'The Frozen Deep' Summary

The play's genesis lay in the conflict between Dickens and John Rae's report on the fate of the Franklin expedition. In May 1845, the "Franklin expedition" left England in search of the Northwest Passage. It was last seen in July 1845, after which the members of the expedition were lost without trace. In October 1854, John Rae (using reports from "Eskimo" (Inuit) eyewitnesses, who informed that they had seen 40 "white men" and later 35 corpses) described the fate of the Franklin expedition in a confidential report to the Admiralty: "From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging survival." 

This blunt report was presented under the assumption that truth would be preferred to uncertainty. The Admiralty made this report public. Rae's report caused much distress and anger. The public believed, with Lady Franklin, that the Arctic explorer was "clean, Christian and genteel" and that an Englishman was able to "survive anywhere" and "to triumph over any adversity through faith, scientific objectivity, and superior spirit." Dickens not only wrote to discredit the Inuit evidence, he attacked the Inuit character, writing: "We believe every savage in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel: and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man—lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen and dying—has of the gentleness of Exquimaux nature." 

Jen Hill writes that Dickens's "invocation of racialized stereotypes of cannibalistic behavior foregrounded Rae's own foreignness." John Rae was a Scot, not English, and thus held to not be "pledged to the patriotic, empire-building aims of the military." The play by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep, was an allegorical play about the missing Arctic expedition. The Rae character was turned into a suspicious, power-hungry nursemaid who predicted the expedition's doom in her effort to ruin the happiness of the delicate heroine.