and commanded in Genesis to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’. It is not a world view to inspire a love of wild nature, and for most of modern British history man’s ascendency over the natural world was the unquestioned object of human endeavour.1 People took pride in converting wild nature into cultivated land, seeing this as both an economic and a moral imperative. The cultivation of the soil was a symbol of civilisation, and the religious aspiration was to restore the world to the fertility and order of the Garden of Eden before the fall.2 Even the word ‘paradise’ is derived from the Persian for a walled enclosure, a man-made garden from which wild nature was excluded.
Most people did not stray far from their homes, and the few who travelled long distances did so for a purpose. Merchants, pilgrims and soldiers went in search of profit, salvation or victory and some may have enjoyed the journey, but travel was a means to an end, not an end in itself. Even young aristocrats setting off on the Grand Tour did so ostensibly for the purpose of education. They studied languages, art, politics or agricultural techniques and collected ornaments for their houses and gardens. Until the late eighteenth century the journey itself, which often took them through the Alps, was generally regarded as dangerous, expensive, time-consuming and uncomfortable.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British attitudes to nature and to wilderness fundamentally changed. As the population of Britain and Ireland increased nearly sevenfold from 6 million to 41 million, demand for food expanded and agriculture became larger scale and more systematic, transforming the appearance of the countryside. Six years before the start of the Golden Age of mountaineering, in 1848, John Stuart Mill, the liberal politician, philosopher and campaigner for the preservation of natural landscapes, expressed his fear that Britain was becoming a country with ‘nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every foot of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture’.3 Partly due to Mill’s influence, some areas of uncultivated common land were preserved for the benefit of urban dwellers who valued it for leisure, but by then vast swathes of the British landscape had been tamed.
As agriculture became more intensive and wilderness became scarce, there was a dawning realisation that beauty lies, at least in part, in contrast to the ordinary, and an aesthetic reaction set in. In an increasingly ordered world, the apparent chaos and disorder of wild places came to be identified with beauty, and much of the remaining wilderness was to be found in the mountains. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, mountains, which had previously been dismissed as ‘deformities of the earth’, ‘monstrous excrescences’, ‘tumors, blisters’ and ‘warts’, became the object of the highest aesthetic admiration.4 Even parks and gardens were ‘landscaped’ to make them resemble wild, uncultivated land.
Population growth was accompanied by rapid urbanisation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century just 25 per cent of the British population lived in towns and only 13 per cent lived in ‘cities’ of more than 5,000 inhabitants. When climbing took off as a sport in the 1850s, more than half of the British population lived in towns (a tipping point that the world as a whole passed only in 2007). By 1900 over three-quarters of the population lived in towns, and over half in cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants. Following the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the population of London swelled to 2 million, the largest city on earth, as it rapidly became the trading and financial capital of the world. At the same time there was a major shift in population from the agricultural south to the industrialising north. Overcrowding, air pollution from coal fires and water pollution from sewage and industrial waste created an ever sharper contrast between the urban and rural environment. In 1854, at the start of the Golden Age of alpine exploration, there was a major outbreak of cholera in London. Four years later the inhabitants were subjected to the ‘Great Stink’, when the smell from the Thames was so bad that parliament had to halt proceedings. London literally ‘consumed’ people: the death rate exceeded the birth rate until the start of the nineteenth century, and population growth was driven solely by inward migration from rural areas. But the development of trade and industry resulted in dramatic increases in wealth and prosperity, creating a professional middle class with some education, some capital and much ambition. It was overwhelmingly from this new, urban middle class, rather than the traditional rural aristocracy and landed gentry, that the early converts to climbing were drawn.
During Renaissance times, cities were seen as synonymous with civility, while the countryside was regarded as rustic and boorish. When people thought of heaven, they envisaged it as a city: a ‘New Jerusalem’. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, rapid urbanisation and industrialisation brought about a dramatic reversal of attitudes, and the countryside came to be regarded as more beautiful than the urban environment. Mountains were increasingly presented as examples of the virtues of a natural, primitive life, in contrast to the artificial sophistication of life in the cities.5 Albrecht von Haller’s popular epic poem Die Alpen (1732), which was translated into all the major European languages, developed the idea of an alpine utopia populated by simple pastoralists, protected from lowland greed, fashion and debauchery. It portrayed a pure, happy and moral existence, despite the evidence of poverty, dirt and cretinism that early travellers to the Alps recorded in their dairies, and helped to establish the idea that mountains are the work of God, while cities are the work of man.
The Romantic movement in the late eighteenth century reflected growing concerns that cities were becoming too large, too overcrowded, and too complex for man’s good, and that growing wealth and inequality were leading to vanity and vice. It advocated an escape to an imaginary medieval past of rural simplicity, independence and liberty. In France, the movement had a revolutionary impact. In England it assumed a more conservative aspect, but by the late eighteenth century the romantic idea that mountains are both beautiful and provide an escape, however temporary, from an increasingly urban, materialistic and corrupt society had taken root in British consciousness. It remains strong to this day. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in 1762: ‘Happy is the land, my young friend, where one need not seek peace in the wilderness! But where is that country?’6
Rousseau, the founding figure of the Romantic movement, was primarily interested in the social and political implications of rural life rather than the landscape, but he also celebrated mountain beauty. Describing a journey from Lyon to Chambéry in 1732 he wrote: ‘I need torrents, rocks, firs, dark woods, mountains, steep roads to climb or descend, abysses beside me to make me afraid.’7 The attraction of being ‘afraid’ was new and significant. When Thomas Gray and his friend and fellow Old Etonian Horace Walpole travelled to the Alps in 1739 they too discovered the pleasure of mountain terror. Gray was to become the most widely read English poet of the eighteenth century, while Walpole was the son of the Whig prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole took with him to the Alps a King Charles spaniel, ‘the prettiest, fattest, dearest creature’, called Tory. While they were ascending Mont Cenis, Tory was eaten by a wolf, which caused Gray to observe that Mont Cenis ‘carries the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far’. Gray’s record of their journey was the first unequivocally romantic account in English of mountain sublimity; the idea that mountains inspire feelings of wonder and awe. Where earlier travellers had recoiled from mountain terror, Gray and Walpole revelled in it.8
Some 18 years later, in 1757, Edmund Burke published his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In the age of the Enlightenment, Burke was the evangelist of darkness, storms, cataracts and precipices. He was interested in the emotional response to ‘terrible objects’, such as ‘gloomy forests and...the howling wilderness’,9 and distinguished between ‘beauty’, which is light, smooth, delicate and inspires love, and ‘the sublime’ which is vast,
