Cannibalism, Charles Dickens, and Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition: “a fate as melancholy and dreadful as it is possible to imagine”

• Main Author: Capancioni, C.
• Other Authors: Antosa, S., Costantini, M., Ettore, E.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Mimesis 2021
• Subjects: PR English literature; Arctic; Dickens; Rae
• Online Access: https://bgro.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/854/; https://www.ibs.it/transgressive-appetites-deviant-food-practices-libro-vari/e/9788857568973

The absence of the figure of the cannibal in The Frozen Deep is central to this study that investigates Dickens’s representation of the fate of Frank- lin’s 1845 Arctic expedition “contrapuntally” (Said 1994: 59) by focusing on his dialogic exchange with Dr. John Rae that is at the origin of Dickens’s House- hold Words articles. Furthermore, it contextualises Dickens’s defence of Franklin’s reputation within the Victorian colonial discourse of cannibalism, wherein the term “describe[s] the ferocious devouring of human flesh supposedly practised by some savages” (Barker, Hulme, Iversen 1998: 4), and intersects it with Rae’s representation of anthropophagy to outline how Dickens’s imperial narrative, based on “a static notion of identity” built on absolute difference “between Europeans and their ‘others’” (Said 1994 xxviii), relegated the Inuit’s story to the margins.