”60—many of the political resonances of this influential representation of the sea have been left unexplored. In particular, the poem’s engagement with imperialism has been neglected, an examination of which, I believe, would do much to address Landow’s charge that no “interpretation commands [Falconer’s] imagination enough to dominate the poem.”61 When Landow writes, of Falconer’s repeated references to “faithless tides,” that Falconer “does not make clear how or with whom the sea could conceivably have broken faith,”62 he omits the significant role that the ocean played in Britain’s national mythology. Falconer’s poem, which depicts the ship Britannia being devoured by the ocean it risked in the pursuit of Indian and African profits, uses the idea of the ocean as a providential guarantor of Britain’s safety to question the wisdom of the nation’s overseas entanglements. Falconer’s ocean is both the space on which maritime empire relies and the space that can undo that empire; in its furious rebellion against British pretensions to maritime sovereignty, the ocean subsumes the unacknowledged discontents of the sailors and colonists on whom Britain’s overseas ambitions rely. Falconer’s poem, I argue, evolves from a 1762 work primarily concerned

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with the formation of a united Britain to, in its 1769 incarnation, a poem reacting against the prospect of an expanding empire. Reading the various iterations of The Shipwreck alongside Falconer’s 1765 poem The Demagogue reveals the degree to which the developing American colonial crisis increased Falconer’s cynicism regarding Britain’s ability to maintain an overseas empire. In reading The Shipwreck as a poem expressing deep reservations, if not outright antagonism, toward British imperial expansion, we can see not only the vexed status that the ocean could hold in popular eighteenth-century poetry, but also the degree to which the fusion of literary and maritime “crafts” could import the politics of an extranational maritime community into the national literary canon. One recurring trope of maritime literature is the notion that the culture and experience of the ocean are so radically different from anything the average landbound citizen experiences that a communication barrier exists between sailors and landsmen. In Falconer’s 1762 version of The Shipwreck, we see early evidence of this trope as well as an early attempt to overcome the perceived barrier by educating readers in the language of the sea through a labeled diagram (of a ship, included in the frontispiece), documentation (the poem is heavily footnoted), and contextualized use of naval jargon. For example, close to the beginning of the poem the line “They heave the broad-fluked Anchor to the Bows” is footnoted with “Bows are the round parts in the foreend of the Ship that meet and close in the Stem or Prow.”63 Should the reader remain confused, he or she can consult the detailed illustration of a merchant ship (see Figure 4) that Falconer includes at the beginning of the poem. This illustration, in which each rope and spar corresponds to a number on a key of nautical terms, forces the land-based reader to appreciate the complexity of both the language and the space of the ship, and thereby the difficulty of the tasks set for both officers and sailors in terms of the routine operation and control of this space. To identify each numbered piece of rigging, the viewer must look over one of the three keys grouped at the top right, left, and bottom of the page. These keys are grouped according to rigging and mast areas, reinforcing the spatiality of a ship’s operations and suggesting the difficulty of any one person attempting to “master” all parts of a merchant vessel, the sailing of which is, by necessity, a communal affair. The individualism of early maritime adventure stories such as Robinson Crusoe is thus eschewed in favor of a vision of the communal labor needed to survive exposure in oceanic space, labor that the reader is implicitly invited to participate in by mastering its prerequisite language.

Figure 4. Illustration from The Shipwreck (1762). © The British Library Board. 78.h.10 pg7.

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The Shipwreck’s integration of naval experience into poetic language drew praise from contemporary reviewers, with the Monthly Review paying homage to Falconer’s successful “versifying [of ] his own sea-language,” asking, “What other poet would ever have dreamt of reef-tackles, halyards, clue-garnets, buntlines, lashings, lanyards, and fifty other terms equally obnoxious to the soft sing-song of modern poetasters?”64 But as the Monthly Review’s list may indicate, Falconer’s extensive use of jargon risked overwhelming readers. In the first edition of the poem, Falconer clearly anticipates criticism of his poem on this account, and he defensively presents the poem as a compromise between a sailor’s desire to convey maritime experience in its “native” tongue and a poet’s desire to make the poem accessible. In the advertisement, he apologizes for the extensive framework surrounding the poem, claiming that “it was not his first Intention to swell the Work with so many Notes.” However, he explains, after reviewing “the modern Dictionaries” and finding them “deficient in the technical Terms expressed there,” Falconer was compelled to define his terms himself.65 Falconer’s dismissal of “modern dictionaries” is aimed not only at the somewhat suspect maritime dictionaries circulating in 1762, but also at works like Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which had notably eschewed the language of the “laborious and mercantile part of the people” on the grounds that it could not “be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language, and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation.”66 Like the ocean that spawned it, a sailor’s language exemplified the foreign influences and mutability that Johnson sought to exclude from the English language, and “the dialect of navigation” is therefore, not surprisingly, given as an example in the preface of one of the dialects excluded from the dictionary.67 Not only did Johnson deliberately omit nautical jargon, but he also notes that, “in reviewing my collection, I found the word SEA unexemplified.”68 Johnson corrected his “sea” entry before the dictionary’s publication, but his lack of attention to a word of such importance to English national mythology not only, as Johnson himself notes, has “the appearance of negligence,” but also fits, thematically, with his desire to exclude from the English nation the corrupting, commercial dialects he associates with “coasts” and “the port.”69 In introducing his middle- and upper-class audiences to the language of the sea, then, Falconer works against Johnson’s strict definition of an English language and insists—both implicitly and explicitly—that his readers regard the sailors he describes as representative of the very essence of British identity.

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Nor is he particularly subtle in this endeavor: The ship at the heart of the poem is called the Britannia. Nevertheless, in the 1762 version of The Shipwreck, Falconer wears his anxiety over the reception of his linguistic project on his sleeve, begging his readers to accept the difficulties his use of naval jargon may create for them and “censure not severe th’ unvaunted song! / Tho’ jarring sounds the lab’ring verse prolong.”70 In the next line he makes the class basis of this appeal clear when he also asks his readers not to take umbrage if “terms uncouth should strike th’ offended ear.”71 In asking his readers to tolerate the “uncouth” terms that load his “lab-ring” verse with the parlance of nautical work, Falconer signals that he himself is keenly aware both of the negative reception that may await his use of nautical terms and of his tenuous status as a “laboring-class poet.”72 The resounding success of the 1762 edition of The Shipwreck gave Falconer more confidence when it came to using naval language in the 1764 version of the poem. In the 1764 Shipwreck, readers are asked to avoid censuring the poet’s “native song”73 rather than his laboring verse, a change that not only positions Falconer’s nautical language as having emerged organically from his maritime environment, but also implicitly claims the poet’s naval jargon as “native”—that is to say, British. In this edition, Falconer is also less likely to make apologies for his class status: His verses are now “measured” rather than “laboring,” and in his new advertisement, Falconer goes so far as to attack a “Sea-Officer” for being “so ignorant as to mistake the names of the most common things in a ship” in a “fully inadequate” maritime dictionary.74 However, a close reading of the poem also reveals a shift in Falconer’s goals: If in the 1762 Shipwreck Falconer was primarily concerned with bringing the language of the sea into circulation in national space, in subsequent versions of the poem, he is increasingly concerned with the price paid by ordinary seamen for Britain’s extension of its sovereign power overseas.

The Shipwreck Revised: Falconer and the Empire of the Deep The political context of Falconer’s changes to The Shipwreck is exemplified in his little-studied 1766 poem The Demagogue, which reuses some of The Shipwreck’s nautical metaphors in a pointed satire of William Pitt the Elder, John Wilkes, and Charles Churchill. Reading The Demagogue alongside Falconer’s revisions to his most famous poem provides a crucial insight often omitted from scholarly analysis of Falconer’s work, namely, that, during the period he

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was working on his final version of The Shipwreck, Falconer was actively questioning the value of the imperial wars in which he and other members of Britain’s navy had participated.75 Early in The Demagogue, Falconer expresses anger that, for the sake of a politician’s rhetoric, Britain’s military are “wasted with incessant toils, / Or doom’d to perish in contagious soils, / To guard some needy royal plunderer’s throne, / And sent to fall in battles not their own.”76 Falconer’s disillusion with foreign wars has been exacerbated by the tension growing between Britain and its American colonies: Falconer cannot reconcile politicians’ former jingoistic patriotism with their willingness to let the colonies shirk what Falconer sees as their financial debt to Britain for their defense during the Seven Years’ War. Footnoting his satire with examples of American privateering and illegal maritime trade practices, Falconer portrays the colonists as ingrates who casually dismiss the time when, to relieve America, Britain “the gleaming sword of vengeance drew. . . . That shook the deep abyss from zone to zone.”77 Now, encouraged by demagogues like Wilkes who seek to wreck Britain “headlong on that dreadful strand” of American rebellion, America simmers with insurrection, and “Rebellion waits, impatient of delay, / Thy signal her black ensigns to display.”78 Falconer’s prescient anticipation of American rebellion and his heavy use of shipwreck metaphors in a political satire lend a political resonance to The Shipwreck’s 1762 imagery and also underscore the political allusions made in his 1764 and 1769 revisions. Read in light of The Demagogue, the opening of the 1762 version of The Shipwreck, in which “Britannia’s Thunders” roll “In vengeance, o’er the deep, from pole to pole,”79 invokes the naval power claimed by Britain toward the end of the Seven Years’ War, a power whose global pretensions are emphasized by Falconer’s buttressing of the ocean with the extremity of the imagined poles. However, in the 1769 version, the reference to Britannia is removed; Falconer replaces references to the British Isles with the supranational “Ocean,” which “hears vindictive thunders roll.”80 This surprising excision of patriotic allusions reflects Falconer’s renewed doubts over the costs of colonial warfare. Having moved past the anger he expressed in The Demagogue, by 1769 Falconer was focusing on the need to avoid war, inserting into his final version of The Shipwreck a fresh appeal to readers who, like him, are “Sick of the scene, where war with ruthless hand / Spreads desolation o’er the bleeding land.”81 Falconer contrasts his story of maritime distress with martial horrors, promising “other themes of deep distress to sing,”82 and he presents the unity on board the foundering ship Britannia as a stark contrast to the divisions plaguing the real British Empire. In his 1764 version, Falconer acknowledges the

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specter of rebellion lurking in the background of his poem, depicting the sea as a region where “lawless surges swell;”83 in 1769, “Peril and Dismay / Wave their black ensigns on the watery way.”84 In other words, the “black ensigns” of American rebellion decried in The Demagogue appear also in the 1764 and 1769 versions of The Shipwreck to implicitly threaten the still orderly (though imperiled) ship Britannia and to provide a reminder of what (for Falconer) lies on the other side of rebellion against sovereign order: the lawless, stateless existence of piracy. Even as Falconer’s 1764 and 1769 revisions suggestively deploy threatening images of piracy in the background of the poem, the evolving narrative of The Shipwreck expresses new anxiety over sovereign figures’ exploitation of their subjects in the destructive pursuit of imperial wealth. The 1764 version introduces a new narrative element to Falconer’s tale of nautical woe: the corrupt ship owner who exploits both his son’s filial duty and his crew’s poor economic status in order to increase his own wealth. Characterized as despotic, the owner is castigated by his son, who angrily echoes the complaints of American colonists when he refers to the “tyrant-duty” he must perform in order to placate his father’s “fixt, inexorable will.”85 Not only do the owner’s financial interests force his son into an unnecessary voyage, but they also, quite literally, set the course of the ship, sending the Britannia’s crew, the “slaves of Fortune,”86 to hazard their lives in the contagious ports of Africa.87 Falconer’s use of slave ship imagery to criticize, via the figure of the owner, British capitalism’s obsession with colonial profiteering is hardly accidental. As in The Demagogue, his anxiety over imperial growth is not centered on the suffering of slaves or exploited native peoples but rather on the price paid by the lowerand middle-class Britons who worked, fought, and died in the name of patriotism to advance the interests of the wealthy. Just as in The Demagogue, Falconer railed against Britain’s military being sent “to perish in contagious soils / To guard some needy royal plunderer’s throne,”88 in his later versions of The Shipwreck he criticizes those who risk ships like the Britannia—“A fetter’d Captive to the oar of Gain”—in the “richest ports of Afric.”89 The result of this unregulated commercial speculation is that the Britannia will soon be sent to the “dreadful empire” of the deep, and its crew will vainly wish that they could “the wealth bestow that India yields / To pass alive and safe.”90 In his reference to the “dreadful empire” of the sea that waits to consume the doomed Britannia, Falconer invokes the ocean as not a pathway to Britain’s imperial greatness but the providential force that maintains the sea-girt isle and that will punish as well as protect the greedy nation that oversteps its

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borders in the pursuit of foreign trade. This hungry ocean’s waves cannot, ultimately, be ruled. However much Albert, the ship’s captain (the positive representative of sovereignty in the poem), might try to put his navigational knowledge to use in preserving his ship from “lawless surges” on its contaminated voyage, his ostensible mastery of the oceanic spaces shown on his charts proves useless once the sea turns against him. In vain, we are told, Albert “spreads the graduated chart, / And bounds the distance by the rules of art,” but knowledge of the “geometric distances surveyed”91 is not enough to control the planetary ocean. On one level, The Shipwreck’s depiction of rebellious waves destroying a representative of the king’s sovereign power jibes with the allusions to colonial unrest that appear elsewhere in Falconer’s work. But The Shipwreck’s ocean is more than a metaphor for political forces at work elsewhere: It serves also as the anti-empire, as the raw power of planetary Nature assembled to destroy with ease Britons’ hubristic pursuit of global ambitions. The ocean’s capacity to challenge sovereign power has clear implications for the expanding empire evoked by the name Britannia. A participant in the maritime trade that seeks “in certain ills imagined good,” the ship founders amid the Greek islands, where the relics of classical civilization “lie in ruins; in oblivion lost.”92 The classical ruins surrounding the wreck of the Britannia emphasize the shipwreck’s function as a memento mori for the mercantile nation, invoking a possible future in which Britain and its dominions fall victim to the ravages of more powerful forces. The ocean, serving as “the imaginary agent of ultimate obliteration,”93 is a metonym for these forces and a natural rival to Britain’s international endeavors: the “dreadful empire”94 with which a maritime empire such as Britain’s must forever grapple. The ocean’s role as a natural rival to the British Empire is driven home by Falconer’s peculiar transference of British martial imagery to the deadly seas that overwhelm the Britannia. A shattering wave descends, we are told, as “when, Britannia’s empire to maintain / Great HAWKE descends in thunder on the main.”95 Falconer alludes to the brilliant victory scored by Edward Hawke over the French in 1759, a naval engagement that, at one stroke, ruined French plans for an invasion of Britain and provided the Royal Navy with its most decisive victory until Trafalgar.96 But the martial power that had, in 1759, secured the safety of Britannia (the nation) is attributed here to the ocean as it annihilates Britannia (the ship). Depicting the ocean in this light allows Falconer to bypass the patriotic indignation his readers might otherwise feel at a stark depiction of the dangers posed to imperial laborers by rival European powers and colonial rebels. It is against the backdrop of the divinely ruled

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ocean—not against French armies or American rebels—that Falconer strategically interrogates his readers’ investment in empire building. Insofar as the Britannia’s bleak fate can be ascribed to any human agency, it is the agency of the commercial interests that have proven willing to sacrifice the happiness of subjects in favor of financial gain. While the shadows of imperialism lie over Falconer’s poem, The Shipwreck is not a story about survival and the re-creation of England abroad, as were early fictional shipwreck narratives like Robinson Crusoe; instead it is a reaction to and against the prospect of an expanding empire. Whereas in the original poem, Falconer is mainly concerned with the nature of Britishness itself, depicting the brave and united crewmen of the ship Britannia struggling against disaster in a poem that seeks to integrate maritime experience into recognizable poetic forms, his revised versions of The Shipwreck encourage his readers to reflect on the precarious position of Falconer’s maritime subalterns and the degree to which his readers support the casual sacrifice of sailors’ lives in the pursuit of imperial riches. Haunted by the American colonial crisis, the later versions of The Shipwreck display an increased anxiety over the stability of sovereign power in an expanded, far-flung British Empire, and they register a deep suspicion of the commercial interests that frequently drove the empire’s military expansion. These versions of The Shipwreck thus usefully remind us of the ways that nautical nationalism might be used to agitate against, rather than merely support, British imperialism. The decades that followed Falconer’s death saw his reputation spread, generating new editions of The Shipwreck and inspiring poetic imitations and tributes. Variations on the title “The Shipwreck” became frequent post-1783 accompaniments to poems submitted to periodicals and newspapers, with a few of these works, such as Richard Hart’s “The Shipwreck: An Elegiac Poem” (1783), explicitly taking up Falconer’s anti-imperial themes.97 But such poems were in the minority, and in the later decades of the eighteenth century, the political agency that animated Falconer’s literary project faded from popular view. Sailors, however, did not lose sight of the implications of Falconer’s fusion of literary and maritime craft. The Shipwreck enjoyed a considerable afterlife as one of the foundation stones of seamen’s international literary canon, and, in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, naval officers raised on Falconer’s poetry would also begin to self-consciously use literature marked by nautical jargon as a technology with which to incorporate sailors into an imagined community of the sea.

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Instilling the Language of the Sea “You are required to give evidence in the language which the law can recognize and receive as intelligible.” “I deliver myself in the language of a sailor,” said the witness, sullenly,—“it’s never no fault o’ mine, if that language is lost to the law.” —Land Sharks and Sea-Gulls by William Nugent Glascock, 1838

While poetic imitations of The Shipwreck continued to appear well into the nineteenth century, Falconer’s original project—educating his readers in the language of the sea—was increasingly taken up in different genres by the turn of the century. In 1797, the same year that the naval mutinies at Spithead and Nore threatened Britain with what Herman Melville called “a demonstration more menacing to England than the contemporary manifestos and conquering armies of the French Directory,”98 Vernor and Hood published a children’s board game called The Bulwark of Britannia (see Figure 5), which paradoxically promised to help instill the patriotic love of the sea “congenital to the hearts of Britons”99 into the hearts of the youths who played it.100 The board consisted of sixty-three panels illustrating a variety of nautical terms, including “a shallop,” “a lighthouse,” “taking an observation,” and, lastly, the expected “safe arrival in port.” Unsurprisingly, “mutiny”—the specter of 1797—did not make it into the game; instead, the scene of “shipwreck” comes to bear the sole burden of representing maritime disaster. Despite the directions’ promise that The Bulwark of Britannia will allow its players to fight “the battles of our country . . . without danger,” few of the scenes pictured show any kind of military engagement. The exception is the rousing depiction of “the glorious victory obtained by Admiral Duncan over the Dutch fleet, on the 11th of October, 1797,”101 which dominates the center of the board. Its positioning after the “safe arrival in port” square suggests a connection between the players’ ability to navigate the hazards of a routine sea voyage and naval victory. But this martial scene is also the only nonparticipatory illustration on the board: Admiral Duncan must stand alone as a British war hero and as a force for stability in the fleet. The young players are not asked to imagine themselves in battle but instead are asked to fulfill their patriotic duties by amassing the vocabulary needed to communicate effectively regarding Britain’s maritime empire. This latter goal is emphasized in the game’s directions, which claims that “whether our youth may be intended

Figure 5. The Bulwark of Britannia game board (London, 1797). The numbers at the top of each square are indexed to a list of nautical terms for players to learn. Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

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for the more domestic situations of life, or to range the ocean in a commercial or military capacity, an acquaintance with the terms used, and the different situations of ships at sea, must be of equal utility.”102 The key to instilling the nautical patriotism “congenital to the hearts of Britons” then lies in the routine understanding and use of a vocabulary of the sea. In claiming to educate its young players in the patriotic language of the sea, The Bulwark of Britannia is appealing to a late eighteenth-century association of nautical language with patriotic investment in the Royal Navy and, by extension, in the empire. If in the 1762 Shipwreck, Falconer had fretted over the reception of his nautical jargon, by the early nineteenth century public expressions of the “utility of understanding the professional language of a class of men so connected to the interests of the public”103 had become commonplace. However, as Dening has observed, the increased prominence of the language of the sea in British public culture was not necessarily a sign of closeness between sailors and their land-based countrymen; indeed, depictions of nautical language could be used to render British sailors “incongruous and laughable on land,” an exploitable labor force “controlled by a joke.”104 British naval officers noticed and, in many cases, resisted “stage” sailorisms. In his Naval Sketchbook of 1826, William Nugent Glascock refers contemptuously to the “species of nautical jargon and murder of common sense . . . palmed on the public as the genuine effusions of our tars.” The “confusion of ideas, absurdity, and ignorance” contained in newspaper anecdotes and stage portrayals of sailors is, he reasons, symptomatic of the spatial distancing of sailors from the metropole: As the mariners’ “sphere of action and services” are “remote” from their land-dwelling countrymen, “the mass of even reading, intelligent Englishmen is unacquainted with, or uninterested in the welfare or concerns of that force, on which our existence as a nation solely depends.”105 “In the absence of authentic information,” Glascock argues, “fiction naturally steps in to aid the imagination,” resulting in “absurdities” that “would be amusing, were it not for the false, and often unfavourable impressions they create of the service.”106 Such impressions have political consequences, and Glascock is determined that “authentic” British seamen should have input into the “tactics, naval improvements, punishments, and discipline”107 foisted on the fleet. Crucially, this input into national literary culture takes literary form: It is by writing and publishing their own “fiction” of the sea that British seamen like Glascock can shape a national culture from which they are often physically removed. In positioning his collection of stories and essays alongside “modern

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works from the pens of naval men,” Glascock declares his participation in a movement by contemporary “professional writers”108 (that is to say, writers who are also members of the naval profession), aiming at using cultural productions to insert the voices of officers and sailors into debates over the reform of the Royal Navy. As the Metropolitan Magazine—itself an organ of this movement—explained in 1836, “Classes of men, like nations, must have their peculiar literature.”109 British sailors working in the dangerous space of the ocean formed just such a class; like Britain itself, they required their own literature to elevate their characters, to interrogate their society, and—perhaps most importantly—to represent them to the world. In the absence of such literature, the representation of British sailors was controlled entirely by landsmen, and consequently, the sailor would be “regarded by his brethren of the sod as little better than a courageous brute at sea, and a blustering fool on shore.” As the Metropolitan indicates in its praise of the nautical language of Ben Brace—“His idiom is critically classical, not a flaw to be found in his main deck dialect”110—the language of the sea functioned in such works as a proof of one’s membership in an imagined maritime community bound together by a shared language and literature. The Metropolitan, which had been edited from 1832 to 1835 by Frederick Marryat, the foremost naval author, sycophantically attributes the allimportant moment in the development of the literature of the sea to Marryat’s publication of The King’s Own, claiming that “All was vagueness and uncertainty, till Captain ——— flashed forth upon the Orlop deck, the light of literature, and the mutiny at the Nore became a classical event.”111 There is no doubt that Marryat is the author generally credited with “launching sea fiction in the United Kingdom”112 and that the success he found in this genre made him “one of the consistently best-paid novelists of the nineteenth century.”113 Nevertheless, the Metropolitan’s pronouncement sidelines some significant precursors to Marryat’s naval novels: Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), for example, had propelled its picaresque hero to sea for interludes informed by Smollett’s eighteen-month service as a ship-surgeon. The Metropolitan also ignores a far more recent candidate for the “founding” book of the sea-novel genre: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot (1823), an influential novel that, according to its author, had capitalized on the literary fusion of nationbuilding ideology and seascapes promised by Walter Scott’s “not very nautical”114 novel, The Pirate (1822). The Pilot’s pro-American, anti-British plot was probably reason enough to strike it from the official canon of British naval officers; Roderick Random, on the other hand, was appropriately British in

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sentiment and had famously introduced Tom Bowling—an iconic representation of the honest, loyal Jack Tar whose dialect is hopelessly infused with nautical metaphor—to the cultural imagination. But nineteenth-century maritime writers did not recognize Smollett as one of their own: His ocean was, for the most part, a chronotope of meeting and circulation virtually indistinguishable from his picaresque road; his satires of naval life lacked political bite—“he sought neither to elevate nor improve,” notes the Metropolitan dismissively— and, more importantly, his stage-tar-isms were characterized as “intolerable” concoctions that diminished rather than encouraged respect for sailors.115 Smollett’s literary project, in short, was differentiated from that of Marryat and his circle. In hailing Marryat as the founder of a new form of sea fiction, the Metropolitan thus usefully signals the political overtones of Marryat’s literary endeavors, a context that has been all too often overlooked in scholarly analyses of Marryat’s novels. In writing about Marryat’s fiction, the Metropolitan makes the following assumptions: First, literature plays an essential role in pulling together an imagined community of maritime men; second, literature mediates between those at sea and those on land; and third, this mediation is necessary if Britain wants to prevent discontented sailors from mutinying or, as another Metropolitan article put it in 1833, from pursuing “the lawful resistance to . . . injustice, which in a few years will inevitably take place.”116 Marryat’s early naval novels, in short, speak the language of panopticonal naval reform in their belief that a properly administered Royal Navy requires that the dark interiors of Britain’s maritime empire be examined, accurately charted, and exposed to the public gaze.

The Naval Officer and His Discontents In Rule of Darkness, Patrick Brantlinger asserts that Marryat’s novels “set the pattern for imperialist adventure fiction” in their portrayal of young midshipmen learning to submerge their “individual identity” in the will of empire.117 He cites Frank Mildmay, Marryat’s first novel, as a typical example of Marryat’s sea fiction, and he argues that such narratives implicitly encourage their young readers to follow Marryat’s protagonists in embracing “a spirit of ‘altruistic suicide’—of an ultimate self-sacrifice ending in silence.”118 In a similar vein, Tim Fulford has argued that Marryat’s novels seek to “promote the chivalry of the ocean” in “fictionalized and idealized portraits of its officers.”119 Like

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Brantlinger, Fulford cites Frank Mildmay as an exemplar of Marryat’s brand of sea fiction, a novel that “contemporary reviewers valued” because of the plausibility of its depiction of heroic characters of “whose deeds the country may well be proud.”120 These arguments, however, do not quite square with contemporary reviews of Frank Mildmay, then called The Naval Officer, which was published by Henry Colburn in 1829. Public notices of the novel were, on the whole, negative. Periodicals that Colburn had an interest in, such as the Athenaeum and Literary Chronicle and the Literary Gazette, declared the novel “contemptible,” described its hero as “the most consummately heartless scoundrel that ever stopped short of positive crime,”121 and condemned the work as one that would “depreciate the profession to which [Marryat] has the honour to belong” and “degrade the naval character in the esteem of the country.”122 If these criticisms represented calculated attempts to play up the novel’s controversial elements—a possibility, given Colburn’s reputation for puffery—they were nevertheless echoed by rival periodicals.123 The Monthly Review, for example, concurred regarding the novel’s “offensive”124 character but, in one of the very few positive reviews of the novel, praised its scathing indictment of naval life: The author throws open, without reserve, the interior of a ship—a scene of iniquity and profligacy, the coarsest in the universe. . . . If after reading such disclosures, any pa. and ma . . . can plunge their darlings into such a smoking hot bed of villainous vice, it will require some stretch of charity to assign a creditable motive; and sweeping indeed must be the patriotism of those who can thus sacrifice, not themselves, but their offspring, to what they call the service of their country. Far from being praised for its elevating portraits of heroic officers, in other words, The Naval Officer was described by contemporary reviewers as a corrective to “chivalric or romantic fictions.”125 Moreover, as the Monthly Review makes clear, it was also received as a savage critique of the Royal Navy. Indeed, in defending the novel, the Monthly Review goes so far as to embrace The Naval Officer as a modern example of the Jacobin novel of social reform, and it describes Marryat’s political project in phrases that would become familiar standbys in descriptions of 1830s naval novels. The Naval Officer, the Monthly Review declares, is a work aimed at the literary “improvement of society,” a goal indicated by its determination to “familiarise” the public

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“with strange phrases, and add to our vocabulary, and vivify facts by mixing them up with living beings.”126 Given that the “life of a sailor afloat . . . is more remote than any thing that can be imagined from ordinary life,”127 such novels are needed to educate the British public out of its patriotic blindness to the realities of military service. Invoking the language of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), the reviewer hails this latest fictional attempt to “exhibit things as they are,” observing that it is only through the aid of such warts-andall depictions of the Royal Navy that Britons can “judge of any thing correctly, or reform it usefully.”128 The Monthly Review’s description of Marryat’s novel thus alerts us to not only the reformist tendencies of The Naval Officer but also the political allegiances of the naval novels that followed in its wake and that, like The Naval Officer, authenticated their observations through the careful deployment of sea language. Marryat does indeed, as the Monthly Review observes, throw open “the interior of a ship.” The protagonist describes, often in very critical terms, spaces normally shielded from the public’s gaze: His berth, for example, is a “small hole . . . ten feet long by six, and about five feet four inches high; a small aperture, about nine inches square, admitted a very scanty portion of that which we most needed, namely, fresh air and daylight.”129 But maritime structures are hardly the only interiors exposed; indeed, part of what marked this novel as controversial was not only its exposure of the thoughts and culture of naval officers but also its relentless dissection of the interiorities of their minds and bodies. What Brantlinger calls the novel’s “pornography . . . of violence,”130 in other words, should be read as a critique, not a celebration, of the abuses of empire. Essential to understanding this critique is the fact that the protagonist, Frank Mildmay, is not supposed to be an admirable character; he is the brutalized product of an imperial system that, rather than civilizing the world, turns its weakest members into “savages” whose survival depends on their cunning and ruthlessness. Marryat’s depiction of Frank’s descent into naval “savagery” begins early in the novel, when Frank first dons the uniform of a midshipman. Instead of symbolizing Frank’s absorption into a larger national body, the act of donning a navy uniform marks Frank as an exploitable Other. Walking proudly to the Plymouth dock, Frank observes that the “natives did not appear to admire me. . . . It never occurred to me then, that middies were as plentiful at Plymouth Dock as black boys at Port Royal, though, perhaps, not of so much value to their masters.”131 Marryat’s description is disorienting: Frank’s emphasis on the word “natives” and his prompt reference to Port Royal

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disguise the fact that Frank is still in England and that the “natives” in question are his fellow Britons. Marryat’s equation of midshipmen with Jamaican slaves—an analogy that would have been familiar to his readers given the frequent comparison of British sailors to slaves in abolition debates—emphasizes Frank’s alienation and disempowerment on joining the naval service. This equation of nautical service with slavery is reinforced shortly afterward, when Frank is assigned to a midshipman’s berth and quickly learns that, in the Royal Navy, one must act the part of either “tyrant or a slave.” Finding himself marked as a “slave,” Frank decides to “resist the tyranny of the oldsters” with cunning and violence. After being targeted for abuse by one of the older midshipmen, Frank decides to take action, and, like “the North American savage,”132 he tries to murder his enemy while he sleeps. Frank succeeds in severely injuring his opponent but not killing him; the lesson that he imbibes from this incident, that actions that might be considered dishonorable and “savage” onshore are his best chance at surviving at sea, is later reinforced by the navy itself. For, as Frank quickly learns in his time aboard the man-of-war, “the Commandments of God were in a manner abrogated by the Articles of War—for the first might be broken with impunity, and even with applause, while the most severe punishment awaited any infraction of the latter.”133 On a warship, military power rather than conventional morality holds sway, and actions that might offend the latter are regarded with indifference by a military hierarchy concerned only with executing orders and upholding the established hierarchy of power. Insofar as Frank retains a sense of sympathy, it is directed not toward his fellow shipmates but toward Britain’s enemies. In describing his ship’s depredations against “the unoffending and industrious, the usual victims of war,” Frank records the “legal murder and robbery” of the British Navy, observing that “our prize-money came to our pockets with the tears, if not the curses, of the widow and the orphan.”134 Nor are the victims of this violence limited to the working classes. In one of the book’s most memorable scenes, Frank’s captain orders a test of the range of the ship’s main-deck guns on a “man . . . seen walking on the white sandy beach.”135 The shot succeeds in cutting down the passerby, a fact that does not particularly disturb Frank’s fellow officers. It is only chance that later brings Frank to the beach where their victim lies, cut in half by the shot. According to Frank, what “made the circumstance more particularly interesting was, that he was evidently a man of consequence. He was well dressed, had on black breeches and silk stockings; he was reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and still grasped the book, which I took out of his hand.”136

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This scene has disturbing implications for Marryat’s own readers, who, while they might not identify with the poor fishermen robbed by Frank’s crew, might feel that they have more in common with a “man of consequence” who, like them, is in the act of reading when his encounter with the Royal Navy sends him to an early and anonymous grave. The random killing of a gentleman reader is an example of what Brantlinger has called the novel’s “pornography . . . of violence,”137 one of many moments in which bodies are torn and shredded before the callous gaze of the protagonist. Trained by the Royal Navy to detach himself from both rational fear and conventional morality, Frank learns to imagine himself as a scientific observer in a battle rather than as a vulnerable participant. “I loved the deep investigation of hidden things,” Frank explains, in a passage that sounds more reminiscent of Frankenstein than the gung-ho heroism of other naval novels, “and this day’s action gave me very clear insight into the anatomy of the human frame, which I had seen cut in two by shot, lacerated by splinters, carved out with knives, and separated with saws.”138 Even as the interiors of his shipmates’ bodies are exposed to his gaze, so are the interior workings of Frank’s mind exposed to the reader: We get to see the irrationality of his false sense of power and the sociopathy of his (navy-cultivated) pleasure in battle. He is “secretly pleased” to see sailors who had previously mocked him killed; later he is “secretly pleased at seeing the effect of raking shot” on his shipmates because he “liked to judge of causes and effects.”139 Frank’s language puts him in a position of power he does not actually occupy: He likes to “judge” the effects of shots that might, in the next second, be the death of him, and his repeated references to “secret” responses to battle emphasize the novel’s exposure of his hidden mental experience. Frank’s callous detachment from the suffering of his shipmates is, the novel emphasizes, not unique. When the battle is over, the officers muster the hands and discover that the “number of killed amounted to nine, and wounded to thirteen.” Frank is still green enough to be surprised by the “general smile of congratulation at the number fallen, rather than of their regret for their loss. The vanity of the officers seemed tickled at the disproportionate slaughter in a frigate of our size, as compared to what they had heard the ships of the line had suffered.”140 Here, Marryat drives home the point that institutional forces within the navy prevent the formation of the kind of sympathetic homosocial community that outsiders might expect to find onboard a man-of-war. In his unpublished papers, Marryat suggested that the reading public played a part in encouraging wanton slaughter at sea. “John Bull is but

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satisfied with a dispatch, even if it proclaims an important victory, if it not be attended with a slaughter commensurate with his ideas of what it ought to have been,” he observes, continuing, “I have often witnessed, during the time I have been in the service, the effects of this well-known feeling on the part of the people at home; and I have heard officers rejoice that there had been considerable slaughter, as they felt that their good names depended upon a holocaust having been offered up to this blood-thirsty national propensity.”141 Marryat considered this behavior “very bad, and very injurious to the service.” If we take Marryat at his word, then The Naval Officer emerges as a critique not only of the Royal Navy but also of a “patriotic” public more concerned with body counts than the lives of seamen. The way the public reads and watches the navy reinforces bad naval practices; to reform the navy, then, Marryat first needs to reeducate the British public. Part of what Marryat is assaulting here is what Gillian Russell has described as the British public’s experience of “war as theatre:”142 a performance that, Marryat’s angry words on body counts suggest, could be received as entertainment rather than as a matter of life and death. As Russell notes, the British perception of war during the long Romantic era was mediated not only by theatrical military performances such as parades, but also by theater itself, which depicted naval men and their experience of battle in spectacles such as The Glorious First of June (1794), sentimental comedies such as “Black-Eyed Susan” (1829), and theater-born nautical ballads by authors such as Charles Dibdin. The performances of valor, sentiment, and homosocial community valorized in the theater are brutally undermined in the aforementioned passages by Frank’s “frank” exposé of the inner lives of naval officers. Nor does Marryat suggest that interiority belongs only to officers. In other episodes in The Naval Officer, Frank makes it clear that ordinary British seamen are also reflecting on the situations that surround them and are, in many cases, harboring smoldering resentments beneath calm facades.143 Marryat’s depiction of British seamen thus contradicts the image of the naïve “Jolly Jack Tar,” who, as Russell observes, was supposed to be an unthinking, blindly patriotic being. As idealized in a preface to a typical ballad collection, the British sailor’s thoughts were not supposed to reach “much above the topmasthead . . . this brave fellow views all things as sheep do the stars . . . without any after-thought, or reflection.”144 This is intended as praise: In the wake of the mutinies of 1797, a thinking sailor was a dangerous sailor. In contrast, Marryat’s descriptions of the private thoughts and workings of Britain’s maritime culture reopen sources of anxiety that stage images of honorable

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officers and Jolly Jack Tars were meant to contain. Rather than playing down or cordoning off what Russell calls “the strangeness of the sailor . . . [his] deracination . . . and in many cases, [his troubling] loyalty to ship and mates that superseded previous ties to family and community,”145 Marryat instead highlights the potentially dangerous alienation of the seaman from his homeland, and he suggests it is a problem that Britain needs to solve. Indeed, The Naval Officer continues to signal its reformist tendencies by explicitly depicting the domestic alienation created by the communications gap between land and sea. As the novel progresses, Frank finds himself increasingly alienated from his landbound family, who are unable to understand that Frank’s physical remoteness from land means that he experiences events differently than they do. This becomes particularly clear when Frank learns that his mother has died, and he goes to his family’s home, expecting to join them in mourning. But “though the death of my mother was an event new to me, it had happened six months before I had heard of it.”146 Desynchronized from the emotions of his close relatives, Frank’s grief is regarded by them with suspicion. The distance between Frank’s experience and that of his family ultimately contributes to the continued corruption of his character, for Frank’s father, who ought to be able to regulate and educate his son, “knew nothing of the navy; and when I had got him out of his depth . . . I soused him and his company head over heels in the horse-pond of their own ignorance. Such is the power of local knowledge and cunning over abstruse science and experience.”147 As a result, Frank is “kept in much better order on board my ship than I was in my father’s house,”148 where the “abstruse science and experience” of his father cannot control him. There is a political resonance to Frank’s observation, for, as noted by the more reform-minded reviewers of Marryat’s novel, the navy itself could be difficult to manage or reform from shore if its administrators governed without the advantage of “local knowledge.” Insofar as a sense of positive marine community appears in the novel, it is summoned into being through acts of communication. This is illustrated most powerfully in Frank’s account of the Battle of Trafalgar. Initially the chaos of war leads Frank to believe that all order has been lost. Every ship fights for itself, without direction from or communication with its allies. But then the signal flags are deployed. Recalling the battle later in life, Frank, who has elsewhere expressed skepticism concerning the neatly ordered accounts of sea battles in newspapers and histories, briefly brings his experience into alignment with the idealized navy of British national myth:

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When the immortal signal was communicated, I shall never, no, never, forget the electric effect it produced through the fleet. I can compare it to nothing so justly as a match laid to a long train of gunpowder; and as Englishmen are the same, the same feeling, the same enthusiasm, was displayed in every ship; tears ran down the cheeks of many a noble fellow when the affecting sentence was made known.149 Frank’s assertion of English “sameness” flies in the face of his depiction of the fleet elsewhere in the novel, but temporarily at least Frank and his compatriots feel that they are a genuine part of the national community that they are about to risk their lives for. Subsequent passages reveal that Frank attributes this effect not to Nelson (who warrants only two sentences in Frank’s account of the Battle of Trafalgar) but to the mechanism by which his message is communicated: “It was wonderful to see how instantaneously the same flags were displayed at our mast heads as had been hoisted by the admiral; and the more wonderful this appeared to me, since . . . the signal officers of a repeater had to make out the number of the flag during its passage aloft in disguise.”150 Frank’s lengthy, admiring description of the signaling process emphasizes the triumph of science, skill and judgment that the signaling system displays, and it stands in stark contrast to his description of the chaos of battle, where strategy appears obsolete and confusion reigns. Marryat, who had based many of the episodes in The Naval Officer on his own experiences at sea, was a believer in technologies of communication. In 1817, he had developed the first commercial signal code for use by public vessels, a contribution that led to his election as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1819. Marryat’s code, which allowed vessels to form sentences and communicate with each other in a “Universal Code of Signals,” was rapidly adopted within Britain and internationally, and it is the ancestor of the nautical signal codes in use today. Marryat’s development of a “sea language” (as some nineteenth-century newspapers dubbed nautical signal codes) allegedly also led to him being considered for a knighthood, which was then denied because of Marryat’s campaign against the impressment of seamen. The Naval Officer’s description of signal codes argues for the essential role of technologies of communication in maintaining a sailor’s sense of national integration at sea. We can read the importance that Marryat attaches to the “sea language” of signal codes in this passage as extending also to the literary works that Marryat and his fellow naval writers used to negotiate the gap between the imagined

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community of the land and the community of the waves. For, as Marryat’s Metropolitan would later testify, the printed word could work as well as a signal flag in uniting sailors at sea. Marryat was, he admitted in later years, surprised by the vehemence of critics’ reception of The Naval Officer. “The ‘confounded licking’ we received for our first attempt in the ‘critical notices’ is probably well known to the reader,” he wrote in 1834. “We felt that our punishment was too severe; it produced indignation rather than contrition, and we determined to write again in spite of all the critics in the universe.”151 It is difficult to take seriously Marryat’s professed desire to rewrite his first novel so that “the ‘Naval Officer,’ when ‘corrected,’ will be so improved that he may be permitted to stand on the same shelf with ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ or ‘Sense and Sensibility’ ”:152 Marryat’s use of quotation marks around the word “corrected” implies that he thought the novel’s portrait of the Royal Navy was correct the first time around, and his allusion to the works of Jane Austen seems more a satire of critics’ calls for him to domesticate his wild protagonist than an expression of a genuine desire to Austenize his hero. Nevertheless, in The King’s Own (1830), Marryat eliminated many of the elements that had caused The Naval Officer’s reviewers such concern: His portrait of the Royal Navy was wholesome, his hero’s morality indisputable, and his naval officers were, on the whole, upstanding British subjects with no reservations regarding their duties. Having, in The Naval Officer, committed the sin of opening up interior spaces that should have been kept “private”—the naval ship, the anatomy of wounded soldiers, and the mental recesses of an outwardly honorable naval officer—Marryat responds in his next novel with an ironic disavowal of the interiority of men of honor. “In the ‘Naval Officer’ we had sowed all our wild oats. . . . We had no further personality to indulge in,”153 Marryat wrote of The King’s Own, a novel that has far less personality than its predecessor either in terms of its disparagement of the naval service or its hero. Indeed, at the novel’s conclusion the narrator wearily kills off his “irreclaimably insipid”154 hero, explaining that it is impossible to create a protagonist who conforms to what critics expect of both novels and the Royal Navy without the author being condemned for mutinous activity: I find . . . that my hero . . . is not sufficiently the hero of my tale. As soon as he is shipped on board of a man-of-war he becomes as insignificant as a midshipman must unavoidably be. . . . I see the error—yet I cannot correct it without overthrowing all the “rules

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and regulations,” which I cannot persuade myself to do, even in a work of fiction. Trammeled as I am by “the service,” I can only plead guilty to what it is impossible to amend.155 In Rule of Darkness, Patrick Brantlinger observes that Marryat’s novels “diminish the importance of individual identity,”156 but in The King’s Own this diminishment of individuality is satirical, an ironic acknowledgment of the perils of displaying too much “personality” or revealing too much of one’s interior space in either the naval or public literary sphere. This is not to say that The King’s Own is entirely without any reformist tendencies. The novel opens, famously, with a sympathetic depiction of the 1797 Nore mutiny against the “infirmity and selfishness” of the government. The hero’s father, roused by “virtuous indignation” at his treatment by a “superficial, presuming, pompous, yet cowardly creature” of a captain,157 is hanged for his rebellion. The orphaned hero’s subsequent adventures acquaint him with a “tyrannical” captain whose volatile, cruel temper the novel attributes to “an eccentricity of character—not natural, but created by the service.”158 And while Marryat does now include depictions of heroic officers who could serve as patriotic role models, they appear spouting recommendations for specific reforms, as in the case of the suspiciously named “Captain M——” who wishes “for the benefit of the service, that the Admiralty would give a standing order” for officers “never to punish, until twenty-four hours after the offense has been committed”159—a change that was actually implemented by the Admiralty following the publication of The King’s Own. Nor do all the novel’s reformist tendencies need to be teased out by readers, for the narrator himself makes public appeals to his “fellow countrymen . . . on behalf of a service at once your protection and your pride,”160 to protect sailors’ rights and opportunities against the encroachment of government cost cutters. While The King’s Own takes a sizable step away from the controversial, negative portraits of naval service in The Naval Officer, in other words, it represents not an abandonment but a reframing of Marryat’s reformist politics. In making its noble officers mouthpieces for specific reforms, and in making explicit its appeal for political action on the part of its readers, The King’s Own displays what would become Marryat’s standard mode of representing the concerns of British seamen to their countrymen.

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Marryat’s Metropolitan and Its Aftermath The success of Marryat’s novels invigorated the market for “naval” or “nautical novels” and led to a surge of fictional productions that Marryat, acting as an editor of the Metropolitan Magazine from 1832 to 1835, encouraged and supported.161 In an 1831 article titled “Naval Novels,” William Nugent Glascock took care to define the parameters of what the Metropolitan considered as a novel of that class. A naval novel is, he explained, a novel characterized by its ability to “exhibit to the landsmen the nature of the goings-on at sea.”162 Smollett’s novels are therefore insufficiently naval, for “Smollett’s sea-scenes are only incidental to his stories,” and his novels, however brilliantly written, founder upon “his exaggeration of naval character and incident, and upon the forced and inconsistent phraseology put in the mouths of his seamen.”163 Once again, Glascock argued that a novel’s ability to convey the real perspective of nautical men was inseparable from the author’s ability to accurately reproduce the language of the sea. Nautical language, in Glascock’s view, marked the identity of an author as being that of a genuine seaman or a “landsman or a naval civilian, who had industriously picked up the most common-place portions of sea-slang and had pressed them into the service.”164 Glascock’s language suggests a slippage between the appropriation of the “vernacular of the forecastle”165 and the impressment of seamen; indifference to one is inseparable from contempt for the other. The Metropolitan made its feelings on the latter topic clear. “Poor Jack has no ‘vested interest,’ even in his own body,” ran one 1833 editorial on impressment: “The vigor of his nerves and muscles are not his—he has no right of voluntary locomotion—he is—a pressed man. . . . We have heard of Magna Charta, and even dreamed of such a thing as the habeas corpus . . . denied to the most honest . . . class of his Majesty’s subjects—the defenders of a throne that they never can overturn.”166 The revolutionary threat of mutinies like the one at Nore was exaggerated, the editorial implies, because the very remoteness from land that makes sailors’ bodies so easy to exploit also makes it impossible for sailors to threaten the land-based sovereign power that decides their fate. That said, although the sailors are not in a position to “overturn” the throne they defend, they are in a position to mutiny; the editorial suggests that they would be justified in doing so: “It surely would not be asking too much of the representatives of the nation, to form a committee of inquiry, to ascertain where it would be possible

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to make such arrangements as to preclude the necessity of injustice, and we will further boldly add, the lawful resistance to that injustice, which in a few years will inevitably take place.”167 When not justifying grand mutiny, Marryat’s Metropolitan voiced its support for the less drastic reform measures taking place in the navy. It applauded the removal of the naval board and commended the improved professionalism of administrators, who, having a thorough grounding in mathematics, would be better able to monitor spaces critical to the Royal Navy.168 Administrators should not only monitor shipbuilding and deployments, Metropolitan writers argued, but also prioritize oceanic cartography. As one Metropolitan reviewer declared in 1835, with improved education and the (always, in the eyes of Metropolitan writers, tenuous) support of the government, Britain was close to realizing its goal of having “almost every part of the globe . . . explored or surveyed.”169 By continuing to map the oceans, the reviewer argues, Britain will strengthen its claim to rule the waves and also reduce the erosion of its maritime workforce by ensuring that British seamen and officers do not seek employment under foreign flags.170 Among reform-minded Metropolitan writers, supporting surveying meant supporting seamen; their firm belief in the importance of charting the ocean overlapped with their belief in the importance of surveying, and reforming, the Royal Navy. A telling review of nautical literature in an 1829 edition of The United Service Journal and Naval and Military Magazine brings together the threads of naval jargon, literature, reform, and cartography in a manner that illustrates both the spatial resonances of naval reform and the ways in which Falconer’s The Shipwreck was being recalled as an essential model for British maritime literature. Presented as a debate between sailors over the merits of Marryat’s notorious The Naval Officer, the speakers in the review express their hope for “a second Falconer” capable of steering reforms in a more positive direction than Marryat’s “naval monster.”171 Reflecting on the value of Falconer’s translation of the “tarrish tongue” into a literary language appreciated by the nation, Marryat’s harshest critic makes an analogy between the task that confronts seamen in describing the “terra incognita” of their maritime culture to landbased Britons, and that which confronts polar explorers like Ross, who aim to demonstrate Britain’s power over the waves by solving “the North-western problem” of the mythic Passage. While supporting, in theory, the determination to “leave no terra incognita on mother Earth,” the sailor-reviewer condemns Marryat’s exposure of the hidden naval spaces as unnecessary, outré, and smacking of “over-reform.”172 In criticizing Marryat’s project, this review

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highlights not only the ways in which, as an 1836 Metropolitan Magazine would observe, the “nautico-lyrical poet had prepared the way”173 for the rise of the jargon-heavy naval novel, but also the ways in which Marryat’s literary “mapping” of naval culture could be recognized as an expression—albeit an unauthorized one—of the patriotic desire to extend British sovereignty over the globe. By the 1840s, support for British seamen—either in respect to nautical novels or in terms of their political causes—was on the wane. Reviewers complained when yet another naval novel crossed their desk, inflicting them with yet another generic plot rendered in a “sailor’s appropriate dialect.”174 Following the controversial debut of Marryat’s The Naval Officer, most nautical novelists had taken to heart the lesson that it would not do to be too critical of the navy. By the 1840s this generic impetus had crystallized in novels in which, as one writer noted, “could you place implicit faith, you would imagine that a bad character does not appear on ship-board.”175 Even Marryat’s former literary flagship, the Metropolitan, displayed less patience with nautical yarns than it had in years past, observing of James Fenimore Cooper’s Ned Myers (1843) that even though the source material was, no doubt, “adorned with nautical phrases, [and] embellished with technical allusions. . . . [t]hese charms are . . . wanting to the reader. The work is dull and dry, and being such, we dismiss it without comment.”176 The Metropolitan drifted from its previous naval orientation, and in the final years of its print run, it all but abandoned the tales of professional seamanship that had used to fill its pages. Instead, it printed poems such as “The Yachtsman” (1849), in which the gentleman narrator effuses about pleasureboating and, contradicting the nautical sentiments of a previous era, proclaims that “the rising wave / No terrors has for me.”177 Similarly, political articles in the Metropolitan now struck a markedly different tone than they had in Marryat’s day: In “Military Law Makers” (1849), the anonymous author rails against the influence of military men on the government, arguing that the budget for the military is too high for peacetime and that naval and army men in general corrupt the government with their autocratic attitudes, for in “the army they have learnt to look at men like machines. Their commands are implicitly obeyed. . . . With them . . . the people are a mob, whose duty is to work and pay taxes.”178 This was a far cry from the Metropolitan’s promise in 1832 to publish “the communications of intelligent officers on any points in which the welfare of the navy may be concerned,” arguing that “it is from naval officers only that the Government and the country can obtain this

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important information; and that the former may not plead ignorance when called upon, it is through the public press alone that such information should be conveyed.”179 Similarly, the patriotic desire to acquire a mariner’s vocabulary was as likely to be an object of satire in the 1840s as it was to be portrayed as a laudable goal. Thus, Dudley Costello’s “The Travels and Opinions of Mr. Jolly Green” (1845) pokes gentle fun at the enthusiastic patriot who, following the precepts of the early nineteenth century, shores up on his arsenal of Britishness by studying the language of the sea prior to his arrival in France: In a short time, I became a proficient in those nautical terms which so truly characterize the British tar in every region, and under all circumstances of adversity or peril. . . . “How delightful,” as my new friend confidentially remarked, “how delightful it was to observe the daring fellows, when reefing the jib-boom, haul aft the braces, and bend the weather topping-lift, while heavy seas broke over the lee counter, and strained the starboard binnacle!” It is this that swells the bosom when we think of the victories of the Nile and Trafalgar, it is this that makes every Englishman rejoice at being the countrymen of Nelson!180 At the conclusion of this scene the reader is left unsure as to what exactly “this” refers to. Is it the string of (misapplied) nautical terms Jolly Green’s companion unleashes on his eager student? Or the scene of nautical professionalism that Green’s imagination conjures up for him in response to his companion’s description? Green himself seems unclear about the specific object of his patriotic sentiment; for him, the conflation of nautical language and the victories of the Nile and Trafalger is absolute. Even in the 1840s, however, Green’s contemporaries would still have been able to follow his train of associations, from the phrases that marked “the distance between the salt-water sailor, and the shore-going landsman”181 to the presumed permanence of the character of the British sailor, who, despite his global circulation, is able to stay constant and patriotic in all regions and situations, and whom his countrymen could support, outwardly at least, by attempting to learn the language of the sea.

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Imperial Afterimages: Heart of Darkness and the Right Way of Going to Work In this chapter I have traced the ways in which British seamen’s respect for the power of language—the original “technology” with which sailors preserved themselves from the devouring atopia of the waves—underpinned the development of a body of British maritime writing that posited the power of literature to preserve the British community at sea. In the writing of nineteenth-century naval officers such as Glascock and Marryat, literature emerges as one of the essential tools of empire, a tool that, like the map, can expose previously wild spaces to the control and regulation of a sovereign gaze. But as deployed by the maritime writers described in this chapter, literature is also a tool that, like the oceanic spaces it describes, can agitate against the nation and the empire. No simple propagandists, maritime writers such as Falconer and Marryat criticized imperial projects and institutions from the perspective of an extranational community of maritime labor, a community formed in the blank space of the ocean and united by a shared language and literature of the sea. By and large, these writers succeeded in their immediate political goals, helping to shape a society that both assumed the patriotic value of learning nautical language and implemented reforms that would better the lives of ordinary seamen. But in arguing for the utility of literature in strengthening the sinews of empire, and in suggesting reforms that would better enable Britain to manage maritime space, these authors also smoothed the path of an imperial expansion with which they did not altogether agree. It is this vexed legacy of British maritime writing, I argue by way of closing, that Joseph Conrad is interrogating in his nightmarish Heart of Darkness (1902). In reviewing Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” for an 1897 edition of the Daily Telegraph, W. L. Courtney notes that, as an “unflinching realist,”182 Conrad seems a harsher version of that previous sea novelist, Frederick Marryat. “I believe that some excellent persons have objected to Captain Marryat’s stories of the sea,” Courtney admits, attributing these objections to Marryat’s use of “explicit language.”183 Ultimately, however, Courtney portrays Marryat as a safe, staid writer who “had not in his time burst upon an astonished world.” Unaware of the controversy surrounding Marryat’s The Naval Officer, Courtney portrays Conrad as a refreshing change from the naval novels of the past, an unflinching realist whose unique style is perhaps most

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marked by his depiction of sailors’ language: His seamen “are heard talking as undoubtedly they ought to talk, and would have talked, without any squeamishness on the part of the author in deference to our sensitive and refined nerves.”184 Courtney detects a connection between Conrad’s and Marryat’s projects, a connection that he suspects has something to do with the peculiar reputation for controversy attached to Marryat’s tales of adventure, a connection that had something to do with nautical language—but this is a connection that Courtney, eager to establish Conrad as a sui generis maritime author, is also eager to dismiss. Conrad himself was always conscious of the maritime literary tradition in which he wrote. He considered Marryat’s “greatness . . . undeniable,” for “it is in Marryat’s novels . . . that we obtain a glimpse of the everyday life and an insight into the spirit animating the crowd of obscure men who knew how to build for their country such a shining monument of memories.”185 But toward Marryat’s legacy, and the legacy of all his Metropolitan compatriots who had hoped to help Britain manage the sea by reforming its navy and pressuring the Admiralty to reward those who would “survey . . . half the coast of Africa,”186 Conrad expressed a much more ambiguous attitude. The tale Marlow tells in Heart of Darkness casts a cold, hard light on the imperial legacy of the maritime culture promoted by Marryat and his fellow nineteenth-century nautical writers. It is addressed to their descendants, a community of sailors linked by the “bond of the sea,” who consider the ocean “their country,” and who, as the narrator’s opening reflection on nautical history suggests, are proud of the “ages of good service done” by seamen spreading “the germs of empires”187 to distant shores. How those seeds of empire have germinated once on land is of little interest to maritime men, who, the narrator admits, pride themselves on their “disdainful ignorance”188 of the land beyond ports and sea-strands. Marlow’s story of a seaman’s view of the interior of Africa thus discomforts his maritime audience, as it inverts the timehonored sailors’ complaint about landsmen’s ignorance of the sea, and challenges his fellow seamen to confront the consequences of their deployment of maritime craft in the service of “over-sea empire.”189 The connection between Marlow’s odyssey and the literature of Britain’s drive to manage the oceans is epitomized by the abandoned book that Marlow discovers in a cabin, its cover torn off but “lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread.” The book, a relic of the early nineteenth-century drive for nautical professionalism, is titled “An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship”; its author is distinguished less by his name, which Marlow can barely

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recall, than by his position as “Master in his Majesty’s Navy.”190 Marlow, himself slowly disintegrating in the malarial madness of his new environment, “handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve in my hands. . . . At the first glance you could see there was a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light.”191 Worn out by his journey into the darkness of Western imperialism, Marlow is temporarily comforted by his rediscovery of the literature of a cohesive community united in “honest concern” for the right way of going about ruling a maritime empire. “I assure you,” Marlow comments, “to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.”192 But scrawled across the book’s pages is a maze of writing that Marlow can only interpret as a “cipher,”193 commenting on and interpreting the book’s passages in a language from which Marlow is excluded. Marlow speaks the language of the sea, but the language that has superseded and interpreted the early nineteenth-century nautical text is the language of Kurtz’s devoted follower, the young Russian whose idealistic quest for adventure has led him to become an uncritical supporter of the horrors of imperialism. In the Russian’s garbled repetition of phrases like “Brother sailor . . . honor”194 and his awe of all that is English, we, like Marlow, can hear the echoes of the phrases that helped bind together the homosocial maritime community consolidated by books like those of Marryat and “Towson or Towser,”195 the Master in his Majesty’s Navy. It is the familiar language of that “old and solid friendship” that lures Marlow into giving his word, as a “brother seaman,”196 to protect Kurtz’s reputation from domestic scrutiny. In agreeing to protect Kurtz under the banner of a community of the sea, Marlow is not just hopelessly linking maritime labor to the depravity of Kurtz’s civilizing project. He is also betraying the principles espoused in nineteenth-century naval writing, first by agreeing to cover up rather than expose dark interiors, and second by condoning the prioritization of European trade above the welfare of shipboard laborers. Hopelessly enmeshed in the scaffolding of European racism, a conflicted Marlow struggles to explain to his fellow seamen why, precisely, he suspects Kurtz was not “worth the life we lost in getting to him”197—the black helmsman killed on the voyage upriver. “Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage,” Marlow frets, trying to articulate the source of his unease. “Well don’t you see, he had done something, he had steered; for

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months I had him at my back. . . . It was a kind of partnership.”198 In the transnational world of shipboard labor, it was the black helmsman, not Kurtz, who was owed the protection of a “brother” sailor. But whereas in Marryat’s Mr. Midshipman Easy the white protagonist and a black seaman are able to communicate in the language of the sea,199 Marlow fails to honor his black crewman’s “claim of a distant kinship” and is unable to connect with the dying man in the “understandable language”200 of maritime community. Marlow’s nightmarish journey upriver thus exposes the ugly failings of European civilizing enterprises and also the European maritime world. Followed into Africa by “the voice of the surf,” which sounds in his ears “like the speech of a brother,”201 Marlow has been lured by a distorted version of the language of the sea into protecting that which should not be protected, and into condoning the very thing authors like Falconer and Marryat had argued against—the casual sacrifice of shipboard workers in the name of imperial enterprise.

Chapter 3

The Regions of the Air

The element of Air, pregnant with wonder, and daily presenting to the eye of even common observation . . . alone remains comparatively unexplored, and AErostation, the only Science which opens the field of discovery to the Philosophic mind, neglected and uncultivated . . . instead of exciting any national feeling. . . . England, the seat of Science and Literature, remained satisfied with gazing on the casual experiments of Foreign AEronauts, without a single Native turning his attention to the subject. —Windham Sadler, Aerostation, 1817

Atmospheres of Anxiety Why, asked the British aeronaut Windham Sadler in 1817, had England, that self-proclaimed “seat of Science and Literature,” not played a more prominent role in the development of hot air ballooning and the exploration of the atmosphere? Human greed, he observed, “has overcome every difficulty in diving into the bowels of the earth, and been rewarded by those hidden treasures, Metals, Fossils, and Minerals, which now constitute so much of the comfort and ornament of society: the same principle has brought the Stormy Ocean into subjection, and has almost it may be said formed a highway on the deep.”1 Like the ocean and the subterranean, the atmosphere was an inhospitable space, one that promised similar advantages to nations that could find a way to extend their reach into its dizzying heights. It might even prove a superior medium of trade to the dangerously unstable, tidal, and reef-strewn sea so important to Britain’s national mythology. Why then, Sadler asked,

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did the “unexplored Regions of Space”2 not attract more interest from his countrymen? With the hindsight of the twenty-first century, it is easy to look back and see both the absurdity and the validity of Sadler’s self-serving questions. Despite Sadler’s claims, hot air ballooning never did become a common “mode of Travelling between distant places,”3 and the transparency of air seems a selfevident rationale for Britons’ lack of curiosity regarding the “unexplored regions” above their heads. But, viewed from the perspective of a century in which aerial transportation has become commonplace, Sadler’s question also appears to be powerfully prescient. Why, when Britons knew all too well the importance of ruling the waves, did they not display more interest in ruling the air? The closest we come to public contemplation of the geopolitical implications of airspace comes in the form of early 1780s satires. However, even the earliest and most explicit of these, a letter published in the Public Advertiser in September 1783, refuses to take airpower seriously. Observing France’s “Hopes of substituting the circumambient Atmosphere instead of the Ocean, as the great Medium of commercial Communication,” the author mockingly envisions a near future in which the “French, as being the first who have explored these trackless Regions, pretend, on the established Rights of Discoveries, to the undisputed Sovereignty of the Atmosphere.” Having extended their sovereignty into the skies, the French proceed to “threaten, cut, sink and destroy the Balloons of every Nation whose Subjects shall presume, without their permission, to navigate the Air.” The development of airpower, the author concludes, has delivered “a mortal Wound to the Naval Dominion of poor Old England,” ushering in a future in which the English must “bid Adieu to our Wealth and Commercial Greatness.”4 Published a couple of weeks after the first reports of balloons reached Britain, this letter shows that eighteenthcentury Britons were fully capable of thinking through the disturbing implications that airspace might have for their island nation, even if they were not willing, publicly, to take them seriously. Absurd though visions of a Frenchdominated atmosphere might seem in September 1783, when many Britons still doubted that air balloons even existed, they seemed increasingly plausible as, over the next two years, the French not only succeeded in sending humans into the atmosphere, but also led a successful aerial crossing of the English Channel. Yet, during this period, Britons’ default position remained one of skepticism toward ballooning, a posture that, while ostensibly objective, was inflected by decidedly unobjective concerns.

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As Paul Keen has observed, much of Britain’s public skepticism about balloons had nationalist origins.5 The Critical Review, for example, defended its silence on the subject of ballooning in 1784 by reminding its readers that “the first accounts of aerial voyages came to us from France.” And given that the French, as everyone knew, were overexcited fashion followers incapable of bestowing “praise without the highest panegyric . . . the philosopher hesitated in silence.”6 While British dismissals of ballooning were infused, as Keen has argued, with nationalist disdain for French fashion, they may have also been informed, I suggest, by pragmatic fears of the implications of aerostation’s success. It is striking, for example, that in rejecting various proposed uses of balloons, the Critical Review focuses almost exclusively on balloons’ proposed military applications, declaring the idea that balloons might be used for “reconnoitering . . . too ridiculous to excite a moment’s attention.”7 (However, France would be successfully using balloons to track army movements by 1794.) What might be hinted at in the Critical Review’s anti-French, antiballoon rhetoric is addressed more explicitly in the private correspondence of Horace Walpole. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann on December 2, 1783, Walpole admits that his attitude toward the French invention is colored by concern over balloons’ potential militarization: “I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and the idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race.”8 Like many of his contemporaries, Walpole did not believe that balloons posed an immediate threat or, as he exclaimed elsewhere, that the possibilities suggested by a “navy in the air” should distract Britain from the importance of maintaining its far more significant “empire of the ocean.”9 But he nevertheless found balloons troubling for not only their potential impact on European geopolitics but also the doubt they cast on his and other Britons’ ability to anticipate the future: If “Balloonism is exploded, we shall be called fools for having imagined it could be brought to use,” he observed in 1785; “if it should be turned to account, we shall be ridiculed for having doubted.”10 In the following chapter, I explore the ramifications of the development of the hot air balloon for British representations of the atmosphere. As the letter in the Public Advertiser indicates, the invention of human flight invited Britons to imagine the atmosphere as a space along the lines of, and perhaps a potential rival to, the contested ocean. We should not, I argue, take what Sadler terms Englishmen’s lack of “national feeling” toward the development of flight as evidence of Britons’ obliviousness to flight’s potential consequences.

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Indeed, as I have already suggested, a thinly disguised set of anxieties lies beneath the surface of many eighteenth-century British responses to the invention of ballooning: anxiety over the implications of a traversable atmosphere, anxiety over Britain’s peripheral relationship to what Paul Keen has called an early “version of the space race,”11 and anxiety over the apparent triumph of foreign spectacle over the cautions of British scientific authority. These anxieties, I argue, birthed an intriguing pattern in literary representations of the atmosphere and of ballooning, in which, far from universally serving as symbols of the extension of sovereign power, aerial voyages instead expose the vulnerability of Britain on the world stage. This argument cuts against the grain of our standard association of balloon flights with visions of extended sovereignty. Srinivas Aravamudan, for example, has observed that fantasies of flight serve also as “fantasies of domination.”12 In a similar vein, Elaine Freedgood has argued that, for the Victorians, “ballooning could function as both a rehearsal for and re-enactment of empire building,” with the intrepid aeronaut serving as a roving embodiment of Foucault’s “eye of power.”13 In pointing out representations of atmospheric exploration that seem to undermine visions of a powerful British sovereignty, I am far from dismissing the symbolic functions of ballooning as described by scholars such as Aravamudan and Freedgood. I do, however, wish to complicate their accounts by exploring the rationale behind this counterintuitive narrative undercurrent. In doing so, I aim to challenge the assumption, articulated by Freedgood, that representations of aerial voyages offered their British readers a “reassuring perspective on the nation” as viewed from the “safe and uncomplicated”14 space of the atmosphere.15 Far from viewing the atmosphere as a safe space, many eighteenth-century Britons expressed anxiety regarding this newly traversable atopia of global connection. While early fears that “England would be invaded by clouds of aerial monsters”16 faded with Napoleon’s dissolution of the French aeronautic corps in 1799, Britons continued to think of the atmosphere as a problematic space that superseded national borders and remained outside of state control, a space that inherently threatened, as Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal blithely observed in 1852, to “denationalise the country.”17 The specter of a threatening atmosphere left its footprints in the aeronautical plays, ballads, and novels often classified as “balloon literature,” and also, I argue, in proto–science fiction stories such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), in which England is annihilated by the circulating air of the planetary atmosphere. The atmosphere proves in such works to be a useful figure of the global,

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and, when paired with the image of the balloon—a fragile “paper” construction that, as Michael R. Lynn has observed, was spread across Europe by the circulation of letters and print—it becomes also a space in which authors can reflect on the utility (or threat) of print culture to the nation. 18

The Invention of Atmosphere The word “atmosphere” was a relatively late arrival to the English language, first appearing in 1638 as a designation for the orb of air exhaled from the body of a planet. But the earth was not the planet in question: John Wilkins coined “Atmo-sphæra” in The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638) to describe the “orbe of grosse vaporous aire”19 he supposed to surround the lunar body, a space that, in a later edition, he predicted would be broached by Englishmen looking to trade with the moon’s inhabitants. It was thus interest in lunar space, and not the earth’s aerial space, that inspired the invention of “atmosphere.” Appearing two decades before Robert Boyle’s air pump would make air visible as an object of investigation, the word “atmosphere” nevertheless serves as a harbinger of a new way of imagining the heavens.20 Aerial space had been described before, of course. Greek mythology envisioned a solid hemisphere of sky arching over the bright and occasionally fiery realms of Aether, the mortal air of Khaos, and the dark mist Erebos that filled the realms of the dead. These aerial divisions persisted in nonmythological works such as Aristotle’s Meteorology, which describes an upper aerial region of air and fire, beneath which lies a “region common to water and air” that Aristotle likens to the “Oceanus” mentioned by “early writers.”21 The Greek Christian tradition reworked the lower realms of air into the sublunary sphere that would cloak the corrupt mortal world of medieval Christianity; it was into this realm, mused some theologians, that Satan fell after being expelled from heaven and where he continued to work his mischief as the “prince of the power of the air.”22 While the atmosphere could be identified with the heavens, transcendence, and divinity, it was thus also imagined as a dubious border region between the human and the divine, a space that, as in the legend of Icarus, might offer an escape from the sphere of mortal sovereignty, only to put one in peril of immortals’ wrath. In this early mythologizing of aerial realms, we can see many of the images that would recur in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts: the air as the realm of spirits; the air as backdrop to portentous meteors and prophetical omens; aerial space that could double as

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“caves of darkness”23 or as the true world-ocean that marked the border of the habitable hemisphere. When Windham Sadler compares aeronauts to subterranean and maritime explorers, then, his association of the atmosphere with nautical and subterranean space is not without precedent. But despite the lingering influence of these earlier aerial realms, it is also possible to view Windham Sadler’s atmosphere as a recently created space: a space accessible to navigation, if not permanent occupation, and therefore imagined in new ways. Certainly there was a decided shift in imaginary voyages’ descriptions of aerial travel following the advent of flight: Before the 1780s, the atmosphere does not seem to strike European fantasists as a space worth marveling at. Imaginary voyages such as Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638) and Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’autre monde: Ou les états et empires de la lune (1657) are, as their titles indicate, far more interested in the moon than in the space immediately above the earth’s surface. Tellingly, the narrator of Samuel Brunt’s A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727) even precedes his enforced visit to the moon with the promise that he “shall not detain the Reader with my Observations in this aerial Journey.”24 To describe the miraculous experience of flight would be to “detain” them on the page, when what the reader truly desires is to turn the page and arrive at the next narrative episode. For the sake of readers’ enjoyment, the atmosphere must remain invisible in these lunar voyages, the unseen background against which the narrative transitions from a quasi-realistic setting to a space of pure imagination. Its blankness is the blankness of the page; it is the emptiness that exists only to bring other spaces into view. The atmosphere’s status as a significant space was also in doubt in popular geographical texts circulating during the early eighteenth century. Dugdale’s 1736 translation of Bernhardus Varenius’s Geographia Generalis, still considered one of the most significant texts on geography almost seventy years after its original publication, contended that the Earth could be “divided into dry and moist Parts, or into Land and Water; to which some add the Atmosphere.”25 Even in a work arguing “that the Earth is best divided into these three Parts,”26 the atmosphere’s status as geographical space is in doubt: Only “some” would consider it as a region worthy of mapping. True, the height of the atmosphere could be estimated by mathematicians, but what value was there in charting an area into which human beings would almost certainly never venture? The atmosphere might be significant insofar as it served as a reservoir of life-giving air and rain, as the medium of oral communication, as a potential vector for plagues, and as a quasi-spiritual space that, as The Young Lady’s Inrtoduction [sic]

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to Natural History (1766) rather breathlessly put it, connects “the heavens and the earth.”27 But it was not a space that could be thoroughly traversed or occupied and, therefore, was not a space that preoccupied Europeans. In 1783, the atmosphere underwent a drastic revision. Almost overnight, the Montgolfier brothers’ launch of the first hot air balloon turned the regions of the air into an area that might one day be patrolled by armies, negotiated by smugglers, and explored by scientists. This new atopia had characteristics both familiar and novel: It was a space that shared both the ocean’s resistance to construction and its global scale but that, unlike the ocean, could permit travelers to transcend rather than bypass traditional land barriers. It a space that promised access to new perspectives—a characteristic appealing to an Enlightenment culture given to equating knowledge with views from above— but that also frustrated vision, in that, unlike other atopias, the atmosphere could not be seen except as made visible through transitory phenomena: the fluctuating manifestations of weather, the flight of birds, and, now, the unexpected rise of hot air balloons. If the vast visual perspectives granted by the atmosphere, its historical role as the mediator of ominous meteors, and its unforeseen penetration by the Montgolfiers’ marvelous new invention infused this atopia with connotations of futurity, it was a futurity that was decidedly, perhaps worrisomely, unpredictable. Already predisposed to compare the atmosphere to the ocean, observers were swift to speculate about the kinds of social and spatial transformations that might follow in the wake of the Montgolfiers’ invention. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson listed some of these speculations, noting that balloons might be used for practices such as “housebreaking, smuggling”; for “conveying intelligence into a besieged place, or perhaps enterprizing on it, reconnoitering an army”; for “traversing deserts, countries possessed by an enemy, or ravaged by infectious disorders, pathless and inaccessible mountains”; and perhaps even for the “discovery of the pole.”28 Balloons, in other words, might usher in a new era of unrestricted global mobility and limitless empire, in which, via the atmosphere, even the North Pole could be conquered.29 But balloons might threaten sovereignty as well as extend it. The visions of smugglers and enemies conjured by Jefferson’s list show that this new technology was already being imagined as a potential threat to property owners, communities, and the sovereignty of their respective nations. What good could natural barriers such as “pathless & inaccessible mountains” do in the face of a military force that could take to the air? Could states exert jurisdiction over the atmosphere? And if they failed, might not the atmosphere

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become a highway to all those who wanted to sail comfortably above the outdated landpower of the state? Could not the newly accessible atmosphere serve as a refuge, as the advertisement for Mary Alcock’s translation of “The Air Balloon; or, Flying Mortal” (1784) declared, “to those who wish TO EVADE THE LAWS OF THEIR KING OR COUNTRY”?30 As “balloonomania” swept Europe, concerns about the threats balloons posed to sovereignty coalesced around two facets of early aeronautics. The first threat lurked in balloons’ democratic appeal: in the large crowds that gathered to watch their ascensions and that, as Paul Keen has argued, made ballooning “both a potent symbol and a popular element of a consumer revolution that was changing the most fundamental aspects of Britain’s social order.”31 The spectacle of balloon ascensions eroded the status of “real” science and also seemed to elevate (metaphorically and literally) the wrong sort of people, turning paper makers like the Montgolfiers into the toasts of society. Even before the turmoil of the French Revolution cast a dangerous shadow over this French emblem of Enlightenment progress, commentators like the “Poetical Rambler” observed in 1784 that Lunardi’s movements in the sky, Has spread the passion to be high; And tempted those on earth content Before, to wish for an ascent. 32 Rather than serving as reassuring symbols of sovereign power, in other words, balloon ascensions might unleash the ambitions of a dangerously restless populace. Concern over the popular influence of balloons segued easily into a concern over the impact of other “heated” paper devices, namely, those produced by print culture. The “Poetical Rambler,” for example, quickly turns his attention from the dubious new desire for “elevation” triggered by Lunardi’s ascension to the “paragraph . . . far too bold . . .” In which the freedom of the press, Is push’d, indeed, to an excess! But libertys a charming thing, Ev’n while it drives us ’gainst a k——g; And makes us, in a roaring hour, Severely rail ’gainst regal power.33

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Balloons and newspapers are, in the eyes of the “Poetical Rambler,” dangerously inflated paper productions that erode respect for the real embodiment of sovereign power—the king—and threaten to undermine the social order. This connection between writing and aeronautical excursions was reinforced by a cultural perception of poetry as a form of “airy production”—as Frederick Pilon notes in his 1785 preface to Aerostation, or the Templar’s Stratagem, “Poets are the only living Creatures . . . that have any Interest, or Real Property in Air”34—and by a growing tendency to identify the atmosphere with the realm of literary production. The 1784 “Night Walker,” for example, envisions the balloon enabling “poets, projectors, paragraphmongers, editors of periodical miscellanies and compilers of histories of England” to take up their rightful place in the regions of the air, adding the political caution that, like aeronauts, “authors may easily soar too high.”35 The first threat associated with balloons, the threat of the disorderly mob, thus came to be linked in 1780s Britain to a rabble-rousing print culture. In later years, the threats associated with balloons—and, by extension, with textual production—increasingly took on international dimensions. For, as I shall explore in the next section, in Britain, balloons also threatened sovereignty by transforming the domestic atmosphere into a visibly global space, penetrable by foreign aeronauts and vulnerable, perhaps, to aerial invasion.

The Frenchman in the Clouds “O by gar!” exclaims Montgolfier from his perch in the clouds (see Figure 6). Gesturing to an insubstantial bubble that has emerged from his pipe, he declares, Dis be de grande invention—Dis will immortalize my King, my Country, and myself; We will declare de War against our enemi; we will make des English quake, by gar: We will inspect their camp, we will intercept their Fleet, and we will set fire to their Dock-yards: And by gar, we will take de Gibraltar in de air balloon, and when we have Conquered d’Eenglish, den we conquer d’other countrie, and make them all colonie to de Grand Monarque. Demonstrating what Paul Virilio has termed “the eye’s function [as] the function of a weapon,”36 the aeronautical Frenchman merges sight and foresight as he gazes on the lands he anticipates making “colonie to de Grand Monarque.” The threat of the foreign aeronaut gazing upon Britain is countered, however,

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by the satirical gaze of the cartoonist, who, in giving Montgolfier a child’s bubble pipe and a cloud throne and by identifying the French air balloon with a bubble, reassures his audience that France’s dreams of aerial conquest are childish, transitory fancies.

Figure 6. “Montgolfier in the Clouds: Constructing of Air Balloons for the Grand Monarque” (London: S. W. Fores, 1784). © The British Library Board, L.R.301.h.3.

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As Srinivas Aravamudan, has noted, this cartoon “inflects flight with colonial mastery,”37 and, in doing so, it participates in a cultural association of flight with the sovereign gaze. But this cartoon alludes to a more specific threat than the reversibility of the Oriental despot’s projection of power: In seeking to reassure its audience of the insubstantiality of French dreams of conquering the English, the cartoon alludes to what the Victorians would later remember as the French dream of establishing in “the great ocean of the atmosphere a general navigation . . . to give peace and happiness to all the nations of the universe, and unite them as one family,” a “most appalling . . . scheme of national destruction” cloaked in the garb of cosmopolitanism.38 This nineteenthcentury recollection of the specter of French aerial invasion points us to the ways in which this threat could shade into a more generalized insecurity about the nation’s ability to withstand ideological forms of global integration. For while it is certainly possible, as Elaine Freedgood has argued, for aeronautical views of England to offer both aeronauts and their readers a “reassuring perspective on the nation”39 as they resolved a diverse countryside into a maplike image, this perspective was not, as the “Montgolfier” cartoon indicates, necessarily reassuring in an age when almost all aeronauts were foreigners. Moreover, it should be remembered that aeronautical views can also prove dramatically uncartographic: Because they display no human-drawn borders, such views reveal a nation laid open to the world. To envision the nation from the perspective of the atmosphere is thus also to reflect on the nation’s connectedness to the space of the global and, for many British authors, to envision the nation as vulnerable to foreign invasion, international competition, and cosmopolitan dissolution. During the 1780s, British anxieties about ballooning seethed below the surface of balloon poems and ballads. The patriotic ballad “The Air Balloon” (c. 1785), for example, reminds its audience that the Royal Navy has often “without a balloon, sent [the French] up in the air”40 and assures its audience if “again should they dare us to war, we wou’d soon / Make the air of our guns fill the Frenchman’s Balloon.”41 While many of these works expressed concern over the martial threat posed by French balloons, others fretted over both the failure of British scientists to invent this technology themselves and the relatively slow adoption of ballooning in Britain compared with the rest of Europe.42 This national insecurity is manifested in poems such as “Air Balloon, or Blanchard’s Triumphal Entry into the Etherial World” (c. 1785), a celebratory work determined to convert a Frenchman’s voyage into a victory for British science. By hosting the foreigner’s balloon launch, we are told, Britain has

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fulfilled its providentially decreed role as a scientific leader, and thus the glory of Blanchard’s triumph accrues to the nation from which his balloon departed: “The Standard always shall remain, / Won by Blanchard’s AErial flight / Presents it as Britannia’s right.”43 The poem’s insistence that the standard of scientific wisdom remains in Britain chafes against both the poem’s professedly cosmopolitan sentiments and the awkward fact that the aeronautical technology being celebrated was invented and demonstrated by Frenchmen. Other celebratory works accidentally dramatize Britain’s peripheral relationship to aeronautical advances by hailing foreign aeronauts, as the “Epistle to Mr. Lunardi, on His Recent Aerial Excursion” (1784) does to the Italian aeronaut Vincenzo Lunardi, as “THE COLUMBUS OF BRITAIN!”44 The fact that Lunardi’s “discoveries” lie within British borders invites the reader of the poem to view Britain itself as the “New World” being discovered, while Britons, cast by implication as “Indians,” look on in bewildered awe. Unconscious though such a suggestion might be, this image nevertheless aligns with the representations of a marginalized Britain to be found in other eighteenth-century aeronautical works. And like other poems of the 1780s, it also suggests the vulnerability of Britain in an aerial era: Astute readers would have known all too well—and would not have enjoyed sharing—the fate of Columbus’s Indians. Plays and novels in the 1780s and 1790s picked up on the anxieties swirling around balloons, and several adopted the balloon as a symbol of Britain’s diminished status as a world power. One such work, Elizabeth Inchbald’s popular “The Mogul Tale; or, The Descent of the Balloon” (1784), uses Britons’ inability to steer balloons as the plot device launching a farce in which Englishmen are revealed as fools unable to direct themselves on the global stage.45 The figure of the balloon serves in this play as a device that underlines the failure of the English sovereign gaze: The play’s aerial travelers understand nothing of the territory they have surveyed, nor are they equipped to engage with the wider world into which Montgolfier’s balloon has carried them. “The Mogul Tale” begins with an off-course balloon landing in the titular mogul’s seraglio. Distressed, the bewildered passengers try to determine their new geographical location in a scene that satirizes English ignorance of the world outside their national borders. Johnny, a cobbler, declares that they have landed in “Scotland, Denmark or Ireland, or Norway, or Limbo,” eventually concluding “it must be Limbo, or Greenland.” The Doctor, ostensibly the voice of educated authority, is equally disoriented, telling his companions that “this is either east, west, or south, but which I cannot tell.”46 Recalling tales of

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aeronauts attacked by superstitious European peasants, the Doctor frets that the ignorant natives will behave in the same fashion and “put us all to death, taking us for three witches that ride in the air.”47 As it happens, the Muslims remain calm in the face of the spectacle of air travel: The ladies of the seraglio declare themselves unafraid of the wondrous balloon, while the educated, philosophical mogul notes that he has already heard of the development of air travel in Europe, thereby showing the Europeans at a disadvantage. Appearing a mere year after the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War, “The Mogul Tale” suggests that Britain’s loss of international territory may be linked to Britons’ lack of interest in the world beyond the domestic. In one of the play’s best-known scenes, the Doctor, posing as King George’s ambassador, tries to rival the Oriental ruler’s display of majesty by concocting a similar list of titles for the British king. Frantically casting about for the names of territories that will boost his sovereign’s stature, the insular Englishman is limited by his knowledge of the world beyond Britain and France: “The King his master is, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, Ireland, Scotland, Northumberland, Lincolnshire, Sheffield and Birmingham. . . . Prince of the River Thames, Trent, Severn, Tyne, New-River, Fleet-Ditch, and the Tweed.”48 Put on the spot, the Doctor cannot remember, for example, Britain’s claim to Quebec, and so he desperately tries to inflate the status of his sovereign by listing more and more English territories and rivers, a tactic that, to both the educated mogul and to Inchbald’s English audience, makes the Doctor and the empire he claims to represent seem embarrassingly small. Unable to think beyond the limits of the nation, the Doctor inadvertently ends up shrinking the British Empire at a historical moment when the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War had convinced many Britons that their empire was on the wane. The English characters’ ignorance not only participates in what Betsy Bolton has dubbed the play’s inverted politics, in which “Christianity and British imperialism are unveiled as tyranny, while the oriental despot appears as a gentle ruler,”49 but also puts them entirely in the power of foreigners like the mogul. Whereas the Englishmen show little knowledge of the world beyond their borders, the mogul’s attention to both European newspapers and to English conversation enables him to confidently manipulate the intruders. In an era of international invention and circulation suggestively represented by the air balloon, nationalist navel-gazing, the play suggests, may be a wasteful and potentially harmful occupation. The play’s air balloon thus acts as more than just an excuse for 1780s theatrical spectacle: It is a symbol of both foreign

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innovation and international circulation, and it serves as a device that forces both Inchbald’s English characters and her London audience to reevaluate England’s position on the world stage.

Global Circulation in The Aerostatic Spy’s “New AEra” The air balloon is used, still more dramatically, as the harbinger of a new era of global politics in the 1785 novel The Aerostatic Spy: Or, Excursions with an Air Balloon. A minor novel, The Aerostatic Spy nevertheless usefully highlights some of the elements of contemporary aerostatic discourse treated more obliquely in better-known works. Unlike “The Mogul Tale,” for example, The Aerostatic Spy makes the relationship between its representation of British inferiority and the loss of Britain’s American colonies explicit: “As all Empires have their rise and decline,” the novel observes, “so it appears that Britain is rather past her meridian. America already lost to her; other branches are ready to drop from that vast tree, beneath whole shade the nations rested.”50 To its predictions regarding the imperial disintegration of Britain and its European rivals, the novel adds an intriguing portrait of postnational circulation, as the aerial traveler repeatedly encounters Persians, Englishmen, and Spaniards who, like him, have become unmoored from the familial and national domestic. In this postrevolutionary world, the space of the atmosphere becomes the symbolic gateway to a “new AEra”51 of cosmopolitanism, in which literature will prove essential to an individual’s ability to navigate a changing international landscape. The connection between this new “AEra” and problematized national identities is hinted at in the opening pages of the narrative, in which the titular aeronaut describes himself as being “of Trans-Atlantic birth,”52 a phrase that immediately places him not in Britain or in its former colony but in the space between the two nations. As tensions rise between Britain and its North American colonies, the future aeronaut declares himself a Loyalist, and subsequently he loses his patrimony, his lover, and his country at the hands of his unfeminine aunt and an unscrupulous Congress. As “the Americans, who, as well as the country, [were] no longer objects of regard to me,”53 the protagonist turns his back on his native land. But rejecting his native land proves easier than finding a replacement. Lacking property, friends, or strong emotional ties to Britain, and with his Crusoe-esque path to rehabilitation via colonial wealth blocked by the spreading forces of revolutionary disorder, the Loyalist finds

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himself metaphorically, and then literally, adrift in the space between nations. It is at this moment, when the nameless Loyalist is in danger of being utterly annihilated by the extra-national space of the ocean, that he is saved by the thinly disguised cast of a familiar English novel. An old English castaway and the “negro youth” who serves as his “only domestic and companion”54 drag the drifting Loyalist to the shores of their tropical island. There, the Crusoe doppelganger, aptly named “Sagely,”55 inspires the narrator to take his narrative in a different direction: He will use goatskins and leaves to construct the hot air balloon whose ascents and descents will structure the rest of the plot. While he helps the aerial traveler transition into this new era, however, the Crusoe doppelganger refuses to accompany him, declaring himself too attached to his island “plot” to leave. The future, the novel implies, will belong to the cosmopolitan aerial traveler, who will sail freely into its new expanse, leaving the Crusoe-esque figure of old imperialism to fade away within the domestic confines of his island. The narrator’s subsequent adventures repeatedly bring him into contact with people who, like him, have been failed by or wish to renegotiate the structures of both family and nation. Some of these exiles are presented negatively: An English couple, for example, is revealed to be an incestuous brother and sister who have abandoned conventional morality along with traditional domesticity and now travel the land with a troop of traveling players. Most, however, are presented in a positive light. One of the aeronaut’s first meetings is with Parham, an Englishman-turned-African, who, “Vexed and dissatisfied with what I had seen in my native country,” has instead opted to become a farm laborer in an African kingdom. As with many of the other self-exiles described in the novel, Parham’s rejection of the country of his birth is set in motion by his family’s refusal to accept the validity of a border-crossing relationship. Rather than advantageously marrying a person from his own geographical and social background, as his family desired, Parham instead wed “the daughter of a Barbadoes merchant”56 whose fortune had been almost completely annihilated by a recent hurricane. Cut off by his family, Parham and his wife tried, unsuccessfully, to create a new domestic sphere in England, before deciding that their chances were better in “foreign climes.”57 Their experiment ended unhappily—she drowned during the voyage—but Parham has subsequently found peace as a lowly member of a society of “African blacks.”58 “Here,” he tells the aeronaut, “I have found a people simple in their manner, humane in their behaviour, and temperate in their living,

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contradicting that philosophical assertion, That in climes where extremes of weather prevail, the extremes of manners (consequently vice) must be predominant.”59 In denying Montesquieu’s adage that the climates of different nations produce different national characteristics—an argument that naturalizes national and racial differences—Parham is not only denying the presumed inferiority of those that “Europeans, might denominate . . . Savages”60 but also strengthening the novel’s identification of the atmosphere as the representative space of a new internationalism. The atmospheric phenomenon of weather, Parham concludes, does not, as Montesquieu has argued, separate people. Africans share the same basic humanity as Europeans, and, as his story illustrates, in the new era of international trade, the hurricanes of Barbados can impact the life of an Englishman as much as that of a resident of the Lesser Antilles. Parham’s speech, in other words, anticipates what Mary Favret describes as the nineteenth century’s “newly integrated understanding of the earth’s weather,” in which the manifestations of the atmosphere were perceived as part of “a global system of exchange, something that passed from one region to another, moving over local and national borders.”61 Addressed to the pilot of a device that not only demonstrated air’s ability to circulate across borders, but also was coming to be used in the developing science of meteorology, Parham’s story helps cement the novel’s representation of the atmosphere as a global space of human connection free from the cynicism and self-interest of the mercantile ocean. The concept of the atmosphere as a more ideal space from which to contemplate the global is further developed by the aeronaut’s meeting with Amiel, “a spirit of the Atmosphere,” who bears a resemblance both to angels and to Shakespeare’s Ariel, and whose mobility parallels that of the aerial traveler.62 “Being not confined to a particular space or portion” of his native domain, Amiel explains, the aerial spirit can “traverse these regions, and frequently visit the sons of men.”63 These are precisely the activities that the narrator, having thrown off the confining bonds of nativity, will pursue for the rest of the novel, using his air balloon to traverse the atmosphere and descending to visit the inhabitants of different parts of the world. Moreover, as their balloon passes over various nations, Amiel educates the aeronaut in a new view of global relations as seen from above, in which the mountains thought to act as providentially ordained borders between nations appear “scarcely as large as so many ant-hills.”64 Seen from an aeronautical perspective, national differences become less significant than the similarities between human beings from

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different parts of the world, all of whom appear plagued by the failings of the domestic structures into which they were born. The sophisticated, generous, and angelic Amiel serves as a harbinger of an emerging cosmopolitan era of aerial travel and international connection: He predicts the advantages that the hot air balloon will bring the human race, and he also anticipates the next stage in human development, a stage that the aeronaut and his companions in self-exile are already groping toward.65 The Aerostatic Spy also returns to the association of balloons with print culture, arguing that literature will play an important role in the emergence of this new cosmopolitan era. The intertextual cameos of Sagely and Amiel, both of whom intervene to save the protagonist when he has become unmoored in postnational atopias, suggest that literature not only is a technology useful in navigating the unstable aftermath of the postrevolutionary transatlantic but also a possibly vital tool for shoring up the identity of people in need of new ways of mediating their relationship to the domestic. When The Aerostatic Spy argues for the utility of air balloons, in other words, it is also arguing for the utility of literature. This connection is first made in the novel’s preface, which follows a discussion of the dazzling new technology of ballooning with a promise to shortly unveil literary “Machinery . . . bold and nouvel in its Construction.”66 The balloon and the novel itself are, we are invited to conclude, similarly bold and innovative devices: Both are creations capable of “transporting” their passengers, entertaining the populace and inspiring wonder; both are also treated with suspicion by critics who question their value and accuse them of distracting the public from weightier matters. This idea returns near the close of the novel, when a balloon skeptic dismisses newspapers’ speculations on the possibility of human flight as mere “fiction.”67 The reader, knowing that flight is now possible, is thus treated to an example of an incorrect dismissal of both aeronautical technology and print culture. In a work that is itself an overt work of fiction, which concludes with an optimistic prediction regarding the future of aeronautical technology, this episode implicitly argues for the power of “fiction”68 to predict, and prepare people for, the future. In making an argument for the value of an aerial technology dismissed by many as mere entertainment, The Aerostatic Spy is thus also making a claim for the important role of literature in enabling individuals to successfully navigate the world and preserve their sense of self at a time when more traditional anchors for identity—native lands, families, nations—are failing.

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From Polar Rimes to Jacobin Skies: The Romantic Atmosphere Literature’s engagement with balloons as vehicles for exploring the international space of the atmosphere fell off dramatically around 1800—a development that may coincide with what Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, tracking the manifestations of “common air” in literary atmospheres, observes as the “cold” trail that follows Radcliffe’s gothic novels in the 1790s.69 It seems likely that Napoleon’s dissolution of the French aerostatic corps in 1799—and with it the abrupt disappearance of any threat of French aerial attack—contributed to the striking absence of representations of threatening balloons in the early decades of the nineteenth century.70 But in 1816, interest in the atmosphere as a space of global connection surged again, as the depressed temperatures of the “year without a summer” demonstrated to Britons that their domestic climate was subject to the same weird weather fluctuations troubling continental Europe and North America. In Britain, the unseen connection that the atmosphere forged between Britain and the North Pole became a topic of particular interest, as newspapers and periodicals theorized that the winds blowing across distant polar ice were responsible for the climatic crisis. Not only did this crisis bolster Britain’s decision to resume polar exploration, but it also reinforced a developing link between polar and atmospheric space in the British imagination. This association was only strengthened by the rhetoric of aeronauts like Windham Sadler, who, in presenting ballooning as a type of exploration, practically invited Britons to compare the figure of the aeronaut to that of the polar explorer. This confluence of events helps explain the sudden ubiquity of literature linking polar and atmospheric space. In Henry Fothergill Chorley’s Coleridgeinspired “The Ballad of the Aeronaut” (1832), for example, an eighteenthcentury aeronaut experiences a nightmare vision of his balloon descending into the high Arctic, where he is punished by the demonic inhabitants of the North Pole for trespassing on their domain. The similarly fantastic Blackwoods story “A Visit to the Lunar Sphere” (1820) by “A Midshipman” invites an unfavorable comparison between the excessive scientific weight with which aeronauts attempt to freight ballooning, and the “real” adventures, aesthetic travel, and scientific accomplishments of British naval expeditions to “the Arctic Regions.”71 While the use of balloons to travel to the North Pole had been proposed almost from the moment of their inception, it is not until the 1820s that

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we see British literature taking up this idea with a vengeance and portraying the poles and the atmosphere, as not only similarly atopic but also overlapping spaces. As the story descriptions given above may indicate, in the 1820s balloon literature also began depicting the atmosphere as a marvelous space. “Balloonomania” poems such as “Blanchard’s Triumphal Entry” may have draped their aeronauts with classical laurels, and the figure of the angelic or demonic guide may have been a staple of 1780s aeronautic novels, but few of these works treated their supernatural machinery as anything other than useful expository devices. In the 1820s, however, many authors began depicting the atmosphere as a space granting access to not only remote corners of the globe but also the realms of romance. Whereas polar literature insisted on the infeasibility of human attempts to penetrate polar space during the very decades in which this penetration had become feasible, balloon literature developed in an opposite direction, claiming the balloon as a tool for exploration, and the atmosphere as a marvelous space worth exploring, during the very decades when many Britons had given up on both. While it seems likely that the rhetoric of aeronauts such as Windham Sadler influenced the connections that authors made between the atmosphere and other atopias, it also seems as though the decreasing likelihood of balloons “penetrating . . . into the wildest and most inhospitable regions”72 of the globe also made them fitter subjects for imaginative speculation. Renounced by empire, the regions of the air were reclaimed during this period as a province of the imagination: an area mercifully (or monstrously) free of the regulations of the nation-state, in which the imagery of older mythologies could be revived in the context of an emergent, geoimaginary space of global communication and exchange. The atmosphere’s inclusion in the category of atypical spaces is amply demonstrated in “Raymond the Romantic, and His Five Wishes” (1822), a short story serialized in the European Magazine, and London Review. Raymond, an adventurous “Romantic” fond of composing and collecting poetry, vows to achieve five goals “in perfect consonance with my title of Raymond the Romantic. . . . To descend to the bottom of the Sea in a Diving-Bell; to ascend into the Air in a Balloon: to go down into the Earth in one of the deepest Mines: to pass into the Crater of a Burning Mountain, and to behold an Apparition!”73 Four out of Raymond’s five “wishes” are contingent on new forms of spatial mobility and all may, to the modern reader, seem eminently achievable. But the fifth, Raymond’s desire to see a spirit, signals the degree to which the first four spaces may be considered “mythic” spaces similar to the

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spirit world: spaces lying beyond the normal, mortal range of sight and experience; spaces that humans can technically gain admittance to but that, for most readers, can only be imagined. Notably, the only “Romantic” space that remains impenetrable in the story is polar space: The realm of “the Black Rock and Four Whirlpools of the Arctic Regions, and . . . North-West Passage”74 attracts Raymond’s equally adventurous friend, but he is unable to penetrate the ice barrier and drowns in northern seas. The pole, it seems, is off-limits, even to the “Romantic” explorer. The upper regions of the atmosphere, on the other hand, are imagined as accessible. In its depiction of its protagonist’s voyage into the upper atmosphere, “Raymond” updates balloon-fiction tropes from the 1780s by subtly associating the air balloon “threat” with the dangerous ideals of the French Revolution. This portion of the story is set during the 1780s and finds Raymond, determined to fulfill the second of his five wishes, heading to France, where he anticipates that his aerial voyage will “not be less extraordinary, nor perhaps less dangerous, than my marine one had proved.” Aerostation and Jacobinism are associated with each other as Raymond climbs into his French balloon and sets the grand “Machine . . . at liberty,” noting as he does so that “Versailles, Paris, France, almost the world itself, seemed to fall into chaos beneath me.”75 Rather than the balloon enabling Raymond to see the world below him as more ordered—a commonplace observation in balloon ascensions—the act of setting this French invention “at liberty” causes the world to fall into “chaos,” beginning with the symbol of French royal power and soon spreading out through France to affect the rest of the world. The suggestive connections between aerostation and revolution continue as Raymond, like many of the intellectual contributors to the revolution, loses control of the machine he has set in motion. The balloon ascends ever higher, into “the habitation of Chaos,” until “the clouds seemed to break beneath me, and I discovered a new species of atmosphere . . . [possessing] that red and lurid kind of light which we see preceding a storm.”76 In this dreamlike place, Raymond encounters “an innumerable multitude of winged figures,” whose Grecian visages are marred by “pointed ears of a swarthy colour” and “sad, yet sarcastic smile” that “gave to the face an air at once grand, imperious, and contemptuous.”77 Rather than bringing him closer to heaven, Raymond’s use of the “Montgolfier Balloon” has brought him closer to the archetypal rebels against sovereign authority. The conclusion of this episode warns against violating natural limits on exploration while hammering home the new “French” threat to be associated

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with balloons. Surrounded by air spirits, Raymond is confronted by Ouranodemon, their king, who demands that Raymond pass on to his “fellow-mortals, that I command them to cease from their vain, and ignorant attempts to invade my dominions.”78 If his commands are not respected, the malevolent spirit promises to wreak horrible vengeance on whatever human should next attempt the feat, a vengeance that, Raymond fears, is afterward felt by the unfortunate Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier and Pierre Romaine.79 The mention of de Rozier and Romaine dates Raymond’s voyage to 1785, a year that, combined with the story’s allusions to the revolution, suggests that the tragic deaths of the French aeronauts might not be the only consequence of Frenchmen aspiring to rise above their station. The point is driven home by the story’s epigraph, in which the Marquis de Villette admonishes Frenchmen to “climb not with your inflammable air beyond the sphere to which God has limited it” and to “renounce the project of raising yourself above the thunder.”80 Raymond’s vision of France collapsing into chaos and his ominous encounter with creatures resembling fallen angels in “the kind of light which we see preceding a storm” link the practice of aerostation to satanic ambition, and suggest that the French invention of ballooning was an expression of the same desires that would later precipitate the French Revolution. The balloon episode of “Raymond the Romantic” bridges late eighteenthand nineteenth-century balloon fiction by providing a postrevolutionary spin on the “French” and democratic threats of ballooning. As in many other 1820s works, “Raymond the Romantic” depicts the atmosphere as a space akin to the deep sea or the poles, a space highly attractive to the Romantic imagination but that represents a limit on human mobility. In “Raymond,” however, the supernatural threat of the upper atmosphere takes on a political aspect. Ideas, we are reminded, also reside in the atmosphere, and perhaps balloons are not the only threat to lurk in British skies.

Mary Shelley’s Empoisoned Air As Charlotte Sussman notes, Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) “describes few technological innovations” and, therefore, Sussman implies, cannot truly stand as an example of that “new category of utopian fiction, science fiction.”81 But as Steven Jones has observed, while The Last Man is “noticeably lacking in . . . technological gimmickry . . . the one technology central to the book is balloon flight.”82 In a novel that is otherwise devoid of

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futuristic technology, The Last Man’s “sailing balloons” are one of Mary Shelley’s few nods to her far-future setting. But given that the novel culminates with the globe’s plague-infused atmosphere exterminating the human race, Shelley’s descriptions of navigable balloons sailing “through the unopposing atmosphere”83 are clearly intended as more than just science-fictional window dressing. In The Last Man, I contend, Mary Shelley adapts the tropes of earlier aerostatic literature—the balloon as symbol of print culture, the atmosphere as an international space supposedly free from the corruptions of imperial trade, the atmosphere as the vector of threat to England’s sea-girt isle—as a means of exploring the limitations of literature. On taking his first balloon journey, the titular protagonist, Lionel Verney, thrills at this display of “the power of man over the elements; a power long sought, and lately won; yet foretold in by-gone time by the prince of poets.”84 Balloons serve, in Verney’s eyes, as a symbol of humanity’s mastery over nature, and they also substantiate the utopian visions of long-dead authors. To Verney, himself destined to craft literary visions for “Posterity,”85 this is one of the balloon’s main fascinations, and we are told that he spends most of his first balloon flight instructing the balloon pilot in the continuity between Virgil’s poetry and this futuristic flying machine. Verney’s strong identification of balloons with radical prophetic vision recalls, of course, the faith expressed in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Sonnet: To a Balloon, Laden with Knowledge” that the radical texts he distributed via “fire balloons” would find their intended readership and inspire social reform.86 In portraying balloons not as the “beacon in the darkness of the Earth”87 that Percy Shelley had anticipated, but as the victims of whatever evil clouds the global air, Mary Shelley articulates her own doubts regarding her late husband’s belief in the power of writing to shape the world. At the same time, the fact that Verney’s own testament can serve as a prophetic text suggests that Mary Shelley is not entirely willing to renounce literature’s potential ability to alter society. My reading of The Last Man’s atmosphere might seem at first to contradict the arguments of scholars who read the plague as intertwined with imperial trade.88 For whereas Lionel Verney associates the ocean with the “navies [that] used to stem the giant ocean-waves betwixt Indus and the Pole for slight articles of luxury,”89 the atmosphere in The Last Man is apparently a trade-free space; the sailing balloons that plow Britain’s future skies are envisioned as human conveyances only. Furthermore, Verney’s rhetoric picks up on the eighteenth-century cosmopolitan juxtaposition of an idealized “great ocean of

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the atmosphere” with the problematic space of the “maritime . . . which has ever disturbed the tranquility of mankind.”90 Verney’s “farewell to the sea!”91 speech, delivered at the outset of his last balloon voyage, provides a striking example of this opposition, as Verney attempts to forever turn his back on the “death-bearing waves” of the ocean in favor of the “azure serene”92 of the atmosphere. The ocean’s role in British history encourages Verney and his countrymen to view it as a space that separates them from the rest of the world.93 The atmosphere, on the other hand—that “cloak that enwraps all our fellowcreatures—the inhabitants of native Europe—the luxurious Asiatic—the swarthy African and free American”94—contains the invisible, intangible connections between people that oceans pretend to divide. But the atmosphere cannot save humanity—indeed, it will destroy humanity—precisely because it is an indisputable symbol of global connection. The cosmopolitanism of the ocean may be deniable, but the atmosphere’s is not. The atmosphere’s power as a symbol of an insistent, ungovernable, and potentially dangerous interface between the domestic and the global had been deployed in one of the key political debates informing The Last Man. This context helps explain, I think, why Shelley does not pursue a contagionist theory of disease transmission: If the plague is spread by disease, then, as Verney notes, halting trade would successfully quarantine England, but if, as Verney notes, “the air was subject to infection,” halting trade would not be enough.95 In 1826, the slave trade had been banned, but slavery—in England’s colonies and elsewhere in the world—continued. Early nineteenth-century abolitionists argued, therefore, that the pernicious effects of slavery could be felt even when trade had been stopped: that the famously “pure air” of England was not, in fact, separate from the air of its colonies but circulated in one atmosphere. Thus some abolitionists warned their brethren of the dangers of slavery by associating slavery with airborne plague, hoping, as did a letter to the Imperial Magazine in 1826, that “the British atmosphere would be purified at once from the poisonous infection of slavery.”96 In The Last Man, Verney himself contracts the plague in what appears to be a nearly fatal encounter with the atmosphere of slavery. Searching for his family in his London home, Verney stumbles into a dark room and encounters, in this most domestic of spaces, a scene resembling those described on slave ships: “a pernicious scent assailed my senses. . . . I felt my leg clasped, and a groan repeated by the person that held me. I lowered my lamp, and saw a negro half clad, writhing under the agony of disease.” Rather than displaying compassion, Verney with “mixed horror and impatience” strives “to

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disengage” himself and in the very act of pulling free, falls “on the sufferer; he wound his naked festering arms” around him: “his face was close to mine, and his breath, death-laden, entered my vitals.”97 As Peter Melville has observed, this scene “attests to the limits of Lionel’s compassion”;98 in this moment of unwilling embrace, Verney refuses to recognize the African either as a “man” (he does not once use this word to describe the “wretch” who embraces him, though the stranger Idris encounters in the preceding paragraph is described as a “woman”) or as part of the “family” he is seeking.99 But even though Verney tries to separate himself, physically and linguistically, from the African’s pain, even though he refuses to take responsibility for the man he sees suffering in his domestic sphere of influence, he cannot escape participating in the African’s suffering because it suffuses the air they both breathe. “The air is empoisoned,”100 Verney declares of the world’s plague-saturated atmosphere, but as Anne McWhir notes of Mary Shelley’s anticontagionism, miasmatic theories of disease transmission assumed that plague originated somewhere.101 The scene of Verney’s infection, reminiscent of contemporary descriptions of slavery’s infectious atmosphere, reminds readers that even when the waves are controlled and all trades halted, the air of the atmosphere continues to tie the fates of “the inhabitants of native Europe” and “the swarthy African” together.102 And what of balloons, the aerial barks that Verney hopes will allow him to permanently distance himself from the ocean’s “death-bearing waves” and that he claims serve as evidence for the prophetic power of literature? It may be useful here to remember that, in arguing that Britain’s pure air was being tainted by the miasmatic air of slavery, nineteenth-century abolitionists were not speaking literally. They were warning of the dangerous encroachment of despotic ideas on the British ideal of liberty, of the erosion of compassion, and of the extinction of sympathies that made citizens susceptible to the appeals of not only conscience but also literature. Robert Southey, for example, reported with disgust the case of an American who was utterly incapable of comprehending the story of Inkle and Yarico, remarking that this imperviousness to sentimental fiction proved “how impossible it is to breathe without injury an atmosphere contaminated with slavery.”103 Such pessimistic reflections on the corrosive atmosphere of slavery would have run directly counter to the optimistic beliefs of a young Percy Bysshe Shelley, who is alleged to have predicted, regarding the devices he elsewhere identified with poetry, that the “shadow of the first balloon” to cross the interior of Africa, merely in gliding “over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery forever.”104 When we think of The Last Man’s air balloons,

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those testaments to the power of literature, lying broken before the foul atmosphere that is consuming the world, we should consider this image alongside the novel’s other depictions of rhetorical failure. As Verney reflects regarding the failure of his words to move a rebellious troop of soldiers, in the contest of “evil with good . . . the former for ever remained triumphant.”105 In The Last Man, none of humankind’s arts are at last adequate to overpower the poisonous atmosphere generated by humankind’s sins.

The Descent of the Victorian Balloon At the beginning of Victoria’s reign, an onlooking aeronaut might well have been optimistic about the prospects of ballooning under the new queen. No longer were British newspaper articles on aerostation dominated by the names of foreign aeronauts: The intrepid Charles Green had revived flagging national interest in the balloon with his experiments with “carbureted” hydrogen gas and with his record-setting 480-mile flight from London to Weilburg, Germany, in 1836. Nor was Green alone. Sailors had always been well represented on balloon voyages, but in the era of Pax Britannica, would-be naval heroes such as the young Henry Tracey Coxwell, recognizing that opportunities for glory and advancement at sea were few, turned their attention to adapting the professional craft of “mariners” to the sky.106 At the other end of the professional spectrum, theatrical showmen and celebrities such as Margaret Graham, the self-proclaimed “only English female aeronaut,” proved adept at using balloons to attract and hold the national gaze. Indeed, by 1838, the number of British aeronauts had increased to the extent that Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal could claim with a straight face that England was now leading the field of aeronautics.107 Britain’s newfound aerial confidence was expressed on the very day of Victoria’s coronation, when Londoners were treated to a “new national anthem” to be “sung in the aerial regions” by Margaret Graham as she ascended from Green Park. As the royal salute announcing a woman’s assumption of sovereign power rang out over the park, “England’s only female aeronaut” entered the car of the Royal Victoria balloon and began an ascension meant to symbolically “announce to thousands, who were not witnesses of the joyous scene, . . . the occurrence from the aerial regions.”108 What the eighteenth century had perceived as a threatening symbol of alien sovereignty was now, at long last, serving as a symbol of the Crown.

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This grand day for British aeronautics was marred by what, in hindsight, were two ominous notes. The first was the lack of attention paid by the “new national anthem” to the aerial regions: In wishing that Victoria “triumphant be, / O’er land and over sea,” the anthem omits the aerial regions for which it was composed. This surprising oversight signals the degree to which nineteenth-century Britons had stopped viewing the atmosphere as a potentially military space. The second sour note was struck by the misadventures of the Royal Victoria balloon, which collided with a house on its descent, critically injured two spectators, and was badly torn when clutched by the eager hands of the crowd. Pressed into service as a symbol of female sovereignty, the Royal Victoria balloon had failed to narrate the tale the government wanted told; it had proved a subversive representative of the nation. Its ascension would prove to be the high-water mark of aerostation’s reputation in Britain, as the Victorians would, in subsequent years, increasingly look askance at aeronauts. The marvelous space of the atmosphere would undergo a corresponding reevaluation: Increasingly seen as the province of suspect science and crowd-manipulating charlatans, the atmosphere would become a slightly disreputable space of national endeavor. The respectability of atmospheric exploration is inherently questioned by John Poole’s well-received Crotchets in the Air; or, An (Un)scientific Account of a Balloon-Trip in a Familiar Letter to a Friend (1838), a transitional text that celebrates the cosmopolitan atmosphere even as it satirizes the pretensions of aeronauts.109 The text’s “grounded” perspective deflates not only aeronauts’ scientific ethos, but also their association of ballooning with a totalizing gaze. Pondering his friend’s lengthy question on the extent to which “the interests of science . . . and the state of society in general” are “likely to be improved by the use of balloons,” the aerial voyager cheerfully admits his ignorance: This question is framed with such extraordinary precision, that, to one who could, there ought to be not the slightest difficulty in answering it. My observations, however, having been confined chiefly to the looking down on the chimney-tops, I am enabled to reply only, with anything approaching certainty, first, that I do not know; secondly, that I cannot tell; and thirdly, that is hard to say.110 Elevated above all human beings, the narrator can indeed entertain a “new view” of the countryside, potentially even achieving the much-desired totalizing gaze of the Enlightenment. But looking down on chimneytops endows the

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narrator with no more knowledge than he had before, and it perhaps even diminishes his ability to peer into the lives of his neighbors, given that he is now excluded, by roofs and chimneys, from the secure space of the home. Far from occupying the enviable position of the Aerostatic Spy, able to encompass both future and globe in his balloon-enhanced vision, the voyager in 1838 claims that his vision is limited rather than enhanced by his ascension, and indicates that the only thing he can see clearly from the atmosphere are markers of his temporary removal from the nation. And that, for the 1838 voyager, is a very fine thing indeed. Finally he can escape the petty laws, property constraints, and surveillance of domestic society: In the “boundless regions of the air . . . not an acre is inclosed; and for ever you might float there, unimpeded by a humane caution to beware of spring guns, or a friendly hint about prosecution for trespass, and the amiable rigours of the law.”111 In the atmosphere, one can travel freely throughout the world— “passports are not required”—and revel in the knowledge that there are “no busy, prying, spying police to watch your movements.”112 Here, too, one can “revel in all the delights of imagination”113 and compose texts—the “crotchets” of the title—which, as the Oxford English Dictionary notes, express the peculiar notions “held by an individual in opposition to common opinion.”114 The same is not necessarily true of the national space below. Floating over London, the narrator turns to Westminster Abbey’s refusal to erect a memorial to Byron, and he castigates the “expurgated . . . Family edition of Westminster Abbey, in which not a Name shall remain that may not stand as a type of absolute perfection.”115 The space beneath the gentleman voyager is legible, but what he reads there is a bowdlerized version of the nation, a nation increasingly structured around the middle-class family and fenced off from would-be Byronic gentlemen like himself. In contrast, the atmosphere is both a “blank space” mercifully free of policing and an empty page onto which the imagination can be liberally poured: “Here,” the narrator declares regarding his experience of the aerial regions, “I leave a blank, which you are at liberty to get some one else to fill up . . . if he can.”116 National space is presented as a page overwritten by laws and social mores, the atmosphere as the space of a free (one might say “Romantic”) imagination. But in the enthusiastic responses to Crotchets we can also see the first expressions of a desire to move past the figure of the individualist aerial adventurer who had so obsessed the Romantics. The Athenaeum, for example, in its review, begged the author to “follow the steps of ‘Raymond the Romantic’ (eide the latter’s ‘Five Wishes,’ . . . ) and, ere long, to treat us with ninety-eight

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pages of deep sea crochets, originating within the narrow dome of a divingbell!”117 The Athenaeum may have remembered “Five Wishes” fondly, but the image the reviewer conjures of the satirist retreading, and inevitably deflating, the sublime wonders described by “the Romantic” poet-adventurer is a powerful one. It is an image that meshes surprisingly well with the criticisms directed at aeronauts with increasing frequency during the 1840s and 1850s. By 1849, Household Words was patronizing the “extravagant fictions” and “romances” of early aeronauts, while observing of contemporary aeronauts that “their so-called ‘voyage’ is little more than ‘drifting.’ ”118 The Leader, which would in 1851 call for casual ballooning to be banned entirely, in 1850 ridiculed the formerly “heroic” Charles Green for making a public ascension while mounted on horseback. The Leader’s mockery of Green and its disgust at his exploitation of an animal were not unusual, but what stands out in its withering account of the ascension is its caricature of Green as “the ‘ancient mariner’ of the skies.”119 The conflation of aeronaut and Coleridgean mariner suggested by works such as Chorley’s “The Ballad of the Aeronaut” returns here in a Victorian expression of contempt for the outré figure of the aeronaut, an adventurer more deserving of ridicule than admiration. Continuing the trend begun in the 1820s, the poles, rather than the atmosphere, appear as the preferred proving ground of national heroism. In an 1851 article by Margaret A. Burgoyne (whose blasé amusement at her aerial voyage points to one reason that aerostation could no longer be seen as a test of masculine courage), the female aerial traveler repeatedly compares her experience to that of “navigators in the Polar Regions.”120 Polar space is, of course, the atopia from which Victorian women were absolutely excluded, and it was therefore a safe space for the construction of narratives of manly heroism. The atmosphere, on the other hand, to judge the remarks and complaints made in Victorian aeronautical writing, has been practically overrun by women, who, when they are not terrifying their male counterparts with their disregard for the dangers of balloons, are, as Burgoyne dryly insinuated in her account of a balloon trip, showing up men’s cowardice.121 This desire to turn the reading gaze from accounts of the atmosphere to the space of the pole curiously manifests even in scientific descriptions of the atmosphere, as in the meditation on “the thin envelope of air to which our existence is limited”122 contained in “Physical Geography: The Air” (1849), which progresses in its final pages from isothermal lines to “the situation of the southern explorer, coasting for many hundreds of miles continuously along the verge of this vast, monotonous icefield.” From here, naturally, “imagination, passing

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from pole to pole swifter than even that electricity on which heat and cold both possibly depend, if it be not itself a mode of the same element, transports us full of sympathy to the side of Franklin, ice-bound at the other extremity of the globe.”123 The mentally visualized elements of the atmosphere become, in the article’s final paragraphs, the medium of the imagination itself, which turns obsessively to the search for Franklin and visions of his survival. The atmosphere may be a space of imagination, but, by the late 1840s, Victorians attempting to imagine their nation’s relationship to the global are increasingly preoccupied by the polar, rather than the aerial, atopia.

Watch the Skies! The Nineteenth-Century Afterlife of the Threatening Atmosphere “It is quite time ‘something should be done’ to put down balloon excursions for mere curiosity,” fumed the Leader in 1851. “Perhaps the latest accident— which not only placed the transept of the Crystal Palace in great peril, knocked over chimney pots, and tore away coping, but nearly killed the aeronauts— may . . . open the eyes of the public . . . to the many dangers and extreme folly of using balloons.”124 The same balloon that had opened Victoria’s reign, piloted by the same female aeronaut, had, the Leader indicates, become a national embarrassment, and one that, in its near collision with the Crystal Palace, threatened, physically and symbolically, the global reputation for science and industry that Britain had built. If in 1785 Britons had worried that their nation was endangered by foreign balloons, by 1851 the threat had become a domestic one, with unregulated balloons—and, to some, the principles they represented—threatening not only Britain’s international reputation but also its domestic spaces. British literature’s interest in the atmosphere as aeronautical space declined with the fortunes of balloons.125 The threat posed by French balloons and by their possible occupation of the uncomfortably cosmopolitan space of the atmosphere would not entirely disappear in subsequent years—Dudley Costello’s “All the World and His Wife; or, What Brought Everybody to London in 1851” (1851), for example, features the dastardly French president of the “Cosmopolite Club”126 using a balloon to kidnap and attempt a midair ravishment of the British hero’s beloved—but as the nineteenth century wore on, the balloon appears to have been more useful as a symbol of the fluctuations of the marketplace than as a treacherous symbol of cosmopolitanism. The

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balloon’s utility as a figure of dangerously global circulation of paper remained, but the dangerous paper with which it was associated was increasingly imagined as being produced by the speculations of finance rather than those of philosophy and literature. As for the aeronautical atmosphere, while it continued to be occasionally invoked as a space conducive to imagining the international connections forged by scientific networks and other forms of transoceanic intellectual exchange, it also remained a space outside Britons’ imagined map of the nation, a space uncomfortably connected to the Outside. While the threatening balloon lambasted by the Leader is of domestic origin, we continue to see, in the danger it poses to the Great Exhibition, atmospheric space as a vector of threat to Britain’s pretensions of global dominance. Even as its visibility faded, the atmosphere thus retained its atopic status as the nineteenth century progressed, serving as a planetary rival to the ocean as a space of global connection, as a space imaginatively joined to the imperial limit represented by the poles, and as the futuristic end of a vertical axis rooted in the alternate histories of the subterranean. Indeed, it is possible to see continuity between the dangerous atmospheric space described in this chapter and the dangerous skies of turn-of-the-century invasion tales. In H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), for example, the Martians first appear in Britain as “a line of flame high in the atmosphere,” and they find a seeming ally in the oxygen-rich “atmosphere of the earth,”127 which counteracts the effect of the heavier gravity of the earth on their bodies and serves to enhance their mobility. But the Martians’ attempts to transform nature are brutally arrested when Earth’s bacteria—spread by, among other mediums, the unpredictable, plague-infused atmosphere—annihilate the would-be imperialists. Nor is the ominous gaze of Enlightenment science forgotten in Wells’s novel. It appears both in War’s famous opening paragraph (“this world was being watched keenly and closely. . . . Perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water”128) and in the lesser-known passage in which the narrator, attempting to gain perspective on the devastation the Martians have wrought, imagines “a balloon in the blazing blue”129 gazing on fleeing Londoners from what are now Martian-dominated skies. By the late nineteenth century, Britons might no longer fear French balloons, but the specter of invading “aerial monsters” had not been entirely laid to rest. Nor, perhaps, had the specter of dangerous writing. It seems significant that Wells’s imaginary “balloonist” would, from the heights of the atmosphere,

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view the Martian invasion as the relentless flow of ink from “some monstrous pen. . . . Steadily, incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley, exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting-paper.”130 The invasion from above is here portrayed as a dramatic overwriting of Britain by foreign, alien ink. Even at the twilight of the nineteenth century, the intellectual realm of the atmosphere thus appears as a vector for not only invading armies but also the ideas circulated by a literary culture that, far from serving to shore up the nation, instead threatens to prove its undoing.

Chapter 4

Underworlds

Grotto, n: . . . A cave or cavern, esp. one which is picturesque, or which forms an agreeable retreat. —Oxford English Dictionary Grotesque, n. and a.: Characterized by distortion or unnatural combinations. . . . The etymological sense of grottesca would be “painting appropriate to grottos.” —Oxford English Dictionary But of all the kinds of incompactness and disunion, the most ridiculous and contemptible, as it appears to us, is that which forces into contact the historical and the fabulous. —Review of Sophia Lee’s The Recess, 1786

Those Grotesque Regions of the Earth In 1776 a group of miners discovered a large cave system while blasting rock within the demesne of Lord Edgecumbe, near Plymouth. Reluctantly (for, in the eighteenth century, subterranean exploration was still a notoriously dangerous activity), a small group of miners ventured into the cave. They soon returned, overcome with fears both superstitious and practical, and told their overseers of the strange phenomena they had observed underground: of strange shapes and sounds and of the peculiar behavior of fire and water in “those gloomy and grotesque regions.” Particularly alarming had been the moment at which “a murmuring sound that seemed to come from the hollows of

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the cave . . . one of them, who chanced to be near the largest well with a candle in his hand, saw at that instant the water rise about half a foot.”1 Deciding, rather prudently, that the gentlemen who had expressed an interest in the cave were perhaps better suited to investigating these peculiar subterranean phenomena, the miners made their way back to the surface. We know of the discovery of Tent Cave, as it was later called, from the letters of Francis Geach (1724–98), a Plymouth surgeon and one of the inquisitive gentlemen who decided to investigate this discovery. Geach recorded his subterranean experiences in a 1776 letter to Lord Edgecumbe, which was reprinted in British periodicals such as the Oxford Magazine, Monthly Ledger, and European Magazine well into the 1790s. Geach’s letter is remarkable not only for its implied conflict between the miners’ fears regarding the cave system and his own enlightened response (an opposition that is, as I will shortly discuss, complicated by Geach’s presentation of cave formations and phenomena), but also for the way in which it exemplifies the Romantic Century’s desire to project repressed histories into subterranean spaces. Geach’s letter begins (as did many accounts of eighteenth-century cave discoveries) by acknowledging the fact that this elaborate cave system had apparently existed undetected for many years on Lord Edgecumbe’s welltraveled and surveyed estate. Geach suggests that human agency may have played a part in the site’s long invisibility: “The place, at a considerable extent round, as your lordship well knows, belonged formerly to the monks,” he observes, and then notes that the ground above the cavern “seemed to have been made with rubbish brought thither, for what purpose I know not, unless it were for that of concealment.” At the site of the miners’ penetration of the cave system, Geach claims to see further evidence of a secret Catholic hand: “Here, indeed, but here only, we saw some appearance of art and vestige of masonry.”2 However, his admission that evidence of former human occupation is “only” present outside the cave system is buried in the middle of his sentence; by the time Geach descends into the cave, his admission might as well have been forgotten, for Geach, the enlightened cave explorer, sees the vestiges of Catholicism everywhere. Having entertained the possibility that the monks knew of the cave system, Geach seems unable to divest his subsequent scientific documentation of the limestone caves from his association of Catholicism with Gothic art and architecture. He describes the first limestone cavern as having walls that are “every where deeply and uncouthly indented, here and there strengthened with ribs, naturally formed, which, placed at a due distance from each other,

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give some idea of fluted pillars in old churches.” But the further Geach descends into subterranean space, the less he acknowledges the natural origin of the structures he is describing. Creeping from “cell to cell,” Geach and his companions eventually arrive “at a natural arch of a Gothic-like structure, which is four feet from side to side, and six feet high.” “Beyond this Gothic pile is a large space, to which the arch is an entrance,” Geach writes of the next cave. This “inner room (for so we have termed it), is 11 feet long, 10 broad, 25 high.”3 Geach’s empiricist urge to document the precise measurements of subterranean space is at odds with the language of his description, which keeps obscuring the fact that the subterranean structures he and his companions encounter are natural rather than man-made. Geach’s obsessive association of this “hidden” underground space with Gothic architecture reflects his unconscious combination of a number of British traditions regarding the subterranean. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, caverns often seen as “nature’s wrecks,”4 natural parallels to the moldering abbeys and castles that, as Anne F. Janowitz has observed, registered the physical trace of a historical event on the nation. For observers who determinedly interpreted rock formations in light of Scripture—an act that Geach does not, in this letter, attempt to perform—caverns might indeed serve to “authorize” the present state of the world by testifying to humanity’s providentially ordained survival of the biblical Deluge, much as the ruins that dotted England’s countryside could be read as testifying to the inevitable rise of “England’s autonomy as a world power.”5 But unlike Britain’s ruined abbeys and crumbled Scottish castles, cave systems were unaccompanied by official histories explaining the events that had led to their formation and “ruined” appearance. Their human and planetary histories were obscure, “recoverable” only through acts of imagination and speculation. Cave spaces were more prone, therefore, to association with human histories lost or hidden to the sovereign gaze: with secret histories of rebellion and “opposition to central government,” that, as Janowitz notes, tended to drain away from the figure of the ruin in the English imagination.6 Geach’s reading of the cavern as a monkish hiding place thus suggestively associates Tent Cave’s natural features with a secret history of resistance to centralized Anglican power, a suggestion reinforced by a particularly British cultural association of Catholics with the “secret Caves, Dennes, and holes” of underground sanctuary.7 In the panic of Geach’s miners, we may perhaps glimpse another tradition informing perceptions of subterranean space: the powerful legacy of British folklore’s construction of the underground as the dwelling place of

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fairies, a construction often suggestively intertwined with the image of underground as the atopic refuge of rebels against the state.8 Belief in fairies was primarily associated with Britain’s Celtic fringe and signaled what, to some observers, was a disturbing atavism that could shade into the more politicized antimodernism of anti-English rebellion. The potential for this overlap can be discerned in the writings of Robert Kirk (1644–92), the earnest seventeenthcentury documenter of the “Secret Common-Wealth” of Highland fairies. In 1689 Kirk defended the existence of the creatures he called “Subterranean,” “people to us invisible,” who possessed their own “Commonwealth Laws and Oeconomy” separate from that of the state.9 Notably, Kirk views fairies as potential colonial subjects, comparing them to the previously undiscovered “inhabitants of America,” and the as-yet-undiscovered subterranean spaces they inhabit to the “antipodes.”10 Kirk’s construction of fairies as inhabitants of a separate, secret social order occupying fissures in the national landscape harkens back to sixteenth-century associations of Catholics with the underground. His representation of fairies also suggestively anticipates the ways in which stories surrounding Irish fairy mounts would, as Susan B. Egenolf notes of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, permit a “glimpse of a secret historical reality” of colonial unrest, hinting at the inadmissible activities of one form of “underground”—underground resistance—through allusions to a mythical subterranean.11 While Geach himself traces the “unusual and uneasy sensations” he experiences underground to material causes, his description of Tent Cave nevertheless appears haunted by the “Gothic” potential of these “gloomy and grotesque regions” of the earth.12 Indeed, we can see the strands that will later underpin the literary Gothic taking form in Geach’s association of suspect Catholicism, strange phenomena, and Gothic architecture with the natural space of caves. But the connotations of Geach’s reference to the “grotesque regions” of the subterranean also warrant explication. As Victoria Nelson has observed, the origins of the term “grotesque” can be traced to the excavation of Nero’s Domus Aurea in 1480, when a group of Italian antiquarians uncovered a subterranean network of rooms they dubbed “grotte” (“hidden pit” or “cave”). The strange art the antiquarians found on the walls—pictures of hybridized monsters and fantastic juxtapositions, “dreams of a sick person’s mind”— inspired a new art form called alla grottesca.13 The art also brought about a new architectural accessory, the artificial caves or “grottos” that soon appeared in gardens across Europe. In the seventeenth century the grotesque became associated in English with the “monstrous” or “fantastic” and with forms of

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madness characterized by deliberate or accidental anachronism.14 The term “grotesque” is thus peculiarly appropriate to the suggestive descriptions of subterranean explorers such as Francis Geach, who see in subterranean formations the half-forgotten shapes of a history, planetary or national, from which they are alienated. In the following chapter, I invoke the grotesque as an aesthetic concept inherently associated with “hidden” spaces and subterranean secrets, with buried national histories and lost or alien cultural meanings, with monstrous corporeality and the irrational fusion of opposites.15 This “aesthetic of the irreconcilable,” to borrow Colin Trodd’s, Paul Barlow’s, and David Amigoni’s phrase, persistently appeared in representations of subterranean space during the Romantic Century and may be applied, I argue, not only to the realms that opened up before cave explorers’ eyes, but also to the competing historical narratives that surface in literary representations of the subterranean.16 In exploring Tent Cave, Geach is descending into the secret history of his national landscape, a history he experiences both as a Gothic return (the sudden appearance of an atavistic past in a regulated space) and as a grotesque discovery (a past that, despite the speculations of the enlightenment observer, remains inscrutable and cannot be seamlessly integrated with the history of the world above). In all probability, Geach’s abortive attempts to read the unrecoverable history of the cavern back into its rock formations are also informed by developments in the nascent practices of archaeology and geology, both of which revealed to eighteenth-century Britons the subterranean’s capacity to serve as an independent recorder of history. While the “tradition of the cave as a passage to the underworld, the place where ghosts were encountered” dates back to ancient times,17 the association of subterranean structures with the memory of the dead took on new significance in the eighteenth century with the excavations in the 1730s and 1740s of the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii.18 Published accounts of the excavations, such as Memoirs Concerning Herculaneum, the Subterranean City (1750), contributed to an increased popular consciousness of how subterranean artifacts might not only preserve the past but also revise contemporary understandings of history. Geach’s subterranean observations more directly contribute to the emerging science of geology, a line of inquiry that, in Geach’s day, increasingly rooted speculations about planetary processes in fieldwork conducted around “newsworthy” rock formations.19 Geology, too, was poised to make drastic revisions to the accepted historical record of the planet, positing a “deep time” that far outstretched the records of human civilizations and

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contradicted Scripture-based chronologies.20 In Geach’s uneasy juxtaposition of precise measurements with allusions to the cave’s speculative Gothic history, we may see the influence of a growing cultural awareness of the subterranean’s capacity to serve as a repository of histories that evade, challenge, or subvert the narratives of the world above. In the following chapter, I examine the peculiar resonances of subterranean space in the British imagination, considering how caves and secret passages functioned not only as an asylum or refuge for those seeking to escape imperial space but also as a synecdoche for alternative and suppressed perspectives on the history of the nation-state. In attempting to illustrate the links among representations of underground space, the aesthetics of the grotesque, and the repeated appearance of the subterranean in novels and poems depicting challenges to state power, I will bring together two modes of investigation of literature’s subterranean spaces. By far, most of the literary criticism examining subterranean spaces has focused on the psychological implications of Gothic literature’s preoccupation with secret passages and the underground lairs of nefarious banditti.21 This line of criticism has remained largely isolated from historians’ and cultural geographers’ interest in the dramatic changes in perceptions of subterranean space taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.22 In the following chapter, then, I will put some of the most striking subterranean atopias of this period alongside an archive largely untouched by literary scholars: the depictions of subterranean spaces by cave explorers and tourists, which, printed in pamphlets, newspapers, and periodicals, circulated alongside fictional depictions of the subterranean during the Romantic Century.23 In doing so, I hope to illustrate the ways in which real geological formations were read alongside the fictional spaces of Gothic novels and Romantic poetry as spaces that contained histories that potentially conflicted with dominant narratives of national progress, as the domain of those who abjured or were outlawed from British society’s established networks of power and as bastions of the imagination.

Exploring the Subterranean, 1680–1830 The term “subterranean” encompasses a multiplicity of spaces, ranging from the mythical space of the inner earth, to the atopia of deep cavern systems, to atopic cave mouths, to the human-forged mines that, like the ships discussed in Chapter 2, exposed laborers to the influence of a surrounding atopia

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presumed corrosive to body and mind. If the ocean was a site of useful but menacing fluidity, the subterranean tended to be characterized by stubborn fixity and omnipresent darkness, features that retarded, rather than enabled, mobility. And yet the subterranean was also imagined as a global space that was entangled with the fluid spaces of ocean and atmosphere, maintaining, via drainage, “that vast body of water the sea . . . fit for . . . sailors to navigate,”24 and exhaling from its mysterious depths “the poisonous air” that contaminated “the passing gale with plagues and death.”25 It was also, despite its quotidian appearance of fixity, as capable as the ocean and atmosphere of sudden, violent motion, menacing underground travelers with the often lethal hazards of explosion, rockfall, and collapse. The exploration of the underground was thus associated with the dangerous exploration of other environments; indeed, British promoters of mining would sometimes, citing the contributions of miners to the development of both British industry and technologies such as the compass, portray subterranean exploration as both participating in and enabling the “Revival of Geography, of Trade, of Natural History, and the Discovery of several strange Countries.”26 Britons assumed that venturing into the subterranean was a risky affair. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works tend to take for granted “the evil effects of mines upon those who work in them,”27 and accounts of early cave exploration are littered with the tales of adventurers whose exposure to the geological underworld proved fatal.28 Madness, too, was a danger associated with subterranean exploration: The “poor Peasant”29 who descended into the Eldon Hole in Derbyshire famously returned to the surface as a lunatic, and the “Mr. Day” who attempted to dive the sump in England’s Peak Cavern in 1773 similarly returned to the surface “disorder’d.”30 Whereas twenty-firstcentury readers are primed to consider caverns as natural dwellings for primitive man, then, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons did not automatically view cave spaces as domestic. Indeed, the powerful cultural traditions surrounding subterranean spaces cultivated the assumption that caves were not fit dwelling places for ordinary humans. Their gaping mouths might be occupied by peculiar individuals wishing to keep one foot in the spirit world—witches and hermits—or might offer temporary asylum to bandits, rebels, and Catholics, who no doubt were doing the devil’s work anyway. But to Britons assured of their membership in society, such as Francis Geach, caves could usually be imagined in domestic terms only if occupied by the Other. The power of this cultural assumption is strikingly illustrated by the pioneering work of William Buckland (1784–1839), the geologist who, beginning

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in 1816, “inaugurated modern cave research” with his excavations of caverns.31 When human fossils began to be discovered in excavated caves, Buckland was at a loss to discover a possible “motive for living in such a Place.”32 Of the ancient human bones discovered in a limestone cave at Burringdon, Buckland speculated that the bones demonstrated that the cavern had served as a “place of sepulture in early times” or had been “resorted to for refuge by wretches . . . when the country was suffering under one of the numerous military operations . . . conducted in that quarter.”33 Similarly, when confronted with evidence of habitation surrounding the famous “Red Lady” skeleton, Buckland concluded that the person whose remains he had discovered could not have been a typical member of her society but must have belonged to the “underground” female occupations of witch or prostitute.34 For, Buckland assumed, only the dead, the abject, or those seeking temporary sanctuary would willingly dwell in a cave. However outlandish some of Buckland’s conjectures might now appear, his difficulty in imagining domestic cave space is both culturally symptomatic and logical: In an era before artificial lighting or effective ventilation methods, Britons had good reason to view the subterranean as habitable only as a last resort.35 While the subterranean can be occupied, in other words, its occupation is usually presumed to be temporary, and, like the poles, ocean, and atmosphere, it can pose a challenge to the presumptive spatial power of the nation and empire. Its occupants are usually represented as excluded from, or living on the fringes of, the nation, and its recesses are assumed to resist, and to enable resistance against, sovereign power. On that score, it is significant that one of the few, and one of the most famous, fictional depictions of a successful occupation of a cave is imagined in that ultimate imperial fantasy, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Crucially, Crusoe does not aspire to live in the caves he discovers; instead, he wishes to rid them of the rival powers they might contain. Crusoe’s spatial mastery of his island arguably culminates with his discovery of the second cave, which he must evacuate of his superstitious fears (the “devil or man” that he fears lurks in the cavern’s depths) in order to don the mantle of power possessed by the mythological subterranean’s former occupants (“I fancy’d my self now like one of the ancient giants, which were said to live in caves, and holes, in the rocks, where none could come at them”).36 Having purged his island of its last unsurveyed space, Crusoe then converts the cavern, not into a dwelling space, but into a powder magazine, staging, in effect, a military occupation of the subterranean in which its secret spaces are exposed and then made to hold the symbols of his martial power. Crusoe imagines

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living in the cave only if his island is invaded by an outside power—the cannibals– in which case he would, like so many remnants before him, retreat to the sanctuary of the subterranean in an attempt to outlast the new sovereign order. Even as it depicts the exposure and occupation of cave space, in other words, Defoe’s fantasy of colonial spatial mastery assumes that the subterranean is a space of resistance that must be exposed and stripped of the threat it might otherwise pose to Crusoe’s sovereignty over the island.37 While caverns, not mines, are the focus of this chapter, it should be noted that, in the British literature, mine spaces are often portrayed as blending or segueing into the natural subterranean, taking on the latter’s connotations. Indeed, mining and other forms of excavation are often characterized as modes of travel into a global subterranean atopia, not as acts of construction. In John Sargent’s scientific poem The Mine (1785), for example, miners appear only briefly and are characterized as explorers attempting to penetrate the blank space of the inner earth.38 The Queen of Fairies appears and scoffs at their efforts, claiming that “tho’ you toil for ever, / Never shall your labours, never / Our essential realms unfold.”39 A footnote helpfully observes that the deepest mines bear “no proportion to the depth of the globe,” which remains, like the poles, an “undiscovered space . . . filled according to the conjectures of speculative men.”40 The privileging of the perspectives of “speculative men” and of gentrified cave exploration is indicated by the mine’s swift absorption into the familiar discourse of the natural subterranean: The miners quickly vanish from the narrative, which focuses instead on a group of upper-class exiles bemoaning their relegation to the subterranean refuge of “Outcasts and ruthless bandits.”41 Although they find themselves in a mine rather than a cavern, the nobles assume the inevitably fatal consequences of their exposure to the hostile subterranean: As one exile notes, the “inflicted ill” of a subterranean sojourn “Bears its own cure: the damp infectious air / Will quickly set me free.”42 Despite the human-forged nature of the titular mine, in other words, Sargent’s narrative downplays the presence of labor and portrays the subterranean space that encompasses the mine as a marvelous but lethal atopia. As my discussion of Sargent’s poem may indicate, the rise of geological exploration as the province of the educated scientific gentleman often involved the erasure of the labor and presence of the lower-class miners who had preceded their social betters into the subterranean. This development took on a peculiarly national character: Whereas the German Romantics, as Theodore Ziolkowski observes, reveled in depictions of the sublime spaces of mines, the British Romantics appeared to share a “national predisposition against

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mining” that often led them to exclude miners and mines from their works, except when the latter space had been, via the phenomenon of the show cave, imaginatively reintegrated into the natural subterranean.43 Ziolkowski suggests that this British discomfort with mining stemmed from its close ties with the Industrial Revolution: British mining had, after all, catalyzed the development of Watt’s steam engine and fueled British factories. Abstract though these connections may appear, Ziolkowski’s argument is borne out by the particularly atopic valence of mining in British discussions of the industry. By bringing the countryside and the poisonous effluence of subterranean atopia into physical proximity, mining, unlike nautical labor, was imagined as endangering the agriculture that underpins rural place. To a far greater extent than salt water, the mineral material removed from the subterranean atopia is, as John Sargent observes, “peculiarly destructive to all vegetable productions”; runoff from mines thus threatens to undo agricultural improvements, turning cultivated lands back into “savage” wastes.44 John Barrow, ever a supporter of the nineteenth-century landed interest, expanded on this sentiment in 1812, observing that “the advantages which agriculture possesses over the mining trade” included not turning the British landscape into a Dante-esque vision of “wicker-work hovels . . . filth and stench.”45 Barrow’s rhetoric, while specifically aimed at the social and environmental contamination that Britons associated with mining, is also suggestive of a larger critique of the social changes wrought by urban factories. As I will explore in the final chapter, nineteenthcentury writers’ invocation of natural atopias thus does indeed intersect with the fear of a capitalist destruction of place associated, in the twentieth century, with the rise of the urban nonplace. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, subterranean space underwent an imaginative renovation that would transform it from the unexplored site of myth to a site containing alternative ways of imagining the history of the planet, nation, and empire. One of the key elements in this transformation, I argue, was Europeans’ growing interest in the exploration of the underground. In 1676 the deepest recorded cave in the world measured only sixty-four meters. Tales of deeper caves existed, of course, but without accurate maps, reliable artificial lighting, tested methods of negotiating caves, and a widespread audience for publications that attempted to describe or document the earth’s interior, little progress was made in documenting the depths of the earth until the mid-eighteenth century. The Romantic Century’s advances in subterranean exploration are indicated by the dramatic increase in recorded cave depth from 1748 (when it jumped from the previous record of

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64 meters to 138 meters, after exploration of the Macocha cave in what is now the Czech Republic) to 1841 (when the new record was set at 329 meters, after exploration of a cave at Trebiciano, near Trieste). In part, these advancements occurred because of improvements in technology—the first equipment designed specifically for exploring caves was introduced during the eighteenth century—and in part because of growing interest in exploration and natural history.46 Similar progress was made in mining, where the Newcomen engine (introduced in 1712) and the Watt steam engine (which was in widespread use in Cornish mining by 1784) powered pumps that enabled the working of deeper shafts.47 As I have just indicated, however, the progress of mining as an industry attracted less enthused public celebration than the achievements of cave explorers. Despite living on an island, many Britons lived and died without ever seeing the ocean, and only a very small minority were ever in a position to travel to the poles. Like the atmosphere, however, the mysterious subterranean was potentially accessible everywhere. As a result, while the annals of the first age of cave exploration (roughly 1680–1850) are dominated by the names of merchant captains and “naval officers who ‘made a habit of measuring slopes and estimating distances,’ ”48 they also contain the names of Britons whose class or sex would have prevented them from participating in other forms of exploration, such as the intrepid “Mrs. Gillespie at Kilmoree,” who, in 1808, inspired by “the marvelous stories she had heard,” took a boat to a then “unknown” cave system and explored what later became known as the celebrated Spar Cave of Skye.49 While most accounts of early cave exploration and discovery come via the familiar voices of educated gentlemen (and occasionally gentlewomen),50 the presence of other, voiceless explorers can be detected at the peripheries of these texts, in the shadowy forms of the miners who preceded Francis Geach into the bowels of Tent Cave or who left their instruments to mark their prior exploration of “newly discovered” caves such as Loxton Cavern.51 Class and community tensions often surface in relation to the question of who could lay claim to subterranean spaces. The British mining industry, particularly in Cornwall, had well-established traditions for negotiating the tension between the claims of the owner of the mine and that of the miners whose labor uncovered valuable materials.52 Cave space had comparatively less in the way of cultural scaffolding to negotiate claims to its space, and contention surfaces in many texts describing early cave exploration. On one hand, the eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century discovery of a cave often led to it

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being claimed (verbally, if not legally) as a national treasure or wonder; however, as we saw in Geach’s implication that Tent Cave was hidden by Catholic monks, subterranean spaces were also associated with local resistance to modern, centralized modes of measuring and controlling space. Smugglers and outlaws notoriously used caves, recesses, and subterranean passageways to evade detection outside, as well as inside, the pages of Gothic fiction. Even when caves were not sites of active resistance, the gentlemen who wanted to claim these subterranean spaces as tourist destinations were frequently frustrated by locals’ conflicting claims to these regions. One particularly remarkable contest over subterranean space helps convey the degree to which local (lower-class) and national (upper-class) interests in subterranean space were assumed to be opposed: In 1797, the True Briton reported the discovery of a new cave near Bristol, which, despite its importance to natural historians, had remained frustratingly accessible to the locals who had discovered it. Luckily, according to the True Briton, the cave was protected from the “depredations” of the “country people” who were its discoverers by a local gentleman who, “with great liberality and propriety, caused a door to be fitted to the entrance, in order to preserve it as perfect as possible, as a treat for the Naturalist and Antiquarian.”53 The gentleman in question apparently had no legitimate property rights to the cave itself, but, by sealing off this subterranean area, he managed to effectively reserve the cave as a privileged space. The opposition between “primitive,” local forms of knowledge and the enlightened views of cosmopolitan adventurers is also played out repeatedly in accounts of subterranean exploration. Thus, the intrepid Mrs. Gillespie (a foreigner by birth and a Scot only by marriage, we are told) is praised for triumphing over “the perpetual darkness which dwells in these gelid and dreary mansions,” which “added strength to the superstitious fears of the natives, and marked these caves as the certain abodes of malignant spirits, and supernatural beings, which subsequently precluded their being thoroughly examined.”54 In British guidebooks during this period, subterranean exploration tends to appear as a marker of not only Enlightenment progress but also increasing British unity, as scientific and imperial ways of viewing subterranean space travel from the center to the periphery of the nation. The explanations offered for the geological formations and fossil evidence found in subterranean space were diverse: Caves were cited in the catastrophist and uniformitarian theories of the time as being evidence for the former convulsions of the earth, “Apertures of the Abyss” through which biblical floodwaters had drained,55 the products of erosion on as-yet-unformed rocks,56 and

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the product of tectonic forces that had folded rock like “the leaves of a book,” leaving the record of former convulsions to be read by future generations.57 But no matter which theory a particular writer might embrace, all agreed that subterranean spaces were natural destinations for those interested in national and world history. As the young hero of Elizabeth Helme’s Instructive Rambles in London (1798) declares on exploring a cave for the first time, “when I have made myself master of the history of my own country, I know no study that would afford me so much pleasure” as the study of the history contained in the subterranean formations of the earth.58 But the history of the earth was by no means settled. Indeed, caves and other subterranean spaces were notorious for challenging early geologists’ conceptions of the earth during this period, presenting excavators with fossil evidence that seemed incompatible with biblical history.59 Accounting for both subterranean evidence of extinct animals and sacred events such as the Deluge required considerable theoretical dexterity on the part of scientists who, like Buckland, wished to reconcile empirical evidence with sacred histories of the earth. In literature, we can see these tensions explicitly echoed in works like Beckford’s Vathek (1786), which famously culminates in the titular protagonist’s entrapment in the subterranean expanse he has entered in the pursuit of power and knowledge. Motivated by a “thirst for knowledge which ever should be hidden from mortals,” Vathek, his lover, and his mother pursue power into the “subterranean expanses of the mountain,” and they come to possess “the exclusive privilege” of viewing representations of “the various animals that inhabited the earth prior to the creation of that contemptible being whom ye denominate the father of mankind.”60 But after having “penetrated the very entrails of the earth” in their unholy quest, they are condemned to spend the rest of eternity with their hearts engulfed in flames.61 Vathek and his companions are thus ultimately punished for their unholy knowledge seeking, and Vathek’s overextended sovereignty is entombed in the subterranean realms he had sought to make subject to his despotic gaze. Concern over the implications of the history of the earth may have contributed to the popular insistence (even on the part of uniformitarian geologists) of reading the marvelous back into subterranean space, and projecting into the darkness of underground caverns evidence of a premodern sacred past and of the power of creation both human and divine. While Macleay’s 1811 description of Spar Cave depicts Mrs. Gillespie’s exploration of the cave as a triumph over local superstition, for example, Macleay, like Francis Geach, evacuates the cave’s supernatural possibilities only to project primitive Gothic,

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grotesque, and mythological imagery back onto natural geological formations. Turning from the “grotesque and elegant structures” of the rocky coastline near the cave to Spar Cave itself, Macleay promises that on entering the cave, a visitor will feel “transported to the abodes of Genii, or to the temple of Fairies, whose magic art has created such a collection of images at once to delight and astonish.”62 Like Geach, Macleay glosses over the natural origin of the cave’s stalagmites and stalactites, instead reading them as artistic productions that might be found in the ruins of a Catholic monastery or pagan temple: The first to attract his notice is a spar statue of a monk, on the right side, as large as life. . . . It appears in a kneeling posture upon a cushion, as if in the act of devotion, with uplifted hands. The drapery of the gown, which envelopes the body, is beautiful and correct. The head is bare, and seems shaven after the monastic fashion, without any resemblance of hair. The face is distinctly seen, though the nose is rather small and flat. The shoulders are just in proportion, as are the other parts of this figure, so that it may almost pass for an Anthropolite.63 Macleay “discovers” a host of Catholic statuary within the cave, and he feels the need to judge it according to artistic standards, praising, in this case, the “correctness” of the monk’s attire and the style in which the cavern depicts “the head of a nun covered with a hood . . . the drapery of which on both sides, is chaste and elegant.”64 The line between the artificial and the natural is absolutely blurred in Macleay’s description of the last cave chamber, which he refers to as a “subterranean Grotto” within which a “lively imagination” may trace among “figures . . . grotesque and fanciful” a “complete model of the golden fleece, in bas relief, and of the due size.”65 Macleay’s desire to mentally project onto cave space the artistic creations of his “lively imagination” also reflects the association of subterranean enclosures with the mysterious operations of that cave of the skull, the human mind, and particularly with the mind’s capacity to populate obscure, unknowable spaces with its own imaginative creations.66 This approach to reading subterranean space is perhaps best captured by John Hutton (1740–1806) in A Tour to the Caves, in the Environs of Ingleborough and Settle (1781), the first book in English about subterranean exploration and the publication generally credited with starting the fashion for British cave tourism. Despite his contributions to geological theory (for Hutton, as Shaw notes, produced one of the

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first English theories of cave formation),67 Hutton makes it clear that his entrance to subterranean space as a “curious and speculative traveler” is mediated primarily by poetry: “Having never been in a cave before, a thousand ideas, which had been for many years dormant, were excited in my imagination on my entrance into this gloomy cavern. Several passages out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil, and other classics crowded into my mind together.”68 Hutton’s description of the caverns he explores with his companions emphasizes the limitations of their journey: the vast darkness their weak torches cannot penetrate; the uncertain and tentative nature of their estimated measurements. Whereas at other points in his narrative he emphasizes the prospect commanded by the travelers’ gaze as they journey up the mountains—“All the country betwixt us and the sea, to the extent of forty, fifty, and sixty miles from the north-west, by the west to the south-west, lay stretched out beneath us, like a large map, with the roads, rivers, villages, towns, seats, hills and vales, capes and bays, in succession”—he happily recounts their failure to completely explore or accurately perceive the caves through which they also travel: “With all the light we could procure from our candles and torches, we were not able to see the dimensions of this cavern,” he says of the first cavern they explore, enjoying the stimulation to the imagination that such Miltonic “darkness visible” provides.69 After describing the terrors of another cavern he acknowledges that “there was room for the imagination to conceive this cavern more dreadful and horrible, if possible, than it was in reality,” and he follows his evocation of the sublime horrors of subterranean space with a surprisingly domestic image that spells out who, if anyone, Hutton perceives as the natural inhabitant of the dangerous caverns he is exploring: “A stranger cannot but take notice of a natural seat and table in a corner of this grotesque room, well suited for a poet or philosopher: Here he may be excluded from the bustle of the world, though not from noise; the uniform roaring however of the cascade will exclude from the ear every other sound, and his retirement will conceal him from every object that might divert the eye.”70 Subterranean space is thus identified with the space of a poet’s or philosopher’s mind, a mysterious interior space that cannot (in Hutton’s account) be fully charted or explored, within which both the mysteries of human existence and the creations of the imagination can be traced. It will also (as this chapter proceeds later into the Romantic Century) become increasingly identified with the products of the creative imagination, to the extent that the show caves (subterranean spaces displayed to public for money) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were often named

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not for their original discoverers but for the literary settings they were thought to either resemble or inform. Thus, the famous Rutland Cavern of Derbyshire contains not only an “Ossian’s hall,”71 but also, as its main attraction, “an arcade to the hall of enchantment, in the castle of Otranto.”72 The Romantics’ conversion of cave spaces into literary theme parks should give us pause, particularly in the case of enthusiasts like Macleay, who celebrates the annihilation of local myths and also projects onto cavern formations the products of his own imagination. It is in such ostensibly contradictory attitudes that we can see the traces of what, in other spatial contexts, would develop into colonial acquisitiveness. There is a similarity between the tourist’s desire to project the figments of his imagination into a space evacuated of its supernatural connotations, and Crusoe’s eradication of the supernatural from his island caves. Through exploration and standardization of space, regions previously obscure and potentially resistant are rid of the darkness of accumulated tradition and converted into the blank space of a fresh artistic canvas. Indeed, it is possible to read many late eighteenth-century celebrations of fanciful cave tourism as the final stage in the exertion of national control over resistant spaces: It is only when dangerous cultural beliefs have truly been evicted from the subterranean that they can be reintroduced in controlled form for the enjoyment of the standardized British subject. But this is not to say that fictional representations of the subterranean all uncritically participate in the mapping of national and imperial territory. Works such as Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–85) elegize, but also subversively invoke, alternative ways of imagining the nation in their depictions of underground space. The titular Recess combines many of the elements described in the preceding paragraphs: It is a hidden site of resistance to centralized, imperial modes of historical narration and spatial control, which can be seen as overlapping with the inner recesses of the human mind. In associating subterranean space with alternate histories of England, Lee draws on subterranean space’s potential to disturb and challenge dominant narratives of history. Ultimately, I argue, the fate of Lee’s characters suggests that Lee is less interested in subterranean space as refuge than she is in subterranean space’s testimony to the limits of imperial knowledge and control and in the mediating role that print culture and art can play in reimagining the national community.

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Chasms in the Story: Buried Histories in Sophia Lee’s The Recess First published in 1783, Sophia Lee’s The Recess quickly became one of the first and most popular examples of what some critics now refer to as the “Female Gothic.”73 Within twenty years of its original publication, Lee’s depiction of the misadventures of the twin daughters of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, had run through five officially licensed English editions, been translated into multiple languages, and inspired a play, an opera, and a host of novels that imitated Lee’s ingenious blend of historical fact with Gothic fiction. Indeed, Lee’s long-suffering Stuart heroines proved so popular that, well into the nineteenth century, authors such as Mary Roberts referred to Mary Stuart’s daughters as though they were historical personages, not the creations of a fellow writer’s imagination.74 Roberts’s willingness to integrate Lee’s fabulous invention into her private history of the nation might have pleased Lee, who, despite knowing Elizabethan history well, reversed the order of famous historical events such as the execution of Mary Stuart and the destruction of the Armada (a subversively counterfactual act that may, as I will shortly argue, be allied to The Recess’s orientation against the standardizing practices of the imperial state).75 Lee’s novel follows the unfortunate adventures of Matilda and Ellinor, the twin daughters of the Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk, who are raised in secrecy in the vast underground complex that gives Lee’s novel its title. As legitimate heirs to the thrones of England and Scotland, the heroines are in constant danger from Queen Elizabeth, whose unfeminine desire for power and empire leads her to persecute and destroy those she perceives as threats. Matilda and Ellinor become romantic as well as political rivals to Elizabeth when they each fall in love with one of Elizabeth’s favorites: Matilda with Lord Leicester and Ellinor with Lord Essex. Once they leave the safety of the Recess, the heroines are assailed by disaster and tragedy. Parted from the men they love, and from each other, they enter into the circuits of England’s developing empire and spend time as isolated captives in the colonies of Jamaica and Ireland, before escaping to die of grief in the lands that might have been theirs to rule. As other critics have observed, The Recess is a novel that is preoccupied with space: the dark interiors of the various towers, houses, and nunneries in which Matilda and Ellinor are imprisoned; the ocean that parts them; the Torrid Zones and Celtic Fringes through which they wander; and lastly, but

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most importantly, the subterranean space of the novel’s title.76 In the most detailed analysis of The Recess’s titular space, “Pretenders in Sanctuary,” Richard Maxwell notes that the underground space of The Recess is part of a long literary tradition that associates royal pretenders with “the motif of sanctuary, a space outside the law sought by lost, pursued, or abandoned would-be royals.” “Sanctuary and diplomatic asylum are parallel institutions,” Maxwell observes of one such pretender tale, adding that both forms of refuge are presented as being “like (or indeed derive[d] from) the natural retreats of animals, ‘rocks and caves.’ ”77 Maxwell does not pursue this observation, focusing on the political implications of fictional pretenders rather than on the peculiar subterranean nature of the asylums they tend to emerge from. I, on the other hand, wish to stress that the aboveground sanctuaries of foreign courts and manors are presented as being derived from the natural space of caves, as opposed to what many would consider a more obvious origin of sanctuary, the sanctified space of a church. Indeed, caves often seem superior to both churches and courts in these pretender tales, for while man-made sanctuaries fail with great regularity, truly subterranean refuges usually remain safely outside the realm of the enthroned sovereign, although, as we shall see in The Recess, this does not necessarily guarantee the safety of those who take shelter in their depths.78 Lee’s The Recess, I suggest, is a novel that participates in and is in part informed by shifting eighteenth-century conceptions of subterranean space. The various associations that Lee makes with the Recess of the title—that it is, alternatively, a prison, tomb, refuge, Catholic sanctuary, work of art, and double for the human mind—not only draw on the same eighteenth-century conceptions of cave space that inform the literature produced by subterranean explorers, but also position Lee’s famous “hybrid”79 as a novel that is, in both its subject matter and its form, grotesque. Contemporary reviewers, whether they praised or maligned the novel, acknowledged it as such: “Of all the kinds of incompactness and disunion, the most ridiculous and contemptible, as it appears to us, is that which forces into contact the historical and the fabulous,” the English Review wrote of Lee’s novel in 1786, characterizing The Recess as a failed attempt to unify elements that should remain irreconcilable.80 Rather than merely speculating on preexisting blanks in the historical narrative, The Recess does something far more subversive, subtly altering the facts of Britain’s historical narrative to create room for its story, even as it alters the map of the nation to create an imagined atopia within a space already standardized by state cartography. No longer, in short, are we seeing authors speculate on

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preexisting atopias; in the case of the subterranean, we see them actually creating them. In the following section, then, I intend to examine The Recess’s grotesque blend of the “historical and the fabulous” as markers not, as other critics have suggested, of its divided allegiance to the developing genres of the historical novel and the Gothic, but as markers of its participation in a kind of subversive “subterranean literature” that anticipates that nineteenth-century invention, the grotesque romance. The Recess begins with an image of excavation. The narrator, Matilda, Mary Stuart’s eldest daughter, confesses her reluctance to dig up “all the sad images buried in my bosom” for the benefit of her sympathetic reader. Having agreed to expose her buried history, however, Matilda takes us into the depths of underground space with a paragraph that indicates the importance of space to her story, beginning with a sentence that tells her audience that her “life commenced with an incident so extraordinary as the following facts alone could incline any one to credit.” Matilda’s narrated life “commences” at a surprising point. Rather than beginning, as readers might expect, with an account of the twin daughters’ extraordinary (and secret) birth to their famous mother, her opening sentence instead identifies her life’s commencement with a moment of self-discovery in a subterranean setting: “As soon as capable of reflection, I found myself and a sister of my own age, in an apartment with a lady, and a maid older than herself.” The apartments in which Matilda “finds herself ” appear to be underground, far from the light of the sun, and every day, she and her sister receive, as in a fairy tale, “whatever was necessary for subsistence or improvement, supplied . . . by some invisible hand.”81 Although Matilda’s and her sister’s royal identities are key to the plot of the novel, the first mystery that Matilda tries to unfold is not related to who or what she is—indeed, she displays little curiosity about herself, her genealogical history, her fellow subterranean inhabitants, or the rationale behind their underground seclusion—but, instead, to the nature of the peculiar space she occupies. Exploring the Recess, Matilda and her sister discover that “every room was distinct, and divided from the rest by a vaulted passage with many stairs, while our light proceeded from small casements of painted glass, so infinitely above our reach that we could never seek a world beyond; and so dim, that the beams of the sun were almost a new object to us when we quitted this retirement.”82 This portion of the Recess could not, she later reflects, “be called a cave, because it was composed of various rooms; and the stones were obviously united by labor.”83 But it is, she later learns, connected by “several

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subterraneous passages”84 to an abbey that once housed a monastery and to a genuine cave system. From the beginning, then, the Recess appears as a strikingly ambiguous space, a creation of both art and nature, which, as a space separated from the historical processes of the world outside, can be conceived of as either a refuge or a tomb. The Recess’s annexation to the space of the natural subterranean, however, is indicated by its afterlife in translation, in which its title was rendered as a reference to a natural cave system rather than a caveruin hybrid. This is particularly striking in the case of the English re-translation of the novel, which, taking its inspiration from the French version, Le Souterrain, ou les deux soeurs, rendered the novel’s title as The Cavern, or the Two Sisters (1809). Eventually, Mrs. Marlow, the girls’ female guardian, tells them the history of the Recess, and in unfolding its tale she reveals the girls’ own peculiar relationship to the British state. The subterranean passageways that Matilda and Ellinor have walked since birth were originally, Mrs. Marlow explains, developed and used as a (presumably secret) communication between the nunnery housed in the apartments and the nearby monastery. Although the nunnery and the monastery were abandoned around the time of the Reformation, the labyrinth of their buried history remained and was rediscovered by an aristocratic Catholic sympathizer who used it to hide priests. Finding “themselves shut up in too small a place, and in total want of employment,” the hidden priests “began working under ground and by degrees formed two other passages from the Recess, one of which ends in the Hermit’s cave . . . and the other in the midst of the ruins.”85 The tunnels left by burrowing Catholics have been put to use yet again in the current generation, this time to hide the twin daughters of Mary Stuart and the Duke of Norfolk. Matilda and Ellinor thus learn the history of their parents’ secret relationship in the context of a history of illicit relationships among monks, nuns, overtly Protestant lords, and Catholic priests, all of which, in attempting to escape the gaze of the institutions of church and state, have created the subterranean network of the Recess. The Recess is thus conceived of as a space both developed by and permitting unlicensed histories: It is a space that simultaneously shelters and preserves the histories of those who wish to live outside the state. From their male guardian, Father Anthony, Matilda and her sister learn that the space of the Recess offers a refuge from “a terrible . . . place called the world, where a few haughty individuals commanded miserable millions, whom a few artful ones made so.”86 But the girls find their confinement within the Recess oppressive, and despite Father Anthony’s warnings, they long to

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journey to this exciting space of sovereign power of which they have heard so much. They explore the passage leading to the ruins in the hopes of finding a way of escaping into the world outside, and after traversing a passage that is “narrower, closer and damper than the others” they exit the Recess through a passageway concealed by “a high raised tomb, at each corner of which stood a gigantic statue of a man in armor.”87 This is the first of many references that link the Recess to the necropolis, or place of the dead, but what I would like to stress in this passage is the Recess’s connection to art: The first entrance to the Recess is, as we learn here, concealed behind a statue. Matilda later describes the second entrance as being a “door of the size of that portrait which first gave me such singular sensations” (the portrait in question being a painting of the Duke of Norfolk, Matilda’s father).88 Both entrances are associated with memorials to the dead—the first with a tomb’s statue, the second with a portrait of Matilda’s dead father—but particularly with artistic representations of the dead. Insofar, then, as the Recess, as subterranean space, is also linked to the space of the creative imagination, we can see it as protected by and existing within works of art. As a work of art that represents both the real and imaginary dead, Lee’s novel can be seen as providing a gateway to the space of its title. After discovering this exit, Matilda and Ellinor begin, in secret, to leave the Recess and explore the surrounding territory of the ruined abbey, claiming it as their “new empire”—a phrase that indicates that they have indeed entered the world of sovereign power and property relations that Father Anthony warned them about. This claim prefaces their fall: On leaving the Recess in search of “empire,”89 the two fictional heroines quickly become drawn into the destructive schemes of historical figures such as Lord Leicester and Lord Essex, who see in the women’s connection to the English throne the opportunity for their own rise to power. “Born as you are for empire . . . with incontestable evidence of your birth (which I will employ every art to procure) I will boldly present to the people of England another blooming Queen,” Essex promises Ellinor.90 But both men’s schemes are doomed to failure, and both women end up spending part of their life as colonial prisoners, not as sovereign rulers: Matilda is imprisoned in Jamaica until freed by a slave rebellion, and Ellinor becomes a captive of a rebellious Irish chieftain who, like her, does not recognize Elizabeth’s sovereignty. Part of the problem faced by the sisters is that the Recess, as a geoimaginary space outside the realm of sovereign power, cannot be used as a base from which to attack or reform the world outside. Matilda and Ellinor have

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no property in this space—indeed, at a crisis point later in the novel, the property-less Matilda can only bribe the sailors under her command with “imaginary worlds to row on.”91 They also cannot control or rule the space of the Recess, which as an area outside the law is as accessible to bandits and criminals as it is to them. When Matilda returns to seek refuge in the Recess with Lord Leicester, they are promptly captured by a group of outlaws who have set up residence there, led by a man who (like the Bounty mutineers I discuss later in this chapter) has escaped the laws of society by daring to “precipitate himself into the ocean in search of freedom” and afterward seeking out the similarly atopic space of the subterranean.92 Finally, Matilda and her sister do not always have access to underground space: Indeed, while the sovereign forces arrayed against them cannot seem to invade the Recess itself, they do eventually succeed in sealing it off from the outside world. Late in the novel, Ellinor returns to the abbey to find that “the same imperious will which had destroyed me” has transformed the ruined abbey into the “bare and barren level” of Lefebvre’s abstract space—one of the homogeneous, logico-mathematical spaces characteristic of modernity93—awaiting further imposition of spatial measures of imperial control. The surrounding terrain is to be gridded and transformed with “infant plantations,”94 a phrase that recalls similar attempts to spatially transform and control the colonial spaces through which Ellinor and her sister circulate over the course of the novel. Below the surface, the subterranean passageways of the Recess still presumably exist, but Ellinor can no longer reach them. In seeking, like her sister, public recognition that she was “born . . . for empire,” Ellinor has been punished for her implicit assertion of a rival narrative of sovereignty by being physically trapped in the standardized history and space of the world she once longed to join. The atopic space of the Recess can thus never be brought into exact alignment with the world outside its anachronistic depths. Its primary value lies in its private function: in allowing outlaws to take refuge in its subterranean labyrinth and, by virtue of its existence, providing a space within which society can be reconceived. Hitherto I have discussed the Recess’s role as a physical setting, but one of the most intriguing aspects of this subterranean network, of course, is the degree to which it overlaps and is identified with the heroines’ mental space. This overlap is immediately suggested by Lee’s use of the term “recess,” which, in its sense of denoting “one of the remotest or innermost parts or corners of anything,” was frequently applied to both mental and geological space during the eighteenth century.95 Lee makes this connection clear early in the novel, when

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Matilda, summoned by Lord Leicester to join him at Kenilworth, experiences a moment of regret on leaving the Recess in which she has spent her youth: “It seemed to me, as if in quitting the place where the dust of Mrs. Marlow was interred, I quitted likewise her idea: every spot I looked upon was marked by some noble sentiment, or tender emotion of that dear lady: but I was unjust to myself, for I have carried in my heart, through every scene of life, her respectable image, and nothing but death can efface it.”96 In the latter half of this paragraph, Matilda makes the move anticipated by the title of Lee’s novel, and she links the subterranean site of the Recess to her own interiority, revealing that even though she will lose her ability to interact with this significant location, the associations that make the Recess significant to her will be “carried” in her heart as an unchanging mark of character through all of the subsequent scenes of the novel. From this point onward, precious little of the action of The Recess takes place in the space that lends Lee’s novel its title, and yet the idea of a subterranean space in which buried histories accumulate—a space that, like eighteenth-century caves, comes to be associated not only with repressed national histories but also with the private recesses of the human mind— continues to be felt in the actions and experiences of Lee’s characters. In part, the “buried histories” of The Recess are the buried histories of human hearts, and much of the real strangeness of the novel turns on the ultimate inaccessibility of the minds of others.97 Matilda, for example, adores Lord Leicester and believes that her sister is likewise smitten with his charms. Only in Part IV do we get Ellinor’s perspective as she unfolds her own narrative in an interpolated text within Matilda’s story, and then we learn that Ellinor actually formed a “diametrically opposite” opinion regarding Leicester. Believing Leicester to be “unbounded in his projects, timid and subtle in his actions, tyrannic in his pursuits,” Ellinor nevertheless tries to hide her distaste for the man, realizing that both her sister’s feelings and prudential caution (for Leicester is now in a position to betray them all) require her to disguise her real sentiments.98 As a result, she recalls, “My own actions must ever then have appeared eccentric and enigmatical” to those who observed her.99 Or they may have been interpreted, to use another eighteenth-century term for contradictory, unreadable behavior, as “grotesque.” However, Ellinor’s “eccentric turn of mind” and tendency toward hyperbolic romance mean that her own reading of people and politics may be no more reliable than her sister’s.100 Not only do people such as Lady Pembroke, who passes on Ellinor’s tale to Matilda, feel that they “cannot agree with this fair visionary, who so easily adopts the romance of her lover,” but Ellinor

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descends into madness characterized by her inability to accurately communicate her real thoughts to the world.101 “Something strangely intervenes between myself and my meaning,” she frets, as her ability to narrate a universally accessible version of her story deteriorates and her fanciful imagination fluctuates “between the possible and impossible.”102 Increasingly trapped in her own mental recesses, Ellinor is able to convey meaning only through her body. Thus Ellinor believes herself able to show her contempt for Elizabeth by rejecting the Queen’s hand and “fixing my eyes on her with a dreadful meaning” before fainting.103 Sometimes her performances succeed: Ellinor is able to win her freedom by faking her own death and substituting her maid’s dead body for her own, and she is able to then journey to Ireland to see Essex by dressing as a man and letting her masculine appearance speak for her. But as Ellinor enters the final stages of madness, any ability she has to control another’s reading of her body is lost to her. When Ellinor bursts in on Elizabeth following Essex’s execution, the aging Queen understandably reads this “beauteous phantom (for surely never mortal looked so like an inhabitant of another world)” as a supernatural manifestation of her guilty past—as a Gothic rather than historical character.104 And ultimately that is to be both Ellinor’s and Matilda’s fates, as the persecutions they endure confirm their exclusion from any official historical narrative and their consignment to the emerging subterranean genre of the Gothic. The text that supplies us with Ellinor’s narrative registers her growing madness by fragmenting into sections divided by asterisks, and these, combined with the heavy use of dashes favored by both sisters, mean that The Recess is full of textual blanks that interrupt the narrative and signal the inaccessibility of the emotion or moment in question. While these narrative gaps anticipate some of the literary devices analyzed by trauma theory in the twentieth century,105 Lee’s novel metaphorically aligns them with geological interruptions in spatial and historical knowledge; they are, as the advertisement observes, “chasms in the story.”106 The word “chasm” signifies not only a “fissure in the surface of the earth” or a “vacant place affecting the completeness of anything; a void, blank, gap,” but also, in signaling “an intervening blank, hiatus, break, interval,”107 evokes the titular Recess’s status as a site outside standardized space and time. The conflation of mental and subterranean space that occurs in The Recess suggests that retreating into subterranean spaces uncontrolled by the state is ultimately no more productive than retreating, as Ellinor does, into her own mind. In one sense, the refuge offered by both strategies is real, but in both

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cases it necessitates one’s isolation from society. Ultimately, then, the question begged regarding the utility of The Recess’s subterranean refuge is the same begged regarding the act of writing—for in the novel, authoring their own stories is the only way that Ellinor and Matilda can attempt to bridge the “chasms” that separate them, not only from official historical record but also from each other. Communication—as in the case of a physical passageway between the Recess and the world outside, or as in the case of a letter passed between individuals—is key. In The Recess, communication allows us to entertain different, and perhaps productive, ways of reimagining figures such as the nation and the sovereign: Lee’s novel even features some flickering moments of possibility, as when Ellinor, moving “from paper to paper” in reading her mother’s obituary, sees “friends and enemies unite in the eulogium of the Royal Martyr.”108 This moment of unity, which is centered around the act of reading and writing about the sufferings of Mary Stuart, appears to momentarily create a kind of imagined community united by a sympathetic connection to, rather than fear of, the sovereign.109 But although the exercise of sympathy is encouraged by the novel’s depictions of female suffering—an exercise that, moreover, Lee’s conclusion suggests might result in the construction of a national and cosmopolitan community bound together by sympathy as opposed to defined by acts of sovereign aggression110—the destruction of the access points to the Recess reminds us that, in a world of censorship and tightly controlled space, communications that the sovereign judges as illicit can be limited, if not eliminated. Thus, although The Recess provides us with Matilda and Ellinor’s tale, and therefore with an alternate way of conceiving both national history and space, its conceptions of the nation and the national community are still ultimately regulated by the sovereign. A more permanent subterranean escape from sovereign power is featured in Byron’s The Island: Or, Christian and His Comrades (1823), in which one of the notorious Bounty mutineers is allowed to escape the British Empire by taking sanctuary in a South Seas cavern. Byron’s poem brings together a number of elements already described in this chapter: a subterranean setting associated with alternative historical narratives, a fanciful imagination, and peoples excluded from traditional hierarchies of national power. While The Island is less grotesque in form than Lee’s The Recess, it nevertheless was criticized by contemporary reviewers for combining the historical and the fabulous in a manner that undermined the dominant narrative concerning a historical incident.

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Neuha’s Cave: Competing Histories in Byron’s The Island In The Island, Byron moves the subterranean sanctuary to the exotic periphery of the empire and takes advantage of the subterranean association with alternative perspectives on national history to construct his own version of the “mutiny on the Bounty saga.”111 In merging the tale of the 1789 mutiny with a popular legend of the Tonga Islands concerning a woman hidden by her lover in a tropical cave, Byron created a tale that captured the popular imagination even as it frustrated nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics who hoped to see a more radical political outlook reflected in Byron’s “flawed poem of great interest.”112 While I acknowledge both the appeal of Byron’s description of Tubuai and the apparent conservatism of Byron’s condemnation of the mutineers, I argue that The Island draws attention to the artificiality of both types of narratives—patriotic national histories and utopian romances—as a means of dramatizing the power of the poet over competing constructions of history and space. Far from passively acquiescing to the expectations of the reading public, Byron continues The Recess’s grotesque tradition of conflating the historical and the fabulous in subterranean settings, in a poem that slyly asserts the power of poetic visions over national narratives. The Island brings together many of the spaces discussed so far in this book: from the first chapter, the poles, those distant magnets for Britain’s imperial ambitions; from the second chapter, the ocean, the alien space that threatens to dissolve the domestic allegiances of British sailors; and finally, the subject of this current chapter surfaces in Byron’s famous description of a cave (again, described in Gothic and Catholic terms) that proffers a subterranean refuge from the imperial gaze. Nineteenth-century readers found this latter space so memorable that “Neuha’s Cave” supplanted Byron’s original title in nineteenth-century melodramas based on the poem.113 The opening lines of The Island introduce the soon-to-be-deposed Lieutenant Bligh as an uncomplicated British navigator-hero dreaming of a safe return to domestic shores, having added his name “to the glorious roll / Of those who search the storm-surrounded Pole.”114 Bligh has preserved his sense of Britishness despite his atopic pursuits, but his crew, too long exposed to the extranational wilds of oceanic space, has not: The sailors have become “Men without country, who, too long estranged, / Had found no native home, or found it changed.”115 Divorced from their former domestic attachments, the men have become too closely affiliated with atopic space and, now “half

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uncivilized, preferred the cave / Of some soft savage to the uncertain wave.”116 Pole, ocean, and cave spaces form three dangerous points on an imperial spatial quadrangle: Bligh, the navigator with a primarily polar orientation, is able to keep his vision fixed on that other fixed point of imperial mobility, “Old England’s welcome shore,”117 while his men dream of escape and obtaining a new domesticity in one of imperial space’s subterranean blind spots.118 While the first canto of The Island accords with historical accounts of the expedition, Byron soon departs from history in a manner that contemporary critics found both puzzling and controversial. In constructing a tale in which the mutineers live on Tubuai (the site of their two disastrous colonial experiments) rather than Tahiti and fight a pitched battle with representatives of the Royal Navy, after which Fletcher Christian commits suicide, Byron is abandoning any “adherence to the fact” and constructing a literary work that is “at war with . . . known fate.”119 To this tale of crime and punishment, Byron adds the equally fictional tale of Torquil, a single mutineer who is saved from imperial forces by the timely intervention and subterranean knowledge of his native lover. In this second tale, the more romantic aspects of the myths that had grown up around the notorious Fletcher Christian are displaced onto the figure of Torquil, whose rebellion appears to be motivated not by wounded pride but by love for one of the island’s women. After being saved by his retreat into a subterranean cave, Torquil is reborn into the world outside as a man capable of enjoying the mythic afterlife usually assigned to Christian. What are we to make of this bifurcation of the Bounty saga, which imagines two possible paths for rebellion, one in which the rebel is crushed by the forces of historical inevitability, and the other in which the rebel escapes history altogether? The answer, I suggest, lies in the genres that the two protagonists come to occupy. Christian, in pursuing the mutiny, follows a narrative pattern of masculine self-assertion that demands he make and occupy history, whereas Torquil, in subordinating his will to The Island’s incarnation of the Other, Neuha, is ultimately able to renounce his former identity and thus turn himself into an object of myth, legend, and speculation. Torquil’s survival is possible because of his relationship with Neuha, who in turn is able to connect him to the subterranean atopic space that acts as Torquil’s portal into an afterlife of story. As a native Polynesian and as a woman, Neuha is, from the beginning of the poem, presumed to have access to the subterranean. This is foreshadowed even in the poem’s description of her body: Byron dwells on her “clear nut-brown skin” over which “a lucid hue, / Like coral reddening through the darkened wave, / Which draws the diver to

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the crimson cave” is said to lie.120 Neuha’s sexuality is here linked to subterranean space in a series of lines that clearly anticipate Torquil’s escape from imperial forces. But the rest of The Island’s description of Neuha raises questions about her relationship to atopic space and the integrity of the retreat she provides: If her lover, Torquil, is a storm-driven, oceanic figure, Neuha is distinguished by her watery tranquility: “Her smiles and tears had passed, as light winds pass / O’er lakes to ruffle, not destroy, their glass, / Whose depths unsearch’d, and fountains from the hill, / Restore their surface.”121 Neither as deep nor as tempestuous as the ocean, Neuha promises to remain an endless supply of calm, albeit one that presumably (if its depths were to be sounded, plunged, and searched) might not be as immune to turbulence as its surface makes it appear. The next few lines explicate this dramatic potential, suggesting that this superficial calm will only appear “Until the earthquake tear the Naiad’s cave, / Root up the spring, and trample on the wave, / And crush the living waters to a mass, / The amphibious desert of the dank morass!”122 Having established Neuha as an icon of peaceful noble savagery, these lines imagine a catastrophic future, one in which her inner recesses are indeed destroyed and her natural feelings reduced to arid despair. The real history of the Bounty mutiny lurks at the edge of this poem, I suggest, and emerges, particularly within this passage, as a repressed reminder of the realities of colonial interactions with exotic spaces. In the imagined threat to the “cave” and “living waters” of Neuha’s mind and body, we are reminded of the threat of slavery, rape, and the brutal imposition of power as practiced by the actual mutineers.123 Torquil, alone out of his companions, seems to have the potential to integrate into island life. This is in part because although he, as a British sailor divorced from the nation, is a representative of alienated, imperial modernity, he and Neuha, a representative of premodern innocence, are able to meet in the middle of their divergent times, in the peculiar, atemporal space of one of the poem’s many grottos and caves: Here, in this grotto of the wave-worn shore, They passed the Tropic’s red meridian o’er; Nor long the hours—they never paused o’er time, Unbroken by the clock’s funereal chime, Which deals the daily pittance of our span, And points and mocks with iron laugh at man. What deemed they of the future or the past?

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The present, like a tyrant, held them fast: Their hour-glass was the sea-sand, and the tide, Like her smooth billow, saw their moments glide.124 In the space of the grotto, the two lovers escape the rigid progress of standardized time just as, later in the poem, they will retreat to a cave in order to elude the British Empire’s enforcement of its control over standardized space. Curiously, though, Byron implies the perennial present of oceanic and grotesque space is itself “a tyrant” that, far from freeing the lovers from the concerns of the outside world, somehow holds them fast, preserving them in the amber of an endless moment. This imagery evokes the fossilized life that nineteenthcentury readers associated with caves and grottos. Unlike the corpse that will disintegrate according to the progress of the modern clock’s relentless “funereal chime,” the lovers appear frozen in time, lifelike in appearance, but preserved without future or past in an eternity that is effectively indistinguishable from death. I would also call attention to the strangeness of Byron’s use of the word “tyrant” at this point in the poem. At the time Byron was writing, the Christian and Heywood families had effectively destroyed Bligh’s reputation, arguing in pamphlets and in the captured mutineers’ court-martial that Bligh had driven the midshipmen to mutiny through his tyrannical behavior.125 While Byron strikingly chooses not to depict Bligh in this light, it is nevertheless fair to assume that many of Byron’s readers would have come to this poem expecting the word “tyrant” to be applied to Bligh, if at all. That the word is applied instead to natural time implies suspicion of the freedom that the mutineers hope to find in nature, and it indicates that Torquil, at least, has exchanged his relationship with one sovereign figure (Bligh) for one with a natural world that may ultimately be far more tyrannical. Despite Byron’s apparent idealization of the ocean, and the grotto, then, we can see in this line a reminder of the ultimate inhospitality of atopias to the development of ongoing societies and a foreshadowing of the destruction of the mutineers’ colony on Tubuai. While Torquil and Neuha appear to enjoy a space outside chronological time, their idyll is swiftly interrupted by a reminder that, outside the grotto, history is progressing with terrible and ruthless efficiency. The lovers’ romance is interrupted by news from one of the other mutineers. A sail has been glimpsed on the horizon; eighteen stanzas after the mutiny, the British Empire has arrived to punish the mutineers and assert its power over the island. And it asserts its power successfully, in a pitched battle that, interestingly, is not

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described in the poem. Byron allows the mutineers no possibility of success, no historical moment at which the battle might have gone in their favor.126 Any chance, imaginary or otherwise, in which the mutineers might alter their fate is buried in the textual chasm between the second and third cantos. The third canto opens with the mutineers already defeated, their dreams of island domesticity destroyed as a consequence of their sins against the nation: “No further home was theirs, it seemed, on earth, / Once renegades to that which gave them birth.”127 Finding that their “sea-green isle, their guilt-won paradise, / No more could shield their virtue or their vice,” the mutineers feel “[p]roscribed even in their second country” and wander across the island in Miltonic exile: “in vain the World before them lay.”128 Alienated, perhaps permanently, from both of their potential domestic spaces and occupying the unenviable position of homo sacer, the life no longer ascribed political meaning by the sovereign state, the mutineers still hope to repeat their escape from imperial power by finding yet more chasms and pockets of spatial potential to take refuge in. “Tracked like wild beasts,” they flee the island and turn once more to the ocean, hoping to find in the world beyond Tubuai yet more “distant caves [that] / Might still be missed amidst the world of waves”129—but they find none. Accompanying the collapse of the mutineers’ domestic dreams is the collapse of their identity as citizens in a masculine honor culture. In embracing the wildness of their ocean-influenced natures and choosing rebellion over patriotism, the mutineers have severed their domestic ties and, apparently, permanently consigned themselves to the stateless world of the waves. As a result, their acts of courage cannot be remembered by society; moreover, in tying themselves to the atopia of the ocean, they have ensured that they can never be memorialized. Musing on the doomed mutineers’ fate, the poem draws attention to the impermanence of their desperate acts of courage. In abjuring Britain, the mutineers have also abjured national history, and thus “No nation’s eyes would on their tomb be bent, / No heroes envy them their monument; / However boldly their warm blood was spilt.”130 Despairing, knowing that they have exiled themselves from the masculine honor system that previously ordered their lives, the mutineers reflect on the annihilation of their former, honorable selves. They prepare for their physical destruction, not on the lush island of Tubuai, but in the shadow of an atopic rock, a “desart to mankind”131 that juts from the ocean, mocking their dreams of island renewal and reflecting both the mutineers’ alienation from human society and the sterility of their stateless existence. The search party approaches, and despite

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feeling momentary reluctance to complete the final elimination of those who “Briton no more, had once been Britain’s still,” follows its orders. The majority of the mutineers die fighting, and Fletcher Christian commits suicide by leaping from a cliff, leaving “scarce a shred to tell of human form.” In abandoning their original domestic ties and affiliating themselves with the “unsympathetic”132 space of the ocean, the mutineers, the poem implies, cannot be memorialized; they die, like Christian, unburied, without even leaving corpses to testify to their former selfhood. Having apparently condemned the mutineers’ rebellion against the state, Byron depicts Torquil’s fate as deviating from that of his peers. Seeing the search party approaching, Neuha, who has accompanied the mutineers on their wild flight, commands Torquil to follow her and plunges “into the ocean’s hollow.” Torquil, though unsure as to whether Neuha has led him to “a place of safety, or a grave,” follows her unquestioningly into the sea. Notably, the monument that is denied Christian and his companions appears to be permitted Torquil and Neuha, for the bewildered observers see in the white foam that eddies over the site of their disappearance a marker “white as a sepulcher.”133 Although the vanished lovers “left no marble,” the sailors—both the mutineers and their pursuers—promptly integrate the pair into “superstition” and legend.134 “Some said he had not plunged into the wave, / But vanished like a corpse-light from a grave; Others, that something supernatural / Glared in his figure, more than mortal tall; While all agreed, that in his cheek and eye / There was the dead hue of eternity.”135 The instant Torquil chooses to submit himself totally to Neuha’s judgment and to immerse himself (as his companions have not) in the atopic waves, he and his lover pass out of the realm of British national history and into the realm of the speculative and marvelous. “Did they with Ocean’s hidden sovereigns dwell,” the poem asks. “And sound with Mermen the fantastic shell”?136 While on one hand the line’s use of mythical imagery aligns The Island’s ocean with the marvelous, the reference to “hidden sovereigns” also evokes the images of sanctuary deployed in subterranean novels such as The Recess. Byron tries to preserve the poem’s sense of the fantastic for as long as possible, drawing on his readers’ prior associations with atopic space to spin out a number of possibilities regarding the lovers’ fate: that, by plunging into the atopia, they have committed suicide (as Frankenstein’s Creature promises to do before plunging into the darkness of the North Pole), that they have been translated into the marvelous, or that they, like the sisters in The Recess, have sought out a temporary sanctuary in a space that the British Empire cannot

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touch. The latter of these possibilities turns out, of course, to be the one depicted in the poem. Torquil resurfaces in subterranean space, in an atopia that, unlike the poles, the ocean, or the atmosphere, contains domestic potential. Byron’s lavish description of the cave draws on the familiar tropes of subterranean description, although here Neuha’s intervention and foresight have also transformed the cave into a forerunner of the lovers’ future domestic bliss. Entrance to the subterranean is notably (as we have seen before) predicated on the subterranean traveler’s familiarity with the atopia of the ocean. Torquil follows Neuha into the sea, which she traverses as if she was “a native . . . of the element.” It is crucial to note that neither Torquil nor Neuha are native to the ocean—a distinction that other critics have sometimes missed137—but their willingness (particularly in Torquil’s case) to sacrifice previous domestic ties and submerge themselves in the dangerous sea allows them access to the proto-domestic space of the subterranean, from where they can contemplate a rebirth into society. Notably, in enabling Torquil’s symbolic rebirth,138 the cave allows him to relive, however briefly, the history of the earth. Emerging from their submarine voyage into a world where “all was darkness for a space,”139 Torquil sees for the first time a self-born Gothic canopy; The arch upreared by nature’s architect, The architrave some earthquake might erect; The buttress from some mountain’s bosom hurled, When the Poles crashed and Water was the World.140 Byron is clearly drawing on the familiar conventions of subterranean description in this section, associating the cavern with Catholicism and Gothic architecture in his description of this “chapel of the seas,” a space resembling an “old cathedral” where a creative imagination armed with “a little tinge of Phantasy” can discern both the grotesque (“Fantastic faces moped and mowed on high”) and Gothic remnants of Catholicism (“then a mitre or a shrine would fix / The eye upon its seeming crucifix”).141 But the walls of Neuha’s cave also reflect the nineteenth century’s growing preoccupation with the geological record, narrating for Torquil a catastrophic history of the earth, cataloguing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and testifying to the potential for cyclical rebirth following cataclysmic change. Moreover, the cave provides insight into not only the early history of the earth but also the history of the Tubuai islanders: On revealing the cave to Torquil, Neuha tells him of its role

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in local lore, as the site where “a young Chief, a thousand moons ago. . . . sheltered there a daughter of the clime, / A foe beloved, and offspring of a foe.”142 Viewing subterranean space thus provides Torquil with an opportunity to re-view history; having detached himself from the historical narrative of the British Empire, a narrative in which the Bounty mutineers must be inevitably crushed, Torquil is now in a position to survey the various strands of history that intersect in the cave—biblical (when “Water was the World”), cyclical, scientific, and Romantic—and choose both his desired point of reentry and the type of narrative he will inhabit. As a result, when Torquil reenters the world above, it is no longer as a problematic representative of modernity, but as a man who has “perilously earned” his membership in an innocent, premodern world and who is now a participant, not in imperial history, but in local legend: “And from that hour a new tradition gave / Their sanctuary the name of ‘Neuha’s Cave.’ ”143 Byron’s poem began with the image of an empiricist explorer, Bligh, dreaming of his place in imperial history. It ends with a native woman’s name passing into local legend, in connection to a space that has proved itself to be a blind spot in the imperial gaze. Torquil’s story is that of a man choosing between these two genres: a national history that demands tales of masculine self-assertion, whether the self-assertion be on the part of “heroic” explorers or “villainous” mutineers, or a form of romance that Byron associates with atopic space, the feminine, and the marvelous, which demands tales not of masculine self-assertion and aggrandizement, but of submission. Neither genre is, it should be noted, more “true” than the other: Byron’s description of the death of Fletcher Christian is clearly part of a “realist” imperial history and is also completely counterfactual. But in denying us a factual history of the mutiny and its aftermath, The Island draws attention to the power of the poet over both these genres, forcing its readers, no matter what their political persuasion, to acknowledge that they are satisfied with—and even prefer—fiction over fact, as well as poetry over the complicated and sordid reality of mutiny and colonization.

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Penetrating the Earth: Urban Excavation in the Nineteenth Century Caves and subterranean spaces remained the province of romance for much of the nineteenth century. Articles such as “On the Subterranean Sounds Heard at Nakous, on the Red Sea,” published in the Imperial Magazine in 1827, attempted to find scientific explanations for subterranean phenomena. However, without deeper and more thorough exploration of cave systems and underground rivers, the myths that had grown up around such mysterious phenomena could not be entirely eliminated by scientific explanation. As tourism and excavations for urban improvements such as canals, railway and road tunnels, and sewers made the subterranean yet more accessible for nineteenth-century curiosity seekers, we can see a shift in representations of underground spaces, which became less the province of social Others such as Catholics and indigenous natives and became increasingly the property of travelers interested in using the marvels of the subterranean to activate the potential of their own imaginations.144 British imaginings of cave spaces were also strongly influenced by the nineteenth-century natural histories constructed by geologists such as the aforementioned William Buckland.145 In reconstructing vanished ecosystems based on fossilized remains discovered in caverns, early paleontologists laid before a fascinated public a vision of an alien, but recoverable, national landscape. Whereas in the eighteenth century, Britons had been inclined to see caves as the repositories of grotesque histories, they were now increasingly inclined to view cave spaces as imaginative conduits into the past, as the geologist’s “time-machine,”146 providing the imaginative cave explorer with glimpses of monsters out of deep time. One typical nineteenth-century evocation of the relationship between subterranean space and the imagination begins by drawing attention to the improvement in transportation systems that allowed the 1840s urban dweller to experience rapid movement between different locations in stadial history. “There is something singularly novel in the sensations which arise in the mind after having been whizzed through the air by the ‘boat and the rail’ from the crowded thoroughfares of London to this singular island,” writes Robert Postans (1787–1892) of his journey to the Channel Island of Sark, noting that the “quickness of the transit barely allows us to accommodate our natures to the change.”147 Postans’s departure from the city culminates in him deciding to explore—and then, dramatically, get lost in—the premodern space of the

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island’s most famous cavern.148 Initially, Postans is delighted by the generic, subterranean magic-lantern show his imagination conjures up for him in the darkness of subterranean space: “Flying buttresses, lofty arches, pinnacles and towers, as if by magic sprung out of the walls. Huge monsters of every shape and hue, were revealed to the busy imagination by the blaze of the fire, and were confusingly blended with every style of architecture. The grotesque and hideous forms of some, were strangely contrasted with the life-like appearance of others.”149 But soon Postans, led astray by his curiosity, finds himself lost within the labyrinths of the cave and of his imagination. Terrified, imagining himself pursued through the darkness by all forms of imaginary monsters, Postans finds his “boasted reasoning faculties were of no avail”150 in the subterranean darkness; he has to be rescued from his dark fate by a loyal French poodle, which proves more courageous and sophisticated in subterranean matters than its master. Postans’s self-deprecating description of a city-dweller’s voyage into underground space concludes, then, by presenting the subterranean as a sublime site still unconquered by modernity and as a space associated with the marvels of an undisciplined and primitive imagination.151 The 1840s and 1850s witnessed a notable increase in documentation of urban subterranean spaces, whether in the form of reports concerning caverns and recesses discovered in the course of city improvements (as in the case of The Northern Star and National Trades’ Journal’s discussion of an underground recess discovered in the digging of a new sewer line) or in new descriptions of underground spaces in foreign cities. The latter form of article often served as a pretext for considering the historical situation of that other great city, London. In London itself, urban excavations increasingly brought the grand city’s colonial past back into view via what Thomas Pennant noted in 1790 was the large number of “Roman antiquities . . . found whenever it has been thought necessary to dig to any considerable depth.”152 As Norman Vance and Virginia Zimmerman have observed, public awareness of the Roman archaeological past underfoot thus reached new heights during the nineteenth century, and along with the discovery of Pompeii, this contributed to an increased sense that the remains of Roman cities might serve as subterranean portents of Britain’s imperial future. Articles that specifically engage the underground spaces of London, such as “Subterranean London” (1853), also display a growing association of the city’s hidden spaces and subterranean depths with the laborers who excavate them and with the “refuse” of society, who search through the city’s sewers for lost artifacts to sell. If miners had been relegated to the periphery of accounts

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of early cave exploration, the body of the underground laborer was, in the wake of Chartism and mining reform movements, becoming an object of interest to middle-class Britons. Public works projects and urban excavations fed this interest by not only opening up slices of the subterranean to the casual gaze of the city-dweller, but also making newly visible the bodies of the laborers descending into its depths. Aesthetic perspectives that used to be applied to cavern walls are now applied to the bodies of the workers who descend into mysterious subterranean cavities: In “Subterranean London,” the picturesque is no longer applied to sublime depths (which, however, do continue to yawn out at the reader in the form of “excavations, carried to a depth which the eye cannot penetrate”) but to the “spectacle singularly picturesque” of the “principally Irish” workers responsible for excavating London’s streets: “The swart faces of the workmen in their white shirts, lit up by the light of flaring torches; the cavernous gloom of the narrow pit in which they sink rapidly out of sight, to emerge again bending under a heavy load . . . the dusky forms of figures dimly visible through the black shadows cast by the mounds of soil and rubbish that line the edges of the chasm—these are some of the elements of the picture.”153 In portraying urban workers as the shadowy forms inhabiting the chasms of the nation, these portraits laid a cultural track for the late nineteenth century’s association of the underground with the working class154 and anticipated later Victorian works, such as The Time Machine, which project the sublime threat of the subterranean onto the grotesque bodies of laborers. In “Subterranean London,” exposure of London’s substratum reveals the ways in which the modernizing city has been able to reproduce and exceed the imperial glories of “ancient Rome,” as well as the blueprint of its future, which appears in the form of the “slender threads radiating from a common centre in Lothbury,” which are the “means of effecting the most marvellous triumph which the united industry and genius of man has ever accomplished.”155 The telegraph, the article reminds its readers, provides an indisputable connection between the city of London and its empire: It “dives across the Irish Channel, startling the ear of England with the lamentations of her desolate sister.” These subterranean threads connecting those who live at the center of the nation with the histories of the excluded and peripheral might, Leisure Hour suggests, contribute to the ongoing improvement of society and help ensure that the “generation which is to come after us will do more than tread in our steps, and will leave us, in all likelihood, still farther in the rear than we have left our sires.”156 If in the eighteenth century subterranean space had been discovered to hold the secrets to lost pasts, in the wake of early nineteenth-century urban

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excavations, subterranean space is increasingly represented as a repository of the nation’s mysterious future. In envisioning the utopian capacities of modern technologies of communication, the author of “Subterranean London” does not neglect the printed word. Indeed, while scientists’ ability to access the substratum is pushed to the margins of this article—“groups of men with scientific instruments” are themselves observed by working-class passersby, whose speculation that these “strange fellows” might have something to do with the excavation of city streets is quickly dismissed by the text—the ability of a journalist or author to penetrate the depths of the earth is not open to question. The article twice adopts the perspective of a “being . . . gifted with a sufficient degree of clairvoyance to see through the solid ground”157 in laying out for its readers the various subterranean systems of London. While this powerful prospect gaze relies, of course, on scientific knowledge and data, it is notably positioned as a supernatural or marvelous form of vision (clairvoyance) and not as the gaze of a land surveyor or scientist. In “Subterranean London,” government agents may investigate particular underground sites, but a grand unifying perspective that is able to draw together the city and the subterranean, the past and the future, belongs not to the explorer, geologist, or surveyor, but to the writer. In this chapter I have tried to trace the development of representations of subterranean space from the mid-eighteenth century (when caverns were still strongly associated with the Catholic underground) through the midnineteenth century (in which we can see the emergence of urban subterranean spaces associated with the working class, which would come to figure heavily in later nineteenth-century “grotesque romances” such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine [1895]). Common to many of these representations is a powerful association between subterranean spaces and peoples who are excluded or might have reason to take refuge from sovereign power. Frequently this “province of the Other” is allied with the aesthetics of the grotesque, that subterranean aesthetic form that conjures up images of monstrosity, cultural alienation, and histories that the nation has repressed or forgotten. For the poet or the geologist, caverns provide sites of inspiration, pockets outside standardized time and space within which it is possible to imagine alternative versions of historical incidents (as in The Recess and The Island) or to project the future paths of global history (as in “Subterranean London”). The political valence of these spaces is not fixed—the imagined subterranean can be deployed to support state power as well as undermine it—but in authors’ representations of

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other histories we can frequently see them claiming the power of their literary craft to shape, rather than be shaped by, the nation. By way of a closing snapshot, it is to the future of subterranean spaces that I will now turn, to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which, in its depiction of nightmarish class relations in a far-future London, revisits many of the themes I have already described. It is easy to forget, given The Time Machine’s later canonization as a classic work of early science fiction, how much Wells affiliated his work with the “grotesque”—he subtitled The Invisible Man (1897) “A Grotesque Romance”—and how influential subterranean space appears to have been on his speculations concerning Britain’s future social relations. Indeed, Wells’s Time Traveller compares his journey into the future to a journey into the earth. On being trapped in the future time of the Eloi, he reports feeling like a man “who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit and how to get out of it.”158 Initially, on arriving in the “pit” of the future, the Time Traveller perceives himself to be the alien element emerging out of the buried heap of history: On his first meeting with the delicate Eloi, he worries about his “grotesque,” “nineteenth-century” appearance and his inability to communicate with these future humans.159 But gradually he comes to perceive himself in the position of an archaeologist confronted by the grotesque, chasmed text of the future past. “Suppose you found an inscription, with sentences here and there in excellent plain English, and interpolated therewith, others made up of words, of letters even, absolutely unknown to you?” he asks his audience. “Well, on the third day of my visit, that was how the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One presented itself to me!” Eventually, the Time Traveller realizes that the key to “boldly penetrating these underground mysteries” lies in the subterranean network guarded by the mysterious, loathsome statue of a “White Sphinx.”160 What he finds in the darkness of the Morlocks’ subterranean network is at first unclear, obscured as the sight is by “grotesque black shadows.” But gradually he—and the reader—come to realize that the “unmeaning shapes” he glimpsed in the darkness were Morlocks at a cannibal feast, consuming the descendants of their former overlords.161 “The Upperworld people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants,” the Time Traveller reflects, “but that had long since passed away. . . . Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back—changed!”162 The subterranean, in other words, remains the province of the excluded Other—in this case the exploited “Labourer”

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turned monstrous in the darkness of the industrial underground. “No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you,” the Time Traveller continues in a famous passage, and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply. . . . Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?163 The natural resort of those who have lost their lost “birthright”164 is to turn, like the Stuarts in The Recess, to the subterranean. But a subterranean atopia is no fit place for dwelling, and over the course of centuries, the Time Traveller realizes, the excluded Others of Britain have returned to wreak havoc on their former oppressors. Soon after emerging from the Morlocks’ underground, the Time Traveller tries to put his newfound knowledge to use in a museum. Standing in the ruins of “the Paleontological Section” and regarding its “very splendid array of fossils” (among which he sees “traces of the little people” of the future) the Time Traveller tries to find in the relics of the past a means of recovering his Time Machine and, with it, the potential to change the past.165 But as readers we know that the only “relic” of the Time Traveller’s search that can possibly make a difference is the story he tells. The Time Traveller himself last appears in the novel as a character fading from view, his “figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct.”166 Only the art he has produced (the “sheets of drawings”) and, by proxy, the novel called The Time Machine remain—products of grotesque speculation on Britain’s dubious future.

Conclusion

“Dislocated Progress”: Atopias in Urban Space

I was working in London, dreaming of escaping the city. The crowds were grinding me down. . . . I had lost the will to push myself forward. . . . It was around that time that I regained an earlier obsession with polar exploration. It was an old interest of mine; I had always enjoyed an Arctic saga, but I began to buy them in bulk. There was something about the starkness of life in the snow, the terrible risks of traveling across ice plains, that seemed to supply a release from the sameness of my days, the relentless round of my hours. . . . Each day, I took another explorer into the packed carriages, flicking through another attempt to shade in a few more blanks in the maps. My mounting fascination supplied a sense of purpose, something I had lost in my dislocated progress around the city. —Joanna Kavenna, The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule, 2005

Imagining Atopias In recalling the genesis of her quixotic search for the lost polar land of Thule, Joanna Kavenna focuses not on her first encounter with polar literature but on her first encounter with the space of the city: the massive sprawl of London,

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and its pressing crowds. Bewildered by complex transportation systems, alienated from her neighbors, and feeling her sense of individuality eroded by the “grind” of the anonymous crowd, Kavenna turns to an imagined high Arctic for escape, reorienting herself to the city by way of its print-mediated antipode.1 Her reading project, as she obliquely acknowledges a few pages later, is in many respects a nineteenth-century endeavor: As her polar reading leads her from explorers’ narratives to poetry, she finds herself in sympathy with writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, like Kavenna, imagine “Thule as the geographical antithesis of London.”2 Like the stereotypical Wordsworthian Romantic, Kavenna finds that the image of Nature steadies her in the midst of the alienating metropolis. The natural landscape that sustains her, however, is not an idealized English countryside, but that of the high Arctic. She turns not toward the local but toward a half-imagined space that seems to lie beyond the reach of globalized commerce and the relentless sprawl of the urban environment. Ironically, Kavenna’s mental turn toward the polar land of Thule confirms her as an agent of the society she longs to escape. She identifies with the polar explorers who go to fill in “a few more blanks in the maps” and who thus serve to eliminate the very mysteries that lend Thule its mystique. Empathizing with the explorers’ relentless northward march nevertheless provides Kavenna with a sense of purpose she had previously “lost in . . . dislocated progress.”3 The evocative phrase “dislocated progress” describes Kavenna’s discomfort with urban space and also suggestively evokes spatial theorists’ criticisms of the homogeneous, globalized spaces created by the de-localizing “progress” of late capitalism.4 In short, although Kavenna’s musings on polar space are meant to be personal, they gesture toward the ongoing significance of atopias to our cultural imagination and to the complex role played by literary representations of these spaces in mediating between the individual and the system of global commerce given visible form in the flows of the city. In describing her mental turn from the modern metropolis toward the nineteenth-century atopia, Kavenna invites one of the questions prompted by this study: What are we to make of such ostensibly binaric juxtapositions of the unpopulated, unseen space of the North Pole and the overcrowded space of the metropolis? In this book, I have argued that atopias formed a category of atypical space in the British imagination represented as persistently challenging the incorporative efforts of British sovereign power. I have also argued that, while authors often link these spaces, they also assign them different symbolic functions. The ocean emerges as an exemplary space of atypicality, the iconic space

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of anti-land that threatens to undo the social structures of the shore. Both the enabler of and a potential threat to mobility beyond domestic borders, the ocean can be negotiated only through well-monitored social systems. The poles, on the other hand, incarnate both the inhospitality of the ocean and the specter of terra nullius in their frigid icescapes. Serving as the ultimate limit on oceanic mobility, the poles emerge as the persistent objects of British speculation, undomestic limits on human endeavor that resist being synthesized into imperial systems of knowledge. The newly traversable atmosphere of the late eighteenth century promised, on the other hand, to transcend the geographical limits represented by spaces like the poles, producing a new era of truly global mobility. In promising, or threatening, to replace the ocean as a medium of global connection, the atmosphere became a site associated with British insecurities about the nation’s ability to survive in a globalized future. And if the balloon-traversed atmosphere is a site of disquieting futurity, then the subterranean spaces that lie at the other end of the vertical axis are associated with the past, albeit a past that resists easy incorporation into standardized history and eludes the regulatory gaze of the sovereign state. From the depths of this fissure in national and imperial maps, one can imagine alternate forms and alternate histories of community and, therefore, perhaps alternate paths for the future. Taken together, the subterranean, the atmosphere, the ocean, and the poles provide writers with a familiar spatial vocabulary with which to define the limits, and the limitations, of Britain’s engagement with the global. In describing the evolution of these geo-imaginary spaces, I have been particularly attentive to the ways in which atopias offered authors opportunities to reflect on the role played by literature in British imperial expansion: on the power that novels, plays, and poetry might wield in promoting the exploration of distant lands or in forging the kinds of communal identification needed to maintain Britain’s power overseas. I have analyzed the ways in which authors used atopic backdrops to assert the continued survival and independence of the imagination by setting limits on the ambitions of the state, exposing the weaknesses of empire, and inviting the formation of different communities than those imagined by the nation. Not all authors used atopias to argue for the utility of literature; nor did they invoke these spaces in identical ways. Nevertheless, the patterns surrounding the representation of atopias in British literature made them persistent touchstones for writers reflecting on the role played by texts in the ongoing social construction of nation and empire.

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In tracing this path through atypical forms of space, An Empire of Air and Water has also intersected with issues outside its original purview. The atopic settings discussed in this project throw into stark relief some of the anxieties attending forms of labor—slave trading, sailing, mining, writing—that threatened, in their international circulations or in their perceived environmental or moral contamination, to weaken an idealized domestic community. I have also suggested, in my brief discussion of mining, one of the ways in which representations of an atopic environment could sublimate criticisms of industrial practices outside of atopic space, by highlighting the locally destructive and deracinating forces associated with the rise of a globalized capitalism. Although they are often portrayed as separate from the “normal” landspace of the nation-state, atopias can thus register anxieties concerning the spatial and social transformations taking place within the national domestic. In troubling the relationship between humans and governable conceptions of nature, atopias also highlight questions attending humanity’s agency within, and possible collective responsibility for, the natural environment. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of spaces such as the Arctic continue to have a profound influence on our contemporary geopolitics. Our imaginings of planetary spaces such as the ocean, for example, continue to beg the question of who can intervene in the environmental degradation of spaces frequently imagined as belonging both to a collective humanity and to “no one.”5 In tracing a history of atopias’ eighteenth- and nineteenth-century entanglements with literature and print culture, then, I have also laid out some of the roots of our deep and continued investment in cultural concepts that some twenty-first-century environmentalists and politicians are attempting to renovate: namely, the dual and, in a climatological context, contradictory imagining of these areas as both threatening natural zones lying outside the scope of effective human management and as “blanks” that can be safely ignored. My research into atopias has, like Cook’s voyage in search of Terra Australia Incognita, also involved the discovery of absences. When I commenced this project, I hypothesized that spaces that were resistant to imperial appropriation might be associated with the resistance of indigenous peoples to European empires. However, as my readings of Byron’s The Island and Lee’s The Recess attest, when rebellion and atopic spaces intersect in contact zones fictionalized by British Romantics, the rebellion in question tends to be subsumed in the European agent’s own opposition to the imperial state. Works such as Shelley’s Frankenstein may, through symbolically freighted figures such

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as the Creature, position atopias such as the North Pole as unkind refuges for European Others, but they do so metaphorically. This ostensible reluctance to explicitly extend atopic resistance to people of color may merely be a byproduct of the historical and national limits that bound this project: Certainly the rich possibilities offered by subterranean spaces were later taken up in the United States by abolitionist novels such as J. T. Trowbridge’s Cudjo’s Cave (1864), in which cave space signifies a location of resistance that harbors “grotesque” African-American rebels and hides evidence of slaves’ “human agency” from white surveillance.6 This then is one of several potential avenues of future inquiry toward which this conclusion gestures: the intersection (or lack thereof ) of atopias and representations of subaltern resistance; the transformation of atopic tropes in other national contexts and moments of historical exigency; the afterlife of atopias in postcolonial and speculative fictions;7 and the significance of rhetorical invocations of these spaces in un-atopic contexts. It is to the latter topic that I now turn, taking up the question that opened this chapter, and which is suggested by my use of the term “atopia” to describe a form of placeless space associated with nature rather than with the erasures of global urbanization. What are we to make of atopic spaces when they are invoked in relation to the built environment of the city?8 For this was a not uncommon recourse for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers describing London, the metropole that, as J. B. Harley observes, served as “an entrepôt and clearinghouse for the geographical knowledge of a far-flung territorial system.”9 Rather than depicting the metropole assimilating atopic space within its borders, however, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers invoke the unassimilability of atopias to signify the unmanageability of London’s urban space, a move that frequently, in the long Romantic period, also prompts them to reflect on the text’s ability to orient readers to the city. In the remainder of this chapter, then, I conclude with a preliminary analysis of the relationship between atopias and the nineteenth-century metropolis, one of the most significant geo-imaginary spaces located within the framework of the nation. I will, in the following sections, contemplate British literature’s turn toward the atopia in representations of London, arguing that, in nineteenth-century works such as Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805, 1850), De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), and Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844–46), such atopic invocations betray the authors’ own uncertainty about textual strategies of mastering urban space.

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The Blank Space of the City By 1700, London had become the largest and most cosmopolitan city in Europe, an early indicator of the problems and symptoms accompanying urban development, and an obvious reference point for anyone wishing to discuss the characteristics of urban space.10 As such it was the dominant city in Britain, and the site from which many ideas concerning urbanization and modes of representing the city tended to emanate. Even as London was increasingly “known” by eighteenth-century Britons through description and travel, however, it was characterized by its perceived resistance to comprehension. As Leonard Schwarz observes, one of the early eighteenth century’s commonplace observations concerning London was that “it was impossible to know all of it, or to agree what it was”: The city was simply too expansive and too fractured, too defined by compartmentalized neighborhoods and by circuitous transportation routes to be adequately represented.11 Moreover, cartographical knowledge of London—indeed, of most British cities in the eighteenth century—was incomplete and outdated. William Morgan’s comprehensive 1682 survey of London, for example, was not repeated for sixty years, during which time the city changed almost beyond recognition. The challenges faced by navigators of eighteenth-century London were extreme versions of problems faced by many British city dwellers. Whereas the seventeenth-century English town, as Joyce Ellis notes, “had no need for road signs, house-numbers and street maps,” the eighteenth-century city could be confusing even to residents.12 Rapid changes in the urban economy meant that businesses shifted locations frequently, rendering overhead signs next to useless, except (as in John Gay’s 1716 poem “Trivia”) as landmarks for locals “in the know.” Rapid business turnover meant that there was “no longer any guarantee that a painted fish marked out a fishmonger or that a loaf indicated a baker”; a different kind of “urban reading” was thus required than what had been of residents of seventeenth-century English towns.13 During the eighteenth century we therefore see a dramatic increase in the publication of texts purporting to help readers gain perspective on urban spaces. The guidebook as such did not yet exist (though it would take recognizable shape by the early nineteenth century, just in time for the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851).14 Travelers to large cities usually had to supplement their local knowledge with urban histories and “surveys” of the town in question. Even were a tourist lucky enough to locate a “perambulation” of the city

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(such as John Stow’s popular 1603 A Survay of London, which presciently described a walking tour [sans maps] of pre-Fire London),15 the spatial information included was usually hopelessly out of date and sandwiched between vast compilations of legal and mercantile histories. Despite their promises, in other words, these new textual forms often could not provide the comprehensive, accurate views of the cities that they promised. Indeed, the chaotic, piecemeal nature of urban growth, combined with a lack of adequate mapping or surveying, made the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city an energizing but anxiety-inducing spectacle for onlookers, a space that seemed to call into question the ability for any sovereign power to exert a controlling gaze over this spectacular materialization of modernity’s unstable transformations. In the vacuum of sovereign power created by what Wordsworth dubs the city’s “blank confusion,” the atopia rushes in like a deluge, providing a wealth of metaphors for observers trying to describe the unsettling cosmopolitanism of the metropole and their unstable sense of the city’s changing spaces.16 “London, like the Ocean,” declares the opening line of Erasmus Jones’s A Trip Through London (1728), “swallows up all the scum and filth, not only of our own, but of other countries.”17 In John Gay’s “Trivia” (1716), to walk London’s streets is to “navigate” the perilous flows of the commercial center of Britain, to steer a course between “Charybdis’s Gulphs . . . and Scylla’s craggy Dangers” on London street corners and to seek safe “Harbour” in a location made alien by industrialization and commerce.18 Some of this process, at least, could be made easier by the developing genre of the guidebook, which, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gradually grew more proficient at leading the London traveler “safe to the various havens and ports where his bark may rest at anchor, with proper security and certain advantage.”19 Works such as Roach’s London Pocket Pilot, or Stranger’s Guide Through the Metropolis (1793) played their nautical metaphors to the hilt, framing the urban journey as an exercise in navigating (or “piloting”) “unwary, and unaccustomed strangers, through the dangerous rocks and shoals, and quicksands with which the great ocean . . . but more especially, the municipal vortexes thereof, is, and are, surrounded and intersected.”20 This image of London as ocean continued well into the nineteenth century, haunting the dreams of De Quincey’s Opium Eater, who initially takes pleasure in his “nautical” exploration of the city but is later vexed to nightmare by his drug-induced visions of “the rocking waters of the ocean . . . paved with innumerable faces.”21 Connections between the nautical atopia and “illimitable London”22 also appear in Victorian novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The

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Woman in White (1860), in which Walter Hartright, Laura, and Marian take refuge in a London house that, as a “place of concealment,” operates, Hartright reflects, as effectively “as if the house we lived in had been a desert island, and the great network of streets and the thousands of our fellow-creatures all round us the waters of an illimitable sea.”23 Frequently, as Collins’s reference to a “desert island” domestic suggests, the Victorian ocean-city inherits the vexed status of the ocean in Britain’s maritime mythology, promising young arrivals like David Copperfield, “more solitary than Robinson Crusoe,” an opportunity for individual reinvention, while simultaneously threatening them with annihilation.24 For, like the ocean with which it is often paired, Victorian London is an atopic site that threatens to swallow individuals and make them vanish.25 Such metaphors convey not only the sublimity of urban space but also London’s status as an imperial metropole and a global city that gathers in all geographies, a space that carries with it the allure of the colonial blank and that also possesses a threatening power to engulf and destroy individuals. While oceanic metaphors tend to dominate the space of London, the ocean is far from the only atopia invoked in relation to the city. The space of the atmosphere appears infrequently but, when it does, it is as liable to serve as a lid trapping the city navigator in obscure streets as a site from which, as Elaine Freedgood observes of Henry Mayhew’s 1862 description of his balloon voyage over London, a controlling perspective on the city can be exerted.26 The “eternal Frost”27 of the Arctic Circle and the bewildering “cavern”28 also make their appearances in urban spaces. In “circumnavigating all the capes and headlands” of the London streets, for example, De Quincey’s Opium Eater seeks “ambitiously for a north-west passage”29 that will lead him out of the urban labyrinth in which he has become enmeshed into the pure clarity of anticommercial polar light. When he emerges from the depths of the city, he is like one emerged from “the cave of Trophonius,” brooding over the future of the world he has seen charted in the convoluted sprawl of the metropolis.30 In navigating the confusing globe that appears to be materialized in the flows, dislocations, and exotic apparitions of the imperial city, literary London walkers invoke atopias as imagined boundaries on the spaces unfolding around them.31 They project atopic imagery onto the alien space of the metropole as a way of, paradoxically, making the space of the city seem familiar—that is, familiarly threatening, sublime, and unmasterable. In doing so, these literary walkers are asserting the power of imagination to control urban space, by projecting onto its features a mental image gleaned not from firsthand

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observation but from their reading. This point of origin also suggests that texts play an important role in enabling city walkers to come to grips with urban space—a suggestion typically reinforced by a city walker’s strategic deployment of the rhetoric of early guidebooks. But whereas the invocations of atopias described in other chapters tended to emphasize the power of the imagination and the importance of print culture, nineteenth-century invocations of atopias in urban space often appear to question whether the imagination, and whether texts, can truly help readers to master the blank space of the city. Wordsworth’s 1805 version of The Prelude, for example, constructs London as a kind of atopic space but invites the reader to question the authority of the poet’s representation of London, a move that inherently differentiates Wordsworth’s poem not only from panoramas and panoramic guidebooks but also from the urban poetry that tried to associate itself with these technologies’ “authoritative” takes on metropolitan space.32 Similarly, the atopias invoked in early nineteenth-century prose works such as De Quincey’s Confessions and Reynolds’s Mysteries usher in moments that undercut the urban walkers’ and the texts’ pretension to a comprehensive view of London.

Representing London in Wordsworth’s The Prelude Arguably one of the most sophisticated literary representations of London space in the early nineteenth century, Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805, 1850) famously moves through the poet’s memories of the Romantic metropolis, framing London as a blank space that both inspires and challenges the poetic imagination.33 We begin with the London of Wordsworth’s childhood: an unvisited site that, like the poles, serves as the object of speculation, and which the young poet views as a fabulous space, at one with “airy palaces and gardens built / By genii of romance.”34 The young poet regards London as though it were one of the half-mythical grails of exploration—another El Dorado or Terra Australis Incognita—and looks with awe on a schoolmate summoned to the great metropolis—a “fortunate / And envied traveller”—who, upon his return, is examined for some sign of his incredible voyage, “some beams of glory brought away / from that new region.”35 Wordsworth’s lines recall speculative dreams of colonial plunder—glories that the young poet assumes wait to be “brought away” by the intrepid explorer of a “new region.” In the next line, however, the poet finds his expectations cruelly defeated by his schoolmate’s

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failure to embody the kind of Crusoean individualism associated with the figure of the triumphant explorer. His schoolmate appears changed by his exposure to London but is likened by Wordsworth not to the man who surveys and claims new territories but to the objects he acquires: to “a cagèd parrot” (a possession rather than a possessor).36 Here we see the seventh book’s first hint at the city’s disquieting ability both to undermine the images and stories projected on it by the poet and to, like Coleridge’s Antarctic, “possess” those who penetrate its regions, turning the desire for sovereignty back against those who seek to master it. Wordsworth’s childhood fantasies regarding the metropolis are, he indicates, fantasies about power. To go to London, the young poet believes, is to gain power: to be, like “young Whittington,” or like Robinson Crusoe, reinvented in exotic territory as an embodied extension of sovereign power, able to command both men and the landscape.37 When the poet finally does go to London he is open concerning his objectives—“I sought not then / Knowledge, but craved for power.”38 But instead of discovering his ability to command, in London the young poet discovers his own relative powerlessness: His motion is directed by the crowd, and if he gazes, he is also gazed upon. Perhaps more disturbingly to the poet, in London he also surrenders control over his imaginative productions to the city itself, granting, as a young man, the materiality of urban space an authority that the older poet appears to want to contest. On taking up residence in London, the young poet acknowledges the material city, rather than his romance-inspired childhood fantasies, as the more authentic text, and he “Familiarly perused it day by day.”39 Even when disappointed with the empirical reality of London, the poet voluntarily displays “courteous self-submission” before the sights of the metropolis, “as a tax / Paid to the object by prescriptive right, / A thing that ought to be.”40 The city is a book, a book that, in the latter part of this stanza, reads like some future projection of a Jacobin novel aimed not at reforming “things as they are” but insisting, in its dirty, chaotic growth, that it is a “thing that ought to be.”41 Wordsworth characterizes his youthful reaction to the city as one of “submission” to the authority of the center, a “tax” paid to a sovereign site of the British imagination. But in characterizing the power of the material metropole over his imagined city as a “prescriptive right,” Wordsworth seems to suggest that his own imaginative property is being usurped by material London and that, by surrendering control over his imagined cityscape for a prolonged period of time, he risked losing his mental space to appropriation by the forces of modernity coalesced in the city.42 The imagination, this

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passage suggests, must have some role in mediating the individual’s relationship to urban space—it must preserve what Michael Wiley has called its “blanking” capacity—lest the city dweller lose his capacity to imagine humandirected reforms of the processes that, manifested in city space, declare themselves things “that ought to be.”43 Thus, in describing the city, Wordsworth often turns to atopic metaphors that convey the sublime grandeur of the city and that reinfuse its enormities with the appeal of romance, even as they also signal the way that urban space resists total comprehension. In recounting his first visit to London, for example, Wordsworth turns to a metaphor of cave tourism to capture the “blank sense of greatness” that overwhelms him.44 He likens his reaction to his first sight of the “great city” to that of an explorer who “With torches passed into some vault of earth, / The grotto of Antiparos, or the den / Of Yordas among Craven’s mountain tracts.”45 Wordsworth’s subterranean metaphor conveys the failure of the empirical gaze to accurately perceive this new space—the traveler “sees, or thinks / He sees, erelong, the roof above his head / Which instantly unsettles and recedes”46–and the falseness of representations that pretend to offer a fixed perspective on this space of flows. For a moment, indeed, a stable perspective on cavern space appears achievable, and the traveler entertains a “perfect view / Exposed, and lifeless as a written book.”47 But should the traveler “look again,” the falsity of this sense of stability will be revealed: a “new quickening” will animate “the senseless mass” and, like “a magician’s airy pageant, parts, / Unites, embodying everywhere some pressure / Or image, recognized or new, some type / Or picture of the world.”48 Notably, the notion of surrendering one’s imagination, either to the direction of a text (which generates the “lifeless,” ostensibly stable perspective offered by a “book”) or to the panoramic representations generated by commerce, is suggested by Wordsworth’s invocation of the Cave of Yordas. On entering this well-known “show cave,” the subterranean tourist was expected to put his imaginative gaze at the direction of a guidebook or guide and to read rock formations in terms of an established set of conventions.49 The formations of Yordas do not, therefore, necessarily call forth the independent response of the first explorer descending with his own torch into an unknown “vault of earth” but are associated with the tourist’s participation in a well-established cultural system of navigating and interpreting this still-dangerous zone of practice. Therefore, while the subterranean images that confront Wordsworth’s underground traveler—“Ships, rivers, towers, the warrior clad in mail, / The prancing steed, the pilgrim with his staff, / The mitered bishop, and the throned

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king”50—are projections of the imagination, they do not necessarily represent the same kind of spontaneous response to rural nature that Wordsworth celebrates elsewhere. Indeed, their conventionality within the context of the subterranean suggests that they may be read as a submission of the imagination to a commercially perpetuated set of interpretive conventions that, like panoramas, turn the subject into a passive consumer of a “spectacle to which there is no end.”51 The “blank space” of London that Wordsworth imagined as a child has thus undergone transformation and is likened, at the moment of his first encounter with London’s disconcerting material reality, to an atopia perniciously mediated by commercial culture. Both the shadowed cave and the turbulent urban space of the city present the poet with preconceived spaces that appear stable in print (“lifeless as a written book”) but that, when viewed anew, remind the observer of their essential unknowability. Unable to erect a controlling, prospect gaze that will permanently manage the visual incoherence of this environment, the observer both draws on familiar cultural strategies for reading inhospitable space and maps onto unknown forms the images and pressures associated with such environments. Thus in the cavern the traveler projects onto stalagmites the conventional figures of Romance and the Gothic, whereas in the city the visionary poet sees “the destiny of earth itself ”52 teeming in streets that are alternatively the seat of monumental sublimity and anarchic monstrosity. However, in reminding the reader of the falsity of a “written” representation of a blank space that, in its blankness, continually invites some form of imaginative engagement, Wordsworth is inviting the reader to question the authority of not only guidebooks and other “stable” perspectives on the city, but also of the poet’s own urban representations.53 He reminds us that when he describes London as a “tiresome sea” or when he perceives the sleeping city as partaking of the “beauty” found in the near-silent space of “desarts,” that “these I fear / Are falsely catalogued.”54 As James A. W. Heffernan has observed, this last statement “casts doubt on [the poet’s] power to control the city, to bind together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of society in this imperial metropolis”; it is appropriate, then, that this expression of doubt should follow on the heels of Wordsworth’s invocation of one of the spaces thought capable of rapidly undoing the illusion of order imposed on its surface.55 The city, like the planetary atopia, threatens to undo the meanings that have been imposed on its flows and manifestations. Interpretations that temporarily pretend to reveal coherence reveal not the observer’s control over the environment he describes but his possession by the cultural forces that have brought the global city into being.

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In the comparisons he makes between the city and atopic spaces, we see Wordsworth skirting an acknowledgment of the degree to which his poetry of nature is, in part, constituted by the sublime blankness of the Romantic city. We also see him attempting to differentiate his own representations of city space from the falsely authoritative renditions of guidebooks and panoramas. Coined by Robert Barker for his London Exhibition in 1791, the “panorama,” a gigantic circular painting marketed as providing its viewer with the illusion of being transported to an exotic location, was originally used to represent urban space to urban dwellers, promising, as in the case of Barker’s seminal Panorama of London from the Albion Mills (1792), to provide paying audiences with a controlled view of the metropolis.56 Panorama painters, Wordsworth observes, “take in,” or deceive, not only nature but also the human eye in their visions of fixed landscapes through which the viewer will be directed. Wordsworth is suspicious of these artists who, like “angels or commissioned spirits,” claim to “plant us upon some lofty pinnacle / or in a ship on waters.”57 Like the spirits they resemble, panorama artists are in thrall not to the viewer they pretend to serve but to an invisible sovereign power (the commercial heart of London). In seeming to “plant us upon some lofty pinnacle / or in a ship on waters” they display an ostensive mastery of space that weirdly dislocates the viewer from both the material environment of the city and that of the landscapes depicted in paint.58 Wordsworth is wary of such commercialized artistic visions, as well as wary of the panoramic guidebooks that reproduced the panorama’s claim for comprehensive knowledge of space in printed form.59 Indeed, Wordsworth adopts the language of such guidebooks at certain moments in The Prelude, only to enact the failure of this genre to truly orient the visitor to the city. His exhaustive list of tourist sites in The Prelude’s panorama and microcosm stanzas recall the listing of metropolitan wonders in panoramic guidebooks, a connection reinforced in the seventh book when the poet subsequently shifts from the autobiographical “I” into the collective “we” used by guidebooks to orient their readers to the urban scene. “Shall I give way,” he asks rhetorically, near the beginning of “Residence in London,” before launching into his “eyewitness” account of London scenery.60 Wordsworth’s “I” does give way, for as soon as he turns to describing the “endless stream of men and moving things” of the London streets, he shifts pronouns, subsuming his individual vision of the city within a flawed version of the collective voice of urban spatial authority: “Escaped as from an enemy, we turn / Abruptly into some sequestered nook,” he writes of a hypothetical escape from London crowds.61 “Thence

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back into the throng, until we reach—Following the tide that slackens by degrees—Some half-frequented scene.”62 As the interrupting dash indicates, the poet seems unable to guide his companion in a steady path across the city. Frustrated by the crowd, he nevertheless attempts, like a panoramic guidebook, to direct his companion’s gaze, commanding him to “behold” and “see” the sights they pass.63 It is within the framework of this tour that “we proceed” through London streets and view the panoramas that promise, without the inconvenience or expense of actual voyaging, to visually transport their audiences to distant locations and show us “all that the traveler sees when he is there.”64 Here, Wordsworth is criticizing technologies of urban control—the panorama in both its textual and visual forms—that he maintains are inadequate when it comes to coping with the seething cauldron of modernity represented by the city and that, moreover, reduce an individual’s autonomy by encouraging him to turn control over his movement and gaze to another. The panoramic guidebook, for example, advises the traveler which buildings to look at and how to view them; the painted panorama replicates this textual guidance in the form of a program that directs the viewer’s gaze to “objects of significance,” physically directs the viewer’s movements via barriers and walkways, and lastly, of course, limits the objects that meet the viewer’s eye to the objects the artists have decided will be on the canvas. Wordsworth recognizes his mental turn to atopias—the metaphorical ocean, cavern, and desert spaces that he uses to describe the inhospitable city—as the impulse of a citified imagination, a strategy for control over the urban environment. It is a strategy he finds appealing, because it requires the individual to exercise his imagination, though not always independently. Ultimately, however, it is also a move that he recognizes to be as “false” as the panorama’s pretense of spatial mastery. Regarding urban space, Wordsworth suggests, any representation that pretends to offer a fixed image of urban space cannot be trusted. The city thus remains in Wordsworth a fascinating but profoundly disorienting space, which ultimately may constitute as much as it threatens the Romantic poet’s imagination.65

The Atopias of London: De Quincey and Reynolds Although Wordsworth’s The Prelude remains the most fully realized depiction of urban space in early nineteenth-century poetry, the most memorable

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descriptions of urban space were increasingly found in prose. Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), for example, famously stresses the anonymity of the great city, where “the mighty labyrinths of London” could confuse even the most experienced urban walker, and “a barrier no wider than a London street,” could, in the case of the author’s separation from Ann of Oxford Street, amount “in the end to a separation for eternity.”66 Like Wordsworth, De Quincey uses atopic imagery in his descriptions of urban space, and these atopic metaphors invite the reader to suspect the claims of totalizing spatial knowledge made by texts that presume to chart the city.67 However, if in Wordsworth’s Prelude, the poet expresses anxiety over the material and conventional city’s suppression of the individual’s ability to imaginatively engage with its space, in Confessions, the urban dweller’s mental version of London comes to dominate his vision of that city, to nightmarish effect. Taking as a given the potential overlap between urban and oceanic space popularized in London “pilot” books, De Quincey projects onto the metropolis the visions of his narrative-infused imagination, transforming the winding alleyways of London into the iceberg-strewn waters of polar seas and the claustrophobic press of crowded streets into the overwhelming space of a mythological cavern. But whereas urban “pilot” books emphasize, like their nautical predecessors, the importance of landmarks to navigation, the Opium Eater imagines himself as striking away from “the capes and head-lands” of readily identifiable locations into the blank space of the globalized city.68 Like the nautical voyagers who have enabled the opium trade, the Opium Eater steers himself across the city’s abstract space by superimposing on London a chart of the globe that includes such unseen, geo-imaginary markers as the Northwest Passage. The consumer of the goods of empire thus, in this section, recognizes and celebrates his own implication in the networks of global trade that are producing not only the space of the city but also the unseen atopias imagined as regulating, via resistance and enablement, capitalism’s flows. In situating himself in relation to an abstract global space, not in relation to visible landmarks, the Opium Eater’s wanderings interestingly anticipate what Lynda Nead observes is the “reconceptualisation of space” normally associated with the rise of underground railway travel, in which Londoners’ experience of the city became abstracted away from “identifiable external features” and a “sense of the spaces between” the beginnings and ends of their journey.69 That this abstract mode of comprehending urban space, thought to find its culminating expression in Harry Beck’s iconic 1933 map of the London Underground, is

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here anticipated by the Opium Eater’s oceanic navigations suggests that Britons’ engagement with the geo-imaginary regions discussed in this book helped establish precedents for later modes of negotiating a world city shaped by the flows of international capital.70 At first, De Quincey appears to enjoy the illusion of control he feels in viewing the London streets as a sequence of hostile atopias, boasting that he “could almost have believed . . . that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terræ incognitæ, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.”71 But the Opium Eater’s professed ability to “read” the urban environment in terms of voyage narratives soon fails him. He encounters streets and squares as texts he cannot fully comprehend: They are “enigmatical entries” in a navigator’s journal he cannot translate, reminders that, however much he appropriates the language of exploration, it is not able to completely suppress his feelings of alienation from the urban “text” he is reading.72 As Sanjay Krishnan observes, De Quincey’s use of the word “entries” invokes “the balance sheets of accountants and reports of colonial officers, as well as the jottings of naval explorers and scholarly cartographers.”73 The financial systems that fuel and underwrite the search for new lands and swift passages are also thus suggestively identified with the confusing cityscape they have helped to build. De Quincey’s pretention to simultaneously “command a view” of the city and of the ocean is later punished, when, having indulged in the fantasy of himself as an eye of power “aloof from the uproar of life,” he is famously tortured by panoramic visions of the spaces he used to analogize his treks through the metropolis.74 In opium dreams he is “despotically” oppressed by a recurring vision of “the sea . . . paved with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens—faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries.”75 The imaginary ocean that De Quincey conflated with urban space becomes a terrifying construction built out of the bodies of the London poor he has elsewhere tried to aestheticize as a “spectacle” for his own enjoyment.76 De Quincey’s text-influenced reveries, his dream suggests, have suppressed or “paved over” the emblematic suffering of urbanized modernity. His construction of London as a blank space has allowed him to estrange himself from a domestic landscape of generational poverty that now returns as a source of imaginative torment. In Confessions, in other words, we see not only the image of the atopia invoked in an attempt to exert mental control over urban space, but also the fear that unproblematically celebrating the spatial transformations wrought by Britain’s

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global engagements represents a wrong turn—an improper way of engaging with the internationalized economic flows incarnated in the modern city. Such reservations also appear in the emergent novel of urban mysteries that, as Richard Maxwell has argued, was one of the primary responses to the problem of “knowing” the city in the mid-nineteenth century. Like Confessions, G. W. M. Reynolds’s exemplary Mysteries of London draws on the tropes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century guides to the city in likening itself as a nautical “chart” that will “point out and lay bare the shoals, the quicksands, and the rocks of vice which render the passage perilous and full of terrors.”77 Even as Mysteries claims to fill in the menacing blanks of urban space, however, its narrative engine demands that space must continuously fold outward, revealing yet more mysteries and grotesque subterranean spaces that have hitherto escaped surveillance. In doing so, Mysteries implies that London cannot ever be fully known, making its professed commitment to the mapping of urban space as misleading as the polar fictions of London speculators condemned in the pages of Reynolds’s text. Adopting the language of early guidebooks, Mysteries dramatizes its ability to situate its readers in the city, advising the interested traveler to seek out views such as the “too comprehensive glance” that awaits him where “the Eastern Counties’ Railway intersects Spitalfields and Bethnal Green.”78 Yet the city it describes is also curiously divorced from place, its sinister commercial culture embodied in figures such as the archetypal “City Man,” George Montague, a villainous financial speculator of whom it is said that “no one knew where he lived. He was some times seen getting into a Hackney omnibus at the Flower Pot, a Camberwell one at the Cross Keys; or running furiously after a Hammersmith one along Cheapside; but as these directions were very opposite, it was difficult to deduce from them any idea of his domiciliary whereabouts.”79 Montague, like the capital he hopes to command, is in constant circulation and thus cannot be readily located in the book’s chart of the city.80 Notably, Montague’s antidomestic activities link him to dislocated atopias, which, like the dark, omnipresent, and intangible “atmosphere of London,” appear to infuse but ultimately refuse to be fixed by the map of the city.81 Indeed, maps, the narrative implies, are fictions, that, particularly when they pretend to show atopic spaces, are not to be trusted. “And I suppose the mines do not really exist?” asks one financial speculator of his colleague’s depiction of subterranean riches. A fellow swindler reassures him: “Oh! yes; they do—upon his maps!”82 Shades of Terra Australis Incognita pervade the fictions created by these villainous speculators, who cover their office walls with

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papers advertising the “unparalleled and astounding advantages to be reaped” in various unexplored regions of the globe and who deploy panoramic depictions of “the majestic scenery of the North Pole” to better part fools from their money.83 Drawing on a cultural legacy that links the poles to suspect speculations, Reynolds has his liars and financial criminals invoke not only the North but also the South Pole in their attempts to manipulate audiences, a device that serves to highlight the fictional nature of their appeals.84 Although Mysteries itself is represented as a “chart,” in other words, cartographical perspectives are objects of distrust within the text itself, and the promises to fill in the blank spaces of the earth, from the subterranean to the poles, are sure signs that the speaker is out to manipulate his audience with story. However, taking advantage of what the last chapter observed was an increased Victorian awareness of the underground spaces opened up by city improvement projects, Mysteries itself insists on the omnipresence and multiplicity of subterranean spaces within city limits. Again, Reynolds draws on atopic cultural associations in his portrayal of subterranean spaces, depicting these urban fissures as areas safely immune from the gaze of the law, in which London’s criminals accumulate the histories of their crimes.85 Once precipitated into the subterranean, Reynolds’s virtuous protagonists are able to take advantage of its atopic dimensions, taking refuge in dark corners and using cavernous depths to evade detection, until they are able to expose both subterranean space and hidden criminal activities to the light. But even as one of London’s “mysteries” is solved and the dangerous potential of a secret subterranean hideaway negated, we are told that another atopic space awaits discovery in a different location. The serial form of the penny dreadful demands the continued existence of uncharted spaces; it demands that new “plots” of land and crime continually be generated to keep up the momentum of the narrative. If Mysteries disapproves of the atopic fictions employed by speculators then, it is in part because it recognizes its own implication in the rampant invention of blank spaces around which stories must be told. Like the villainous speculators, it exploits its readers’ interest in the spatial unknown and leads its audience astray even as it promises them mastery over atopic space. Despite the narrative’s implicit promise that we will come to know London, like Reynolds’s virtuous Richard Markham upon yet another escape from ghastly subterranean perils, we will forever wander the streets of the city “lost in vain endeavour to unravel the tangled topographical skein which perplexed [the] imagination.”86 Both Confessions and Mysteries, in other words, invoke atopias in their

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representation of pretentions of spatial mastery that, ultimately, seem inadequate in the face of a relentlessly sprawling metropolis. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey’s mental conflation of urban space with the Arctic, the subterranean, and the ocean proves an insufficient and perhaps dangerously misguided technique for cognitively mapping urban space. In The Mysteries of London, the text itself is implicated in the speculative spatial practices it condemns, and, while promising its reader a sense of security in the face of urban transformation, contributes to the perceived instability and incomprehensibility of London by inventing yet more blank spaces within city limits. The imagination, in both of these narratives, plays an important role in mediating the individual’s relationship to a city experienced as much textually as physically. De Quincey relates his urban navigation to the act of reading, while Reynolds’s characters, when not in danger of imminent death, rather enjoy “wandering amongst all the haunts of crime . . . of which [they] had read in romances.”87 In both texts, however, imaginative ways of engaging with the city further contribute to their urban navigators’ (and their readers’) disorientation regarding the space of the metropolis. Even as atopias are invoked in claims of spatial mastery, in other words, their appearance seems to signal these texts’ own inability to stabilize their readers’ relationship to the urban environments they represent. In the case of De Quincey and Wordsworth, such destabilizing atopias therefore also suggestively legitimize their authors’ turn toward the rural countryside, where less-mediated versions of nature can provide the Romantic writer with a geo-imaginative anchoring that will resist the deracinations of global capitalism. Whereas in the early eighteenth century, we frequently saw atopias depicted as asserting planetary limits on the global circulations of goods, print, and people, then, in the context of the nineteenth-century metropole, we can see them now invoked as spaces imagined as reflecting, or as allied with, the delocalizing forces of emergent globalization. In De Quincey’s Confessions, Reynolds’s Mysteries, and Wordsworth’s Prelude, atopias are invoked as a means of conveying the urban walker’s sense of alienation from, but also his apprehensive admiration of, the sublime space of the city. Portrayed as resistant to totalizing, prospect gazes, the city is a space that stimulates, but ultimately resists, attempts at textual control. In metaphorically importing atopias to London, these writers signal a desire to limit the spatial fluctuations of modernity, but in doing so they also reinscribe the “unmanageable” nature of the metropole, which seems to seethe and grow and absorb foreign geographies at a pace that outstrips the writer’s attempt at

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representation, indeed, at a pace that, particularly in the case of Reynolds’s Mysteries, seems accelerated by the writer’s attempt at representation.88 If in the other chapters of this book, atopias have frequently served to shore up literary claims for the importance of print culture in mediating individual and national relationships to space, in these representations of urban atopias we see an unexpected admission of print culture’s failure, and even of its complicity, in the spatial transformations wrought by imperial expansion and global capitalism. The atopia may serve as an imagined limit on empire, but, via its reassurance that such limits do exist and are naturally or providentially imposed, its literary invocation may also serve to subtly accommodate readers to the cultural changes a text pretends to, or genuinely strives to, resist. When Joanna Kavenna turns to high Arctic sagas in an attempt to mentally escape the pressures of the city, she appears to be unconscious of the ways in which her reading of explorer narratives mirrors back to her “the sameness of my days, the relentless round of my hours” in heroic guise, replacing the alienating tedium of her workdays with the equally tedious ploddings of polar explorers.89 Far from offering her an escape from, or a way to rethink, the global capitalist system in which she is enmeshed, her polar reading instead valorizes her alienated condition. Kavenna’s desire to turn, in urban space, toward the distant atopia of the poles, would no doubt be recognizable to the nineteenth-century writers whose works she draws from for inspiration. But it is a desire that authors such as William Wordsworth would have us interrogate, bearing in mind that such “falsely catalogued” juxtapositions may accommodate us to the spatial signs of disquieting global appropriations and may reinforce the senses of modern dislocation and globalized placelessness that we desire to combat.90

Notes

Introduction 1. Hiatt 44. 2. Petto 58. 3. John Frost, for example, traces the scramble for Africa back to the moment at which d’Anville’s map “first exhibited that vast interior blank which so strongly excited the curiosity and enterprise of Europe” (121). 4. Voltaire, quoted in Besterman 407. 5. D’Anville 66. For more on d’Anville’s relationship to Voltaire, see Petto 186–87. 6. According to Petto, the attention paid by d’Anville and other French geographers to accuracy reflected a new “alignment of mapping and power for a state less concerned with the ‘cult of image’ of the Sun King and more directed by scientific authority and rational thought in service of well-reasoned government” (59). 7. Harley 86. 8. Ibid. 105. 9. I am thus suggesting that what Bertrand Westphal describes as postmodern literature’s determination to combat the horror of “excessive stabilization, the denial of transgressivity, and the consecration of the static” suggested by the filled-in map is anticipated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature’s similar attempt to preserve “the imaginary margins” (59) of the world. 10. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 108. 11. Schmitt 44, 43. Schmitt argues that Britain’s claim to extend “law to the space of the free sea” constituted a “world-historical [event] of revolutionary significance,” inaugurating a new era of “human means of power and human consciousness of space” (44) that made possible the development of a global sense of the earth. In terms of legal practice, Britain’s arguments for a mare clausum failed to gain historical traction, but in their attempt to convert the atypical space of the ocean into territory, Britons highlighted the exceptional spatial nature of the ocean and seemed to beg for new strategies through which to conceive of oceanic imperium. See Schmitt 39–54. For culture’s role in integrating the concept of property with oceanic space, see Baker 46–55.

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12. Benton 30. As Benton argues, the popular historical narrative of the rationalization of space—a narrative that I invoked in the opening pages of this chapter—needs to be tempered with a “history of imperfect geographies and the production in empire of variegated spaces with an uncertain relation to imperial power” (2). Benton’s illuminating examination of the legal anxieties associated with river regions, seas, hills, and islands describes law’s role in the social construction of uneven imperial geographies; my own project might be said to complement Benton’s in its examination of literature’s role in the same. 13. I use this term in a different sense than Vittorio Gregotti, who uses it to refer to the culturally detached spaces created by globalization. As I suggest in the Conclusion, there may well be an imagined connection between these sites of natural placelessness and the placeless locations created by late capitalism; one serves, perhaps, to naturalize relationships to the other. But more immediately, I adopt the term “atopia” to connote the atypical nature of these spaces, to signal their resistance to the habitation usually imagined as a precondition for the creation of place, and to differentiate them from both Michel Foucault’s heterotopias (of which they may be considered a subset) and utopias. The term “heterotopias” is too broad for my purposes, encompassing as it does everything from concentration camps to brothels to the space of the ship. As for utopias, atopias are geographically “real” in a way that the “nowhere” space of the utopia is not; they are hostile to permanent occupation, whereas the utopia is the locus of a model society. As I note elsewhere, however, utopian discourse tends also to express faith in humanity’s ability to thoroughly transform the geographical, as well as social, character of the world: The founding act of Thomas More’s Utopia is the Utopians’ engineered creation, rather than discovery, of their island. Atopias occasionally intersect with utopian discourse as spaces whose uninhabitable character is successfully changed through the efforts of the ideal society: Utopia, in short, is occasionally imagined as triumphing over atopia. 14. I am working here with a concept of place rooted in the Heideggerian concept of “dwelling” and in the Lefebvrian spatial tradition, in which place is conceived of as a form of (often bounded) space constructed by the lived experiences of the people who inhabit it and whose social relations are mediated by this location. As I will argue in this book, people may certainly have an affective relationship to atopias; indeed, as Yi-Fu Tuan observes, one’s relationship with the “security and stability of place” is dialectically informed by one’s relationship to the “openness, freedom, and threat of space” (6). 15. Exceptions to this may be found in utopian discourse, where faith in the power of human agency to transform society often extends to humans’ ability to transform the geographical character of hitherto resistant spaces. For example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Queen Mab posits the future habitability of the poles, which will be rendered un-atopic as the incline of the axis of the globe improves along with human nature. As this example indicates, however, once a region has been imagined as an atopia its conversion into habitable space is considered a monumental act of transformation, akin to religious visions of mountains being made low and the ocean giving up its dead. Such visions testify, in other words, to the power of the imagined utopia, rather than to the inherent nature of the atopia. 16. Spivak 72.

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17. Geographical and Astronomical Definitions 1. 18. De Quincey, Confessions 47, 48, 72. 19. Mountains’ historical function as providential borders between European nations likely underlay their representation as fixed, known spaces. Notably, however, the peaks of unconquered mountains were “filled in” not only on maps of Europe but also on maps that limited themselves to the representation of mountain ranges. Horace Bénédict de Saussure, for example, included a fully elaborated but defective map of the western Alps as the frontispiece to his 1786 volume of Voyages dans les Alpes. When he successfully attained the summit of Mont Blanc the following year, he reported that “a single glance” provided him with cartographic knowledge that “years of work had not been able to resolve” (qtd. in Rudwick 17). For more on mountains in the British imagination, see Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. 20. Indeed, even within the nineteenth-century British imagination the desert is a markedly unstable space, portrayed at times as an atopia, as a site of civilization, and as a frontier space that can be “greened.” Teasing out the complexities of this space’s interaction with Orientalism and late Victorian imperialism would make for a fruitful line of inquiry, but it lies outside the necessarily limited scope of this project. 21. A utopia is the happy place that is located “nowhere.” Mythical spaces such as the moon and the inner earth made useful settings for early utopias and satires because their setting advertised their unreality. Once a region such as the moon falls within the scope of plausible mobility, however, it becomes a real location—a “somewhere”—that, for many authors, is no longer an appropriate setting for the habitable utopia. It instead becomes available for its imagining as atopia, the space that retains its affinity with the imagination via its resistance to incorporation into the space of the community. For a useful overview of the history of utopia and its geographical and temporal transitions, see Vieira. 22. Tuan 86. Tuan describes two types of “mythical space,” the first of which is a “fuzzy area of defective knowledge surrounding the empirically known” (86) and the second of which is the spatial component of “cosmology” (88). All of the atopias described in this book are informed by tensions accompanying their representational transition from the first type of mythical space (infused, in certain instances, with connotations of the second type) to an abstract, chartable space. 23. Lefebvre 290. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre famously dates the shift to an “abstract” space governed and surveyed by capitalist society to the late eighteenth century. According to Lefebvre, the French Revolution provided the “definitive constitution of abstract space” (290), while in a larger sense, Romanticism itself “lived through . . . the transitional moment that separated abstract spatiality from a more unmediated perception” (290). Romantic literature thus registers a dramatic reimagining of the nature of state power and national community, a reimagining that was projected onto and came to characterize subjective understanding of physical spaces. 24. Here I am sympathetic to Saree Makdisi’s argument that “Romanticism . . . can be understood as a cultural discourse defining the mutual constitution of the modern imperial metropolitan center and its anti-modern colonies and peripheries” (175). Accepting

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Marilyn Butler’s caveat that Romanticism is “not a single intellectual movement but a complex of responses to certain conditions which Western society has experienced and continued to experience since the middle of the eighteenth century” (184), I agree with Makdisi’s assertion that one of the processes eliciting—indeed, being constituted by—these responses was England’s hegemonic relationship to its colonies within and without the British Isles. 25. Baker 52. 26. Ibid. 61. 27. Cohen 42. 28. Ibid. 15. 29. As a means of acknowledging moments of intersection between the history I narrate and widely accepted accounts of the literary developments of this period, I use the classic labels of “Romantic” and “Victorian” to describe authors whose ideologies and dates of literary production conform to those traditionally associated with their respective literary movements. 30. Here I agree with Cheeke’s description of these two philosophical strands as that of a post-Heidegger, post-Bachelard “poetics of space” and a Lefebvrian strand of “Marxist cultural analysis” (7–8). Cheeke’s observation is substantiated by the fact that introductory texts on spatial theory often construct a lineage that claims critic but not the other. Thus Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine’s excellent Key Thinkers on Space and Place stresses the importance of Lefebvre but omits Heidegger and the Heidegger-influenced work of Gaston Bachelard, whereas Tim Cresswell’s illuminating Place: A Short Introduction elaborates the theories of Heidegger but makes only passing mention of Lefebvre. The titles of these works hint at the varying preoccupations of these traditions: namely, that scholars interested in place tend to look backward to Heidegger, whereas scholars working on space tend to look to Lefebvre. That said, as David Cooper observes in his useful meditation on space and place in Romanticism, these two genealogies of spatial thought often overlap, as in the work of Tuan and Relph (see Cooper 809). 31. Lefebvre cites both Heidegger and Bachelard in The Production of Space, but he emphasizes the socially produced nature of dwelling spaces and problematizes the suggestion of transhistorical conceptions of place contained in Heidegger’s description of dwelling and Bachelard’s meditations on the home. Significantly for later discussions of the city, Lefebvre also challenges Heidegger’s privileging of the rural and treats urban space as a complex object of analysis. See, in particular, Lefebvre’s discussion of dwelling and modernity in The Production of Space (120–22). 32. Ibid. 38–39. 33. See, for example, Barnett 529–30. 34. Claudia Strauss provides a useful overview of the Lacanian debts of the “imaginary” in anthropological analyses of “shared mental life” (333). As deployed in political science, “geo-imaginary” is often used to emphasize the role of cultural rhetoric rather than economic or political policy in the social construction of regions such as the Pacific Rim (see Wilson and Dirlik 5). For applications of this term in projects similar to my own, see

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Patricia L. Price’s analysis of the “imminently dis-placed region” of the American West in the American geo- imaginary (56), Adriana Craciun’s work on the “geo-imaginary region” (435) of the Arctic, and Christopher L. Connery’s analysis of the “oceanic geo-imaginary” (196). 35. Bachelard, Heidegger, and Lefebvre all turned to literature as a source of information on the import of spaces, and though Lefebvre ultimately rejects literature-based analysis as the basis of his own methodology (Lefebvre 14–15), the stress that Edward Soja laid on the imagination’s role in Lefebvre’s model helped inaugurate literary studies’ “spatial turn” (Warf and Arias 2). 36. A “geo-imaginary” mode of inquiry differs from that implied by other spatialliterary terms, such as Bakhtin’s chronotope, in that, first, it tends to pursue the spatial object of its analysis across a variety of genres, and, second, it asks how literature informs our perceptions of a “real” space as opposed to identifying the function that a represented space performs within the narrative pattern of a particular genre. Given this project’s interest in both texts’ contribution to perceptions of these regions, and the kinds of narrative functions these spaces share in the literature in which they are represented, I will occasionally use “chronotope” where appropriate. 37. Perera 7. 38. Westphal 112. 39. Makdisi 15, 12, 12. 40. Simpson 72. 41. Said, Culture and Imperialism 7. The imperial implications of the improvable landscapes collected under the umbrella of terra nullius have been admirably explored by scholars such as Richard H. Grove. What I am suggesting here is that the discourse of improvement—a discourse that justified the European “right” to exert control over colonial landscapes in the service of environmental management—was positioned in opposition to not only native peoples but also atopias such as the North Pole and the subterranean, which resisted, and, in some cases, threatened to undo, European improvements. 42. Cook, Journals 1: 72. 43. “The Island,” Examiner 396. 44. Auerbach xi.

Chapter 1 1. D’Urville 2: 474. 2. Mawer 82. 3. The English translation of the report also unintentionally exaggerated the numbers of seals in the area, generating unwarranted speculative enthusiasm among sealers. See Mawer 82. 4. The term terra nullius did not come into widespread use until the nineteenth century; nevertheless, scholars such as Anthony Pagden use it to denote a range of practices

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used by European powers to legitimate their colonial acquisitions (see Pagden 1–31). As suggested by the discussion of oceanic law in the next chapter, the littoral oceanic zone of an “uninhabited” land could technically also be claimed under terra nullius. The high seas, on the other hand, were considered res nullius—space belonging to no one—a designation that acknowledged the ocean’s status as not-land. As Kathryn Milun observes, “Terra/res nullius . . . stands for a type of space that either can be seized because it isn’t ‘governed’ or not seized because it cannot be ‘governed.’ ” Atopias fall into the latter category, functioning as spaces that cannot be permanently occupied or “governed.” Milun also notes that “terra/res nullius, as a category of things which are ungoverned or ungovernable, also often overlaps with the legal category of res communis, things which are held in common” (69). Spaces such as the ocean are thus often also portrayed as a kind of global commons—a space claimed by a collective humanity rather than by an individual nation. 5. A Fata Morgana mirage is an optical illusion resulting from temperature inversion. Light refracts through alternating layers of warm and icy air, creating a distorted (and often inverted) mirror of the nearby landscape. Sailors associated unsettling Fata Morgana projections of upside-down mountains with fairy-tale castles, so they named the phenomenon after Morgan le Fay (in Italian, “Fata Morgana”), King Arthur’s sorceress antagonist. 6. Such was the experience of d’Urville’s American rival, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, who charted “high mountainous lands” that were subsequently sailed over by Sir James Clark Ross, who then disputed Wilkes’s discovery in an 1847 book. Wilkes responded by going to the American press, turning (as many explorers did) to print culture to defend both his reputation and the legitimacy of his discoveries. For more on the Wilkes controversy, see Mawer 124–38. 7. Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative 145. 8. Brontë 21. 9. S. T. Coleridge, Specimens 310. 10. Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online, s.v. “speculate, v.” (accessed September 2012). 11. OED Online, s.v. “imagine, v.” (accessed September 2012). 12. While the verb “speculate” is nominally different than the verb “imagine,” the denotations of these words occasionally overlap. Both words, for example, can denote the act of “conjecture,” both can denote the act of “view[ing] mentally,” and both may imply the formation of “an idea or notion with regard to something not known with certainty” (OED, “imagine”). In general, acts of speculation differ from acts of imagination in that the object of their contemplation—a soul, a star, a market—are presumed to exist externally to the mind that contemplates them. In contemporary practice, this distinction was not vigorously preserved. Philosophical speculation, for example, frequently took imaginative flight, while what Margaret Cohen refers to as the “pragmatic imagination” (54) of maritime craft was used to negotiate uncertain geographies. 13. Hill 3. 14. In referring to “community formation,” I mean to gesture not only toward scholarship following in the nationally oriented footsteps of Linda Colley and Benedict

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Anderson, but also to works such as Michael Wiley’s Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions and Toby R. Benis’s Romantic Diasporas: French Émigrés, British Convicts, and Jews, which stretch beyond the parameters of the nation to examine eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transnational identities. 15. Keskitalo 28. 16. As David notes, the public’s misperception of the polar regions as interchangeable was also reinforced by artwork such as the 1845–46 whaling paintings of J. M. W. Turner, which transposed subjects between the northern and southern ends of the globe (244–45). 17. Keskitalo 30. 18. As Keskitalo observes, in nineteenth-century polar exploration “what was spoken of as Arctic was . . . to a large extent the polar desert and semi-desert High Arctic (a much smaller area than that treated in international cooperation today)” (26). For an overview of the difficulties of defining “Arctic” territory and the various geographical and environmental measures used to define this region, see Keskitalo 25–51. 19. U.S. National Committee 65. In representing the poles as sites of cosmopolitan scientific inquiry, the National Committee eschews mention of the IPY’s historical implication in Cold War politics and the possibility that its professed neutrality may again be undermined by the international tensions surrounding the contemporary “scramble for the Arctic.” For more on the history of political tension surrounding the IPY, see Belanger. 20. U.S. National Committee 65, 66. 21. Richard 6. 22. Byron, quoted in U.S. National Committee 65. I have reproduced this quotation from Don Juan as it appears in A Vision for the International Polar Year, 2007–2008. 23. Robert McGhee reports hearing stories of a tropical valley hidden in the Arctic while he was in British Columbia in 1959 (20–21). Rumors of hidden tropical paradises have also surfaced in conjunction with the Bigfoot myth, as in an influential 1956 Stag magazine article, “Is the Missing Link Living in Canada?,” that reported would-be Sasquatch hunters speaking knowledgably of the “hot springs in the middle of the Arctic, of the tropical vegetation around them, of fabulous veins of gold in the rocks, and of prehistoric caves lining the shores of the river” (I. Johnson n.p.). 24. John Dee, British Museum, Cotton MS, Augustus I, I, iv. Quoted in McGhee 28. 25. See E. Wilson 143–52. Elizabeth Leane also provides a useful overview of Antarctica’s imagined valences in Antarctica in Fiction (22–52). For Elizabethan representations of the Arctic as a demonic space, see C. Franklin. 26. Lambert of St. Omer, in Chapman 4. 27. Campbell 2: 400. 28. For a history of Britain’s search for the Northwest Passage, see G. Williams. 29. For the relationship of Terra Australis Incognita to capitalist myth making, see Markley 213–18. For a discussion of the Southern Continent’s role in cartography, see Richardson. 30. Cavendish 124. 31. Ibid. 126.

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32. Ibid. 186. 33. This is not to say that Cavendish’s work had a direct influence on these later texts. As Elizabeth Spiller notes, “Cavendish’s work received little serious attention during the seventeenth century” (141), and by the mid-eighteenth century, most of her writing had “disappeared from view” (Whitaker 350). The Blazing World is thus better seen as an expression of a particular cultural moment than as a grand shaper of future polar representations. 34. The Naval Chronicle 2: 346–47. 35. Ibid. 2: 347. 36. G. 157. 37. Reeve 53. 38. Paltock 35. 39. Ibid. 43. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 151, 54. 43. Ibid. 55. 44. See Baucom 16–17. 45. Ibid. 16. 46. Paltock 54. 47. Ibid. 373. 48. Ibid. 114. 49. Ibid. 234. 50. Ibid. 215. 51. Markley 234. 52. Ibid. 53. Crook 87. 54. “Article VII” 123. 55. Ibid. 128. 56. Hunt, “Of Peter Wilkins” 250. 57. Cook’s narrative was beaten to press by at least six weeks by a competing account of the voyage by George Forster. Forster’s narrative did not, however, succeed in outselling Cook’s official narrative of the expedition. For the respective publication successes of Cook and Forster, see Thomas and Berghof xxxvi. 58. Cook, Journals 2: 72. 59. This is not to say that the accounts produced by Cook’s expeditions were universally utilitarian. George Forster’s account of Cook’s second voyage, for example, revels in its sublime descriptions of icebergs, one of which reminds the observer of “a grotto or cavern.” According to Forster, the drifting ice formations inspired those on board Cook’s ships to give “full scope to our imagination, which compared them to several known objects” (76)—a practice similar to the reading of cave formations that I describe in Chapter 4. 60. Richardson 98.

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61. Ibid. 73. 62. Cook, Journals 1: 413. 63. Ibid. 64. Hawkesworth 5. Defending his controversial account of Cook’s voyage, Hawkesworth explained that his decisions had been made with literary concerns in mind: “It was debated whether it should be written in the first or third person: it was readily acknowledged . . . that a narrative in the first person would bring the Adventurer and Reader nearer together . . . more strongly excite an interest, and consequently afford more entertainment” (5). Moreover, Hawkesworth had been told that he was free to comment upon his subject as an author would and to “intersperse such sentiments and observations as my subject should suggest” (6). 65. Richardson 97. 66. Cook, Voyage (1777) 1: ix. 67. Cook, Journals 2: 72. 68. Ibid. 2: 80. 69. Cook, Voyage (1779) 2: 231. 70. Ibid. 2: 243. 71. Ibid. 2: 231. 72. A Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen 2: 70, 71. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. The notion that racial hierarchies could be complicated in polar space was revisited in American fiction. In Adam Seaborn’s Symzonia; a Voyage of Discovery (1820), a voyager enters the hollow earth by way of the South Pole and discovers a land of perfect whiteness, in which he, being darker skinned, is now racially inferior. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) features another polar traveler overwhelmed by whiteness, an image revisited in H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936), a sequel to Pym that narrates a lethal encounter between white scientists and the Antarctic remnants of an alien slave rebellion. 76. As Richard Haven observes, while initial critical responses to Rime were cool, by 1817 it had become a poem familiar to most British readers (366). By the middle decades of the nineteenth century it had become one of the obvious literary mediators of polar space. An 1838 review in the Literary Gazette, for example, praises George Back’s narrative of the 1836–37 Arctic expedition by noting that its “effect . . . upon our minds had been something like that of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner” (“Narrative of an Expedition in H.M.S. Terror” 433). By the early twentieth century, references to Coleridge’s poems were made by explorers themselves. In his account of his famous 1914 Endurance expedition, for example, Ernest Shackleton repeatedly compares his crew’s experiences to those of the “Ancient Mariner” (98). For an analysis of Shackleton’s polar Romanticism, see Hubbell. 77. S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1798) ll. 50–51. 78. Ibid. ll. 101–2. 79. Cook, Journals 2: 80.

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80. B. Smith 131. 81. S. T. Coleridge, Specimens 309. 82. Ibid. 310. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. In an 1834 article in Tait’s Magazine, De Quincey accused Coleridge of failing to acknowledge his “obligation to Shelvocke” (“The English Opium Eater” 511) for the albatross anecdote that inspired the Mariner’s famous error. 86. There were six published versions of Rime in Coleridge’s lifetime. Coleridge made his most famous changes to the poem in the 1817 version published in under his name in Sibylline Leaves. 87. Wallen 5. This and all subsequent references to Rime refer to the 1798, 1800, and 1817 versions as collected in Wallen. 88. The area “beyond the line” was a treated as a highly ambiguous legal region in European treaties and in popular discourse, in which the laws that governed other oceanic areas did not necessarily apply. As Lauren Benton observes, “Which line was meant when Europeans invoked the phrase ‘no peace beyond the line’ underwent change from the more precise delineations of fifteenth and early sixteenth-century treaties to the more simple designation of the Tropic of Cancer, and to the more informal reference to the equator as the dividing line” (114). 89. S. T. Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner” (1800) 5. 90. Ibid. “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798) ll. 49–50. 91. Ibid. ll. 53–54. 92. Ibid. l. 55. 93. OED Online, s.v. “ken, v. 1” (accessed January 2, 2008). 94. S. T. Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798) l. 63. 95. E. Wilson 171. 96. S. T. Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798) ll. 113–14. 97. Ibid. ll. 120–21. 98. Ibid. ll. 128, 406, 60. 99. This translation appears in Keach 504. 100. Darwin 524. 101. Wallen 111, 138. 102. Ibid. 20. 103. For more on Banks’s relationship to state politics, see Gascoigne 34–64. 104. Cook, Journals 1: 243. 105. For an overview of the effectiveness and popularity of Barrow’s Quarterly contributions, see Cameron. 106. Barrow, “Memoir” 457. 107. Barrow, A Chronological History 379. 108. Morley 241. I pick up here on the language of Henry Morley’s 1853 article in Household Words, in which he lauds the imperial character associated with the poles,

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“stainless” areas free from associations with “slavery” and native corruption, where the “only bloodshed by our Europeans . . . has been the blood of animals, honestly killed” (241). 109. See Fleming 30–34. 110. Leslie 3. 111. “Quarterly Review.” 112. “Expedition to the North Pole” 2F. 113. Leslie 5. For a more detailed discussion of the controversy surrounding Barrow’s climatology, including his invocation of the visions of poets such as Erasmus Darwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley, see Carroll. For more on the controversy attending his geographical speculations, see Richard. 114. See Carroll. 115. In the Morning Chronicle’s April 8 list of “Books Published This Day,” a new paragraph is inserted about Voyage’s advertisement, stressing the fact that “this little work was published previous to the design of the present Expedition.” The concluding sentence trumpets that this novel “now becomes interesting to all those who wish to have a clear idea of the insuperable difficulties that must be encountered in those dreary regions” (2). While the stress placed by the advertisement on Voyage’s early entry into the polar conversation positions the novel as an impartial source on the North Pole, the concluding sentence advertises the political ammunition this volume will provide those who question Barrow’s optimism regarding the possible achievements of a British polar expedition. 116. See Richard 306–7. 117. The Quarterly frequently ran behind schedule, so the month on its title page does not reflect the date of its actual publication. Barrow’s first Arctic article, “A Sketch of the British Fur Trade in North America,” has a publication date of October 1816, but actually first appeared a year later, in February 1817. 118. Barrow, “Sketch” 168. 119. Ibid. 129. Lord Selkirk (1771–1820) famously promoted the colonization of present-day Canada as a means of addressing the discontents of Irish Catholics and of Scottish Highlanders dispossessed by the Highland Clearances. In June 1816, the ongoing tension between Selkirk’s Red River colony (supported by the Hudson’s Bay Company, in which Selkirk had invested) and the North West Company exploded into violence at Seven Oaks (an area near Winnipeg in present-day Manitoba). Selkirk responded by seizing Fort William (the North West Company’s headquarters), arresting the North West Company’s partners, and seizing their furs. The latter action subsequently opened Selkirk up to charges of personal profiteering. For more on Selkirk and the Seven Oaks controversy, see Bumstead 302–30. 120. Barrow, “Sketch” 129. 121. Ibid. 130. 122. “Narrative of Occurrences” 2: 3. 123. Barrow, “Sketch,” 129. 124. Ibid. 146, 151. 125. Ibid. 153.

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126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 155, 153, 169. 128. Ibid. 161, 169. 129. Ibid. 172. 130. Ibid. 131. While the first forty pages of the Frankenstein manuscript are not extant, in the Frankenstein Notebooks, Charles Robinson indicates that M. W. Shelley had fixed on an Arctic setting for the novel’s conclusion by April 1817 at the latest (lxxxiv). Britain’s resumption of polar exploration was announced in February 1818, after the publication of Frankenstein and Bragg’s A Voyage to the North Pole, the latter of which first appears in a “Published This Day” notice on May 29, 1817. 132. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket might be said to offer an American example of an exception to this trend, but the moment at which the protagonist appears to arrive at the South Pole is also the moment at which the narrative famously breaks off. Carried toward one of the giant holes that John Cleves Symmes claimed were located at the poles, Pym never narrates what lies within or at the pole; the rest of his tale, we are told, is “irrecoverably lost” (244). 133. As Robert Crossley observes, the “science-fiction writers of the 1970s . . . felt constrained by the new information” and Mars fell out of favor as a “setting for narratives” (245). Crossley also suggests that the increasingly scientific discourse surrounding Mars exacerbated tensions between writers of realistic science fiction and those who, like Ray Bradbury, favored more “romantic” (214) portrayals. See Crossley 195–262. 134. Bragg 19. 135. Ibid. 36. Bragg’s Voyage received little in the way of critical attention but appears to have been reprinted in at least three editions during the 1817–19 period. It was also published under the title The Surprising Voyage of Captain Bragg in a Journey to Discover the North Pole. 136. Ibid. 145, 164, 164. 137. Ibid. 164, 165. 138. Ibid. 165. 139. Ibid. 157. 140. Ibid. 158. 141. Markley 234. 142. Bragg 158. 143. Ibid. 157. 144. Ibid. 163. 145. Ibid. 160. 146. Ibid. 161. See P. Davidson on the “idea of north” (20). For more on the relationship between Scotland and “north,” see Fielding 13–39. 147. Ibid. 190, 191. 148. Ibid. 169. 149. The novel’s contemplation of a future apocalypse in which polar ice will overrun

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the earth suggests that human empires will ultimately lose their battles with the empire of ice. See Bragg 35. 150. Craciun notes that Frankenstein’s polar dimensions were swiftly eclipsed in popular culture, in part because the novel found its widest audience via theatrical adaptations that stripped it of its high Arctic setting (459). This is not to say that the novel had no impact on subsequent polar imaginings. As Craciun observes, the Arctic explorer John Richardson compares an Inuit woman to the bride of Frankenstein’s Creature in one of his letters (451), and the review of Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean cited later in this chapter presumes its audience’s familiarity with Frankenstein’s polar frame in 1827. As I mention in Chapter 3, Jane Franklin, who later became a driving force behind the search for her husband’s missing expedition, was also a reader of Mary Shelley. Evidence exists, in short, to suggest that some of the nineteenth-century figures configuring polar space in the British imagination were familiar with Frankenstein’s imagery. 151. Shelley, Frankenstein (2003) 21. 152. Ibid. 15, 22. 153. “North Pole” 3. 154. See, for example, “Extract of a letter from on board the Isabella,” published in the Liverpool Mercury on October 23, 1818: “July 18, in lat. 74.43—The compasses for some time traversed very sluggishly; this, we suppose is due to an increase in the dip. I think it not at all improbable that as the terrestrial magnetism begins to act more inclined to the compass needle, it will act with less force” (“Polar Expedition” 6). Similarly, an 1820 letter to “a lady in this neighbourhood” (JR 111) describes icebergs in detail and dwells on the difficulties of navigating in polar seas. In contrast, Walton’s letters contain little in the way of description, let alone scientific observation, of the polar seas through which he passes. 155. Craciun 474. 156. Shelley, Frankenstein (1998) 38. 157. Ibid. 20. 158. Poovey 256. 159. Shelley, Frankenstein (1998) 138. 160. Barrow, “Sketch,” 142. 161. Shelley, Frankenstein (1998) 96. 162. Ibid. 163. Schmidgen 136. 164. Shelley, Frankenstein (1998) 96. 165. Ibid. 77, 120. 166. Ibid. 95. 167. Ibid. 138. 168. Ibid. 191. 169. Ibid. 5. 170. Ibid. 184. 171. Shelley, Frankenstein (2003) 22. 172. “Quarterly Review” 7.

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173. “The Arctic Expedition” (1818) 241. 174. Ibid. 241, 240. 175. Craciun 458. 176. Parry, Journal of a Voyage 74. The first edition of Parry’s expensive 1821 narrative “consisted of 1500 copies; all were reportedly sold on the day of publication,” netting John Murray “a stunning profit of £2373 8s. 10d” (Cavell, “Making Books” 53). 177. Parry, Journal of a Voyage 125. 178. Bewell 21. 179. Parry, Journal of a Voyage 125. 180. I am suggesting, therefore, that Parry is manifesting a similar attitude here toward “culture” and the uninhabitable that Samuel Baker identifies at work in the Lake poets’ imaginative engagements with oceanic space (56–73). 181. Parry, Journal of a Voyage 275. 182. Ibid. 176. 183. Ibid. 106. 184. Ibid. 185. Ibid. 127. 186. “The North West Passage.” 187. Parry, Journal of a Voyage 115. 188. Ibid. 158, 74. 189. Holland 185. 190. “Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean.” 191. Ibid. 100. 192. Ibid. 101. 193. Gillies 2: 114. 194. Parry, Journal of a Voyage 125. 195. As Cavell notes, Franklin’s narrative outsold Parry’s, but because of the high price of Parry’s edition, the latter proved more profitable to Murray (“Making Books” 53). 196. John Franklin 325. 197. See David 99–101. 198. Parry, letter to John Murray (July 3, 1826) 3. Parry’s correspondence also shows his connection, via what Craciun terms the Murray “print nexus” (457), to figures such as “Mr. Southey” (Parry, letter 2) and “Lord Byron,” for whom Parry is, on July 3, 1826, providing “a little account” (3) of his expedition. 199. Parry, Journal of a Third Voyage 40–41, emphasis in original. 200. Barrow, “Narrative” 445. 201. “Departure of the ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ ” 328. 202. Conrad, “Geography” 10–11. 203. Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative 28. 204. Conrad, “Geography” 11. 205. “The Arctic Expeditions” 720. 206. “The Arctic Expedition” (1849) 181.

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207. Ibid. 181. 208. Ibid. 209. “Pictures of the Polar Regions” 248. 210. Ibid. 211. Francis 47. 212. “Safety of Sir J. Franklin” 8. 213. “The Arctic Expeditions” 720. 214. Ibid. 215. Dickens, “Lost Arctic Voyagers” (Part II) 392. 216. Francis 48. 217. Dickens, “Lost Arctic Voyagers” (Part II) 392. 218. Jen Hill suggests that Dickens’s decision to fictionalize his Franklin arguments in dramatic rather than novelized form reflects his “distrust of the effectiveness of narration on private readers” (131), a suggestion that seems likely, given the number of competing written arguments circulating in the public’s eye. 219. See Brannan, 3–5. 220. Dickens and Collins 104. 221. Dickens, “Letter to W. H. Wills” 8: 82. 222. Hill 133. 223. Dickens and Collins 146. 224. Dickens, “Lost Arctic Voyagers” (Part I) 361. 225. Dickens and Collins 103. 226. Ibid. 101. 227. Ibid. 136. 228. Ibid. 101. 229. Ibid. 127. 230. Ibid. 158. 231. For a history of the reception of Dickens’s theatrical version of The Frozen Deep, see Brannan. A version of the play, albeit heavily revised by Wilkie Collins, was published in 1866. Collins also translated the story into novelette form for his 1873–74 American reading tour, and the novelette version was published in 1874. For a history of Collins’s version of The Frozen Deep, see Nayder 96–99. 232. Dickens, “Letter, 7 Dec 1857” 8: 488. 233. Jen Hill provides an analysis of this essay’s relationship to Heart of Darkness in White Horizon (21–24). 234. Conrad, “Geography” 11–12. 235. Ibid. 11. 236. Ibid. 10. 237. Ibid. 238. Ibid. 15. 239. Ibid. 14.

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Chapter 2 1. One of Marryat’s most successful novels, Mr. Midshipman Easy was reprinted well into the twentieth century and is considered a canonical work of maritime literature. The last “popular” print edition of which I am aware was published by McBooks Press in 1997. 2. Marryat, Mr. Midshipman Easy 62. 3. Ibid. 155. 4. Ibid. 299. 5. Ibid. 79. 6. Harrison 4. 7. Ibid. 8. Byron, Lord Byron 4.179.1611. 9. Mancke 236. 10. The continued geopolitical relevance of these oceanic qualities can be seen in the United States’ 2011 decision to bury Osama bin Laden at sea, a space that, as Time observed, avoided the creation of a “grave site” that could turn into a “place of worship for bin Laden’s followers” (Levy 1). The cited reason for this burial—the political difficulties inherent in “finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world’s most wanted terrorist” (1)— also emphasizes what Hugo Grotius would have recognized as the ocean’s status as a space belonging to everyone and no one. Symbolically, Bin Laden’s burial emphasized the latter component of the ocean’s internationalism, appearing less as an act of international “claiming” than as the ultimate expulsion of the figure of the terrorist from the body of the nation. The ocean portrayed by Marryat as an extra-national atopia associated with criminals and politically threatening ideologies, in other words, remains present in the background of twenty-first-century politics. 11. Cohen 4. 12. As Marcus Rediker notes in The Slave Ship, it was precisely the unusual “social geography” of the ship, its “geographic isolation . . . far from the governing institutions of society” (188), that invested figures like the ship’s captain with the power of life and death, and made him, in effect, “the sovereign of the wooden world” (220). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the ocean became a space in which sovereign power was brutally enforced precisely because the ocean made escaping the influence of the state a distinct possibility. 13. Sailors sometimes tried to use beliefs concerning the ocean’s dissolution of social contracts to their advantage, arguing, for example, that shipwreck survivors were exempt from the penalties normally applied to mutineers, because their contract to obey disintegrated along with their ship. See Linebaugh and Rediker 13, and C. Thompson, “Introduction” 16–17. 14. In the first half of the eighteenth century, observers of Britain’s developing trade networks expressed fears that the international community of oceanic trade would weaken Britons’ domestic ties and undermine their patriotic allegiance to the nation. This fear took very real form in the British shipping industry, where, because of the international nature

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of the shipping business, British intellectual property and skills could circulate, and the man who built a ship for Britain one month could be working in France the next. Britain took steps to try to limit the mobility of shipbuilders in 1750, with an act that tightened control over the emigration of artificers. See Morriss 36–42. 15. Mountaine v. 16. Britain’s position on the legality of territorial claims to the ocean changed with the perceived power of its navy. In the sixteenth century, when England’s navy mostly consisted of commercial ships doubling as military vessels, Elizabeth I declared that “the use of sea and air is common to all; neither can any title to the ocean belong to any people and private man, for as much as neither nature nor regard of the public use permitteth any possession thereof ” (qtd. in Reidy 272). 17. As Linda Colley has observed, even at its most powerful the Royal Navy “never possessed sufficient ships both to protect Britain herself from European armies, and simultaneously to preside in strength over the world’s oceans” (8). Cycles of inadequate budgeting and shipbuilding also meant that the navy periodically found itself in positions of weakness, as in the 1779 mustering crisis, in which the British Admiralty could only scramble forty-two ships to protect Britain from a sixty-three-ship Franco-Spanish fleet that had entered the Channel. See Black and Woodfine for more on the limitations of British sea power. 18. See Morriss 147–89. 19. Reidy 6. 20. Dening 57. 21. Blum 3. 22. Indeed, the term “technology” was first coined by Wye Saltonstall in praise of John Smith’s A Sea Grammar (1627). Saltonstall lauded Smith’s Sea Grammar for its useful definitions of “technologicall . . . words of Art” (qtd. in Cohen 42). There are, in short, etymological as well as cultural reasons for suggesting that the nautical jargon that underpinned maritime writing encouraged a technological view of literature. 23. Baker 72. 24. Harrison 4. 25. Strabo, quoted in Corbin 12. 26. Corbin 7. 27. Ibid. 1. 28. Braudel 1: 31. 29. Kinzel 29. 30. Grotius 24. 31. Selden 138. 32. Connery 179. 33. John Selden famously argued for sovereigns’ dominion over seas that adjoined their kingdom and, in King James’s case, the North Atlantic. As David Armitage notes, following the Restoration, Selden’s arguments became effectively obsolete as the British Crown increasingly insisted on a Grotian freedom of the seas. For an overview of Britain’s participation in legal debates over the sovereignty of the seas, see Armitage 100–124.

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34. Kinzel 29. 35. Rozwadowski 73. As Rozwadowski notes, systematic investigation and mapping of the depths of the oceans did not really commence before the 1850s; it was during this period that many of the vigias reported by mariners were eliminated from oceanic charts. While the late nineteenth century did much to reduce the cartographical uncertainty associated with the vastness of the ocean, it has not been entirely eliminated. The most recent “nondiscovery” of an island that I am aware of occurred in November 2012, when a team of scientists from the University of Sydney proved that the sizable Sandy Island in the South Pacific—an island shown not only on marine charts but also on satellite-informed Google Maps—did not actually exist. For the Sandy Island incident, see “South Pacific Sandy Island.” For more on cartographical uncertainty in oceanic space, see Rozwadowski. 36. Alexandrowicz 64. 37. Benton 159. 38. See Benton 100 and Steinberg 105. 39. Cook, Voyage Towards the South Pole (1777) 1: 15. 40. Anson 459. 41. Burney v. 42. Ibid. 43. Connery 177. 44. Thompson, “An Authentic Narrative” 154. 45. Thompson, “The Medusa” 166. 46. For an overview of shipwreck narratives and their ideological function during the Romantic period, see Thompson’s excellent “Introduction” (1–33). 47. Dangers of the Deep n.p. 48. Ibid. 49. Anson 33. 50. Thompson, “Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno” 123. As Titlestad notes, Mackay’s narrative found considerable “purchase in future representations” (799), including Byron’s Don Juan. 51. Cohen 4. 52. Thompson, “An Authentic Narrative” 146. 53. Thompson, “Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno” 119. 54. Duncan 1: iv. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 1: iii. 57. For more on the poem’s reception, including its legacy for Romantic poets such as Byron and Wordsworth, see Jason. 58. I am thinking here of the work of Bridget Keegan and also of the research that Janet Sorensen is pursuing on Falconer’s linguistic projects. I was fortunate enough to discuss Falconer with Sorensen and to attend her presentation on “Sea Tech and Sea Affect” at a Modern Language Association conference. My remarks on Falconer’s language dovetail with those of Sorensen in that we both see his language use as linked to a project to increase

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sympathy between sailors and landsmen. Unlike Sorensen, though, I do not see Falconer’s maritime language as inspiring this sympathetic connection; rather, I see Falconer’s project of educating landsmen in nautical terms and nautical experience as eroding the barriers to sympathy that such alien terminology might otherwise erect. 59. Cohen 127. 60. Landow 84. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 79. 63. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1762) I: l. 197 and fn. The roman numerals in references to The Shipwreck refer to the different cantos of the poem. 64. K. N. K. 198. 65. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1762) 6. 66. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language para. 80. 67. Ibid. para. 78. 68. Ibid. para. 81. 69. Ibid. para. 81, 86. 70. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1762) I: ll. 80–81. 71. Ibid. I: l. 82. 72. Keegan 76. 73. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1764) I: l. 58. 74. Ibid. I: ll. 59; 3. 75. William R. Jones suggests that the allusions to naval life found in Falconer’s poetry indicate that Falconer probably served in the Royal Navy, most likely during the Seven Years’ War. As Jones notes, the activity of the “hot press” means that “it was unlikely that an experienced seaman like Falconer would escape naval service altogether” (4). If Falconer had indeed been impressed during the war, this would explain his unpatriotic aversion to Britain’s foreign entanglements and would lend gravitas to his comparison of sailors to slaves. For more on impressments, and on the differences between being prest and pressed, see Ennis 15–20. 76. W. Falconer, The Demagogue ll. 155–58. 77. Ibid. ll. 333, 5. 78. Ibid. ll. 149, 420–21. 79. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1762) I: ll. 3–4. 80. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1769) I: ll. 5–6. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. I: l. 11. 83. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1764) I: l. 12. 84. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1769) I. ll. 18–19. 85. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1764) I: ll. 489–90. 86. Ibid. I: l. 101. 87. At least one later editor of Falconer chose to exclude this line in later publications, declaring “I am not fond of styling seamen ‘the slaves of fortune!’ ” (Mitford 135). However,

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the analogy Falconer makes here would come to have powerful currency in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Marcus Rediker notes in The Slave Ship, abolitionists argued (successfully) that the slave trade destroyed British sailors along with Africans. British sailors were thought to be destroyed physically—“Half of all Europeans who journeyed to west Africa in the eighteenth century, many of them sea-men, died within a year” (Rediker 244)—and also morally, as they became witnesses to and participants in the slave trade. Falconer’s concern with foreign contagion thus most obviously evokes the very real danger of tropical disease but can also be read as alluding to Britons being morally corrupted by their involvement in overseas trade. 88. W. Falconer, The Demagogue ll. 155–58. 89. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1769) I: ll. 211, 145. 90. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1764) III: ll. 486, 502–3. 91. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1769) II: ll. 434–35, 443. 92. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1764) III: ll. l01, 148. 93. Harrison 4. 94. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1764) I: l. 486. 95. W. Falconer, The Shipwreck (1769) II: ll. 450–51. 96. William R. Jones observes that, in 1762, Falconer served as a midshipman on Hawke’s flagship, the Royal George; Jones speculates that Falconer may have also served with Hawke during the Seven Years’ War, although the evidence for this is slight. 97. Hart’s “The Shipwreck” bemoans “Wealth’s gorgeous dream, and power’s unquenched draught” (l. 7), which led its hapless shipwreck victim to “quit with joy my native land” (l. 16) for “India’s rich spoils, and Afric’s precious ore” (l. 13). Lured by “cheating fancy,” which “drew the nabob’s part / In colours fair, and mark’d them for my own” (ll. 11–12), the young Briton leaves his domestic shores and almost perishes in the rival “empire of the raging flood” (l. 74), which rises to punish him for his avaricious ways. The poem concludes by moralizing on the fleeting pleasures of commerce, warning that “as ambition her domains increase, / Conscience and guilt whet their invenom’d stings” (ll. 106–7). Like later works such as “Description of a Shipwreck Off the Coast of Africa” (1817) by “G. M.,” the poem uses the figure of the anti-imperial ocean to express a deep-rooted suspicion of imperial commerce. 98. H. Melville 290. 99. The Bulwark of Britannia 1. 100. From April through June of 1797 seamen took possession of a total of 113 ships anchored in domestic waters at Spithead and Nore and petitioned Parliament for amelioration of conditions in the navy. While the Spithead mutiny was successful in obtaining some concessions from the Admiralty, the subsequent Nore mutiny fatally extended its demands to include a demand that the king dissolve Parliament and make peace with France. The mutiny ultimately fell apart, and its leaders were hanged, flogged, or transported. For more on the mutinies, see Mabee, Linebaugh and Rediker, and Gill. 101. The Bulwark of Britannia 1, 8. 102. Ibid. 1. 103. B. P. 237.

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104. Dening 56. 105. Glascock, Naval Sketchbook xiv. The Naval Sketchbook went through two editions in 1826, was reprinted again in 1831, and generated a “second series” in 1834. It helped establish Glascock’s reputation as “the most sailor-like and ship-shape of his numerous literary naval contemporaries” (“Naval” 676). John Wilson, in his Blackwood review of the first edition, praises Glascock’s “excellent” (355) anecdotes but satirizes his obsession with naval language and his seeming desire to start a “war of words” (356) with the Admiralty over naval reform. By the 1830s, however, Glascock’s naval jargon had become a familiar marker of authenticity. An 1834 Monthly Magazine review of the Sketchbook’s second series declares that “the best criterion of [Glascock’s] power is, perhaps, the avidity with which his works are read by the veriest Johnny Raw of a landsman, who, although unable to comprehend the abstruse technicalities of the cuddy and the orlop, feels the truth of the description” (“Naval Sketch-Book” 676). 106. Glascock, Naval Sketchbook ix. 107. Ibid. xvi, xvii. 108. Ibid. xviii. 109. “Ben Brace” 243. 110. Ibid. 243, 244. 111. Ibid. 244. 112. Cohen 163. 113. Sutherland 414. 114. J. F. Cooper 5. 115. “Ben Brace” 243. The frequent criticisms of Smollett’s language made by Marryat’s circle were geared toward promoting their own, or similar, literary productions. The fact that the Scottish Smollett avoided placing “Scots brogue” (Basker, Boucé, and Seary xliv)— the dialect with which he was arguably most familiar—in the mouth of Roderick Random’s Scottish protagonist or, indeed, in the mouths of any of his Scottish characters suggests that Smollett may indeed have used dialect as a marker of an Otherness that he was not willing to claim himself. 116. “Practice of Impressment” 6. 117. Brantlinger 49, 56. 118. Brantlinger 54. 119. Fulford, “Romanticizing the Empire” 162. 120. Ibid. 192. 121. “The Naval Officer,” Athenaeum 214. 122. “The Naval Officer,” Literary Gazette 188. 123. Marryat’s determination to assert his independence from Colburn, particularly after assuming editorship of the Metropolitan, made the Colburn-Marryat relationship volatile. An 1833 Metropolitan article, “Publishing and Puffing,” probably written by Marryat himself, condemns Colburn for having “debauched the press” with puff pieces (176). The attack appears to have been motivated by a power struggle between Marryat and Colburn, probably over Marryat’s serialization of his novels within the Metropolitan’s pages. Alluding

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to an attempt by Colburn to have the “ ‘Metropolitan’ . . . abused” (176) in a puff piece, the article concludes by declaring that “if Mr. Colburn still perseveres in his threat of putting us down . . . we have struck the first blow to prove that we defy him; if he wishes for any more, we are quite ready, and will prove as good as our word” (178). For more on Henry Colburn and his marketing techniques, see Erickson 152–55. 124. “Military and Naval Tales” 222. 125. Ibid. 223, 217. 126. Ibid. 215, 217. 127. Ibid. 217. 128. W. Godwin 217–18. 129. Frederick Marryat, Frank Mildmay 27. 130. Brantlinger 53. 131. Frederick Marryat, Frank Mildmay 23. 132. Ibid. 35, 33, 34. 133. Ibid. 35. 134. Ibid. 61, 65. 135. Ibid. 66. 136. Ibid. 137. Brantlinger 53. 138. Frederick Marryat, Frank Mildmay 46–47. 139. Ibid. 45. 140. Ibid. 46. 141. Florence Marryat, Life and Letters of Captain Marryat 1: 31, 32. 142. Russell 17. 143. See the episode involving the execution of William Strange (92–97). 144. The Naval Songster 6. For a discussion of Dibdin’s role in promoting this type of imagery, see Russell 100–103. 145. Russell 99. 146. Frederick Marryat, Frank Mildmay 106. 147. Ibid. 53. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid. 42. 150. Ibid. 44. Passages such as this one thus provide an interesting contrast with what Russell calls the “cult of Nelson” (86). As Tim Fulford has observed, Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson (1813) had influentially portrayed Nelson as not only a model naval hero but also “a model of the British government as it should be” (173). Marryat is, like Southey, positioning Nelson’s signal at Trafalgar as a moment of insight into the foundational strengths of the British Empire. In emphasizing communications technologies rather than the figure of Nelson, however, Marryat is suggesting that the former is even more important to Britain’s overseas aspirations than the figure of the naval hero and that works such as Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson, in other words, might actually have a more significant effect on the character of the Royal Navy than Nelson himself.

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151. Florence Marryat, Life and Letters of Captain Marryat 1: 200. 152. Ibid. 1: 199. 153. Ibid. 1: 200. 154. Frederick Marryat, The King’s Own 3: 172. 155. Ibid. 3: 171–72. 156. Brantlinger 56. 157. Frederick Marryat, The King’s Own 1: 3, 5, 6. 158. Ibid. 2: 206. 159. Ibid. 1: 288. 160. Ibid. 3: 236–37. 161. As Sullivan observes, the Metropolitan has a particular place in literary history as the “first nineteenth-century British periodical to provide serial fiction in its monthly numbers” (Sullivan 304). Under Marryat’s editorship it increased in circulation; he was able to sell his interest in the magazine for more than £1,000 in 1836. For an overview of the Metropolitan’s history, see Sullivan 304–8. 162. Glascock, “Naval Novels” 370, emphasis in original. 163. Ibid. 370–71. 164. Ibid. 375. 165. Ibid. 166. “Practice of Impressment” 4. 167. Ibid. 6. 168. In praising the appointment of Captain Symonds as naval surveyor, the Metropolitan notes that Symonds “happens to possess those very attainments in which Sir Robert Seppings [his predecessor] was deficient; he is a thorough mathematician, a good algebraist, a man who is able to calculate before he ‘lays down his lines,’ and who will fearlessly state the results to be anticipated” (M. M. 246). 169. “A Treatise” 50, 51. 170. The Metropolitan reviewer specifically represents surveying as a partial solution to the problem of keeping trained officers employed during peacetime. “Much has been said about English officers accepting employment under other flags. We think, however, that this should not be visited too harshly. What can they do? They must do something” (“A Treatise” 51), the reviewer writes, going on to explain the benefits and importance of surveying. 171. “Editor’s Portfolio” 508, 507. 172. Ibid. 508. All emphases in original. 173. “Ben Brace” 243. 174. “Article XV” 432. 175. “Real Nature and Novelists’ Nature” 361. 176. “Ned Myers” 10. James Fenimore Cooper had never been wholeheartedly embraced by the British naval writing school. As an American who had served on Lake Ontario during the War of 1812, he was often referred to in contemporary reviews as an inauthentic depicter of maritime life, an “amphibious” creature who “offended” the “nautical ear” with “freshwater phrases . . . which frequently destroys the raisemblance of his sketches” (“King’s Own”

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561, 567). In the case of the Metropolitan’s review of Ned Myers, the references to Cooper’s omission of proper nautical terminology emphasize what Hester Blum has called the narrative’s treatment of Cooper’s old shipmate as “a subaltern in his own story” (95): The review is using the association of sea language with sailors’ bodies to suggest that Cooper is denying his audience an authentic connection with the sailor whose memoir he purports to edit. 177. “The Yachtsman” 408. 178. “Military Law Makers” 103. 179. M. M. 241. 180. Costello, “Travels and Opinions of Mr. Jolly Green” 150. 181. Ibid. 182. Courtney 85. 183. For more on Courtney’s review and Conrad’s response to it, see D. R. Smith. 184. Ibid. 86. 185. Conrad, “Tales of the Sea” 54, 53–54. 186. “A Treatise” 54. 187. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 103, 105, 104, 105. 188. Ibid. 105. 189. Ibid. 110. 190. Ibid. 141. 191. Ibid. 192. Ibid. 142. 193. Ibid. 141. 194. Ibid. 146. 195. Ibid. 141. 196. Ibid. 170. 197. Ibid. 156. 198. Ibid. 199. In Mr. Midshipman Easy, not only can Mesty and Jack Easy communicate, but after Mesty agrees to help Jack put an end to a mutiny, the narrative drops the dialect it had previously used to convey the “mixed jargon” of the “African negro” and instead promises to henceforth translate Mesty’s speech “into good English” (160). While class barriers remain, the racialized linguistic markers that have hitherto divided the two characters are minimized after Mesty takes a loyal stand against social disorder. 200. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 156, 151. 201. Ibid. 114.

Chapter 3 1. Sadler 16. 2. Ibid. 25. 3. Ibid. 20.

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4. “Extracts of a Letter from Spa” 1. 5. Keen, Literature 61. 6. “Lunardi, Blanchard, and Martyn, on Balloons” 417. 7. Ibid. 424. 8. Walpole, “Letter to Sir Horace Mann, Tuesday 2 Dec 1783.” 451. 9. Ibid. “Letter to Sir Horace Mann, 7 May 1785” 9: 579. 10. Ibid. “Letter to Sir Horace Mann, 24 June 1785” 9: 591. 11. Keen, Literature 61. 12. Aravamudan 205. 13. Freedgood 89, 87. 14. Ibid. 85, 89. 15. Renzo Dubbini also challenges our assumptions regarding the reassuring nature of European aeronautical views, observing that, in French novels and aeronautical narratives, balloon flights are sometimes depicting as disappointing aeronauts by revealing a “chaotic and confused” (178) assembly of disparate landforms rather than the harmonious landscape imagined in “bird’s-eye” perspectives. This trope of disappointment has political connotations, given that what the French aeronaut discovers in taking his view from above is a “land urgently in need of reform” (179). Of the works described in this chapter, the only ones that may be said to participate in this trope are John Poole’s satirically inclined Crotchets in the Air (1838) and, significantly, “Raymond the Romantic, and His Five Wishes” (1822), in which the chaos of the French landscape anticipates the failures of the French Revolution. Textual evidence suggests, in other words, that British writers read different political disappointments onto their own national landscape. 16. “A Chapter on Balloons” 39. 17. “Air-Travelling” 214. 18. See Lynn 14–21. As he notes, the spread of aerostations testifies to the effectiveness of Enlightenment networks at disseminating information: Most of the early aeronauts had never seen an ascension with their own eyes, but they built their balloons based on the descriptions given by their written sources (19). The phenomenon of balloon ascensions was thus carried across Europe by the written word. 19. Wilkins 63. 20. See Shapin and Schaffer as well as Steven Johnson for arguments regarding the seventeenth century’s new interest in “the problem of air” (Johnson 67). 21. Aristotle 9. 22. Eph. 2.2. Quoted in Boyd 41. James W. Boyd ascribes the placement of fallen angels in the atmosphere to Jewish tradition (41–42). However, Henry Ansgar Kelly traces this association between Satan and the atmosphere to Athenagoras of Athens, suggesting that Athenagoras’s interpretation of the “caves of darkness” (181) from the Book of Enoch was responsible for Satan’s new aerial domain. Regardless of the origins of his aerial principality, Satan would be referred to as a spirit of the atmosphere in both Catholic and Protestant theology. As we will see, this association would persist into the eighteenth century: In The Political History of the Devil (1726), for example, Daniel Defoe refers to Satan

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“hovering in the Earth’s Atmosphere, as he has often done since, and perhaps now does” (130). 23. Kelly 181. 24. Brunt 132. 25. Varenius and Dugdale 1: 89. 26. Ibid. 1: 90. 27. Young Lady’s Inrtoduction [sic] 67. 28. Jefferson 7: 136. 29. Jules Verne would later trace his first experiments in the “line . . . I was destined to follow” (Sherard 120) to his early contributions to French balloonomania literature. His preoccupation with new forms of transportation might therefore be said to emerge from this cultural moment. 30. Alcock 2. 31. Keen, “Balloonomania” 508. 32. “The Poetical Rambler” 644. 33. Ibid. 34. Pilon iv. 35. “The Night-Walker” 2: 245. 36. Virilio 3. 37. Aravamudan 210. 38. “Notabilia.” 39. Freedgood 85. 40. The Air Balloon, a New Song ll. 9–14. 41. Ibid. ll. 15–16. 42. Typically, as in poems such as George Townshend’s Poetical Epistle on Major Money’s Ascent in a Balloon (circulated in 1784, published c. 1791), multiple concerns are addressed: In “Major Money’s Ascent,” there are the potential applicability of balloons to the “trade” (7) of war, balloons’ association with the subversion of sovereign power (“If once the vulgar we allow / To reason where they ought to bow / What monarch can maintain his throne?”), and what the poem claims is balloons’ tendency to inspire both Frenchmen and the British public to hold “our learned in contempt” (5). 43. Air Balloon, or Blanchard’s Triumphal Entry 16. 44. “Epistle to Mr. Lunardi” 212. 45. Inchbald’s debut play, “The Mogul Tale,” was first performed in 1784, and its success launched Inchbald’s literary career. The script was first published in the 1788 version that I cite here. Its continuing popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is evidenced by its being reprinted in Britain as an individual volume in 1796, 1824, 1830, and c. 1877. An American edition first appeared in 1827. 46. Inchbald 2. 47. Ibid. 3. Charged encounters between balloon travelers and superstitious peasants were a mainstay of early aeronautical narratives. Blanchard, for example, describes his attempting to evade a crowd of “country people . . . as it was impossible to know their

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intention” (“Aerostatics” 308). In a 1784 article that carries suggestive implications for Shelley’s The Last Man, fishermen on the Isle of Man are described as falling flat on their faces before a balloon, one exclaiming in terror that “it was the Devil—another that it was the plague from Constantinople” (“Aerostatic Intelligence” 3). Aeronautical narratives play up both the humor and the danger of these juxtapositions of Enlightenment science and atavistic superstition, usually with an eye to enhancing the heroic status of the explorer. In this respect we can see early aeronautical accounts anticipating the “rehearsal for and reenactment of empire building” (89) that Freedgood sees occurring in Victorian balloonvoyage literature. The Muslims depicted in “The Mogul Tale,” however, acquit themselves much better than the superstitious natives of European aeronautical voyages. 48. Inchbald 10. 49. Bolton 208. 50. The Aerostatic Spy 1: 4. 51. Ibid. 1: iii. 52. Ibid. 1: 5. 53. Ibid. 1: 31. 54. Ibid. 1: 38. 55. Ibid. 1: 39. 56. Ibid. 1: 52. 57. Ibid. 1: 69. 58. Ibid. 1: 50. 59. Ibid. 1: 71, emphasis in original. 60. Ibid. 61. Favret 131. 62. The Aerostatic Spy 1: 81. Amiel’s voluntary service as an aerial guide represents an iteration of the “Asmodeus flight” trope popularized by Alain-René Le Sage’s Le Diable Boiteux (1726), in which the devil Asmodeus flies a young student to the top of a church spire, strips off the roofs of the houses below, and offers him an unparalleled view of the hidden affairs of Madrid. This trope is usually deployed satirically and in urban contexts. The author of The Aerostatic Spy, however, sets his action on a global stage and is at pains to portray his spirit guide as a servant of good rather than evil. For more on Asmodeus flights, see Pike, Metropolis on the Styx 36–37. 63. The Aerostatic Spy 1: 82. 64. Ibid. 1: 198. 65. Ibid. 1: 83. 66. Ibid. 1: vii. 67. Ibid. 2: 107. 68. Ibid. 69. Lewis, “Air’s Appearance” 11. 70. The year 1798 marked the high-water mark of military ballooning’s reputation in Britain. As a Monthly Magazine article from that year observes, news of the French “aerostatic institute, founded by the committee for public safety, and enveloped in the most

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profound secrecy at Meudon” had at last begun to circulate in Britain and, with it, a new respect for the balloons that, “during the present war, [have] been productive of material advantages to France” (“Aerostatic Institute” 337). But, fulfilling the prophecies of the patriotic ballads described earlier in this chapter, Britain’s navy destroyed the aerostatic institute’s equipment at the Battle of Aboukir, and a disappointed Napoleon disbanded the aerostatic institute in 1799. 71. A Midshipman 125. 72. Sadler 654. 73. “Raymond the Romantic, and His Five Wishes. No 1” 135. 74. Ibid. 136. 75. “Raymond the Romantic, and His Five Wishes. No 2” 246. 76. Ibid. 247. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 248. 79. Ibid. 249. 80. Ibid. 242. 81. Sussman 286. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man never attained the cultural stature of her first novel, and it was not reprinted in Shelley’s lifetime. It nevertheless had its admirers, who remembered it as an “unfairly neglected” work that stood as one of her “more romantic creations” (“Mrs. Shelley” 191). Following its publication, it found a certain immediate afterlife as a harbinger of what we would now call science fiction. An 1827 review of “The Mummy!” for example, promptly identifies this novel as similar to “the Last Man, [in which] Mrs. Shelley carried us a century or two forward, and . . . disclosed to us what the world will then be” a world of changed politics, and, of course, “balloons” (643). In 1835 the Metropolitan cites “Lionel Verney, the last man” (312), in its own utopian aeronautical visions of global and even galactic travel. The potential for its readership overlapping with the other texts discussed in this book is illustrated by Jane Franklin’s reading list for 1830. A determined supporter of her Arctic-bound husband, Franklin consumed voyage narratives and naval novels alongside Gothic romances. Her reading list for 1830 includes the aforementioned The Mummy, Marryat’s The King’s Own, and a number of other nautical works. The Last Man appears sandwiched between the Quarterly Review and Glascock’s Tales of a Tar (“List”). 82. Steven E. Jones. 83. M. Shelley, The Last Man 55. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 106. 86. A “fire balloon” was the Romantic term for any balloon lifted by hot air rising from a flame. Today, the balloons Shelley used to distribute his poetry are more popularly referred to as “sky lanterns” or “Chinese lanterns.” 87. P. Shelley, “Sonnet” 6. 88. See, for example, Cantor 196–202; Lew; Haggerty 122. 89. M. Shelley, The Last Man 250.

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90. “Notabilia” 474. 91. M. Shelley, The Last Man 169. 92. Ibid. 170. 93. In The Last Man, characters repeatedly cite the ocean as a space that divides them from others: Perdita, at the moment of her separation from her husband, blames Raymond for having created “a stream, boundless as ocean” to “yawn between us” (96), while Verney and his countrymen claim that the “sea [will] rise a wall of adamant” (195) between Britain and plague-stricken Europe. These remarks prove unfounded: When Perdita later regrets her decision, she pursues Raymond across an “ocean [that] smiled at . . . love and hope” and that poses no real “obstacle between my sister and the land which was to restore her to her first beloved” (115, 127). Similarly, the English Channel poses no real obstacle to the plague’s transmission. 94. M. Shelley, The Last Man 332. 95. Ibid. 182. The best account of Mary Shelley’s theory of disease transmission in The Last Man remains McWhir. 96. Britannicus 1019. 97. M. Shelley, The Last Man 265. 98. P. Melville 835. 99. I differ from Melville in that I do see the “suffering negro” as emblematic of the source of the novel’s plague. I concur, however, that Verney’s treatment of the nameless African hardly explains his subsequent immunity to the apocalyptic disease. I believe that Verney’s survival of the plague is connected instead to his compassion toward Evadne, whom he willingly embraces and whose death vigil he holds, rather than to his unsought embrace by the African. As with the African, Verney encounters Evadne as a strange “form” in the darkness, her mind “deranged” by “pain and fever.” However, in this encounter, Verney finds himself “penetrated . . . with compassion” and tries to “soothe the sufferer,” lifting her up so that “her sunken cheek rested on [his] breast” (142). Verney’s later encounter with the African “sufferer” infects him, I argue, because he denies a black man the same type of compassion. 100. M. Shelley, The Last Man 184. 101. McWhir 23. 102. M. Shelley, The Last Man 332. Constantinople, the city Verney associates with the outbreak of the plague, was, of course, also a famous center of Ottoman slavery. 103. Southey, “Article” 557. 104. Hogg 96. 105. M. Shelley, The Last Man 316. 106. Coxwell 58. Coxwell, one of the best-known Victorian aeronauts, makes it clear in his autobiography that he transferred his ambitions and interest from the sea to the atmosphere at an early age, a decision that was influenced and confirmed by his two older brothers’ disappointment in their naval ambitions. Throughout his popular account of his aeronautical career, Coxwell emphasizes the commonalities between the craft and language of “air explorers” (58) and that of mariners.

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107. “Aerial Voyage to Nassau” 347. 108. “Her Majesty’s Coronation” 8. 109. Crotchets had two editions in 1838 and continued to receive some attention in aeronautical writing during the decades that followed its publication. Richard Horne, for example, quotes from this “very amusing” (98) work at length in his 1851 article for Household Words. 110. Poole 5. 111. Ibid. 10. 112. Ibid. 11. 113. Ibid. 13. 114. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “crotchet, n1.” (accessed July 2012). 115. Poole 40. Emphasis in original. 116. Ibid. 45. 117. “Crotchets in the Air” 790. 118. Horne 99, 100, 98. 119. “Balloon Exploits” 438. 120. Burgoyne 530. 121. As Leigh Hunt remarked in 1836, “Does it not seem a shame for men to have any thought of danger, while ladies can go up in paper balloons, or in any balloons at all? One is forced,” he declares, “in self-defense, to conclude, that these fair aerial voyagers cannot . . . superabound in imagination” (“Aeronautics” 51). The latter is a curious admission that the heroism associated with ballooning is, if not purely imaginary, nevertheless the product of narrative construction. The reason so many women do not fear ballooning, Hunt insinuates, is because they do not read enough: “[In mentioning Alexander Pope, Mrs. Graham] betrays . . . the extent of her reading. . . . What could she do better than to resort to the utmost limits of her book-knowledge, to show the height of her sensations?” (51). These women, who have read only Pope and who lack imagination, are consequently limited both in their sensations and in their expression of them. 122. “Physical Geography” 497. 123. Ibid. 515. 124. “The Balloon Catastrophe” 579. 125. Henri Giffard’s 1852 invention of the first dirigible—another vexingly French contribution to aeronautics—failed to rouse much interest from British authors. 126. Costello, “All the World and His Wife” 445. 127. Wells, Critical Edition 57, 73. 128. Ibid. 51. 129. Ibid. 130. 130. Ibid.

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Chapter 4 1. Geach 525. 2. Ibid. 523. 3. Ibid. 524. 4. Geographical and Astronomical Definitions 1. 5. Janowitz 2. 6. Ibid. 3. 7. Bell A4. From the sixteenth century onward, British Catholics mostly worshipped in secret, by holding masses in private locations protected (they hoped) from the eyes of the state and, notoriously, in the case of priests, seeking refuge in “priest holes.” Historically, of course, most priest holes were located inside houses, but as Julian Yates observes, they were, crucially, designed to appear part of uninhabitable spaces (145). As Yates has argued, the spatial obscurity of subterranean hiding places reinforced the frustrating (from the state’s perspective) opacity of Catholic subjects, whose minds also resisted penetration. To pursue Catholics, as Baxter advocated doing, the good Protestant must therefore “follow the examples of miners, which pursue the signes . . . as they spread in the ground, till they be guided to the trunke or bodie of the metall” (174). As Baxter’s language indicates, even though priest holes were frequently aboveground, they—and the people who took refuge in them—were conceived of in terms of the subterranean. 8. For more on fairies’ relationship to the underground, see James, “Folklore” 336–37 and Spence 295–303. For German kobolds and their association with underground phenomena, see Davidson and Duffin 104–6. 9. Kirk, Sermons 24, quoted in Kirk, Secret Common-Wealth 15. Kirk’s more thorough overview of fairies’ “subterranean” culture, The Secret Common-Wealth (1691), was claimed by Scottish antiquarianism in the early nineteenth century and published as An Essay of the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and, for the Most Part,) Invisible People, Heretofor Going Under the Name of Elves, Faunes, and Fairies, or the Lyke, Among the Low-Country Scots, as They Are Described by Those Who Have the Second Sight. 10. Kirk, Secret Common-Wealth 15. 11. Egenolf 857. 12. Geach 527, 525. 13. Horace, Ars Poetica, Epistles, book II. Quoted in Nelson 2. 14. Trodd, Barlow, and Amigoni 6. 15. David R. Castillo, in his analysis of “baroque horrors,” observes the frequent invocation of the cavern space as the repository of marvels in the literature of the Spanish Golden Age. The feverish repetitions associated with the baroque, the incoherent combinations of the grotesque, and the marvelous discourse of New World exploration informed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century visions of caves as the site of encounters with curiosities and forbidden knowledge. For more on caverns and the baroque, see Castillo 18–35, 137–59. 16. Trodd, Barlow, and Amigoni 2.

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17. Cheetham and Harvey 106. For more on classical and Christian underworlds, see R. Falconer; Pike, Passage Through Hell; and Macdonald. On the overlap of these underworlds with underground spaces, see Lesser’s The Life Below Ground, a meditation on the archetypal spaces of the subterranean in literature; and Pike, Metropolis on the Styx, which provides a fascinating examination of the devil’s persistence in the underground spaces of the urban environment. Kiera Vaclavik’s recent work on katabases (underworld journeys) also reflects usefully on the persistence of this trope in children’s literature. 18. For the influence of archaeological discoveries at Pompeii and London on Victorian representations of urban space, see Zimmerman 97–14. For the conflation of underground city spaces with the space of necropolis, see Pike, Subterranean Cities 101–89. 19. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time 77. For the growing importance of fieldwork to geohistory and physical geography, see ibid. 37–44. 20. As Rudwick notes, by the late eighteenth century, most well-educated men with geological interests accepted that the evidence found at sites like Tent Cave contradicted Scripture-based histories of planetary formation. They were also aware that bold assertions to this effect would not be well received in conservative religious circles or by the general public. Indeed, by 1793, allusions to the antiquity of the planet would be perceived in Britain as smacking of Jacobin sympathies. See Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time 115–18, 333–37. 21. See, for example, works such as Kate Ferguson Ellis’s The Contested Castle and Pamela J. Sheldon’s “Jamesian Gothicism: The Haunted Castle of the Mind,” which explore the psychological and ideological implications of familiar Gothic spaces. 22. What scholarship there is putting literature and cultural perceptions of the underground into conversation has tended to skew toward the later nineteenth century. Particularly noteworthy examples include Rosalind Williams’s Notes on the Underground, an essential source for those interested in late Victorians’ proclivity for inner earth dystopias, and David L. Pike’s Subterranean Cities and Metropolis on the Styx, both of which provide crucial examinations of the nineteenth century’s gradual conflation of criminal and subterranean underworlds. 23. The work most resembling mine in terms of its attention to the history of Romantic subterranean exploration is Kevin Cope’s “Under the Enlightenment,” which, however pioneering in its recovery of the history of cave exploration, does not attempt to connect the Enlightenment’s investigation of the subterranean with literary underworlds. Noah Heringman’s Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology also intersects with my project in its analysis of tourists’ and poets’ reactions to the caverns of Derbyshire (228–66). While my argument supports Heringman’s assertion that recalcitrant landscapes serve as a “borderland between art and nature” (265), it also qualifies his argument that geological features such as caverns “contest the subjugation” of the sublime wilderness “because they manifest materiality as something that is actually recalcitrant” (13). The fictional caverns discussed in this chapter are intangible but nevertheless recalcitrant. 24. Borlase 147. 25. Sargent 11.

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26. Hardy 127. 27. Sargent 53. 28. In early cave-exploration narratives, explorers who do not die from falling or getting lost in the depths of a limestone cave network often die a few days after their subterranean sojourn, as was the case with Captain Samuel Sturmy, the first explorer of the Pen Park Hole in Bristol. For more on the perils of eighteenth-century cave exploration, see Cope, “Under the Enlightenment” 289–313. 29. Hobbes 37. 30. Subsequently, Day, no longer of “the soundest mind . . . undertook to sink a Vessel at Plymouth, to sink himself in it & to live under Water for some Time.” Neither ship nor man, alas, “ever rose again” (qtd. in Shaw 24). The unfortunate career of Mr. Day demonstrates speleological insanity at its most intense; it also perhaps suggests, in Day’s turn from a project of subterranean to oceanic descent, the degree to which these atopias often overlapped in the Romantic imagination. 31. R. Williams 32. 32. “Letter to Lady Mary Cole.” 33. Buckland 164. 34. Sommer 62, 63. 35. It should be remembered that even the famous “underground cities” of Turkey’s Cappadocia did not serve as “permanent dwellings” but as refuges in times of “bleak necessity” (Rodley 6). 36. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe 140, 142. 37. This move plays out differently in different texts. In Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), for example, Scott situates the Jacobite threat in a constellation of cavern spaces. Unlike the subterranean system depicted in The Recess, Scott’s caves, like the Highlands themselves, presumably become accessible to nineteenth-century English tourists once the more dangerous members of the Jacobite movement have been killed and their cause laid to rest. But within the novel itself, caverns disappear from the text once the last Jacobite sympathizer has been reclaimed from the antimodern depths. 38. Sargent’s poem was a moderate commercial and critical success. It received generally positive reviews, including a poetic tribute by Anna Seward, and was reprinted in 1788, 1790, and 1796. Erasmus Darwin was, as Noel Jackson notes, later accused of plagiarizing segments of The Mine in The Botanic Garden (1791). See Jackson 177. 39. Sargent 44. 40. Ibid. 45. 41. Ibid. 43. 42. Ibid. 51. 43. Ziolkowski 25. 44. Sargent 49. 45. Barrow, “Article IX” 351. 46. See Shaw 23–43 for an excellent overview of the progress of European cave exploration.

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47. For an overview of the progress of British mining during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Martin Lynch 62–112. 48. Shaw 14. The first survey of a natural cave ever published was the work of Captain Collins, the captain of the surveying ship Merlin. Collins’s 1682 exploration of the Pen Park Hole was facilitated not only by his experience charting coastlines, but also by his access to nautical rope, tackle, and measuring lines. Given that the great technological innovation of eighteenth-century speleology was the use of rope ladders to explore deeper caves, it seems likely that sailors’ disproportionate representation in the annals of British cave exploration may have been due in part to their familiarity with the technology used in negotiating ship space. 49. Macleay 22, 23. Interestingly, Mrs. Gillespie is given full credit in contemporary publications for her discovery of the Spar Cave, while her husband appears only within the domestic context, as a potential host for interested tourists (“If the traveler has the good fortune of getting acquainted with the kind family of Mr. Gillespie at Kilmoree, his journey will be greatly and most agreeably facilitated” [23]). One wonders whether caves’ association with primitive domestic space and the long-standing association of subterranean space with the maternal (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, minerals were often thought to have grown organically in the womb of the earth) had contributed to caves’ accessibility to female tourists and explorers during this period. 50. The number of female cave tourists was the subject of some commentary by nineteenth-century travel writers. In an 1842 article on “The Grand Peak Cavern,” for example, the author suggests that “a stranger naturally concludes that but few of the ‘fair and tender sex’ would be found to venture within such dark and vast recesses. This, however, is not the fact; on the contrary, for the last four months, the number of ladies had been in much the same proportion to gentlemen as five will bear to three!” (31). 51. See Town and Country Magazine’s description in the “Cavern at Loxton Explored” (1795). Here, as in other middle- and upper-class accounts of cave exploration, the narrator complains about members of the lower classes breaking off stalagmites and stalactites as souvenirs (a practice that gentlemen tourists also pursued without condemnation). Likewise, when, in Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth Bennet learns that her curtailed travel plans will bring her close to Mr. Darcy’s estate, she responds by alluding both to her travel plans and to the nineteenth-century’s common understanding of cave tourism: “But surely,” said she, “I may enter his county without impunity, and rob it of a few petrified spars without his perceiving me” (231). 52. Joseph Yelloly Watson’s A Compendium of British Mining (1843) provides a useful nineteenth-century overview of the legal and cultural traditions used to negotiate claims in different British mining regions. 53. “Bristol, Jan 14” 5. 54. Macleay 32. 55. Hutchinson 12: 262. 56. Hutton 11. 57. Shaw 119.

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58. Helme 2: 7–8. By the 1790s, many guidebook authors included known locations of caves alongside sites of historical or social interest, and caves that were located within or nearby cities were presumed to be of great interest to tourists. In Helme’s Instructive Rambles, for example, the children follow their father to Blackheath (an area in southeast London, near Greenwich) “to view the curious cavern discovered in the year 1780” (5). The relatively late date of the cave’s “discovery” almost certainly reflects the growing market in cave tourism. 59. For an extensive account of the development of the discipline of geology and its attendant debates during this period, see Rudwick’s Bursting the Limits of Time and Worlds Before Adam. For a still essential assessment of the consequences of geology’s revision of the history of the earth, see Gould. 60. Beckford 119, 111. 61. Ibid. 118. 62. Macleay 21, 44. 63. Ibid. 45–46. 64. Ibid. 46–47. 65. Ibid. 53, 47. 66. The turn from observation to romance could serve as a useful rhetorical tool in avoiding the theological implications of subterranean discoveries. As Marianne Sommer has observed, William Buckland, the famous nineteenth-century geologist and proponent of “undergroundology,” used his fanciful interpretations of skeletons not only to deny the contemporaneity of human fossils with those of antediluvian monsters, but also to dismiss the prehistoric skeletons discovered by others as merely additional entries in an “amusing” story (72). 67. Despite the similarity between their names, John Hutton should not be confused with James Hutton, the “father of modern geology.” 68. Hutton 6, 14. 69. Ibid. 30, 15. 70. Ibid. 26. 71. For more on cave tourism and Ossianic poetry, see Michael. 72. “Rutland Cavern” 6. One of a series of natural limestone caves excavated by successive generations of lead miners, Rutland Cavern is an example of a show cave uniting nature and labor, a type of subterranean space that further blurred the line between the wonders created by nature and those crafted by human beings. 73. Here I am following April Alliston’s and Angela Wright’s leads in borrowing Ellen Moers’s phrase to associate Lee’s novel with the kind of feminine Gothic romances later produced by Ann Radcliffe, although, as Wright notes, there is a danger of anachronism in applying Moers’s term to novels of this period. For more on The Recess as Gothic novel, see Wright. 74. For more about the influence of Sophia Lee’s The Recess on later authors, see Summers 473–74 and Alliston, “Introduction.” 75. See Alliston, “Introduction” xviii.

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76. For other critical discussions of The Recess’s interest in these spaces, see Alliston, “Of Haunted Highlands”; Nordius; Doody; and Maxwell, “Pretenders in Sanctuary.” 77. Maxwell, “Pretenders in Sanctuary” 288, 295. 78. For example, immediately after the speech that Maxwell quotes from in John Ford’s The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634), the speaker, King James, agrees to sacrifice the principle of sanctuary for political reasons and denies the pretender diplomatic asylum. 79. Doody 559. 80. “The Recess” 194. This exclamation against the grotesque fusion of the historical and the fabulous of the nation should also remind us of d’Anville’s comparison of speculative cartography to the invention of history. 81. Lee 7. One is reminded of the language of Alice’s misadventures in the book that Lewis Carroll originally titled Alice’s Adventures Underground. At the beginning of each new encounter in Wonderland, Alice “finds herself” in yet another location and, occasionally, form. 82. Ibid. 8. 83. Ibid. 7–8. 84. Ibid. 15. 85. Ibid. 23. 86. Ibid. 8. 87. Ibid. 37. 88. Ibid. 15. 89. Ibid. 38. 90. Ibid. 215. 91. Ibid. 110. 92. Ibid. 99. 93. Lefebvre defines abstract space as the characteristic space of capitalism, brought into being at around the same moments as the abstraction of labor. This “dominant form of space, that of the centers of wealth and power, endeavors to mould the spaces that it dominates . . . and it seeks, often by violent means, to reduce the obstacles and resistance it encounters there” (49). The appearance of abstract space is characterized “by the disappearance of trees, or by the receding of nature . . . by the great empty spaces of the state and military” and “it dissolves and incorporates such former ‘subjects’ as the village and the town” (50). Lefebvre also argues that abstract space “erases distinctions” (49) between bodies, reducing individuals to homogeneous subjects. This opens up a potentially interesting reading in which we can see abstract space’s erasure of the feminized space of the Recess, enabling Ellinor’s later identity switching and cross-dressing, for one homogenized subject looks just like another. 94. Lee 207. 95. Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online, s.v. “recess” (accessed September 2012). The word “recess” can also refer to time (as in “a period of cessation from usual work or employment”), space (as in a “retired or inner place or part”), deviation (as in a “departure from some state or standard”), and/or hidden information (as in “a dark resource, a secret”).

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It also (like the word “chasm,” which I discuss later in this section) can refer to a site “breaking the continuity” of an object. 96. Lee 66. 97. In addition to misunderstanding Ellinor’s behavior, Matilda also misreads (with tragic consequences) the real affections of her daughter; the intentions of Matilda’s halfbrother, King James; and (perhaps) the real disposition of the Earl of Somerset. 98. Ibid. 155, 156. 99. Ibid. 156. 100. Ibid. 256. 101. Ibid. 220. 102. Ibid. 185, 229. 103. Ibid. 188. 104. Ibid. 266. 105. I am thinking here of critics who have mapped Cathy Caruth’s observation that “traumatic experience suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness” (91–92) onto the fragments, gaps, repetitions, and ghostly returns of twentieth-century novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (see, for example, works by Joseph Flanagan, Petar Ramadanovic, and Naomi Morgenstern). 106. Lee 5. 107. OED Online, s.v. “chasm.” (accessed January 2012). 108. Lee 118. 109. In Virtue’s Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women’s Fiction, April Alliston positions The Recess as one of a set of eighteenth-century novels that deconstruct the patriline borders of the nation-state. While The Recess certainly dramatizes Ellinor and Matilda’s failure to inherit property, I differ from Alliston in that I see The Recess as responding to a particular crisis of international community formation: the American Revolutionary War, in which Britain’s “first empire” collapsed in large part because American colonists felt they had been denied the inherited freedoms due to them as Englishmen. One of the central questions advanced in the novel is whether England should subscribe to a model of overseas empire ruled by force (the kind of empire Elizabeth implements in the Irish scenes) or the inclusive, “sympathetic” model of empire we see at work in Lee’s characterization of Mary Stuart and Matilda. In adopting this perspective on the novel, I am strongly influenced by Jayne Elizabeth Lewis’s arguments concerning Mary Stuart as an organizing symbol of alternative conceptions of British citizenship in “ ‘All Mankind Are Her Scots’: Mary Stuart and the Birth of Modern Britain.” 110. The concluding paragraph of the novel begins “Dear and lovely friend, you are now in England” (326), as though the act of reading about the sisters’ sufferings is an act of transportation that allows Matilda’s—and Lee’s—reader to enter an idealized England called into being by the relation of Matilda’s tale of woe, or a “mother country” recovered now that this missing piece of “history”—a chasm in the history of the nation—has been filled in.

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111. Schmidt 21. At the time Byron was writing, the Bounty mutiny had already passed into legend. The 1789 incident in which a group of midshipmen took over a naval ship on the South Seas and sailed away to start a new life on the tropical island of Tahiti captured the popular imagination from the late eighteenth century onward, combining as it did the specter of revolution, a heroic survival tale (the mutineers’ commander, Lieutenant Bligh, navigated a tiny vessel more than three thousand nautical miles after being stranded in the ocean), and colonial dreams of personal reinvention in a tropical island paradise. 112. Woodring 222. It should be noted that Byron was hardly the first to deliberately confuse the historical record regarding the Bounty incident. The debate over the merits of the mutineers were pursued not only in legal arenas, but also, unofficially, in the literary market, where spurious travel narratives purporting to be the work of Fletcher Christian, escaped mutineer, circulated under titles such as The Voyages and Travels of Fletcher Christian (1798). 113. See, for example, Covent Garden’s 1831 production of “Neuha’s Cave.” 114. Byron, The Island I: ll. 21–22. Roman numerals are used hereafter to specify the different cantos from which extracts are taken. 115. Ibid. I: ll. 29–30. 116. Ibid. I: ll. 31–32. 117. Ibid. I: l. 19. 118. This kind of excessive poetic accumulation of atopias became more frequent in the 1830s and 1840s, and it reflected the early stages of a retroactive popular construction of Romanticism. T. P. Porch’s The Mysteries of Time; or, Banwell Cave, for example, explicitly acknowledges its debt to Byron in its combination of geological theory with meditations on the instability of human empires. The spectacular catastrophic history implied by the cavern’s rock formations naturally inspires the poet’s imagination to turn to the equally sublime, but silent, spaces of “Polar deserts” (11) and the savage “Ocean,” which like “ye dark Caves / Interminable, “could . . . trace, / Had ye but language, the mysterious past” (73). Notably, Porch’s description of his process of gradual poetical composition mirrors his description of the accumulation of mineralized history in cavern walls—“the Author, having occasion to visit the cave a few summers since . . . penned a few stanzas which, from time to time, insensibly increased, until they at length attained the present magnitude” (viii)— and reinforces the overlap between cave space and the poetic mind that undergirds Porch’s otherwise odd pairings of figures such as Shakespeare with the fossils of “dead monsters” (115, 7). 119. “The Island,” Literary Chronicle 387; “The Island,” Examiner 396. After a small group of the mutineers were captured on Tahiti in 1791, the British public learned that the mutineers had tried unsuccessfully to settle on the island of Tubuai but had found themselves unable “to reach an agreement with the natives” (“Fate of the Crew of the Bounty” 454). Over the course of three months, the mutineers clashed with “Tubuaians over property and women” (Alexander 14), killing sixty-six islanders in the process. Eventually the mutineers abandoned their hopes for a settlement on Tubuai and divided into two groups. The group led by Fletcher Christian took once more to the waves; the other group that remained

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on Tahiti was subsequently captured by the British. The fate of Christian’s band of mutineers remained unknown until 1808 when a colony populated by their descendants was found on Pitcairn Island. From the Pitcairn Islanders, the Royal Navy learned that Christian and his companions had been murdered in an uprising of their Tahitian “servants,” after Christian had taken “forcibly a wife of one of the black fellows to supply her [his dead wife’s] place, and which was the chief cause of his being shot” (“Pitcairn’s Island” 2). I provide this history of the Bounty mutineers in part to complicate our understanding of the tale told by The Island, a poem often received as a tale of “an amorous, cooperative encounter between Europeans and non-European peoples, which is (briefly) free of the imperialist power relations analysed in other Tales” (Leask 64). Many modern critics writing about this poem have taken for granted a twentieth-century understanding of the Bounty mutiny, filtered through late nineteenth-century histories that were happy to mythologize the incident as a Romantic rebellion against tyranny followed by a return to idealized Nature. This, then, is the story that Byron’s The Island has been interpreted as telling, and apparently contradictory details—such as Byron’s criticism of the mutineers and praise of Bligh, and his choice to set the poem on Tubuai—have been explained away as concessions to the conservatism of the reading public and as a mere exercise of poetic license, respectively. Rather than reading the poem’s apparently idealistic view of island life as representative of Byron’s own views, I suggest that we read the poem’s idealization of the island and its inhabitants through the lens of the history of the Bounty mutineers, since doing so calls attention not only to the poem’s anticipation of the mutineers’ defeat, but also to Byron’s desire to detangle the visions of Robinsonade literature from the bitter pattern of colonial disaster. 120. Ibid. II: ll. 138–40. 121. Ibid. II: ll. 151–54. 122. Ibid. II: ll. 155–58. A naiad is a nymph associated exclusively with fresh water in classical mythology. Neuha’s association with the naiads underlines her separation from the nautical world of the Bounty, for a naiad (unlike a nereid) is explicitly barred from the ocean. The most famous “naiad’s cave” appears in The Odyssey, when Odysseus makes landfall on Ithaca in a sheltered harbor near a cave sacred to the naiads. Byron’s reference to the destruction of a “naiad’s cave” thus also suggests the elimination of any possibility of shelter for those who, like Torquil, are wandering sailors. 123. The implied future destruction of Neuha’s refuge also reminds us of the outcome of other colonial love stories, most notably that of Inkle and Yarico. As told in a March 13, 1711, edition of The Spectator, Mr. Thomas Inkle, an English merchant, was saved from certain death by a Native American woman who fell in love with him. After emerging from the subterranean cavern in which Yarico had protected him, the ungrateful Inkle sold his pregnant lover into slavery. The story of Inkle and Yarico was told (and staged) repeatedly in England and was occasionally alluded to in reviews of Byron’s The Island. 124. Byron, The Island II: ll. 346–55. 125. The politics of the Bounty mutiny are still subject to debate. I admit to being sympathetic to Caroline Alexander’s argument that the aristocratic status and superior

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social connections of Bligh’s midshipmen contributed both to the mutiny and to the subsequent tarnishing of Bligh’s reputation. 126. Unlike, for example, Victor Hugo’s famous description of the Battle of Waterloo in Les Miserables, in which the narrator ponders the factors that contributed to Napoleon’s defeat and imagines a history in which events might have turned out differently. 127. Byron, The Island III: ll. 13–14. 128. Ibid. III: ll. 39–40, 44. Note how Byron’s use of phrases such as “sea-green isle” and “second country” suggests that in Tubuai, the mutineers had hoped to find another version of Shakespeare’s “sea-girt isle,” a newer, better Britain. Instead, they find themselves now divorced from the domestic. 129. Ibid. III: ll. 15, 35–36. 130. Ibid. IV: ll. 267–69. 131. Ibid. IV: l. 11. 132. Ibid. IV: ll. 288, 343, 368. 133. Ibid. IV: ll. 60, 55, 88. 134. Ibid. IV: ll. 77, 84. 135. Ibid. IV: ll. 85–90. 136. Ibid. IV, ll. 99–100. 137. See, for example, John Bury’s claim that “only Neuha and Torquil can enter the cave since the water, not land, is their natural domain” (unpaginated). This statement is problematic on several counts because Byron never states that Neuha and Torquil are native to the ocean, only that the first resembles a native of that element and the second would like to think of himself in that context. Second, all of the other characters in the poem have an equal, if not better, claim to consider the ocean as their “domain”: Indeed, Torquil is being pursued by the naval representatives of a nation that claims to rule the waves. Unfortunately, Bury’s statement replicates some of the associations of property and space that I think Byron’s poem is trying to avoid. The islanders, in the mutineers’ idealistic vision of the island, are crucially propertyless and have no “domain.” It is precisely this perceived lack of property that enables the mutineers to believe (wrongly) that they can integrate seamlessly into (and perhaps appropriate) this terra nullius. Of all the characters in the poem, only Neuha can be said to possess a domain in the form of the cavern that ends up being known as “Neuha’s Cave,” but she only “possesses” this atopic space insofar as she is associated with it in later legends and stories. 138. Numerous critics have connected Neuha’s cave to womb imagery, including Catherine Addison in “Gender and Race in Byron’s ‘The Island’ and Mitford’s ‘Christina,’ ” and, most recently, Elisa Beshero-Bondar in Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism 153–54. 139. Byron, The Island IV: l. 131. 140. Ibid. IV: ll. 146–50. 141. Ibid. IV: ll. 160, 133, 155, 156, 157–58. 142. Ibid. IV: ll. 195, 200–201. 143. Ibid. IV: ll. 418, 413–14.

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144. A less typical view, which also, however, can be found in some accounts of subterranean tourism, is that underground spaces also expose the limitations of the human imagination. That, at least, seems to be the argument of Bradshaw’s Journal’s description of Derbyshire’s Spar Cavern, which, readers are told, presents travelers with “a succession of scenes that at once bids defiance the ablest pen or pencil, nay, beyond, far beyond, the utmost conceptions of the human imagination.” Next to the actual wonders of the underground, the “scenes of Arabian tales were a cipher”; interestingly, exposure to the glories of the subterranean temporarily interferes with the tourists’ ability to experience the sublime and the picturesque aboveground: “So absorbed were we with the scenes just witnessed that all around appeared uninteresting, and it was some time before we could fully appreciate the bold mountainous landscape before us” (109). 145. For the contributions of early paleontology to new histories of the earth, see Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam. For the geo-historical implications of Buckland’s famous analysis of the 1821 fossil discoveries in Yorkshire’s Kirkdale Cave, see Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time 622–38. 146. Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam 159. 147. Postans 274. 148. Postans notes as one of the island’s curiosities that “the common name for cave, in Serk, is boutique, or shop” (275). Postans is not particularly bothered by the islanders’ association of caverns with mercantile space, but later commentators on the island, such as Charles Grindrod, appear to have been somewhat more disturbed by this linkage. In “The Caves and Rocks of Serk” (1885), Grindrod reduces the application of the word “boutique” to a single cavern (the same cavern, as it happens, that Postans describes in his account under the name of the “Great Cavern”). Grindrod then goes on to offer potential correctives to the cavern’s name, explaining in his introduction that “the Boutiques, or merchant’s (pirate’s or smuggler’s?) cave, is reckoned the largest cavern in the island” (112). It is entirely possible that Grindrod is correct in his speculation that any “wares” stored in the Serk caves were goods stolen or smuggled in from passing vessels; popular histories of smuggling abound in references to “smuggler’s caves” used for the storage of contraband goods. But his subsequent description of the “Boutiques cavern” makes no mention of local histories linking the cavern to illicit trade, suggesting that the speculation is entirely Grindrod’s and is a product of his own dissatisfaction with the romantic, natural space of a cave being linked to the space of everyday commerce. 149. Postans 275. 150. Ibid. 278–79. 151. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), revised and reprinted in his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), arguably picks up on similar themes. Notably, the doomed Usher’s reading material consists of numerous imaginary voyages into atopic and mythical spaces, including “the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm de Holberg . . . the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella” (51). The narrator questions the effect of this kind of literature on the mental health of his friend, suggesting that it may reproduce the “rapid increase of . . . superstition” (43) that

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the narrator himself experiences on approaching the house, and which he links to his “childish experiment, of looking down” (43), peering into the chthonic depths of the earth rather than exercising his gentlemanly prerogative and enjoying the prospect of the countryside. 152. Pennant 18. 153. “Subterranean London” 452. 154. For a more extensive account of this process, and of the Victorians’ association of subterranean spaces with the “lower classes,” see R. Williams, Notes on the Underground; Pike, Subterranean Cities; and M. Allen. 155 “Subterranean London” 451. 156. Ibid. 455. 157. Ibid. 452, 453, 451. 158. Wells, The Time Machine 57. 159. Ibid. 26. 160. Ibid. 41, 51, 22. The discovery of the Egyptian Sphinx by Napoleon’s forces is considered by many to be the origin point of the discipline of archaeology. The “white leprous face” (34) of The Time Machine’s White Sphinx is an early indicator of the decay of “white” civilization, which the Time Traveller, by entering the Sphinx’s subterranean network, is soon to uncover. 161. Ibid. 54. 162. Ibid. 57. 163. Ibid. 48. 164. Ibid. 165. Ibid. 65. 166. Ibid. 90.

Conclusion 1. Kavenna 5–6. 2. Ibid. 8. 3. Ibid. 6. 4. Spatial theorists from Henri Lefebvre onward have examined the impact of globalizing forces on localized, traditional communities. Marc Augé, for example, has argued that the modern world is increasingly characterized by “nonplaces” such as generic supermarkets or airports, which reflect no particularity or local history. Joshua Meyrowitz has made similar arguments regarding proliferation of electronic media, while Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) remains a classic account of the creation of placelessness in the landscape. 5. See, for example, the 2012 controversy that surrounded the “rogue geoengineer” (Lukacs 1) Russ George when it was discovered that he had dumped one hundred tons of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean in what was allegedly an attempt to unilaterally change the climate of the globe. George appears to have deliberately located his experiment on a

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highly ambiguous border section between the high seas and Canada’s territorial waters so as to benefit from the complicated questions of sovereignty and responsibility that attend this space of global connection. 6. Trowbridge 116. 7. To expand on this remark: While extraterrestrial territory within the scope of space exploration forms the new atopic frontier, authors of speculative fiction often revisit the atopias of earlier centuries. Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (originally Northern Lights, 1995), for example, makes the penetration of a neo-Victorian world’s polar space a matter of apocalyptic anxiety. Cherie Priest’s steampunk zombie novel Boneshaker (2009) makes subterranean Seattle the ground zero of a dramatic eruption of alternative national history and portrays the nineteenth-century atmosphere as both a vector of plague and a semi-oceanic space of freedom for ex-slaves. Postcolonial fiction has also revisited atopic space, as in the case of the Cave of Swimmers that becomes the burial site of secret histories in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) or the atmospheric space that forces characters in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) to reflect on the artificial construction of their nation. In all of these cases the novels in question retrofit atopias for contemporary political purposes. 8. In making this brief turn toward the city, my argument intersects with the substantial body of scholarship on the negotiation of urban space. In addition to the scholars I cite here, my own thinking on city space has been shaped by the arguments of Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin, by the analyses of “urban texts” provided by scholars such as David Henkin, and by arguments on the problems of managing London, articulated by critics such as Nicholas Freeman. My own move in this chapter is intended as a gesture toward the potential applications of this project’s argument, not a comprehensive survey of the spatial politics of the geo-imaginary metropolis. 9. Harley 126. 10. See, for example, L.-S. Mercier, the great chronicler of Paris, who declared that London “must inevitably be considered when talking of Paris” (qtd. in Schwarz 642) and who accordingly traveled to London to research a book on the subject in 1781. 11. Schwarz 645. 12. J. Ellis 90. 13. Ibid. 14. For the development of the guidebook genre, see De Beer; Vaughan; Michael Harris; and Sweet 100–141. 15. Stow’s Survay was frequently reprinted, though not necessarily updated or, from a practical perspective, improved. In 1720, John Strype produced a “new edition” of Stow’s Survay, which embedded parts of Stow’s original text within a mass of other information now considered pertinent to urban representation, such as local coats of arms, prospects of buildings, maps (not necessarily current), and detailed lists of the by-laws and legal recourses for inhabitants of certain neighborhoods. Strype’s 1720 Survey thus errs on the side of being too comprehensive, although it was probably the best printed guide to the city available at the time. 16. Wordsworth (1805) I: 696.

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17. E. Jones 1. 18. Gay III: 184–85, 404. 19. Roach 1. 20. Ibid. 21. De Quincey, Confessions 47, 72. 22. The urban sprawl of London has caught the attention of many commentators over the centuries. In using the phrase “illimitable London,” however, I am invoking the words of Ford Madox Ford, who claimed in 1905 that “one may easily sail around England, or circumnavigate the globe. But not the most enthusiastic geographer . . . ever memorized a map of London. Certainly no one ever walks around it. For England is a small island, the world is infinitesimal amongst the planets. But London is illimitable” (qtd. in Pike, Subterranean 23). At the point at which one believes the world completely known and charted, Ford’s comments suggests that one can turn inwards, to the mysteries of the microcosm and the sublime foreignness of urban space. 23. Collins 442. 24. Ibid. 68. 25. Like the ocean that acts as its twin, David Copperfield ’s London threatens to engulf bodies and make them vanish. The novel stresses connections between the two, demonstrating, particularly in the case of the novel’s women, how easy it is to pass from the ocean to the city. After Emily is seduced into sailing away with Steerforth, her maritime course inevitably leads her to London, for there is no greater refuge for “fallen” women than the anonymous streets of the metropolis. And yet to lose oneself in London is, as indicated by the suicidal speech of Martha Endell, to return to the ocean: Endell speaks of joining with the Thames, which “goes away, like my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled—and I feel that I must go with it” (632). For an excellent analysis of Dickens’s topography of the Thames, see M. Allen 63–65, 86–108. 26. See Freedgood 85–88. 27. Gay III: 402. 28. Wordsworth (1805) VIII: 711. 29. De Quincey, Confessions 47. 30. Ibid. 48. 31. For an interesting overview of early nineteenth-century Britain’s interest in London walking, see Guldi 116–44. 32. The popularity of panoramic guidebooks was accompanied by the publication of a number of illustrated poems that attempted, often in truly awful verse, to provide similar visual orientation to metropolitan visitors. Thus, works such as A. P. Bast’s “London: a Poem, . . . Giving a Picturesque Description of the Various Public Buildings, Squares, and Principal Streets” (1818) promised to lead readers through a poetical “survey” of the city that would “point out its various beauties sans delay” (ll. 1–2). 33. Given that I am trying to trace changes in perceptions of urban space at the turn of the nineteenth century, I will focus in this section on the 1805 version of The Prelude as represented in the Norton Critical Edition.

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34. Wordsworth (1805) VII: 78–79. 35. Ibid. VII: 96–97, 104–5, emphasis mine. 36. Ibid. VII: 106. 37. Ibid. VII: 114. 38. Ibid. VIII: 754–55. 39. Ibid. VII: 140. 40. Ibid. VII: 141–43. 41. For connections between Wordsworth’s description of London and his reaction to the politics of revolutionary Paris, see Jacobus. 42. A prescriptive right is a right that is not specifically granted but is gained by longterm occupancy or acquisition, “nec vi, nec clam, nec precario” (“without force, without secrecy, without permission”). Squatters’ rights, for example, are a form of prescriptive right, and the term most often surfaces in relation to land disputes. In Romantic Britain the term also carried with it the sense of “hereditary right”; thus Burke argued that the rights possessed by Britons were not universal or natural to man but were prescriptive, having arisen and gone uncontested for generations in a particular society. This is not to say that prescriptive rights could not be contested—indeed, the eighteenth century’s enclosure of the commons was a clear example of a violation of a prescriptive right of the people (see E. P. Thompson 9, 126). What is significant concerning Wordsworth’s use of the phrase is that it points to a dispute over the ownership of space: Wordsworth could presumably refuse to abandon his imagined version of London, but as a young man, he does not, and thus he lends the city power and authority it does not have license to possess. Wordsworth’s reimagining of London in The Prelude can be seen as a challenge to the authority of the material city, as prescriptive rights cases were supposed to be decided based on “the memory of man,” originally defined, as Joshua Williams declared in 1880, “as long as the oldest person in the neighbourhood could remember” (4). The Prelude, insofar as it is a poem based on personal recollection that remembers a time before such an imaginative tax was paid, could thus legitimately position itself as a challenge to the “prescriptive right” of the material city. 43. Wiley 14. I find Michael Wiley’s argument that Wordsworth sees blank space as the medium through which the “world of sense experience . . . engages with the re-imagined world” (16) highly persuasive, although my reading of The Prelude’s cave passage differs from his. I believe that Wordsworth’s positioning of this stanza in relation to the city rather than the Alps demands that we consider the blank of cave space as commenting on the similarly resistant space of the London. 44. Wordsworth (1805) VIII: 744. 45. Ibid. VIII: 693, 712–14. 46. Ibid. VIII: 716–18. 47. Ibid. VIII: 726–27. 48. Ibid. VIII: 728, 729, 731, 734–37. 49. John Housman’s A Descriptive Tour (1800), for example, describes his local guide to the Cave of Yordas reading the rock formations for his clients, pointing out such communally established imagined features as the “Bishop’s Throne” (37). That the conversion of

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this formerly mythical space into a zone of practice does not eliminate the inherent threat of the subterranean, however, is illustrated by an “unpleasant event” in which Housman’s guide slips and narrowly escapes falling “into some deep chasm of the rock, which might have proved fatal” (37) and that would have stranded his clients in the darkness. Like the ocean, the Cave of Yordas may have become a space of labor and travel that is integrated into commercial circuits, but it has retained its connotations of danger and, via its connection to as-yet-unexplored subterranean depths, the unknown. 50. Wordsworth (1805) VIII: 738–40. In the 1850 Prelude, Wordsworth alters his description of these subterranean fancies so that they more strongly reflect Britain’s association of Catholicism and the Gothic with subterranean space. The traveler no longer sees kings or prancing steeds, but instead gazes on “the ghostly semblance of a hooded monk / Veiled nun, or pilgrim resting on his staff” (587–88). Similarly, the figure of the “warrior” is transmuted description that evokes the vision of gigantic armor that supposedly inspired Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). 51. Wordsworth (1805) VIII: 711–41. 52. Ibid. VIII: 748. 53. Ibid. VIII: 727. 54. Ibid. I: 35, VII: 634, 636, 642–43. 55. Heffernan 433. 56. For more on Wordsworth’s response to panoramas, see Agathocleous 92–107; J. Jones; King; and Galperin 99–128. 57. Wordsworth (1805) VII: 260, 261–62. Here, Wordsworth is recalling the actual language of panorama advertisements, with one important difference: Advertisements for panoramas tended to use the verb “suppose” rather than “plant,” as in a 1795 advertisement for Barker’s “First of June” panorama, which declared that “observers may suppose themselves upon the open sea, in the centre of the fleet.” Barker’s previous ad copy for his famous view of London had made a similar promise, declaring that viewers of the panorama would be “by Painting only, so deceived as to suppose themselves on the Albion Mill, from whence the View was taken” (“Panorama” 1). The advertisement’s phrasing (particularly in the case of the First of June panorama) implies that the observer has a choice to submit to the deception of the panorama (observers may suppose); Wordsworth, however, clearly locates power in the hands of the panorama’s creator. 58. Wordsworth (1805) VII: 261–62. 59. Books such as London and Its Environs Described (1761) promised to “serve as both a guide and an instructor to the travelling Virtuosi, whether natives or foreigners” (unpaginated) by providing illustrated views of the famous public buildings of London. These illustrations of famous sites tended to emphasize the spectacle of the buildings’ sizes and to stress shape over social function. Thus, London and Its Environs places its illustration of the notorious Bedlam hospital above that of London Bridge, implying a visual and geographical equivalency that was absent from written descriptions of these buildings. This mode of “knowing London” would become de rigueur by the close of the century and would be used extensively in guidebooks such as The Panorama of London, and Visitor’s Pocket Companion

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(1830). It would also appear in the form of literary works such as London: A Descriptive Poem (1811), children’s books such as A Peep at London (1818–47), and in the form of game boards such as The Panorama of London, or A Day’s Journey Around the Metropolis (1809). 60. Wordsworth (1805) VII: 145, 148–50. 61. Ibid. VII: 158, 185–86. 62. Ibid. VII: 205–7. 63. Ibid. VII: 216, 228. 64. Ibid. VII: 236, 280. 65. The ambiguity of Wordsworth’s portrayal of the relationship between urban space and the imagination is highlighted in stanzas such as his critique of London theaters, in which he explains that “the imaginative power / Languish[ed] within me” (VII: 499–500) as he watched the plays, for the grand emotions supposedly generated by the great tragedies “passed not beyond the suburbs of my mind” (507). Wordsworth’s use of this spatialized metaphor is odd, for it suggests that the suburbs—the periphery of a city—also mark the periphery of the poet’s self, implying that the imagination has to lie either within the city center or far beyond it. But the metaphor, in focusing in the moment of transition into or out of the city, fails to specify in which direction emotion should pass to each the imagination, and thus leaves the creative power curiously dislocated, existing perhaps in the density of the city core, or in the countryside, or in the remote atopia that, for so much of the eighteenth century, was thought to constitute the city’s polar opposite. 66. De Quincey, Confessions 34. 67. In “Thomas De Quincey and Spatial Disorientation,” Porter argues that De Quincey’s anxieties about his own autobiographical project of “mapping the self ” (229) are reflected in his depiction of incoherent London space. I would rearrange the order of Porter’s formulation, arguing that the confusing geographical incorporations of the metropole—which include decadent “Oriental” products such as opium—produce rather than reflect De Quincey’s incoherent sense of identity. For other perspectives on De Quincey’s responses to urban space, see Fulford, “Prophecy and Imagination”; Wolfreys; and Schwarzbach. For more on De Quincey’s Orientalism, see Krishnan, Reading The Global; Leask 170–220; and Sudan. 68. De Quincey, Confessions 47. 69. Ibid. 36. 70. David Pike provides a particularly effective account of the significance of Beck’s conflation of subterranean space with the space of London in Subterranean Cities (22–25). 71. De Quincey, Confessions 48. 72. Ibid. 47. 73. Krishnan, “Opium and Empire” 209. 74. De Quincey, Confessions 48, 49. 75. Ibid. 72. 76. Ibid. 46. The main “spectacle” that De Quincey seeks out in London streets is that of the poor, specifically “the pleasures of the poor, their consolations of spirit, and their reposes from bodily toil” which were “never . . . oppressive to contemplate” (46).

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77. Reynolds 148. 78. Ibid. 406. 79. Ibid. 21. 80. Montague’s abstract “white-collar” financial criminality is juxtaposed with the brutal criminality of characters such as the Resurrection Man, who, as Sally Powell has observed, dramatizes in more corporeal terms “the threat posed by city commercialism to the sanctity and survival of the working-class individual” (45). 81. Reynolds 122. 82. Ibid. 22. 83. Ibid. 331. 84. Ibid. 400. 85. The association of the subterranean and criminality in Mysteries fits with what David Pike and Rosalind Williams have argued was the Victorians’ growing tendency to use the subterranean as a means of representing the lower classes and the “criminal element” of an increasingly vertically stratified London society. 86. Reynolds 129. 87. Ibid. 23. 88. Wordsworth (1805) VII: 709. 89. Kavenna 5. 90. Wordsworth (1805) VII: 643.

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Index

abstract space, 167, 207n.22, 207n.23; of city, 199; 240n.93; of ocean, 77–80 Act of Union (1707), 74 Aerostatic Spy, The, 128–31, 141, 231n.62 Africa: blank space of, 1–5, 14, 71, 112, 205n.3; and maritime community, 112–14; and slavery, 28–29, 90, 130, 137–38, 224n.87, 233n.99; and trade, 84, 224n.97 air balloons: English skepticism toward, 115– 17, 140, 143; and finance, 144; and French Revolution, 122, 134–35, 229n.15; invention of, 8, 16, 17, 78, 121; as symbol of print culture, 119, 122–23, 131, 136, 138, 144, 145. See also sovereignty; warfare Alcock, Mary, “The Air Balloon; or, Flying Mortal,” 122 American Revolutionary War, 35; fictional responses to, 127–29, 131, 241n.109; tensions in advance of, 85, 89–90, 92 Anderson, Benedict, 11, 210n.14 Anson, George, 79, 83 Antarctica: associations with race, 36, 213; mythology of, 24–25, 30, 211n.25. See also Cook, James; polar space; South Pole d’Anville, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon, 1–5, 17–18, 205n.3, 205n.6, 240n.80 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 16, 118, 125 Arctic: definitions of, 23, 211n.18; mythology of, 24, 211n.23, 211n.25. See also North Pole; Northwest Passage; polar space Aristotle, 25; Meteorology, 119 Athenaeum and Literary Chronicle, 98; Athenaeum, 141–42 atmosphere: and future, 121; literary, 132; mythology of, 119, 130–33; as space of the page, 120, 141; as space of romance, 133. See also globe atopia: atmosphere’s transition into, 120–21, 132–33, 141; definition of, 6–11, 186–87, 189,

203–4; ocean’s history as, 72–73, 77–78; polar space’s transition into, 50, 54–55, 60– 61; subterranean status as, 151–54. See also domestic; improvement Augé, Marc, 10, 246n.4 Austen, Jane, 14, 32, 105; Pride and Prejudice 105, 238n.51; Sense and Sensibility, 105 Baker, Samuel, 9, 75, 218n.180 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12, 209n.36 “balloon literature,” 118–19, 122–23, 135, 230n.29 “balloonomania,” 122, 133 Banks, Joseph, 42, 214n.103 Barker, Robert, Panorama of London from the Albion Mills, 197, 250n.57 Barrow, John, 35, 42, 61; controversy over Arctic articles, 44, 51, 215n.113, 215n.115; influence on conceptions of polar space, 43–47, 50–51, 54–56, 70, 214n.105; on mining, 155 Baucom, Ian, 29 Beck, Harry, 199, 251n.70 Beckford, William, Vathek, 158 Bentham, Samuel, 74–75. See also Royal Navy Benton, Lauren, 6, 78, 79, 206n.12, 214n.88 Bewell, Alan, 13, 56 Blanchard, Jean-Pierre, 125, 126, 133, 230n.47 “Black Eyed Susan” (play), 102 Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 132 blank space, 1–5, 8, 14, 17–18, 41, 161, 249n.43. See also space The Blazing World (Cavendish), 25–26, 33, 47, 212n.33 Bligh, William, 34, 242n.111, 244n.125; in Byron’s The Island, 171–72, 174, 178, 243n.119 Blum, Hester, 15, 75, 228n.176

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bodies: in atopias, 6–7, 83, 152; interiors of, 100–101; of laborers, 107, 181, 251; monstrous and grotesque, 5, 25–28, 48, 53, 149, 169; sexuality and, 172–73. See also illness; madness; property; slavery Bolton, Betsy, 127 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 118, 132, 231n.70, 244n.126, 245n.160. See also Napoleonic Wars Boyle, Robert, 119 Bragg, Benjamin, A Voyage to the North Pole, 15, 44, 46–50, 55, 216n.131, 216n.135, 217n.149 Brantlinger, Patrick, 97–99, 101, 106 Britain: anti-French nationalism of, 117; exploration and, 27, 34, 47, 51, 63; national character of, 6, 14, 43, 45–46, 65, 69–70; relationship with atmosphere, 115–16, 118, 127, 139–40, 145, 187; relationship with navy, 95, 102–4; relationship with ocean, 68, 73–76, 78, 84, 87, 90–91; and subterranean, 148–51, 157–58, 161–63, 176, 181–83. See also nation Bronte, Charlotte, 58; Jane Eyre, 14, 21 Brunt, Samuel, A Voyage to Cacklogallinia, 120 Buckland, William, 152–53, 158, 179, 239n.66, 245n.145 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 47–48 Bulwark of Britannia (board game), 93–95 Burgoyne, Margaret A., 142 Burney, James, Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea, 79–80 Byron, George Gordon, 13, 16–17, 141, 218n.198, 242n.118; Don Juan, 24, 222n.50; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 73; The Island; Or, Christian and His Comrades, 170–78, 182, 188, 242n.112, 242n.119, 244n.128, 244n.137 cannibalism, 60, 62, 65–66, 81–82, 154, 183. See also bodies capitalism: global, 17, 199, 200; spatial transformations of, 10, 155, 186, 188, 203–4, 206n.13; supporters of, 56, 201; and undiscovered lands, 25–27, 31–32, 49, 54. See also abstract space; empire; globalization cartography: and atmosphere, 120, 125; development of, 1–5, 8, 16, 33–36; and ocean, 77–78, 91, 108, 222n.35; older models of,

25, 27, 33; spaces resistant to, 16, 50, 155, 163; and urban space, 190–91, 199, 202 Catholics: associated with subterranean, 147– 49, 152, 157, 179, 182, 235n.7, 250n.50; in The Recess, 163, 165; and Gothic architecture, 171, 177; Irish rebels, 215n.119. See also Scottish Highlanders Cavell, Janice, 21, 62, 218n.176, 218n195 Cavendish, Margaret, The Blazing World, 25– 26, 33, 47, 212n.33 caves: and baroque, 237n.37; of Sark, 179–80; “show caves,” 154–55, 160, 195, 239n.72; Spar Cave, 158–59; Tent Cave, discovery of, 146–51; of Yordas, 195–96. See also grotesque; subterranean; tourism Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 118, 139 Chorley, Henry Fothergill, “The Ballad of the Aeronaut,” 132, 142 chronometer, 8, 34, 37, 74. See also cartography; technology chronotope, 97, 209n.36 Clare, John, 13 class: conflicts, 156–57, 238n.51, 252n.80; depictions of working class, 67, 100, 107, 181–84; disruptions of hierarchy, 82; linguistic politics of, 84, 87–88, 90, 96. See also labor; sailors climate: change, 18, 44, 47, 55, 132, 246n.5; presumed influence on national characteristics, 65, 129–30 Cohen, Margaret, 9, 74–75, 83–84, 210n.12, 221n.22. See also craft Colburn, Henry, 98, 225n.123 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 5, 15; cultural afterlife of Rime, 51, 53, 132, 142, 213n.76; and polar space, 18, 21, 23, 194; Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 37–42, 47, 214n.85, 214n.86 Colley, Linda, 11, 210n.14, 221n.17 Collins, Wilkie: The Frozen Deep, 66, 219n.231; The Woman in White, 191–92 colonialism, 27; of Bounty mutineers, 172– 74, 178; spatial strategies of, 5, 14, 20, 31, 153–54, 161, 167, 209n.41. See also empire; indigenous peoples colonization: of the Americas, 45, 52–54, 126, 149, 215n.199; of Australia, 33; fictional allusions to, 30, 36; relationship to cultivation, 56–57. See also empire; indigenous peoples Columbus, Christopher, 126

index commons: atopias as, 188, 209n.4; enclosure of, 249n.42; ocean as, 72–73, 77. See also property communication, 99, 228n.199; atmosphere as medium of, 116, 120, 133; between land and sea, 51, 57, 65, 103, 109; communication barrier for sailors, 85, 93, 103; subterranean as medium of, 165, 170; technologies of, 75, 104, 181–82, 226n.150 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (De Quincey), 191–93, 198–200, 202, 203, 251n.67, 251n.76 Connery, Christopher L., 77, 208n.34 Conrad, Joseph, 5, 62, 70–71; Heart of Darkness, 5, 111–14; The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 111–12 Cook, James: and Antarctica, 33–36; as empiricist explorer, 34, 51, 59, 66; narration of voyages, 79, 212n.57, 212n.59, 213n.64; and Rime, 37, 39. See also Terra Australis Incognita Cooper, James Fenimore, 227n.176; Ned Myers, 109; The Pilot, 96 Corbin, Alain, 76–79, 221n.25, 221n.26 cosmopolitanism: identified with atmosphere, 125, 128–29, 131, 140–41, 143; identified with city, 13, 157, 190–91; identified with ocean, 72, 136–37; opposed to nationalism, 16, 125; and science, 126, 211n.19 Costello, Dudley: “All the World and His Wife; or, What Brought Everybody to London in 1851,” 143; “The Travels and Opinions of Mr. Jolly Green,” 110 Courtney, W. L., on Conrad, 111–12 Cowper, William, 32 Coxwell, Henry Tracey, 139, 233n.106 Craciun, Adriana, 52, 56, 208n.34, 217n.150, 218n.198 “craft,” 9, 13, 75, 80, 83–85, 92, 210n.12; adapted to ballooning, 139, 233n.106 criminals: bandits, 73, 157, 167; financial, 201–2; as “mobile peoples,” 7; pirates, 18, 89–90; smugglers, 121, 157, 245n.148; and subterranean, 151–52, 154, 157, 236n.22; terrorists, 220n.10. See also mutiny Critical Review, 117 Croker, John Wilson, 44 Crotchets in Air (Poole), 16, 140–42, 229n.15, 234n.109 culture: cultivation of polar space, 55–58, 218n.180; and maritime empire, 9, 76

281

Dalrymple, Alexander, 34 Dampier, William, 34 Dangers of the Deep or, Interesting Narratives of Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, The, 81–82 Darwin, Erasmus, The Botanic Garden, 41 David, Robert G., 14, 22, 60 Dee, John, 24 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe: fictional critiques of, 27–29, 53–54, 128–29; imperial politics of, 92, 153–54, 161; model of individualist adventurer, 85, 192, 194 Demagogue, The (Falconer), 85, 88–89, 223n.76, 224n.88 Dening, Greg, 75, 95 De Quincey, Thomas, 7, 38, 189, 214n.85; Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 191– 93, 198–200, 202, 203, 251n.67, 251n.76 desert, 7–8, 121, 196, 198, 207n.20 Dibdin, Charles, 102 Dickens, Charles, 15, 17, 35, 65; David Copperfield, 192, 248n.25; The Frozen Deep, 15, 22, 61, 66–70, 219n.231; Household Words, 65–66 dictionaries, politics of, 85–88. See also Falconer, William domestic: alienation of sailors from, 65, 79, 102–3, 171, 220n.14; atmosphere, 123, 132, 137–38, 141; exclusion from, 53; identity, 14, 128, 131; as opposed to global commerce, 29, 201, 224n.97; opposite of polar space, 14, 38–39, 69, 187; social problems of, 54, 200; space of island, 129, 175–76, 192, 244n.128; space of nation, 6–7, 10, 54, 127– 29, 143, 188; sphere of home, 29–30, 52, 61, 64–67, 137, 208n.31; and subterranean, 152–53, 160, 172, 177, 238n.49; relation to atopia, 6, 14. See also dwelling Douglas, Thomas. See Selkirk, 5th Earl of Dubouzet, Joseph, 19, 20 Duncan, Archibald, The Mariner’s Chronicle, 83–93 D’Urville (expedition), 19, 20, 209n.1, 210n.6 dwelling: and concept of place, 6, 10–11, 72, 76, 206n.14, 208n.31; subterranean as antithetical to, 152–53, 184. See also domestic Elizabeth I, Queen, 24, 221n.16; fictional depiction of, 162, 166, 169, 241n.109 Ellis, Joyce, 190

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empire: alternate forms of, 26, 129, 155, 241n.109; and capitalism, 31–32, 90, 199; and “culture,” 56–57; as destructive to Britons, 65, 166; ideologies of, 6, 20, 43, 70–71, 92, 113; importance of communication to, 9, 93, 95, 181, 226n.150; importance of surveillance to, 97, 174; literature’s role in, 12, 15, 111, 181; paradox of maritime foundation, 6, 9, 74–76, 84, 90–91, 224n.97; polar space as limit on, 32, 121, 216n.149; relationship to atopias, 6–18, 50, 154, 204; and scientific networks, 21–22, 42; subterranean as escape from, 154, 170, 176–77; uneven geographies of, 206n.12. See also colonialism; colonization; indigenous peoples empiricism: and experience of location, 12, 49, 66, 147–48, 194–95; and polar space, 9, 21, 37–42, 46, 48, 54, 70; and religion, 158; and space, 207n.22; and state cartography, 1, 15, 34, 59, 178 Enlightenment, 5, 21, 30, 122, 157, 229n.18, 231n.47, 236n.23. See also scientific community European Magazine and London Review, 133 exploration: changes in, 5, 13, 34–35, 45, 52, 154; legacy of, 23–24. See also cartography explorers: cultural influence of, 24–25, 59, 70–71, 185–86, 200; figure of, 27, 46, 48, 62, 64, 120, 132, 193–94; typical experiences of, 6–8, 20–21, 41, 51, 68, 152; as writers, 55–58, 60, 160–61, 210n.6. See also Cook, James Falconer, William, 10, 15, 18, 76, 83, 108, 223n.75, 224n.96; The Demagogue, 85, 88– 89, 223n.76, 224n.88; language and, 85–87, 93, 222n.58; The Shipwreck, 84–92, 95, 108, 223n.87. See also dictionaries Favret, Mary, 130 flight: Asmodeus flights, 231n.62; in imagined voyages, 29–30, 120; as realized by balloons, 117–18, 131; symbolic meaning of, 16, 33, 125 Foucault, Michel, 118, 206n.3 France: aerostatic literature of, 229n.15, 230n.29; imperial ambitions of, 19–20; as military threat, 116–18, 123–25, 132, 231n.70; naval battles with, 91–92; science and, 126, 230n.42, 234n.125; as social threat, 93, 122, 134–35, 143–44; spatial developments in, 1, 5, 205n.6, 207n.23

Frankenstein (Shelley), 44–48, 51–55, 188–89, 216n.131 Franklin, Jane, reading of, 232n.81 Franklin, John, 60–61, 143, 218n.95; lost expedition of, 17, 20, 62–67, 70 Freedgood, Elaine, 118, 125, 192, 230n.47 French Revolution, 122, 134–35, 207n.23, 229n.15 Frobisher, Martin, 45 frontier, 6, 57, 207n.20, 247n.7 Frozen Deep, The (Dickens), 15, 22, 61, 66–70, 219n.231 Fulford, Tim, 13, 97, 98, 226n.150 future: anticipations of collapse of British Empire, 91, 116, 128–29, 180, 183–84; anticipations of colonial destruction, 52–54, 173, 243n.123; of climate, 48, 206n.15, 261n.149; difficulty in predicting, 117; predictions regarding, 35–36, 56, 61, 131, 135–36, 181. See also science fiction; speculative fiction; vision Galperin, William, 9 Gastaldi, Giacomo, 1–2 Gay, John, “Trivia,” 190–91 Geach, Francis, 147–52 gender: in atmosphere, 139–42, 234n.121; in polar space, 22, 29–30; at sea, 82; in subterranean, 156, 169, 172–73, 175, 177–78, 238n.49, 238n.50 geo-imaginary, 11–12, 208n.34, 209n.36 geology, 150–51, 157, 174, 179; sacred theories of earth, 151, 157–58, 236n.20 Gillies, R. P., Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean, 59 Glascock, William Nugent, 93, 96, 107, 111; Naval Sketchbook, 95, 225n.105 globalization, 10, 13, 125, 186, 188–89, 203–4, 246n.4, 206n.13; as manifested in city, 192, 196, 199 globe: atmosphere as figure of global, 118, 121, 123, 130–33, 137; circulations and, 17, 37, 74, 110, 144, 187, 203; conceptual space of, 6–7, 52, 54, 141, 199, 205n.11; global commerce, 15, 28, 199; mapping of, 1–5, 41, 108–9; and ocean, 68, 73, 77, 209n.4; subterranean, 152, 154. See also globalization; nation; planetary Glorious First of June, The (play), 102 Godwin, William, Caleb Williams, 99 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 24

index

283

habitation, 6, 13–14, 206n.13. See also domestic; dwelling Harley, J. B., 5, 189 Harrison, Robert, 73, 76 Hart, Richard, “The Shipwreck,” 92, 224n.97 Hawke, Edward, 91, 224n.96 Hawkesworth, John, 34, 213n.64 Hearne, Samuel, 60 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 5, 111–14 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 206n.14, 208n.30, 208n.31, 209n.35 Helme, Elizabeth, Instructive Rambles in London, 158, 239n.58 Herculaneum, 150 Hiatt, Alfred, 1 Hill, Jen, 14, 22–23, 67, 219n.218 history: imaginatively reconstructed, 68, 110, 242n.118; lost in atopia, 62, 69, 73; oral vs. written, 65–66; recorded in subterranean, 150–51, 158, 177–78, 187; secret and alternative histories, 148, 155, 163–65, 170–76, 240n.80, 247n.7; stadial, 179. See also Gothic; grotesque homo sacer, 175 Household Words, 65, 67, 142, 214n.108 Hudson, Henry, 27 Hudson’s Bay Company, 56, 215n.119 Hunt, Leigh, 28, 32, 234n.121 Hutton, John, A Tour to the Caves, 159–60, 239n.67 Hyperboreans, 24, 49, 54

Man, 136–38, 233n.93, 233n.99, 233n.102; scurvy, 83; and subterranean, 152, 154. See also bodies; madness Illustrated London News, 61, 63 imagination: “bad” versions of, 1, 44–45, 49–50, 91, 95, 117, 169, 200; failures and limitations of, 193–98, 234n.121, 245n.144; fictional depictions of, 26, 101, 144–45, 153– 54, 177; in formation of community, 63, 83, 110, 170; geographical, 6–8, 10–13, 21, 46, 51, 119–20, 152; “good” versions of, 55, 99, 141–43, 159–61, 179–80, 212n.59; of individuals, 14, 58, 153, 186; literary, 5, 11, 22–23, 32, 38, 41, 133, 162; types of, 523, 210n.12; “Romantic,” 135, 141; spaces identified with, 21, 26, 32, 120, 133–34, 151, 166; uses of, 30, 51, 148, 155, 187, 192. See also geoimaginary; literature; nation; print culture imagined voyages, 36, 48–50, 52, 120, 132, 245n.51 imperialism. See empire Imperial Magazine, 137, 179 impressment, 104, 107, 223n.75. See also sailors improvement: agricultural, 6, 29–31, 57, 155, 209n.41; of individuals, 164; of society, 30– 31, 98, 181; urban, 179–81, 202 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 10; “The Mogul Tale, or, The Descent of the Balloon,” 126–28, 230n.45 India, 84, 90 indigenous peoples, 179, 188–89; of Arctic, 23; of Americas, 60, 100, 126, 149, 243n.123; of Africa, 113, 129–30, 137–38, 228n.199, 233n.99. See also Inuit; Ireland; Polynesia industrial revolution, 10, 152, 155–56, 184 interior, of bodies, 99, 101–5; of mind, 62–63, 160, 168 International Polar Year (IPY), 23–24, 211n.19 Inuit, 60, 62, 64–67, 217n.150 Ireland: as colonial space, 162, 241n.109; indigenous people of, 149, 166, 181, 215n.119. See also Scottish Highlanders island, as iconic imperial space, 21, 54, 70, 116, 129, 153–54, 175, 192 The Island; Or, Christian and His Comrades (Byron), 170–78, 182, 188, 242n.112, 242n.119, 244n.128, 244n.137

illness: and atmosphere, 120, 144; disease, 113, 144, 223n87, 230n.47; plague in The Last

Jacobinism, 72–73, 93, 98, 132, 134, 194, 236n.20

Goldsmith, Oliver, 13 Gothic: architecture, 147–49, 177; “Female Gothic,” 162, 239n.73; fiction, 59, 132, 149– 51, 157–58, 161–64; return of the repressed, 80, 150, 169 Graham, Margaret, 139 Great Exhibition (1851), 17, 143–44, 190 Greek Islands, 91 Green, Charles, 139, 142 grotesque: as applied to subterranean structures, 159, 160, 177, 179; definition of, 149– 50, 182; as genre, 28, 163–64, 170–71, 178, 182–84. See also bodies Grotius, Hugo, 72–73, 220n.10; Mare Liberum, 77 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 28

284

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Jacobin novel, 98, 194 Janowitz, Anne F., 148 Johnson, Samuel, Dictionary of the English Language, 87 Kavenna, Joanna, The Ice Museum, 185–86, 204 Keen, Paul, 117, 118, 122 Keskitalo, E. C. H., 23, 211n.18 King’s Own, The (Marryat), 96, 105–6, 232n.81 Kinzel, Ulrich, 77, 78 Kirk, Robert, 149, 235n.10 Kitson, Peter J., 13 Krishnan, Sanjay, 200 labor, 29–30, 87, 88, 91, 188, 240n.93; agricultural, 127, 129, 230n.47; literary, 38, 123; maritime, 9, 75–76, 80, 83, 85, 95, 111–14; subterranean, 151–52, 154–56, 180–83, 249n.49. See also class Landow, G. P., 84 Last Man, The (Shelley), 118, 135–39, 232n.81, 233n.93 Leader, 142–44 Leane, Elizabeth, 22, 211n.25 Lee, Debbie, 13 Lee, Sophia, The Recess, 161–71, 176, 182, 184, 188, 241n.10, 241n.110 Lefebvre, Henri, 8, 10–12, 167, 206n.14, 208n.30, 208n.31, 209n.35, 246n.4. See also abstract space Leisure Hour, 181 Leslie, John, 44 Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth, 132, 241n.109 Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, The (Paltock), 27–33, 36–37, 47, 53, 55, 70 Literary Gazette, 64, 67, 98, 213n.76 literature: community maintenance, 84, 95– 97, 111, 131; conflated with space, 38; and craft, 75–76, 85; definition of, 9; independence from nation, 145, 183; influence on spatial perception, 11, 23–24, 43, 160–61, 186, 204, 213n.76; limitations of, 139; marketplace, 106, 123, 213n.64; postcolonial, 189; postmodern, 205n.9; role in empire, 8–10, 12, 51–52, 57–59, 66, 109. See also under future; improvement; print culture London: as archetypal urban space, 185, 189–90; associated with atmosphere, 201; associated with caves, 195–96, 198, 201–2; associated with desert, 198; associated with

ocean, 191–92, 198, 200; associated with poles, 199, 202; as global city, 7, 191–93; relation to ancient Rome, 180–81. See also tourism; urbanization Lowes, Jonathan Livingston, 37 Loyalists, 128–29 Lunardi, Vincenzo, 122, 126 Lynn, Michael, 119, 229n.18 Mackay, William, “Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno,” 83, 222n.50 Macleay, Kenneth, Description of the Spar Cave, 158–59, 161, 238n.49 madness, 6, 49, 113, 149–50, 168–69; and subterranean, 152, 169, 237n.30, 245n.51. See also illness Makdisi, Saree, 13, 207n.24 Markley, Robert, 31, 32, 49 Marryat, Frederick, 15, 72–73, 75–76, 111–14, 225n.123; editor of Metropolitan, 96–97, 107–8, 227n.161; Frank Mildmay/The Naval Officer, 97–106, 108–9, 226n.150; The King’s Own, 96, 105–6, 232n.81; Mr. Midshipman Easy, 72–73, 76–80, 220n.1, 228n.199. See also Royal Navy; sailors; surveillance Mars (planet), 47, 144–45, 216n.133 Maxwell, Richard, 163, 201 McWhir, Anne, 138 Melville, Herman, 93 Melville, Peter, 138, 233n.99 Mercator, Gerardus, 29, 33 meteorology: development of, 130; observation of “meteors,” 117, 119, 121. See also climate Metropolitan Magazine, 107–9, 112, 225n.123, 227n.161, 227n.170, 228n.176, 232n.81. See also Marryat, Frederick mines: miners, 146–48, 154–55, 180, 235n.7; space of mines, 133, 151–56, 201, 239n.72. See also labor mobility, 6–10, 78–79, 207n.21; atopia as limit on, 21, 135, 152, 187; improvements to, 37, 121, 130, 133, 144; 66, 187; and international trade, 28–30, 36, 221n.14. See also transportation modernity, 173, 178; spatial transformations of, 8–13, 167, 180, 191, 194, 203, 208n.31. See also industrial revolution; urbanization “The Mogul Tale, or, The Descent of the Balloon” (Inchbald), 126–28, 230n.45

index Montgolfier brothers, 8, 16, 121–26. See also air balloons Monthly Review, 28, 87, 98–99 moon, 119–20, 207n.21, 207n.19. See also outer space Moretti, Franco, 12 Morriss, Roger, 74 mountains, 7–8, 121, 130, 206n.15, 210n.5; volcano, 133, 177 Mr. Midshipman Easy (Marryat), 72–73, 76– 80, 220n.1, 228n.199 Murray, John, 60, 218n.176, 218n.195, 218n.198 mutiny: on the Bounty, 74, 167, 171–78, 242n.111, 242n.119, 243n.125; specter of, 73, 93, 97, 105, 108, 228n.199, 220n.13; at Spithead and Nore, 93, 102, 106–7, 224n.100 Mysteries of London, The (Reynolds), 17–18, 189, 193, 201–4, 252n.80, 252n.85 mythical space, 8, 26, 151, 207n.21, 207n.22, 245n.151, 250n.49 Napoleonic Wars, 43, 52, 58, 92. See also Bonaparte, Napoleon nation: and climate, 130; contrasted with transnational forms of community, 92, 97, 114, 128–31; character exposed through shipwreck, 81; identified with rural locality, 13; imagined community of, 11, 57–58, 63–64; and language, 84; people excluded from, 7, 53, 99–100, 141, 153, 175, 220n.10; print culture’s role in, 9–10, 69, 96, 119, 170–71, 204; property of, 6; undone by global spaces, 125, 188 Nature: governable, 136, 144, 188; mixed with labor, 165, 236n.23, 239n.72; opposed to human empire, 35, 91; opposed to city, 13– 14, 186, 189, 196–97, 203, 240n.93; “state of,” 53, 65, 174, 243 Naval Chronicle, 26–27 naval novels, 96–99, 107, 109, 111, 232n.81 Naval Officer, The (Marryat), 97–106, 108–9, 226n.150 navigation, development of, 33–35, 77, 79, 115 navy. See Royal Navy Nead, Lynda, 199 Nelson, Horatio, 104, 110, 226n.150 Nelson, Victoria, 149 newspapers: maintaining British community at sea, 55, 57–58, 75; read by foreigners, 127;

285

speculations of, 22, 63–64, 67–68, 131–32; undermining nation, 95, 123 Nile, Battle of the (Battle of Aboukir), 110, 232n.70 North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle, 57–58 North Pole: and city, 186; and climate change, 47, 132; expeditions in search of, 27, 45, 55; fictional depictions of, 26, 47– 50, 55, 59, 176, 189; part of interchangeable polar space, 20, 51; reachable via balloon, 121, 132; territorial claims to, 18, 24, 59; visual depictions of, 202. See also Arctic; Northwest Passage; polar space Northwest Passage: as British goal, 8, 25–26, 44–46, 108, 134; expeditions in search of, 27, 56, 58, 60, 61; invoked in urban space, 7, 192, 199 “The North West Passage” (play), 58 ocean: alternate experience to land, 42, 85, 103; antithetical to social order, 82–83, 175– 76, 186–87, 220n.12, 220n.13; compared to London, 191–92, 199–200, 248n.25; compared to other atopias, 8, 20–21, 115– 17, 119, 121, 152; as global space, 87, 187, 220n.14; imagined characteristics of, 6–9, 72–81, 171, 188, 220n.10; legalities of, 77, 205n.11, 209n.4, 220n.16, 246n.5; mapping of, 8, 34, 222n.35; significance to Britain, 74, 90–91, 130, 136–37, 233n.93 Oriental despot, figure of, 125, 127, 158. See also under sovereignty outer space, 7, 47, 118 Paltock, Robert, 18; Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, The, 27–33, 36–37, 47, 53, 55, 70 panorama, 12, 193, 196–98, 250n.57, 250n.59. See also vision Parry, William Edward, 55–61, 63, 218n.176, 218n.180, 218n.195, 218n.198 Pennant, Thomas, 180 Perera, Suvendrini, 12 Petto, Christine Marie, 1, 205n.6 Pilon, Frederick, Aerostation, or the Templar’s Strategem, 123 place, 6–7, 10–11, 50, 206n.14, 208n.30; destruction of, 155, 189, 201, 204, 206n.13, 246n.4; ocean as opposed to, 76, 78, 79; and subterranean, 152

286

index

planetary, 6, 13, 16, 79, 91, 118, 144, 188; in contrast to global, 7 “Poetical Rambler,” 122, 123 polar space: and capitalism, 25–27, 201–2; changing representations of, 47–48, 50, 60–61; characteristics of, 20–22; conflation of north and south, 23, 211n.16; defining imperialism, 43, 70–71; imagined as outside imperial economy, 29–30, 32–33, 71; as interrupting narrative, 62–63, 68, 216n.132; and uncertainty, 20–21, 41, 60, 62. See also Antarctica; Arctic Polynesia, 170; indigenous people of, 172–73, 178, 242n.119, 244n.137 Pompeii, 150, 180, 236n.18 Poole, John, Crotchets in Air, 16, 140–42, 229n.15, 234n.109 Poovey, Mary, 52 Postans, Robert, 179, 180, 245n.148 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 73, 189, 193–99, 203–4, 249n.42, 249n.43 professionalism, discourse of: aerial, 139; nautical, 34, 95–96, 108–10, 112–13 property: and balloons, 121, 123, 141; dispossession, 29–30, 128, 157, 194; intellectual, 38, 220n.14; mobile vs. landed, 29; and ocean, 9, 72, 77; people without property, 53–54, 65, 166–67, 244n.137 print culture, 12, 76, 161, 196, 203–4; utility to explorers, 19, 33, 60, 210n.6. See also air balloons; nation Public Advertiser, 116, 117 Quarterly Review, 43–47, 51, 55, 64, 215n.117, 232n.81 race: atopic hierarchy inversions, 36, 81, 213n.75; monstrous, 25, 52, 54, 183–84. See also Africa; indigenous peoples; Inuit; slavery Radcliffe, Ann, 63, 132, 239n.73 Rae, John, 62, 65–67 “Raymond the Romantic and His Five Wishes,” 47, 133–35, 141–42, 229n.15 Recess, The (Lee), 161–71, 176, 182, 184, 188, 241n.10, 241n.110 Rediker, Marcus, 15, 220n.12, 223n.87 Reidy, Michael S., 75 Relph, Edward, 10, 208n.30, 246n.4 Retrospective Review, 32 Reynolds, G. W. M., 10; The Mysteries of London, 17–18, 189, 193, 201–4, 252n.80, 252n.85

Richard, Jessica, 24, 51 Richardson, W. A. R., 33 Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge), 37– 42, 47, 214n.85, 214n.86 Roberts, Mary, 162 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 92, 153–54, 161 Roderick Random (Smollett), 96–97, 225n.115 Romaine, Pierre, 135 romance, 28, 44–45, 47, 98; and atmosphere, 133, 142; and London, 193, 194–96, 203; of polar exploration, 21, 24, 64; and subterranean, 164, 168, 178–79, 182–83, 239n.66; utopian, 8, 171. See also Gothic Romanticism: construction of, 24, 141–42, 186, 198, 42n.118; and maritime empire, 9, 12–13, 57, 76, 84, 207n.24; “Romantic Century,” 9, 74, 102; and space, 8–9, 11, 13, 74, 155, 207n.23 Ross, John, 43, 56, 58, 64, 108 Royal Navy, 136; and exploration, 43, 56–58, 60–62, 65, 132, 156; national mythology of, 74, 95, 116, 125, 103, 221n.16, 221n.17; reform of, 74–75, 91, 95–100, 103, 106–12; violence of, 100–101, 172. See also sailors; surveillance Royal Society, 104 Royal Victoria, balloon, 139, 140 Rozier, Jean-Francoise Pilatre de, 135 ruin, 91, 148, 165–67, 184 Russell, Gillian, 102–3 Sadler, Windham, 115–17, 120, 132–33 Said, Edward, 11–13 sailors: alienation of, 79, 84, 103–4, 171, 173; compared to slaves, 100, 107, 223n.75, 223n.87; and identity, 97, 106; “Jack Tar,” 95, 97, 102–3, 110; and language, 9, 75, 83–87, 95–97, 109–10; national politics of, 81, 87, 93, 102; exploration of land and air, 8, 139, 238n.48; writing of, 15, 58. See also labor; Royal Navy Sargent, John, The Mine, 154–55, 237n.38 Satan, 119, 135, 229n.22 Schmidgen, Wolfram, 53 Schmitt, Carl, 6, 205n.11 scientific community (Britain): Barrow and, 43–44, 46; ballooning and, 118, 122, 125–27, 140, 143–44; exploration and, 34–35, 48, 51–52, 75, 132; subterranean and, 150, 154, 157–58, 182 science fiction, 47, 118, 135–36, 183, 216n.133,

index 230n.29, 232n.81. See also speculative fiction Scoresby, William, 32, 43, 51 Scotland, 156 Scott, Walter: The Pirate, 96; Waverley, 45, 237n.37 Scottish Highlanders, 44–45, 49, 53, 66–67, 215n.119, 237n.37; and fairies, 149. See also Catholics; colonization; Ireland Selden, John, 77, 221n.33 Selkirk, 5th Earl of (Thomas Douglas), 44– 46, 50–53, 215n.119 Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen, 36, 47 Seven Years War, 89, 223n.75, 224n.96 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 9–10, 15–16, 18, 21, 32, 42; Frankenstein, 44–48, 51–55, 188–89, 216n.131; influence on polar representations, 23, 59, 217n.150; The Last Man, 118, 135–39, 232n.81, 233n.93 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 28, 32, 138, 186, 206n.15, 215n.113; “Sonnet: To a Balloon Laden with Knowledge,” 136, 232n.86 ship, space of, 78–79, 83, 85, 98–99 Shipwreck, The (Falconer), 84–92, 95, 108, 223n.87 shipwreck: Francis and Mary, 81–82; Juno, 83, 222n.50, 222n.53; Méduse, 81; narratives of, 79–80, 83, 222n.46 Simpson, David, 13 slavery: abolitionism and air, 137–38; exploitation of indigenous people, 173, 243n.143; polar space and, 36, 214n.108; possession by market forces, 29–31, 53, 90, 188; slave rebellions, 166, 189, 213n.75, 247n.7. See also Africa; sailors Smollett, Tobias, 107, 225n.115; Roderick Random, 96–97, 225n.115 Soja, Edward, 11, 209n.35 Southey, Robert, 32, 138, 218n.198, Life of Nelson, 226n.150 South Pole: cultural resonances of, 20, 22, 25, 29, 32, 36, 38–40, 202; voyages toward, 33, 35. See also Antarctica; polar space South Sea Bubble, 28, 31–32 sovereignty: aided by literature, 111; balloons as symbols of, 118; of commerce, 197; extension over space, 8, 18, 74, 109, 116, 125– 26, 221n.33; figure of sovereign, 123, 127, 139–40, 158, 166–70, 174; literary interrogations of, 26, 88, 90–92; spaces resistant to,

287

148, 153, 163, 186–87, 191, 194; threats to, 16, 84, 107, 121–22, 154, 220n.12. See also atopia; homo sacer space: definition of, 10–11, 208n.30; and fiction, 1, 5, 13, 209n.35; legal constructions of, 205n.11, 206n.12, 209n.4; opposed to place, 206n.14; and Romantic period, 8, 11, 207n.23 spectacle: of balloons, 118, 122, 127; theatrical, 69, 102, 127; and urban space, 181, 191, 196, 200, 251n.76 speculation, 55, 148, 150, 183; definition of, 22, 210n.12; commercial, 15, 28–29, 90, 144, 202; fictional, 48, 59, 66, 70, 133; geographical, 5, 25, 31–32, 34, 36, 44–47, 54; and newspapers, 62–64, 131, 184. See also future speculative fiction, 18, 22, 189, 247n.7. See also science fiction Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 7 Spufford, Francis, 22 Steinberg, Philip, 79 Stow, John, 191, 247n.15; A Survay of London, 191, 247n.15 Strabo, 25, 76 Stuart, Mary, Queen of Scots, fictional depiction of, 162, 164–65, 170, 241n.109 sublime, 7, 77, 81, 84, 154, 180–81, 195, 155n.144 subterranean: definitions of, 151; and imagination, 159–61; and labor, 180–81; mythology of, 149–50, 157–58; relationship to other atopias, 144, 151–52, 177; and ruins, 147–48, 150, 180, 183; as sanctuary, 154, 163, 176–77. See also cave; tourism “Subterranean London,” 180–82 surveillance: escaping, 165, 171, 178, 187, 202; panopticonal, 16, 97, 99, 141 Sussman, Charlotte, 135, 232n.81 sympathy, 100–101, 138, 143, 170, 176, 222n.58, 241n.109 technology, 8–9, 14–15, 111, 221n.22, aerial, 125–26, 135–36; of communication, 104, 181–82; effect on perceptions of space, 34, 121; literature as, 75, 92, 131; subterranean, 156, 238n.48. See also navigation; transportation Terra Australis Incognita, 25, 27–36, 188, 193, 201; fictional depictions of, 29–32, 36, 33, 70

288

index

terra nullius, 5, 29, 38, 52, 54, 65, 187, 209n.4; and polar space, 20–21, 29, 50, 187 theater, 66, 127, 251n.65; military, 58, 102; “stage” tars, 95, 97, 102 Thomson, James, “Rule, Britannia,” 74 Time Machine, The (Wells), 181–84, 246n.158, 246n.160 tourism: and caves, 157, 159–61, 179, 195–96, 238n.49, 238n.51, 245n.144; and cities, 190– 93, 197–99; national, 237n.37, 239n.58. See also gender Trafalgar, Battle of, 91, 103, 104, 110, 226n150 transportation: and ballooning, 116, 136, 230n.29; via emotion or imagination, 110, 131, 143, 159, 197; and ocean 73; as punishment, 224n.100; and urban space, 179, 184, 186, 190, 199, 201 “Trivia” (Gay), 190–91 Trodd, Colin, 150, 235n.14, 235n.16 Trowbridge, J. T., Cudjo’s Cave, 189 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 8, 206n.14, 207n.22, 208n.30 tyranny, 90, 100, 106, 127, 174, 242n.119. See also sovereignty, figure of sovereign underwater exploration, 78, 133, 142 United Service Journal and Naval and Military Magazine, 108 United States Exploring Expedition (“Wilkes Expedition”), 19–20, 210n.6 urbanization, 11, 13, 155, 186, 189, 190–92. See also globalization; improvement; London utilitarian, 34–35, 212n.59 utopia: fiction depicting, 25–26, 136, 171; space of, 8, 206n.13, 206n.15, 207n.21 Varenius, Bernhardus, Geographia Generalis, 120 Verne, Jules, 230n.29

Victoria, Queen, 69, 139, 140 Virilio, Paul, 123 vision: ability to penetrate interiors, 101, 181–82; association with power, 123–26, 144, 158, 191, 198, 202; control over, 194, 198; failures of, 141, 160, 195–96; optical illusions, 21, 39, 56; “prospect gaze,” 61, 111, 160, 182, 196, 200; sea vs. shore, 42, 80; supernatural, 66–67, 182; “totalizing,” 7, 125, 140, 144. See also surveillance; sovereignty voyage narratives: of aeronauts, 142, 192; genre, 79–80, 82–83; influence on urban representations, 193, 199–200; polar, 26– 27, 33–35, 45, 55–62, 66 Walpole, Horace, 117; The Castle of Otranto, 161, 250n.50 warfare, 89; and balloons, 117, 123–24, 140; as “theatre,” 102 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 144–45 Wells, H. G.: The Invisible Man, 183; The Time Machine, 181–84, 246n.158, 246n.160; The War of the Worlds, 144–45 West Indies: Barbados, 129–30; Jamaica, 99– 101, 162, 166 Westphal, Bertrand, 12, 205n.9 Wiley, Michael, 195, 249n.43 Wilkes, John, 88–89 Wilkins, John, The Discovery of a World in the Moone, 119 Wilson, Eric G., 22, 39 Wordsworth, William, 18, 73, 186; “spot of time,” 13; The Prelude, 73, 189, 193–99, 203–4, 249n.42, 249n.43 Zimmerman, Victoria, 180 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 154–55

Acknowledgments

In working on this project I benefited from the advice and support of many teachers, colleagues, and friends. To begin with, I express my warm gratitude to Deidre Lynch, Nicholas Williams, Mary Favret, and Ivan Kreilkamp, whose thoughtful feedback helped shape this project’s earliest incarnation. To Deidre I owe particular thanks for her rigorous readings of many an unkempt draft and for her support both during and since my time at Indiana University. I’d like to further thank the faculty and students of Indiana University, especially Patrick Brantlinger, Jonathan Elmer, Susan Gubar, Rebecca Bauman, Paul Westover, Courtney Wennerstrom, Ioana Patuleanu, Yael Shapira, Grant Simpson, Sharoni Sibony, Maura Smyth, and Linda Englade, who all, at one point or another, made suggestions that have helped make this book incalculably better. At the University of Delaware, my work benefited from the enlivening presence of my colleagues and students. Many of them read this manuscript and offered commentary; many inspired me with their own arguments and ideas. I owe particular thanks here to Hans Howk for his help in collating balloon narratives, and to Charlie Robinson, Heidi Kaufman, Emily Davis, Miranda Wilson, Don Mell, Matt Kinservik, Iain Crawford, and Ed Larkin for their feedback, recommendations, and support. In writing this book I have had the opportunity to discuss aspects of my argument with a number of people who have contributed, in one way or another, to its current form. Miranda Burgess, Ian Duncan, Janet Sorensen, Sam Baker, Hester Blum, and Elisa Beshero-Bondar all offered much-needed words of wisdom, for which I am very grateful. Special thanks, of course, go to Jerry Singerman and my two anonymous readers not only for making the publication of this book possible but also for improving my argument with their criticism, questions, and suggestions. Librarians and archivists are often the unsung heroes of research projects, and such was the case here. The tireless staff of the Lilly Library did much to

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aid this project in its earliest stages and in its late stages were always willing to offer long-distance help. On the British side, I’d like to particularly thank the indefatigable Naomi Boneham at the Scott Polar Research Institute, who helped me locate a wide array of expedition papers and did her best to warn me away from some of the explorers’ more terrible attempts at fiction; Rachel Beattie at the National Library of Scotland; Doug Stimson at the National Science Museum Archives; and Mike Bevan at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, whose guidance to the Marryat and Falconer collections proved invaluable. Lastly, I must thank the endlessly patient staff of the British Library, who have fielded a number of obscure requests from me over the years. At both the University of Delaware and Indiana University, I was lucky enough to receive financial support for this project. At Indiana University, the Robert H. Ferrell Endowed Fellowship enabled my competition of its first draft, while at the University of Delaware, the General University Research Program enabled its expansion and completion. To the generosity of both universities, then, this book owes its existence and current incarnation. Part of Chapter 3 appeared in article form in the European Romantic Review 25, no. 1 (2014). Material from Chapter 1 also appeared in European Romantic Review 24, no. 2 (2013). I am grateful to the editors Diane Hoeveler and Regina L. Hewitt as well as to Taylor and Francis for permission to reprint my research in this book. Finally, my family has also contributed a great deal to this project by way of emotional support, baffled questions, and a fervent interest in exploration. So to Neil, Anne, Daniel and Marianne Carroll, and Maria Shawcross: thanks again.