Across Country from Thonon to Trent: Rambles and Scrambles in Switzerland and the Tyrol - Couverture souple
Synopsis
Douglas William Freshfield was born on Sunday, 27 April 1845 in London, the only son of Henry Ray Freshfield and Jane Quinton Crawford. After being educated at Eton College and University College, Oxford, he followed his father into the legal profession and was called to the bar in 1870. One of the features of his privileged childhood was the opportunity to travel with his parents and enjoy long summer holidays abroad. At the age of eight he had his first experience of the Swiss Alps undertaking a journey from Basel to Chamonix. Eventually, in 1863, he was ready to undertake an Alpine adventure of his own planning. This volume, which he arranged to have printed privately in 1865 before he had reached his majority, was his first work of mountain literature and also his rarest. It is his journal from a trek made from the southern shores of Lake Geneva, in the company of two schoolfriends, through the Swiss Alps and into northern Italy during the summer. Freshfield was only 18 when he made this trip, and in the narrative of the journal can be found the beginnings of the style and observational genius that was to serve him well over the course of his writing career. The reader is engaged at once with the three young men as they begin their adventure and is bowled along as an unseen travelling companion through the high routes and passes, the valleys and gorges and is with them as they tackle the mountains they climbed along the way. The book culminates with Freshfield becoming the first schoolboy to conquer Mont Blanc. It is an engaging and informative journal of how privileged young Englishmen once spent their leisure time and reveals a lifestyle long gone now but still worthy of reminiscence. Freshfield died aged 88 in 1934 in Forest Row, Sussex.
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À propos de l'auteur
Douglas Freshfield was one of the great Victorian Alpinist writers and was a President of the Royal Geographic Society and a Chairman of the Society of Authors. In all he published 9 mountain and travel books.
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