Studies in Romanticism

Readers of Romanticism know well that the vehicles of icy mountain ascents and mist-shrouded peaks graciously accommodate themselves to the tenors of spiritual yearning and epistemological limit. Wordsworth's Simplon Pass and Snowdon episodes from the Prelude, Percy Shelley's "Mont Blanc," Byron's Manfred and the alpine stanzas from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Mary Shelley's scenes of glacial encounter in Frankenstein—one could give a fair account of Romanticism through a tour of mountain sites and the literature they have inspired. This is not Bainbridge's adventure in Mountaineering and British Romanticism, though he is helpfully attentive to this tradition, and to why it has mattered to our conception of the Romantic era. What Bainbridge wants, instead, is to consider the vehicles themselves without rushing too quickly to uncover the tenors, to think about the climbing of mountains as, well, the climbing of mountains, and to find out what sorts of new stories emerge in doing so.

The book opens with a moyenne-durée account of the emergence of mountain climbing as a leisure activity. This engaging cultural history has something of an Annales sweep—I was reminded of Alain Corbin's Lure of the Sea (1978; trans. 1994), which tracks the evolution of the seashore across roughly the same period from a place of myth, industry, and peril to a site for the restoration of health and the pleasures of a day at the beach. In eighteenth-century Britain, most recorded mountain ascents were at first means to scientific ends (taking measurements, collecting minerals and botanicals), but by the century's closing decades, Bainbridge shows, a less instrumental approach to mountaineering emerged. Some climbers were in pursuit of picturesque views, with Skiddaw and Snowdon becoming particularly popular. By this point, local industries had cropped up to support the new activity: "Inns increasingly acted as the organization hub for such ascents, frequently supplying guides, provisions, and sometimes even horses or mules for the climb" (46). one upshot of this developing popularity is that climbers expecting a solitary scene from Casper David Friedrich were often disappointed to find others gathered at the summit, chattering away. First [End Page 159] science, then aesthetics, the reasons for mountain climbing were becoming more diffuse: for some it was "curiosity," for others "adventure" or "heroic pursuit," but in each case mountain climbing was understood as "an activity worth undertaking for its own sake" (50). This historical survey sets the stage for Bainbridge's consideration of the importance of mountain climbing for several Romantic-era writers, including William Wordsworth, John keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Walter Scott.

Examining William Wordsworth's experiences on Snowdon and John keats's on Ben Nevis, Bainbridge points out that both poets followed what were by the Romantic era established ascent routes, just as they used the language of sensorial overwhelm that was by then common in mountain-climbing discourse. The lexicon of the sublime enters here: "astonishment," one of Burke's favorite descriptors, becomes a keyword in the language of mountaineering (82). Wordsworth and keats both participated in this turn to the sublime to describe their mountain-climbing experiences, which included not only clear summit prospects but also striking visual and auditory effects generated by meteorological events. Here, too, they took part in what had become something of a stock discourse. Bainbridge points out that Wordsworth's account of "a huge sea of mist" on Snowdon, for instance, was "very much part of the literature of mountain 'spectacle'" (88). If Wordsworth and keats shared with their era an enchantment with the varieties of spectacularity encountered on mountain ascents, what they shared with each other was a belief that these experiences were "crucial to the confirmation of their poetic identities" (98). For Wordsworth, this confirmation came several years after his 1791 ascent of Snowdon, while for keats the relation between mountain climbing and vocational aspiration was present from the outset. keats saw mountaineering, as he told Benjamin Robert Haydon in an 1818 letter written a few months before his Ben Nevis climb, as "'a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue – that is to write'" (103).

Bainbridge turns next to consider Coleridge's contributions to the mountaineering literature of the era. Coleridge had so fallen in love with mountain climbing that he remarked that his "soul must have pre-existed in the body of a Chamois-chaser" (160; CL II: 916). It was in fact Coleridge, Bainbridge points out, who coined the term "mountaineering." Although the major work that Coleridge planned to write based on his experiences did not materialize, the descriptions that survive in his letters and notebooks have earned him a place in the history of mountain-climbing literature. For Coleridge, to climb a mountain was to move "away from the material world of 'animated Nature' to a transcendental region of divine revelation," but just as important, Bainbridge emphasizes, is that Coleridge's mountain writing closely traces "the material dimensions of moving through challenging mountain terrain" (151). Coleridge brought pens and paper with him so that he could [End Page 160] write along the way, at one point telling Sara Hutchinson that he was composing "surely the first Letter ever written from the Top of Sca'Fell" (153; CL, II:840). In reading Coleridge's in situ writing, we are suddenly there with him—now glorying in the serene expanse of a clear mountain view, now imperiled by a raging storm. of the pains and dangers of his pursuits, Coleridge describes mountain climbing as a "sort of Gambling, to which I am much addicted" (158; CL II:841). Bainbridge does an admirable job of balancing Coleridge's enthusiasm for mountain climbing against the poignancy apparent in his willingness to give himself over to this addiction, to let the elements decide his fate.

The longest chapter of Bainbridge's book treats the many women mountaineers of the era, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Elizabeth Smith, Ellen Weeton, and Anne Lister. These women were subject to sexist statements about female climbers and even the stark registration of gender ideology in contemporary efforts to categorize some hills and mountains as less taxing and so supposedly more "suitable" for female climbers (222). In the case of the Wordsworths, these gender norms were at first observed, with Dorothy Wordsworth participating in hill walks while "mountain-climbing was something undertaken by William and his male friends" (230). But she soon grew more comfortable. In 1799 Dorothy Wordsworth climbed Helvellyn, and as the years passed she would become an experienced mountaineer—in an 1825 letter to Robert Jones she writes, "Will you trust yourself again to my guidance to the Top of one of our Mountains? or did I give you too much of it the last time?" Bainbridge pays special attention to the mountaineering narratives that Dorothy Wordsworth included in letters she wrote after she and Mary Barker summited England's highest mountain, Scafell Pike, in 1818. Material from these letters would be included (as an "extract from a letter to a Friend") in the third edition of William Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes (1822). Dorothy Wordsworth didn't receive proper attribution for her mountaineering account, but this "extract," Bainbridge shows, proved compelling to readers, and was reprinted in contemporary journals and later included in Harriet Martineau's Complete Guide to the Lakes (1855). Anyone who still thinks of Dorothy Wordsworth as timorous or retiring will be surprised to hear her confident proclamations of her mountain-climbing expertise. In an 1820 letter, she declares, from a position of experience, "Let no one speak of fatigue in crossing the Alps who has climbed Helvellyn" (241).

The significance of gender also contours Bainbridge's final chapter, which considers Walter Scott's presentation of masculinity in the "rock-climbing heroes" of The Antiquary (1817), The Pirate (1821), and Anne of Geierstein (1829). Bainbridge is interested in particular in the figure of the "cragsman"—traditionally, a hunter of sea-birds (or their eggs) among shoreline cliffs—arguing that Scott reimagined this "traditional Highland occupation" as a "heroic [End Page 161] identity available to the recreational scrambler" (253). The cragsmen in Scott's novels, Bainbridge shows, are set against more violent figures like pirates or soldiers, but Scott also distinguishes cragsmen from "mountaineers," who are defined narrowly in his novels as the often-violent natives of mountainous regions. Arguing that for Scott the mountain-born hero is prone to excessive aggression, while the cragsman represents a "restrained, controlled masculinity," Bainbridge forwards the provocative suggestion that the version of the hero represented by the cragsman is for Scott more fitting for the post-Waterloo era (266–67).

It is a wonder that Bainbridge's is the first book-length study of the significance of mountain climbing to Romantic-era writing. In bringing concentrated attention to a topic that somehow manages both to saturate the literature of the era and remain understudied, Mountaineering and British Romanticism is a fitting follow-up to Bainbridge's influential work on Romantism and war. In this new project, Bainbridge's personal investment in his subject matter makes for a tremendously engaging reading experience. A mountain climber himself (this is the first monograph I've read that includes mountain guides in the acknowledgments), Bainbridge is particularly superb at revealing its allures and dangers, and at showing how for Romantic-era writers the imaginative and even spiritual aspects of mountain climbing are everywhere and inescapably interfused with the sheer materiality of the pursuit.