Lady Jane's Lament: British Maritime Communities, Arctic Exploration, and the Making of a National Heroine, 1851

From 1848 to 1859, the British public was transfixed by the search for the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin in the Canadian Arctic. As scores of rescue missions were dispatched to the polar regions, public culture was saturated with Arctic themes (from expedition narratives to melodramas). This paper examines a moment in 1851 when Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, and his niece, Sophia Cracroft petitioned the unwilling Admiralty to outfit a new expedition. Drawing on Admiralty records and private papers, I examine how these women engaged in a complicated and delicate gender performance as they simultaneously organized and distanced themselves from the petitioning process. In order to safeguard Jane Franklin’s reputation as a paragon of wifely devotion (rather than a caricature of unwomanly zeal) they drew on a broad network of supporters and correspondents to “launder” petitions they wrote, distributing them throughout the British Isles. When the petitions were taken to the home ports of the missing sailors, however, they took on a new life as families and communities used them as an opportunity to express common cause with Jane Franklin, to claim the right of British subjects to be rescued in any quarter of the globe, and to criticize the Admiralty for dereliction of duty and for a lack of sympathy with the humane and civilized mission of the Arctic searches. Fundamentally, it argues that Arctic was crucial for the construction of national and imperial identities in ways that were deeply personal and profoundly gendered.