The Climbing Body

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.