Abstract
Burns examines the public presentation of English mountaineering in the ‘Golden Age’ of British Alpinism. In particular he explores the ways in which ‘climbing’ came to be understood as a separate activity from ‘walking’. The chapter shows how uncertain the boundary between walking and climbing was in the 1850s and 1860s as observed in narratives of alpinism. In particular, it notes how accidents in the mountains were accommodated in ways which did not challenge the presentation of such tourism as an activity accessible to a broad, non-specialist, leisured constituency. However, the series of accidents in 1865, and in particular that which befell Edward Whymper’s Matterhorn expedition, helped render this accommodation unsustainable, confronted by a new understanding of the place of risk and danger in alpinism.
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Notes
- 1.
J. Hašek, ‘The Moasernspitze Expedition [Výprava na Moasernspitze, 1907]’, in J. Hašek, The Bachura Scandal and other Stories and Sketches, ed. and trans. Alan Menhennet (London, 1991), 20–5.
- 2.
E. L. Strutt, 1938 valedictory address in Walt Unsworth (ed.), Peaks, Passes and Glaciers: Selections from the Alpine Journal (London, 1981), 210.
- 3.
Frank S. Smythe, The Mountain Vision [1941] (London, 1946), 188–9. Smythe’s view was that ‘mountaineering is not to be classed with one of the modern crazes for sensationalism and record-breaking at the possible cost of life and limb. It is an exact science, a perfect blending of the physical and the spiritual. It is not, and should not become, a desperate enterprise’: Frank S. Smythe, The Kangchenjunga Adventure (London, 1946), 171.
- 4.
David Rose and Ed Douglas, Regions of the Heart: The Tragedy of Alison Hargreaves (London, 1999); Joe Simpson, Touching the Void (London, 1988); Touching the Void (2003), dir. Kevin McDonald. Among many others and most recently, Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest (London, 2011).
- 5.
e.g. Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (London, 2000); Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind (London, 2003); Jim Ring, How the English Made the Alps (London, 2000); Simon Thompson, Unjustifiable Risk? The Story of British Climbing (Milnthorpe, 2010). For a bold, wider frame, see Peter H. Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man (Cambridge, MA, 2013). Important earlier works include Ronald W. Clark, The Victorian Mountaineers (London, 1953).
- 6.
In ‘Climbing Mount Everest is Work for Supermen’, New York Times, 18 March 1923. Mallory’s motivation was, of course, distinct from that of the expedition as a whole which, like other British assaults on Everest, was co-sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society as an exercise in exploration.
- 7.
Clark, Victorian Mountaineers, 84.
- 8.
e.g. J. Ball (ed.), Peaks, Passes and Glaciers: A Series of Excursions by Members of the Alpine Club, 5th edn (London, 1860). For J. D. Forbes, see his Travels through the Alps of Savoy and other Parts of the Pennine Chain with Observations on the Phenomena of Glaciers (Edinburgh, 1843).
- 9.
Leslie Stephen, ‘The Ascent of the Rothorn’, Alpine Journal [hereafter AJ], 2 (1865), 67–9, later republished in Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (London, 1871), which represents his chief statement on mountaineering; for his view of walking more generally, see Leslie Stephen, ‘In Praise of Walking’ [1901], in Studies of a Biographer, 4 vols (London, 1898–1902), III, 254–85.
- 10.
John Ruskin, comment on ‘Extract from Fors Clavigera’, in L. Rendu, Theory of the Glaciers of the Savoy (London, 1874), 206.
- 11.
Albert Smith, The Story of Mont Blanc (London, 1853); the alcohol content detailed on 159; R. Fitzsimmons, The Baron of Piccadilly: The Travels and Entertainments of Albert Smith (London, 1967); on Ruskin and Smith, see Darren Bevin, Cultural Climbs: John Ruskin, Albert Smith and the Alpine Aesthetic (Saarbrücken, 2010).
- 12.
J. Ruskin, ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures delivered at Manchester in 1864 (London, 1865), 84–5.
- 13.
Charles Hudson and T. S. Kennedy, Where There’s a Will There’s a Way: An Ascent of Mont Blanc by a New Route and Without Guides (London, 1856).
- 14.
John Ball, ‘Suggestions for Alpine Travellers’, in John Ball (ed.), Peaks, Passes and Glaciers (London, 1859), 291–312. It is also striking that the word ‘traveller’ occurred more than three times as frequently as ‘mountaineer’ in this volume—‘climber’ was entirely absent; the preface to the 5th edition spoke of its pocket-book format as being ideal for ‘pedestrian travellers’; and it was ‘travellers’ too who had conquered the highest peaks (viii, vi). The second series (1862), again saw a similar imbalance, although the term ‘climber’ was now (sparingly) deployed, not least to describe the authors of the essays in the first: T. S. Kennedy (ed.), Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers: Being Excursions by Members of the Alpine Club: Second Series (London, 1862), v.
- 15.
Arthur Burns, ‘Hudson, Charles’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London, 1906), 63.
- 16.
John Tyndall, Hours of Exercise in the Alps (London, 1871), 3, 102, 156.
- 17.
The subject of mountaineering risk is discussed in Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 4; here my specific focus is different in concentrating on actual accidents rather than potential danger.
- 18.
F. V. Hawkins, ‘Partial Ascent of the Matterhorn’, in F. Galton (ed.), Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel in 1860 (Cambridge, 1861), 299. For Burke’s views, see E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).
- 19.
E. S. Kennedy, ‘The Ascent of Monte della Disgrazia’, AJ, 1 (1863), 19–20.
- 20.
William Longman, ‘A Narrative of an Accident on the Aletsch Glacier in 1862’, AJ, 1 (1863), 20–6; Philip C. Gossett, ‘Narrative of the Fatal Accident on the Haut de Cry, Canton Valais’, ibid. (1864), 288–94. Newspaper reports of both accidents, in contrast, (sur-)named those involved.
- 21.
Leslie Stephen, ‘Alpine Dangers’, AJ, 2 (1866), 273–81.
- 22.
Reproduced in Edward Whymper, Scrambles amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–1869 (London, 1871), facing 263. Unless otherwise noted, all references in this chapter are to this edition.
- 23.
Stephen, ‘Alpine Dangers’, 281; J. D. Forbes, ‘Pedestrianism in Switzerland’, Quarterly Review, 101 (1857), 286, quoted in Bevin, Cultural Climbs, 133.
- 24.
J. J. Cowell, ‘Some Relics of the Guides Lost on Mont Blanc’, AJ, 1 (1864), 332–9.
- 25.
See Thompson, Unjustifiable Risk?, 35.
- 26.
Alan Lyall, The First Descent of the Matterhorn: A Bibliographical Guide to the Accident of 1865 and its Aftermath (Llandysul, 1997); Ronald Clark, The Day the Rope Broke: The Tragic Story of the First Ascent of the Matterhorn [London, 1965] (Frodsham, 2008). For biographies, see Ian Smith, Shadow of the Matterhorn: The Life of Edward Whymper (Hildersley, 2011); F. S. Smythe, Edward Whymper (London, 1940); Emil Henry, Triumph and Tragedy: The Life of Edward Whymper (Kibworth Beauchamp, 2011); Walt Unsworth, Matterhorn Man (London, 1965). For films, see the British The Challenge, dir. Milton Rosmer and Luis Trenker (1939), and Alexander Korda’s remake of Trenker’s Der Berg Ruft of the previous year, itself a remake of Mario Bonnard and Nunzio Malasomma’s silent Der Kampf uns Matterhorn of 1928 in which Trenker had appeared as Carrel. For documentaries, see August Julien’s Whymper’s Weg aufs Matterhorn (1955), and Mick Conefrey’s The Misfit and the Matterhorn (BBC, 2001). In September 2014, the route of the first ascent was illuminated on the mountain by guides and mountaineers to inaugurate the celebration of the 150th anniversary; no climbers were allowed on the mountain on 14 July 2015, lest the current death toll of more than 500 fatalities be further increased.
- 27.
Clark, Day the Rope Broke, 159; The Times, 2 August 1865, 10.
- 28.
In 2002, National Geographic selected it as one of the 100 greatest adventure books of all time.
- 29.
The position taken by Clark, Day the Rope Broke, 199–200.
- 30.
Leslie Stephen, review of Scrambles, Macmillan’s Magazine, 24 (May–October 1871), 306, 311.
- 31.
AJ, 2 (1865), 148–53.
- 32.
‘The Fatal Accidents on Mont Blanc’, AJ, 2 (1866), 382–6; Leslie Stephen, ‘Recent Accidents in the Alps’, AJ, 3 (1869), 373–9.
- 33.
W. E. Hall, ‘Fatal Accident on the Lyskamm’, AJ, 5 (1870–2), 23–34; Leslie Stephen, ‘Note’ in AJ, 5 (1870–2), 188–90; J. Stogdon, ‘Late Accident on Mont Blanc’, AJ, 5 (1870–2), 193; [Leslie Stephen?], ‘Alpine Accidents in 1871’, AJ, 5 (1870–2), 372–3.
- 34.
Stogdon, ‘Late Accident’, 193.
- 35.
A. G. Girdlestone, The High Alps without Guides: Being a Narrative of Adventures in Switzerland, together with Chapters on the Practicability of Such Mode of Mountaineering, and Suggestions for Its Accomplishment (London, 1870), 10.
- 36.
Stephen, review of Scrambles in Macmillan’s, 309.
- 37.
[Stephen?], ‘Alpine Accidents in 1871’, 372–3.
- 38.
Stephen, ‘Review of Scrambles’ in AJ, 5 (1870–2), 239.
- 39.
T. Middlemore, ‘Col des Grande Jorasses’, AJ, 7 (1875), and ensuing discussion; quote from Freshfield, 158–9.
- 40.
See, for example, Anthony Brandt, introduction to the National Geographic edition of Scrambles (Washington, DC, 2002), xvi.
- 41.
Smythe, Whymper, 225, quoting Whymper to James Robertson, 23 June 1869.
- 42.
Smith, Shadow of the Matterhorn, 79; Whymper, Scrambles, 262.
- 43.
Ibid., chs. 3, 16.
- 44.
Stephen, review of Scrambles in Macmillan’s, 311.
- 45.
Ibid., 306.
- 46.
This was the case with Stephen’s Playground of Europe and Tyndall’s Hours of Exercise, both published contemporaneously with Scrambles.
- 47.
Stephen, review of Scrambles in Macmillan’s, 306.
- 48.
Edward Whymper, The Ascent of the Matterhorn (London, 1880).
- 49.
Stephen, review of Scrambles in Macmillan’s, 310.
- 50.
Alan Lyall, ‘The Matterhorn Lithographs of 1865: Gustav Doré and His Links with Edward Whymper’, AJ, 100 (1995), 215–21.
- 51.
See Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, ch. 17, ‘Tramps and Contributors’.
- 52.
Davis, Into the Silence.
- 53.
Whymper, Scrambles, 406–8.
- 54.
For drawing this incident to my attention, I am grateful to Simon Thompson, author of the best modern account of Conway, A Long Walk with Lord Conway: An Exploration of the Alps and an English Adventurer (Oxford, 2013), on which I rely for the biographical details which follow. For Wicks, see the memoir by C. Wilson in AJ, 33 (1920), 102–10; Arnold Lunn, A Century of Mountaineering (London, 1957), 84.
- 55.
Douglas Freshfield, ‘Six Weeks Travels in the Central Caucasus’, AJ, 13 (1886–8), 376; Douglas Freshfield, ‘Climbs in the Caucasus’, AJ, 13 (1886–8), 499.
- 56.
W. M. Conway, ‘The Dom from the Domjoch’, AJ, 15 (1890–1), 108. Later Conway opined that this approach led inevitably to unjustifiable risk-taking, making it ‘one of the most insidious and fatal of Alpine dangers’: W. M. Conway, ‘Exhausted Districts’, AJ, 15 (1890–1), 256.
- 57.
W. M. Conway, ‘Centrists and Excentrists’, AJ, 15 (1890–1), 400.
- 58.
Conway, ‘Dom from the Domjoch’, 109.
- 59.
See W. M. Conway, The Alps from End to End (London, 1895); Thompson, Long Walk with Lord Conway.
- 60.
Conway, ‘Dom from the Domjoch’, 109, 110; Conway, ‘Exhausted Districts’, 257; Conway, ‘Centrists and Excentrists’, 397, 400–1, 403.
- 61.
J. H. Wicks, ‘Two Peaks and a Centre’, AJ, 15 (1890–1), 333–43.
Acknowledgement
For John Walsh and in memory of my friend Andrew Neil Crompton (1964–1985), who died on the Eiger. I would like to thank Chad Bryant, Ying Chang, Richard Drayton, Peter Hansen, Anthony Kenny, Paul Readman, Simon Thompson, John Walsh and audiences in Oxford and Chapel Hill for a variety of stimulating responses and comments to thought and work which informs this chapter.
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Burns, A. (2016). Accidents Will Happen: Risk, Climbing and Pedestrianism in the ‘Golden Age’ of English Mountaineering, 1850–1865. In: Bryant, C., Burns, A., Readman, P. (eds) Walking Histories, 1800-1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48498-7_7
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