Drawing, along with reading and keeping a personal diary, was one of the middle-class values central to work and pleasure that transferred to shipboard life and encouraged social cohesion on expeditions. While naval officers were expected to produce basic topographical drawings as part of their duties, individuals aboard ship, including non-officers, often created drawings for other reasons. Using original empirical research, this chapter analyses a number of sketches and watercolours by expedition members from all ranks, discusses the practicalities of sketching in the Arctic, and shows how layers of new, and often surprising, information begin to emerge when the visual material is interrogated. The contents of pictures reveal an unexpected array of responses to the Arctic environment and its people. The examination of scientific and personal documentary art from the Franklin searches points to a visual matrix of the Arctic that is far more complex than the peaked icebergs and threatened ships that dominated the public eye.

This essay analyzes the way that Edith Wharton’s writing frames the ethical and ontological relationship between human and nonhuman animals. Disputing a philosophical tradition that defines the difference between humans and animals on the basis of a capacity for language, Wharton – a committed animal lover – ambivalently suggests a less stark species boundary. The “humanimality” rendered in her work depicts human characters who are rendered animal through pain, through extreme experience, and through speechlessness. These representations are most manifest in Wharton’s wartime texts, Summer, Ethan Frome, and Fighting France. Wharton proposes that the appropriate posture toward both human and nonhuman animals is a pity based on the recognition of shared vulnerability to suffering. Yet her writing also frequently frames human–animal boundary-crossing as a mode of gothic excess, suggesting a pervasive anxiety about the very humanimaity that forms the basis of her compassionate ethics.

“Wharton and the Romance Plot” describes the relationship among three of Wharton’s novels that are heavily indebted to romance conventions – The House of Mirth, The Reef, and Summer. The failure of each narrative to reach the happy ending of a wished-for marriage provides readers with one means of questioning the actions of each pair of carefully drawn characters: is the absence of a fairy-tale ending the fault of Lily or Selden? Anna or George? Charity or Lucius? As Wharton changes the conventions of romance, she asks the reader to do a different kind of reading, a more socially based critique, one dependent on expectations by gender. Literary history seems to have prejudiced readers against Wharton’s early women characters, yet Henry James saw all too clearly how noble Anna Leathe was. With Lily Bart dead, and Charity Royall summarily wed, the fact that Anna wins the lover she desires breaks the often-cliched romance plot in her favor.