Resisting the New Mountaineer

McNee, Alan

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-33440-0_3

Alan McNee³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

217 Accesses

Abstract

In this chapter, McNee analyses how the New Mountaineer was discussed, debated, and criticized by contemporaries. He provides evidence for a backlash against the new values of modernity and codification, and shows how this criticism was often framed in terms of Romantic or traditional values. At the same time, he complicates the idea of two hostile camps of mountaineers with opposing values, arguing that many climbers of an earlier generation had displayed attitudes similar to those of the New Mountaineers, and that conversely the New Mountaineer was still influenced to some extent by the assumptions of Romantic literature. This chapter also examines the increasingly common claim that direct physical engagement with mountains gave climbers a privileged experience of wild nature that was unavailable to more casual observers.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 79.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 99.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 109.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Alfred Ernest Maylard, ‘Winter Ascents: Ben Vorlich and Stuc-a-Chroin on the 1st January 1891’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 1 (1890–91), 222–34 (p. 225).
2.
Conway, Alps from End to End, p. 174.
3.
Lehmann J. Oppenheimer, The Heart of Lakeland (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1908), p. 9.
4.
Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 278.
5.
For examples of these usages, see Ramsay, ‘The President’s Address’, p. 6; Martin Conway, ‘The Dom from Domjoch’, Alpine Journal, 15 (1890–91), 104–11 (p. 109); ‘Mountain Climbers and Mountain Gymnasts’, Alpine Journal, 15 (1890–91), 224–25 (p. 224); and Martin Conway, ‘Exhausted Districts’, Alpine Journal, 15 (1890–91), 255–67 (p. 257).
6.
See, for example, Claude Wilson, ‘The Corno Bianco’, Alpine Journal, 17 (1894–95), 475–92 (p. 477).
7.
Hely H. Almond, ‘Ben-y-Gloe on Christmas Day’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 2 (1892–93), 235–39 (p. 235). Ultramontanism was a medieval doctrine that insisted papal authority was superior to that of temporal authorities or local bishops, while by ‘Salvationist’ Almond was simply referring to the Salvation Army.
8.
Almond, ‘Ben-y-Gloe’, p. 235.
9.
Almond, ‘Ben-y-Gloe’, p. 236.
10.
See, for example, J.G. Stott, ‘Mountain Memories’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 4 (1896–97), 224–37 (p. 237), in which the writer refers to ‘our worthy friends the Ultramontanes’, and describes himself as having ‘posed as a Salvationist’.
11.
Dent spoke in an address to the Alpine Club in 1889 of ‘discouraging mountaineering which is but flashy athleticism’: Clinton Dent, ‘Address to the Alpine Club’, Alpine Journal, 15 (1890–91), 3–16 (p. 15).
12.
Ruskin, Modern Painters, IV, 29.
13.
John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 53.
14.
Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, p. 3.
15.
Anthony Trollope, Travelling Sketches (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), p. 94.
16.
Trollope, Travelling Sketches, p. 94.
17.
Ramsay, ‘President’s Address’, p. 6.
18.
Ramsay, ‘President’s Address’, p. 6.
19.
Ramsay, ‘President’s Address’, p. 3.
20.
Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy, ‘Introduction’, in Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era, ed. by Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 1–14 (p. 3).
21.
Radford and Sandy, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
22.
Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 211.
23.
George Gilbert Ramsay, ‘Rise and Progress of Mountaineering in Scotland’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 4 (January 1896–97), 1–15 (p. 2).
24.
F.G. Donnan, ‘Collie, John Norman (1859–1942)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/32498.
25.
‘Proceedings of the Alpine Club’, Alpine Journal, 17 (1894–95), 85–98 (p. 87).
26.
William C. Taylor, The Snows of Yesteryear: J. Norman Collie, Mountaineer (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), p. 29.
27.
Collie, ‘A Reverie’, p. 99; Alfred Tennyson, ‘Morte d’Arthur’, 420, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. by Christopher Ricks, Longmans Annotated English Poets (London: Longmans, 1969), pp. 585–98.
28.
Collie, ‘A Reverie’ p. 98. Sgurr nan Gillean and Cir Mhor are mountains on the islands of Skye and Arran respectively.
29.
NLS, Acc. 11538, Manchester City News, p. 14.
30.
Wim Tigges, ‘“Heir of All the Ages”: Tennyson between Romanticism, Victorianism and Modernism’, in Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle: The Fusions and Confusions of Literary Periods, ed. by C.C. Barfoot (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 307–22 (p. 307).
31.
Joseph Bristow, ‘Whether “Victorian” Poetry: A Genre and Its Period’, Victorian Poetry, 42 (2004), 81–109 (p. 90).
32.
Samantha Matthews, ‘After Tennyson: The Presence of the Poet, 1892–1918’, in Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 315–35 (p. 328).
33.
Theodore Watts, ‘Aspects of Tennyson: Tennyson as Nature-Poet’, The Nineteenth Century, 33 (1893), 836–56 (p. 841).
34.
Tennyson’s choice of Arthurian legend in this particular poem is also significant. The idea of Romanticism in the late nineteenth century was closely connected to Medievalism – itelf a ‘Victorian coinage’, as Clare A. Simmons points out – and the medieval period was frequently used, as Marian Sherwood notes, to represent ‘mourning for loss’ in the present: See Clare A. Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 2; Marian Sherwood, Tennyson and the Fabrication of Englishness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 104.
35.
Joseph Gibson Stott, cited in Robin N. Campbell, ‘My Dear Douglas’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 34 (1990), 388–99 (p. 392).
36.
Hayden Lorimer and Katrin Lund, ‘Performing Facts: Finding a Way Over Scotland’s Mountains’, in Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance, ed. by Bronislaw Szerszynski, Wallace Heim and Claire Waterton (London: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 130–44 (p. 130).
37.
William C. Smith, ‘The Cairngorms’, Cairngorm Club Journal, 3 (1899–1902), 8–14 (p. 9).
38.
Walter Scott, Rob Roy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 223.
39.
Ironically, Naismith also quoted from Rob Roy in his 1893 article on Scottish snow and ice climbing, in which he took a typically New Mountaineer approach to the question of guideless climbing and the technicalities of using ice axes. Naismith took Bailie Nicol Jarvie’s description of the Highlands as ‘a wild kind of warld by themsells’ as the epigraph to this article: Naismith, ‘Snowcraft’, p. 157.
40.
George Gilbert Ramsay, ‘In Memoriam: Professor John Veitch’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 3 (1894–95), 175–82 (p. 181).
41.
Ramsay, ‘Prof. John Veitch’, p. 181.
42.
Ramsay, ‘Prof. John Veitch’, p. 182.
43.
Ramsay, ‘Prof. John Veitch’, p. 182.
44.
Robert Adamson, ‘Hill Climbing in Skye’, Cairngorm Club Journal, 1 (January 1893–96), 181–91 (p. 181).
45.
Douglas Freshfield, ‘The Solitude of Abkhazia’, Alpine Journal, 15 (1890–91), 237–55 (p. 238).
46.
William Martin Conway, ‘Centrists and Excentrists’, Alpine Journal, 15 (1890–91), 397–403 (p. 401).
47.
Ramsay, ‘President’s Address’, p. 7.
48.
Ramsay, ‘President’s Address’, p. 7.
49.
Conway, ‘Dom from Domjoch’, p. 108.
50.
Conway, ‘Dom from Domjoch’, p. 109.
51.
Conway, ‘Dom from Domjoch’, p. 109.
52.
Conway, ‘Centrists and Excentrists’, p. 400.
53.
Conway, ‘Centrists and Excentrists’, p. 400.
54.
Conway, ‘Centrists and Excentrists’, p. 403.
55.
Conway, Alps from End to End, p. 9.
56.
Conway, Alps from End to End, p. 255.
57.
Kennedy, ‘Ascent of Monte della Disgrazia’, p. 3.
58.
Benjamin Hawes, A Narrative of an Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc Made During the Summer of 1827 by Mr. William Hawes and Mr. Charles Fellowes (privately printed, 1828), p. 19.
59.
Smith, Story of Mont Blanc, p. 209.
60.
Smith, Story of Mont Blanc, p. 192.
61.
Charles Hudson and Edward Shirley Kennedy, Where There’s a Will There’s a Way: An Ascent of Mont Blanc by a New Route and Without guides (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856), p. xi.
62.
Conway, ‘Centrists and Excentrists’, p. 401.
63.
Ramsay, ‘Prof. John Veitch’, p. 182.
64.
Hudson and Kennedy, Where There’s a Will, p. xi, emphasis in original.
65.
G.N. Vansittart, Letter, ‘Mr. Vansittart’s Ascent of Mont Blanc’, The Daily News, 26 August 1851.
66.
Leslie Stephen, ‘The Peaks of Primiero’, Alpine Journal, 4 (1868–70), 385–402 (p. 385).
67.
Coolidge and Howard, eds., Pioneer in the High Alps, p. 65.
68.
Coolidge and Howard, eds., Pioneer in the High Alps, p. 71.
69.
Coolidge and Howard, eds., Pioneer in the High Alps, p. 99.
70.
Edward Whymper, ‘The Ascent of Mont Pelvoux’, Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, 2 (1862), 233–56 (p. 256).
71.
William Mathews, ‘On the Determination of Heights by Means of the Barometer’, Alpine Journal, 2 (1865–66), Part 1, 33–41 (p. 34).
72.
R.C. Nichols, ‘Excursions in the Graian Alps: The Ascent of the Ste. Helene’, Alpine Journal, 2 (1865–66), 387–97 (p. 387).
73.
Radford and Sandy, Romantic Echoes, p. 7.
74.
Mathews, ‘Determination of Heights’, Part 1, p. 34.
75.
Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic Nineties (London: Putnam, 1951).
76.
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 1.
77.
Sally Ledger, ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’, in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 22–44 (p. 23).
78.
Henry Schütz Wilson, Alpine Ascents and Adventures (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1878), p. xi.
79.
Wilson, Alpine Ascents, p. xi.
80.
Wilson, Alpine Ascents, p. xi.
81.
Wilson, Alpine Ascents, p. 69.
82.
Wilson, Alpine Ascents, p. 72.
83.
Spufford, I May Be Some Time, p. 270.
84.
Spufford, I May Be Some Time, p. 128.
85.
Wilson, Alpine Ascents, p. xi.
86.
A.F. Mummery, ‘The Aiguilles des Charmoz and de Grepon’, Alpine Journal, 16 (1892–93), 159–73 (p. 171).
87.
‘Reviews and Notices’, Alpine Journal, 17 (1894–95), 527–34 (p. 528).
88.
Mummery, ‘Charmoz and de Grepon’, p. 172.
89.
Mummery, ‘Charmoz and de Grepon’, p. 172.
90.
William Brown, ‘Climbing in Scotland: Ben Nevis’, Cairngorm Club Journal, 2 (1896–99), 1–8 (p. 2).
91.
Brown, ‘Climbing in Scotland’, p. 2.
92.
Jones, Rock Climbing, p. xlix.
93.
Maylard, ‘Winter Ascents, p. 141.
94.
Alfred Ernest Maylard, ‘Scottish Mountaineering: Retrospective and Prospective’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 5 (1898–99), 308–14 (p. 311).
95.
Maylard, ‘Scottish Mountaineering’, p. 311.
96.
Maylard, ‘Scottish Mountaineering’, p. 312.
97.
John Norman Collie, ‘Climbing Near Wastdale Head’, Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 3 (1894–95), 1–9 (p. 9). The Wasdale valley was commonly known as Wastdale at this time.
98.
Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind (London: Granta, 2008), p. 37.
99.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) p. 38.
100.
Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, p. 33.
101.
John Ruskin, Complete Works, ed. by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), XXXVI (1909), 115.
102.
Collie, ‘A Reverie’, p. 95.
103.
Collie, ‘A Reverie’, p. 102.
104.
Collie, ‘A Reverie’, p. 102.
105.
Collie, ‘A Reverie’, p. 102.
106.
Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (London: Longmans, Green, 1871), p. 267.
107.
Stephen, Playground, p. 266.
108.
Stephen, Playground, p. 266.
109.
Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, p. 6.
110.
Stephen, Playground, p. 268.
111.
Stephen, Playground, p. 268.
112.
Stephen, Playground, p. 269.
113.
Stephen, Playground, p. 273.
114.
Stephen, Playground, p. 296.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

London, UK
Alan McNee

Authors

Alan McNee
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

McNee, A. (2016). Resisting the New Mountaineer. In: The New Mountaineer in Late Victorian Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33440-0_3

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33440-0_3
Published: 04 October 2016
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-33439-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33440-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics