Mountains of the Mind (41 page)
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Authors: Robert Macfarlane
The history of mountains and mountaineering is by no means a trackless waste. More than once I have found myself wandering lost in a blizzard of information and ideas, and have only regained the path by following footprints not my own. Two books above all are to be thanked. The first is Simon Schama’s
Landscape and Memory
, which expressed and extended with rigour and elegance my own rudimentary sense of landscape as a confection of imagination and geology. The second is Francis Spufford’s magnificent cultural history,
I May Be Some Time
, about the imaginative history of polar exploration, a book which I encountered halfway through writing
Mountains of the Mind
.
I should like to thank those editors who have kept me supplied with review material, some of it mountainous and some of it not, throughout the writing of this book. I am very grateful for their trust and encouragement in allowing me word space: many of the images and ideas in this book were first tested out in newsprint. In particular I should like to thank Steve King at
The Economist
, James Francken at the
London Review of Books
, Stephanie Merritt, Robert McCrum and Jonathan Heawood at the
Observer
, Mark Amory at the
Spectator
, and Lindsay Duguid at the
Times Literary Supplement
. And thank you so much to Lucy Lethbridge for giving me a chance in the first place.
Gratitude is also extended for a variety of reasons to Richard Baggaley, John Brunner, Arthur Burns, Ben Butler-Cole, Guy Dennis, Dinny Gollop, Jo Griffiths, Peter Hansen, Robin Hodgkin, Thelma and Bill Lovell, George and Barbara Macfarlane, James Macfarlane, Garry Martin, Teddy Moynihan, Dan Neill, Robert Potts, David Quentin, Nick Seddon, Andy Shaw, John Stubbs, Captain Toby Till, Eammon Trollope, Simon Williams, Mark Wormald and Ed Young.
I should also like to thank: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst for his double-agency as my doctoral supervisor – both looking over my work and overlooking its absence; the Department of Physics, Heriot-Watt University; Mark Bolland for sending me unbidden his thesis, ‘Nietzsche and Mountains’ (University of Durham, 1996); and Ralph O’Connor for letting me see his forthcoming book on literary spectacle and nineteenth-century geology.
Santanu Das, Olie Hayes, Henry Hitchings, Julia Lovell, John and Rosamund Macfarlane, Ralph O’Connor, and Edward and Alison Peck all read the book in its draft stages. The perspicuity and respective expertises they brought to bear on it were invaluable.
I gratefully acknowledge Christina Hardyment and the other executors of the Arthur Ransome estate for permission to use a line from
Swallows and Amazons
as the epigraph to Chapter 6; John Macfarlane for permission to reproduce the illustrations; Rosamund Macfarlane for permission to reproduce the photographs on the endpapers; the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the Mallory family for permission to read and reproduce sections from George Mallory’s letters; Sandra Noel for permission to reproduce the illustration; the Royal Geographical Society for permission to reproduce the illustrations; Audrey Salkeld for permission to reproduce the illustration; and the Spurrier family for permission to reproduce Steven Spurrier’s
map. The illustrations are reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. All other illustrations are copyright the author. I would like especially to thank: my agent Jessica Woollard, who plucked
Mountains of the Mind
from a prodigious slush pile, and told me to put an ‘I’ into it, and who has been a marvellous critic and enthusiast ever since; my editors, Sara Holloway at Granta and Dan Frank at Pantheon, for their brilliance at seeing what was wrong with the book and how to right it, and what was right with the book and how to keep it; my mother, Rosamund Macfarlane, for allowing me to use her magnificent photographs, and also for her ceaseless encouragement, enthusiasm and technical expertise with the illustrations; Julia for everything.
Above all I should like to thank my grandparents Edward and Alison Peck, for their enthusiasm, love and knowledge.
Mountains of the Mind
is dedicated to them.
The literature on mountains is appropriately vast. The following is a selection of the books and articles which have contributed to
Mountains of the Mind
. Sources are arranged in alphabetical order per chapter. Each source is noted only once, in the first chapter in which it appeared. At the end is a list of the books which were of general use.
Malcolm Andrews,
The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800
(Aldershot: Scolar,1990)
John Ball, ed.,
Peaks, Passes and Glaciers: a Series of Excursions by Members of the Alpine Club
(London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1859)
James Boswell,
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson
(London: C. Dilly, 1785)
Apsley Cherry-Garrard,
The Worst Journey in the World
(London: Penguin, 1922)
Bernard Comment,
The Panorama
(London: Reaktion, 1999)
G. R. De Beer,
Early Travellers in the Alps
(London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1930)
G. R. De Beer,
Alps and Men
(London: Edward Arnold, 1932)
Daniel Defoe,
A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
(London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1962, first published 1724–7)
Claire Eliane Engel,
A History of Mountaineering in the Alps
(London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1950)
R. Fitzsimons,
The Baron of Piccadilly: the Travels and Entertainments of Albert Smith 1816–1860
(London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967)
Maurice Herzog,
Annapurna
, trans. Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952)
John Hunt,
The Ascent of Everest
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953)
U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, eds.,
Nature and the Victorian Imagination
(Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1977)
Arnold Lunn,
The Matterhorn Centenary
(London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1965)
John Mandeville,
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983)
Alfred Mummery,
My Climbs in the Alps and the Caucasus
(London: Fisher Unwin, 1898)
John Murray,
A Glance at Some of the Beauties and Sublimities of Switzerland: with Excursive Remarks on the Various Objects of Interest, Presented during a Tour through Its Picturesque Scenery
(London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1829)
E. F. Norton et al.,
The Fight for Everest: 1924
(London: Edwin Arnold, 1925)
John Ruskin,
Modern Painters
, 5 vols. (Volume IV,
Of Mountain Beauty
) (London: George Allen & Sons, 1910; first published 1843, 1846, 1856, 1860)
Horace-Bénédict de Saussure,
Vo yages dans les Alpes, précédés d’un essai sur l’Histoire Naturelle des environs de Genève
(Neuchâtel: Samuel Fauche, 1779–96)
Ernest Shackleton,
South
(London: Heinemann, 1970, first published 1920)
Albert Smith,
The Story of Mont Blanc
(London: Bogue, 1853)
Leslie Stephen,
The Playground of Europe
(London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1871)
Edward Whymper,
Scrambles amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–69
(London: John Murray, 1871)
Frank Worsley,
Endurance: an Epic of Polar Adventure
(London: Philip Allan & Co., 1931)
Francis Younghusband,
The Epic of Mount Everest
(London: Edward Arnold, 1926)
Robert Bakewell,
An Introduction to Geology, illustrative of the general structure of the earth; comprising the elements of the science, and an outline of the geology and mineral geography of England
(London: J. Harding, 1813)
Georges Louis-Leclerc Buffon,
Natural History: Containing a Theory of the Earth
, trans. J. S. Barr, 10 vols. (London: J. S. Barr, 1797, first published 1749–88)
Thomas Burnet,
The Sacred Theory of the Earth
, ed. Basil Willey (London: Centaur Press, 1965, first published in Latin in 1681, and in English in 1684)
Georges Cuvier,
Essay on the Theory of the Earth
, trans. and ed. Robert Jameson, 5th edn (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1827, first published 1812)
Charles Darwin,
The Voyage of the Beagle
(London: Dent; New York; Dutton, 1967, first published 1839)
Isabella Duncan,
Pre-Adamite Man; or, the Story of Our Old Planet & Its Inhabitants, Told by Scripture & Science
(London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1860)
Richard Fortey,
The Hidden Landscape
(London: Pimlico, 1994)
Douglas Freshfield,
The Life of Horace Bénédict de Saussure
(London: Edward Arnold, 1920)
Marjorie Hope Nicolson,
Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: the Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959)
James Hutton,
Theory of the Earth
(Weinheim: H. R. Engelman, 1959, first published 1785–99)
Charles Lyell,
The Principles of Geology: an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation
, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1830–33)
John McPhee,
Basin and Range
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981)
Hugh Miller,
The Testimony of the Rocks or Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies Natural and Revealed
(Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1878, first published 1857)
John Playfair,
Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth
(London: Cadell and Davies, 1802)
Martin Rudwick,
Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992)
Jonathan Smith,
Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
(Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994)
Antonio Snider-Pelligrini,
Creation and Its Mysteries Revealed
(Paris: 1858)
Alfred Wegener,
The Origins of Continents and Oceans
(London: 1966, first published 1915)
Simon Winchester,
The Map That Changed the World
(London: Viking, 2001)
William Whiston,
A New Theory of the Earth
, 4th edn (London: Sam Tooke and Benjamin Motte, 1725)
John Woodward,
The Natural History of the Earth
, trans. Benjamin Holloway (London: Thomas Edlin, 1726)
Edmund Burke,
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1990, first published 1757)
George Byron,
Letters and Journals
, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973–81)
Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, first published 1859)
Elaine Freedgood,
Victorians Writing about Risk
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Yi Fu Tuan,
Landscapes of Fear
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1979)
Frances Ridley Havergal,
Poetical Works
, 2 vols. (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1884)
Samuel Johnson,
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, first published 1775)
John Ruskin,
The Letters of John Ruskin
, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 2 vols. (London: G. Allen, 1909)
Robert Service,
Collected Poems of Robert Service
(London: Benn, 1978)
Samuel Smiles,
Self-help
(London: John Murray, 1958, first published 1859)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (London: 1956–71)
John Tyndall,
Mountaineering in 1861
(London: Longman, Green & Co., 1862)
Louis Agassiz,
Études sur les glaciers
(Neuchâtel: Solothurn, 1840)
Henry Alford, ‘Inscription for a Block of Granite on the Surface of the Mer de Glace’, in
The Poetical Works of Henry Alford
, 4th edn (London: Strahan, 1865)
Karl Baedeker,
Handbook for Travellers to Switzerland and the Adjacent Portions of Italy, Savoy and the Tyrol
, 4th edn (London: John Murray, 1869)
Gillian Beer,
Open Fields
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
Marc-Theodore Bourrit,
A Relation of a Journey to the Glaciers in the Duchy of Savoy
, trans. Charles and Frederick Davy (Norwich: Richard Beatniffe, 1779)
