Monumental Ephemera: British Sculpture in the Arctic, Icebergs in London, an Inuit Map

Abstract

The Arctic fascinated Londoners in the nineteenth century in panoramas, paintings and sculptures, voyage narratives and—tragically—transplanted Inuit. What has not been fully examined are the little-known amateur ‘snow sculptures’ of Britannia and other imperial figures made on a monumental scale in the Arctic in the early 1850s, when hundreds of sailors were searching for the lost 1845 Franklin expedition. Comparable with this crossing in sculpture is the amalgamation in one Parliamentary chart of an anonymous Inuk’s drawing of Franklin’s ships in the ice with a rendering of the area approved by the Admiralty. While these chiasmic interactions map a circuit of exchange, they also lack a centre. The most conspicuous absence in the Arctic was John Franklin, his crew and his two recently-salvaged ships. In England, what was never ‘fixed’ was the idea of the Arctic.