Conclusion

This book has argued that in Britain the pursuit Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ was established during the Romantic period and that it had a mutually energizing relationship with the era’s literature. Both these developments were important factors in mountaineering’s continuing evolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inspiring the extraordinary growth of cultures of ascent in the Alps and beyond. Many of the notable British mountaineers who ‘made the Alps’,...