Albert Smith is one of the most famous Victorians of whom you’ve probably never heard. During his lifetime, he was a household name, thrilling audiences with his Ascent of Mont Blanc show at London’s Egyptian Hall. An inveterate showman, Smith was also a doctor, journalist, raconteur, novelist, travel writer, and playwright. His many talents were outstripped only by his boundless self-belief and huge personality. Even Queen Victoria described him in her journal as “inimitable”, an epithet Smith’s contemporary Charles Dickens liked to reserve for himself. Although Smith died aged only 43, he managed to pack much incident into his short life. He was robbed by highwaymen in Italy, narrowly escaped death in a hot air ballooning accident, and dodged arrest in Paris during the June Days Uprising of 1848. He also got caught up in the row over Dickens’s affair with Ellen Ternan. While his bumptiousness made Smith a divisive figure, many saw in him the Victorian ideal of the self-made man: energetic, imaginative, and ready to seize any new opportunity. As Alan McNee explains in this lively biography, it was his intrepid ascent of Mont Blanc in 1851 that propelled Smith to stardom. His subsequent show inspired ‘Mont Blanc mania’, encouraging participation in mountaineering as a popular pursuit. The Cockney Who Sold the Alps is a story of ambition, spectacle, and the fleeting nature of celebrity.

This book is about the rise of a new ethos in British mountaineering during the late nineteenth century. It traces how British attitudes to mountains were transformed by developments both within the new sport of mountaineering and in the wider fin-de-siècle culture. The emergence of the new genre of mountaineering literature, which helped to create a self-conscious community of climbers with broadly shared values, coincided with a range of cultural and scientific trends that also influenced the direction of mountaineering. The author discusses the growing preoccupation with the physical basis of aesthetic sensations, and with physicality and materiality in general; the new interest in the physiology of effort and fatigue; and the characteristically Victorian drive to enumerate, codify, and classify. Examining a wide range of texts, from memoirs and climbing club journals to hotel visitors’ books, he argues that the figure known as the ‘New Mountaineer’ was seen to embody a distinctly modern approach to mountain climbing and mountain aesthetics.

This book explores the moving qualities of mountains by utilising theories, ideas and processes which contribute to a larger understanding of these geological forms. In highlighting the fluid attributes of mountains the authors offer an alternative to the traditional approach of the sciences and the humanities, which address mountains as static geological or geographical features. The essays in this collection posit that movement impacts the relationship between society and mountains – travelling landscape objects, constructing design and artistic translations, climbing and experiencing changing atmospheres and the different ways of seeing from mountain peaks – and that physical, intellectual and spiritual motion is integral to their understanding. This innovative collection will be of great interest to scholars of geography, art, architecture, history, theology and philosophy.

Climbing is one of the world's fastest-growing sports – exciting, addictive and, arguably, much more fun than going to the gym. In 2021 it made its long-awaited Olympic debut, but its journey to Tokyo has been anything but traditional. And the traditionalists would argue that it's not even a sport at all ... In Born to Climb, anthropologist and climber Zofia Reych shares with us the fascinating cultural history of rock and competition climbing. Zofia offers a fresh perspective on some of the pivotal moments and outstanding individuals of the sport, from eighteenth-century exploratory forays on rock, via the rise of climbing legends such as Emilio Comici, Wolfgang Güllich and Lynn Hill, to the limelight of the Olympic arena for the stars of today – Janja Garnbret, Adam Ondra, Shauna Coxsey and more. But Born to Climb is much more than a celebration of the sport's famous people and places: it is an examination of modern sporting participation and culture, interwoven with the author's own climbing journey. While the writing is engaging and often funny, Zofia is not afraid to broach sensitive and often overlooked topics, including gender divide, capitalism and the tension between aesthetic and athletic approaches to climbing, in what is a must-read for all climbers.

This is the only collection of its kind to focus on one of the most important aspects of the cultural history of the Romantic period, its sources, and its afterlives. Multidisciplinary in approach, the volume examines the variety of areas of enquiry and genres of cultural productivity in which the sublime played a substantial role during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With impressive international scope, this Companion considers the Romantic sublime in both European and American contexts and features essays by leading scholars from a range of national backgrounds and subject specialisms, including state-of-the-art perspectives in digital and environmental humanities. An accessible, wide-ranging, and thorough introduction, aimed at researchers, students, and general readers alike, and including extensive suggestions for further reading, The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime is the go-to book on the subject.

Launching the landmark Performing Landscapes series, Performing Mountains brings together for the first time Mountain Studies and Performance Studies in order to examine an international selection of dramatic responses to mountain landscapes. Moving between different registers of writing, the book offers a critical assessment of how the cultural turn in landscape studies interacts with the practices of environmental theatre and performance. Conceived in three main parts, it begins by unpicking the layers of disciplinary complexity in both fields, before surveying the rich history and practice of rituals, playtexts and site specific works inspired by mountains. The last section moves to a unique analysis of mountains themselves using key concepts from performance: training, scenography, acting and spectatorship. Threaded throughout is a very personal tale of mountain research, offering a handrail or alternative guide through the book.

This ambitious study traces the strategies of human rights activists to show how world-changing reform movements were shaped by women and men from modest backgrounds who were deeply attuned to the power of performance. Tracy C. Davis explores nineteenth-century reform campaigns through the pioneering work of a family of activists – prominent anti-slavery lecturer George Thompson, his daughter Amelia (the first female theatre and music critic for a British daily newspaper) and her husband, the political organizer Frederick Chesson. Engaging in some of the most important social struggles of the late Georgian and Victorian periods – including abolition, enfranchisement, and anti-genocide - this book reveals how two generations' insights into performance consolidated into activist tactics that persist today. Characterised by a skilful deployment of performance theory alongside deep and wide-ranging historical knowledge, this ground-breaking work demonstrates what 'dramaturgy' can teach us about 'history'.