Abstract
Abstract This chapter takes as its starting point William Wordsworth’s ascent of Snowdon in 1791 and Keats’s ‘fag & tug’ up Ben Nevis in 1818 to show how the writers participated in the period’s developing mountaineering culture. It investigates the visual dimension of the two poets’ ascents, locating their climbs within the optically-motivated culture of Romantic-period climbing and showing how ascent made possible new ways of seeing. To trace the developing aesthetics of elevated viewing, the chapter examines a wide range of travel texts by writers including the following: Thomas Pennant, John Brown, William Hutchinson, Charles Moritz, Ann Radcliffe, James Denholm, Adam Walker, John Stoddart, William Green, Jonathan Otley, and Edward Baines. Within the context of this developing literature of mountaineering, it argues that Wordsworth’s and Keats’s mountain-top experiences can be best understood within the evolving framework of ‘the spectacle of Nature’.
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