114 KNOWING DICKENS
the two men had collaborated in drama as well as fiction. Dickens produced
Collins’s play The Lighthouse at Tavistock House in June 1855. In the summer
of 1856 they were at work together on the script of The Frozen Deep, the
play that was to jump-start a radical change in Dickens’s life and a shift in his
representations of male identification and rivalry.
The Frozen Deep was a second stage in Dickens’s response to the disap-
pearance of Sir John Franklin’s Arctic exploration party and to the specula-
tion, voiced by Dr. John Rae, that the party had resorted to cannibalism.
Dickens had pronounced on the impossibility of such degradation in a long
Household Words article, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers” (December 1854; Dent
3.254–69). Early in 1856 he received from Franklin’s widow a laudatory
memoir of Franklin written by Sir John Richardson, who had accompanied
Franklin on two earlier Arctic expeditions. What moved Dickens in the
memoir was its testimony to male friendship. He wrote to Forster (no doubt
recalling Forster’s role as his own biographer), “I think Richardson’s manly
friendship, and love of Franklin, one of the noblest things I ever knew in
my life. It makes one’s heart beat high, with a sort of sacred joy” (8.66). A
month later he announced to his sub-editor W. H. Wills that “Collins and
I have a mighty original notion (mine in the beginning) for another play at
Tavistock House” (8.81). The “original notion” was a play praising British
self-control in the setting of a socked-in Arctic exploring party. His deter-
mination that Collins was to be the principal author of the play—when in
fact Dickens altered the draft scripts to his own liking—may have been part
of his plan to bring Collins into the public eye, to “make” Collins into a
writer known as Dickens’s protégé. Or perhaps he did not want to admit to
having authored a play that was so clearly a vehicle for his own passionate
self-dramatization.
The Frozen Deep featured Dickens in the role of Richard Wardour, a
fiercely masculine Arctic explorer with a longstanding passion for Clara,
who has rejected his fearsome advances and, in his absence, become engaged
to the gentle and effeminate Frank Aldersley (played by Collins). Although
Wardour does not know who his rival is, both men turn out to be officers in
the same Arctic exploration party, whose remaining members are stranded, ill
and starving, at some furthest outpost of the icy world. In a last attempt to get
help, a rescue party is sent out, its members chosen by lot. Wardour discovers
by chance that Aldersley is his hated rival, and arranges at the last minute to
join him in the rescue party. At the end of the second act, the tension of the
play lies entirely within Wardour’s character: will he give in to his jealousy
and murder Aldersley? Act Three builds that tension as the women wait
for the rescued explorers to show up in Newfoundland: in the final scene