author
Albert Smith
1816–1860
Best known in Victorian England for lively humor, travel writing, and a hugely popular Mont Blanc stage lecture, this versatile writer moved from medicine into literature and entertainment with remarkable ease.
4 Audiobooks
The Comic Almanack, Volume 1 An Ephemeris in Jest and Earnest, Containing Merry Tales, Humerous Poetry, Quips, and Oddities
by William Makepeace Thackeray, Gilbert Abbott À Beckett, Henry Mayhew, Horace Mayhew, Albert Smith
The Natural History of the Gent
by Albert Smith
The Comic Almanack, Volume 2 An Ephemeris in Jest and Earnest, Containing Merry Tales, Humerous Poetry, Quips, and Oddities
by William Makepeace Thackeray, Gilbert Abbott À Beckett, Henry Mayhew, Horace Mayhew, Albert Smith
About the author
Born in Chertsey, Surrey, in 1816, he first trained in medicine in London and Paris before drifting toward journalism and comic writing. He became one of the early contributors to Punch and built a wide readership with humorous fiction such as The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and other lively sketches of mid-19th-century life.
His fame grew even further after his ascent of Mont Blanc in 1851. He turned the experience into a book and then into an illustrated lecture-show, The Ascent of Mont Blanc, which became one of the great popular entertainments of the Victorian period and helped stir public interest in Alpine travel and mountaineering.
He was more than a novelist: also a lecturer, traveler, and performer, he wrote with an easy, sociable tone that made his work accessible to a broad audience. He died in 1860, just before his forty-fourth birthday, but remains a distinctive example of the writer-entertainer in early Victorian culture.