The chapter examines one of the most intriguing fiction stories about Greenland’s ‘lost colony’: the Scottish author James Hogg’s The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon (1837). The analysis shows that Hogg’s novella is loosely based on The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Using this template, Hogg’s story gives narrative form to the colonial anxieties about isolation and succumbing to nature. The story starts out as a romance only later to turn into an account of gritty hardships that ends in final tragedy. Offering an alternative explanation of how the European colonists vanished from Greenland, the settlers (whom the protagonist finds and joins) are eventually overcome and devoured by polar bears. In the last section of the chapter, it is argued that Hogg uses the ‘lost colony’ narrative as a mirror for communities in remote parts of Scotland. This exemplifies how the image of the settlers of Greenland were used in fiction to raise present concerns. Hogg’s novella is the first of many nineteenth-century stories imagining an encounter with the vanished settlers. Such storylines story will be further examined in the chapters that follow.

Critical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular adventure fiction often focus on novels about forays into Africa. It is the aim of this chapter to show that the Arctic provided an alternative arena for such stories. In the first half of the chapter, the notion that the European settlers migrated from Greenland to other locations is discussed. Based on geophysical and geoclimatic theories that a navigable sea with habitable islands existed near the North Pole, it was hypothesised that the vanished settlers could have found a new home furhther north in the Arctic. The second half of the chapter examines how fiction writers drew on contemporary science to create what can be classified as the ‘lost colony’ story. In this type of popular fiction, it is imagined that descendants of the old Greenland settlers or other Norse explorers had survived in a hidden land. In some of the tales, the ideas of imperialism and exploitation of the Arctic become pronounced, thereby returning us to the fantasies discussed in the early chapters of the present book.

This chapter explores the development of a popular print culture in Ireland during the decades between 1830 and 1880, as well as the growth of an audience for such publications. It traces the history of the technological and legislative changes – such as the arrival of steam presses and the abolition of stamp and paper taxes – necessary for a popular press to emerge, as well as the social and political landscape which enabled an expanded readership to develop. In particular, the chapter examines the role of the radical political press in actively developing that readership through both its network of reading rooms across Ireland and its publishing of newspapers and juvenile story papers, including the Nation newspaper, the Irish Fireside Magazine, Young Ireland and the Shamrock magazine. These publications were intended to establish an imaginative link between popular entertainment and radical politics, especially through the use of Irish history and historical fiction in order to create a print culture which created and reinforced a national Irish audience for both the popular press and mass political movements.