The Donors of the Fox

This summer, I was the recipient of the generous Digital Humanities Fellowship from NYU. My proposed project was a broad-reaching initiative called “Visualizing the Victorian Polar Network,” but once the fellowship began I quickly realized I had to narrow my view, and ended up settling on a revised version of my project where I would […]

G. Julian Harney & the 1857 Franklin Search

I’m currently working on a project for my NYU Digital Humanities summer fellowship to illuminate the connections and stories behind the list of subscribers to the Fox expedition of 1857. This has meant going through the publicly available list included in McClintock’s narrative of the expedition and trying to figure out as much biographical information […]

Henry Peglar’s Beer Hall

Out of pure curiosity, I transcribed this 40-page reminiscence written by a seaman (possibly a steward)* who served on HMS Wanderer 1839-44, alongside Hodgson, Peglar, and Gibson. None of them turned up until the very last page, when the anonymous author gave the following memory of Peglar. H Peglar opened a beer house in Westminster and after […]

Lt. George Hodgson, RN

A lot of my original research began from the work of the wonderful Drac on Tumblr, who was the first to track down a veritable hoard of details about Hodgson’s family back in 2019. A recap of their amazing research:  Born in 1817, youngest of 7 by 5 years. One sister predeceased his birth, another […]