The Haptic Sublime and the ‘cold stony reality’ of Mountaineering

Abstract

The middle of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new leisure activity — mountain climbing. From the 1850s, an increasing number of Britons made their way to the Alps, and began to treat its peaks as a play-ground for adventure and physical challenge. Mountaineering quickly became one of the characteristic hobbies of the Victorian commercial and intellectual elite, and while the absolute numbers involved in Alpine climbing were relatively small, the new genre of mountaineering literature that emerged almost contemporaneously with the activity enjoyed a read-ership well beyond the population of active mountaineers. 1 The formation of the Alpine Club in 1857 gave shape to this new ac-tivity and propelled it into the public consciousness, and a burst of climb-ing activity saw the first ascents of numerous peaks. By 1800, only about twenty-two major Alpine mountains had been scaled; by 1865, at the end of what became known as the 'Alpine Golden Age', a total of 140 first as-cents of Alpine summits had been made. 2