Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"'Perilous Play': Life and Death in John Tyndall's Travel Writing"
Gerald Majer
Department of English, Villa Julie College
f-majer@mail.vjc.edu
Victorian author-scientist John Tyndall is best known for a series of popular-scientific works collected as Fragments of Science and for his public role (with T.H. Huxley) in debates on science and religion. While the Fragments and texts such as the Belfast Address have received their fair share of attention from intellectual historians, Tyndall's travel writings have mostly been forgotten. Such neglect is partly the result of a judgment of Tyndall's work as secondary to Huxley's, a view that has obscured Tyndall's distinctive place as writer and public figure in late-Victorian culture. It is also a result of the hybrid character of Tyndall's travel writings -- along with travel narrative, they include field-work reports, scientific exposition, and polemical asides on science and religion, thus eluding ready categorization.
In focusing on Tyndall's three major travel texts of the 1860s and 1870s -- Glaciers of the Alps, Mountaineering in 1861, and Hours of Exercise in the Alps -- my main interest is understanding what Tyndall means by the phrase he uses to characterize his travels, "perilous play." One aspect of this perilous play is Tyndall's role in the Victorian mountaineering craze of the 1850s and 1860s. Off the regular paths of Victorian tourism, the perils Tyndall courts in his mountaineering are germane to a construction of an "anti-tourism" (to enlist James Buzard's term) specific to a Victorian- masculine subject of travel. "The glaciers and the mountains," Tyndall remarks, "have made me feel in all my fibres the blessedness of perfect manhood..." (Mountaineering 249). For Tyndall, perilous play is masculine recreation, a re-production of manliness.
A second aspect is Tyndall's emphasis on health as the salutary profit of travel. Such play for the sake of health is also a matter of considerable peril, so that Tyndall's journeys follow two rather different paths. In the first, he celebrates the body's powers, what he calls "the pleasurable present exercise of Mr. Bain's 'muscular sense'" (Hours viii). The second is demanded by the first, insofar as the body's powers are best reinvigorated through exertion. Yet in this phase Tyndall's travels move far beyond measured exercise and venture into realms of extreme risk, vividly registered in his descriptions of wounds, injuries, and fatalities, and in cliff-hanging over Alpine chasms where to lose one's purchase would have consequences "not to be calculated" (Hours 14).
I suggest in conclusion that in Tyndall's writing a peculiarly modern sensibility is emerging as travel for health redefines the life it would profit in light of a proximity to pathology and death. Against the main stream of Victorian scientific optimism, Tyndall is drawn toward disaster and mortification, asserting that "the state to which material nature tends is not one of perfection, but of death" (Mountaineering 213). With his contemporary Walter Pater, Tyndall bears witness to those "fatal combinations" of material existence and natural law by virtue of which the subject is imbued with a newly tragic sense. As he celebrates such paradoxically "great experiences" of mortality and finitude, Tyndall's perilous play in the Alps intimates a limit-point for the powers of Victorian manhood, and an emergent style of modern subjectivity.
Gerald Majer
Department of English,
Villa Julie College
410-675-7614
f-majer@mail.vjc.edu
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