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
