When every land seems already explored, and space travel has declined in scope and prestige, the northern exploits of our Victorian forebears offers a pleasantly distant mirror from which to regard our own time. The Arctic regions have been the subject of a long-lasting visual fascination, one which has from the outset crossed boundaries between fine art and mass entertainment, 'high' and 'low' cultures, and even national identity. In the mid-nineteenth century, this polar passion reached a peak, dominating the visual culture of both Britain and America, and yet its history is scarcely known. Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North on Visual Culture, 1818-1875 illuminates the nineteenth-century fascination with visual representations of the Arctic, weaving together a narrative of the major Arctic expeditions with an account of their public reception through art and mass media. In a century that saw every corner of the globe slowly open to the examining eye of Western science, it was the
