I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (Paperback)

by Francis Spufford (Author) "We had better begin with the question asked by every reader of the standard accounts of the great expeditions, the urgent question that floats irresistibly..." (more)
Key Phrases: polar landscape, polar exploration, last expedition, North Pole, Lady Jane, Terra Nova (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
What on earth could inspire so many men--so many British men, in particular--to brave unimaginable cold, hunger, fear, and physical danger in the planet's most remote and forbidding locales? In the case of many polar explorers, writes Francis Spufford, it was a complicated amalgam--English notions of sportsmanship, heroism, and honor mixed with romantic notions of the sublime. In his I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, Spufford explores the British obsession with the world's coldest and bleakest climes, using their literary representation as his guide. Although his book gives some historical background about early polar explorations, Spufford concerns himself more with English perceptions of snow and ice than with the snow and ice itself. He considers the writing of Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Melville, Mary Shelley, and others, as well as that of the polar explorers themselves, expertly limning how coldness and its metaphors captured the imagination of a generation of Englishmen. Along the way Spufford examines exploration's often unsavory ideological bedfellows, including Victorian views about class, race, and empire. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews
Spufford, of the Guardian in London, plumbs the cultural fascination and aesthetic attraction of cold regions for British explorers, and how their romance with snow was fashioned by an evolving national sensibility, in this smartly argued, wide-ranging book. The polar regions--with their isolation, nullity of landscape, cold so extreme that ``the breath of the travellers crystallizes and falls to the snow in showers''--were explored by many nations (not to mention the Inuit, who lived there), but by none more than the superbly ill-experienced British. Cook, Franklin, Scott, Shackleton--what drove these men to the ends of the earth, wondered Spufford, ``Why do these insane things?'' Well, he answers, it's more than just a passing fancy. Drawing on the diverse works of Byron, Coleridge, Cruikshank, the Shelleys, Conrad, and many others, the author paints an extraordinary portrait of a culture shaped by the notion of cold and its representations. A yearning for the sublime, for sights great and terrible, played a part, as did the strength of soul necessary to tangle with the most hellacious elements--to brush with them, or even to be utterly beaten by them, was to be touched in a rare way. There were the uncertainty and filtered truths from which spring romance and fantasy. There was the chance for the explorers to distinguish themselves, to shoulder a heroic mantle. Each chapter is an archaeology of the British love affair with ice, Spufford often unearthing unattractive strata: the class nature of exploration, colonialism, racism toward the Inuit, who undercut all the heroism by the simple fact that they lived where the explorers more often died. Spufford elegantly details how all these images, elements, and metaphors came home to roost in the Edwardian imagination, leading directly to parts unknown. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 388 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (July 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312220812
• ISBN-13: 978-0312220815
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #631,134 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Psychohistory of a famous disaster, July 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (Hardcover)

Fascinating exploration of how the romantic movement nurtured the creation of an ideal vision of arctic/antarctic ice that ultimately contributed to a sense that it was nobler to suffer than survive. I found the book a well-written survey of popular opinion and response to polar exploration in England that presents an interesting thought: the idea that the ultimate source of Scott's disaster in the Antarctic may not have been stupidity, ego, arrogance, or any of the character flaws with which Robert F. Scott has been charged so much as hopeless romanticism (a character flaw all its own, true enough, which may contain elements of All Of The Above).

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I began to think then that things were getting a bit serious, December 30, 2003

By A Customer

If you have come this far into the Antarctic you've already read Lansing,
Mawson, Scott, Shack, Cherry-Garrard, and Lashly. So those trudging first person narratives that caught your attention have given over to the Huntford style management critic, you got that. And here with Spufford you arrive at the analytical pole. This is not a discussion of technique nor tactics but from the South Center you can look in all directions at religion, music, poetry, myth, media; and the very power of precedence to both push and pull men.
Here is the geography that makes otherwise hard practical men simply and ultimately spiritual; the deserts frozen or not, hold horizons of nothing that fill mens' heads with everything.
Beyond this is to dream and hallucinate; try a little
Vollmann. Enjoy the ride.

PS. The last chapter of this book is worth its price; 48 pages of the best in the language on Scott and his men.
It will make you cry.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Well Argued Thesis, but One that Must be Critically Evaluated, February 19, 2009

By	Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Francis Spufford's "I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination" seeks to show the relationship between polar exploration and English literature. He asks why British polar explorers willingly placed their lives in jeopardy in the harsh polar environment; was it gold or glory or something else? The answer, Spufford believes, rests not with the explorers themselves but with the English imagination as expressed in the writings of such the Brontës, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, and others.

At a sublime level this book is about the power of ideas to shape imperial ambitions. Romance about the Arctic distorted perceptions both of reality in England and in the far-off lands of the North. The concept of the sublime in the works of Edmund Burke and Samuel Coleridge found themselves deployed to explain the inspiration and terror of the Arctic ice and the environment of the cold. Arctic explorers transmogrified the sublime into a nostalgic identification of the Poles with the best of the human imagination. Conquest of the Arctic in Spufford's estimation might be equated with virtue and destiny. It propelled the British Empire into an unending quest for knowledge about the Polar region.

Spufford's argument is quite useful, but it tends to downplay what I view as the critical component of English exploration of the Arctic, the quite mundane and practical desire to find a water route around the Americas to foster trade with Asia. The search for the Northwest Passage had motivated English Arctic expeditions since the sixteenth century and while imagination certainly aided in sustaining those efforts in the face of failure, there was a clearly understood and delineated rationale for undertaking them that had little to do with the sublime and philosophies. A fascinating account nonetheless, that requires serious consideration by anyone seriously interested in the history of Arctic exploration.