Romantic Writers and Mountaineering

Abstract

I: Romantic Mountaineers On 9 August 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge returned to his Keswick home at the end of his famous nine-day ‘Circumcursion’ of the more remote parts of the Lake District, a vigorous tour that had included a ground-breaking ascent of Scafell and had left the poet’s trousers in tatters and his boots in need of repair. That evening Coleridge sent an excited account of his adventures to Robert Southey in which he made the first recorded use of the verb ‘mountaineering’, writing that he had ‘Spent the greater part of the next Day mountaineering’ (Collected Letters, ii. 846). Coleridge was using a new word for a new activity; the ascending of mountains for pleasure, rather than for economic or military purposes, was a pursuit that had originated in Britain and Europe in the previous few decades. The invention of this pursuit is illustrated by another etymological development; while Coleridge was the first to use ‘mountaineer’ as a verb, the noun form of the word was also undergoing a transformation of meaning. Long used to define ‘a person who is native to or lives in a mountainous region’, ‘mountaineer’ was also coming to denote ‘a person who engages in or is skilled at mountain climbing’. In 1792, for example, the pioneering mountain climber and travel writer Captain Joseph Budworth described his guide Paul Partridge in A Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes as ‘so bold a mountaineer, he can go any where that a sheep can; and I dare say thinks every person can do the same’. Here Partridge’s identity as one from a mountainous region is also being used to describe his skill at negotiating the environment’s challenging terrain and his ability to reach places not normally accessible to people. By the third edition of Rambles, when Budworth recounts what he claims to be the first ascent for pleasure of Pike o’ Stickle in 1797, he tests the applicability of the word to himself, describing how he and his guide ‘started like hardy mountaineers’. William Wordsworth plays on the word’s emergent double meaning in The Prelude when he describes himself and Robert Jones as ‘mountaineers’; both come from mountainous regions and both are intent upon climbing peaks. By 1837, when Wordsworth describes himself as ‘an Islander by birth,/ A Mountaineer by habit’, the word has become capable of referring specifically to an individual who participates in mountain climbing rather than one who lives in mountainous regions. The Romantic period, then, saw the emergence of a new activity— mountaineering—and a new identity—the mountaineer—and both, I want to argue in this essay, are crucial to Romanticism, to the

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