Dickinson's Arctic
The Arctic was a marginal concern for Dickinson, yet provided material for her imagination and words for her vocabulary. When she uses imagery of ice, freezing, Arctic "Zones," or plants like the gentian, she is participating in the popular culture of Arctic explorations in the years 1840-1860. In "When the astronomer stops seeking," she talks about "the lone British Lady," Jane Franklin, who for years kept up hope that her husband Sir John would be retrieved from the Arctic ice where he'd disappeared in 1845. I have discussed this poem and its contexts more extensively in print in "Dickinson's Arctic" (The Emily Dickinson Journal 6.1, 1997); this page, meant to supplement a course lecture, gathers some Web material that can illustrate 19th-century fascinations with the Arctic.
Who was Sir John Franklin? There are many sites on the Internet that will tell you things about him: you can get quick biographical facts; there are ratings of Franklin sites, even a log of a modern expedition in search of Franklin. Russell A. Potter maintains what amounts to a Franklin information clearinghouse with its own e-mail list devoted to the explorer.
Basically, Franklin, a career Royal Navy officer, was involved in Arctic exploration from very early days. Among his first achievements was a survey of the Arctic coast of Canada in the 1830s. Franklin was not an exceptionally lucky man. His overland surveys of Canada were masterpieces of wilderness survival but somewhat less successful in terms of personnel management: there were allegations that his party had resorted to cannibalizing dead members in order to survive.
Franklin's crowning moment was the departure of his 1845 expedition, with the avowed purpose of tracing a Northwest Passage by sea from east to west. With two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, Franklin sailed into the ice north of Baffin Island.
Franklin disappeared. His wife Lady Jane mobilized the resources of the Navy, the Empire, and several privately funded explorers to help look for him. Americans helped too, notably the US Navy doctor Elisha Kent Kane. Kane helpfully sailed in the wrong direction--he went north, along the west coast of Greenland. It didn't escape Kane that by heading north he was heading toward the North Pole, still unreached in those days, and that he might get lucky and reach it . . . in the event, all Kane managed to do was to get stranded and provoke expeditions to come looking for him. He returned to America a hero.
Jane Franklin became an icon for steadfast marital constancy--the Penelope of the Arctic, as she was sometimes called, spent years sponsoring searches for Franklin and then decades defending her husband's honor and celebrating his achievements. Before dying, Franklin probably reached by sea a point on the coastline that he had reached by land years earlier, "proving" rather absurdly that there was a Northwest Passage--one that has never proved commercially reliable.