Romanticism on the Rocks

This chapter examines the influence of mountaineering’s demanding physical activities and challenging situations on Romantic-period literature, contesting later constructions of ‘Romanticism’ that see the period’s response as essentially imaginative and transcendent. It investigates the development of rock climbing from the 1790s to the 1820s, examining the activities and writings of a number of pioneer climbers. It then focuses on William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s climbing writing, showing how the specific physical activities, environment, and emotions involved in climbing were productive of visionary states. It investigates Wordsworth’s presentation of the role of ‘fear’ in his mountain-based development in The Prelude. The chapter concludes with an examination of Coleridge’s mountaineering writings, exploring the relationship between mountaineering and writing, the poet’s attitude to risk, and his ambivalent construction of his mountaineering identity.

From ‘vast extended prospect’ to ‘the spectacle of nature’

This chapter takes as its starting point William Wordsworth’s ascent of Snowdon in 1791 and Keats’s ‘fag & tug’ up Ben Nevis in 1818 to show how the writers participated in the period’s developing mountaineering culture. It investigates the visual dimension of the two poets’ ascents, locating their climbs within the optically-motivated culture of Romantic-period climbing and showing how ascent made possible new ways of seeing. To trace the developing aesthetics of elevated viewing, the chapter examines a wide range of travel texts by writers including the following: Thomas Pennant, John Brown, William Hutchinson, Charles Moritz, Ann Radcliffe, James Denholm, Adam Walker, John Stoddart, William Green, Jonathan Otley, and Edward Baines. Within the context of this developing literature of mountaineering, it argues that Wordsworth’s and Keats’s mountain-top experiences can be best understood within the evolving framework of ‘the spectacle of Nature’.

‘The traveller of taste, … the naturalist, and the antiquary’

This chapter traces mountaineering’s evolution from one-off ascents, usually undertaken for a specific utilitarian purpose, into a leisure pursuit participated in by an increasingly large section of society. It examines how the practice of climbing developed out of three cultures that were well established in late eighteenth-century Britain: scientific research, antiquarianism, and picturesque travel. Investigating a wide range of writing from these three cultures (with key texts including Horace Bénédict de Saussure’s Voyages dans les Alpes, Thomas Pennant’s Journey to Snowdon, and Thomas West’s A Guide to the Lakes), the chapter shows how the summit became appreciated for the role it played in these pursuits, as an elevated viewing station, an observatory, a source of scientific specimens, and even as an outdoor laboratory.

‘Master[s] of the prospect’?

This chapter explores how William Wordsworth and John Keats invested their climbing exploits and the mountain-top position with symbolic significance. Placing the poets’ work within the context of the period’s wider mountaineering literature, it examines how the new ways of seeing gained through mountain-climbing became linked to new ways of being. It investigates how elevation was seen to offer self-transformation and place the climber in a position of power, an idea both Wordsworth and Keats called upon in their definitions of poetic identity. The omniscient position of the summit view, with what Wordsworth termed its ‘visual sovereignty’, raised significant questions about the politics of ascent. The chapter argues that even as both poets made mountain ascent crucial to their poetic identities and missions, they came to adopt a more nuanced response to climbing that challenged the simple equation of the summit with a position of unqualified authority.

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’,...

‘Active climber[s] of the hills’

As ‘active climber[s] of the hills’ to use Dorothy Wordsworth’s phrase, women played a significant part in the Romantic-period development of mountaineering and its literature, with Wordsworth herself and Ann Radcliffe producing two of the era’s most influential ascent narratives. This chapter examines the climbing activities and writing of the era’s female mountaineers, including Elizabeth Smith, Sarah Murray, and Ellen Weeton, in addition to Wordsworth and Radcliffe. It argues that these women were responding to a developing culture of climbing which increasingly sought to differentiate modes of ascent in terms of gender. The chapter concludes with a focused examination of Dorothy Wordsworth as both a mountaineer and a climbing writer, tracing her remarkable development over the course of three decades during which she wrote her narrative of her pioneering ascent of Scafell Pike, which was published unattributed in her brother’s Guide to the Lakes.

Introduction

This ‘Introduction’ establishes the importance of the activity Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ for the literature of the Romantic period. It discusses the etymologies of the words ‘mountaineering’ and ‘mountaineer’, showing how they indicated the creation of a new activity and identity. The chapter outlines the mountaineering pursuits and writings of a number of the period’s authors, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, John Keats, and Ellen Weeton, exploring the emerging link between ascent and literary authority. The introduction situates the overall study in terms of current research in the fields of mountaineering and Romantic-era literature.

‘I was a bauld craigsman’

Walter Scott played a major role in popularizing mountain-based adventure, particularly through his best-selling novels. Examining the dramatic rock-climbing episodes in The Antiquary, The Pirate, and Anne of Geierstein, this chapter argues that Scott helped turn rock-climbing into a pursuit undertaken for pleasure, and reconstructed the figure of the climber from one associated with particular occupations, such as fowling, into a heroic identity to which his readers could aspire. Unlike many of the other period’s writers, Scott resisted the allure of the mountaineer, whom he associated with less civilized communities. Rather, Scott embodied a redefined manliness in his ‘cragsman’ heroes, whom he constructed against a range of other masculinities, one of which was that of the mountaineer. The chapter explores how Scott helped create the identity of the heroic recreational climber and provided what many contemporaries regarded as the authentic articulation of the climbing experience.

‘Fearless I rove, exploring, free’

This chapter investigates why the figure of the mountaineer became so important in Romantic-period literature, beginning with an examination of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential account of the benefits of being in the mountains. It explores the politics of the mountaineering identity, examining the relationships between different types of climbers, especially between those who worked in the mountains and those whose economic and social positions made it possible to climb for pleasure. Through analysis of a number of travel texts and literary works, the chapter reveals the extent to which the summit was a place of negotiation between individuals, groups, and classes, rather than simply a scene of self-assertion or self-discovery for the solitary climber. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Wordsworth’s The Excursion, which includes the instruction to ‘Climb every day’, and presents the mountaineer as the ideal post-war identity and the embodiment of the nation’s imperial future.

‘Curiosity’, ‘dangerous adventure’, and ‘the perilous point of honour’

This chapter investigates how reaching a mountain summit came to be seen as a meaningful act in the Romantic period. It examines three case studies of texts by pioneering climbers who played significant roles in the development of mountaineering and who can be seen as representatives of different emerging cultures of ascent. Joseph Budworth’s A Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes (1792 and 1810) illustrates how mountaineering developed as a ‘curious’ pursuit. William Bingley’s A Tour Round North Wales (1800) and North Wales (1804) reveal how a culture of mountain ‘adventure’ evolved out of the scientific pursuit of botany. John MacCulloch’s The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland (1824) shows the developing conception of mountaineering as a heroic pursuit that enabled those undertaking it to claim a specific identity, articulated particularly through the language of chivalry. The case studies illustrate mountaineering’s development in the Lake District, Snowdonia, and the Scottish Highlands.