Dreams of flight in the nineteenth-century Arctic imagination

Abstract This article is an attempt to understand how diverse and seemingly incommensurable aerial perspectives on Arctic exploration could co-exist during the search for the John Franklin expedition in the 1840s and 1850s. I begin by examining the cultural context of ballooning before turning to proposals to send balloons and other aerial missions to the Arctic. Why did balloons and ‘balloonacy’, as the popular periodical Punch described this craze, come to feature so prominently in responses to the Arctic mystery, and how did women feature in these responses? I then discuss the clairvoyantes who were put into mesmeric trances and then described visiting Franklin and his men in the Arctic. Beginning at the time of greatest anxiety regarding the fate of the expedition, clairvoyante visionaries and their operators formed part of an emotional field of speculation and experimentation centred on the Arctic. I conclude by arguing that actual balloon expeditions in search of Franklin echoed many of the mesmeric and imaginary projects emanating from popular culture. This connects women’s perspectives about the Arctic with aerial exploration schemes and suggests that we look at both together for a deeper understanding of polar culture in the 1840s and 1850s.