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BEFORE 1854: IN SEARCH OF THE SUBLIME

Until 1854 the British hardly concerned themselves with climbing except as a means of exploiting the animal and mineral resources of sea cliffs and mountains, or gaining a military advantage. In the 11 years that followed, they climbed almost every major peak in the Alps.

During the ‘Golden Age’ of alpinism, between 1854 and 1865, 39 major alpine peaks were climbed for the first time, all but eight of them by British parties. During this intense period of activity the British can legitimately claim to have invented the sport of climbing, and for the rest of the nineteenth century they remained at the forefront of developments, undertaking ever more difficult routes in the Alps and expanding their exploratory activities throughout the world to Norway, the Caucasus, the Rockies, the Andes and the Himalaya.

What caused this sudden explosion of climbing activity in the second half of the nineteenth century? Developments in science and technology, industrialisation, urbanisation and changing attitudes to the natural world all contributed to the birth of the sport, and Britain led the world in each of these fields. Climbing was both a result of, and a reaction against, a period of unprecedented peace, increasing wealth and leisure, and the ever more complex, artificial and ordered existence of the emerging urban middle class. Just like climbers today, the pioneers were attracted to the sport primarily as an escape from the crowded complexity of life in the city to the vigorous simplicity, beauty and adventure of the mountains.

FROM GLOOM TO GLORY

For most of British history the idea of climbing for pleasure and enjoyment, in other words for sport, was unimaginable. Life for the overwhelming majority of people was a struggle for survival, and man’s attitude to the natural world was essentially utilitarian and exploitative. Animals, plants and rocks provided food and shelter, and most people suffered enough hardship meeting these basic needs without undertaking unnecessary activities that might add to their discomfort. The wilderness, and mountains in particular, were literally seen as ‘waste land’: unproductive and potentially dangerous. In keeping with the classical ideal, beauty was associated with fertility. Fields, orchards, vegetable gardens and fish ponds were beautiful; mountains were not.

Whereas many religions see a natural world inhabited by gods and goddesses, spirits and sprites, the Judeao-Christian tradition is centred on man, made in the image of a single transcendent God, aloof and separate from nature, and commanded in Genesis to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’. It is not a world view to inspire a love of wild nature, and for most of modern British history man’s ascendency over the natural world was the unquestioned object of human endeavour.¹ People took pride in converting wild nature into cultivated land, seeing this as both an economic and a moral imperative. The cultivation of the soil was a symbol of civilisation, and the religious aspiration was to restore the world to the fertility and order of the Garden of Eden before the fall.² Even the word ‘paradise’ is derived from the Persian for a walled enclosure, a man-made garden from which wild nature was excluded.

Most people did not stray far from their homes, and the few who travelled long distances did so for a purpose. Merchants, pilgrims and soldiers went in search of profit, salvation or victory and some may have enjoyed the journey, but travel was a means to an end, not an end in itself. Even young aristocrats setting off on the Grand Tour did so ostensibly for the purpose of education. They studied languages, art, politics or agricultural techniques and collected ornaments for their houses and gardens. Until the late eighteenth century the journey itself, which often took them through the Alps, was generally regarded as dangerous, expensive, time-consuming and uncomfortable.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British attitudes to nature and to wilderness fundamentally changed. As the population of Britain and Ireland increased nearly sevenfold from 6 million to 41 million, demand for food expanded and agriculture became larger scale and more systematic, transforming the appearance of the countryside. Six years before the start of the Golden Age of mountaineering, in 1848, John Stuart Mill, the liberal politician, philosopher and campaigner for the preservation of natural landscapes, expressed his fear that Britain was becoming a country with ‘nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every foot of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture’.³ Partly due to Mill’s influence, some areas of uncultivated common land were preserved for the benefit of urban dwellers who valued it for leisure, but by then vast swathes of the British landscape had been tamed.

As agriculture became more intensive and wilderness became scarce, there was a dawning realisation that beauty lies, at least in part, in contrast to the ordinary, and an aesthetic reaction set in. In an increasingly ordered world, the apparent chaos and disorder of wild places came to be identified with beauty, and much of the remaining wilderness was to be found in the mountains. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, mountains, which had previously been dismissed as ‘deformities of the earth’, ‘monstrous excrescences’, ‘tumors, blisters’ and ‘warts’, became the object of the highest aesthetic admiration.⁴ Even parks and gardens were ‘landscaped’ to make them resemble wild, uncultivated land.

Population growth was accompanied by rapid urbanisation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century just 25 per cent of the British population lived in towns and only 13 per cent lived in ‘cities’ of more than 5,000 inhabitants. When climbing took off as a sport in the 1850s, more than half of the British population lived in towns (a tipping point that the world as a whole passed only in 2007). By 1900 over three-quarters of the population lived in towns, and over half in cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants. Following the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the population of London swelled to 2 million, the largest city on earth, as it rapidly became the trading and financial capital of the world. At the same time there was a major shift in population from the agricultural south to the industrialising north. Overcrowding, air pollution from coal fires and water pollution from sewage and industrial waste created an ever sharper contrast between the urban and rural environment. In 1854, at the start of the Golden Age of alpine exploration, there was a major outbreak of cholera in London. Four years later the inhabitants were subjected to the ‘Great Stink’, when the smell from the Thames was so bad that parliament had to halt proceedings. London literally ‘consumed’ people: the death rate exceeded the birth rate until the start of the nineteenth century, and population growth was driven solely by inward migration from rural areas. But the development of trade and industry resulted in dramatic increases in wealth and prosperity, creating a professional middle class with some education, some capital and much ambition. It was overwhelmingly from this new, urban middle class, rather than the traditional rural aristocracy and landed gentry, that the early converts to climbing were drawn.

During Renaissance times, cities were seen as synonymous with civility, while the countryside was regarded as rustic and boorish. When people thought of heaven, they envisaged it as a city: a ‘New Jerusalem’. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, rapid urbanisation and industrialisation brought about a dramatic reversal of attitudes, and the countryside came to be regarded as more beautiful than the urban environment. Mountains were increasingly presented as examples of the virtues of a natural, primitive life, in contrast to the artificial sophistication of life in the cities.⁵ Albrecht von Haller’s popular epic poem Die Alpen (1732), which was translated into all the major European languages, developed the idea of an alpine utopia populated by simple pastoralists, protected from lowland greed, fashion and debauchery. It portrayed a pure, happy and moral existence, despite the evidence of poverty, dirt and cretinism that early travellers to the Alps recorded in their dairies, and helped to establish the idea that mountains are the work of God, while cities are the work of man.

The Romantic movement in the late eighteenth century reflected growing concerns that cities were becoming too large, too overcrowded, and too complex for man’s good, and that growing wealth and inequality were leading to vanity and vice. It advocated an escape to an imaginary medieval past of rural simplicity, independence and liberty. In France, the movement had a revolutionary impact. In England it assumed a more conservative aspect, but by the late eighteenth century the romantic idea that mountains are both beautiful and provide an escape, however temporary, from an increasingly urban, materialistic and corrupt society had taken root in British consciousness. It remains strong to this day. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in 1762: ‘Happy is the land, my young friend, where one need not seek peace in the wilderness! But where is that country?’⁶

Rousseau, the founding figure of the Romantic movement, was primarily interested in the social and political implications of rural life rather than the landscape, but he also celebrated mountain beauty. Describing a journey from Lyon to Chambéry in 1732 he wrote: ‘I need torrents, rocks, firs, dark woods, mountains, steep roads to climb or descend, abysses beside me to make me afraid.’⁷ The attraction of being ‘afraid’ was new and significant. When Thomas Gray and his friend and fellow Old Etonian Horace Walpole travelled to the Alps in 1739 they too discovered the pleasure of mountain terror. Gray was to become the most widely read English poet of the eighteenth century, while Walpole was the son of the Whig prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole took with him to the Alps a King Charles spaniel, ‘the prettiest, fattest, dearest creature’, called Tory. While they were ascending Mont Cenis, Tory was eaten by a wolf, which caused Gray to observe that Mont Cenis ‘carries the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far’. Gray’s record of their journey was the first unequivocally romantic account in English of mountain sublimity; the idea that mountains inspire feelings of wonder and awe. Where earlier travellers had recoiled from mountain terror, Gray and Walpole revelled in it.⁸

Some 18 years later, in 1757, Edmund Burke published his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In the age of the Enlightenment, Burke was the evangelist of darkness, storms, cataracts and precipices. He was interested in the emotional response to ‘terrible objects’, such as ‘gloomy forests and...the howling wilderness’,⁹ and distinguished between ‘beauty’, which is light, smooth, delicate and inspires love, and ‘the sublime’ which is vast, gloomy, rugged, powerful and inspires terror. But Burke believed that the sublime was also capable of producing pleasure, because ‘terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close’. By the late eighteenth century, the emerging urban professional classes in Britain felt sufficiently in control of their own lives and of the environment to make ‘terror that does not press too close’ a desirable experience, and mountain travel met this new need.

Burke also identified solitude as a sublime experience: ‘Temporary solitude...is itself agreeable...[But] an entire life of solitude contradicts the purposes of our being...[D]eath itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.’¹⁰ Many early visitors to the mountains identified solitude as one of the most appealing features of the landscapes they sought out – a reaction to their increasingly overcrowded lives in the cities – and access to open spaces came to be seen as a symbol of human freedom. In 1848 John Stuart Mill wrote that ‘solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without’.¹¹

In 1769, 30 years after his journey through the Alps with Horace Walpole, Thomas Gray wrote his Journal of the Lakes, an account that established the Lake District as the definitively sublime English landscape of ‘turbulent chaos’ and ‘shining purity’. By the 1780s, visitors were pouring into the Lake District and Snowdonia, and the more adventurous began to visit Switzerland and Savoy. Most early visitors, like many tourists today, did not stray far from the roads and were content to admire the views from the valley, but in 1792 Joseph Budworth, a retired army captain who had lost his arm at the siege of Gibraltar, walked some 385km/240 miles through the Lake District, hiring local guides to take him into the high fells. The account of his travels encouraged the development of fell walking as a respectable and fashionable pastime that combined an aesthetic appreciation of the landscape with a distinctly sporting attitude to movement through the mountains. In Britain, an activity may be said to have entered the cultural mainstream when it becomes the object of popular humour. A tour of the Lakes achieved this status in 1811 when it was satirised in William Combe’s illustrated poem The Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of the Picturesque.¹²

In Scotland the original rationale for mountain exploration was primarily military, to extend the network of roads, bridges and forts set up by General Wade after the first Jacobite uprising in 1715, and used to subdue the second in 1745. Captain Birt, a surveyor under Wade’s command in the 1720s, used the conventional vocabulary of the time to describe the Scottish mountains as ‘monstrous excrescences...rude and offensive to the sight...their huge naked rocks producing the disagreeable appearance of a scabbed head...a dismal gloomy brown drawing upon a dirty purple and most of all disagreeable when the heather is in bloom’.¹³ As the security threat receded, the country gradually opened up to more peaceful travel, but perceptions of the landscape were slow to change. In 1773, the committed urbanite Dr Johnson undertook a tour of Scotland during which he observed of the Highlands that ‘an eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility...[T]his uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller.’¹⁴ Over the ensuing decades, painters and writers depicting a romantic landscape of shining lochs, gnarled Caledonian pines, craggy mountains and regal stags transformed this uniformity of barrenness into highly desirable real estate for the leisured classes. Today, one of General Wade’s military roads forms part of the West Highland Way, along which dozens of travellers may be seen each day trudging through the peat and rain, presumably in the hope and expectation that it will afford some amusement.

The fresh appeal of the mountains was publicised in pictures, plays, poems and novels. Englishmen purchased paintings by Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and their many eighteenth-century followers, copiers and imitators,¹⁵ and there was a flourishing trade in prints. By the nineteenth century, landscape painting, which was virtually unknown before the seventeenth century, had become the dominant art form, and for many urban visitors to the country the appeal of the landscape lay in its similarity to the pictures they had been taught to admire, hence the expression ‘picturesque’. Turner visited the Alps in 1802, producing his Alpine Sketchbook which was later championed by Ruskin in his paean to ‘mountain gloom and mountain glory’¹⁶ and helped to define the idea of mountain beauty in the mid-nineteenth century. Like other landscape painters, Turner also sought to capture the moral dimension of the mountains as ‘chastisers of human vanity and hubris’:¹⁷ it was no coincidence that he painted Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps in 1812, the year of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.

The English Romantic poets were also energetic propagandists for the new natural aesthetic. For a time Coleridge and Wordsworth lived some 13 miles apart in the Lake District, in Keswick and Grasmere respectively. Both were prodigious walkers and regularly set out on foot to visit each other, returning the same day. Both of them also went climbing, Wordsworth as a schoolboy in search of birds’ eggs, Coleridge in search of sensation. Coleridge’s description of descending Broad Stand on Scafell in the Lake District in 1802 is the first literary account of an adrenaline-rush brought about by rock climbing:¹⁸ ‘Every Drop increased the Palsy of my Limbs’, he wrote of his descent, and when he reached the safety of Mickledore he ‘lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight – and blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason and the Will, which remaining no danger can overpower us!’ In his account, the landscape was merely the backdrop against which he experienced a personal drama of risk and fear.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the idea that mountains are beautiful and worthy of exploration for their aesthetic appeal was revolutionary. By the mid-nineteenth century the idea was commonplace amongst the urban professional classes, but it was still a concept that would have been incomprehensible to the majority of the population at that time, as they struggled to make a living. Leslie Stephen, an early pioneer of alpine climbing, was taken aback when a visiting Swiss guide found the rooftops and chimneys of London far finer than the view from Mont Blanc. Likewise, Cecil Slingsby, the Yorkshire-born ‘father of Norwegian mountaineering’, once told his guide that he thought the view of the fjord and mountains from his house was very fine. The guide shook his head philosophically: ‘Not so fertile,’ he replied.¹⁹ To the people who actually lived and worked in the mountains, the romantic ideal was absurd. Amateur mountaineering (as opposed to professional guiding) was overwhelmingly an activity undertaken by rich, well-educated men, and later women, who lived in the towns and cities of the plains, and the appeal of the mountains lay, in large part, in their contrast to a comfortable life in town. Even Wordsworth conceded that ‘cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions’.²⁰

AESTHETES AND HEROES

Relief from the day-to-day toil of earning a living from the land also enabled the emerging urban middle classes to entertain thoughts of personal liberty and self-fulfilment. Both were an essential part of the Romantic movement. Romantic heroes are vigorous and passionate individualists, with little regard for the social consequences of their actions; love, hate, resentment and jealousy, martial ardour and contempt for cowards are all admired. They are frequently selfish, solitary, violent, anti-social and anarchic.²¹ Some climbers clearly conform to this aspect of the romantic tradition, even if they may appear to lack any aesthetic appreciation. Many more are attracted by the mildly anarchic self-image of the sport, and even the most law-abiding climbers appear to take some vicarious pride in the antics of the wilder members of the climbing community. As climbing has developed in Britain over the past 200 years, these twin aspects of the Romantic movement – the aesthetic and the heroic – have developed side by side, sometimes complementary, sometimes in conflict. Aesthetes emphasise the beauty and spiritual appeal of the mountains and man’s emotional response to the landscape. The heroic school is more concerned with personal courage and the pursuit of freedom and self-fulfilment. While the aesthetic school is contemplative, the heroic is competitive. The aesthete seeks harmony with nature; the hero seeks to conquer nature. For the vast majority of climbers today and throughout history, the pleasures of mountaineering combine both elements, and the balance between the two often shifts with increasing years: the uncompromising hero dies young, retires or suffers diminishing returns, while the accumulation of reminiscences and personal associations only adds to the allure of the mountains for the ageing aesthete.

The aesthetic tradition may appear to us now to have been stronger for much of the early part of British climbing history, but this probably reflects the literary record more than reality at the time. In general, aesthetically inclined climbers wrote more books than their heroic contemporaries, who were often content just to climb. The strength of the aesthetic influence in the literary record should not obscure the fact that the heroic tradition, of an anarchic, competitive, sometimes criminal and frequently jingoistic pursuit of individual liberty has been a vital part of British climbing throughout its history, particularly at the leading edge of the sport. After reading Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1754), which advocated the abandonment of civilisation and a return to the life of the ‘natural man’, Voltaire wrote ‘one longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.’²² His thoughts were echoed by a guest staying at the Wasdale Head Inn in the Lake District in the late nineteenth century who described his fellow guests, all of whom were climbers, as ‘men struggling to degenerate into apes’.²³ To this day, many climbers are, perhaps unwittingly, pursuing Rousseau’s ideal of the ‘noble savage’ for a few weeks each year.

Pococke and Windham, two Englishmen who visited the Alps in 1741, were in many ways the prototype for subsequent generations of British climbers in the heroic rather than aesthetic mould. They arrived in the Chamonix valley with a party of 11 others and camped in fields near the town. Richard Pococke, who had recently travelled in the East, wore an exotic Arab robe. His companion, ‘Boxing’ Windham, had a reputation for rowdy athleticism and had been accused of drunkenness, assault and wanton shooting while studying in Geneva. The entire party was heavily armed. As Windham noted: ‘One is never the worse for it and oftentimes it helps a Man out of a Scrape.’²⁴ They climbed up to Montenvers and descended to the glacier which, as a result of Windham’s memorable description, is still called the Mer de Glace. Standing on the ice, they uncorked a bottle of wine and drank to the success of British arms. Their expedition contained at least three elements that would reappear throughout the history of British climbing: adventure, alcohol and a belligerent contempt for foreigners.

The motives of Colonel Mark Beaufoy, an Englishman who was the first foreigner to climb Mont Blanc (4,807m/15,770ft) in 1787 (the fourth ascent), remain obscure, but the beauty of the mountain landscape does not appear to have made a lasting impression. He had been moved by ‘the desire everyone has to reach the highest places on earth’²⁵ and recorded that ‘he suffered much, thought he had gone blind, got a swelled face and regretted he had undertaken such a thing’.²⁶ Nevertheless, he was the first Englishman to climb a major alpine peak.

In parallel with the Romantic movement, the growing popularisation of science during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century provided a further impetus to mountain exploration. The development of printing technology and publishing spread scientific knowledge as subscription libraries sprang up in major towns and cities and natural history became a popular pastime for the educated classes. Geologists and botanists were pioneering explorers of the British hills. The first recorded ascent of Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis (1,344m/4,406ft), in 1771, and the first recorded rock climb, on Clogwyn Du’r Arddu in Snowdonia in 1798, were both undertaken in order to collect plant specimens. The idea of mountain climbing purely for sport and pleasure had still not been accepted and, in keeping with the spirit of the age, many early pioneers insisted that their motives were primarily scientific. De Saussure, the Geneva-born founder of ‘scientific alpinism’ who sponsored the first ascent of Mont Blanc and made the third himself in 1787, wrote: ‘I was bound to make the scientific observations and experiments which alone gave value to my venture.’²⁷ However, as his Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–96) makes clear, he was interested in far more than natural history, and his book influenced future generations of British climbers to follow in his footsteps for reasons that were often far from scientific.

James Forbes, one of the founding fathers of British mountaineering, also claimed to be primarily motivated by science. He visited the Pyrenees in 1835 and the Alps in 1839, as well as making extensive journeys on foot across the Scottish Highlands, including the first ascent of Sgurr nan Gillean on Skye in 1836. The son of a wealthy banker, Sir William Forbes, and Williamina Belsches, the first love of Sir Walter Scott, Forbes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 23 and became Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh one year later. He was particularly fascinated by glaciology, a subject that attracted widespread interest in Britain following the publication of a book by the Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz in 1840 which suggested that glaciers had once been much more extensive. As evidence accumulated of an ‘Ice Age’ during which glaciers had scooped out the mountains and scoured the valleys of northern Britain, people travelled to the Alps just for the experience of walking on these rivers of ice. Forbes’ book Travels through the Alps of Savoy, published in 1843, contained both scientific observations and the first account in the English language of a series of alpine climbs, including the fourth ascent of the Jungfrau (4,158m/13,642ft) in 1841. The book, which was widely read, communicated Forbes’ enthusiasm for science and the pure joy of climbing: ‘Happy the traveller who...starts on the first day’s walk amongst the Alps in the tranquil morning of a long July day, brushing the early morning dew before him and, armed with his staff, makes for the hill-top – begirt with rock or ice as the case may be – whence he sees the field of his summer’s campaign spread out before him, its wonders, its beauties, and its difficulties, to be explained, to be admired, and to be overcome.’²⁸

Glaciers also had an indirect impact on mountaineering because of the extraordinary popular interest in polar exploration in the first half of the nineteenth century. During the ‘Great Peace’ following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Royal Navy embarked upon a series of exploratory missions that were the most expensive in history before the United States and Soviet space programmes in the second half of the twentieth century. They set out to fill in the blanks on the map of the Congo, the Sahara and the Sahel, but in the period from 1820 to 1850, expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic captured the public imagination more than any other. The great polar explorers became household names, including William Parry, who found the entrance to the North-West Passage in 1819; John Franklin, ‘the man who ate his boots’ during a disastrous overland expedition to Canada’s northern coast in 1822; James Ross, who discovered the northern magnetic pole in 1831 and explored the Antarctic in 1839; and the leaders of numerous overland and naval expeditions that set out to search for Franklin when he and his crew disappeared once again in 1847. Accounts of these journeys in the press and in bestselling books formed part of the childhood experience of the generation of Englishmen that set out to conquer the Alps in the 1850s.

These great exploratory expeditions were, from a practical point of view, quite useless. The North-West Passage proved not to be a passage (although global warming has since made it one), the Arctic and Antarctic had no economic or strategic significance, and the leaders of the expeditions were often extraordinarily incompetent. But the public celebrated their failures almost more than their successes. To Victorians, explorers represented the romantic ideal of a quest: a reminder of England’s chivalrous and buccaneering past. With its combination of hardship and heroism, polar exploration, in particular, had the effect of making a virtue out of suffering. Franklin appeared alongside Frobisher, Drake, Cook and Nelson in children’s books, and a whole generation of young men grew up in the mid-nineteenth century with the ambition to become explorers and to suffer. Most of them never went near the poles, but some found that there was a region of glaciers and snow, accessible by railway in the heart of Europe, where it was possible to become an explorer for a few weeks each summer. Many of the first generation of alpine climbers openly acknowledged the inspiration that polar exploration provided. Edward Whymper, the conqueror of the Matterhorn, wanted to be a polar explorer. Even Leslie Stephen, the great mid-Victorian intellectual, confessed that in the Alps he imagined himself walking across the Arctic wastes to encourage himself to keep going.

The importance of exploration was reflected in the status of the Royal Geographical Society, which was founded in 1830 and to this day occupies ‘the best country house in London’ on the edge of Hyde Park at Kensington Gore. The link between exploration, suffering and heroism was openly acknowledged. An article in 1881, celebrating the first 50 years of the Society, referred to them as ‘the most perilous and therefore the most glorious’.²⁹ As the Empire expanded, so too did the need for geographers to survey, map and catalogue the resources of the conquered territories, and since high mountain ranges frequently form natural boundaries, exploration in mountainous areas on the edge of the Empire often had a military and strategic, as well as purely geographic, significance. In the Himalaya, in particular, much of the early exploration was motivated by the need to define and defend the boundaries between the British, Russian and Chinese empires. Ambitious and courageous young men were naturally drawn to this ‘Great Game’, which combined nationalism and heroism in romantic surroundings.

Europeans were late to realise the scale of the Himalaya, and when a reconnaissance expedition by Lieutenant Webb and Captain Raper in 1808 calculated the height of Dhaulagiri at 8,188m/26,862ft they were astonished by the result. Until that time it was widely assumed that the Andes were the highest mountains in the world. In 1848–50 Sir Joseph Hooker, a botanist and protégé of Charles Darwin who had already sailed to Antarctica with Captain James Ross, made a number of journeys into the Himalaya from Darjeeling to Sikkim. He also crossed into eastern Nepal (an area subsequently closed to Europeans for nearly a century), reaching the border of Tibet. When he was arrested and held prisoner by the Raja of Sikkim, the East India Company annexed a portion of southern Sikkim, thereby bringing the British Raj to the foot of Kangchenjunga (8,586m/28,169ft), the third highest peak in the world. The Survey of India started mapping the foothills of the Himalaya in 1846, and the height of Everest (8,848m/29,028ft) was first determined in 1852. Until 1883, when the first purely sporting expedition took place, the main purpose of Himalayan exploration was military and scientific: to map and survey the land and to collect specimens. The remoteness and huge extent of the region made it a scientific curiosity for much longer than the Alps, and British expeditions to the region often tried, usually unsuccessfully, to combine scientific and sporting objectives until the 1930s. As a result of this legacy, and a more recent dispute over ownership of photographs from the 1953 Everest expedition, the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society have a somewhat uneasy relationship to this day.

While scientific and military considerations motivated much early mountain exploration, for John Ruskin the overwhelming attraction was aesthetic. Ruskin was the son of a prosperous sherry merchant in the City of London who bemoaned the fact that his son knew ‘the shape of every needle round Mont Blanc, and could not tell you now where Threadneedle Street is’.³⁰ Like Rousseau, Ruskin was a social critic and reformer, but whereas mountains were merely a backdrop for Rousseau’s social and political ideas, Ruskin saw the appreciation and understanding of mountain beauty as an end in itself. He was a gifted public orator, with the ability to speak with absolute conviction on a huge range of topics, and was as popular at working men’s clubs as he was at Eton and Oxford.

Ruskin became a convert to and prophet of the cult of mountains after making his first visit to the Alps and reading De Saussure’s Voyage dans les Alpes in 1833 at the age of 14. He went on to visit the Alps 19 times between 1833 and 1888. A visionary and frequently contradictory thinker and aesthete, he loved mountains and hated mountaineers with almost equal passion. Domineering and protective parents combined with a lack of personal initiative meant that he never climbed himself and, perhaps as a consequence, he despised people who did, regarding almost any intrusion into the high mountain environment as a sacrilege. He identified the heroic tendency in many climbers – ‘the real ground for reprehension of Alpine climbing is that with less cause, it excites more vanity than any other athletic skill’ – and rejected it forcefully: ‘True lovers of natural beauty...would as soon think of climbing the pillars of the choir at Beauvais for a gymnastic exercise, as of making a playground of Alpine snow.’³¹ An accomplished artist, he was also profoundly influenced by scientific developments and had ambitions to become president of the Geological Society. He particularly admired the works of Alexander von Humboldt, the great German explorer and scientist, and the pioneering geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell, who popularised the concept that the present landscape is the key to the past. In Modern Painters Volume IV: Of Mountain Beauty (1856), Ruskin set out to open people’s eyes to mountain beauty by interpreting its individual components, using a slightly uneasy combination of artistic criticism and scientific analysis, while maintaining an awareness of the aesthetic and spiritual value of the landscape as a whole. The book had a major influence on many early alpinists, including Leslie Stephen, redefining their perception of beauty.

In a typical example of his sometimes contradictory thinking, Ruskin saw the mountains as sacred examples of God’s work but, despite his opposition to climbing, he also recognised that they might be a means for men to test and discover themselves. In a letter to his father in 1863 he wrote: ‘If you come to a dangerous place, and turn back from it, though it may have been perfectly right and wise to do so, still your character has suffered some slight deterioration: you are to that extent weaker, more lifeless, more effeminate, more liable to passion and error in future; whereas if you go through with the danger, though it may have been apparently rash and foolish to encounter it, you come out of the encounter a stronger and better man, fitter for every sort of work or trial, and nothing but danger produces this effect.’³² This was far more than Burke’s eighteenth-century idea that terror ‘always produces delight when it does not press too close’. By the mid-nineteenth century deliberately seeking out risk and danger had become morally desirable.

Changing attitudes to the moral value of danger reflected the huge influence of the theory of evolution set out by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), which was subtitled The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The biological concept of evolution rapidly became woven into almost every aspect of British thought, providing an apparent justification for imperialism abroad and sharp class divisions at home. But the theory also gave rise to self-doubt, that evolution might be followed by dissolution, and that increasing wealth and comfort were making British society soft and decadent. It was the political philosopher Herbert Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, and the idea of economic and social Darwinism spurred the British to ever greater efforts to demonstrate their ‘fitness’ in both their work and leisure pursuits. In Germany, Nietzsche also believed in the moral value of danger and saw in mountaineering the perfect testing ground for his cult of the hero and contempt for weakness: ‘The discipline of suffering – of great suffering – know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto...This hardness is requisite for every mountain climber.’³³ Nietzsche’s philosophy influenced German-speaking climbers, many of whom were students, from the late nineteenth century onwards, and through the writing of German and Austrian mountaineers it had a profound impact on the post-war generation of British climbers in the 1950s and 60s.

Under the influence of eighteenth-century notions of the sublime, mountain travellers had already experienced feelings of awe, terror and exultation once reserved for God. By the mid to late nineteenth century, as urbanisation, industrialisation and scientific developments, including the theory of evolution, progressively undermined the authority of the established church, the experience of walking and climbing in the mountains became at least a partial substitute for traditional religious observance for a growing number of people. At the time of its formation in 1857 more than a quarter of the members of the Alpine Club were clergymen, but many of their books and diaries come close to idolatry. St Augustine warned against confusing the created with the creator, which he regarded as the fundamental sin of paganism. By this standard many of the Victorian reverends who climbed in the Alps were certainly pagans and some were practically animists, ascribing emotions and intentions to the mountains that they climbed. While many saw in the beauty of the mountains confirmation of the existence of God through the perfection of his creation, others lost their religious faith but found a sort of secular pantheism that satisfied their need for spiritual renewal.

In 1825 the first railway in the world was constructed from Stockton to Darlington. Within a few decades all the major centres of population in Britain were connected by rail, and the ability to travel significant distances in relative comfort combined with the growth of the middle class and increasing leisure to create a sports boom. During the 1850s, 62 new race meetings were added to the calendar; the rules of boxing were established in 1857, those of football in 1859 and rugby union in 1871. The first county cricket matches were played in 1873 and the first Wimbledon lawn tennis championship took place in 1877.³⁴ Soon the railways were advancing beyond the towns and cities into the mountains, opening up once remote parts of the country to visitors from the cities. In 1844, at the age of 74, Wordsworth was indignant at a proposal to extend the railway from Manchester beyond Kendal to Windermere, fearing that the Lakes would be inundated with ‘the whole of Lancashire, and no small part of Yorkshire’.³⁵

In the Alps, the great passes became accessible to wheeled transport from 1800, initially as a result of Napoleon’s military road-building programme. Railways followed from 1847 onwards and contributed to the dramatic growth of tourism. A thousand new inns and hotels were built between 1845 and 1880, many of them above 1,000m. Thomas Cook conducted his first alpine tour to Geneva and Mont Blanc in 1863. The tour in 1864 was extended to include Interlaken and Kandersteg. John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland in 1838 indicated a journey time by coach from London to Geneva or Basle of 14 days, including two days in Paris, at a cost of £20. By 1852, using railways, the journey time had reduced to three days and the cost to just £2.³⁶

Many of the mountain pioneers were aware that the sacred beauty they so admired was under threat from these developments. They saw the damage that was being done to the English countryside and feared that the Alps would go the same way. As the inhabitants of Grindelwald hacked away at their glaciers and exported the ice to Parisian restaurants, and railways headed up once remote and silent valleys, Ruskin thundered: ‘You have despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made racecourses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars.’³⁷ But ironically, Ruskin’s own writing, painting and photography simply attracted more tourists to the mountains.

By 1850 the stage was set for the development of climbing as a sport. Since 1815, a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity had created a sizeable professional class of ambitious young men who had been taught to regard gloomy forests and icy mountains as objects of glorious beauty. Their heroes were explorers who braved extreme hardships to chart the unknown, the wild and the savage. Their education emphasised the virtues of ‘muscular Christianity’ and mens sana in corpore sano and they had leisure: time in which to seek pleasure, purpose and a contrast to their crowded and complex working lives. They believed, as Blake did, that:

Great things are done when men and mountains meet;

This is not done by jostling in the street.

Even Queen Victoria gave her stamp of approval to the nascent sport by making a somewhat sedate progress to the summit of Lochnagar near Balmoral Castle in 1848. All that was needed to set off the explosion of alpine climbing activity that started in 1854 was publicity. It was Albert Smith, the greatest mountaineering showman of all time, who lit the fuse.

Albert Smith was born in Chertsey in 1816 and studied medicine in Paris for a time before earning a living as a journalist writing for magazines including Punch. Since childhood he had harboured the ambition to climb Mont Blanc, and after several attempts he finally succeeded in 1851. He staggered up the mountain dressed in scarlet gaiters and Scotch plaid trousers, with three Oxford undergraduates wearing light boating attire, 16 guides and a score of porters laden with 93 bottles of wine, three bottles of cognac, loaves, cheeses, chocolates, legs of mutton and 46 fowls. Not surprisingly, he fell asleep on the summit.

One of the undergraduates was the nephew of Sir Robert Peel, a former Tory prime minister, who happened to be in Chamonix at the time and greeted their success with a huge party. By coincidence, John Ruskin was also in Chamonix, and it was probably Smith’s triumphant return that inspired him to write his famous condemnation of the vulgarisation of the Alps some 15 years later: ‘The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a beer-garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again with “shrieks of delight”. When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction.’³⁸

If Ruskin was the great prophet of mountain beauty, Smith was the great populariser. Returning to London, he made his ascent of Mont Blanc the subject of an ‘entertainment’ that ran for six years and featured two chamois, several St Bernard dogs and three pretty barmaids from Chamonix dressed in Bernese costumes. The show made Smith a wealthy man. He wrote The Story of Mont Blanc in 1853, and by the summer of 1855 Britain was gripped with ‘Mont Blanc mania’ according to The Times. Special music was composed, including the Chamonix Polka and the Mont Blanc Quadrille; both were hits.

Smith’s success was not greeted with unqualified enthusiasm. The Daily News wrote: ‘De Saussure’s observations and reflections on Mont Blanc live in his poetical philosophy; those of Mr. Albert Smith will be most appropriately recorded in a tissue of indifferent puns and stale fast witticisms, with an incessant straining after smartness. The aimless scramble of the four pedestrians to the top of Mont Blanc, with the accompaniment of Sir Robert Peel’s orgies at the bottom, will not go far to redeem the somewhat equivocal reputation of the herd of English tourists in Switzerland, for a mindless and rather vulgar redundance of animal spirits.’³⁹ Another contemporary noted that his initials were only two-thirds of the truth. However, the show was a huge success with the public and Smith was summoned to Osborne for a command performance before Queen Victoria, who evidently enjoyed it because the following year Smith gave a repeat performance at Windsor Castle before the court and King Leopold I of Belgium. Smith went on to become an original member of the Alpine Club, an institution that later gained a well-deserved reputation for exclusive snobbery, but Smith was in fact the first member to have climbed Mont Blanc, and in its early years the Alpine Club welcomed enthusiasts almost regardless of their social background. The arch conservative Douglas Freshfield gave a fair assessment when he said that Smith ‘had a genuine passion for Mont Blanc, which fortune or rather his own enthusiasm enabled him to put to profit’.⁴⁰

Smith was the first in a long line of climbers who tried to turn their pastime to profit, including Edward Whymper, Captain John Noel, Frank Smythe and Chris Bonington. All of these were far more competent climbers than Smith, but none of them earned as much as he did from the sport. Thanks in part to the extraordinary publicity generated by Albert Smith, the Golden Age of British climbing was about to begin.