‘Arctic Highlanders and Englishmen: Dickens, Cannibalism and Sensation’, in White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth–Century British Imagination, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 113–50, 195–203

Both the exploration accounts o f the early century and those gen­erated by the search for the lost Franklin expedition found a nar­rative-hungry audience at home. Tales o f resistant British bodies making their way across forbidding frozen landscapes filled lending libraries already packed w ith volumes o f “Voyages and Travels,” leading one Buckinghamshire clergyman to lament, “We require duplicates over again o f such works as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, D efoes Robinson Crusoe, C ook s Voyages, and works o f that description .” 1 There were so many travel writers published in the first half o f the century that one anonymous 1855 reviewer o f travel literature wrote “we are fairly wea­ ried out w ith constant additions to our inform ation .” 2 Still, the same reviewer reserved a special place for Arctic narratives and their tales o f the limits o f hum an experience and knowledge.