{"id":42303,"date":"2012-11-26T14:30:53","date_gmt":"2012-11-26T19:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=42303"},"modified":"2012-11-27T11:54:40","modified_gmt":"2012-11-27T16:54:40","slug":"peaks-and-valleys-leslie-stephen-mountaineer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/26\/peaks-and-valleys-leslie-stephen-mountaineer\/","title":{"rendered":"Peaks and Valleys: Leslie Stephen, Mountaineer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Leslie Stephen is best known today as the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. But in his day, Stephen was a distinguished critic and author in his own right. And, not incidentally, a pioneering mountaineer who made early and important contributions to the literature of what is known as the golden age of alpinism.<\/p>\n

Leslie Stephen arrived in Cambridge University in 1851 with a fair amount of emotional and intellectual baggage. His father, James Stephen, was the colonial undersecretary, a pretty big job at the height of the British Empire. His older brothers, Herbert and James Fitzjames, had preceded him at Cambridge. Herbert had recently died of a fever in Dresden, on his way home from Constantinople, a tragedy that rocked the family confidence and strength, especially that of the overworked elder James, who began heading down a steady decline. James Fitzjames, meanwhile, quickly stepped with authority into the role of eldest son. He was an Apostle at Cambridge (Leslie was not), and moved swiftly to follow in his father\u2019s footsteps toward a distinguished legal career. James Stephen played a central role in abolishing slavery in the British Empire; James Fitzjames Stephen went on to singlehandedly write the criminal code of India.<\/p>\n

Leslie Stephen was cut from different cloth: he was a skinny weakling who had become addicted to narrative poetry in early adolescence. Because he was clearly the most sensitive of James Stephen\u2019s sons, his father marked him for the clergy, and he would indeed be ordained in the Anglican Church. Certainly, academia suited him; while he was ever respectful towards his family, Leslie Stephen seems to have been immediately liberated and invigorated upon his arrival at Cambridge, quickly setting out on a journey of self-discovery that turned out to be quite different from his father\u2019s expectations. He flourished, and began the process of building a life and career of which any father would be quite proud.<\/p>\n

He even took up physical pursuits, starting with rowing.\u00a0He wasn\u2019t a good oarsman, but he became shockingly good at running down the path alongside the river, and ultimately would set the Cambridge record for the mile. There was already a strong Stephen walking tradition, in which Leslie\u2019s frailty hadn\u2019t allowed him to\u00a0participate fully, but he soon took to this, too. His course of adventure had a\u00a0philosophical bent; having developed into a competent mathematician and \u201cwrangler\u201d at Cambridge, he received a fellowship at his college, and studied philosophy and German.\u00a0In 1857 he went on a walking tour through Germany, and at the end of it he got his first view of the Alps.<\/p>\n

The story of the birth of mountaineering is\u00a0known well enough, but few people and scholars realize or care that Virginia Woolf\u2019s father was a key participant in this great saga of exploration and adventure.\u00a0Three factors, and probably more, came together to get the sport going:\u00a0railroad travel, which made the Alps accessible; the Romantic development of the concept of the\u00a0Sublime, which drew tourists to the\u00a0peaks; and the hard-driving Victorian development\u00a0of exploration, technology, science, muscularity, and leisure.\u00a0Stephen found himself standing around Interlaken just as the first English tourists were hiring local Swiss as guides to try to climb\u00a0on the glaciers and into the high country. At twenty-five years old, a Cambridge don who was running ten or twenty miles a day along the river and who had just breezed through a 200-plus-mile tour of Germany, Stephen was ready. He returned to Cambridge, thinking he might return the next summer and have a go.<\/p>\n

While Stephen\u2019s career as a mountaineer was relatively brief, it happened to coincide perfectly with the golden age of alpinism, the initial phase of the conquering of the Alps.\u00a0Stephen climbed for seven summers, arriving in Switzerland in late July and returning to England by early September, and each season consisted of a tour of \u201cpeaks, passes, and glaciers\u201d still\u00a0ambitious by any standard.\u00a0He came to the sport with an outstanding level of fitness, unperturbed by walking thirty to forty miles or more in a single day, and from spring onwards he would have spent a day or two each week rising at dawn and walking until well after\u00a0nightfall.\u00a0In his first season he also found an extraordinary guide, Melchior Anderegg of Meinringen, a small Oberland village near Interlaken, who would later be acknowledged as one of the\u00a0very best climbers\/guides of the\u00a0era.\u00a0Stephen and Anderegg were full partners, and they were a self-contained team, spending weeks on their\u00a0own exploring the high country, establishing new routes, climbing peaks, and bagging first ascents.\u00a0These included the Rothorn and the formidable Schrekhorn, and they brought Stephen some fame.<\/p>\n

Leslie Stephen\u2019s mountaineering pursuits also played a definite role in helping him become a writer.\u00a0He was a charter member of the Alpine Club, and one of its early presidents.\u00a0In its first formation, the club consisted of a small group of pioneers gathering to discuss their tours and plans for the following season. This was done with a standard Victorian formality; members read their accounts, and the classic form of the mountaineering narrative took shape.\u00a0The\u00a0best\u00a0and most characteristic accounts were published by the Club in an annual volume, initially called Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers<\/em>.\u00a0Shortly afterwards, individuals began to publish the first books about mountain travel, the explosive bestseller being\u00a0Edward Whymper\u2019s Scrambles Amongst the\u00a0Alps<\/em>,\u00a0which tells the tale of his single-minded conquest of the Matterhorn and the terrible accident on the descent, when a rope broke and seven lives were lost.<\/p>\n

The first published work of \u201cthe Rev. Leslie Stephen, M.A. Fellow and Tutor of Trinity Hall, Cambridge\u201d is \u201cThe\u00a0Allelein-Horn,\u201d in Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel in 1860<\/em>, edited by Francis Galton.\u00a0This volume contains entries on \u201cNaples and Garibaldi,\u201d \u201cSlavonic Races,\u201d\u00a0\u201cA Visit to\u00a0Peru,\u201d \u201cNorway,\u201d and \u201cSyrian Travel and Syrian Tribes,\u201d as well as \u201cPartial Ascent of Mont Cervin (Matterhorn),\u201d by F. V. Hawkins, and \u201cFrom Lauterbrunnen to the Aeggishhorn by the Lauwinen-Thor in One Day,\u201d by John Tyndall.<\/p>\n

At this point, Stephen\u2019s body of non-climbing work was small. His first professional writing consisted of a series of essays published in the Pall Mall Gazettte<\/em> in 1865 as \u201cSketches From Cambridge, by a Don.\u201d\u00a0The small book was reprinted by Oxford University Press in 1932 with a foreward by G. M. Trevalyan, and the first two chapters are \u201cThe Rowing\u00a0Man\u201d and \u201cAthletic Sports,\u201d which says something about the author\u2019s concerns. In 1871 he collected his mountaineering essays for the first time and published The Playground of Europe<\/em>. The book is a mountaineering classic, and it has been published in different editions\u00a0over the years, certain essays falling in and out.<\/p>\n

Whatever his posthumous reputation in the general literary world, Stephen remains a giant in that of climbing. And his attitude might be summed up by his words, \u201cI believe that the ascent of mountains forms an essential chapter in the complete duty of man, and that it is wrong to leave any district without setting foot on its highest peak.\u201d
\nAlex Siskin studied for his Ph.D in English at U.C. Berkeley before becoming a film producer at Sony Pictures. He blogs at zhiv.wordpress.com.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Leslie Stephen is best known today as the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. But in his day, Stephen was a distinguished critic and author in his own right. And, not incidentally, a pioneering mountaineer who made early and important contributions to the literature of what is known as the golden age of alpinism. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":443,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[9296,9297,9298,969],"class_list":["post-42303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-hiking","tag-leslie-stephen","tag-mountaineering","tag-virginia-woolf"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPeaks and Valleys: Leslie Stephen, Mountaineer by Alex Siskin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 26, 2012 \u2013 Leslie Stephen is best known today as the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. 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