COOL REACTION
Your recent review of Lady Franklin’s Revenge talks of Sir John Franklin’s fame resting of “fictitious mythology”. I would suggest that the book is equally guilty. The Franklin story has been grotesquely skewed by commentators, mostly North American like the author of the book in question, who despise Franklin. The result is a grossly unfair caricature of the man.
Your reviewer claims that Franklin’s life lacks “derring-do”, but it is full of it. It is not a myth that Franklin discovered the Northwest Passage, it is a debatable point on which, even today, many authorities come down on his side. He did not make a “cock-up” of both overland Arctic expeditions. The first ended in near disaster for a variety of reasons, and the second was largely a success. He was not a dullard and a plodder but an even-tempered and stoical man with a burning desire for exploration; he fitted more action and adventure into his life than most of us could in several lifetimes. Your reviewer is right that historical revisionism is as unavoidable as Arctic ice — but the Arctic ice seems to be rapidly melting and I hope the same fate awaits this type of hatchet job.
Martyn Beardsley, author of Deadly Winter: The Life of Sir John Franklin, Nottingham
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AND SO TO BED
David Baddiel wrote that “all great children’s stories begin with a portal”, and that “the most obvious portal — a child’s bedroom” has been used significantly only once in his memory — in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
Perhaps he has not seen the American comic stip Little Nemo in Slumberland, by Winsor McCay. It uses such a portal, and stands unsurpassed in fantasy illustration and writing.
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Sendak himself took up the theme in Wild Things in 1963 and In the Night Kitchen, 1970.
Christopher Rimmell, Croydon