Albert Richard Smith

Albert Richard Smith

Albert Richard Smith (born May 24, 1816 in Chertsey , † May 23, 1860 in London ) was a British writer, humorist, journalist, entertainer and mountaineer who was very popular in Great Britain from about 1850 until his death. In 1851 he climbed Mont Blanc with a guided group , making him one of the first British to stand on this summit. The acting talented Smith developed a humorous show from this ascent, which was visited by more than half a million British people between 1852 and 1858. Among the visitors were members of the English royal family. With his show, Smith was instrumental in making mountaineering popular in Great Britain and the Mont Blanc region a popular British travel destination. With the full bearded Smith, the full beard also developed into a socially accepted beard costume .

Life

Early years

Smith was born in Chertsey , Surrey , England in 1816 . As the son of a doctor, he began to study medicine in London and continued this study in Paris in 1838 . Smith, who has been enthusiastic about the Alps since he was given a book about Mont Blanc when he was 11, used his stay in France to visit the Mont Blanc massif, among other things. He did not climb the mountain at that time, but from the Montenvers he admired the Mer de Glace , the fourth largest glacier in the Alps.

His first literary attempt was an account of his life in Paris, which was published in the English newspaper Mirror . His medical career began in 1841. Smith himself called his medical license a "license to kill people by legal means". At the same time as his medical career, he began a career as a public speaker: He gave lectures on the Alps, mostly in town halls. In 1844 he gave up his career as a doctor in favor of writing. Although more of a journalist than a man of letters, he was one of the most popular writers of his time. Very early on he was one of the journalists who wrote regularly for the newly founded satirical newspaper Punch .

The ascent of Mont Blanc

Outside the Refuge des Grands Mulets on Mont Blanc

In 1849 Smith traveled to Constantinople and the Middle East and shortly afterwards published the travelogue A Month at Constantinople . He appeared shortly afterwards on a revue show reporting on his trip and was very successful. This finally provided him with the necessary financial means to attempt to climb Mont Blanc. In Chamonix , the town at the foot of Mont Blanc, he was able to join a group of three wealthy Oxford students who were on a trip to Europe and who had managed to hire mountain guides for the ascent in Chamonix. The students were initially reluctant to include the overweight Smith in their group and only changed their minds when they realized that Smith was the well-known humorist. In August 1851, the group climbed Mont Blanc together .

In a letter to the Times on August 20, 1851, Smith reported the success of his attempt to climb. His report on this ascent followed in book form a year later. His partly humorous, partly dramatically exaggerated report not only exaggerated Smith's performance - he omitted, for example, that he was the last to reach the summit and only with great difficulty and with the active help of the mountain guides - but also emphasized the dangers of the ascent. The frostbite Smith had suffered on one hand took up a lot of space . His report was initially viewed critically. The British public had become increasingly aware that the Franklin expedition , which had sailed in 1845 to the Northwest Passage to find, had failed, while 129 British sailors to death were found. This had led to a widespread discussion among the British public about the value of such expeditions and against this background the ascent of Mont Blanc, the dangers of which Smith had so dramatically exaggerated, seemed inappropriate. A letter to the editor in the UK Daily News states:

"The aimless scramble of four pedestrians to the top of Mont Blanc [...] with its senseless, instinctual and vulgar superfluity will not improve the already dubious reputation of the great mass of English tourists."

Smith and British mountaineering

One of the responses to the attacks on Smith and his ascent of Mont Blanc was the American Vanstittart, a well-traveled adventurer and balloonist who happened to climb Mont Blanc on the same day as Smith. In his public response, he stated that climbing a mountain has an empirical value that must remain hidden from anyone who has not achieved a comparable performance.

Albert Richard Smith's group of climbers reaches Refuge des Grants Mulets on Mont Blanc, ascent to mark the opening of the refuge

For Smith, this public debate about the dangers and values ​​of mountaineering was a valuable advertisement. Smith aimed his book and lectures at audiences who only wanted third-hand adventure. For these people he developed his show The Ascent of Mont Blanc , which was first staged on March 15, 1852 in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly , London. The show consisted of two parts: in the first, Smith described his journey from London to Chamonix and the second described his experiences in Chamonix and on Mont Blanc. Fergus Fleming noted in his history of mountaineering that Smith shamelessly exaggerated on his show; every slope was a steep slope, every stone a rocky slope, every crevice an abyss and every snowball an avalanche. However, his audience was intrigued and for more than six years Smith's lecture was the most popular performance in London. Smith regularly made changes to the show: For a year, two large dogs as alleged St. Bernard with chocolate boxes tied to their necks trotted through the auditorium so that children could take some of the chocolate. In another year two young women appeared as Swiss dairy farmers . In fact, they were two waitresses from Chamonix. The American-British writer Henry James remembered in his memoir A Small Boy and Others half a century later the deep impression that attending the screening had made on him. He had the most vivid memory of Smith's account of the brief stop the train made at Epernay on the way to Chamonix . It was only by using his voice that Smith let the audience witness the excitement of this stay, imitating the ringing of the bell, the shouts of the porters and passengers, and the slamming of the car doors.

Smith performed more than two thousand times with a staging of his ascent of Mont Blanc in front of British audiences between 1852 and 1858. More than half a million Britons saw his show, including the British Prince Consort, who saw it in 1853, and Queen Victoria , who saw the show a total of three times and invited Smith to private screenings at Osborne House and Windsor Castle . In 1857 Smith even accompanied the Prince of Wales to Chamonix. The Times wrote that the country was in a real Mont Blanc mania. In London they danced “Mont Blanc Quadrille” and “Chamonix Polka”, and for children there was the board game “The New Game of Mont Blanc”. Smith Show also coincided with the point at which the network of railways in France was so dense that Mont Blanc was easily and quickly accessible from Great Britain and many Brits used this for their own Mont Blanc experience. Thanks to Smith, so many people wanted to climb Mont Blanc that in the winter of 1853/1854 the mountain guides built a hut on the way to the summit, which still exists today as the Refuge des Grands Mulets . Smith, now a very popular figure in Chamonix, who was greeted with cannon shots on his annual visits there, was also present at the opening of this hut.

death

Albert Richard Smith in the 1850s.

In 1859 Smith married Mary Lucy Keeley (circa 1830–1870), who came from a family of actors and who had been on stage for some time. Her father was the comedian Robert Keeley , her mother the actress Mary Anne Keeley . In the year of his marriage, Smith traveled to China and developed a very well-attended show from the experience of this trip. However, it only ran for about a year since Smith suffered a stroke . In the spring of 1860 he finally fell ill with bronchitis and finally died on May 23; just one day before his 44th birthday. He was buried in Brompton Cemetery .

Smith as a trendsetter

In his cultural history of the beard, the social historian Christopher Oldstone-Moore describes the entertainer Albert Richard Smith as a prototype of a new masculinity : independent, efficient, courageous and with a beard ornament. Full beards like those worn by Smith were only worn by working class men and Irish freedom fighters in Britain in the first half of the 19th century . Only officers' mustaches were common. This changed very clearly around the middle of the 19th century. While in France the rule of Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte , who wore a toggle beard , made the beard popular again, Christopher Goldstone Moore sees Smith as a trendsetter in Great Britain : his success was not based on inherited wealth or other privileges, but solely on willpower and physical exertion . In British society, which valued such qualities in a man, the beard became a symbol of these qualities.

Publications

Novels and short stories

• The Adventures of Mr Ledbury (1842) - (German: The Adventures of Mr Ledbury )
• The Fortunes of the Scattergood Family (1845)
• The Marchioness of Brinvilliers: The Poisoner of the Seventeenth Century (1846)
• The Struggles and Adventures of Christopher Tadpole (1848)
• The Pottleton Legacy: A Story of Town and Country (1849)
• The Adventures of Jack Holiday, with Something about His Sister (1844).

Plays and shows

A medical student , one of Smith's publications

• Blanche Heriot, or The Chertsey Curfew (1842)
• Aladdin (1844)
• Valentine and Orson (1844)
• Whittington and His Cat (1845)
• The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) based on a story by Charles Dickens
• The Battle of Life (1846)

Short stories

• The Wassail-Bowl: A Comic Christmas Sketchbook (1843)

Humorous pieces

• The Gent (1847)
• The Ballet Girl (1847)
• Stuck-Up 'People (1847)
• The Idler upon Town (1848):
  • Flaneurs & Idlers , edited and introduced by Margaret A. Rose: Flaneurs & Idlers , a panonoramatic overview . Reprint of the edition: Louis Adrien Huart : Physiologie du flâneur , Aubert & Lavigne, Paris 1841, together with the work: Natural History of Idler upon the Town, Bogue, London 1848 (= Aisthesis Archive , Volume 8), Aisthesis , Bielefeld 2007 , ISBN 978-3-89528-640-7 (texts partly in English and French).
• The Flirt (1848).

Travel literature

• A Month at Constantinople (1849)
• The Story of Mont Blanc (1852)

literature

• Darren Bevin: Cultural Climbs: John Ruskin, Albert Smith and the Alpine Aesthetic 2010.
• Walter Goodman: Chapter XVII: Albert Smith . In: The Keeleys on Stage and at Home . Richard Bentley and Son, London 1895, pp. 224-234.
• Fergus Fleming: Chapter XII . In: Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps . Grove Press, New York 2000.
• Christopher Oldstone-Moore: Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair . The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2015, ISBN 978-0-226-28414-9 .
• Alan McNee: The new mountaineer in late Victorian Britain: materiality, modernity, and the haptic sublime , London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016, ISBN 978-3-319-33439-4
• Alan McNee: The cockney who sold the Alps: Albert Smith and the ascent of Mont Blanc , Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2015, ISBN 978-1-906469-52-8

Single receipts

1. ^ Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 146.
2. ^ Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 147.
3. ^ Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 148.
4. ^ Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 150.
5. ^ Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 151.
6. ↑ Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 154.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 156.
8. ↑ Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 156. The original quote is: The aimless scramble of four pedestrians to the top of Mont Blanc ... will not go far to talk the somewhat equivocal reputation of the her of English tourists in Switzerland, for a mindres and rather vulgar redundance of mind animal spirit.
9. ↑ ^{a b c} Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 157.
10. ↑ ^{a b c} Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 158.
11. ↑ Henry James; The Small Boy and Ohres , Charles Scribner's Sons , New York 1913, p. 317.
12. ↑ Oldstone-Moore: Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair . Chapter: Patriarch of the Industrial Age . Ebook position 2931.
13. ^ Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 159.
14. ^ Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 160.
15. ↑ ^{a b} Fleming: Killing Dragons , p. 161.
16. ↑ Oldstone-Moore: Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair . Chapter: Patriarch of the Industrial Age . Ebook position 2939.
17. ↑ Oldstone-Moore: Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair . Chapter: Beards of the Romantic Imagination . Ebook position 2768.
18. ↑ Oldstone-Moore: Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair . Chapter: Patriarch of the Industrial Age . Ebook position 2947.