Abstract
‘Cold Stony Reality’: Subjectivity and Experience in Victorian Mountaineering
Highlights
We begin with two pictures, separated by eight decades
The second is a photograph, showing a pair of figures clambering up a rock face
The foreground is in sharp focus, but the horizon beyond is misty and indistinct. Both are images of mountaineers, and the shift in sensibility they illustrate reflects a wider set of cultural changes that took place over the course of the nineteenth century
Summary
We begin with two pictures, separated by eight decades. In the first, a frock-coated figure is seen from behind, astride the summit of a mountain. The photograph of the Lake District climbers, on the other hand, captures a quite different approach to mountain experience, one in which the notion of spiritual and emotional engagement with mountains has been diminished in favour of a very physical, tangible, and tactile contact with a particular mountain, and even a specific rock face (unlike the idealized mountain landscape in the Friedrich painting, this image shows a named climb, Kern Knotts Crack, on an actual mountain, Great Gable). It is an approach in which random wandering across a generic mountain landscape has been replaced by definite and defined progress up a specific route. The shift from the values and attitudes embodied in the Friedrich image to those implicit in the photograph of rock climbers is paralleled in the history of the physical activity of mountain climbing
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