A new chapter in the history of Mont Blanc, Chamonix, and the Shelleys, during the romantic period. A digital edition of 'A Description of the Valley of Chamouni, in Savoy' (1819), by Samuel Glover - edited by Cian Duffy. Available on Romantic Circles, at: http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/chamouni/index.html
By the time that Samuel Glover published 'A Description of the Valley of Chamouni, in Savoy' in 1819, the so-called ‘valley of wonders’ – site of some of the most spectacular Alpine landscapes in western Europe, and of its highest mountain, Mont Blanc – was well established as a place of great scientific importance and as a key attraction for tourists and travellers seeking the mountain sublime. [1] Glover’s Description took its place amongst a plethora of contemporary guidebooks and personal travel narratives. It is distinguished from these, however, by its close connection with two high-profile episodes in the recent cultural history of Chamonix-Mont Blanc. The first of these – less familiar to scholars of romanticism today – was the very popular exhibition at 20 Frith Street, Soho, of relief models of the area by the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Troye, Swiss emigrée and father of the American painter Edward Troye. The second – rather more familiar to scholars of romanticism – was the ongoing controversy surrounding the inscriptions left in the registers of various hotels and tourist sites around Chamonix by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in July 1816, in which he declared himself an atheist, a democrat, and a philanthropist. This edition re-situates Glover’s Description in the context of eighteenth-century and romantic-period writing about Chamonix-Mont Blanc and details its connections to Troye’s exhibition and to Shelley’s inscriptions. It also attempts to solve what is now the mystery of who Samuel Glover might have been.
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