Historicizing the Networks of Ecology and Culture: Eleanor Anne Porden and Nineteenth-Century Climate Change

Abstract

In 1818, the poet Eleanor Anne Porden wrote and published The Arctic Expeditions. The poem is a paean to one of the first of the polar expeditions that would come to dominate ideas of British national pride in the nineteenth century. As an early literary response to the race to the Arctic, it was also an early textual construction of global climate change, as I intend to show. Today, however, The Arctic Expeditions is often consigned to footnotes in historical considerations of polar exploration and the climatic conditions that prompted it, and has been overshadowed by the Arctic visions of its immediate contemporary, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Yet, compared with Shelley's novel, Porden's poem opens up just as effectively and, one might argue, engages more directly with the intricate complex of ecological events and cultural productions that constituted Britain fascination with Arctic spaces in the nineteenth century. This complex comprised the meteorological phenomena and climatic shifts that facilitated scientific discovery and exploration as well as the socio-political rhetoric and controversy that seemed so imbricated in them from the start. Porden's poem functions as a useful index to this network of the ecological and the discursive, even as it participates within that network.

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