As this thesis has shown, the transformation of the way that mountain and cave landscapes were perceived was partly due to the emergence and development of both natural philosophy and the sublime aesthetic. These developments were gradual processes that required a considerable increase in the numbers of fieldworkers, or reporters from the field, who were dependent on an individual’s independent wealth and free time, improvements in transport and accommodation in remote mountain regions, and improvements in information, such as maps and guides.1 Information had to become ‘mobile’ and be shared.2 The growth of popular
travel and tourism beyond the aristocratic grand tour, corresponded with the growth in the number of people reporting back from descents into caves, increasing considerably the paradigm community, while at the same time broadening its diversity. Reports from the field often appeared through the formal mediation of the Royal Society in the Philosophical Transactions, though the greater quantity addressed the reading public through popular books, such as travel journals and diaries. Such books were used as guides and encouraged people to travel, which of course helped to develop the tourist industry. These journals were written for a non-specialist readership and so brought the observable details of the subterranean biblical flood paradigm to a curious travelling public. The genre that engaged with both the scientific and the aesthetic qualities of caves using the descent narrative, and that ensured the mobility of knowledge, attitudes and logistic information was travel writing. Travel writing was one method of establishing the paradigm in the popular imagination with the aid of the descent narrative. It had to become a part of the wider culture.
1 Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), p. 6.
159 Philosopher David Hume made this point in 1740 when he wrote, ‘the influence of belief is at once to enliven and infix any idea in the imagination, and prevent all kind of hesitation and uncertainty about it.’3 This was evident in the poetry and novels of the period. The descent
narrative provided the framework to explore what was commonly referred to as ‘the hidden recesses of nature,’ or as equally significant in the paradigm shift, ‘the hidden recesses of the mind.’ For the natural philosopher, to descend a cave was to observe and to examine its size, its range and boundaries, the potential for deposits of ore, its hydrology, or the formation of speleothems; the traveller may also have been interested in these phenomena, though it is evident he or she was interested in what happened to the mind when deprived of senses, with the remaining ones intensified, in the darkness, silence and solitude of the cave, staples of the aesthetic of the sublime. Trepidation in the dark, vertical and unstable labyrinth, a space of obscure dimensions, led to common fears of falling, becoming lost and being buried alive. Both the natural philosopher and the traveller were drawn by curiosity; curiosity which provides a momentary glimmer of wonder or which provides an obsessive pursuit of concealed, unknown causes; curiosity which confirms established knowledge or which transgresses the bounds of the legitimate and permissible. The cave visitor experiences displacement as he or she descends into an environment that is barren, impenetrable and solidly enclosed, inside a vast physical object; yet once within their own phenomenal physicality, their subjectivity, appears to dissolve into absence.
Incumbent upon the descender who returns, is the need to tell their tale. The descent narrative is the essential story in the popular imagination of a journey ‘to hell and back,’ and such a narrator is, perhaps, most recognizably Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner.’ Classical descent narratives attempt to convey what ordinarily cannot be conveyed, a return from the dead, while the eighteenth-century narratives attempt to convey an insubstantial visionary
3 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by David Norton and Mary Norton (Oxford: Oxford
160 experience, or simply what is largely in darkness, what is invisible. They attempt to catch the experience and in so doing they had to, in Samuel Richardson’s words, ‘write to the moment.’4
This is evident in the diaries, journals and letters that provide the hybrid form for not only travel writing but for the emerging genre of the novel. The narrators present sublime visions, nightmares and analogies of classical katabatic experiences alongside their observations of the natural environment of the cave. This is the knowledge they return with from the underworld. The early descriptions include the confrontation of superstitious belief, inherited from miners’ experiences in the seventeenth century and earlier. This is a mark of the transformation in natural philosophy and the perception of caves and mountain landscapes.
In this chapter, I examine the large archive of traveller’s descent narratives from the long eighteenth century to see how they represent the causal and aesthetic properties of the cave, and their own emotive and embodied responses to such an environment. As it is large archive, I have divided the accounts into periods of exploratory intensity. The period from 1750 – 1800 includes so much material it is necessary to divide it further into the regions of the country with known limestone caves.