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Early alpine club culture and mountaineering literature
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2015 |
| Description | Book Name: Mountaineering Tourism |
| 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 – physicallysighted 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... |
| Related Links | https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9781315769202-18&type=chapterpdf |
| Ending Page | 144 |
| Page Count | 14 |
| Starting Page | 131 |
| DOI | 10.4324/9781315769202-18 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited |
| Publisher Date | 2015-06-05 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Book Name: Mountaineering Tourism Literary Reviews Europe London Victorian Mountaineering |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Chapter |
