Abstract
McNee discusses how the attitudes of late-Victorian mountaineers were influenced by wider cultural, intellectual, and scientific discourses in the nineteenth century – in particular, by the growing interest in the physical basis of sensation. He introduces the concept of the human engine – the notion of the body as a machine for productive labour – and discusses the new pleasure that climbers took in the sensations of cold, fatigue, danger, and discomfort. McNee examines developments in physiology, psycho-physiology, and aesthetics in the period under discussion, and shows how these indirectly influenced writing about mountaineering. He suggests that this newly expanded definition of physical pleasure is linked to a new idea of embodied perception, which underpins the claims to privileged experience outlined in Chap. 3.
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Notes
- 1.
Alan Hankinson, The First Tigers: The Early History of Rock Climbing in the Lake District (London: J. M. Dent, 1972), p. 157.
- 2.
E.R.G., ‘Reviews’, Climbers’ Club Journal, 3 (1900–01), 42–46 (p. 43).
- 3.
E.R.G., ‘Reviews’, p. 43.
- 4.
E.R.G. was not the only commentator who regarded Jones in this light. Walter Parry Haskett Smith was reported as saying that Jones ‘studied his own physical powers as a chauffeur studies his car’. Cited in Hankinson, The First Tigers, p. 99.
- 5.
Rabinbach, Human Motor, p. 3.
- 6.
Rabinbach, Human Motor, p. 4.
- 7.
Rabinbach, Human Motor, p. 48.
- 8.
Charles Edward Mathews, ‘The Recollections of a Mountaineer’, in Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes: Mountaineering, ed. by Clinton T. Dent (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), pp. 348–79 (p. 377).
- 9.
Mathews, ‘Recollections’, p. 378.
- 10.
Charles Pilkington, ‘Climbing Without Guides’, in Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes: Mountaineering ed. by Clinton T. Dent (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), pp. 307–24 (p. 308).
- 11.
Crampons had been used in the Austrian Tyrol by local climbers since around the 1880s, but it was not until the twentieth century that their use became widespread among British climbers. Eckenstein was a key figure in popularizing them, developing his own model and organising public crampon races in 1912: Ed Douglas, Mountaineers: Great Tales of Bravery and Conquest (London: Royal Geographical Society, 2011), p. 99.
- 12.
Douglas, Mountaineers, p. 42.
- 13.
See, for example, J. Oakley Maund, ‘Mountain Misadventures’, Alpine Journal, 7 (1874–76), 409–21.
- 14.
G.G. Ramsay, ‘Ascent of Suilven by the Grey Castle’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 4 (1896–97), 23–34 (p. 32).
- 15.
Clinton T. Dent, ed., ‘Mountaineering and Health’, in Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes: Mountaineering (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), p. 85.
- 16.
Sven Dierig, ‘Engines for Experiment: Laboratory Revolution and Industrial Labour in the Nineteenth-Century City’, Osiris, 2nd ser., 18, ‘Science and the City’ (2003), 116–34 (p. 117).
- 17.
Parisi, ‘Tactile Modernity’, p. 191.
- 18.
Robert G. Frank, ‘The Telltale Heart: Physiological Instruments, Graphic Methods, and Clinical Hopes’, in The Investigative Enterprise: Experimental Physiology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by William Coleman and Frederic L. Holmes (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 211–90 (p. 213).
- 19.
Angelo Mosso, Fatigue, trans. by Margaret and W.B. Drummond (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1904), p. 76.
- 20.
Rabinbach, Human Motor, p. 97.
- 21.
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 71.
- 22.
W.J. O’Connor, Founders of British Physiology: A Biographical Dictionary, 1820–1885 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 132.
- 23.
O’Connor, Founders, p. 248; ‘In Memoriam, Francis Maitland Balfour’, Alpine Journal, 11 (1882–84), 101–03.
- 24.
O’Connor, Founders, p. 227.
- 25.
Mosso, Fatigue, p. 82.
- 26.
Rabinbach, Human Motor, p. 125.
- 27.
Mosso, Fatigue, p. 200.
- 28.
France Daniele, Camillo di Giulio, and Charles M. Tipton, ‘Angelo Mosso and Muscular Fatigue: 116 years After the First Congress of Physiologists’, Advances in Physical Education, 30 (2006), 51–57 (p. 55).
- 29.
Rabinbach, Human Motor, p. 146.
- 30.
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p. 169.
- 31.
Frank, ‘Telltale Heart’, p. 247.
- 32.
Parisi, ‘Tactile Modernity’, p. 208.
- 33.
Martin Grunwald, Human Haptic Perception: Basics and Applications (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), p. 11.
- 34.
Smith, Climbing in the British Isles, I, vii.
- 35.
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise, p. 10.
- 36.
T. Clifford Allbutt, ‘On the Effect of Exercise Upon the Bodily Temperature’, Alpine Journal, 5 (1870–72), 212–18 (p. 214).
- 37.
Clinton T. Dent, Above the Snow Line (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), p. 326.
- 38.
See, for example, R.L. Bowles, ‘Sunburn’, Alpine Journal, 14 (1888–89), 122–27; Dent, ‘Mountaineering and Health’, p. 82.
- 39.
T. Clifford Allbutt, ‘On the Health and Training of Mountaineers’, Alpine Journal, 8 (1876–78), 30–40 (p. 39).
- 40.
Dent, Above the Snow Line, p. 315.
- 41.
See, for example, C.G. Monro, ‘Mountain Sickness’, Alpine Journal, 16 (1892–93), 446–55; Percy W. Thomas, ‘Rocky Mountain Sickness’, Alpine Journal, 17 (1894–95), 140–41.
- 42.
George Wherry, Alpine Notes and the Climbing Foot (Cambridge: Macmillan & Bowes, 1896), p. 120. Wherry was an Alpine Club member and a surgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. The book was dismissed in a review in the Cairngorm Club Journal, the reviewer pointing out that any structural difference in feet was most likely due to a lifetime spent walking up steep slopes: ‘Reviews’, Cairngorm Club Journal, 2 (1896–99), p. 69.
- 43.
Dent, Above the Snow Line, p. 264.
- 44.
Ramsay, ‘Prof. John Veitch’, p. 181.
- 45.
William Brown, ‘The Coolins in ’96’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 4 (1896–97), 193–208 (p. 208).
- 46.
Rabinbach, Human Motor, p. 4.
- 47.
William James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1890), I, 5.
- 48.
Parisi, ‘Tactile Modernity’, p. 199.
- 49.
Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 1.
- 50.
Richardson, British Romanticism, p. 2.
- 51.
Edwin Clarke and L.S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1987), p. 306.
- 52.
John Harrison, Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 26.
- 53.
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p. 43, emphasis in original.
- 54.
Hilary Fraser, ‘Foreword’, in Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures, ed. by Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. ix–xv (p. ix).
- 55.
Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King, 1877), p. 2.
- 56.
Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, p. 34.
- 57.
Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, p. 34.
- 58.
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise, p. 98.
- 59.
Douglas Freshfield, ‘The Dolomites of Val Rendena’, Alpine Journal, 5 (1870–72), 249–59 (p. 249).
- 60.
Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, p. 53.
- 61.
Conway, ‘Dom from Domjoch’, p. 106.
- 62.
Conway, ‘Dom from Domjoch’, p. 108.
- 63.
H.G. Willink, ‘Snowdon at Christmas, 1878’, Alpine Journal, 16 (1892–93), 33–42 (p. 37).
- 64.
Willink, ‘Snowdon at Christmas’, p. 37.
- 65.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. by Kenneth Clark (London: Collins/Fontana, 1961), p. 220.
- 66.
Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (London: Ashgate, 2011), p. 73.
- 67.
Stephen, ‘Peaks of Primiero’, p. 389.
- 68.
J. Stafford Anderson, ‘The Dent Blanche from Zinal’, Alpine Journal, 11 (1882–84), 158–72 (p. 159).
- 69.
Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater, p. 73.
- 70.
Theodore Cornish, ‘An Ascent of the Weisshorn from Zinal; and Some Notes on Winter Climbing’, Alpine Journal, 15 (1890–91), 192–205 (p. 202).
- 71.
Willink, ‘Snowdon at Christmas’, p. 38.
- 72.
Fraser, ‘Foreword’, p. x.
- 73.
Bernard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, 3rd edn. (New York and London: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1908), p. 3.
- 74.
Berenson, Florentine Painters, p. 4.
- 75.
Berenson, Florentine Painters, p. 5.
- 76.
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise, p. 102.
- 77.
Dent, Above the Snow Line, p. 114.
- 78.
Aloïs Riegl, Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. by Jacqueline E. Jung (New York: Zone Books, 2004), p. 395.
- 79.
Riegl, Historical Grammar, p. 187.
- 80.
Riegl, Historical Grammar, p. 341.
- 81.
Linda M. Shires, Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2009), p. 4.
- 82.
Shires, Perspectives, p. 5.
- 83.
Fraser, ‘Foreword’, p. xiv.
- 84.
Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, p. 73.
- 85.
I.A. Richards, ‘The Lure of High Mountaineering’, in Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. by John Paul Russo (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1977), pp. 235–45 (p. 236) (First publ. in Atlantic Monthly, January 1927, pp. 51–57).
- 86.
Craufurd Grove, ‘Comparative Skill’, p. 89.
- 87.
It should be recalled, though, that Craufurd Grove’s purpose was to point out how difficult it was for the amateur mountaineer to emulate the skills of the professional guide, and his paper was partly intended as a rebuke to Girdlestone’s claims that guides were often unnecessary. Guideless climbing was still controversial in 1870 – later in the century, mountaineers tended to be less modest about their own abilities.
- 88.
Hansen, ‘British Mountaineering’, p. 219.
- 89.
Alfred Wills, ‘The Passage of the Fenêtre de Salena’, Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, 1 (1859), 1–38 (p. 31).
- 90.
W. Mathews, ‘The Mountains of Bagnes’, Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, 1 (1859), 76–125 (p. 82).
- 91.
Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, ‘Ascent of One of the Mischabel-Hörner, Called the Dom’, Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, 1 (1859), 194–206 (p. 202).
- 92.
J.J. Cowell, ‘The Graian Alps and Mount Iseran’, in Vacation Tourists and Notes on Travel in 1860, ed. by Francis Galton (London: Macmillan, 1861), pp. 239–63 (p. 241).
- 93.
A.W. Moore, ‘On Some Winter Expeditions to the Alps’, Alpine Journal, 5 (1870–72), 62–76 (p. 63).
- 94.
Moore, ‘Winter Expeditions’, p. 66.
- 95.
Whymper, Scrambles, p. 262.
- 96.
Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, p. 53.
- 97.
See, for example, Bowles, ‘Sunburn’.
- 98.
Leslie Stephen, ‘Sunset on Mont Blanc’, Cornhill Magazine, October 1873, pp. 457–67 (p. 460). Tyndall, writing two years earlier, had found the mountain atmosphere took longer to have its effect: of a solo ascent undertaken ‘for the sake of training’, in which he struggled physically and mentally, Tyndall wrote, ‘London was still in my brain, and the vice of Primrose Hill in my muscles’: Tyndall, Hours of Exercise, p. 3.
- 99.
Girdlestone, High Alps, p. 73.
- 100.
See Colley’s discussion of Ruskin’s ‘physical and kinetic relationship to the mountains’: Colley, ‘Ruskin’, Victorian Literature and Culture, p. 43.
- 101.
John Ruskin, Praeterita, ed. by Tim Hilton (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 390.
- 102.
Ruskin, Praeterita, p. 390.
- 103.
William T. Kilgour, Observers at the Highest Meteorological Station in the British Isles (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1905), p. 141.
- 104.
Maylard, ‘Winter Ascents’, p. 223.
- 105.
Maylard, ‘Winter Ascents’, p. 225.
- 106.
Maylard, ‘Winter Ascents’, p. 226.
- 107.
Naismith, ‘Snowcraft in Scotland’, p. 162, emphasis in original.
- 108.
John Gordon, ‘An Arctic Summer Day on Cairn Toul’, Cairngorm Club Journal, 1 (1893–96), 157–63 (p. 163).
- 109.
Clinton T. Dent, ‘Rothhorn from Zermatt’, Alpine Journal, 6 (1872–74), 268–74, (p. 269).
- 110.
Dent, ‘Rothhorn from Zermatt’, p. 269.
- 111.
Dent, ‘Rothhorn from Zermatt’, p. 269.
- 112.
Dent, Above the Snow Line, p. 25.
- 113.
James Bryce, ‘Some Stray Thoughts on Mountaineering’, Cairngorm Club Journal, 1 (1893–96), 1–6 (p. 1).
- 114.
Bryce, ‘Stray Thoughts’, p. 4.
- 115.
Bryce, ‘Stray Thoughts’, p. 3.
- 116.
Alfred Ernest Maylard, ‘Climbing Considered in Its Physiological Aspects’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 4 (1896–97), Part 1, 267–75 (p. 267).
- 117.
Maylard, ‘Physiological Aspects’, Part 1, p. 268.
- 118.
Maylard, ‘Physiological Aspects’, Part 1, p. 268.
- 119.
Maylard, ‘Physiological Aspects’, Part 1, p. 269.
- 120.
Maylard, ‘Physiological Aspects’, Part 2, p. 18.
- 121.
Frederic Harrison, My Alpine Jubilee (London: Smith, Elder, 1908), p. 122.
- 122.
Girdlestone, High Alps, p. 59, emphasis in original.
- 123.
F.F. Tuckett, ‘The Col Vicentino, Bosco del Consiglio, and Monte Cavallo’, Alpine Journal, 6 (1872–74), 124–44 (p. 126).
- 124.
Tuckett, ‘Col Vicentino’, p. 126.
- 125.
Stephen, ‘Sunset on Mont Blanc’, p. 464.
- 126.
Douglas Freshfield, Italian Alps: Sketches in the Mountains of Ticino, Lombardy, the Trentino, and Venetia (1875; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, repr. 1937), p. 151.
- 127.
Ashley Abraham, Rock Climbing in Skye (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), p. 6.
- 128.
Abraham, Rock Climbing, p. 6.
- 129.
Oppenheimer, Heart of Lakeland, p. 40.
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McNee, A. (2016). The Climbing Body. In: The New Mountaineer in Late Victorian Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33440-0_4
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