Featured on PDR in the collection The Ascent of Mont-Blanc (ca. 1855)

Mont Blanc in the Alps, near the border of France, Italy, and Switzerland, had an unparalleled impact on the Romantic imagination. Percy Shelley refashioned Burke’s notion of the sublime within this mountain’s vale; Mary Shelley used its “awful majesty” to stage the confrontation between Victor Frankenstein and his monster; Wordsworth registered disappointment during The Prelude, finding that the peak left “a soulless image on the eye”; and — in typical form, chronicled by Fiona MacCarthy — Byron “jeered at an Englishwoman, in the shadow of Mont Blanc, whom he overheard asking the members of her party whether they had ever seen anything so rural, as if it were Highgate, Hampstead, Brompton or Hayes”. During the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, the mountain’s “blanc” became polysemous: white but also…