ABSTRACT
Critics have called mountaineering ‘the most literary of all sports’ (Barcott 1996: 64). This may come as a surprise to anyone who regards climbing as nothing more than the driven antics of adrenalin addicts, kids with too much free time and too little good sense. Perhaps it would be equally surprising to the uninitiated to learn what Canadian climber and raconteur Sean Isaac pointed out not so long ago – that his country’s second longest continuous running periodical (after Maclean’s) is actually the Alpine Club of Canada’s very own Canadian Alpine Journal (Isaac 2008: 5), first printed in 1907 with its green cover and size so conspicuously akin to that of England’s older, revered Alpine Journal. Mountaineering today, globally, is the one sport that’s most likely to have its own section in bookstores. Mountaineers often talk about their favourite climbing books with almost as much enthusiasm as they talk about their favourite climbing routes, and mountain book festivals – from Kendal to Banff – have become an annual highlight on many climbers’ social calendar. And why not? Mountaineering has more than rested on its literary laurels since the mid-1800s. Indeed, the practice itself was predicated on the published word. It still is – and that is the subject of this chapter. This inalienable relationship between mountaineering practice and mountaineering writing finds its roots in Victorian travelling culture and the emergence of alpine clubs. ‘In the 1850s’, Fergus Fleming writes, ‘Britain was on a high. This was the decade of the Great Exhibition, the decade when British supremacy in almost every area was acknowledged around the world’ (2000: 162). Certainly, Britain, at the time, was the most prosperous, the most technologically advanced, the most stable nation in Europe, having been spared in large measure the revolutions that swept across the continent in the late 1840s. With more than half its population living in towns, Britain was now the world’s first urban, industrialized society. Energy was everywhere. The popular mood was expressed by Queen Victoria, herself, after a private visit to the Exhibition at Hyde Park: ‘We are capable’, she wrote on 29 April 1851, ‘of doing anything’ (Morris 1973: 196). Behind Queen Victoria’s happily chauvinistic observation was the further assumption that Britons should so act. More than any other imperial power, Britain took to itself the mission to make the difficult planet known – physically
sighted that is – and then measured, charted and mapped. The Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830 ‘for the advancement of geographical science’, had set out with scholarly fury to reduce the world’s remaining blank cartographic spaces into measurable units. ‘If there is talk of an unknown land into which no Englishman has penetrated’, declared a Times (London) editorial from 1854, ‘he must be the first to visit the place’ (Macfarlane 2004: 178-179). Victorian publishing houses lionized heroes of all kinds – especially dead ones – but none quite so much as the imperial explorers. Words like the following proliferated through Victorian-age monograph titles: Diaries, Gleanings, Glimpses, Impressions, Narratives, Notes, Rambles, Sketches, Travels and Wanderings. Victorian exploration and travel writing attained and deployed another order of capability: that of giving the imperial subject a sense of self-definition, of Englishness, and of mission. Against this exploratory impulse to know, actual mountain spaces could offer relatively little defence. Mountains became a godsend to the lawyers, doctors, clergymen and others who made up Britain’s swelling upper middle and professional classes. Their jobs prevented them from becoming fully fledged explorers. Few could afford, as Robert Macfarlane put it, ‘the year it might take to sail south to the Antarctic, for example, or the many weeks battling north through ship-high waves and ship-wide icebergs to the Arctic’ (2004: 179). But they had money, and a good six weeks’ summer holiday. And terra incognita was to be found upwards in the not-so-far-off Alps, buried in the heart of civilized Europe, previously concealed by the veil of altitude. Developments in rail infrastructure meant that Mont Blanc could be reached in 24 hours; the Swiss Alps a little more. Once there, in only a day, with a pair of well-made boots and a rucksack, one could ascend from a benevolent Swiss meadow to the Arctic severities of a high Alpine summit – and be home not long after. Travellers brandishing alpenstocks were now to be seen congregating on smoggy summer days at London Bridge station, for example, chatting amongst themselves about their Alpine excursions, the Channel crossing or the benefits of the French rail system. And while climbing mountains was already well established in scientific practices, and Romanticism and the Grand Tour in Europe had long made mountain viewing fashionable, it was here, in the middle decades of the 1800s, in London, that climbing mountains became institutionalized as a distinct and coherent activity. Newcomers to the activity felt the need for a forum in which they could share their ideas and experiences. And it took the shape of the quintessential Victorian institution, the club. The idea was first floated in February 1857, by botanist William Mathews to a climbing companion, Reverend Fenton John Anthony Hort, a Fellow of Trinity College, asking him ‘to consider whether it would be possible to establish an Alpine Club’ (Clark 1953: 79). The idea was later taken up in August with E. S. Kennedy – another Cambridge man; an author of independent means – on an ascent of the highest mountain in the Bernese Alps of Switzerland, the Finsteraarhorn. Ad-hoc meetings followed, and by December a list of invitees had been drafted. So it was that on 22 December 1857, ‘The Alpine Club’ was formally inaugurated at Astley’s Hotel, Covent Garden, its
declared aim being ‘the promotion of good fellowship among mountaineers, of mountain climbing and mountain exploration throughout the world, and of better knowledge of mountains through literature, science and art’ (Clark 1953: 81). John Ball – the Irish politician and scientist (also a Cambridge man) – assumed the presidency, and a fourth-generation publisher, William Longman, was elected vice-president. Initially, it was decided that all members should have ascended to a height of at least 13,000 ft; this was quickly toned down, however, and expanded to include those who had written about the Alps, performed ‘mountain exploits’ or simply had shown interest in the region. The height regulation meant, of course, that those without the wherewithal to climb on the continent were out. And the requirement that members had to write about the Alps – or otherwise show significant cultural/scientific engagement with them – secured the professional parameters. Whatever the case, new recruits had to be sponsored by existing members, those who Ball identified as a ‘community of taste and feeling . . . who have shared the same enjoyments, the same labours, and the same dangers, . . . a bond of sympathy stronger than many of those by which men are drawn into . . . mutual feeling’ (Ball 1859: xi-xii). The club quickly swelled in stature and numbers. In its first year, 80 people joined; by 1861, there were 158 members; and two years later, the club’s list contained 281 members, each of whom paid their annual fee of one guinea. Women – of whom there were several very successful climbers – were not permitted to join on account of their supposed physical and moral deficiencies in the matter of mountain climbing; they would have their own club – the Ladies’ Alpine Club – but not until 1907. Continental climbers – of whom there were also several very successful individuals – were brushed aside as irritants. The Alps now belonged to a new breed of traveller, who practised a highly codified form of leisure: they were part of a consolidated, metropolitan, professional and mostly male community – ‘mountaineers’ (Slemon 2008: 236-237), who, as British climber Geoffrey Winthrop Young would later put it, each aspired to their ‘own territory, . . . [and] their own prophetic book of adventure’ (1943: 62). Three books – all written by founding members of the Alpine Club – appeared in 1856-1857 and whetted the appetite for the banquet of mountaineering literature that would follow: Alfred Will’s Wanderings among the high Alps (1856), Thomas Hinchliff ’s Summer months among the Alps (1857) and Where there’s a will there’s a way by E. S. Kennedy and Charles Hudson. But it was a resolution adopted at an early club meeting – in November 1858 – that had the greatest effect: ‘That members should be invited to send to the Honorary Secretary a written account of any of the principal expeditions, with a view to the collection of an interesting set of such documents for general information of the Club’ (Irving 1955: 77). The following spring, Peaks, passes and glaciers: A series of excursions by members of the Alpine Club (1859), edited by Ball, was published by Longman. Its success was immediate. Four editions were printed before year’s end. It contained a selection of thrilling narrative accounts outlining various ascents, which, all told, showed the Mont Blanc range, the Pennine Alps
and the Bernese Oberland quite taken over as ‘an unlimited field for adventure’, a playground (Macfarlane 2004: 180). A second series of Peaks, passes and glaciers, in two volumes, followed in 1862, telling of the eastward extension of the Alpine playground, as well as drawing attention to the most attractive peaks in the Western Alps, which had hitherto been overlooked through concentration on their slightly higher neighbours. The 1858 resolution to encourage writing among members shouldn’t be too surprising given the club’s self-fashioning as a ‘learned society’ (Robbins 1987: 586). Interest in geology, glaciology, botany and cartography motivated much of the early exploration of the European Alps – and the continuation of this tradition meant that a large number of Victorian mountaineers had a decidedly scientific bent. This was reflected in the early membership; indeed, some of the leading scientists of the day now scribbled the designation ‘AC’ alongside ‘FRS’ (Fellow of the Royal Society) or, say, ‘FLS’ (Fellow of the Linnean Society), after their names in hotel registers throughout the Alps. Back at home, members, just like in other learned forums, read their peer-reviewed articles at annual meetings, and these were subsequently printed – in Peaks, passes, and glaciers, or, by 1863, its predecessor as the club’s official organ, the Alpine Journal, not inconsequentially sub-titled ‘a record of mountain exploration and scientific observation’ (my emphasis). Publication mattered. It established a mountaineer’s claim to a particular summit achievement; for just as priority was a matter of intense concern and debate in science, so it was in mountaineering. Publication served another necessary function. In the sciences, a shared ethos was elaborated and maintained through journals. The same can be said about mountaineering, which, unlike most other sports, had neither a formal ‘rule book’ nor a system of refereeing to enforce them. Mountaineering was characterized by a series of complex, tacit rules (or ‘ethics’), which were articulated, sustained and debated in the journal and other literary products. Of course, not all Victorian mountaineers considered themselves scientists (some openly ridiculed science – a point to be discussed below), nor were they all writers. But that alpine club culture emerged at precisely the same time that mountaineering-as-sport evolved from an older tradition of mountain-exploration-as-science is, well, noteworthy. The Alpine Journal’s first editor, a don at New College, Oxford, Hereford B. George, MA, FRGS (Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society), touted in his ‘Introductory Address’ that ‘the amount of geographical and other information’ annually acquired, and now published, was not only worthy of a wider audience, but that there was indeed a public appetite for such postings (George 1863: 1). The first volume of the journal set a fashion that was followed to a large extent: new ascents; exploration as distinct from climbing; science, such as a discussion on glacial theories; equipment, not only in terms of ropes and the development of the ice axe from the old alpenstock, but problems of camping out (tents, sleeping bags, cooking apparatus and so on), at a time when huts or cattle sheds were few and far between, also received attention (George 1863: 1-2). The constituent sections of the journal nicely place on view that which quickly became the chief source of tension within the club’s rank-and-file. As
sociologist/climber David Robbins noted, Victorian mountaineering practices came into existence at an uneasy point of intersection between three very different and potentially conflicting discourses: scientism (climbing for geographical and geological information, which was embraced and encouraged by the scientific societies of London); Romanticism (ascending to sublime heights so to ‘gain access to the fundamental truths touching on the human condition’); and, increasingly into the 1860s and thereafter, athleticism (mountaineering as purely sport, which virtues lay in the moral and physical improvement derived from the urban impulse to get back to manly nature) (Robbins 1987: 587-593). The existence of these three, seemingly incompatible, desires made Victorian mountaineering, to quote literary scholar Stephen Slemon, a ‘deeply incoherent activity’: ‘one cannot, for example’, writes Slemon, ‘scientifically calculate altitude through boiling-point measurements for barometric pressure and at the same time experience Romantic awe in contemplation of the ineffable and mountainous Sublime’ (2008: 238-239). To show how these various desires were articulated and debated within club culture – Robbins called their assemblage ‘teeth gritting harmony’ (1987: 581) – let’s return to the membership, and their books. All three alternative ways of thinking and feeling about their practice were in play throughout the early years of the Alpine Club: each had its proselytizer, and each had its bible. In November 1858 – at the same club meeting where the resolution to encourage literary submissions was adopted – two individuals, whose achievements were well known in fields other than mountaineering, were elected members: John Tyndall and Leslie Stephen. Both were keen, capable and active mountaineers. Tyndall – a teacher, an evangelist for the cause of science and an author of a dozen science books – was a prominent physicist, who did much to bring stateof-the-art experimental physics to a wider audience. Of the Alps, glacial motion was his specific interest, which he satisfied by climbing, and which resulted in his The glaciers of the Alps: Being a narrative of excursions and ascents . . . (1860). Here, and on the mountain, Tyndall was always the scientist:
My object now was to go as light as possible, and hence I left my coat and neckcloth behind me, trusting to the sun and my own motion to make good the calorific waste. After breakfast I poured what remained of my tea into a small glass bottle, and ordinary demi-bouteille, in fact; the waiter then provided me with a ham sandwich, and, with my scrip thus frugally finished, I thought the heights of Monte Rosa might be won. I had neither brandy nor wine, but I knew the amount of mechanical force represented by four ounces of bread and ham, and I therefore feared no failure from lack of nutrition.
