In her essay ‘Can the Native Return?’, Gillian Beer recalls a passage from Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native in which the narrator describes the rare migrant birds of Egdon Heath, including ‘a wild mallard’ from the Arctic, whose knowledge ranges from ‘Glacial catastrophes’ to ‘Franklin underfoot’ – the latter a reference to the famous English explorer who in 1846 perished, along with all his men, while trying to discover the Northwest Passage. Beer seizes upon the allusion to the mallard to recollect the rancorous debate over whether, in their extremity, the members of Franklin's party had engaged in mutual cannibalism, a debate in which Charles Dickens, among others, passionately defended the leader's moral character. Moved by what he saw as Franklin's heroism, Dickens, with his friend Wilkie Collins, wrote the melodrama The Frozen Deep, based on the explorer's story but ‘leaving out’, Beer writes, ‘any reference at all to cannibalism’ – an exclusion that underscores the explosiveness of the submerged psychological material. Beer focuses on the fleeting mention of the mallard to argue that the return of the native often involved, in Victorian narrative, ‘the return of repressed forms of behaviour under the durance of extreme conditions’.

Beer's analysis might be extended to include another bird of passage, a migrant of the human sort, in the novel inspired in part by the melodrama that Dickens and Collins cowrote.