Horror in the Arctic

Around the middle of the 19th century a new image of horror appeared in Victorian art. In 1864 Edwin Landseer exhibited something the like of which he had never painted before and never would again. In ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’, the man who had painted ‘Dignity and Impudence’ shows two polar bears, one howling above a human rib-cage, the other tearing at the sails of a ship crushed in the ice, all this in the bleak half light of what passes for a day in the Arctic. The picture is so terrifying that, hanging in the Great Hall of the Royal Holloway College, it is even now covered over when students take their exams.

Five years earlier, in his short story ‘The Haunters and the Haunted’, Edward Bulwer-Lytton had described a vision of the fate awaiting his demonic villain, a man who, like Cliff Richard, had arrested the processes of ageing.