Romantic Transformation: English experience of the Alps
In 1739, two English travellers crossed the English Channel seeking adventure. Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray had embarked on the Grand Tour—that rite of passage for wealthy young men—expecting to find culture in Rome and antiquities in Athens. What they didn’t expect was the sheer terror they would experience among the high peaks of the Alps.
“Mont Cenis, I confess, carries the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far; and its horrors were accompanied with too much danger to give one time to reflect upon their beauties,” Gray wrote to a friend from Turin. As their carriage wound through precipitous passes, they witnessed torrents tumbling down the mountains and peaks that made them shudder. Their journey became even more dramatic when Walpole’s spaniel was carried off by a wolf. Their terror was typical of the age. Yet within a century, this ancient fear would be completely transformed.
Just 150 years later, Anglican churches in the Alps stretched from Zermatt to Montreux, from Davos to Interlaken. Where medieval travellers had crossed themselves in fear, Victorian congregations sang hymns in these English churches in Switzerland. The mountains hadn’t changed. Human perception had undergone a complete revolution—one that would transform sleepy Alpine villages into bustling resorts
The Age of Alpine Terror
For over a thousand years, the high Alps represented everything civilised society feared. Medieval maps often featured dragons and monsters in mountainous regions. People genuinely believed these frozen wastelands harboured demons.
The evidence seemed overwhelming. Avalanches struck without warning, burying entire villages. Glaciers groaned and cracked with unearthly sounds. Altitude sickness struck travellers with hallucinations and madness. What else but evil spirits could explain such phenomena?
Consider Mount Pilatus above Lucerne. Local law forbade climbing it until 1585—anyone attempting the ascent faced imprisonment. Why? Because disturbing Pontius Pilate’s ghost (supposedly residing in a lake near the summit) would trigger devastating storms. When the Lucerne authorities finally permitted an ascent, they insisted a priest accompany the party—just in case an exorcism proved necessary. Six priests had been punished in 1387 for attempting to visit the forbidden lake.
The theological argument ran deeper. Mountains were wastelands, producing nothing useful. They must therefore be corruptions of God’s perfect creation—evidence of humanity’s fall from grace. Theologians of the period viewed the Alps as monuments to human sin, swept up after the biblical Flood.
Even practical crossings filled travellers with dread. Major Alpine passes earned fearsome reputations. Travellers left wills before attempting them. Many never returned.
The Romantic Revolution
The Romantic transformation of the Alps began, improbably, with a novel. In 1761, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse” took European salons by storm. This epistolary novel, told through letters between lovers, was set in the Alps around Lake Geneva. It portrayed mountain folk not as barbarians but as noble savages, uncorrupted by civilisation’s vices.
Rousseau’s fictional lovers wandered through Alpine meadows finding moral clarity impossible in Paris’s polluted streets. The mountains, he suggested, brought humans closer to their natural state—and therefore closer to virtue. It was a radical idea that overturned centuries of theological thinking. The novel became perhaps the best-selling novel of the 18th century, sparking what would become the Romantic movement.
Young aristocrats, inspired by Rousseau, began venturing into the Alps seeking authentic experience. They were followed by poets who found in mountain storms not God’s wrath but what Edmund Burke termed ‘the sublime’—that peculiar mixture of terror and exhilaration that overwhelms the senses.
The concept of the sublime, refined by philosophers Burke and Kant, gave intellectuals a framework for appreciating nature’s raw power. Unlike beauty, which was harmonious and pleasing, the sublime was vast, terrible, and awe-inspiring. It made humans feel small yet somehow elevated by the experience. Mountains were no longer cursed wastelands but natural cathedrals where one could experience transcendence.
Lord Byron, escaping scandal in England, found inspiration in the Alps in 1816. In his drama “Manfred,” he wrote: “Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains; They crown’d him long ago / On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, / With a diadem of snow.” His friend Percy Shelley was equally moved, composing his own ode to Mont Blanc.
British artists joined the Alpine pilgrimage. J.M.W. Turner first visited Switzerland in 1802 and returned annually in the 1840s, hauling his painting equipment up precipitous paths to capture dawn breaking over the peaks. His swirling, atmospheric canvases, like “Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps” (1812), conveyed the overwhelming sensory experience of high altitude.
The Victorian Discovey
By the 1840s, what had been an aristocratic eccentricity became middle-class fashion. The railways brought the Alps within reach of British professionals. Thomas Cook, recognising the opportunity, organised his first Swiss tour in 1863, leading 60 ladies and gentlemen to Geneva. The age of Victorian tourism in Switzerland had begun.
Understanding why Victorians didn’t just visit but stayed for months requires understanding what they were escaping. In 1858, London experienced the “Great Stink.” The Thames had become an open sewer. Parliament suspended sessions because members couldn’t bear the stench. Temperatures reached 35°C, and Queen Victoria abandoned a Thames cruise due to the smell. Physicians prescribed the only cure they knew: fresh air at altitude.
The numbers tell the story. While exact Victorian-era tourist statistics are difficult to verify, contemporary accounts suggest British visitors to Switzerland grew from an estimated few thousand in 1850 to well over 100,000 annually by 1890. They came seeking health, certainly, but also something ineffable—what one guidebook called “moral elevation through physical elevation.”
This wasn’t casual tourism. Entire families decamped to Swiss resorts for months at a time, bringing servants, governesses, and the full apparatus of Victorian domestic life. Hotels in Grindelwald, Meiringen, and Château-d’Oex weren’t just lodgings but home away from home, complete with English breakfasts, lending libraries, and—crucially—Anglican services.
The Need for Anglican Churches
The establishment of Anglican churches in the Alps became not just a convenience but a necessity for maintaining Victorian social and spiritual life abroad. For Victorians, Sunday worship wasn’t optional—it was the cornerstone of respectability. Missing church marked you as either dangerously radical or morally suspect. Local Reformed churches conducted services in German or French—incomprehensible to most visitors. The influential Baedeker guides understood this perfectly, noting which Swiss resorts had English chaplains.
Some hoteliers, recognising the commercial imperative, arranged English services in their dining rooms, led by whatever Anglican clergyman happened to be holidaying. But this makeshift arrangement satisfied no one. As British communities grew in their favourite resorts, the push for proper churches became irresistible.
Building Churches in the Mountains
The establishment of Anglican churches in the Alps followed a remarkably consistent pattern. First came the hotel services—chaplains holding communion in dining rooms, using sideboards as altars. Then, as the British community grew, came the movement for proper churches.
In Zermatt, it began in 1862 when the Monte Rosa Hotel allowed services in its dining room. By 1871, the English Church stood on land donated by the local commune, its spire a familiar sight against the backdrop of the Matterhorn.
In Montreux, services started in the 1860s at the Grand Hotel. By 1877, St. John’s Anglican Church opened its doors, built in the English Gothic style with funds raised from across the Empire. The church was designed by George Frederick Bodley, a renowned Gothic Revival architect.
Vevey saw Anglican services begin in hotel lounges in the 1870s. All Saints Church, consecrated on August 22, 1882, featured beautiful stained glass windows and was designed by George Edmund Street, another prominent Victorian church architect.
The financing of these Anglican churches in the Alps revealed the strength of Victorian community spirit across the Empire. Appeals would appear in The Times. Donations arrived from India, Canada, Australia—wherever British families had connections. A Lancashire mill owner might contribute £500 in gratitude for his daughter’s recovery. A regiment might send £50. Governesses scraped together francs from their meagre salaries.
The churches themselves were built in the familiar English Gothic style—complete with pointed arches, decorated tracery, and bell towers. These Gothic Revival churches in Switzerland stood as familiar landmarks for homesick Victorians. Inside, brass plaques commemorated loved ones. Prayer books bore familiar stamps. The hymns were Ancient and Modern, the liturgy strictly Prayer Book. For homesick Victorians, these churches provided spiritual comfort and a sense of community far from home.
A Lasting Legacy
This remarkable transformation—from medieval terror to Romantic sublimity to Victorian familiarity—permanently changed the Alps. The Romantic transformation of the Alps had paved the way for generations of visitors seeking both physical and spiritual renewal in the mountains. The hotels may have been rebuilt, the railways electrified, the season extended through winter. But the essential template remains unchanged: mountains as places of restoration, recreation, and spiritual renewal.
Today, Anglican churches in the Alps continue to serve diverse international congregations. Some, like All Saints in Vevey, continue to serve thriving international congregations. Others maintain smaller but devoted communities. During both World Wars, many served new purposes—St. Peter’s in Château-d’Oex ministered to interned soldiers, keeping faith alive in difficult times.
Today, these churches welcome not just British visitors but people from around the world. They host concerts, community events, and continue their original mission of providing English-language worship in the mountains. Their very existence tells a remarkable story: how the Romantic imagination transformed cursed mountains into sublime destinations, and how Victorian faith and determination built communities of worship among the peaks.
Stand in any of these churches and you stand at a unique intersection of history. The mountains that once terrified medieval travellers now inspire millions. The Romantic poets taught us to see beauty where our ancestors saw only danger. And the Victorians, with their characteristic energy and faith, ensured that even in the highest Alps, the familiar rhythms of Anglican worship could continue.
These churches remind us that landscape is never neutral. What we see depends on who taught us to look. But they also remind us of something more profound: wherever people gather, they seek to create community and maintain their faith. The Anglican churches in the Alps stand as enduring testimony to both the power of changed perception and the human need for spiritual continuity, even—perhaps especially—in the most spectacular settings on Earth.
Sources:
- Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London, 1757.
- Byron, Lord. Manfred. 1817.
- Electronic Enlightenment Project. “Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole, on the Grand Tour, 1739-1741.” Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
- Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. 1790.
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. 1761.
- Swiss Tourism Archives and Church Records
- Thomas Cook Archives. Documentation of first Swiss tour, 1863.
- Various church websites and historical documents