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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Kathryn Walchester is Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published widely on women’s european travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her publications include ‘Our Own Fair Italy’; Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Writing and Italy 1800–1844 (Peter Lang, 2007), Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers and Norway (Anthem, 2014) She is currently working on a monograph, Servants and the British Travelogue 1750–1850 and co-editing Keywords in Travel Writing (Anthem Press, forthcoming 2018).
Notes
1 Born Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshead, Le Blond also published under her married names of Mrs. Fred Burnaby, Mrs. Main and Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond. She is most commonly known by the name of her final husband. I will refer to her as Elizabeth Le Blond throughout this article.
2 Mont Blanc had been scaled in 1854 by Mrs. Hamilton; and the following year by Emma Foreman, who also made a first female ascent of Monte Rosa in 1857; Lucy Walker (1836-1917) made the first female ascent of the Jungfrau in 1863, the Matterhorn in 1871, and the Taschorn in 1873. Meta Brevoort (1825-1876) also made significant ascents, including Mont Blanc in 1865, Monta Rosa in 1867, and a first female ascent of Grandes Jorasses in 1869. See Roche (2015, 341-343).
3 In a special edition of Sport in History, ‘Gender and British Climbing Histories’, Paul Gilchrist notes, ‘In the last few years we have encountered a purple patch in terms of the publication of significant cultural histories of climbing which have raised questions about masculinity, male power and the climbing body’ (2013, 224). See also Neil (2000, 58-80).
4 Alan McNee defines the haptic sublime as involving: ‘an encounter with a mountain landscapes in which the human subject experiences close physical contact – sometimes painful or dangerous contact, sometimes exhilarating and satisfying, but always involving some kind of transcendent experience brought about through physical proximity to a rock face, ice wall, or snowy slope. (2014, 14).
5 See also Williams (Citation1973); McCrone (Citation1988); Brown and Blum (2002); Osbourne (2004) Colley (2010).
6 Other writers such as Mary Mummery, wife of Alfred Mummery, who contributed a chapter to his 1895 text, My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, include accounts of the support and skill of the party’s Alpine guides, in particular their leader, Alexander Burgener, who she refers to as ‘the great man of the party’ (Mummery Citation1895, 65-95, 81).
7 Braham notes that ‘It should not be supposed that even during the Golden Age guiding provided even the leading men with adequate financial means’ (2004, 236).
8 Ronald Clark describes Joseph Imboden as ‘in later year a land-owner and a man more comfortable off than most guides’ (Clark Citation1949, 174); see also White ([date unknown, 97), who describes Imboden’s ‘shoemaking’ heritage.
9 Hansen discusses this tension between risk and financial reward in relation to Balmat and his attempt on Mont Blanc (2013, 87). More recently this was discussed in ‘High-Altitude Guiding’ (Steele Citation1999, 215).
10 In Footnote 9, Alan Weber details a route to the summit of Mont Blanc and identifies Pierre Pointue and the Grands Mulets as key points (2003, 61).
11 Alpine Journal Volumes viii to xiii all contain discussion of guideless climbing. Reference to the debate about guideless climbing is made in ‘Alpine Controversies: A Centenary Survey’ (Lunn 1957, 144-157). See also: ‘Guides or No Guides in the Mountains?’ in the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, (1870, 681-682); Hudson and Kennedy (1856); Tyndall (Citation1871).
12 Colley (2010, 108) cites Le Blond (1886, 96-7).
13 See also Thompson (2010, 35) for details of how the guide ‘generally cut all the steps on snow and ice and invariably led on ice’.
14 For more on the significance of Führerbüchen see Roche (2013, 2).
15 Le Blond re-uses the the latter part of this section on page 19 of Mountaineering in the Land of the Midnight Sun (1908).
16 As detailed in A Lady’s Tour Round Monte Rosa (1860), [Mrs. Henry Warwick Cole], walked around the area in 1860 but did not explicitly claim to have climbed to the summit.
17 For a mountain guide, Vittorio Sella had an unusually prestigious provenance; the nephew of Quintino Sella, an Italian Government minister, he became a pioneer in mountain photography (Clark Citation1949, 146).