in Cornwall near his holiday home in St Ives, in 1858. In 1867, at the age of 35, he married and curtailed his climbing activities, later establishing a society called the ‘Sunday Tramps’, who went on long walks through the English countryside. Their motto was ‘High Thinking and Plain Living’, and Douglas Freshfield, Martin Conway and Clinton Dent (all three future presidents of the Alpine Club) were members.
Although self-revelation (no doubt selective) was not uncommon, critical comments about the personalities of fellow climbers (but not guides) were largely banished from nineteenth-century mountain literature by the conventions of the time. In many cases companions were simply referred to by an initial. Candid accounts of fellow climbers were not at all common until well after the Second World War, and therefore reliable descriptions of the character and personality of the early climbers by third parties are comparatively rare, barring obsequious, or at least highly coded, obituaries. However, because of his many literary associations, it is possible to obtain several different descriptions of Stephen. In To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, the father, Mr Ramsay, is clearly based on Stephen. He is a distant, austere and needy individual, self-centred and insecure. The character of Vernon Whitford, a scholarly, unworldly idealist, in George Meredith’s The Egoist was also based on Stephen. In later life, he appears to have become a solitary, difficult and demanding man. When a visitor outstayed his welcome he became visibly agitated and muttered, quite audibly, to himself, ‘Why can’t he go? Why can’t he go?’ A contemporary described him as ‘critical yet deprecating, sarcastic and mournful...not one who ranks either himself or others very high’.24
Even allowing for increasing age, it is hard to believe that this is the same man who played cricket in the main square of Zinal in Switzerland ‘with a rail for a bat and a granite boulder for a ball. My first performance was a brilliant hit to leg...off Macdonald’s bowling. To my horror I sent the ball clean through the western window of the chapel.’25 Or who, returning from the first ascent of Monte Disgrazia in two carriages with Edward Kennedy and Melchior Anderegg, tried to ‘get up an Olympic chariot race’ and then sat up drinking champagne until the early hours. His account of climbing in the Golden Age is full of the heedless fun of climbing: ‘It was necessary to cut steps as big as soup tureens, for the result of a slip would in all probability have been that the rest of our lives would have been spent sliding down a snow slope and that the employment would not have lasted long enough to become at all monotonous.’26 The apparent contradiction between the levity, humour and mild anarchism of Stephen the climber and the melancholic austerity of Stephen the father and intellectual perhaps explains the appeal of alpinism for many mid-Victorians.
Stephen was president of the Alpine Club from 1866 to 1868 and Editor of the Alpine Journal. Together with John Tyndall, he was in many ways the Club’s intellectual mentor in its early years. Elected to the Metaphysical Society, whose diverse membership included William Gladstone, Walter Bagehot, Cardinal Manning, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin and Thomas Huxley, Stephen helped to turn the Alps into a ruggedly congenial meeting place for members of the intellectual upper middle class of the mid-Victorian generation, in much the same way as Geoffrey Winthrop Young did for a later generation with his Pen-y-Pass meets in Wales. On a rare visit to the Club towards the end of the century he wrote: ‘It was queer enough to go to the old place, and I feel that I was regarded with curiosity like a revived mammoth out of an iceberg.’27 Safety-conscious, despite his apparently flippant attitude, he was an opponent of guideless climbing but recognised that risk and danger are a vital part of the sport, noting that ‘no advertisement of Alpine adventure is so attractive as a clear demonstration that it is totally unjustifiable’. Writing of his first ascent of the Zinal Rothorn, he made two observations that have stood the test of time: ‘One, that on the first ascent a mountain, in obedience to some mysterious law, is always more difficult than at any succeeding ascent; secondly, that nothing can be less like a mountain at one time than the same mountain at another.’28
If Stephen was the scholarly aesthete of the Golden Age, Edward Whymper was its flawed hero. Stephen called him the Robespierre of mountaineering.29 The son of a commercial artist, he trained as a wood engraver and always felt a sense of social inferiority, trying hard not to drop his ‘aitches’. Throughout his life he was incapable of close relationships or lasting friendships, and from boyhood he exercised a steely self-discipline and pursued the goal ‘that I should one day turn out some great person’.30 His original ambition was to become an Arctic explorer, which would have suited his temperament well, but in 1860 he was commissioned to produce a series of alpine sketches and transferred his ambitions to the mountains. In 1861 he climbed Mont Pelvoux (PD, 3,946m/12,946ft) and was elected to the Alpine Club. He then set his sights on the Weisshorn, ‘the noblest [mountain] in Switzerland’,31 but immediately lost interest when he heard that it had been climbed by Tyndall. Thereafter he focused his attention on the Matterhorn which, because of its magnificent shape, commanding position above Zermatt and apparent impregnability, had become the greatest prize in the Alps.
After making unsuccessful attempts on the Matterhorn in 1862 and 1863, Whymper joined forces with Adolphus Moore and Horace Walker in 1864 for a successful 10 day campaign in the Dauphiné Alps, including the first ascent of the Barre des Écrins (PD, 4,101m/13,454ft). He then made three first ascents in the Mont Blanc area before being summoned back to London before the end of the season. Following a winter of detailed planning, over a period of 24 days from 13 June to 7 July 1865, he made four first ascents, including the Grandes Jorasses Pointe Whymper (AD, 4,208m/13,805ft) and the Aiguille Verte by the Whymper Couloir (AD, 4,122m/13,524ft), and crossed 11 passes.
He also climbed the Dent Blanche (AD, 4,356m/14,291ft) in poor weather, apparently believing that Thomas Kennedy had failed to reach the summit in 1862 and unaware that it had also been climbed by another party in 1864. When he saw through a break in the clouds ‘about twenty yards off’ the outline of a cairn on the summit ‘it was needless to proceed further; I jerked the rope...and motioned [to my guide] that we should go back’.32
On his ninth attempt, at the age of 25, Whymper finally succeeded in climbing the Matterhorn by the Hörnli Ridge (AD) on 14 July 1865. On the descent disaster struck. Four members of the party fell to their death: Charles Hudson; the young and inexperienced Douglas Hadow; Lord Francis Douglas, the younger brother of the Marquis of Queensberry; and their guide Michel Croz. The death of Hudson was particularly shocking because he was regarded as the best amateur climber of the day. The triumph of reaching the summit of the Matterhorn was the crowning achievement of the Golden Age. The tragedy on the descent marked the end of the era. Whymper effectively abandoned alpine climbing after the accident, although he did return to the Matterhorn in 1874, making the 76th ascent. ‘Soon the biggest duffers in Christendom will be able to go up’,33 he wrote in his diary. Today the Zermatt guides claim that they could take a cow to the summit.
The ascent of the Matterhorn was the first climb to receive widespread media coverage, as a result of the accident, and the first to become the focus of competition inspired by nationalism. Both were to become major features of the sport in later years. In the patriotic fervour created by the unification of Italy, the Italian guide Jean Antoine Carrel, who had fought against the Austrians at the battle of Solferino in 1859, was determined that the peak should be climbed by an Italian from the Italian side. When Whymper succeeded in reaching the summit first from the Swiss side, he triumphantly threw rocks down the face to attract the attention of Carrel and his party below. Carrel climbed the Matterhorn by the harder route from Breuil (now called Cervinia) three days later, ‘to avenge our country’s honour’.34
Whymper was the first leading climber apparently motivated solely by the heroic impulse. He found little beauty in the mountains. Seeing for the first time the mountain with which his name would forever become linked, he recorded in his diary: ‘Saw of course the Matterhorn repeatedly; what precious stuff Ruskin has written about this, as well as about other things...Grand it is, but beautiful I think it is not.’35 His writing contains few descriptions other than the act of climbing, and first ascents were his sole preoccupation. He saw himself as fighting and
