William Cecil Slingsby, Norway, and British Mountaineering, 1872–1914^*

Using the example of William Cecil Slingsby (1849–1929), one of the leading British alpinists active before 1914, this article reassesses late-Victorian and Edwardian mountaineering. It is particularly concerned with the motivations of mountaineers: what drew individuals such as Slingsby to the heights of Norway and elsewhere? Engaging with recent trends in scholarship, the article argues that interpretations which assign priority to aggressively masculine and imperialistic factors can be problematic. As Slingsby’s example shows, climbing was closely associated with a particular form of manliness throughout the period between the 1870s and the Great War, but the performance of this manliness involved embracing a cheerful domesticity as well as valorising robustly male derring-do and toughness in adversity. As for imperialist motivations, by the late nineteenth century these mattered less than might be thought, even to mountaineers who—like Slingsby—were ardent imperialists. A second and important aim of this article is to shed light on British cultural interactions with Norway. In his day, Slingsby was perhaps the best-known Englishman in Norway, and he was certainly one of the leading promoters of Anglo-Norwegian exchange in Britain. His mountaineering was importantly connected to the ethnic and philological ties he and other contemporaries (such as W.G. Collingwood) discerned between the two countries. Finally, the article also seeks to draw attention to Slingsby himself, a figure about whom almost nothing has been written by professional historians, despite his significance as a mountaineer and the existence of a considerable body of archival evidence relating to his life.

In 1923, the British mountaineer George Mallory was asked by an American newspaper reporter why he wanted to climb Everest. ‘Because it is there’, Mallory replied.¹ It was a response that was to become famous, not least because of Mallory’s disappearance and death on the mountain the following year. It was also an enigmatic response, offering little explanation as to the motivations of mountaineers. Many other mountaineers have been similarly reticent, and it seems likely that this reticence has done something to frustrate academic inquiry into the history of mountaineering; it remains an understudied subject. This neglect is remarkable because mountaineering is a peculiar and distinctive feature of the modern world, one that emerged as an organised activity only in the nineteenth century. As is well known, in the medieval and early modern periods mountainous regions were widely seen as places of danger to be avoided, cultivated taste judging their landscape to be as repellent as their inhabitants were uncivilised.² The question, therefore, as to why so many people started to view the climbing of mountains as an activity worthwhile in itself—separate from, say, travelling or hunting—is certainly one worth asking, however difficult it may be to answer satisfactorily.

In the context of the ‘cultural turn’ in historical scholarship, this question seems all the more pertinent, and in recent years scholars have addressed it more vigorously.³ Although coverage of the subject as a whole remains patchy, the lineaments of a consensus seem to be emerging, at least as far as British mountaineering is concerned. It has been argued that from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, mountaineering provided middle-class British men with opportunities to display male vigour, to imagine themselves heroic in contradistinction to their sedentary day-to-day lives, and to enjoy homosocial camaraderie in an environment of wild nature from which women were largely excluded. Moreover, it is claimed, the exploration of high places and the making of first ascents was expressive not only of a general desire to overmaster nature, but also of a particularly British desire for empire, the motivations of the mountaineer being akin to those of the imperialist and congruent with the ideology of the wider imperial project. Mountaineering, according to this interpretation, thus emerges as a specifically masculine expression of the imperialism that suffused nineteenth-century British culture.⁴ As Peter Hansen has put it in an important study focussing on the 1850s and 1860s, ‘The invention of mid-Victorian mountaineering’ in these years

demonstrates that middle-class men ... actively constructed an assertive masculinity to uphold their imagined sense of Britain’s imperial power ... Middle-class mountaineers adopted the languages of exploration and adventure from contemporary explorers in the Arctic and Africa to describe their climbing. These languages transformed the ascent of unclimbed Alpine peaks and passes into representations of British masculinity and imperial ‘conquest’ ... Mountain climbing helped to legitimize exploration and the broader imperial expansion by transforming imperialism from an abstraction into something tangible and readily accessible to ambitious professional men ... Not everyone could travel to remote corners of the globe, but middle-class men with a few weeks’ holiday could reach Switzerland and act out the drama of the empire in the Alps.⁵

Building on Hansen’s findings for the mid-Victorian period, it has been further argued that by the later nineteenth century the masculine-imperial ideology of mountaineers was increasingly in tension with earlier conceptualisations of mountains as picturesque or sublime places, as found for example in the poetry of Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Thus, John Ruskin might still have viewed mountains as the ne plus ultra of natural beauty, picturesqueness and sublimity, but those who actually climbed them had a different set of motivations. While no-one would say that all Victorian and Edwardian mountaineers lacked aesthetic sensibility, it has been suggested that this mattered less to their climbing exploits as time passed. Indeed, as Ann Colley has claimed, the climbing of mountains—with its attendant bragging about manly triumphs over adversity, first ascents and imperialistic exploration—significantly weakened the cultural authority of the earlier aesthetic dispensation.⁶ Mountaineers did not so much ‘sink the sublime’, to adapt the subtitle of Colley’s recent book on the subject, as smash it to pieces with their ice axes.⁷

Using the example of the leading alpinist William Cecil Slingsby (1849–1929), this article reassesses the development of mountaineering in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. It argues that the motivations of British mountaineers, even in the age of high imperialism, were a complex compound of factors. Slingsby’s mountaineering was closely associated with a particular form of manliness, but the performance of this manliness involved the embrace of a cheerful domesticity as well as the valorisation of robustly male derring-do and toughness in adversity. As for imperialistic motivations, by the late nineteenth century these were of less importance even to those mountaineers who—as in Slingsby’s case—were ardent supporters of empire. British alpinists climbed for a range of reasons. Ideas of conquest, domination and assertive machismo may have motivated some individuals, but for others, such as Slingsby, mountaineering had more to do with, inter alia, a very personal reverence for nature and a persisting appreciation of the mountain sublime. This was reinforced by Slingsby’s choice to do much of his mountaineering in Norway. A second—and important—aim of this article is therefore to shed light on British cultural interactions with Norway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his day Slingsby was perhaps the best-known Englishman in Norway, and he was certainly one of the leading promoters of Anglo-Norwegian exchange in Britain. His mountaineering was closely connected to the ethnic and philological ties he discerned between the two countries, ties in which he was especially fascinated as a Yorkshireman conscious of what he believed to be his own Norse ancestry. Finally, the article also seeks to draw attention to Slingsby himself, a figure about whom almost nothing has been written by professional historians, despite his significance as a mountaineer and the existence of a considerable body of archival evidence relating to his life, including letters held in the Alpine Club and the National Library of Norway.

Cecil Slingsby was born in 1849 in the hamlet of Bell Busk, near Skipton in Yorkshire. His father William and uncle John were sons of a prosperous farmer with a sideline interest in domestically-based cotton spinning and weaving. On the death of their father, they expanded this element of the family business, rented a water-powered cotton mill at Bell Busk and made enough money to build their own mills at Carleton-in-Craven, the first of which was completed in the year of Cecil Slingsby’s birth, the second in 1861. In 1862, the family moved back to Carleton into a spacious new house with stables, tennis courts, large gardens and accommodation for seven servants; the Slingsbys were therefore wealthy, though they lived less ostentatiously than many other mill-owning families of the time. Slingsby was educated at home before spending two years at Cheltenham College; unlike many alpinists of his generation he did not attend university, leaving school at the age of sixteen to enter the mill business, for which he seems to have displayed some aptitude. Slingsby acted as salesman for his family’s company, and also did much to modernise its production operations. In 1882, he married Alizon Farrer Ecroyd, who herself came from a mill-owning family, and one that was steeped in a protectionist political Conservatism that Slingsby found congenial. Slingsby had five children with Alizon, the youngest of whom (Eleanor) would become a leading alpinist in her own right. After the deaths of his father and uncle the mills were run on a co-ownership basis, with Slingsby and his cousin John Arthur Slingsby having the principal shares in the firm. The two men did not enjoy good relations, however. John Arthur proved increasingly resistant to Cecil’s modernising efforts and ultimately succeeded in forcing him out of the company in 1909. Left without a salary, Slingsby sold off much of the property he held in Carleton, and moved to a house near Morecambe, in Lancashire, which was owned by his wife’s family. In 1924, he moved to Cartmel, also in Lancashire; he died in a nursing home in Sussex in 1929.⁸

Despite leading a busy professional life, Slingsby was one of the most prominent alpinists of his generation.⁹ He was somewhat unusual in that his climbing career began in earnest in Norway in 1872, where he spent five seasons before first venturing to the Alps, at that time the normal nursery for aspiring mountaineers. And, while he made notable ascents in the Alps and the Italian Apennines, it was his exploits in Norway for which he was best known—not least because of his book Norway: The Northern Playground, which appeared in 1904.¹⁰ Slingsby was a highly important figure in the development of mountaineering in Norway, where he accomplished much pioneering glacier exploration as well as numerous first ascents—including that of the iconic and supposedly unclimbable Store Skagastølstind (1876), which made his name. His achievements were widely recognised by Norwegians, who hailed him as ‘the father of Norwegian mountaineering’.¹¹ Geographical features were even named after him.¹² One mountaineer remembered that ‘When an Englishman in the old days wandered into an obscure Norwegian valley ... the people would say “Are you Slingsby?” and would be sadly disappointed when you were not’; another that ‘He was so much beloved by the Norwegians that I used to chaff him by saying that he could raise a Slingsby horse if needed’.¹³ When, in his old age, Slingsby visited Norway with his daughter Eleanor to unveil a monument to Norwegian merchant seamen killed in the Great War, he was granted an audience with the king and received ‘an almost royal welcome in every district through which he passed’.¹⁴ His mountaineering exploits were also recognised in Britain, where he acquired a considerable reputation for his climbing and route-finding skill, especially on ice and glaciated terrain. J. Norman Collie thought him ‘a magnificent mountaineer’, better even than A.F. Mummery, whose death in 1895 on Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas was widely mourned as one of the greatest losses yet suffered by British alpinism.¹⁵ Slingsby was also instrumental in developing the practice of mountaineering without the assistance of professional guides. As early as 1878 he attempted guideless ascents in the Alps in the company of A.G. Girdlestone, whom he had met in Norway in 1874 (and whose High Alps without Guides he admired as ‘capital’).¹⁶ In the 1880s and 1890s, accompanied by Collie, Mummery and others he undertook very difficult guideless climbs in the Alps, including the first ascent of the Dent du Requin, successes which on their own would have been sufficient to make him an alpinist of note, notwithstanding his still greater achievements in Norway.¹⁷ As befitted a figure of such repute and ability, Slingsby was active in leading mountaineering and climbing organisations. These included the Alpine Club, of which he was vice-president between 1906 and 1908; the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club, for whom he acted as president for ten years; the Scottish Mountaineering Club; and the Rucksack Club. He also played a key role in setting up other such groups, notably the Climbers’ Club (1898), of which he was later president (1904–6), and the Fell and Rock Climbing Club of the English Lake District (1907), of which he was a founding honorary member and also president (1910–12).¹⁸

I

Scholars have suggested that upland landscapes were often stages for the performance of masculinities of various kinds.¹⁹ For Hansen, mountain climbing in the Alps was a means through which mid-Victorian men could assert an imperialist masculinity, so bolstering their sense of being active participants in the developing project of empire and the ongoing maintenance of British world power.²⁰ For Elaine Freedgood, it was a way in which they could imagine themselves as heroic, their physically demanding and dangerous exploits offering a satisfying contrast to the sedate workaday world, while also providing a sense of ‘psychic security’ that England—unlike the risk-drenched mountain environment—was safe and comfortable.²¹ For Paul Deslandes, it was by the turn of the twentieth century an activity seen as so quintessentially masculine that it was even felt capable of redeeming male identity from the perceived threat posed by contemporary homosexual impulses.²²

There is much merit in these assessments. Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods, many people associated mountaineering with masculinity, not least mountaineers themselves. In the 1890s, Mummery thought climbing gave a man means ‘to know that he is not “clean gone to flesh pots and effeminacy”’, and that it promoted ‘manly virtues’ by instilling self-confidence, independence and comradeship with men on whom one’s life often depended.²³ Likewise, in reflecting on his alpine experiences over the previous half-century, the positivist thinker Frederic Harrison wrote in 1908 of his belief that mountaineering gave men the opportunity to demonstrate their ‘manliness’ through the disregard of pain and privation.²⁴ And throughout his own long mountaineering career from the 1870s to the First World War, Slingsby, too, was convinced of its utility in this regard, affirming in 1881 that

There is no sport in the world, so invigorating; so good a restorative to the over-worked brain; so good for the lungs and heart; so capable of replenishing the store-house of nervous energy; of strengthening and of creating muscular tissue; of expanding the chest; and of instilling into a man, the virtues of soberness, patience, endurance, unselfishness, true charity, true heroism, and a true love and reverence for his Creator; in short of making a mere person into—A MAN—in the highest sense of the word—as the sport of mountaineering.²⁵

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Slingsby was keen to ensure that his two sons took up mountaineering, and was delighted when Geoffrey Winthrop Young took his youngest, Laurence, on a trip to Snowdonia in 1910, writing of how ‘good, so very good’ it was ‘for him at his impressionable age to be in the company of manly men’.²⁶

Indeed, as his letter to Young suggests, Slingsby attached considerable importance to homosocial camaraderie. In common with many Victorian men, blood sports provided one source of this camaraderie for Slingsby, especially when conducted in harsh upland environments, including those of Norway.²⁷ As a young man in the 1870s, Slingsby enjoyed bear- and reindeer-shooting expeditions in the Jotunheimen mountains with his Norwegian friend Thorgeir Sulheim and, judging from his correspondence, evidently took great pleasure in the manly fellowship this offered (at least until 1881, when he participated in a bear-hunt that ended with the death of one of the hunters, after which point his enthusiasm for tracking down ‘Herr Bamsen’ seems to have diminished).²⁸ Slingsby’s accounts of mountaineering proper were also often marked by a tone of masculine bonhomie. The following remark, made in the course of a report on an expedition to arctic Norway in the 1890s, serves as a representative example: ‘When climbing up the crags a few hundred feet below the summit of Kjostind Hastings paid me the one compliment with which he has ever honoured me, and I am very proud of it. It was in the good Yorkshire dialect in which we sons of the North are so fond of indulging when out on the fells, and was merely, “Thar’t a toff un”’.²⁹

The pleasure Slingsby derived from male fellowship on the heights might suggest that his mountaineering, like his hunting, was an expression of what John Tosh has identified as ‘a flight from domesticity’ among middle- and upper middle-class men after about 1870.³⁰ Tosh suggests this phenomenon persisted into the twentieth century, correlating it with the challenges posed to hitherto dominant domestic-centred ideas of bourgeois manliness. These challenges included the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts and other legal restrictions on the powers of husbands in the 1870s and 1880s, the rise of the assertive ‘New Woman’ towards the end of the century, and the emergence of militant suffragism in the 1900s. But, while it may be true that ‘[d]omesticity … had a much more equivocal place in the lives of English middle-class men by the 1890s than had been the case in the High Victorian era’,³¹ the extent to which mountaineering offered access to a radically de-feminised or undomesticated world can be exaggerated. Despite the asperity of the high mountain environment, the masculine camaraderie that Slingsby cherished in the mountains was notable for its domesticated inflections, the details of living arrangements receiving much attention in his writings. In this he followed the idiom adopted by J.A. Lees and W. Clutterbuck in their hugely popular Three in Norway by Two of Them (1883), a book replete with jocular descriptions of living arrangements in campsites, hillside huts and so on.³² Food and sleeping arrangements featured especially prominently in Slingsby’s accounts, as for example in the picture he offered of campsite life in the remote Lofoten Islands of the Norwegian arctic, during a visit there with his eldest son, Norman Collie and Dudley Northall-Laurie in 1903. After having expatiated on the cushioning qualities of a good layer of moss under his tent groundsheet, Slingsby remembered how

We soon made a luxurious encampment with the aid of our stores and cosy corners in the rocks ... Our first evening was most lovely, and, whilst we enjoyed a well-earned rest after supper, we felt that we had chosen a delightful spot for beginning our campaign, and that we had a rare good old time before us ... Next morning ... Laurie proved himself to be a master of the art of cooking, so much so that the rest of us then, and to the end of our month’s camping, unselfishly allowed him to enjoy all the honour and glory of an accomplished chef. Indeed, I feel convinced that much of the success which we attained on the aiguilles of Lofoten may be attributed to the strengthening of our muscles and the steadying of our nerves, as a result of the excellent and wholesome meals which were served to us. Yes, think of the porridge, the bacon, and the dry toast too, the coffee or tea and the marmalade for breakfast, and imagine, if you can (but you can’t), the dinners, and then realise how it was that [Mt.] Rulten itself succumbed.³³

For Slingsby, then, mountaineering offered opportunities for men to test their mettle as men, and to build their character. But the performance of this masculinity was not at the expense of the domestic. On the contrary, home comforts were carefully and deliberately introduced into an otherwise austere and challenging environment, and indeed were regarded as tending towards success on the mountains. Perhaps the best example of this in Slingsby’s writings is his account of a winter expedition in the Hurrungane Mountains in 1880, during the course of which Slingsby, Sulheim and another Norwegian man were benighted in a cave in freezing conditions. Yet even here, as Slingsby described it, the climbers managed to fashion domestic comforts, lighting a ‘roaring fire’ and making ‘a festive night of it’. A ‘grand midnight dinner’ was prepared by Slingsby (this time acting as cook), which consisted of soup, fish, tongue, chicken, corned beef, chocolate, toast and flatbrød, the whole being washed down with copious amounts of coffee and tea (some of the latter being used as a replacement for tobacco, the one item which the party seemed to lack). After dinner, Slingsby recalled,

Our bright fire made the icicles above drop now and then, but we easily avoided the drip. Candles illuminated our palace, and we read a good deal, amongst other books ‘The last days of Pompeii’. I sang scraps of songs innumerable, English and Norsk, also hymns, to one of which, and also ‘Home sweet Home’, Sulheim had taken a great fancy, and in consequence I had to sing it at the rate of about six times a day.³⁴

This stress on cheerful domesticity sheds interesting light on the nature of late Victorian and Edwardian masculinity, especially as the accounts of other male alpinists and explorers featured similar domestic emphases. Indeed, Carolyn Strange’s recent work on Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition of 1910–13 has found that, even in the harshest environments, men exhibited emotional intelligences for which cheerfulness and homely fellowship were normative, being at least as important as self-control and muscular resilience in the face of adversity. As Strange writes, although Scott’s ‘voyage took sixty-one men to the tip of the earth, it was less a flight from domesticity than an instance of masculine home-making in extremis’.³⁵ As with the men who went to the north and south poles, men who went mountaineering may have deliberately sought out difficulty and danger, but they also wanted to make the mountain environment habitable, and one from which recognisable home comforts were by no means lacking. This has implications not only for the history of mountaineering, but also for that of masculinity itself, which emerges as more complexly and variously textured than perhaps some accounts have allowed. The embrace of a cheerful domesticity by mountain climbers and explorers suggests that Tosh may have gone too far in his influential claim that by the late Victorian period, manliness had been ‘redefined as a synonym for the toughest and most exclusive male attributes’.³⁶ For sure, the performance and representation of masculinity after 1870 may have involved giving more value to a rugged maleness than hitherto, and this is evident enough in the activities of explorers and mountaineers, Slingsby included. Yet Slingsby’s example also suggests that by century’s end, if not before, understandings of manliness could encompass both physical toughness and cheerful domesticity. The implication here is that notwithstanding the late Victorian turn away from a softly bourgeois domesticity, the parameters of masculinity were drawn more capaciously than Tosh and others have suggested—even for adventurous types such as Slingsby who might be supposed to have inclined towards a straightforward muscular athleticism.

Furthermore, the idea that mountaineering appealed because of its exclusively male character can also be questioned. Slingsby certainly appreciated male company when out on the peaks, but throughout his adult life he also appreciated female company and was always clear that full-scale mountaineering—not just hill walking—was an appropriate activity for women. From an early age he often climbed with women, clearly enjoyed doing so, and was relaxed in their company on the heights. In 1881, less than a decade after he had begun serious mountaineering, he told readers of Den Norske Turistforenings Årbok³⁷ about how he and a female climber—whom he did not know well—had adopted ‘combined tactics’ in their ascent of Store Knuthulstind (‘[i]n one place she climbed on my shoulder’).³⁸ Even earlier, his sister Edith had in 1875 accompanied him on a crossing of the then little-explored Jotunheimen, an expedition involving glacier traverses, and one which prompted an article by Slingsby urging other women to follow her example.³⁹ (Edith was also the first woman to reach the summit of Glittertind, then Norway’s highest mountain; though not a difficult ascent it was a notable achievement.)⁴⁰ After his marriage in 1882, Slingsby continued to climb with women such as Lily Bristow, with whom he and Mummery shared a small tent in the Alps in 1893 during their impressive guideless traverse of the Grépon and ascent of the Dru—the latter a climb that Bristow led for much of the way.⁴¹ Slingsby’s wife Alizon also went with him on many climbs, in 1884 making the first female ascent of the Romsdalhorn, for example;⁴² and so too did his daughters, especially Eleanor (Len). Slingsby encouraged Len to climb from an early age, and as one of Britain’s leading interwar mountaineers, she became the first president of the all-women Pinnacle Club.⁴³ He also went mountaineering with Norwegian women such as the pioneering Therese Bertheau, who climbed in short skirts and trousers and made more than thirty major ascents between 1884 and 1910. Slingsby knew Bertheau well, believing her to have set ‘an admirable example to her sex’ in 1894 by being the first woman to reach the summit of Skagastølstind—a mountain which by that time had in no way achieved the status of ‘an easy day for a lady’, having only been climbed seven times between Slingsby’s ascent in 1876 and 1892, with as many unsuccessful attempts (at least one of which ended in a fatality).⁴⁴

It is worth noting that Slingsby’s early accounts of his mountaineering with women (in the 1870s and 1880s) appeared not in British but in Norwegian publications. This reflected the greater receptivity of the emergent Norwegian mountaineering movement to female involvement in the sport. Den Norske Turistforening was quite different from many British outdoor organisations and not least the Alpine Club, which did not admit women as members until 1974.⁴⁵ The relatively more favourable attitudes to women mountaineers in Norway in turn reflected women’s more favourable position in society. The reform of laws relating to Norwegian women’s rights to property long predated the British legislation of the 1870s and 1880s, and as is well known, Norway was one of the first countries in the world to grant female suffrage.⁴⁶ As British travellers noted throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, sometimes with distaste, Norwegian women were more independent than their sisters across the North Sea. The unsupervised lives of the young women responsible for running summer farms in upland areas came in for considerable criticism, for example, and it was often observed that women of all social classes routinely undertook tasks that in Britain would have been normally the province of men.⁴⁷ No doubt partly on account of his Norwegian experiences, then, Slingsby wanted to see more women on the mountains. He did not understand mountainous landscapes as essentially masculine domains, or mountaineering as an activity only suited to men: by 1901 he was of the opinion that ‘the climbing abilities of ladies ha[d] long ago been proved & established’.⁴⁸ And, although he probably did not appreciate the extent of the cultural, financial and other obstacles faced by aspiring female climbers in Britain, he was unstinting in encouraging women to get to the mountains. This included supporting highly adventurous expeditions in which he was not personally involved: he urged Elizabeth Le Blond to explore Arctic Norway, which she duly did, for instance.⁴⁹ As time passed, he also used his growing status as one of Britain’s leading alpinists to promote female mountaineering. He praised male rock climbers and mountaineers who supported their female counterparts, thinking J.W. Robinson’s efforts in this regard sufficient to warrant mention in the address he delivered in 1908 at the unveiling of the memorial to Robinson at Pillar Rock in the Lake District.⁵⁰ The encomium was an appropriate one, as Robinson had been a key figure in setting up the Fell and Rock Climbing Club of the English Lake District (FRCC), which in defiance of the precedent set by the men-only Alpine Club had admitted women as full members from its establishment in 1906. Slingsby, too, had been instrumental in the formation of the FRCC, and acted as its third president in 1910–12. Indeed, it was under his presidency that women were first invited to the club’s annual dinner.⁵¹ Slingsby even remarked on the incongruity of their previous exclusion in his speech at the fifth annual dinner, expressing his happiness at seeing so many women present: their attendance was ‘as it ought to be’.⁵²

Slingsby, then, was in the vanguard of a turn-of-the-century shift in sensibilities in Britain with regard to women climbers. He enjoyed the pleasures of homosocial comradeship, but this was not incompatible with his championing of climbing as an activity suitable for women, a position shaped by his experiences in Norway. Furthermore, for all that he was confident that mountaineering strengthened the characters of men in particular, he was also sure that it did not do so simply by infusing them with pluck, physical stamina and tenacity, let alone with any sort of all-conquering spirit of domination. Mountaineering taught men prudence and honed their sense of judgment, and for Slingsby these virtues were integral to manliness. They were, moreover, qualities developed through failure as much as success. Slingsby frequently emphasised the importance of knowing when to abandon an expedition, an art of which he was usually a careful practitioner. As he put it in the course of an article devoted to his own mountaineering failures, ‘Some defeats on the mountains are victories in disguise. Every defeat teaches something ... We acquire without knowing it, more of the virtues of patience, unselfishness, and true manliness on the days of defeat than when we return flushed with success from some bold expedition’.⁵³ Thus for Slingsby the truly manly climber—someone like Robinson, for example—showed patience and caution rather than reckless daring, calmly assessed developing dangers, and was ready to abort an ascent selflessly if one of his companions got into difficulties. He was also a man who had a ‘tender-hearted’ care for his colleagues, being attuned to the need for domestic comforts on the heights and prepared to act as ‘nurse’ in the event of accidents to others.⁵⁴

II

Notwithstanding his progressive views on women climbers, in his politics Slingsby was a strong Tory. His Yorkshire Post obituary described him as a ‘keen politician’ who had served as a vice-president of the Skipton Conservative Association and delivered speeches at election times.⁵⁵ His politics were certainly fervent, and fervently partisan, and an important part of his personal identity. In the wake of Benjamin Disraeli’s diplomatic triumph at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Slingsby told his Norwegian friend Sulheim that the Conservative prime minister was ‘the greatest & cleverest man in the world’,⁵⁶ and after Disraeli’s death in 1881 Slingsby routinely recorded the occasion of ‘Primrose Day’ (19 April: Disraeli’s birthday) in letters to his friends.⁵⁷ He was a committed opponent of Free Trade, thinking it a ‘foolish’ Liberal policy that had injured British industry and driven farmers and agricultural labourers off the land.⁵⁸ His wife Alizon was a daughter of William Farrer Ecroyd, a member of parliament and progenitor of the ‘Fair Trade League’ of the 1880s, which campaigned for the re-imposition of import duties to protect British industry and of which Slingsby was an enthusiastic supporter—as he also was of Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform campaign after 1903.⁵⁹ Slingsby’s fiscal views were partly a consequence of his experiences in the textile industry, which from the late nineteenth century faced increasingly stiff competition from abroad; they also correlated with his views on the empire, which Tariff Reform was designed to strengthen.⁶⁰ For there is no doubt that Slingsby’s patriotism—which extended to epistolary exclamations of ‘God Save the Queen’ around the date of Victoria’s birthday and a prejudice against geographical terms of French derivation⁶¹—was also significantly imperialist in its ideological complexion. Firmly supportive of Disraeli’s stance during the Eastern Crisis of the later 1870s, he saw Russia as bent on ‘territorial aggrandisement’ at the expense of British interests in the Mediterranean and India, even saying in one letter that ‘[t]he horrible Indian Mutiny has been said to have been fomented by Russian intrigue’.⁶² At century’s end, he enthusiastically supported the South African War, castigating ‘Little Englanders’ and praising the military efforts of ‘bloodthirsty New Zealanders’ fighting on the veldt for the imperial cause. (A.P. Harper, a New Zealand mountaineer who corresponded with Slingsby at this time found him to be ‘a very keen Empire man’.)⁶³ He also had personal connections with the empire: a cousin was an officer in the Indian Army and one of his sons entered the Colonial Office, serving for two years in Nigeria between 1909 and 1911.⁶⁴

As a strongly patriotic imperial-minded Conservative, Slingsby might seem just the sort of man for whom mountaineering was an expression of an imperialistic impulse towards exploration and the assertion of British dominance. Unsurprisingly, his activities have been seen in these terms. In their book about British perceptions of Norway in the nineteenth century, Peter Fjågesund and Ruth Symes have suggested that for men such as Slingsby, ‘[v]ery much like the uncharted parts of Africa, the great mountain peaks represented an irresistible temptation to conquer new territory. ... Norway ... came to represent yet another frontier, with new opportunities for conquering terrae incognitae’.⁶⁵ Hansen has made similar suggestions, setting Slingsby in the context of a more general push by late Victorian and Edwardian mountaineers to invade and create new climbing ‘playgrounds’ on the edges of Europe and beyond.⁶⁶

There is something to be said for these interpretations. Like many late Victorian mountaineers, Slingsby was attracted to the exploration of the ‘unknown’: the making of first ascents, the crossing of untrodden passes and the mapping of uncharted glaciers appealed to him enormously. From the outset Norway seemed to him to be a particularly good place for such exploits, given the apparently limited scope for ‘new work’ in the Alps by the 1870s. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1893, he was especially noted for his work on glaciers. Slingsby’s achievements in this field were considerable, including an extremely difficult descent of the treacherously crevassed Kjenndalsbreen icefall in 1881, as well as other important glacier traverses—a number of which established new routes across previously ‘unknown corners’ of mountainous regions such as Jotunheimen.⁶⁷ In these activities, as with his mountaineering more generally, Slingsby wanted to make new discoveries, to go to places where no-one had been before. But the utility of understanding this impulse in terms of imperialism is questionable. Ardent imperialist though he was, Slingsby’s mountaineering in no way emanated from a desire to assert dominance over others, or to glorify himself. He disliked brag and bluster, being disgusted by those whom he thought climbed for self-aggrandising purposes. One such individual was Edward Fitzgerald, who in the 1890s set his sights on being the first to ascend Mount Cook, the highest peak in New Zealand. Having been beaten to it by New Zealanders led by Jack Clark, Fitzgerald abandoned his designs on the mountain (allegedly remarking that ‘I would rather it had been climbed by a gentleman instead of by a damned plumber!’) and instead turned his attention to climbing elsewhere in New Zealand.⁶⁸ On his return to Britain, Fitzgerald published a book which belittled the contribution of New Zealand climbers and among other things claimed—erroneously, as it turned out—that he was the first to have made a crossing of the Southern Alps of the archipelago.⁶⁹ Slingsby was incensed, writing to New Zealand mountaineers such as G.E. Mannering and A.P. Harper to express his revulsion at ‘FitzG’s constant underrating of other men’s work’ and ‘disgusting self laudation’.⁷⁰

Unlike Fitzgerald, Slingsby was not exclusively interested in ‘conquering’ unclimbed peaks and passes. In this he also presents a contrast with the pioneers of the 1850s and 1860s—Edward Whymper’s bloody-minded determination to be the first man atop the Matterhorn being the most obvious example.⁷¹ For these men, Hansen and others have argued, first ascents and the spirit of conquest were all important, being linked to the performance of an imperialist masculinity.⁷² Yet, leaving aside the question of the validity of this interpretation for the mid-Victorian period, it does not transfer satisfactorily to the years of Slingsby’s alpinism. Slingsby was not one to shy away from a crack at a first attempt, as best testified by his powerful desire, as a young man, to be the first to reach the summit of Skagastølstind. But even early in his mountaineering career this was far from being his dominating impulse, and insofar as it motivated him at all it was of diminishing importance as time passed. Doubtless Slingsby would not have dissented from Mummery’s view, expressed in the 1890s, that ‘the true mountaineer is the man who attempts new ascents’,⁷³ but at the same time he was quite keen to climb peaks that had been climbed many times before, and to do so by previously-used routes. In 1912, for example, he insisted to Norwegian friends that they take him up Stetind, despite the fact that it had already been climbed.⁷⁴ Moreover, not only was Slingsby happy to climb mountains others had ascended first, he was also happy to do so repeatedly, and by the same routes that he had used on earlier occasions. In this Slingsby was not alone, at least not by the late Victorian period. Many other climbers felt the same way, from J.W. Robinson—who made more than one hundred ascents of Pillar Rock in the Lake District⁷⁵—to the famous explorer Martin Conway, who in 1904 opined that the stories surrounding first ascents gave mountains a human interest they might otherwise lack, and thus encouraged other alpinists to climb them time and again.⁷⁶

Whether they were first or subsequent attempts, most of Slingsby’s ascents in Norway were made in the company of Norwegian climbers and guides (though he often did without the latter). Very few of these individuals were of Slingsby’s social status, and many were poor farmers and fishermen. Yet, despite this social gulf, his achievements in advancing alpinism in Norway, his ascent of the country’s most famous mountain, and the often considerable difference in expertise between him and less experienced Norwegian climbers, Slingsby treated his Norwegian partners with respect and avoided self-glorification. Indeed, rather than stressing the superiority of British alpinists, he took pains to acknowledge the skills and achievements of Norwegian mountaineers. His book had warm praise for Norwegians with whom he climbed, such as Emanuel Mohn and Mikkel Mundal (‘I considered it to be a privilege to act as leading guide to such a man’).⁷⁷ Indeed, despite his failure to accompany Slingsby up the last few hundred feet of Skagastølstind in 1876, which he had judged ‘impossible’, Mohn appears in Norway as ‘a fearless and sure-footed mountaineer’ who on the ascent of Uranostind showed himself ‘quite as much at his ease on the top of this treacherous mountain-wall as he would have been behind the battlements of a Norman tower’.⁷⁸ Even novices received commendation. On one climb in Trollheimen Slingsby was accompanied by a young local who had not even used an ice axe before. Nonetheless, as he reported to the Alpine Club, ‘Johann never flinched’ from a ‘horrid ice-polished precipice’ while leading over a three-yard gap in a narrow ledge on Vinnufjellet (‘one of the nastiest bits of rock I have ever tackled’), and went on to negotiate a difficult gully, seeming ‘quite at home’ on very slippery terrain which Slingsby admitted to not liking much.⁷⁹ But it was not only the Norwegians with whom he climbed that Slingsby praised. His regular reviews of the Norske Turistforenings Årbok for the Alpine Journal were full of commendation of the standards of Norwegian mountaineering as a whole. In fact, by 1913 he felt that the entry requirements for membership of the Norsk Tindeklub, the Norwegian equivalent of the Alpine Club, had probably surpassed those then demanded by the British organisation.⁸⁰

Slingsby’s respectful attitude to Norwegian mountaineers and mountaineering correlated with his attitude to Norwegians generally. He was unfailingly courteous to the peasants and farmworkers he encountered on his expeditions; he sent a Christmas present to a man who had supplied milk to his campsite near Tromsø in 1898, for example.⁸¹ He took the trouble to learn to speak, read and write Norwegian soon after his first visit to the country, and by 1876 was telling Norwegian correspondents that it was perfectly acceptable for them to write back in their native language.⁸² Indeed, he knew many Norwegians personally, including the composer Edvard Grieg, who once made a point of meeting Slingsby in a hotel in Jotunheimen to congratulate him for what he had done to inspire the love of mountains in his countrymen and women.⁸³ But they also included less exalted personages, such as Thorgeir Sulheim, a farmer and innkeeper from Jotunheimen with whom, judging by his correspondence, Slingsby was on fairly intimate terms for twenty years or more.⁸⁴ Slingsby enjoyed many mountaineering and hunting expeditions with Sulheim, who visited him in England on at least one occasion.⁸⁵ By 1880, he felt sufficiently close to Sulheim to suggest that he connive in breaking the Norwegian game laws, specifically a set of recently-introduced regulations restricting the shooting of reindeer by foreigners.⁸⁶

Slingsby’s attachment to Norway and its people was deep-seated, and should be set in the context of a more general late Victorian flowering of British interest in Norway. This manifested itself in the increasing touristic appeal of Norway’s mountains, fjords and coastline: to relatively adventurous middle- and upper middle-class Britons, the country offered a still largely untamed but comparatively accessible landscape of romantic wilderness.⁸⁷ It was also apparent in the surge of British engagement with Norwegian arts and letters, much of which were associated with the rise of a nationalist movement that would culminate in the grant of full independence from Sweden in 1905, a development welcomed in Britain. The music of Grieg and the drama of Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson drew admiration as expressions of modern-day Norwegian identity, while at the same time Norse saga literature continued to attract attention from scholars and non-scholars alike, as well as providing inspiration for fictional writing in English. (Ada Ellen Bayly’s novel, A Hardy Norseman [1889], based on the Frithiof saga, had run to eleven editions by 1893; W.G. Collingwood’s popular Thorstein of the Mere [1895] was written in saga-style prose.)⁸⁸ Associations dedicated to Anglo-Norwegian understanding and cultural exchange were also established: Den Norske Klub and the Norwegian Club were set up in London in 1887 and 1894 respectively.⁸⁹

British interest in Norway was especially pronounced among the Liberal elite. One such prominent example was James Bryce, sometime President of the Norwegian and Alpine Clubs, historian, jurist, and Cabinet-rank politician.⁹⁰ Others included the Liberal prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, who enjoyed a convalescent cruise to Norway in August 1885, and Robert Spence Watson, mountaineer, friend of Slingsby, Northumbrian intellectual and secretary of the National Liberal Federation.⁹¹ Some of the appeal exerted by Norway over such individuals was connected to Liberal political sympathy with small European nationalities. The development after 1814 of Norway’s peaceful and liberal-democratic constitutional nationalism, which would lead to the bloodless revolution of 1905, seemed eminently deserving of support to British progressive opinion.⁹² On his visit to Norway, Gladstone had discerned a ‘love of freedom combined with settled order’ as being ‘markedly characteristic’ of the country.⁹³ Yet at the same time it would appear that Norway could appeal to Conservatives, as the example of Slingsby importantly suggests—he was, after all, perhaps the most notable of all British Norgesvenner. As we shall see, however, for Slingsby the attraction had less to do with politics than Norway’s natural environment and culture, and also, more specifically, with his views as to the existence of strong ethnic ties between the two countries.

Slingsby’s fascination with Norway can be traced back to his childhood, when he had read Harriet Martineau’s enormously-popular Feats on the Fjord, a vividly-realised tale of youthful heroism set in the eighteenth century.⁹⁴ In adulthood, having visited Norway, he developed a deep appreciation of Anglo-Norwegian cultural linkages, an appreciation made more powerful and personal by his understanding of the impact that the Vikings had had on his homeland of Yorkshire and northern England as a whole, and more particularly by his discovery that Slingsby was itself ‘a Scandinavian surname’.⁹⁵ Indeed, as a life member and founding vice-president of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, Slingsby was particularly struck by the Norse origin of many northern English words, family- and place-names.⁹⁶ In his account of an expedition to the Norwegian Arctic in 1912, he told readers of the Alpine Journal that ‘As I am a Yorkshireman, I naturally recognised in Stedtind [Stetind], Nature’s gigantic anvil in Arctic Norway, because in my native county the words “steady”, “stede”, “stiddy”, and “stithy” are all forms still used for an anvil’; and on another occasion he even claimed that it was easy for Yorkshire men to learn the Norwegian language because ‘much of our northern dialect is almost identical with Norsk’.⁹⁷

But the connections went deeper than the philological. In common with other Norse enthusiasts such as his fellow Norwegian Club member W.G. Collingwood, the Cumbrian writer and antiquary, Slingsby felt a strong ethnic connection with the people of Norway.⁹⁸ This was a perspective that might be seen as compatible with contemporary ideas of race. Care is needed here, however. As D.A. Lorimer has observed, ‘the Victorians themselves were often uncertain about what meaning they assigned to “Race”’; their claims about the concept were ‘fluid and contradictory’, race often being confused with culture.⁹⁹ Thus, to the Victorians, in the words of Peter Mandler, ‘a “race” could be a physical stock, it could be something like a “tribe” or a “clan”, or it could be both at once’.¹⁰⁰ Sometimes, and especially in imperial contexts, the term was used in a (pseudo-)scientific biological sense, associated with allegedly inherent physical characteristics; at other times it was deployed as a synonym for nations, ethnicities and peoples. It was in this latter more cultural sense that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Norse enthusiasts seem to have used the term. Individuals such as W.G. Collingwood and H.D. Rawnsley sought to identify the persistence of a Norse ethnic heritage in northern England; but, as Matthew Townend and Christopher Parker have shown, crude biological theories of racial contrasts and hierarchies were largely absent from their thought—for all that they doubtless believed in the superiority of British ‘civilisation’.¹⁰¹ Far from denigrating other peoples, they sought to emphasise the value of ethnic intermixing, which they saw as having occurred in Britain over centuries. For Collingwood, the arrival of the Vikings in his beloved Lake District had strengthened the British national character through facilitating a ‘commixture of races’, Celts, Norsemen, Welsh, Saxons and Angles all blending together.¹⁰² Indeed, his book Thorstein of the Mere gave powerful expression to this perspective by telling the story of the love and eventual union between the eponymous hero and Raineach, a young Celtic woman.

Something similar can be detected in Slingsby’s thought and writing, for all that it was far less well developed than that of Collingwood or Rawnsley (he knew the latter personally). Like many patriotic Englishmen of the time, Slingsby was confident that Britain was the greatest nation on earth, and its people the greatest people. Yet he, too, also had a positive view of ethnic intermixing. For Slingsby, far from being inferior to the vigorous Britons who had showed them the way in the arts of mountaineering, modern-day Norwegians were living embodiments of the various wellsprings of British greatness. In Slingsby’s account, ‘when we go to Norway we ought to feel that we are visiting the land of our remote ancestors’—the land from which the Viking invaders of the ninth and tenth centuries had come to settle in England, where they ‘intermarried with the Saxon maidens, and became the progenitors of the finest race in the world’. His fellow mountaineer E.C. Oppenheim agreed, describing the ‘Norsemen’ as ‘a race to whom the people of England, those magnificent hybrids, owe some of their most sterling qualities’.¹⁰³ But it was not thought that the Vikings had improved the race in a biological way; rather they had stiffened the fibre of the inhabitants of the British Isles in a moral sense, adding ‘hardihood and sturdiness of character’, ‘dogged endurance, and self-reliance’.¹⁰⁴ These qualities of character, according to Slingsby, were still found in present-day Norwegians, particularly among the ‘bluntly hospitable’, honest, frugal, hard-working, religious and patriotic ‘bonder’ farmers of the high fjelds with whom he had come into extensive contact on mountaineering expeditions.¹⁰⁵ In England, he felt, echoing the contentions of Collingwood and others, they survived in their purest form in the north, specifically in his own rural Yorkshire and in the Lake District, and perhaps pre-eminently amongst the small ‘yeomen’ farmers of those parts, such as the much-admired ‘statesmen’ of Cumbria.¹⁰⁶ In this way, Slingsby’s ethnographic reading of Norwegian-British cultural connections supported a particular version of Englishness, one perhaps deserving of closer scholarly attention. This was an Englishness quite different from that focussed on the verdant ‘south country’ of the home counties, which is often seen as so important in constructions of modern English identity.¹⁰⁷ It was, rather, a distinctive northern Englishness, attractive to conservatives such as Slingsby as well as those more liberal in political outlook. Predicated on a relatively positive view of ethnic diversity, it drew its values from the rugged environment of Yorkshire, Cumberland and Westmorland, where Norsemen had settled one thousand years previously, intermixing with the locals to the lasting benefit of the nation as a whole.

III

Slingsby’s ethnographic views shaped his identity and influenced his mountaineering: they were an important reason why Norway exerted such an enduring appeal on him as an alpinist. But they did not indicate any systematically scientific approach on his part. In fact, unlike many of his predecessors, such as the Edinburgh glaciologist James David Forbes, who also went to Norway, Slingsby cannot be described as a scientific mountaineer in any meaningful sense.¹⁰⁸ He once advised members of the Alpine Club to ‘avoid science like poison when ye climb, unless valuable information can be obtained by the pursuit. Avoid barographs below ... and unwieldy instruments above. As for plane table and a prismatic compass, not necessarily heavy to carry, leave them severely at home, where they may be useful’.¹⁰⁹ Slingsby’s exploratory instincts stemmed less from the world of science than from that of emotion and personal experience, the latter wholly consonant with his strongly-held views (as a Yorkshireman of Norse ancestry) about the prevalence of historic—and nationally beneficial—Anglo-Norwegian cultural interconnections. He was at heart a romantic mountaineer, and despite the contentions of some recent scholarship, his example demonstrates the strength of the persistence, into the twentieth century, of romantic ideas of the mountain sublime.¹¹⁰ The very title of Slingsby’s book, Norway: The Northern Playground, was a tribute to Leslie Stephen’s Playground of Europe (1871), a volume as much concerned with the author’s personal response to the natural environment and scenery of the Swiss Alps as it was with the details of his mountaineering achievements.¹¹¹ Its contents lived up to this tribute. Opening with Ruskin’s famous declaration that mountains were ‘the beginning and the end of all natural scenery’, Slingsby’s book was filled with accounts of his personal response to alpine landscape.¹¹² This was also true of his writing about his climbs elsewhere, for instance in the Italian Apennines, which also prompted quotation from Ruskin.¹¹³

As befitting an admirer of Ruskin, Slingsby was keenly interested in landscape painting and deeply impressed by the natural world generally, approaching it with an artist’s eye. Indeed, he was a competent amateur artist, habitually sketching the mountains he climbed: he made five drawings of Mjølkedalstinden, for example, thinking it ‘one of the most graceful mountains in Norway’.¹¹⁴ He also kept mountaineering diaries that contained extensive discussion of scenery, in addition to factual details of climbs made.¹¹⁵ And his published accounts were replete with observations on alpine landscape, flora and fauna.¹¹⁶ Moreover, and specifically in relation to sublimity, it is not only that that Slingsby’s writings were peppered with quotations from poets such as Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron, he also employed the vocabulary of the sublime in describing his ascents. In his accounts of his explorations in Norway, where the mountains reared up steeply from the fjords, Slingsby paid due attention to the ‘terrible grandeur’ of the peaks, their ‘grisly rocks’ and ‘narrow ledges over grim precipices’, the ‘arctic desolation’ of the landscape, and so on.¹¹⁷ For him, as it had been for the poets of the sublime, mountains could be both ‘terrible’ and ‘forbidding’ yet withal ‘beautiful’.¹¹⁸ Travelling to Arctic Norway in 1912, for example, Slingsby thought the Strandåtind a ‘beastly monster’ which looked ‘ever more and more forbidding’ as he approached, there hardly being place for an eagle to perch on its ‘gruesome wall’ of a face. Yet at the same time it was also ‘exceedingly beautiful’.¹¹⁹ In these accounts Slingsby made clear that the sublimity of the mountains was a key reason for their appeal to him as a mountaineer, ‘tempting’ him to climb them, just as the Stortind had lured him when he visited Arctic Norway in the 1890s.¹²⁰

However, it was not simply the sublime that tempted. The picturesque could also draw Slingsby onwards and upwards, with mountains lacking this quality often failing to appeal. (One mountain near Undredal, for example, he judged ‘much too symmetrical for me’.)¹²¹ Partly as a function of this sensibility, he was attracted to mountains that appeared ‘weird’ or ‘uncanny’, such as those of the Lofoten Islands and Sondmore, or the ‘eerie forms’ of the Lyngen Alps near Tromsø.¹²² This was consistent with his love of the mystery of nature in all its wild variety. Difficult of access, the high mountains represented the quintessence of this mystery. Often shrouded in cloud, they sometimes appeared to Slingsby as veiled maidens, their beauties concealed like those of Isis, the goddess of Nature. Waiting for the weather to clear before his attempt on Mjølkedalstinden in 1881, Slingsby observed how ‘the coy milk-maiden up beyond the skar [ravine], just pulled her veil aside to have a peep at us; only for an instant though, as she drew it still more closely about her lovely face. But beauty is not intended to be hidden, and she peeped again and again’.¹²³

In a different way, Slingsby’s appreciation of the mystery of nature through mountaineering was also associated with transcendental experience, prompting reflections on the wonders of creation. He was not alone in this: even agnostic mountaineers such as John Tyndall and Leslie Stephen reached for a religiously-inflected language of Romanticism when describing their experiences on the heights.¹²⁴ But as a devout Anglican, Slingsby’s alpine transcendentalism incorporated occasional appearances by an explicitly Christian God. In his account of exploring the wastes of the Jostedalsbreen glacier, for example, Slingsby described himself lost in an icy landscape of awesome asperity, possessed of seemingly omnipotent mastery over human life. ‘It was’, he wrote, ‘really a terrible place to be in, one calculated to make even the most callous-hearted turn his thoughts to the Divine Creator, and to acknowledge His power and glory. Mountains have preached me many a sermon, much more earnestly than the parson from his pulpit’.¹²⁵ Mountaineering brought Slingsby closer to God; it was a way of worshipping God, a means of ‘learn[ing] to reverence more deeply than before, through His works, the maker and builder of “The everlasting Hills”’.¹²⁶ Even on the occasion of having finally reached the summit of Skagastølstind, the mountain on which he had fixed his early ambitions, Slingsby’s thoughts moved towards prayerful reflection: ‘The exquisite colouring for which Norway is deservedly famous appeared in all its richness and variety; but in such a place, alone, out of sight of every living creature, one of the greatest desires of my heart granted to me, it will be easily understood, when I say, that a feeling of silent worship and reverence was more suitable than the jotting down of memoranda in a note-book’.¹²⁷

Slingsby’s stress on ‘worship’ and ‘reverence’ was consistent with his attitude towards risk. Like all serious alpinists Slingsby did not shun danger, but he did not approve of courting it recklessly either. His letters, speeches and publications cautioned prudence, and it is significant that he was so closely involved in establishing the FRCC, an organisation which from its beginnings had a strong emphasis on safety.¹²⁸ For Slingsby, climbing without proper care and attention was not only foolish in itself, but demonstrated disrespect for the natural world, which in its awesome sublimity could so easily snuff out human life. In Slingsby’s eyes, the true mountaineer was someone for whom an increasing ‘love of mountains’ went hand-in-hand with growing ‘respect and veneration’ for them, the lesson of experience being that ‘no trifling must be indulged in’ when it came to scaling the heights.¹²⁹ Slingsby paid considerable attention to the extent to which individual climbers fulfilled this desideratum. Those whom he felt did, such as J.W. Robinson or C.E. Mathews, two pioneers of rock climbing in the Lake District and Snowdonia respectively, received generous public encomiums from him. On Mathews’s death in 1905, Slingsby affirmed in an obituary that ‘No one worshipped the British hills more devoutly than he. He wooed them as they deserve to be wooed, with a deep love and an ever-increasing respect’.¹³⁰

Conversely, Slingsby was critical of individuals who did not live up to the example set by those such as Mathews. He disliked the approach of Ashley and George Abraham, two young rock climbers who came to prominence in the late 1890s for their pioneering of difficult and highly technical routes in the Lake District. Slingsby was taken aback by what he felt was their overly sensationalist and record-setting style, thinking it antithetical to a rightly respectful attitude to mountaineering and to nature. He also disliked the Abrahams’ making of a living solely from climbing (through photography and technical handbooks), seeing them as ‘sport-cum-businessmen’; and he came to regret their membership of the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club.¹³¹ For Slingsby, that the brothers were ‘firstly mountaineers for commercial purposes’ was a feature of their disrespectful attitude towards the mountains: an appropriately reverential attitude could not be taken towards that which one was ruthlessly exploiting for profit.¹³² The Abrahams were the first people to earn a living from rock climbing,¹³³ and Slingsby’s criticism in the 1890s and 1900s can be read as a conservative reaction to new developments by a representative of an earlier generation. Like Stephen and many older alpinists, Slingsby thought mountaineering rightly offered unique access to the mysterious and in some ways transcendental secrets of nature concealed from those in the valleys below.¹³⁴ Climbing for monetary gain was not compatible with this, he felt.

If Slingsby can be counted as a conservative in this respect (and he was far from alone in criticising the Abrahams), he was certainly progressive in others. Physical effort combined with an appropriately respectful attitude was required to experience the benisons (amateur) mountaineering could give, but they were not things that Slingsby desired to keep inaccessible to ordinary men and women. He may have been a Tory, but—as attested by his son-in-law, the Liberal Geoffrey Winthrop Young—he was in person ‘the most democratic of men’; he mixed easily with a wide variety of people and disliked social snobbery.¹³⁵ His writings encouraged popular participation in climbing, and of course were directed at women as well as men. Slingsby played an active role in new organisations such as the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club, the Climbers’ Club and the FRCC, bodies which in their composition were quite different from the socially selective Alpine Club.¹³⁶ Indeed, he used his leadership position within these groups to emphasise the value of climbing in the mountains as a means through which those ‘who, perhaps, would otherwise be loafers’ could ‘see the finest scenes in nature’.¹³⁷ The speeches he made to these clubs urged their members to promote popular involvement in mountaineering and by extension nature worship more generally. In addresses at the second and third annual dinners of the FRCC, for example, he opposed any restriction on membership numbers, affirming that the capacity to appreciate mountain scenery was found in people of all backgrounds: ‘I know hard working men who appreciate the beauty of these fells in the Lake District quite as much as I do. I do not think that there is anybody in this room who appreciates them more’. It followed, therefore, that the club ought to aim for a socially diverse membership.¹³⁸

Slingsby wanted to see more people on the fells, not fewer. In this he can be seen as a transitional figure in the history of British mountaineering. If he was conservative in some attitudes, he was quite the opposite in others. His leadership added moral authority—and perhaps also respectability—to democratising trends within the outdoor movement, and climbing in particular. He was one of the pioneers of the modern practice of guideless climbing, which was frowned upon by some Alpine Club traditionalists until into the twentieth century.¹³⁹ And, as we have seen, he was committed to encouraging female alpinism and popular enjoyment of the mountains. This latter point is further illustrated by his views on the development of Norwegian tourism. Despite his love of mountain Norway, he did not want even its landscape to be unduly difficult of access; aimed at ‘the general tourist’ as much as the seasoned mountaineer, his book was deliberately designed to facilitate such access.¹⁴⁰ And for all that he personally enjoyed the exploration of the uncharted, he was insistent on the importance of new footpaths and even signposts, and supported Den Norske Turistforenings’s efforts in making them, as well as encouraging that organisation’s construction of ‘luxurious’ mountain huts in more remote areas.¹⁴¹ Indeed, far from encouraging tourists to keep to the beaten track, the better to preserve the ‘unspoilt’ for an elect few, Slingsby sought to do precisely the opposite. Writing in the Norske Turistforenings Årbok for 1890, for example, he urged that more be done to facilitate access to Stordal, then a lesser-known part of the Romsdal region of western Norway. If such improvements were made, he explained, the place ‘has a bright future to look forward to. A small but increasing stream of tourists now passes annually over to Olden ... and it only requires a little of the superfluous energy of the Turist Forening [sic] to be deflected from Jotunheim towards the construction of a footpath down to Maelkevold [Melkevoll], to make this an extremely popular pass’.¹⁴²

Such appeals reflected his more general desire to see Norwegians enhance the accommodation and travel facilities for visitors to mountain regions. Footpaths and mountain huts were a start, but more bridges, roads, hotels and inns—judiciously sited, of course—were also needed. This standpoint is evident from his published writings, but also appears in his private correspondence. In the 1880s, for example, he offered detailed advice to Sulheim about how he might expand his inn-keeping business into a large-scale mountaineering holiday service on the Swiss model, providing extensive accommodation, a full range of equipment for sale or hire, and a staff of trained guides offering a range of pre-prepared excursions at fixed prices.¹⁴³ He even went so far as to suggest text (in Norwegian) for use in advertisements.¹⁴⁴ By the turn of the century, arrangements of roughly the type that Slingsby had urged on Sulheim had been established at Turtagrø in the Hurrungane Mountains (near Skagastølstind), where two well-appointed hotels offered comfortable accommodation, good food, and mountain lectures, as well as much scope for games, dancing and singing among the guests. Such developments were becoming increasingly common in Norway, as its mountainous parts gained popularity as tourist destinations. On the whole, they pleased Slingsby, despite his happy memories of roughing it under canvas in his youth: while there might have been ‘more poetry then, there is more food and fun now’.¹⁴⁵

Slingsby did not welcome all new developments, of course. He opposed proposals to put steamboats on three remote Norwegian lakes, and closer to home objected to the dismantling of a picturesque old stone bridge at Deepdale, near Buckden in Yorkshire.¹⁴⁶ But his attitude was far from being one of automatic resistance to change. In his professional life he was an innovator, as shown in his efforts to modernise the textile business he ran with his cousin.¹⁴⁷ As a mountaineer, Slingsby desired to see preserved the scenic beauty of alpine landscapes, as well as the local myths and customs which added to his appreciation of the mystery and romance of the mountains, whether in Norway or elsewhere.¹⁴⁸ Yet he accepted the inevitability of change, being concerned not to prevent it, but rather to ensure that its otherwise largely welcome advance did not do unnecessary damage to the natural environment he valued. In this respect his attitude was similar to that of the late Victorian and Edwardian preservationist movement, with whom many mountaineers were personally associated. So too were climbing organisations such as the Yorkshire Ramblers, which was established with a formal commitment to support the Commons Preservation Society,¹⁴⁹ and which under Slingsby’s presidency gave active support to the recently-established National Trust.¹⁵⁰ In common with preservationists such as Rawnsley, one of the founders of the Trust (as well as being an honorary member of the FRCC and associated with the Yorkshire Ramblers), Slingsby’s perspective implied a desire to maintain ‘unspoilt’ nature and historical landscapes as public amenities without which future generations would be less well equipped to negotiate the challenges of urban-industrial modernity.¹⁵¹ The sensibilities of mountaineers ran in step with those of preservationists.

Thus, as the example of Slingsby suggests, mountaineering can be seen as offering a means of coping with the modern world, of deriving physical and spiritual refreshment through contact with wild nature. After all, while mountaineering provided access to a more primitive environment, the business of doing so involved the embrace, not the renunciation, of modern technology and techniques, from clinker-nailed boots, ice axes, rucksacks and even skis (the use of which Slingsby helped popularise), to ‘the science of step-cutting’ up glaciated gullies.¹⁵² For those who used such tools, the high mountain environment offered unique solace, conferring lasting benefits that could be drawn upon throughout the vicissitudes of everyday life in modern Britain. As Slingsby told the Climbers’ Club in his 1904 Presidential address,

The high mountains … are the resting places for the weary. Then away to the mountains! away! away! and glean more health and strength of mind and body, to enable you to combat the difficulties of life, and lay up a store of happy memories, from which you can always draw, yet can never exhaust.¹⁵³

IV

Not all mountaineers were like Slingsby. But he was one of the leading late Victorian and Edwardian alpinists, a man respected by his peers. He held prominent positions in important climbing organisations, a number of which he helped set up. He was no maverick, and as such he demonstrates the limitations of existing scholarly interpretations of British mountaineering before the First World War. It is unsatisfactory to present late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century alpinists as increasingly indifferent to the beauty and sublimity of mountain scenery, being impelled instead more by the thrill of quasi-imperial exploration and an aggressively masculine ‘conquest’ of landscape felicitously separated from a feminised urbanity. Slingsby believed that mountaineering fostered manly qualities, but he did not think it an activity suitable only for men; he liked climbing with women, encouraged female mountaineers and did not conceptualise the high mountains as an exclusively masculine domain. And, while Slingsby was an imperialist Tory, his climbing and exploration was not related to any brashly patriotic desire for British domination over man or geography. Slingsby disliked brag and bluster; climbers he judged susceptible to such faults were held guilty of a disrespectful attitude to wild nature, of which (as Ruskin had taught) mountains were the supreme embodiment. First ascents were important, true, but Slingsby felt mountains ought to be revered rather than simply conquered; their beauty and sublimity, and that of high mountain nature generally, exerted a deeply personal and emotionally-charged appeal. This was a perspective shared by other prominent mountaineers of the time—Stephen, Harrison, Collie, Conway, even Mummery to an extent: as Conway put it, his own devotion to mountaineering constituted a response to a call from nature to undertake a ‘Pilgrimage of Romance’.¹⁵⁴ It would persist in the outlook of many younger, early twentieth-century alpinists, such as Winthrop Young and Mallory, the latter being of the opinion that ‘our aesthetic experiences of sunrises and sunsets and clouds and thunder … are not incidental in mountaineering, but a vital and inseparable part of it; they are not ornamental, but structural; they are not various items causing emotion but parts of an emotional whole’.¹⁵⁵ Indeed, as the persistence of these emotional-aesthetic responses suggests, it may actually be the case that patriotic-imperial motivations for climbing were in decline by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Jonathan Westaway has shown, many of the younger generation of middle-class rock-climbing enthusiasts of northern England, of whose activities Slingsby was generally supportive (despite his disdain for Abrahams-style showmanship and money-getting), were as much cosmopolitan as imperialist in their outlook and ideals.¹⁵⁶

Slingsby’s own motivations were varied, complex, and in some ways contradictory. But quite apart from anything else, they were closely bound up with his affection for Norway and ideas of Anglo-Norwegian ethnic interconnections, which were in turn related to his sense of personal, regional and national identity. As Slingsby’s example shows, poetical and exploratory impulses could coexist in one individual; similarly, an ambitious desire to test one’s physical mettle on an unclimbed peak could go hand in hand with a keen appreciation of mountain beauty. While people climbed for their various individual reasons, it seems certain that British mountaineering from its origins to the First World War was closely bound up with their experience of modernity. Mountaineering offered a temporary escape from the urban-industrial environment. But, as with the outdoor movement more generally or the associated growth of landscape preservationism, it did not reflect any personal refusal of the ‘industrial spirit’ or its appurtenances, a conclusion which seems also to hold good for other European countries at this time, notably Germany.¹⁵⁷ Mountaineering was a means of coping with the challenges of contemporary modernity, of replenishing what the sedentary quotidian depleted, for the benefit of the workaday world. By the late nineteenth century, these challenges seemed increasingly pressing, as urbanisation continued apace, technology advanced and life speeded up generally.¹⁵⁸ While such developments generated great excitement and were seen to confer palpable benefits, they also created new pressures and anxieties, and even new ailments such as neurasthenia.¹⁵⁹ In this context, mountaineering offered redress, a modern answer to modern ills. As Slingsby put it at the close of his book, it was not just the ‘musician, the artist and the poet’ who ‘will get inspiration amongst the purple, cloud-wreathed mountains’; others, too, would benefit from accessing the heights, their everyday lives being enriched and revitalised by the experience. ‘The philosopher and the politician’, he wrote,

will learn something of the sense of proportion. The schoolmaster, with the experience of the man, will for the time become the frolicsome boy again. The hard-headed business man will forget his worries and his money-bags, and will become imbued, for a time at least, with a wholesome air of romance ... Go then to the mountains for all that is best worth having in life. Learn again in the mountain solitudes the lessons which you learned on your mother’s knee, and perhaps have forgotten in the bustle of this noisy world.¹⁶⁰