4 - The Silver Age of Mountaineering
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2021
Summary
Abstract
The Silver Age initiated a recirculation of geographical symbols that introduced in learned and popular debates about mountain scenery a new set of cultural images. This chapter investigates the intensity of these symbols away from common narratives on the origin and development of mountaineering as a sport or those linked to the dynamics of aesthetic appreciation and cultural performance. A closer scrutiny of the first English travel guides to the Dolomites shall provide evidence for understanding the ways in which Victorian travellers placed the Dolomites on a tourist map by etching geographical and historical elements of Englishness into their landscape.
Keywords: travel guides, sentimental voyaging, John Murray, John Ball, Amelia B. Edwards
As the night approached and the shadows became deeper, the weird individuality and almost human expression of some of these misty giants, abrupt, and unlooked for, became almost oppressive. I came to think that they were mountains run mad.
− Frances ElliotIn recent histories of Victorian mountaineering the Dolomites figure only sparingly. They are absent in the important monograph by Peter Hansen (2013) as well as in the acclaimed bestseller by Robert Macfarlane (2008), cursorily mentioned in the more specific account by Ann C. Colley (2010), hardly referenced in the historical synthesis by Andrew Beattie (2006), partly noted in the biographical excursus on Victorian mountaineers by Trevor Braham (2004), and largely unconsidered in popular books, such as those by Fergus Fleming (2001), Reuben Ellis (2001), and Simon Thompson (2014), which mainly celebrate the Alpine adentures of the so-called Golden Age of British mountaineering and its legacy. To find some attention paid to the Dolomites in the context of British alpinism we have to return to the old monograph on Victorian mountaineers by Ronald Clark (1953) and its illustrated companion (1956); while, again, the almost contemporary work by Robert Irving omits them almost completely (1955). Despite their recent inclusion in the World Heritage List, and the acknowledgement in the unesco nomination document of the pioneering contribution of British travellers to their earliest promotion, the historical geography of the Dolomites still represents, for Anglo-American scholarship, a blind spot of academic inquiry.
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- Topographic Memory and Victorian Travellers in the Dolomite MountainsPeaks of Venice, pp. 103 - 134Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020