Arctic Spectacles

Life reflects art reflects life -- at least sometimes -- and this is never more so than with the Victorian fascination with places that were the hardest to actually visit, such as the Arctic. Referred to in many texts of the day as "those almost unseen regions," they were as exotic in their time as images of the Moon or Mars are to us today. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, since so few knew what they looked like, they were liable to all sorts of fanciful picturings; who, after all, would be able to compare any of them to their own actual experience?

Here art played a pivotal role, especially in the era before the invention of photography, but also after. The Panorama catch phrase -- "painted from sketches made upon the spot" -- put a premium on the works of explorer-artists such a Samuel Gurney Cresswell, whose image of HMS Investigator heaved up by the ice has become so iconic that, even today, it's a go-to for the cover of any book on an Arctic subject. Later in the century, fine art painters decided that they, too, must learn to paint icebergs from life; one of them, Frederic Edwin Church, bought passage on a ship to Labrador, while others, such as Willam Bradford, chartered their own ships in order to be able to sail yet further north.

And sometimes, despite the limitations of the pre-photographic world, the Victorian's notion of life in the Arctic turns out to be more real than one might imagine. Before I headed north this year, friends of mine gave me a colored print depicting a polar bear attacking a seal; the print came from a nineteenth-century edition of Buffon's Natural History, General and Particular. Imagine the strange shock of recognition when, a week or so into my Arctic sojourn, I beheld almost the very same scene upon the ice. I have only one criticism of the artist who depicted this scene for Buffon -- there is not enough blood.

There were other "unseen" worlds that drew the Victorian gaze in their direction, of course. Microscopes revealed the teeming life in a "Drop of London Water," while one of the earliest films in history depicted the microscopic life within a Stilton cheese, which is quite literally teeming with cheese mites (the film led to a lawsuit from the London Cheese Council). And, just as it is for us, the vast range of distant planets and outer space was a great draw for Victorian spectators; many of these images drew from the Moon as imagined in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865). And yet it was the earthbound vision of the Arctic, with massive icebergs so monumental that one critic compared the one in Frederic Church's "Icebergs" (1861) to "the great white throne of the Apocaypse." The peoples of the Arctic also drew interest, not only in panoramas, dioramas, and lantern slides, but also in the form of human exhibitions at world's fairs and carnivals, where fairgoers could gawk at actual "Esquimaux" people (whom today we know as Inuit).

So read the chapters of my book Arctic Spectacles (linked near the top of the liks list at right), and do a quick self-check: when you think of the Arctic, what images come unbeckoned to your mind? Might some of these, indeed, be similar to those conjured up by your great-great-grandparents? Do these Victorian versions of the north still cast their shadow upon today -- and if so, what does that tell us about our own ways of seeing?