In the “World of Death and Beauty”: Risk, Control, and John Tyndall as Alpinist

Abstract

THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN MOUNTAINEERING and taking risks is conventional and has been so since mountaineering emerged in Western Europe as a distinct preoccupation during the first half of the nineteenth century. Whatever else mountaineering might be about, it has always at least been about risk. 1 Scholarship on English alpinism in its formative period -the first two decades of the second half of the nineteenth century -has long acknowledged this association. Scholarship has, however, only begun to recognize the complex nature of risk in early English alpinism. Recently, Ann C. Colley has shown that John Ruskin's exposure to danger in the Alps ("his numerous and repeated ascents . . . were often tough and sometimes dangerous" [43]), his experience of having a fragile grasp on a fragile environment and his constant exposure to views which were fleeting and fragmentary profoundly influenced his principles of artistic representation.It seems that Ruskin climbed not only for the thrill of exertion and the rage to collect his geological specimens but also for a perspective that reveals more than a panorama -that also exposes, in spite of the accompanying annoyances and frustrations, the privilege of the imperfect vision, which opens up a space for the imagination and leads one into the spiritual mystery of the landscape. (63) The present article is concerned with the mountaineering writings of Ruskin's contemporary and the leading British physicist of his day, John Tyndall. Tyndall was just eight months Ruskin's junior and they knew each other well. Vulnerability to danger was at least as important to Tyndall as Colley has shown it to be for Ruskin. Risk is a central -arguably the central -theme of Tyndall's alpine writing. But unlike Ruskin, Tyndall found it impossible to engage with danger in the high mountains and absorb the experience of that engagement into his larger project, which in Tyndall's case was scientific and cultural. Risk presented a professional, moral, and emotional challenge to Tyndall that he was utterly and explicitly unable to resolve. His work reveals the dynamic, unstable, and highly problematic nature of mid-Victorian attitudes toward danger. The most severe terrain in the high Alps -terrain which could not be traversed without taking serious risks -and the temptation to enter that terrain were Tyndall's constant and proximate fellow-travellers in the Alps. They haunted 55