Alpine monsters
Sir: According to Taki (High life, 6 September), quoting the Victorian secretary of the Alpine Club, ‘goblins and devils’ had long vanished from the Swiss Alps by the middle of the 1850s. Yet when Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins crossed the Alps in 1853, they were still astonished at the appearance of some of the locals. ‘The beautiful valleys,’ Collins reported later, ‘are nests of pestilence and the people who inhabit them are hideous with disease and deformity. Many of the people are born idiots as certainty, if they are born in the valleys.’ The first of these creatures he saw was about the height of a child, ‘had the face of a monkey and could utter no articulate sound’. This was, no doubt, the result of in-breeding in small communities.
William Clarke
London SE10
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