Romantik: Journal for the Study of Romanticisms [1 ed.] 9783737008808, 9783847108801

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Romantik Journal for the Study of Romanticisms

Editors Cian Duffy (Lund University), Karina Lykke Grand (Aarhus University), Thor J. Mednick (University of Toledo), Lis Møller (Aarhus University), Elisabeth Oxfeldt (University of Oslo), Ilona Pikkanen (Tampere University and the Finnish Literature Society), Robert W. Rix (University of Copenhagen), and Anna Lena Sandberg (University of Copenhagen)

Advisory Board Charles Armstrong (University of Bergen), Jacob Bøggild (University of Southern Denmark, Odense), David Fairer (University of Leeds), Karin Hoff (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen), Stephan Michael Schröder (University of Cologne), David Jackson (University of Leeds), Christoph Bode (LMU München), Carmen Casaliggi (Cardiff Metropolitan University), Gunilla Hermansson (University of Gothernburg), Knut Ljøgodt (Nordic Institute of Art, Oslo), and Paula Henrikson (Uppsala University)

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Romantik Journal for the Study of Romanticisms Volume 07|2018

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Articles Tim van Gerven (University of Amsterdam) Whose Tordenskjold? The Fluctuating Identities of an Eighteenth-Century Naval Hero in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Nationalisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Susanne Bangert (Aarhus University) Gathering Storm. A Landscape Painting from a Danish Province and its Art Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros (Lund University) Translating ‘unprejudiced, bright, and philanthropic views’. Henry Brougham and Anglo-Swedish Exchanges in the Early Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Philipp Hunnekuhl (Universität Hamburg) Henry Crabb Robinson, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and William Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Peter Brix Søndergaard (Aarhus University) ‘Something strangely perverse’. Nature and Gender in J. E. Millais’s Ophelia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Uffe Hansen On the Unconscious . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

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Contents

Reviews Lis Møller Romantikkens univers. By Geir Uthaug . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Charles I. Armstrong Studien zur Englischen Romantik, vols. 19, 20, and 21 Enit K. Steiner Balloon Madness. By Clare Brant

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About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Foreword … if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.

This line is spoken by the hapless creature in Mary Shelley’s iconic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. Undoubtedly, some people will have shuddered at this harrowing tale, not least because it has been adapted into the medium of horror film, several examples of which have imprinted the idea that Frankenstein is a story about a brute and bloodthirsty fiend. However, this was not how Shelley wrote the story. The novel has several speakers and among them the creature is allowed to narrate his tale of being rejected and ostracized by an uncaring and hostile humanity. This agonizing tale has inspired love for the wretched outcast among many generations of readers. No matter what version of the story one may know, the tale of the mad scientist, who gives life a creature made from human corpses, has established itself as one of the enduring cultural myths of the modern world. In 2018, we celebrate the bicentenary of Shelley’s influential novel. To mark the occasion, a series of events has been organized around the globe, on the initiative of the KeatsShelley Association of America. The events will take place under the aegis of the Frankenreads Project. At the time this foreword goes to press, 541 events are scheduled to take place in 47 countries. Shelley’s novel is undoubtedly one of the best-known examples of romanticera writing, and amongst the few books from the period that many readers will know. Today, editions of Frankenstein are no longer issued in the original, cumbersome three-volume format, but are made available in inexpensive paperbacks. This has made the original 1818 text accessible to many con amore readers. In richly annotated versions, Frankenstein also ranks among the novels most frequently taught in English courses around the world. As noted, the story has regularly been adapted for other media, whether the stage, television, cinema, comic book, or computer games. If this has been with varying degrees of success, the figure of Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ is now surely among the bestknown characters in the world. In this issue, Lis Møller reviews Geir Uthaug’s new book-length overview of romanticism, Romantikkens univers (2017), in which the author justifiably allots much space to Frankenstein. The novel’s place in the

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canon cannot be contested. The longevity of Frankenstein and its more or less uninterrupted influence on popular culture are testament to the novel’s enduring appeal. After two centuries of criticism, the study of Frankenstein has itself become a kind of stitched-together entity with numerous competing interpretations that do not seem to diminish with time. However, one overriding reason for the widespread celebrations in 2018 is that successive generations of readers have made the novel’s themes bear on debates that happen to be current to them. One strand in the interpretation of the novel is to view it as eerily prescient of issues that we are grappling with in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century society. In addition to this, freak weather conditions caused human and economic catastrophe in the year Mary Shelley wrote the story, which has been extensively discussed in recent years as relevant to contemporary anxieties about climate change. Some of the various interpretations of the novel will briefly be discussed in this foreword, including how modern readers necromantically read Shelley’s masterpiece as prescient of issues that are topical today. To make a beginning on some of the auguries that have been identified in Frankenstein, a prominent theme is the creation of a new kind of man. This aspiration forms the backbone of the novel and has been seen as pertinent to modern debates about bioethics. If the stitching together of cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein may belong solely to the Schauerroman, from which Shelley took inspiration, it should not be forgotten that his ambition is to correct mental and physical faults in humans, and that he is driven by the noble hope of overcoming disease and death. This is a goal congruent with the research agendas of modern biosciences. Nonetheless, such meddling with nature comes with a warning, as Shelley shows us. Today, life-saving surgery may be mostly welcomed, but other interventions are looked upon with a jaundiced eye. One example is GMOs, regularly referred to as ‘Frankenfood’, in reference to Shelley’s novel, with the indication this is a monstrous interference in the natural order. Related to Victor’s quest to create a new life is the unnatural circumvention of women and mothers. This has been a focal point in many late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminist readings of the novel. It can be said that women are central to Shelley’s text precisely because they are overlooked. That is to say, male characters may be front and centre in the plot, but the fact that the usual role played by women in sex, birth, and child rearing is sidestepped is the real focus of the novel. The ambitious Victor offends not only the order of nature but also social codes, and his lack of care for his progeny is what creates the tragedy of the novel. It is Victor’s rejection of his creation and the subsequent solitude and isolation that the creature endures that can be said to actuate his murderous tendencies. Furthermore, Victor’s final refusal of the creature’s request to make a female companion is also related to male fantasies of self-sufficiency. Anne K.

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Mellor, one of the foremost feminist readers of the novel, has observed that Victor is disinclined to create a female partner that may have a sense of self and rationale and who may therefore not be controlled (Victor fears ‘a thinking and reasoning animal’ who refuses to ‘comply with a compact made before her creation’ and may ‘turn with disgust’ from the male creature). Beyond the feminist dimension, the wider political dimension of Shelley’s novel has long been a vexatious question. The author grew up in a radical political milieu and became romantically entangled with a radical activist, and critics have emphasized the heretical and revolutionary streak in the novel. The political aspect is perhaps most clearly seen in the creature’s choice of reading material, which is focused on books containing liberal values and critique of autocratic power. To apply an allegorical reading, Victor Frankenstein can be seen as someone who exploits the bodies of men, like a feudal lord would make use of the peasantry. From the beginning, the creature is treated so appallingly by his master that he becomes reprobate and finally vindictive. One may almost hear an echo of Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who advanced the opinion in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) that ‘[p]eople are rendered ferocious by misery; and misanthropy is ever the offspring of discontent’. Despite Shelley’s clear sympathies with the oppressed, critics have argued that the novel also lays itself open to interpretation as a text sceptical of the Revolution. Frankenstein has more than a few times been expounded as an allegory of the French Revolution – good intentions that fall into disarray and become a destructive as well as self-destructive power. Not that Shelley would necessarily have cheered a conservative perspective, but some critics have heard an echo of Edmund Burke’s description of the negative consequences of the French Revolution: ‘a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it’. Allegorical readings may often spiral out of control, but one should not ignore that the novel was subsequently tapped as a commentary on popular risings. The British Foreign Secretary, George Canning, spoke in the House of Commons in 1824 on the emancipation of West Indian slaves, on which occasion he warned that ‘to turn him [the slave] loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passion, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance’. Readers of Punch magazine would in 1843 have seen a cartoon entitled ‘The Irish Frankenstein’, depicting a fiendish Irishman as a monster in the process of attacking an innocent British man (an allusion to the fear of mob violence following the arrest of the Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell). In 1882, the famous illustrator John Tenniel was behind another cartoon with the same title, this time in referring to renewed fears of Irish rebellion.

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Arguably, the subtitle of Frankenstein (often overlooked) has certain political resonances. Prometheus was the overambitious creator of Greek legend, who created man out of clay and later stole fire from the gods to give to mankind. For Prometheus’s actions Zeus punished him by having an eagle pluck out his liver every night. The symbolic recasting of this myth was low-hanging fruit at a time when the political overreacher was a well-known type. The Prometheus myth was certainly a favourite among romantic-period artists. There is Goethe’s poem from 1789, which was translated into several languages; Percy Bysshe Shelley published the closet drama Prometheus Unbound (1820); and paintings by Heinrich Füger and Thomas Cole come to mind. It is unlikely that Shelley blithely referenced the Prometheus myth without awareness of the political interpretations it was given at the time. The analogy was certainly used in connection with Napoleon, who could be said to have lit a spark of hope for a rebirth of Europe. He rose to fame as the republican hero of Europe, which only made the disenchantment so much more palpable when he increasingly assumed the role of tyrant. Ludwig van Beethoven was a one-time admirer of Napoleon’s anti-monarchical ideas. Soon after composing his only ballet, Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus [The creatures of Prometheus] (1801), Beethoven began work on what is now known as Symphony No. 3 (written 1803– 1804). On an extant copy of the music sheets, Beethoven has scratched out two handwritten subtitles: the Italian phrase Intitolata Bonaparte [Titled Bonaparte] and the German Geschriben auf Bonaparte [Written for Bonaparte]. Apparently, Beethoven withdrew his support for Napoleon in disgust when he learned that the once great liberator had proclaimed himself ‘Emperor of the French’. The news of this power grab was announced to Beethoven by his secretary, Ferdinand Ries, who would later recall that the composer had responded in frustration: ‘So he [Napoleon] is no more than a common mortal! Now, too, he will tread under foot all the rights of Man, indulge only his ambition’. Another admirer of Napoleon was the English Lord Byron. In his ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’ (1814), he, however, compares the military leader unfavourably to Prometheus, because the older Napoleon is not Promethean enough, deciding to abdicate rather than sacrifice himself for mankind. A few years later, in 1816, Byron wrote the poem ‘Prometheus’, in which he issues a strident call to keep the rebellious flame burning – perhaps as a response to Napoleon’s ignominious retreat and defeat. In 1816, Byron was also disillusioned with the political stagnation in Britain and the increasingly toxic reaction to his person. He therefore sought temporary refuge in Switzerland, at Villa Diodati, near Lake Geneva. Here, he entertained the company of his personal physician John Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (soon to be Mrs Shelley), and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Much of the group’s summer was spent indoors. In the foreword to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley recalls that it was ‘a wet, uncongenial

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summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house’. In fact, it was the coldest and wettest Genevan summer since records began in 1753. No less than 130 days of rainfall between April and September would swell the water of the lake so that it flooded the city and some parts could only be reached by boat. Switzerland was particularly hard hit by unusual weather with homes destroyed, fields flooded and livestock drowned. The winds, unusual snowfall and mountain avalanches that year made tourists complain that the picturesque landscapes were unrecognisable. Strange weather phenomena also struck visitors with a sense of awe. In a letter of 1 June 1816, Mary Shelley describes ‘a finer storm than I had ever beheld before’, and on 13 June the well-travelled Lord Byron witnessed ‘the mightiest of the storms’ he had ever seen. Unable to venture outside because of the rain, the literary company who gathered at Villa Diodati passed the time with a ghost-story competition. It was out of this competition that the text of Frankenstein would emerge, and one may surmise that the weather cannot but have had some influence on Shelley’s mood. Few readers have missed that foul weather, thunderstorms and lightning are significant symbols in Frankenstein. 1816 is often referred to as the ‘Year without a Summer’, which was connected with a climate catastrophe – a context not unexpectedly taken up by several critics and historians in recent years. The reason for the lack of sunshine is now linked to the eruption in April 1815 of Mount Tambora, a volcano in what is now Indonesia. The eruption was of an enormous scale, spewing vast amounts of sulphuric acid and ash into the atmosphere (adding to the effect of other eruptions in previous years), preventing light from penetrating the dust cloud that moved across the globe. The knock-on effects of the eruption were decreasing temperatures and abnormal weather conditions. The sudden climate change caused an agricultural shortfall in many countries and, in turn, led to widespread famine in the Northern Hemisphere. The result was the death of thousands, disease, economic collapse, civil unrest, and mass migration. Ironically, 2018 – the year in which we celebrate the bicentenary of a novel born in the ‘Year without a Summer’ – saw one of the hottest summers on record, causing widespread drought and forest fires. For teachers of romanticism, the novel Frankenstein can become monstrous in itself, threatening to eclipse all other works from the period. This should not, however, keep us from celebrating this spectacular work, which is a true classic. It is a novel that perhaps more than any other in literary history has inspired so many readers’ first love-relationship with romanticism. This is not least because Frankenstein has proven itself as an eminently renewable resource, whose themes are given new life by reading them into ever new and topical contexts. Just like the creature himself, the novel is a corpse from the past that is reanimated but on such a scale and with such regularity that it has fostered a corpus of

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critical readings that refuse to let the novel rest in peace. In this issue of Romantik: Journal for the Study of Romanticism, we have made room for other areas that show the variety of topics from the romantic period that also attract the interest of researchers in 2018. The articles consider the mediation of thoughts and ideas, not only across genres and cultures, but particularly across borders. Tim van Gerven’s article on the historical figure of Tordenskjold focuses on the role of literary texts in transforming this navel hero from man to national symbol, exploring dichotomies between history and memory. The fluctuating identities of Tordenskjold are identified and related to the national cultivation of this figure on both sides of the water, with both Denmark and Norway appropriating the man as a cultural symbol. In contrast to Gerven’s analysis of how individuals may be written into the history of a national collective, Susanne Bangert’s article engages with the landscape artist F. C. Kiærskou, who can be said to be have been written out of Danish art history. The article is an analysis of how a painter who enjoyed a fair amount of success during his own lifetime has since been neglected by modern critics and the public. Featured on the front cover of the present volume, Kiærskou’s painting Klippelandskab. Djupadal i Bleking [Rocky landscape. Djupadal in Blekinge] was painted in 1855 and purchased the same year (it has been on long-term loan to the Danish Parliament since 2001). Cecilia WadsöLecaros’s article on the key role of translation, in relation to the mediation of Reform ideas, shows how translators may steer history in new directions. Lecaros explores the liberty translators had for mixing the ideas of others with their own philanthropic views, thereby not only blurring the limits of what constitutes a translation, but also taking on the roles of instigators of political and ideological change. Philipp Hunnekuhl also explores Anglo-Scandinavian relations, emphasising the recent ‘ethical turn’ in romantic studies in a cross-cultural literary study of Henry Robinson, Ernst Arndt, and William Wordsworth. Peter Brix Søndergaard explores the origins of romanticism and the dialectic of enlightenment in his analysis of English art in the context of European ideas. Søndergaard provides an interesting characterisation of Millais’s art, and he discusses gender and nature alongside the issues of painterly control and escape. Finally, we print an exploration of how romanticism may be viewed as a network of contemporaneous thoughts and opinions across Europe. Uffe Hansen’s article on ‘the unconscious’ is a review of the relation between the un- and the sub-conscious state of mind, reminding us that art is as accidental as it is deliberate in its inspiration and construction. Originally published as a contribution to a series of papers on romanticism (Litteraturkritik & Romantikstudier), the article stands out as the most sought-after contribution to the series and has remained a favourite among readers. The translation will give English-speaking audiences a chance to acquaint themselves with the insightful and wide-ranging

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article on a central romantic theme. The translation is also a tribute to the author, who sadly passed away in 2016. Welcome to Romantik. Robert W. Rix, on behalf of the editorial board

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Articles

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Tim van Gerven (University of Amsterdam)

Whose Tordenskjold? The Fluctuating Identities of an Eighteenth-Century Naval Hero in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Nationalisms

Abstract The naval hero Peter Wessel Tordenskjold (1690–1720) was one of the most celebrated historical figures in both nineteenth-century Norway and Denmark. This double national cultivation gave cause for an ongoing feud between Danish and Norwegian historians concerning his true fatherland. At the same time, the uncertainty surrounding his exact nationality offered a wealth of material for narratives of Dano-Norwegian, and even panScandinavian rapprochement. This article explores Tordenskjold’s track record as a figure of national cultivation by treating him as a dynamic and transnational memory site (lieu de mémoire). It will be demonstrated that the contestation surrounding the ownership of his memory formed an important motivation for the rich artistic cultivation of this national hero, while the symbolic meaning attributed to him was subjected to the ideological needs of the individuals and groups appropriating him. As such, Tordenskjold came to be alternately ingrained in Danish, Norwegian, Dano-Norwegian, and Scandinavian frameworks according to the relevant political and social circumstances. Keywords Peter Wessel Tordenskjold, Cultural memory, Cultivation of culture, National heroes, Lieu de mémoire

Introduction Peter Wessel Tordenskjold (1690–1720) belongs to the most beloved and most cultivated national heroes in nineteenth-century Denmark and Norway. The list of songs, poems, stories, plays, novels, and biographies featuring the vice admiral in the leading role is a particularly long one and includes works by such prominent authors as Adam Oehlenschläger, B. S. Ingemann, and Henrik Hertz. On top of these literary appropriations, statues of the historic figure were erected in Copenhagen (1876), Trondheim (1876), and Christiania (1901), while he was immortalized on canvas by the likes of Otto Bache and Christian Mølsted. Finally, streets, squares, and parks were named after him across the two countries, later followed by the naming of, among several others, schools, ships, pubs, restauPhD candidate Tim van Gerven, University of Amsterdam, Romantik 07|2018, 17–46 Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0

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Tim van Gerven

rants, kindergartens, sporting clubs, and – notably – Denmark’s most popular brand of matches.1 Tordenskjold’s rich nineteenth-century afterlife – his veneration, cultivation, and canonization – has never been studied in much detail. So far, discussion of the topic has been contained to short and largely descriptive sections in biographies and encyclopaedias of the kind ‘writer W wrote novel X, painter Y painted painting Z’. An exception is an MA thesis from 2016 written by Eirik Veivåg Tveit which, however, solely addresses the historiographical tradition on Tordenskjold.2 Dan H. Andersen, in the short final chapter of the most recent Danish biography, likewise discusses Tordenskjold’s legacy mainly with reference to history writing and school books, although he also devotes half a page to the matchboxes and mentions some painters and poets in passing.3 In this article, I want to widen the scope to include the fictional and material genres, while emphatically applying a transnational perspective to show two specific dynamics at work in cultural memory in general and the commemoration of Tordenskjold in particular. First, the creative and ideological engagement with the past that we call historicism operates according to its own inner temperature: warming up when the political or social circumstances compel different groups to appropriate Tordenskjold to meet their ideological or artistic needs, and cooling down in times of low topicality to a state of inertia or, adopting Michael Billig’s term, to ‘banal nationalism’. ‘Banal’ refers to that type of nationalism that has retreated to the unremarkable background of everyday life – the street names, statues, schools, pubs, and matches – as the almost unnoticeable but unceasing presence of national-historical identity.4 Secondly, and closely related to this first point, the remembered Tordenskjold is highly flexible in his identity, with his perceived ‘nationality’ continuously oscillating between Danish, Norwegian, Dano-Norwegian, and even Scandinavian identity on the same rambling rhythm of political development that informed the motivations of his appropriators. Taking the cue from recent insights from the field of cultural memory studies, I intend to unravel these trends in the nineteenth-century afterlife of Tordenskjold by presenting the eighteenth-century hero as a dynamic and transnational memory site.

1 Moving into the next century, the dashing young hero also appeared in films (in 1910, 1942, and recently in 2016) and a musical (1993). Since 1998, the Danish city of Frederikshavn has organized an annual festival in his memory that over a period of a few days attracts thousands of visitors. 2 Eirik Veivåg Tveit, “Hei! Det gaaer glædelig!” Konstruksjonen av viseadmiral Peter Wessel Tordenskjold i dansk og norsk litteratur 1747–1925 (MA Thesis, Høyskolen i Bergen, 2016). 3 Dan H. Andersen, Mandsmod og kongegunst. En biografi om Peter Wessel Tordenskiold (Copenhagen: Aschehoug Dansk Forlag, 2004), 383–390. 4 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 6.

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The Fluctuating Identities of an Eighteenth-Century Naval Hero

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Tordenskjold as a Dynamic Site of Memory In his influential introduction of the term, Pierre Nora saw memory sites, or lieux de mémoire, as relatively stable points of reference that help to anchor the nation’s historical identity in the public space and the collective consciousness, thus affirming the nation’s continued viability in the present.5 Memory sites as such not only refer to actual sites, to physical geographical locations, but also to buildings and monuments, works of art, memorial days, symbolic actions, and – being in focus here – historical persons. Key figures from the nation’s past, in their capacity as sites of memory, are intentionally invested with symbolic meaning in the service of nation building. Generalizing Jón Karl Helgason’s observation on national poets, it can be argued that historic figures through their canonization ‘assume a special semiotic role within a society; he or she is idolized, institutionalized and even mobilized in shaping socio-political realities.’6 Importantly, then, ‘Great Men’ (and admittedly to a much lesser extent ‘Great Women’) were celebrated not only for the remarkable achievements that had generated their fame, but also because they were believed to be exemplary of the nation’s character, making their celebration not necessarily one of the honorary person per se, but, also of the nation in general.7 Through their cultivation across the spectre of cultural production and propagation – ranging from the writing of their biographies and their appearance in historical fiction to the erection of their statues and the institution of memorial days in their honour – national heroes such as Peter Tordenskjold were creatively recruited for the raising of national consciousness.8 In recent years, the study of cultural memory has moved away from Nora’s understanding of memory sites as stable entities towards a focus on the cultural dynamics in which they function.9 Cultural remembrance has now come to be understood as an ongoing mnemonic process in which memory sites are constantly being invested with new meaning. To quote Ann Rigney, this also implies that memory sites, ‘while they come into being as points where many acts of 5 Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, [1984–1992] 1997). 6 Jón Karl Helgason, ‘The Role of Cultural Saints in European Nation States’, in Culture Contacts and the Making of Cultures. Papers in Homage to Itamar Even-Zohar, ed. Rakefet Sela-Sheffy and Gideon Toury (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Unit of Culture Research, 2011), 245. 7 Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel, ‘Group Portraits with National Heroes: The Pantheon as an Historical Genre in Nineteenth-Century Belgium’, National Identities 6, no. 2 (2004): 91. 8 Joep Leerssen, ‘Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture’, Nations and Nationalism 12 (2004): 559–578. 9 Ann Rigney, ‘Plenitude, scarcity and the circulation of cultural memory’, Journal of European Studies 35, no. 1 (2005): 11–28; Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, ’Introduction: Cultural Memory and its Dynamics’, in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 1–11.

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remembrance converge, only stay alive as long as people consider it worthwhile to argue about their meaning’.10 As this article will show, these dynamics were clearly at play in Tordenskjold’s case: his continuous remediation throughout the nineteenth century, and the many fluctuations in the identities and meanings ascribed to him in the process, were to a large degree the result of the long drawnout quarrels on who exactly ‘owned’ his memory. Nora’s conceptualization of memory sites has additionally been criticized for its methodological nationalism.11 The shift from static site to dynamic process has consequently been accompanied by a shift towards the application of a more transnational framework that does justice to the capacity of memory sites to travel across existing cultural borders.12 Approaching the afterlife of Tordenskjold from a transnational perspective makes all the more sense, as the hero, from the beginning, was not to be pinned down to a single national framework. So much could already be evinced from the fact that we find Tordenskjold streets today in both Denmark and Norway. Tordenskjold belongs to a specific category of the Danish and Norwegian secular pantheons: that of overlapping names from the relatively long period of political union between Denmark and Norway (1380– 1814). The large majority in this category concerns men who were born in Norway but had pursued their political, artistic, scientific, or military career in Denmark. Consequently, in the nineteenth century they came to be part of the memory cultures of both countries, rendering the ‘ownership’ of their legacy a matter of dispute. The case of the poet and playwright Ludvig Holberg is well known.13 Other notable figures in this category include the poets Edvard Storm, Christian Tullin, and Johan Herman Wessel, as well as the naval heroes Kjeld Lauridsen Stub, Cort Adeler, and Iver Huitfeldt. Tordenskjold stands out from this crowd by the scale of his cultivation alone. Although all these men have been commemorated through monuments, street names, and biographies, Tordenskjold, to a much larger degree than the others, also entered the world of fiction.14 It can be argued that it is exactly because of his fictionalized character that the name of Tordenskjold exerted such great mnemonic power, as his memory could be 10 Ann Rigney, ‘The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing’, in: eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 346. 11 Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 22–27. 12 Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, Transnational memory: circulation, articulation, scales (New York and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014). 13 The debate on Holberg’s nationality came to a head in the early twentieth century, ignited by the writings of Viljam Olsvig, who emphasized the man’s Norwegian descent, and the reaction by the Norwegian historian Francis Bull and the Danish historian Theodor Alfred Müller. 14 This, of course, comes with the modification that the staging of plays on Tordenskjold were outnumbered – by some margin – by the staging of plays written by Holberg, which held a permanent place in the repertoires of Danish and Norwegian theatres throughout the century.

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moulded in a more engaging and aesthetically pleasing form that appealed to potentially larger audiences.15 But, before exploring the memorial tradition centring on Tordenskjold, let me first turn to Tordenskjold’s life for the necessary historical background. Who exactly are we talking about?

The Life and Afterlife of Peter Wessel Tordenskjold until 1814 Tordenskjold was born as Peter Jansen Wessel on 7 November 1690 in Trondheim as the tenth son of a wealthy merchant and alderman. After having joined the Royal Dano-Norwegian Navy at the age of eighteen, he distinguished himself with his audacity and excellent seamanship on numerous occasions. He rapidly climbed the ranks as a result and in 1716 he was ennobled by King Frederik IV, receiving the name Tordenskjold (Thunder Shield) in the process. His most notable triumph followed in July of that year, when he managed to capture a large portion of the Swedish transport fleet in the harbour of Dynekilen, close to the Norwegian border. The loss of supply thus inflicted forced Swedish King Carl XII to abandon his invasion of Norway. The event later earned Tordenskjold the title ‘saviour of Norway’, which would become a common trope in nineteenth-century Norwegian nationalism.16 The young commander was unsuccessful with a surprise attack on Gothenburg in the spring of 1717 and subsequently lost the battle of Strömstad two months later. As a consequence of these setbacks he was stripped of the command over the Kattegat fleet and was court-martialled on the charge of criminal recklessness. Tordenskjold was ultimately acquitted and two years later he avenged himself with the capture of Carlsten fortress in Marstrand, after which he was promoted to the rank of vice admiral. After the signing of the peace treaty between Denmark and Sweden in 1720, Tordenskjold embarked on a Grand Tour to Germany, where he died, aged 30, in a duel with a former officer of the Swedish army.17 Already during his lifetime Tordenskjold had become the stuff of legends. One popular myth recounts a miraculous escape from a Swedish encirclement. Tordenskjold, all alone, managed to break free from the impeding soldiers with one dashing gash of his sword, exclaiming ‘Not this time!’ He thereupon jumped into the sea and started swimming back to his frigate, sword between teeth.

15 Rigney, ‘The Dynamics of Remembrance’, 347–348. 16 Tveit, “Hei! Det gaaer glædelig!”, 65–69. 17 This short biography is based on Andersen, Mansmod og kongegunst.

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The two – arguably most well-known – myths are both set during the siege of Marstrand. According to the first, Tordenskjold had personally spied on the Swedish troops by going around town dressed as a fisherman. The second one serves as an illustration of the hero’s cleverness and inventiveness: he allegedly tricked the Swedish command into believing that his forces were far more numerous than they actually were by letting his modest group of soldiers march criss-cross through the streets of Marstrand.18 None of these anecdotes had any footing in historical fact, but were nonetheless presented as such. Olav Bergersen has suggested that this myth-making was plausibly reinforced by government propaganda. The long and expensive war had brought Denmark a small acquisition of territory in Schleswig, but not a lot more, and the glorification of Tordenskjold, who was popular among the citizens of Copenhagen, could very well have been used as a way to soothe the general disappointment over this meagre result. On 1 January 1720, for example, the government circulated a New Year’s greeting in which Tordenskjold was praised as having been sent by God. Many more such leaflets were to follow over the course of that year.19 After Tordenskjold’s death, the myths surrounding his character were remediated through popular culture and history writing. The popular song Jeg vil sjunge om en helt [I want to sing about a hero], written shortly after 1720, for example features the ‘Not this time!’ and disguised-as-a-fisherman episodes. The historian Casper Peter Rothe uncritically included the many popular tales that were told of Tordenskjold in his three-volume biography published between 1747 and 1750. Rothe’s biography was in turn an important source for Ove Malling in writing his 1777 Store og gode Handlinger af Danske, Norske og Holstenere [Great and Good Deeds of Danes, Norwegians and Holsteinians], a school textbook commissioned by the royal court to legitimize the absolutist regime and foster the patriotic love for the king’s realm among the population of the conglomerate state.20 Thematically structured around virtues that were deemed typical of the Danish-Norwegian-Holsteinian character such as bravery, generosity, diligence, and that very same love of the fatherland, the book illustrated every virtue with a series of historical anecdotes. Of the many ‘Danes, Norwegians and Holsteinians’ Malling introduces across the pages none is mentioned more often than Tordenskjold. Store og gode Handlinger itself became a widespread book that went through several reprints over the 18 The phrase ‘Tordenskjolds soldater’ is still used in Danish and Norwegian today, usually referring to people who hold several positions within the same organisation, thereby giving the impression that the organisation in question is larger or more important than it factually is. 19 Olav Bergersen, ‘Peter Wessel Tordenskjold’, in Norsk Biografisk Leksikon, bind XVI: Sørensen – Torp, Alf (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1969), 472. 20 Ole Feldbæk, ‘Kærlighed til fædrelandet. 1700-tallets nationale selvforståelse’, Fortid og Nutid 71 (1984): 270–288.

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course of the subsequent century. Crucially, the book came to serve as the foundation for many smaller textbooks that were used for history teaching in public schools throughout the state.21 Besides exerting great influence on history education in both Denmark and Norway, Malling’s book furthermore provided a rich source of inspiration for poets and playwrights. To name the most notable example, Johannes Ewald, the great poet of the time, based his 1778 Singspiel Fiskerne [The fishermen] on Malling’s accounts. The play featured the song Kong Christian stod ved højen mast [King Christian stood by the lofty mast] which recounts the naval heroes Christian IV, Niels Juel and, of course, Peter Wessel Tordenskjold.

Fig. 1: Unknown Artist, Wood engraving based on Malling’s Store og gode Handlinger depicting Tordenskjold’s miraculous escape from Swedish captivity.

Moving into the nineteenth century, Malling-style state patriotism that demanded loyalty to the king and his realm was steadily overtaken by a cultural nationalism that perceived the ethnic nation itself as the primary focus of identification. This also implied a shift in the semiotic meaning allocated to national heroes such as Tordenskjold, who was no longer primarily a harbinger of civic virtue as had been the case in the previous century, but first and foremost a specimen of the archetypical Norwegian or Dane. In many ways, in fact, Peter Wessel held out the 21 Andersen, Mansmod og kongegunst, 384–385.

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perfect example of the idealized national character, something which is reflected in the large cultural production dedicated to him across the century. His popularity among both cultural producers and consumers is not hard to understand. However brief his life may have been, the hero’s legacy contained a rich collection of mostly fabricated or at best semi-fabricated stories that followed the attractive narrative of the bold underdog triumphing, against all odds, over an enemy deemed far superior. Because of his half-historical, half-mythical character, Tordenskjold formed an ideal canvas for different ideological currents on which to project their norms, values, and ideals, be they absolutist, Danishnationalist, Norwegian-nationalist, or Scandinavianist. Additionally, he was, both during and after his life, presented as a ‘man of the people’, as the prominent philologist Rasmus Nyerup phrased it in his short introduction to Jeg vil sjunge om en helt, making him a hero almost everyone could relate to.22 In the nation-building context, Tordenskjold was regularly held up as a moral example for the common Norwegian and Dane to aspire to. This aspect of the cultivation of Tordenskjold became all the more pronounced, when DenmarkNorway in 1807 entered into war with Sweden and Great Britain as part of the larger Napoleonic conflict that swept the continent. In those dire times, bellicose heroes from the glorious past were employed to ‘strengthen the weak, encourage the cunning and inspire the noble.’23 To be sure, the mythological and medievalist taste of the time foregrounded legendary saga kings and warriors such as Stærkodder, Hrolf Krake, and Ragnar Lódbrok, but Tordenskjold and other naval heroes from the early modern period also had their role to play. In fact, Tordenskjold was presented as a worthy descendant of these saga heroes, ‘a Viking in a naval officer’s dress’, who proved that the present-day Danes and Norwegians were still of the same noble stock.24 In addition to his instrumentalization in wartime poetry and plays, Tordenskjold also premediated heroes of the ongoing war. A case in point is the young lieutenant Peter Willemoes, who died in battle with the English in 1808. In the introduction to his obituary poem published in the journal Ny dansk Tilskuer, N. F. S. Grundtvig called him ‘the second Tordenskjold’.25 Knud Lyne Rahbek would proceed likewise in an introductory poem to his Singspiel Tordenskjold i Marstrand:

22 Rasmus Nyerup, Udvalg af Danske Viser fra Midten af det 16de Aarhundrede til henimod Midten af det 18de, med Melodier; Første Del (Copenhagen: D. Sal. Schultz, 1821), 85. 23 Rasmus Glenthøj, Skilsmissen: dansk og norsk identitet før og efter 1814 (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2012), 258. 24 Tveit, “Hei! Det gaaer glædelig!”, 47, 64. 25 Ny dansk Tilskuer, 26 May (1808).

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Den Søn har tit paa danske Bølger vandret, Skiøndt han fik Navn som Tiden har forandret, Hedd’ engang Tordenskiold, og siden Willemoes. [That son who oft has roamed the Danish waves, Though time did change his given name, Was once called Tordenskjold; now Willemoes.]26

Rahbek’s play is deserving of a closer examination here. Premiering at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen on 4 April 1813 – in the middle of the war – the tendency of the play is clearly to inspire self-sacrifice in the service of the fatherland, with Tordenskjold as the very embodiment of good patriotic conduct. Rahbek did his best to get both Danes and Norwegians on board for the contemporary struggle, as both nations are repeatedly praised for their noble character and patriotic fervour. It is, thereby, not hidden that Tordenskjold was of Norwegian descent, which is praiseworthy because: ‘Man veed hvordan de Norske er. … At Konge, Norge, Fædreland hos dem gaaer over Alt’ [You know how the Norwegians are. … For them, king, Norway and Fatherland go above all].27 By elevating loyalty to king and country, the piece is still strongly rooted in the state-patriotic tradition. The significance thus attributed to these particular virtues also manifests itself in the positive portrayal of the Swedish characters, who are likewise driven by noble, patriotic motives. This benevolent attitude towards Sweden, even at the height of the war, can be explained by Rahbek’s close friendships with Swedish literati; he had, furthermore, in 1796, been involved in the establishment of the Scandinavian Literary Society, which aimed at stimulating cultural exchange between the two countries, and can be seen as an early expression of cultural Scandinavianism.28 The importance of national loyalty in the play is, therefore, not engendered through the vilification of Sweden, but in a different way. The main antagonist in Tordenskjold i Marstrand is a major in the Swedish army called Stahl, who prides himself on the fact that he has no fatherland. The explicit message is that he, therefore, also has no sense of honour. When Stahl is tricked into believing that Tordenskjold commands a sizeable army in Marstrand, he offers the latter to betray his Swedish superiors in order to get the best out of the situation for himself. Tordenskjold, being a man of honour, of course declines.

26 Knud Lyne Rahbek, Samlede skuespil af K. L. Rahbek. Professor og theaterdirecteur, Ridder af Dannebrogen. Tredie Bind (Copenhagen: Joh. Fred. Schulz, 1813). 27 Rahbek, Samlede skuespil. Tredie Bind, 173. Note that Norway and Fatherland are not synonymous here. 28 Julius Clausen, Skandinavismen historisk fremstillet (Copenhagen: Det Nordiske Forlag, 1900), 11.

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After 1814: Competing Danish and Norwegian Appropriations The conclusion of the Napoleonic wars would have far-reaching consequences for the geopolitical relations between the Scandinavian states. Denmark had been on Napoleon’s side and was, after the French defeat in Leipzig, coerced to cede Norway to the Swedish crown according to the conditions of the Kiel treaty signed in January 1814. The Norwegians rebelled against this decision and declared independence on 17 May with the signing of a constitution and the election of the Danish prince Christian Frederik as their new king. Sweden consequently felt compelled to invade Norway in order to enforce the Kiel treaty; after a short war the Norwegians had to surrender, and the personal union between the two countries was officially implemented on 4 November, when the Swedish king was accepted by the Norwegian parliament as head of state. The members of parliament had, however, managed to negotiate favourable conditions within the new political constellation: Norway was allowed the keep its liberal (for the standards of the time) constitution and accordingly still maintained a large degree of sovereignty.29 The dramatic events of 1814 thus saw Denmark and Norway parting ways after a union that had existed for over four centuries. This now clearly demarcated period was to be remembered quite differently on opposite sides of the Skagerrak. The war years had left Denmark bankrupt, the larger part of its naval fleet had been either captured or destroyed, and the capital lay in ruins after the British bombardment of 1807. What is more, with the cession of Norway, the kingdom had lost 35 % of its former population and more than 80 % of its territory.30 The country’s geopolitical demise caused a severe crisis of identity among intellectuals and remembering the pre-1814 period in both fictional and non-fictional genres provided much-needed impulses for national recuperation. To this end, such moral uplifting was primarily sought in Norse mythology, a vaguely defined heroic ‘Nordic Antiquity’, and the Valdemar Period (1157–1241), as in the literary works of Adam Oehlenschläger, N. F. S. Grundtvig, and B. S. Ingemann. The perception of the post-medieval period was more ambiguous. Although King Frederik VI disallowed any discussion of the ‘loss of Norway’ it, nevertheless, became instrumental in creating a severe national trauma for the generation of 29 Roald Berg, ‘Denmark, Norway and Sweden in 1814: a Geopolitical and Contemporary Perspective’, Scandinavian Journal of History 39, no. 3 (2014): 265–286. 30 These numbers exclude the overseas dependencies Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, as well as the Danish colonies in India, Africa, and the Caribbean. See Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen, Det danske imperium. Storhed og fald (Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2004), 173; Knut J. V. Jespersen and Ole Feldbæk. Revanche og neutralitet 1648–1814. Vol. 2, Dansk udenrigspolitisk historie (Copenhagen: Gyldendal leksikon, 2002), 513.

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1814 that was simply not forgotten.31 In the dominant historiographical tradition, the period of Danish-Norwegian union was portrayed as an era of decay during which the erstwhile peasant freedom was steadily eroded under successive aristocratic regimes. The historian C. F. Allen, writing in 1840, denounced European, and in particular German, influences on Danish society as corrupting forces, pointing out the susceptibility of the nobility towards ‘Germanness’ and other harmful foreign ideas that intruded upon the true national character of the Danish people. In Allen’s perception, this downward trend had been steadily reversed under the aegis of absolutism towards the end of the eighteenth century.32 Despite this uneasy mixture of denial and trauma pertaining to the memory of the union with Norway, a certain nostalgia for the Greater Denmark of yesteryear, when the realm could still claim to be a military power of note, persevered. Ingemann, for instance, in his 1816 ode to the Danish flag Vift stolt paa Codans Bølge [The proud waves of the Baltic] invoked the same naval heroes as Ewald had done some forty years before him, recruiting Niels Juel, Christian IV, and Tordenskjold to convey the message that the present-day Danes, though tainted by defeat, were still of the same bold character as these brave forefathers and could still wave their flag with pride. In Norway, the memory of what was now termed the Danish period (Dansketiden) likewise alternated between appreciation and rejection, depending on the cultural-political views of the beholder. On the one hand, a strong cultural union between Norway and Denmark persisted for at least the remainder of the century. The shared written language had an important role in accommodating these prevailing cultural relations. As Norway at the start of the century still lacked the necessary institutional infrastructure, Copenhagen with its well-established cultural and academic institutions retained its appeal for Norwegian artists, students, and academics.33 Moreover, many Norwegians were tied to Denmark through family bonds or had received their education at the university of Copenhagen. The so-called Intelligens party that was formed in the 1830s considered the cultural ties with Denmark essential for the progress of Norwegian society and the development of a Norwegian national culture. Prominent figures

31 Rasmus Glenthøj, ‘Historie og hukommelse. En epilog, et perspektiv og en anden fortælling om Norge og Danmark’, in Mellem brødre. Dansk-norsk samliv i 600 år, ed. Rasmus Glenthøj (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2016), 284. 32 Claus Møller Jørgensen, ‘The writing of history and national identity: The Danish case’, in Narrating peoplehood amidst diversity: Historical and theoretical perspectives, ed. Michael Böss (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2011), 232–233. 33 Jørgen Haugan, ‘Den dansk-norske litterære union. Da Danmark løftet Norge ut av 400årsnatten’, in Mellem brødre. Dansk-norsk samliv i 600 år, ed. Rasmus Glenthøj (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2016), 110–113.

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within the party, foremost among them the young poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven, consequently held a predominantly positive perception of the period under Danish rule which, in their eyes, had lifted Norway up to a higher level of cultivation. Welhaven’s foremost opponent was Henrik Wergeland, a young poet like himself, who instead propounded the emancipation of Norwegian folk culture and the establishment of an autonomous Norwegian written standard as the foundation of national identity. Wergeland argued that the Norwegian national character had been at its weakest during the Danish period, and he perceived the year 1814 as ushering in a promising new beginning now that national sovereignty had been reclaimed. Illustrative in this context is the metaphor for Norway’s history which he coined in 1834. In Wergeland’s vision, the national past consisted of two half-rings: the Middle Ages, during which Norway had been a proud, independent kingdom, and post-1814 Constitution Norway; these two glorious periods were separated by a ‘poor piece of welding’ – indeed, the four centuries of Danish rule – and this faulty junction needed to be removed in order to fully reinstate the country’s former, medieval glory in the present.34 Interestingly, the leading historian associated with the Intelligens party, P. A. Munch, largely adhered to Wergeland’s reading of the national past. In his eyes, Denmark had robbed Norway of 400 years of its historical memories and this was, according to Munch, as ‘evil as robbing a country of part of its territory.’35 Partly because of this negative assessment of the early modern period, Norwegian historiography – certainly at the beginning of the nineteenth century – remained primarily concerned with the study of the medieval past, which served the purpose of legitimizing the young, modern state, showing that the Norwegian people had in fact old roots and a rich historical background.36 As noted before, cultural life in Norway needed to be built up almost from scratch after 1814. The capital Christiania owned no such institutions as a professional theatre, an art academy, or a publishing company, while the Royal Fredrik’s University had opened its doors only a year before, in 1813. One of the consequences was that history teaching in schools, thanks to the lack of Nor34 Øystein Rian, ‘Henrik Wergeland som historiker’, in: Henrik Wergeland. Såmannen, ed. Anne Jorunn Kydland, Dagne Groven Myhren and Vigdis Ystad (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2008), 225– 272. 35 P. A. Munch, ‘Bemerkninger ved det i Danmark stiftede kongel. Nordiske Oldskriftselskabs Virksomhed’, in P. A. Munch, Samlede Afhandlinger bd. I: 1831–Marts 1849, ed. Gustav Storm (Christiania: Cammermeyer, 1873), 123. 36 Narve Fulsås, ‘Norway: the Strength of National History’, in Nordic Historiography in the 20th Century, ed. Frank Meyer and Jan Eivind Myhre (Oslo: Department of History, University of Oslo, 2000), 241–242; Odd Arvid Storsveen, ‘Gi meg mine fire hundre år tilbake! Danmark og Norge: Historien som aldri tar slutt’, in Mellem brødre. Dansk-norsk samliv i 600 år, ed. Rasmus Glenthøj (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2016), 218–231.

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Fig. 2: Axel Ender’s Tordenskjold statue in Oslo, placed in 1901. Photo: Tim van Gerven.

wegian alternatives, continued to rely on Danish textbooks (many of them modelled after Malling) until the 1830s, thus disseminating a now out-dated, state-patriotic vision of history.37 On a more fundamental level, national feeling in Norway at the start of the century consisted mainly – but not exclusively – of a civic nature and concentrated around such political symbols as flag, parliament, and constitution. Only from the late 1830s onwards did cultural nation-building become more pronounced, resulting in numerous academic publications on national history, language, folklore, and folk music, as well as text editions of medieval sagas and literary adaptations of historical and vernacular motifs. 37 Glenthøj, Skilsmissen, 258–259.

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This national-romanticist upsurge brought with it a growing critique of the Danish appropriation of parts of Norwegian history. The historian and archivist Bernt Moe was one of the first people to voice this irritation. In his genealogical research into Tordenskjold’s family, published in his own Tidsskrift for den norske personalhistorie in 1843, he agitated against the ‘irrepressible rapacity’ of the Danes for ‘Norway’s famous men’ like Tordenskjold, Huitfeldt, Holberg, and Wessel. He thereby referred to a recent article by the Danish historian Caspar Paludan-Müller in which the latter had bluntly called Tordenskjold ‘a Danish man’ without referring to his Norwegian descent. On a superficial reading, this ‘Danification’, if you will, of Tordenskjold indeed seems to have been a common trait among Danish historians at the time. C. F. Allen had used the etiquette ‘Danish’ for Tordenskjold, and also Christian Molbech, in his chronological overview over Nordic history, simply referred to him as Danish.38 However, Moe’s irritation with Danish history-writing might very well have arisen by a misinterpretation from his side of the word ‘Danish’, which in historiographical usage was not necessarily of an ethno-nationalistic nature, but instead commonly invoked the eighteenthcentury state-patriotic understanding of citizenship. In other words, ‘Danish’ might, in all these instances, likely have referred to the Danish conglomerate state and thus included, rather than excluded, Norway. The fact remains that the vagueness of the label ‘Danish’ in this context opened up to the type of criticism Moe expressed. The mist that in this way surrounded Tordenskjold’s ascribed nationality was even thicker in fictional cultivations of his life story, of which there were many in Denmark in the early nineteenth century. The leading romantic poet, Adam Oehlenschläger, for instance had written a drama based on Tordenskjold’s life in 1833 that would also be performed several times on Christiania’s main stage. In the play’s finale, the vice-admiral’s exanimated body is literally draped in the Danish flag: ‘Nei Dannebroge! din blodrøde Dug / Og dit sneehvide Kors skal dække helten’ [No, Dannebrog! your blood-red cloth / And your snow-white cross shall cover the hero].39 Because of this longstanding tradition of Danish cultivation of Norwegian-born men like Tordenskjold, Moe awaited the publication of a new Danish-Norwegian historical-biographical lexicon by the Danish History Society with utmost suspicion, anticipating that also this publication ‘skal bæres Omsorg for Ihukommelse af Norges udmærkede Mænd, rimeligviis for at de alle – selv de ny Norges – kunne vorde iførte den Danskhed I Aand og Væsen’ [will undoubtedly contribute

38 Christian Molbech, Historiske Aarbøger til Oplysning og Veiledning i Nordens, særdeles Danmarks Historie. Tredie Bind. (Copenhagen: Jens Hostrup Schultz, 1848), 185. 39 Adam Oehlenschläger, ‘Tordenskiold. Tragisk Drama 1833’, in Oehlenschlægers Tragødier. 6 (Copenhagen: A. Oehlenschläger, 1833), 179.

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to the appropriation of Norway’s great men, supposedly to such an extent that all of them – even those born and raised in post-1814 Norway – will be entirely draped in Danishness].40 Moe expressed his displeasure at a time during which a new movement started to take shape and make waves in the Scandinavian press. This movement was Scandinavianism – a first mention of that neologism would appear in a Danish newspaper in September 1843.41 The immediate cause for the excitement was a festive meeting between Danish and Swedish students arranged in Uppsala in June 1843.42 In notorious speeches held by the Danes Carl Ploug and H. F. Poulsen, the time-honoured idea of Scandinavian cultural unity found fresh political relevance in calls for the political unification of the three countries, which was presented as a necessary defence measure against the insurgent power blocks Germany and Russia. As Scandinavianism also supported claims for liberal-constitutional reform, the movement met with disfavour from the Danish and Swedish authorities; the newspaper issue in which Ploug’s speech had been printed, was confiscated, while the establishment of a Scandinavian Society based in Copenhagen was prohibited by the court. The political headwind it received did, however, not stop Scandinavianism from quickly growing into an ideological force of note, and the events in Uppsala, for example, were discussed in ‘even the smallest local newspaper in Norway.’43 When the prominent Danish Scandinavist Frederik Barfod reacted against Moe’s accusations in a letter published in Den Constitutionelle on 8 April 1844, his response must be seen in the light of the Scandinavianist enthusiasm of the day. Barfod – writing under the abbreviation O.e.a. – started his letter by objecting to Moe’s implication that every single Dane would be complicit in this falsification of history; in fact, he assured that only ‘et Par enlige Marodører’ [a few marauders] would deny Norway its historical heroes, and he himself would certainly never dare to commit such a robbery. He attributed the agitation with which men like Moe protected Norway’s national individuality partly to the idea of Scandinavian unity that just recently had been put high on the agenda. Himself a dedicated Scandinavianist, he assured that ‘norsk Selvstendighed … indeholder den bedste Forsettelse for os om Nordens tilkommende Enhed’ [Norwegian 40 Bernt Moe, Tidsskrift for den norske personalhistorie, første Række 1–9de Hefte (Christiania: Chr. Schibsted, 1840–1846), 242–243. 41 Ruth Hemstad, ‘“Skandinavismens” tilkomst som samtidig og omstridt begrep’, in Skandinavismen. Vision og virkning ed. Ruth Hemstad, Jes Fabricius Møller and Dag Thorkildsen (Odense: Syddansk universitetsforlag, 2018), 33. 42 The Norwegian students had also intended to travel to Sweden, but were unable to gather the financial means necessary to cover the expenses of such a trip. They, furthermore, met with authorities that were unwilling to assist them in the matter. 43 Kari Haarder Ekman, Mitt hems gränser vidgades – En studie i den kulturelle skandinavismen under 1800-talet. (Gothenburg and Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2010), 65.

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independence … is the best precondition for the future unification of the North], adding that kun Nordmanden som er sig selv, som hverken er svensk eller dansk, men i Evighed intet andet end norsk, kan med fuldkommen Selvstændighed, med fuldkommen fri og bevidst Selvbeslutning, afslutte et folkeligt Forbund, om hvis Varighed der er grundet Forhaabning. [only the Norwegian, who is completely himself, and neither Swedish nor Danish, but in all eternity nothing but Norwegian, is able to enter into a Scandinavian union the permanence of which is reasoned.]

Still, for him, the intimate and historically rooted connectedness between the Scandinavian nations also implied that Norway’s history had always been part of the larger Scandinavian narrative, making Tordenskjold not only Norwegian but also Scandinavian, such as he expressed in an insightful footnote: … saa lidt som jeg skulde søge at fravende Norge ders Adeler, Hvitfeldt og Tordenskjold, saa lidt skulde det falde mig ind at fravriste det Holberg, Wessel og Storm. … Jeg vilde ønske, at Danmark havde født disse Mænd, naar … de dog ikke lige fuldt vare Sønner af vor fælles Moder, Norden. [… I would no more intend to rob Norway of its Adeler, Huitfeld, and Tordenskjold than I would deny it its Holberg, Wessel, and Storm … I would have liked these great men to have been born in Denmark … had they not already been sons of our common mother: Scandinavia.]44

Barfod did not acknowledge the discrepancy he had provoked, in which Scandinavianism – or rather, the Scandinavianist outlook on history – led Adeler, Huitfeldt, and Tordenskjold back to Denmark through the back door. This was exactly the point that the historian P. A. Munch made in his many critiques of Scandinavianism. Munch perceived the ideology to be yet another ploy by Danish nationalists to use ‘den nordiske og fornemmelig den norske Historie til Danskhedens Forherligelse’ [Nordic and, in particular Norwegian history for the glorification of Danishness]. In fact, he argued, ‘det er bekjendt, hvorledes man … søgte, ved at anvende den svævende Benævnelse “nordisk”, at stille Sagen i Halvmørke, idet man fremdeles ømmede sig ved at erkjende det for norsk, som alene var norsk’ [it is well-known how … the vague term ‘Nordic’ has been employed to keep things in the dark, in order not to recognize as Norwegian what truly is Norwegian and Norwegian only].45 Munch feared that Scandinavianism would ultimately lead to the disappearance of Norway from history altogether. Acknowledging that national identity is not only determined by self-confirmation but also, fundamentally, by 44 Den Constitutionelle, 8 April (1844). 45 P. A. Munch, Om Skandinavismen (Christiania: Johan Dahl, 1849), 50.

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external recognition, Munch worked throughout his life to affirm Norway’s position in European history and culture, defending it arduously against competing representations. Even in a very short, seven-page biography of Tordenskjold, he sought to claim back historical territory, stating that it was not necessary to give an extensive account of Tordenskjold’s life ‘da der neppe gives nogen historisk Personlighed, hvis Livsomstændigheder i det Hele taget ere mere bekjendte, og hvis Navn lever saaledes paa envher Nordmands Læber’ [as there is hardly a historical character whose deeds are better known and whose name is on every Norwegian’s lips]; he will, therefore, instead only address the unavoidable highlights and in addition ‘antyde de Familieforhold og övrige Omstændigheder, der kunne vindicere ham for Norge som en af dets egteste Sönner, at han ej alene af Æt, men og i sin hele Fremtræden var og blev Nordman til Liv og Sjæl’ [point out the family relations and other circumstances that will vindicate him for Norway as one of its truest sons, thus reminding us that he not only by birth but also in conduct was and remained Norwegian in heart and soul].46 It appears that the Norwegian sensitivities were taken seriously by the Danish Scandinavianists. On the occasion of the second, large-scale student manifestation in 1845, the banquet hall in Copenhagen’s Christiansborg Castle was decorated with a series of shields bearing the names of great Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes. The names on the shields explicitly reserved for renowned Norwegians included Holberg and Tordenskjold.47

Two Theatrical Tordenskjolds and the Influence of Scandinavianism In the middle of the historiographical debate on the nationality of Tordenskjold and others – to be exact, on 23 May 1844 – a play titled Tordenskjold i Dynekilen premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. Also, this example of Danish cultivation neatly illustrated the point made by Munch and Moe, as Tordenskjold is here once again very much framed in a Danish-patriotic narrative. No mention is made of his Norwegian descent, and he is presented as the stalwart captain fighting for Denmark’s valour. Somewhat uncharacteristic, and even more so against the background of the Scandinavianist agitation suffusing the capital at the time, is the roughly sketched contrast between smart and cunning Danes and dim-witted, foolish Swedes. This crude portrayal of the Swedish characters can also be perceived as uncharacteristic of the author, Henrik Hertz, who the fol46 P. A. Munch, ‘Peder Wessel Tordenskjold’, in Anna Colbjørnsdatters, Cort Adelers, Peter Tordenskjolds Biographier, ed. Michael Birkeland (Christiania: Chr. Tønsbergs Forlag, 1854), 48. 47 Det nordiska studentmötet i Köpenmhamn år 1845 (Gothenburg: C. M. Ekbohrns Officin, 1845), 31.

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lowing year would contribute to the Scandinavianist student meeting in Copenhagen with a poem that celebrated Scandinavian brotherhood in general, and the city of Uppsala in particular.48 Especially the final scene is jubilantly patriotic in tone, when Tordenskjold and his men, after the successful battle of Dynekilen, row away from the Swedish harbour. The play’s ultimate song is performed to the well-known tune of ‘Kong Christian stod ved højen mast’ (the eldest of Denmark’s two national anthems) and rubs the Swedish their defeat in their faces: Sæt ud fra Land med raske Tag! Ombord! ombord! Med Jubel efter vundet Slag, Med Seiersraab fra Kampens Dag, Sæt ud fra Land med raske Tag! Ombord! ombord! O Dynekilen! Danmarks navn Skal længe lyde fra din Havn! Ja, tale skal om Danmarks Navn Din dybe Havn! [Away from the coast with rapid strokes! On board! on board! With joy that comes with victory With cries of victory on the day of battle Away from the coast with rapid strokes! On board! On board! O Dynekilen! Long shall Denmark’s name Sound from your harbour! Yes, the sounding forth of Denmark’s name Shall issue from your harbour deep!]49

Interestingly, only one day before Hertz’s play premiered in Copenhagen, a Singspiel with the apt title Tordenskjold went through its first rendition at the Christiania Theatre in the Norwegian capital. The differences between the Danish and the Norwegian play, written by Hans Ørn Blom, are interesting. What is particularly striking is that Blom’s Tordenskjold is not necessarily presented as Norwegian. There are only three direct references to Norway in the entire play, and the national tone should instead be sought in the use of popular Norwegian tunes, such as ‘For Norge, Kiæmpers Fødeland’, as accompaniment for the many songs in the play. Aside from the music, the tenor of the play is remarkably

48 Det nordiska studentmötet i Köpenmhamn år 1845, 34–35. 49 Henrik Hertz, Samlede skrifter: Dramatiske værker. Sextende bind (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1867), 390–391.

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Scandinavianist. This is all the more surprising, as Blom, contrary to Hertz, had previously expressed anti-Scandinavianist inclinations.50 The comical plotline conjured up by Blom is completely fictitious and centres around a Swedish scheme to assassinate Tordenskjold. The Swedish officer Stenfeldt, using a false identity, has taken up quarters in a small inn along the Norwegian coast where Tordenskjold usually stops to gather supplies. To cut a long story short: the scheme fails, and Stenfeldt and his accomplices are taken captive, but all is ultimately settled in an orderly manner: Stenfeldt is pardoned by Tordenskjold and released and he even gets to marry the inn keeper’s charming daughter. The play’s final words of reconciliation are for Tordenskjold and stand in sharp contrast to the triumphalist tone of Hertz’s closing scene: Gevinst og Tab i denne Sag, Hinanden fuldt opveier, Men Magt og Held den spaaer den Dag Da Nordens Folk, foreent i Slag Gaaer frem til samme Seier [Gain and loss in this story have evened each other out But one day the time will come that the peoples of the North, united in battle will progress towards shared victory.]51

Using a historical figure such as Tordenskjold – who after all had earned his fame in war with Sweden – in the context of Scandinavianism might seem counterintuitive, yet this paradoxical activation of potentially divisive episodes from the past was common practice for Scandinavianists and was often applied in order to project a message of Scandinavian fraternization. The many wars between Denmark-Norway and Sweden between the end of the Middle Ages up to 1814 were in Scandinavianist historicism explained as unfortunate and improper feuds between brother nations that warranted the need for restoration of Nordic unity in the present. The premise that history was shared between the three Scandinavian countries implied in its ultimate consequence that also great achievements and famous figures from this ‘age of discord’ could be celebrated as shared pride.52 Frederik Barfod’s previously cited claim that Tordenskjold was a ‘son of our common mother: Scandinavia’ reflect this widely held belief. 50 John Sanness, Patrioter, intelligens og skandinaver: norske reaksjoner på skandinavismen før 1848 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1959), 488. 51 Hans Ørn Blom, Digtninger af H.Ø. Blom (Christiania: Steens Boktrykkeri, 1864), 79. 52 The term Age of Discord – söndringens tid – is derived from Esaias Tegnér’s famous ode to Oehlenschläger from 1829 in which the Swedish poet-bishop saw the crowning of the Danish poet as ‘the King of Nordic Poetry’ as the symbolic moment that put the lid on the centuries of hate between the Scandinavian countries.

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Henrik Ullstad illustrates how Scandinavianists appropriated age-of-discord heroes to proclaim their reconciliatory vision by taking Tordenskjold’s contemporary Carl XII as an example. The Swedish king was a popular trope in Scandinavianist poetry during the first couple of student meetings. In order to make him fit into their narrative, the poets who used him as their subject, selectively delved into his biography and highlighted those parts that served their message, while they ignored, for example, the warmongering against Denmark, the repeated invasions of Norway, and the fact that he had died in that country during the siege of Fredrikshald in 1718. Instead, Carl XII was generally portrayed as the staunch defender of Scandinavia against the Russian threat and, as a result, as nothing less than a kind of proto-Scandinavianist and a symbol for the contemporary resistance against Russia.53 Moulding Tordenskjold into the Scandinavist narrative was less straightforward than in the case of Carl XII. Unlike his Swedish opponent, Tordenskjold had only engaged in war with the Scandinavian neighbour, and it might be for this reason that he scarcely features in Scandinavianist poetry and speeches. Yet, there are instances in which Peter Wessel too wore the jersey of the protoScandinavianist. We encountered this in Blom’s Singspiel, and there are a few other examples. Particularly striking is a speech held by Mayor Ole Richter in 1876. The occasion was the unveiling of a Tordenskjold statue in his birthplace Trondheim. The statue was an exact copy of the one that would be erected later that year in Copenhagen, just outside the vice admiral’s last resting place in Holmen’s Church. Instead of seeing the statue in Trondheim as a reappropriation of Tordenskjold from Danish claims, the twin statues can, therefore, better be perceived as symbolizing the lasting historical bond between Norway and Denmark. In addition, Richter in his speech creatively put Tordenskjold’s war effort in a positive Scandinavianist light, stating that ‘han mægtigen bidrog til at hævde Ligevægtsprincipet og Jevnbyrdighedsideen i Forholdet mellom Nordens Riger og Folk, – at han afværgede en Magtstilling, hvorunder det ene af de trende Lande skulde havt et absolut Supremati’ [he greatly contributed to asserting the principles of equilibrium and equality between the Nordic states and peoples – he rejected a constellation of power in which one of the three countries would hold supremacy].54 Tordenskjold’s famous victory in Dynekilen had in Richter’s eyes not only saved Norway from occupation, but also secured the viability of the Scandinavianist project by forestalling Swedish expansion. It is, furthermore,

53 Henrik Ullstad, ‘“Med mjöd och manligt glam på fädrenes sätt.” Studentskandinavismen som ideologi och performativ praksis’, in Skandinavism: en rörelse och en idé under 1800-talet, ed. Magdalena Hillström and Hanne Sanders (Gothenburg & Stockholm: Makadam Förlag, 2014), 87–88. 54 Fædrelandsvennen, 10 November (1876).

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noteworthy that the unveiling did not arouse the Swedish authorities to protest, revealing that the memory of this bellicose hero had lost its divisive edge.

On Tordenskjold Street and Tordenskjold Square: Scandinavianism and Solidarity Throughout the nineteenth century, Tordenskjold lent his name to many streets, roads and squares in both Denmark and Norway. In Norway, Trondheim in 1842 was the first major city dedicating a street to its famous son. Christiania followed suit in 1864 with both a street and a square in the centre of town.55 As is the case with the Trondheim statue, these street names in the capital cannot simply be described as historical self-appropriations. On the contrary, the naming of a Tordenskjold street and square occurred in a politically sensitive time and needs to be seen against the background of the Second Schleswig War and the connected Scandinavianist agitation. By 1863, no less than 82 streets required (re)naming in Christiania, owing to the rapid expansion of the city over the previous decades. A committee was formed under the direction of city conductor Christian Heinrich Grosch to draft a proposal containing new street names. What is striking in both the first (12 October 1864) and final proposal (14 December) is the relatively large portion of streets named after historical figures from the Danish period.56 Next to Tordenskjold (who was the only one honoured with two streets) streets were named after fellow-naval heroes Iver Huitfeldt and Kjeld Lauridsen Stub, as well as the poets Tullin, Storm, Holberg and Wessel: the very same persons who had been the topic of the Moe-Barfod feud twenty years earlier. In addition, three streets were named after the three so-called norske graner [Norway spruce], who had served as officers in the Danish army during the First Schleswig War (1848– 1851): Olav Rye, Hans Helgesen, and Frederik Adolph Schleppegrell. Both Rye and Schleppegrell had died on the battlefield. The social geographer Professor Maoz Azaryahu has described how commemorative street names contribute to the cultural production of a shared past. They form an instrument with which to project a dominant vision of national history upon society. Through street names the past is literally connected to physical spaces in the present and as such made part of everyday life – indeed a 55 Tordenskjoldsplass was in 1932 built over and replaced by Oslo’s characteristic city hall; Tordenskjoldsgate still exists and runs alongside that monumental building. 56 Minutes of these meetings were retrieved from the Oslo City Archive: Christiania bystyresaker, 12. Oktober 1864, Sag 3: ‘Angaaende nye Gatenavne’; Christiania bystyresaker, 14. December 1864, Sag 4: ‘Angaaende nye Gatenavne’.

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very good example of banal nationalism.57 It would, therefore, appear logical to place the naming round of 1864 within this frame of communicating a vision of the past that can stir up pride over these heroes and, in turn, over the nation at large. At the same time, the choice of exactly these figures could be perceived as claiming them back from Denmark – where there were also streets and public spaces bearing their names – by literally anchoring them in Norway through their inscription on the Christiania city map. However, the timing of the whole operation complicates this seemingly straightforward analysis. The Grosch committee convened for the first time on 30 June 1864, not long after the Norwegian and Swedish governments had decided not to support Denmark in the war with Prussia and Austria. In his MA thesis on the history of street naming in Oslo – an otherwise understudied subject – Erlend Tidemann argues that at least the decision to name three prominent streets in the central Grünerløkka district after Rye, Helgesen, and Schleppegrell can be seen as a protest against the government. The deeds of the norske graner [Norway spruce] were well-known not only in Denmark, but also in Norwegian society. Particularly salient in this context was the fact that the triumvirate back in 1814 had refused to enrol in the Swedish army and had instead remained true to Denmark.58 In the same vein, naming streets after men like Tordenskjold and Stub, who had earned their glory in war situations with Sweden might likewise be interpreted as a critique of the Swedish decision makers. Unfortunately, there are no extant minutes of the committee meetings that might corroborate the political protest thesis, but there are additional arguments to be made in support of Tidemann’s claim. For one thing, there are indications of Scandinavianist sympathies among the committee members, which would imply support for the military involvement of Norway and Sweden. Five out of six of them took part in the Scandinavian student meetings of 1851 and 1852 in Christiania. In addition to this, the magistrate and the mayor involved in the decision-making process had also been present at these occasions.59 One committee member, head of Christiania police Carl Johan Michelet, had signed an appeal in Morgenbladet soliciting donations in support of Norwegian volunteers who wanted to travel to the Danish front.60 His father, furthermore, was 57 Maoz Azaryahu, ‘The Power of Commemorative Street Names’, Society and Space 14 (1996): 311–330. 58 Erlend Tidemann, Holdninger til gatenavn i Oslo (MA Thesis, University of Oslo, 2011), 57– 58. 59 The names of Nicolay Nicolaysen, Carl Johan Michelet, Christian Heinrich Grosch, Georg Andreas Bull, W. Jürgensen, A. Petersen, Carl Fougstad, and August Thomle all feature in the list over participants given in Studentertog til Christiania 1851 fra Lund og Kjöbenhavn: Beretning fra et Udvalg af Deeltagerne (Copenhagen: S. Trier, 1853). The only committee member that did not take part was law expert Frederik Peter Brandt. 60 Morgenbladet, 9 April (1864).

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Fig. 3: The intersection of Huitfeldts Gate (named 1864) and Cort Adelers Gate (named 1870) in Oslo’s Frogner district. Photo: Tim van Gerven

commander of the Norwegian troops encamped at Gardermoen and which had fruitlessly waited for their deployment. Major General Christian Fredrik Michelet was of the generation of Rye, Helgesen, and Schleppegrell, and it is more than possible that he had served together with them prior to 1814. Finally, it should be mentioned that several members of the committee entertained close ties with Denmark, either through family relations or study periods at the university of Copenhagen. Grosch had even been born in the Danish capital. Dissatisfaction with the government’s refusal to act upon the Scandinavianist rhetoric might thus have provided a motive for honouring men from the DanoNorwegian period with street names. But a different motive is probably more

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likely. The street names were arguably not primarily a message to the Norwegian and Swedish governments, but instead first and foremost an act of solidarity with Denmark. The names of Tordenskjold, Holberg, and the other great Dano-Norwegian men underlined the longstanding historical and cultural bond between Norway and Denmark. Activating the memory of Rye and Schleppegrell served as a reminder that Norwegians were willing to die for Denmark: they had done so in the recent past and were still prepared to do so in the present, as was proven, in 1864, by the 105 Norwegian volunteers fighting on the Danish side.61 Again, as would be the case 12 years later with the unveiling of his statue in Trondheim, the naming of Tordenskjold Street and Tordenskjold Square was neither an act of re-appropriation from Denmark, nor an expression of animosity against Sweden. On the contrary, the memory of Tordenskjold was in this instance employed, first of all to invoke solidarity with Denmark in its hour of need and, more indirectly, to project a message of Scandinavian brotherhood in a period during which the ideals of Scandinavianism were put to the test. The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Swedish-Norwegian union on 4 November 1864 featured a similar instance of Tordenskjold being framed within a pan-Scandinavian narrative. During the official festivities held in Christiania, Major general Carl Björnstjerna – his hopes unshattered by Denmark’s recent defeat – held a speech on the prospects of Scandinavian unification, reminding his audience of the centuries of bloody warfare between the two countries which, according to him, had also had positive consequences. The Norwegians and Swedes had earned each other’s respect in battle, as he stated: ‘ogsaa skattes Carl den XII’s Bedrifter lige høit paa begge Sider af Fjeldet, ogsaa har Tordenskjold ingen varmere Beundrer end den svenske Sømand’ [The deeds of Carl XII were valued highly on both sides of the mountains, while no one admired Tordenskjold as much as the average Swedish sailor].62 Here, once again the bellicose sides of Carl XII and Tordenskjold were neutralized, and the two soldiers were anachronistically remembered as instigators of Scandinavian rapprochement. In the nineteenth-century context, they united rather than divided.

61 H. A. Hanson, For Nordens Frihed, Svenskerne, Nordmændene og Finnerne i vore sønderjydske Krige (Copenhagen: Danmarks-Samfundet, 1919). 62 Morgenbladet, 12 November (1864).

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Tordenskjold’s Return to Norway The period 1843–1845 – not coincidentally the years containing the first two Scandinavianist student meetings – marks the high point of the feud on the exact nationality of canonical Dano-Norwegian figures, which included Danish appropriations of Tordenskjold (Hertz, Paludan-Müller), polemic Norwegian responses to these appropriations (Moe, Munch), as well as alternative Scandinavianist adaptations (Blom, Barfod). These skirmishes, however, seem to have fizzled out rather quickly after 1845. This was to a large degree a consequence of the feud being soon overshadowed by another, and even fiercer, historiographical and philological debate between Danish and Norwegian academics concerning the ownership of the Old-Norse heritage.63 Consequently, new Danish appropriations of the Trondheim native were met without any of the previous venom; two comedies on Tordenskjold (1862, 1872) by the popular author Carit Etlar as well as Holger Drachmann’s long epic poem Peder Tordenskjold (1880) all received sympathetic reviews in the Norwegian press. By the turn of the century, however, the old irritations came to the surface again. In 1901, the celebration of May 17th in Christiania was largely dedicated to Tordenskjold. According to an account of the events in Nordisk Tidende, ‘the entire capital and numerous visitors’ – including the Swedish crown prince – witnessed the unveiling of Axel Ender’s statue of the naval hero on Tordenskjolds Plass. A speech was held by admiral Jacob Børresen (whose Tordenskjold biography appeared the same year) before the veil was lifted during a military salute of 13 canon shots roaring from Akershus Castle and several Navy vessels anchored in the fjord. The remarkably Norwegian-chauvinistic article in Nordisk Tidende – a Scandinavian-language newspaper serving the Scandinavian diaspora in the United States – did not fail to remark that the ‘great naval hero had now finally been given back to his fatherland’. The reporter continued along the same lines: For han har i disse tvende aar kun i historien tilhört Norge medens hans stöv hviler i fremmed Jord. Det hviler i Danmark, men ikke med nordmændenes samtykke. Den norske helt slogs for Norges frelse paa hin tid, men han slogs for sit fædreland under

63 Once again, P. A. Munch was the central figure in this feud. Elaborating on the so-called ‘migration theory’ propounded by his close colleague Rudolf Keyser, he stated that the ancient forebears of the Norwegians had been the original habitants of Scandinavia as they had populated the region from the north, whereas the ancestors of the Swedes and Danes had entered from the south, and were thus of mixed Nordic-continental stock. For Munch, this implied that the Eddas and sagas were written in Old-Norwegian rather than in a common Nordic root-language. Anne-Lise Seip, ‘Nasjonsbygger og kosmopolitt’, in P.A. Munch: Historiker og nasjonsbygger, ed. Sverre Bagge, John Peter Collett and Audun Kjus (Oslo: Dreyers Forlag, 2012), 11–32.

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Tim van Gerven dansk flag, og da hans bedrifter kronedes med held, og han paa samme tid frelste Danmark fra undergang, saa blev Norges lön fordi den hadde fostret den tapre sön, den, at æren herfor ikke skulde tilhöre hans fædreland, men Danmark. [He has in these two centuries only in our memory belonged to Norway, while his remains rested in foreign soil, in Denmark – without the consent of the Norwegian people. The Norwegian hero fought for Norway’s valour in his day, but he fought for his fatherland under the Danish flag, and when he celebrated his greatest victories, he also saved Denmark from ruination. In reward, Norway was denied the honour for having raised this brave son, which was instead bestowed upon Denmark.]64

Those who after the exuberant ceremony still had not had enough of Tordenskjold and were lucky enough to own a ticket, could visit a spectacular staging of Jacob Breda Bull’s drama Tordenskjold at the National Theatre later that evening. The papers were primarily impressed by the abundant stage settings and the spectacular theatrical effects, significantly less so by the literary qualities of Bull’s adaptation of the vice admiral’s life which, according to Aftenposten, lacked psychological depth and real suspense. This was, however, of no consequence, according to the review, as the play lacked literary pretensions and instead aimed at something quite different: Nu fik man liden eller ingen Tid til at tænke paa Stykkets Magerhed som kunst. Hjernene hvilede i veltilfreds national Stemning, og med Sympathi fulgtes den kjække Søguts mange Bedrifter – under Kartovernes hule Drøn og Musketternes Dundren. [The spectators had little or no time to ruminate over the play’s meagreness as a piece of art. Our minds reposed in a pleasant nationalistic mood, and it was with the greatest sympathy that we followed the stout sailor’s many trials and tribulations, while the canons rumbled, and the muskets thundered around our heads.]65

Compared to Blom’s proto-Scandinavianist and Hertz’s all-Danish hero, Bull’s Tordenskjold is, with some distance, the most Norwegian Tordenskjold of the three, being portrayed as an undisturbed optimist who bravely defies Sweden’s military prowess and warmongering. Still, despite numerous expressions of patriotic fervour, the play’s tenor is not one-sidedly nationalistic, nor anti-Danish or anti-Swedish. Bull does, for example, not gloss over Tordenskjold’s loyalty to the Danish king and the Danish flag, and he also does not obscure the fact that the vice admiral after the war proposed the Swedish consul in Copenhagen to join arms against Russia.66 Also the review in Aftenposten picked up on the restrained patriotism: ‘Forfatteren har havt de beste hensigter – han viser en sterk patriotisk Følelse, men holder Chauvinismen unda og lader ikke Følelsen udarte. 64 Nordisk Tidende, 30 May (1901). 65 Aftenposten, 27 March (1901). 66 Jacob Breda Bull, Tordenskjold. Et folkeskuespil i tre afdelinger (Christiania: Det norske aktieforlag, 1901), 244.

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Danske som svenske kan ikke paa noget Punkt føle sig stødt’ [The author has the best intentions – he gives expression to great patriotic feelings; yet, he keeps chauvinism at bay and does not let these sentiments spin out of control. Neither Danes nor Swedes can be offended by this piece in any way].67

Fig. 4: This photo taken during the unveiling of the Tordenskjold statue in Christiania on 17 May 1901 demonstrates that the papers hardly overstated the attendance of the event. Photo: Anders Beer Wilse, DEXTRA Photo / Norsk Teknisk Museum

In the sources, I could find no clues as to why the year 1901 was picked to celebrate Tordenskjold. It was in no way an anniversary year related to his life. It is, therefore, hard to detach the revival of interest in Tordenskjold at this time from the growing crisis within the union with Sweden, despite the toned-down patriotism that characterized the celebrations. In this context of mounting tensions, cultural production was actively employed in Norwegian society to raise national consciousness. The Norwegian parliament had for example in 1899–1900 subsidized a cheap, but high-quality edition of the King’s Sagas in both Norwegian language variants, in order to make what was deemed a national monument available to every citizen. Odd Einar Haugen argues that the impact of this popular publication should not be underestimated as it contributed greatly to the 67 Aftenposten, 27 March (1901).

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fostering of national feeling in the build-up to the dissolution of the union in the autumn of 1905.68 Tordenskjold, of course, represented as a legendary ‘saviour of Norway’ and as a victor having defeated Swedish invaders, became the perfect focus for mounting pleas for full independence. In this light, it may not be surprising that precisely in 1905 Etlar’s play Tordenskjold i Dynekilen was revived in Norwegian theatres, 43 years after its first performance, while Bull published a novel based on his 1901 play that same year. It was especially the events at Dynekilen that came to symbolize Norwegian resistance against Swedish rule. The ScandoAmerican newspaper Nordisk Tidende – which was also widely distributed in Scandinavia itself – again contributed a particularly polemic voice to the debates. On 20 April 1905 for example – a few days after the Norwegian government had rejected a final attempt from Swedish side to save the union – the paper printed a poem titled ‘The Day Tordenskjold saved Norway’. The author of the poem was none other than Jacob Breda Bull. This time, Bull had abandoned the restraint informing his theatre piece, and the implications of the poem are evident: just as Carl XII abandoned his plans to invade Norway in 1716, the present Swedish king should give in and grant Norway its political autonomy. Dramatizing the interception of the transport fleet at Dynekilen, one verse reads as follows: Tolvte Karl paa flaaden bier; Flaaden kommer aldri frem! Sverigs stolte svaner tier; Tordenskjold har talt med dem. Wessels torden Tvang fra Norden Kongen hjem. [King Carl awaits his fleet But the fleet never comes! Sweden’s proud swans are silent Tordenskjold has talked to them Wessel’s thunder Forced from the North The king back home.]69

68 Odd Einar Haugen, ‘Editionen westnordischer Mittelaltertexte in Skandinavien – ein historischer Überblick’, in Geschichte der Edition in Skandinavien, ed. Paula Henrikson and Christian Janss (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 24–25. 69 Nordisk Tidende, 20 April (1905).

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Conclusions From this inventory of his memorial afterlife, the figure of Tordenskjold emerges as a discursive pawn recruited in the political commotions leading up to the dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden on 7 June 1905. This final incarnation once again bears testimony to his remarkable symbolic flexibility. Travelling through the nineteenth century on the tidal wave of historical and political change, the ghost of Tordenskjold was present, one could say, at every landmark moment, taking on a different persona according to the ideological needs of the individuals and groups appropriating him for their cause: a modern saga hero inspiring courage in the devastated Copenhagen of 1813, a famous son of Mother Scandinavia in the 1840s, a spokesperson for solidarity with defeated Denmark in 1864, a figure of resistance against Swedish occupation in 1905. In the process, he was attributed different national identities: Danish, Norwegian, Dano-Norwegian, or Scandinavian, which either gave cause for strife between competing appropriations, or worked into reconciliatory and coalescing visions on Scandinavian identity. The case of Tordenskjold and his role in nineteenth-century Scandinavian memory culture reveals the intimate entanglement between the various national movements in this part of Northern Europe. This entanglement was in part accommodated by the awareness of a larger, pan-national identity tying the three countries together. Sidestepping the dead end that is methodological nationalism, the study of memory sites such as Tordenskjold – ingrained as they are in a dynamic and transnational process of remembrance – goes a long way towards showing how national and regional identities take shape in continuous interaction with other competing and complementing identities.

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Susanne Bangert (Aarhus University)

Gathering Storm. A Landscape Painting from a Danish Province and its Art Histories

Abstract This article presents a case-study of the, largely forgotten, Danish painter, F. C. Kiærskou (1805–1891). Kiærskou’s regular inclusion in exhibitions by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Arts Society of Copenhagen indicates the success he enjoyed during his lifetime. Furthermore, a popular pictorial atlas of Denmark, published by Em. Bærentzen in 1856, featured several reproductions of Kiærskou’s paintings, many of which were then in prominent collections in Denmark. Nevertheless, Kiærskou found himself on the wrong side of a cultural rift that pitted the national against the international in art. Kiærskou’s success began to wane in his later years, and since his death he has been written almost completely out of Danish art history. This article explains Kiærskou’s journey into oblivion through an analysis of his method, subject-matter, correspondence, and reception. Keywords Kiærskou, Charlottenborg, National depiction, Bærentzen, Reception

Nineteenth-century European landscape paintings have often been discussed as visual representations of national ideology. Recently, however, scholarship has moved beyond iconographic analysis to investigate the ways in which nationalist rhetoric sometimes placed an implicative burden on artists dictating their choices of how to represent landscapes. A particularly trenchant example is found in the doctoral work of art historian Gertrud Oelsner. Engaging a methodological framework, inspired by Franco Moretti’s notion of ‘the great unread’, Oelsner noted the titles of the approximately 4000 landscape paintings, by Danish artists, of Danish territory (excluding Atlantic islands and colonial holdings), that were shown at the Royal Academy’s annual Charlottenborg exhibition in Copenhagen between 1807 and 1875. She then plotted the localities referred to in these titles on a map of Denmark. The resulting ‘distant reading’ of landscape painting as a cultural practice clearly demonstrated the significant frequency with which nineteenth-century landscape painters chose locations that

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aligned with the centrist nationalism of Denmark’s Social Democratic party, to the detriment of more peripheral areas of the country.1 An interesting consequence of Oelsner’s findings is the implication that the political and cultural climate in nineteenth-century Denmark projected certain expectations onto the practice of landscape painting that could just as easily marginalize a landscape subject, and thus the artist who painted it, as it could valorise another. When artists, through their choices of motif, entered the ideological fray, they could either flourish or languish by the ideology to which they – sometimes inadvertently – had allied themselves. Building on Oelsner’s achievement, this article takes as a case-study the career and legacy of the Danish artist, F. C. Kiærskou (1805–1891; fig. 1).2 While Kiærskou enjoyed a robust professional career and was regularly featured in exhibitions at Charlottenborg and the Arts Society in Copenhagen, he has since fallen into obscurity. Combining Oelsner’s ‘distant reading’ with an analysis Kiærskou’s biographical record, this article will consider the question of whether and how the artist’s approaches to style, subject-matter, and the market might be shown to have influenced his later reputation and posthumous reception.

1 Gertrud Oelsner, En fælles forestillet nation: Dansk landskabsmaleri 1807–1875 [A communally imagined nation: Danish landscape painting 1807–1875] (Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet, 2017). In his recent review, Mednick expounds on how Oelsner’s approach introduces a new theoretical framework: Thor J. Mednick, review of Gertrud Oelsner, En fælles forestillet nation – Dansk landskabsmaleri 1807–1875. A communally imagined nation – Danish landscape painting 1807–1875 (PhD diss., Aarhus University 2016), Romantik 6 (2017): 115–119. Catalogues of Charlottenborg exhibitions between 1805 and 1882 have been published in one volume: Carl Reitzel, ed., Fortegnelse over danske Kunstneres Arbejder paa de ved Det Kgl. Akademi for de Skjønne Kunster i Aarene 1807–1882 afholdte Charlottenborg-Udstillinger (Copenhagen: Thiele, 1883). After 1882, the annual catalogues have to be consulted. They are all digitized and available on-line at rex/kb/dk. As pointed out by Oelsner (op. cit. 52) the Reitzel edition is not always congruent with the yearly catalogues. Translations from Danish into English are made by the author. 2 As was common in the early nineteenth century, spelling of the Kiærskou family name varied: Kjærschou, Kiærschou, Kierschou, Kierschou, Kjærskou, Kierskou, and Kiærskou are examples on record. It was, in fact only after the 1864 war with Germany that the family adopted the less Germanic spelling Kiærskou, arguably nationalistic or political reasons: Carl Christensen, ‘Kjærskov, Hjalmar Frederik Christian’, in C. F. Bricka, ed., Dansk biografisk leksikon (Copenhagen: J. H. Schultz, 1933). In the earlier correspondence, F. C. Kiærskou signs his name as Kierschou.

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Fig. 1: F. C Kiærskou, n.d. Photo, c. 10 x 6 cm, Det Kongelige Biblioteks billedsamling, www.kb.dk, Creative Commons 3.0

F. C. Kiærskou, from Child Prodigy to Professor Frederik Christian Jacobsen Kiærskou was born to elderly parents, into a family with no connections to the art world.3 He lost his father at the age of five, and the subsequent death of his mother left him orphaned at the age of ten. Although he 3 The central source of biographical information is Peter Nørgaard Larsen, ‘F. C. Kiærskou’, in Kunstindeks Danmark & Weilbachs kunstnerleksikon (Copenhagen: Kulturarvstyrelsen, 1994). These entries draw widely on Kiærskou’s letters to Philip Weilbach. Indeed, Kiærskou participated in his own entry for the first edition of the artist dictionary: Philip Weilbach, Dansk

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came from a large family, from 1817 to 1821 he was a pupil at Det Kgl. Vajsenhus, a Royal institution in Copenhagen which offered free tuition for orphans.4 His teachers noted his drawing abilities and encouraged him to pursue them. In fact, the head teacher and drawing master, in whose household Kiærskou boarded, would become his father-in-law in 1827.5 In 1820, the Vajsenhus arranged for Kiærskou to be enrolled at the drawing school of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he passed all his courses. It was apparent from the start that Kiærskou intended to be a landscape painter, and in pursuit of this, the Inspector of the Vajsenhus approached landscape painter J. P. Møller (1783–1854), who had been titular Professor at the Academy since 1824.6 Based on the limited economic support that the Vajsenhus could offer for Kiærskou’s tuition, Møller advised him to start as a decorative painter’s apprentice. Consequently, he spent the next eight years working for master painters in Copenhagen, while continuing to attend various schools at the Academy. Kiærskou exhibited work regularly from 1826 onwards and qualified for admission to the model school in 1830.7 After two years of tutelage under Professors C. W. Eckersberg (1783–1853) and J. L. Lund (1777–1867), he had acquired the requisite qualifications to proceed with his training as a landscape painter. His landscapes were awarded the Accessit (the second-place prize), in 1832, and then first prize in the following year. It was during this early period that Kiærskou became popular with high profile customers: for instance, King Christian VIII (1786–1848) and the Danish Royal Collection, which purchased Kiærskou’s 1831 painting Et Parti fra Farum [A view of Farum] (Statens Museum for Kunst). In addition, Prime Minister Count A. W. Moltke (1785–1864) was also a steadfast supporter and future employer of

4

5 6 7

Konstnerlexikon indeholdende korte Levnedstegnelser over Konstnere, som indtil Udgangen af 1876 have levet og arbejdet i Danmark eller Den Danske Stat (Copenhagen: Høst, 1877), 356–357. For this correspondence, see ‘Kunstnerbreve og supplerende Samlinger vedr. første og anden Udgave af Ph. Weilbachs Dansk Konstnerlexikon samt Nyt Dansk Kunstnerlexicon (1877–1878 and 1896–1897)’, Det Kongelige Bibliotek; Danmarks Kunstbibliotek (NKS 2308 Kvart). For a short biography published in English, see Elisabeth Fabritius, ed., The Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr. Danish Art Collection (New York: John L. Loeb, Jr., 2005), 266. Also available online: Suzanne Ludvigsen, ‘Frederik Christian Jacobsen Kiærskou (Kiærschou)’, http://loebdanishartcollection.com/artists-pdf/FREDERIK_CHRISTIAN_JACOBSEN_KIAER SKOU.pdf. Chr. Ottesen, Det Kgl. Vajsenhus gennem to Hundrede Aar (Copenhagen: Det Kgl. Vajsenhus, 1927), 302. It appears that C. F. Kiærskou was a remarkably successful pupil, as he is mentioned whenever the context justifies it. See, for instance, pages 179–194. Ibid., 255. Titular, meaning in title only, denoted that although he was a professor, he did not have any official teaching responsibilities for the Academy. For a short description of teaching at the Academy, see: Karina Lykke Grand, Lise Pennington, and Anne Mette Thomsen, ‘Introduktion til dansk guldalder / Introduction to the Danish Golden Age’, in Guld: skatte fra den danske guldalder / Gold: Treasures from the Danish Golden Age (Aarhus: Systime Academic, 2013), 74–75.

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Kiærskou. Moltke had a conspicuous private collection of mostly landscape paintings that was curated and preserved by a group of academy-trained painters; Kiærskou was hired as part of this group in 1865.8 Another prominent patron was Kunstforeningen [The art society] in Copenhagen, which was established in 1825 under the leadership of Academy Professors C. W. Eckersberg and N. L. Høyen (1798–1870). Each year the society bought artwork for a member’s lottery, and a complete list of purchases at Kunstforeningen between 1825 and 2000 indicates Kiærskou as the most sold landscape painter of the period. In all, the society purchased 45 paintings from Kiærskou, the first in 1833.9 It is also clear from this list that landscape painting was a favourite choice for the lottery, followed by flower paintings and genre. In fact, among the few artists, who sold more than 25 paintings, is the flower painter J. L. Jensen (1800–1856), who sold 41.10 It is also interesting to note that several of the landscape painters named in this list are figures who since have either been relegated to negligible status in Danish art history – for instance G. E. Libert (1820–1908), A. C. Lunde (1809–1886), and N. F. M. Rohde (1816–1886) – or have only recently been brought back to attention, such as V. Kyhn (1819–1903) and T. Brendstrup (1812–1883).11 Having established himself as an emerging artist, Kiærskou embarked on a period of travel. Little of Kiærskou’s travel correspondence survives, but a couple of letters written between 1840 and 1845 provide some insight into his experiences.12 In 1840, Kiærskou travelled south to Dresden and Munich, into the

8 Today only one painting by Kiærskou is in the private Danish Royal Collection. I am grateful to curator Elisabeth von Buchwald for this information. Of the twelve paintings owned by members of the Royal Family, according to the Charlottenborg catalogues, seven were sold after the death of Frederik VII in 1864. The one remaining, dated 1865, belonged personally to Queen Consort Alexandra’s mother, Queen Louise (1817–1898), and was exhibited also in 1865. For the Moltke Collection, see Jesper Svenningsen, Samlingssteder: udenlandsk kunst i danske samlermiljøer 1690–1840 (Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet, 2015), 241. 9 Flemming Friborg, Det gode selskab: Kunstforeningens historier 1825–2000 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2000), 207–322. Kiærskou’s works appear in the draw approximately once a year from 1833–1877. In fact, the Society bought only one artist in higher numbers than Kiærskou’s 45: Johannes Larsen (1867–1961) with 48 pieces. For a summary in English, explaining the society’s history, see especially pages 191–198. 10 For the most recent publication on Jensen, see Marie-Louise Berner, The Flower Painter J. L. Jensen, Between Art and Nature in the Golden Age, ed. by Mette Thelle (Copenhagen: Nivaagaards Malerisamling; Strandberg Publishing, 2018). 11 Gertrud Oelsner and Ingeborg Bugge, eds., Thorald Brendstrup: I guldalderens skygge (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2012); Gertrud Oelsner and Karina Lykke Grand, eds., Vilhelm Kyhn & det danske landskabsmaleri (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2012). 12 Research has uncovered letters (or notes and invitations) in the Danish National Archives (one), the Royal Library, Copenhagen (thirty-two), the H. C. Andersen Archives (one), and

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mountains of Bayern, and on to Switzerland.13 The circumstances of this journey were unusual in that he embarked before receiving the travel grant for which he had applied at the Academy. Apparently, he had been offered inexpensive passage on a ship, but with very short notice. His professors kept the letters he wrote to explain his premature departure and to gain support for his travel grant application. Apart from his supplication, the letters reveal his gratitude for the teaching he had received. This is most apparent in the letter to N. L. Høyen, who had been Professor of Art History at the Academy since 1829 and had, since the late 1830s, emerged as Denmark’s most vocal and influential advocate of a ‘National Art’. Kiærskou’s allegiance to Høyen may in part be explained by the fact that the latter had placed landscape painting at the heart of his vision for the Danish School (fig. 2).14 … Ja!, Hr Professor, det er ingen tom Ytring naar jeg siger Dem, at jeg föler dybt, at De og ingen Anden var den Mand, der ved Deres strænge men retfærdige Kritik over mine Arbeider, gav min Aand det höie selvstændige Sving som den har tilkjæmpet sig, og min Pensel den heldige Samklang med hiin; uden hvilken ellers mine Præstationer, ved Andres, som jeg troede rigtige Bedömmelse, ofte kuns förte mig paa Afveje, der altid bragte en forstyrrende Virkning i mine Malerier. [Indeed, Mr Professor, it is no empty utterance when I say to you how deeply I feel that you and none other was the man, who, by your strict but just critique of my work, enabled the elevated independent turn my spirit has attained, and the propitious consonance of my brush with that same; without which my achievements – unlike those of others, whose judgment I believed to be correct but which often only led me astray in ways that always caused a disturbing effect in my paintings.]15

An example of the sharp but constructive criticism to which Kiærskou refers can be found in Høyen’s review of the 1838 Charlottenborg Exhibition, in which six

Thorvaldsen Museum (one). Any information on other letters to the author will be most appreciated. 13 Further to the edition already cited, three more editions exist: Larsen, ‘F. C. Kiærskou’, in Philip Weilbach, ed., Nyt dansk Kunstnerlexikon, indeholdende korte Levnedstegninger af Kunstnere, som indtil Udgangen af 1894 have levet og arbejdet i Danmark eller Den danske Stat, 2. rev. ed., vol. 1 (Copenhagen, 1896); Jørn Rubow (Ph. Weilbach), ‘Kiærskou, Frederik Christian Jacobsen’, in C. F. Bricka, ed., Dansk biografisk leksikon, vol. 12 (Copenhagen: J. H. Schultz, 1933). 14 Oelsner, ‘En fælles forestillet nation: Dansk landskabsmaleri 1807–1875’, 293–294; Karina Lykke Grand, ‘Visionen for Danmark: En politisk landskabskunst / the tension for Denmark: a political landscape painting’, in Guld: skatte fra den danske guldalder / Gold: Treasures from the Danish Golden Age (Systime Academic, 2013). See also David Jackson, ‘Nordic Romantic Landscape: A Double Helix’, in Romanticism in The North – from Friedrich to Turner, ed. David Jackson, Andreas Blühm, and Rud Schenk (Zwolle: WBooks, 2017), 28–29. 15 F. C. Kiærskou, ‘To Höyen, N. L., dat 8. 1. 1841’, Det Kongelige Bibliotek: Ny Kongelig Samling (NKS 1537 folio).

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Fig. 2: F. C. Kiærskou to N. L. Høyen 8. 1. 1841. Det Kongelige Bibliotek NKS 1537 folio, photo: the author

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paintings by Kiærskou were included, four of them landscapes.16 According to Høyen, while Kiærskou showed good judgment in his choice of motifs, his treatment of them was too neat and clustered, and his depiction of natural features such as vegetation was too stereotypical. He recommended that the artist continue and deepen his study of nature, in order to refine his representation of trees. Were the clusters of trees in Kiærskou’s landscapes more powerfully animated, his diligence and promise might produce more meaningful and satisfactory results.17 On Kiærskou’s itinerary in Dresden, besides its picture gallery, was a meeting with Professor J. C. Dahl (1788–1857). Dahl had lived there since 1821 and was known for his interest in young Danish artists and his helpful attitude towards them.18 Kiærskou very proudly relates to Høyen the positive comments he received from Dahl: – Ikke troer jeg det er ubeskedent, naar jeg sandru fortæller Dem Professorens Dom over mine Skitser, som han forlangte at see; “Bliv saaledes ved min gode Kiærschou, saa vil de erhverve Dem et Navn”. Mine Tanker vare i samme Øjeblik hos Dem kjære hr Professor, og jeg takkede Gud af Hjertet, der itide förte Deres Dom over mig: Da jeg nævnte Deres Navn til Professor Dahl, bad Han mig bringe Dem sin venskabeligste Hilsen. [– I do not believe it immodest, when I truthfully tell You the professor’s verdict of my sketches, which he had demanded to see: ‘Continue like this, my good Kiærschou, and you will make a name for yourself ’. My thoughts were at the same moment with You, dear Mr. Professor, and I thanked the Lord from my heart, who in time called Your judgment over me; when I mentioned Your name to Professor Dahl, he kindly asked me to give You his most cordial wishes.]

Kiærskou sent letters almost simultaneously to professors Eckersberg, Lund, and Høyen. Although very similar, these letters confirm the impression of Høyen’s central position. In his letter to Høyen, Kiærskou elaborates on the importance of Høyen’s teachings. He also mentions the crucial role of Høyen’s critique in his letter to Eckersberg, even though Eckersberg had also been his teacher. The Eckersberg letter shows Kiærskou’s gratefulness for the guidance Eckersberg has offered, emphasizing the Professor’s ‘oprigtige Veiledning paa 16 Niels Laurits Høyen, ‘Charlottenborgs Udstilling 1838’, in Niels Laurits Høyens Skrifter, ed. J. L. Ussing (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1871), 121. 17 Fortegnelse over danske Kunstneres Arbejder paa de ved Det Kgl. Akademi for De Skjønne Kunster i Aarene 1807–1882 afholdte Charlottenborg-Udstillinger, 324. It would, of course, be ideal to compare Høyen’s critique with the painting itself; however, it is not known what the painting looked like: Kiærskou exhibited three paintings of Kullen (with the same title) in the years 1836–1838 at Charlottenborg and Kunstforeningen. It also looks as if the painting, to which Høyen refers was already allotted at Kunstforeningen in 1837, and consequently privately owned (by F. V. Dannemand, who in fact was an illegitimate son of Frederik VI). 18 Henrik Bramsen, Landskabsmaleriet i Danmark 1750–1875: stilhistoriske Hovedtræk (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1935), 142.

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Kunstens for mig slibrige bane’ [sincere guidance on art’s, for me, slippery slope].19 In his later letter to Philip Weilbach (1834–1900), who later published the first lexicon of Danish art, Kiærskou emphasises that ‘Eggersberg [sic] havde den Godhed at tegne perspektiv med mig’. [Eckersberg had the kindness to draw perspective with me].20 Furthermore, the Eckersberg letter contains personal comments, such as the pain Kiærskou endured being away from his family. This seems appropriate, as it is likely that Kiærskou did not see his wife and their five children during the two years he was away (1840–1842).21 In his letter to Eckersberg, Kiærskou explains that his family is staying with his brother-in-law on the Danish island of Funen; this indicates his close relationship with the Gindrup-family of his wife Ida Marie (1802–1880).22 However, there is no evidence to support Weilbach’s claim that Kiærskou’s brother-in-law lent him the money for this early trip.23 Instead, Kiærskou borrowed the sum from A. W. Moltke.24 He also succeeded in selling paintings while on his tour, including to Moltke. In fact, the art market was very favourable in Munich, and this as well as the Danish community of artists were major attractions.25 On his return in 1843, Kiærskou submitted his portfolio which included sketches and the painting Parti af Etchdalen [View of the Etch Valley]. On the strength of this work, Kiærskou was assigned the subject of the painting he would submit for accession to the Academy: A Tirolean Landscape.26 Considering the consistent emphasis on Danish subjects later in the century, it is notable that Kiærskou was given a German subject for his membership piece. It had not yet become controversial, in 1843, to suggest a German subject, as it certainly would 19 F. C. Kiærskou, ‘To Eckersberg, C. W., dat 8. 1. 1841’, Det Kongelige Bibliotek: Additamenta (Add. 302, folio a). 20 Weilbach, ‘Kunstnerbreve og supplerende Samlinger vedr. første og anden Udgave af Ph. Weilbachs Dansk Konstnerlexikon samt Nyt Dansk Kunstnerlexicon (1877–1878 samt 1896– 1897)’. 21 Ibid., Kay Bille, Slægten Kiærskou (Copenhagen, 1943). 22 Ibid., the letter to Eckersberg. They were married 24 Nov 1827. For the date of the wedding: C. Klitgaard, ‘Optegnelser om Slægten Kjærskov i Danmark og Norge’, Personalhistorisk tidsskrift 6 (1939): 110. 23 Weilbach, Nyt dansk Kunstnerlexikon, indeholdende korte Levnedstegninger af Kunstnere, som indtil Udgangen af 1894 have levet og arbejdet i Danmark eller Den danske Stat, 1. 24 Kiærskou, ‘To Eckersberg, C. W., dat 8. 1. 1841’. 25 For the art scene in Munich, see Ejner Johansson, De danske malere i München: Et ukendt kapitel i dansk guldalderkunst (Copenhagen: Spektrum, 1997), 215; Weilbach, Nyt dansk Kunstnerlexikon, indeholdende korte Levnedstegninger af Kunstnere, som indtil Udgangen af 1894 have levet og arbejdet i Danmark eller Den danske Stat, 1. 26 Weilbach, Nyt dansk Kunstnerlexikon, 566. Although the exact same title does not feature in the exhibition catalogues, it might have been on display (as well as purchased) at both Charlottenborg and Kunstforeningen. Both feature several paintings in 1843–1845 from the Etch Valley by Kiærskou.

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later. The world in which Kiærskou painted was multinational, with close contact to the artistic centres in Germany. His accession painting was accepted unanimously, and he became a member of the Danish Academy in 1844. Three years later he also became a member of the Swedish Academy. He attained a titular professorship in 1859. It is unclear how many private pupils he took on, but Godfred Christensen (1845–1928), Janus la Cour (1837–1909), and Gustaf Rydberg (1835–1933) were certainly counted among them.27 In 1867, he took up one of the official residences at Charlottenborg.

Fig. 3: F. C. Kiærskou, Landskab, ved Nyrup. Skitse [Landsacpe, near Nyrup. Sketch], 1881. Pencil on paper, 11 x 17 cm, Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, photo: Ole Akhøj.

The Practice and Values of F. C. Kiærskou In Kiærskou’s few preserved letters, he provides insight into his practice. His desire to be a landscape painter appears to have been adamant from the very beginning of his painting career, although he offers no explanation as to why. He does, however, describe the necessity of travelling in order to see landscapes and to do thorough studies on-site, which explains the much slower (and more expensive) mode of travel necessary: 27 Marianne Marcussen, ‘Godfred Christensen’, in Kunstindeks Danmark & Weilbachs kunstnerleksikon (Kulturarvstyrelsen, 1994). Jens Peter Munk, ‘Janus La Cour’, ibid., and ‘Benezit / Grove Art on-Line.’

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… i den fulde Overbevisning: at Aandens Höiere Uddannelse paatrængende fordrede et udvidet Terrain at bearbeide, dersom jeg skulle kunne perfectionere mig i den Deel af Kunstens Gebeet, hvortil jeg stedse har fölt Kald, og stedse for Kontinueringen, har Deres særdeles Opmuntringer at takke. [… – in the full conviction: That higher education of the spirit urgently required contemplating an expanded terrain, were I to accomplish perfection in that part of the metiér of art, to which I always felt called; and always regarding continuation thereof, I have Your extraordinary encouragements to thank.]28 … men Et er at reise paa Dampskibe fra Stad til Stad et Andet er det, naar man vil reise for at see og studere et Lands Natur [… but one thing is travelling on steam ships from city to city, something else it is, when one travels in order to see and study the nature of a country].29

Another feature central to Kiærskou’s practice was the role played by his sketches. On his travels, including of course to various parts of Denmark, he purposefully built up a portfolio of sketches (fig. 3, fig. 4). He refers to these in his letters from around 1840 and describes them as satisfactory results of his working days during his travels. These sketches became the backbone of his larger oil paintings afterwards. He would consistently return to a group of subjects and themes in paintings throughout his life.30 Many other artists do have these recurrent themes and their preferred motives appears to be a series of explorations of a fascinating and important phenomenon. In the case of Kiærskou, subtle variations in these repetitive motifs explore how to make the given landscape most appealing and beautiful. These experiments show him working with changing positions: of vegetation, such as trees; of a deer or a group of deer; of the course of a track or a dirt road; of figural groupings; and, importantly, of clouds (fig. 5, fig. 6). Kiærskou also described producing copies on demand. For example, referring to a painting now in the Thorvaldsen Museum collection, dated 1846 (fig. 5), 28 F. C. Kiærskou, ‘To Lund, I. L., dat 9. 1. 1841’, Det Kongelige Bibliotek: Nyere Brevsamling. Dansk (NBD vol. IX). 29 ‘To Lund, I. L., Dat 16. 09. 1845’, Det Kongelige Bibliotek: Nyere Brevsamling. Dansk (NBD vol. IX). This is also the professional way for an artist to travel at this time, as discussed by Karina Lykke Grand, Dansk Guldalder: rejsebilleder (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2012). 30 The auctions after his death provide concrete evidence, as several hundred sketches were offered for sale: ‘Dødsboauktion Kiærskou, F. C. (Frederik Christian), 13. September 1916. København’, and ‘Dødsboauktion Kiærskou, F. C. (Frederik Christian), 9. November 1891. København’, available online from Det Kongelige Bibliotek, in Dødsboauktioner samt eventuelt andre auktioner, danske. Ordnet efter efternavn. Mappe 91. Begyndelsesbogstaver: Kiæ – Kles). See also, for instance, Laura F. Jacobsen, Søllerød – set med malerøje: en kommenteret og dokumenteret registrant over kunstværker med Søllerød-motiver (Nærum: Historisk-Topografisk Selskab for Søllerød Kommune, 1983).

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Fig. 4: F. C. Kiærskou, Allé med træer. Skitse [Avenue with trees. Sketch], n.d. Pencil on paper, 23 x 17.8 cm, Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, photo: Ole Akhøj.

Kiærskou explains that Bertel Thorvaldsen had asked him to copy a picture he had originally painted for A.W. Moltke in 1844 (fig. 6). In his letters to Weilbach, Kiærskou similarly reports having made several copies of another picture in Moltke’s possession, En aften paa Alheden [An evening on the moors], of 1848.31 The same title is mentioned in an 1861 letter written to another client, the medical doctor Carl Schiötz. The letter indicates that Ida Kiærskou made contact with Schiötz through her brother, the pharmacist Gindrup, in whose Funen home Ida and the children had stayed from 1840 to 1842. It is noteworthy that they also could feature as lithographs (fig. 6). Moltke 31 Weilbach, ‘Kunstnerbreve og supplerende Samlinger’.

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Fig. 5: F. C. Kiærskou, Vejen fra Reichenhall til Ramsau i Bayern [The Road from Reichenhall to Ramsau in Bavaria], 1846. Oil on canvas, 76.5 x 62.8 cm, Thorvaldsen Museum, www.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk, public domain.

was amenable to sharing his pictures with the general public, often allowing a graphic version to be disseminated with attribution to his ownership. Kiærskou was a hard worker during his long life and, consequently, his oeuvre is large.32 The lack of his received correspondence, as well as any other private 32 Probably 500 paintings, according to ‘Professor Kiærskou’, Illustreret Tidende, no. 37 (1891).

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Fig. 6: F. C. Kiærskou (pin 1844); S. H. Petersen sc, Tyrol /The original belongs to Count Moltke, Bregentved], 1847. Etching, 49.5 x 41.3 cm, The Royal Collection of Graphic Art, www.smk.dk, public domain.

archive, prevents an exhaustive outline of his paintings. It may at any time have been problematic to get an overview: At a request in 1878 concerning the price of paintings related to the Moltke collection, Kiærskou in absentia replies ‘da jeg først for en hals snes Aar siden, begyndte at opskrive hvad jeg malte og Priserne derved’ [since it is only half a dozen years ago that I began to write down what I

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painted and the corresponding prices].33 Kiærskou had been a curator of the Moltke collection for approximately twelve years, at that point. It was evidently not a priority for him to register work through most of his career, as it was only in his mid-sixties, after having painted for 45 years, that he began this practice. It also appears from the titles of his paintings registered at Charlottenborg and Kunstforeningen (totalling more than 275, often exhibited at both venues), that he used progressively more descriptive titles. This might reflect a wish or a need to distinguish between paintings with the same main subject, so that there was more of an overview. Concerning exhibition practices, it has been remarked that Kiærskou virtually only exhibited at Charlottenborg – and, of course, at Kunstforeningen, when they requested his work. As it is, Kiærskou exhibited more than 250 landscape paintings exclusively at Charlottenborg exhibitions, and participated in 62 annual exhibitions out of 65, during his lifetime.34 It appears both from catalogues and from letters that he would ask owners to lend their paintings to these exhibitions. An important source of information on these transactions is Kiærskou’s correspondence with Weilbach. Here, Kiærskou emphasizes his major works, which are the canvases bought by the Royal Collection and the Royal Household, as well as Count Moltke. Furthermore, he specifically mentions another painting in the Royal Collection, titled Klippelandskab. Djupadal i Bleking ([Cliff landscape.] fig. 9), painted 1855 and purchased in the same year. That this picture has been on long-term loan to the Danish Parliament since 2001 is interesting, in that it indicates appreciation of another of Kiærskou’s non-geographically Danish landscapes. The painting is also an example of his thematic work method, in this case working with material from his trip to ‘Bleking, Smaaland [and] Gothland’ in 1849.35 In 1853, a painting titled Waterfall, motif from Blekingen was the prize at Kunstforeningen’s annual lottery, and was exhibited at Charlottenborg in 1854. Yet again, in 1854, another painting with the same title featured in the draw at Kunstforeningen.36 It seems likely that the 1855 painting in the Royal Collection was the apogee of this series.

33 F. C. Kiærskou, ‘To Reitzel, Carl, dat. 26. 7. 1878’, Det Kongelige Bibliotek: Arne Portmans Autografsamling (NKS 4941 kvart, I.2). 34 Fortegnelse over Danske Kunstneres Arbejder paa de ved Det Kgl. Akademi for De Skjønne Kunster i Aarene 1807–1882 Afholdte Charlottenborg-Udstillinger, 322–331. See also: Jacobsen, Søllerød – set med malerøje, 24, 26. 35 Weilbach, ‘Kunstnerbreve og supplerende Samlinger’. This painting does not figure in the Charlottenborg catalogues – 1855 was one of the very few years that Kiærskou did not participate in the exhibition. 36 According to the lists in Friborg, Det gode selskab: Kunstforeningens historier 1825–2000, and Fortegnelse over Danske Kunstneres Arbejder paa de ved Det Kgl. Akademi for De Skjønne Kunster i Aarene 1807–1882 afholdte Charlottenborg-Udstillinger, respectively.

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The Weilbach letters are not dated, but in them Kiærskou recounts that the largest picture he made was a bridal gift, commissioned by the City of Copenhagen and presented to Danish Princess Alexandra in 1863 on her marriage to Edward (VII), Prince of Wales (fig. 7). The canvas, now in the English Royal collection, measures 193 x 292.1 cm and hung for many years at Sandringham House. After a restoration, it is now at Buckingham Palace.

Fig. 7: F. C. Kiærskou, The Bernstorff House and Park, 1863. Oil on canvas, 193 x 292.1 cm, Royal Collection Trust/ © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018.

In this case, Kiærskou painted a landscape scene featuring a manor house, but in fact it is a house portrait. The catalogue entry notes that the depiction is also used on a dessert service, which was a gift from ‘the ladies of Denmark’.37 The use of landscape and/or nature motifs on exclusive china was also common for the works of Kiærskou’s contemporary Thorald Brendstrup. Although he was not as popular as Kiærskou, Brendstrup, who was trained as a porcelain painter (as ‘brogetmaler’ [polychrome painter]) and worked at the Danish Royal Porcelain Factory in his early career, had a career path comparable to Kiærskou’s.38 Practice across a range of media was common in this period. Indeed, C. W. Eckersberg was encouraged to be a porcelain painter in his early career by his

37 Royal Collections, ‘Bernstorff House and Park Signed and Dated 1863’, https://www. royalcollection.org.uk/collection/405124/bernstorff-house-and-park. 38 See Oelsner and Bugge, Thorald Brendstrup: i guldalderens skygge.

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professor N. A. Abildgaard (1783–1809).39 The manor house portrait genre was one to which Kiærskou, with his prominent group of clients, was well accustomed. It should be noted, however, that this was not a trademark category for Kiærskou, as it was for his contemporary Ferdinand Richardt.40 Kiærskou’s greatest activity was as an illustrator in the emerging genre of travel literature and descriptions of Denmark’s nature in the mid-nineteenth century.

National Depiction in Books and on Canvas Gertrud Oelsner describes the importance of illustrated descriptions of Denmark in the development of ‘the Danish visual nation’.41 Such illustrations appeared primarily in guidebooks in the early 1800s and, later in that century, in formal volumes of cultural and geographic description.42 Considering the popularity of, and general access to, these books, the landscape depictions they contained arguably became ‘household items’, and the specific iconography of the depictions became so well known that they became iconic renderings of certain locations. Oelsner corroborates this assumption by showing how often these popular images were recycled. Also important is Oelsner’s persuasive argument that the topographic and stylistic variety in these images complicates the notion of a stable and reified ‘Danish landscape’ with views counter or alternative to the iconic softly rolling hills, beech trees, grassy meadows, and bodies of water. For the purposes of the present study, it is important to note that these lithographs were often based on paintings. The depictions of Denmark created by Kiærskou are a case in point. In the popular volume Danmark, fremstillet i Billeder [Denmark, represented in images], published by Bærentzen in 1856, Kiærskou is the artist behind fifteen out of sixty depictions of Denmark proper. This total excludes illustrations of Denmark’s other holdings in the Atlantic: the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and the 39 Henrik Bramsen, Dansk Kunst fra Rokoko til vore Dage, Dansk Kultur, vol. 2 (Copenhagen: Hirschsprung, 1942), 144. 40 F. Richardt, T. A. Becker, and C. E. Secher, Prospecter af danske Herregaarde, (1844). In this context it is also interesting that houses positioned in landscapes have a function through the ‘views’ they provide, thus enabling a visual conquest of the territory, an important trope in the nineteenth century. Oelsner, ‘En fælles forestillet nation: Dansk landskabsmaleri 1807– 1875’, 184. 41 Most recently in ‘En fælles forestillet nation: Dansk landskabsmaleri 1807–1875’. An earlier discussion can be seen in Gertrud Oelsner’s ‘Udsigt til guldalderen: politiske landskaber’, in Udsigt til guldalderen, ed. by Gertrud Oelsner (Maribo: Storstrøms Kunstmuseum, 2005), 26– 28, and in ‘The Democracy of Nature’, Romantik 1, no. 1 (2012), doi: 10.7146/rom.v1i1. 15851: 97. 42 For a detailed discussion, see Oelsner, ‘En fælles forestillet nation: Dansk landskabsmaleri 1807–1875’, 179–194, especially 190–194.

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Virgin Islands, all of which were produced by artists who had travelled to these locations.43 E. Erslev’s Den Danske Stat [The Danish state] had been published the previous year and, remarkably, Kiærskou is similarly heavily represented in this first ‘common’ book on the geography of Denmark. Oelsner points out that Erslev did not just use what was available; if he deemed it relevant, he would choose the newest image available, or even commission one. It appears that Kiærskou’s depiction of Denmark was ideal for Erslev’s interest in natural history. Among the locations Kiærskou illustrated for Erslev, are Stevns Klint, a white chalk cliff on the island of Zealand, Denmark, and Alheden, a hilly moor landscape from Rye, in Jutland, which Kiærskou painted several times. Kiærskou is also the artist behind three typological landscapes: A Bog, A River, and Outskirts of the Forest on the Eastern Coast of Jutland.44 It is evident that Kiærskou’s renderings were deemed satisfactory for a bio-topical description requiring precise observations of the vegetation and topography. That the images of Denmark which Kiærskou provided to Bærentzen and Erslev often depicted nationally famous landscapes, is supported by the fact that these locations feature prominently elsewhere: not only in Kiærskou’s oeuvre, but in the general body of landscape painting from the period. Another important piece of evidence, however, emerges from analysis of the provenance of Kiærskou’s paintings, particularly as their early ownership is looked into. It appears that there is a correlation between Kiærskou paintings sold to very prominent customers, the several copies requested of these works, and the images featured in Bærentzen. This presence of images with the same title and/or subject alone is, of course, not evidence for a common iconography. In the case of a work such as Dyrehaven [Dyrehaven], however, it does seem that the several references to this title in various exhibition lists refer to the same motif. Dyrehaven, a former Royal hunting ground just north of Copenhagen, was one of the period’s most popular natural environments. For his publication, Bærentzen adopted two of Kiærskou’s depictions of the location: Parti fra Jægersborg Dyrehave [A view of Jægersborg Dyrehave] and Udsigt fra Fortunen [View from Fortunen]. The latter was featured at Charlottenborg in 1847, 1848, and 1849. The paintings were owned by the King, the Prussian Minister in Copenhagen, and the King, respectively. In Kiærskou’s letter to Weilbach, he notes that he painted Fortunen twice for the King, and that one of these paintings is in Stockholm. Between 1835 and 1884, Kiærskou exhibited no fewer than twelve paintings with the titles Jægersborg or Dyrehave. Of these, one belonged to

43 Danmark, fremstillet i Billeder: Samling af Prospecter af mærkelige Byer og Egne paa Øerne, i Nørrejylland og Slesvig (Copenhagen: Em. Bærentzen & Co., 1856). 44 Edouard Erslev, Den Danske Stat, En almindelig geografisk Skildring for Folket (Kittendorff & Aagaard, 1855), 68, 83, 87, 116, 121, and 144.

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Count Moltke (exhibited in 1841) one to Queen Louise (exhibited 1865) and one to the Prussian Minister.45 Kiærskou specifically mentions in his letter to Weilbach, that he delivered paintings to ‘the then German Minister and English Minister’. The two paintings belonging to the German Minister went on display at Charlottenborg in 1848.46 Taken together, these examples, as well as the Alheden motif mentioned above, convincingly point to motifs migrating from high-profile collections to general iconography that was disseminated even beyond Danish borders. It was not necessary, however, for a painting to be highly visible – prominently owned or exhibited – for lithographic or other reproductions of it to make their way into the wider public sphere. Nor is it necessarily valid to assume that territories which were not depicted in Kiærskou’s high-profile paintings were absent because he never visited or painted them. From the standpoint of ‘the great unseen’, it is interesting to note that Kiærskou, who travelled and painted throughout Denmark, painted pictures of several locations that never made it to Charlottenborg. An interesting example of this, which indicates Kiærskou’s disregard for national priorities when choosing a motif, is a picture he painted in Maribo, in the Lolland-Falster region, and which is now in the collection of the Fuglsang Kunstmuseum (fig. 8).

The Maribo Painting by Kiærskou ‘Maribo provides a lovely view’ – a quote from Bærentzen – would easily fit as the subtitle to Kiærskou’s painting of Maribo, which does not seem to have been well known beyond its inclusion in Bærentzen’s volume (fig. 8). In his recent book on graphic depictions of Lolland-Falster, Jørgen F. Lind collected 39 engravings from the Maribo region, of which eight were landscapes.47 Thorald Brendstrup is generally recognized as the first painter to produce fine-art depictions of Maribo, which he did in the 1830s. As Oelsner has explained, these early works were painted during trips to see his in-laws, who were major landowners in the Maribo 45 The painting owned by Queen Louise, consort of Christian IX, is the only Kiærskou presently in the Danish private Royal Collections. It is a canvas measuring 130 x 197 cm. It is registered as giving the view from The Eremitage [The Hermitage] (a royal hunting lodge) towards Øresund. 46 According to Fortegnelse over Danske Kunstneres Arbejder paa de ved Det Kgl. Akademi for De Skjønne Kunster i Aarene 1807–1882 afholdte Charlottenborg-Udstillinger, 326. The name of the Prussian minister is Baron Schoults v. Ascheraden, of a Swedish-Pomeranian family, and the Baroness was Swedish. The Baron was in Copenhagen from 1842–1847. 47 Jørgen F. Lind, Det frugtbare land: Lolland-Falster skildret i grafiske billeder og landkort før 1900: en registrant og lystvandring (Virum: Forlaget Jørgen Lind, 2004), 51–54. For the Bærentzen quote, see 129.

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Fig. 8: F. C. Kiærskou, Optrækkende uvejr over Maribo Sø [Gathering storm over Maribo Lake], 1873. Oil on canvas, 46.5 x 62 cm, Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, photo: Ole Akhøj.

district.48 One such example features fishing boats by a pier and, across the lake, the silhouette of a cathedral. A comparison of this image with Kiærskou’s depiction of Maribo is instructive. While Kiærskou succeeds in communicating the charm of the view, he does not achieve the same degree of identifying description as Brendstrup. In comparison to Brendstrup, Kiærskou stays more firmly in the romantic mode. This is further enhanced by the dramatic sky above the quiet landscape below. The quietness is emblematic in the still lake, and in the calmness in the slowly moving cart drawn by glossy horses, as it carries a couple of passengers along the scenic, winding road. Seen here is another hallmark feature of Kiærskou’s composition: the diagonal lines into the landscape emphasized by rolling hills. This creates a sort of ‘hide and seek’ impression; there might be a delightful surprise just around that corner, where we cannot see. The low-lying landscape is, although seen from an elevated position, not quite laid bare to our view. We are allowed only a preview that hints at the presence of much more than what we can perceive at a single glance. This is emphasised by the lonely sail of a boat right at 48 Gertrud Oelsner, ‘Thorald Brendstrup. En pionér ved Maribo Sø’, in Udsigt til guldalderen (Fuglsang Kunstmuseum og Skovgaard Museet, 2005).

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the border between the pink and ice-blue in the water. The direction of the boat’s progress is unclear; it might be returning from a voyage just ahead of a storm or heading towards it, in which case it would be heading straight towards what comes very close to the golden section. With this in mind the sky adds a dramatic aspect as well as emphasizes the complexity of the softly rolling intricate landscape below. This is achieved through a deceptively simple composition: the shape of the clouds mirrors the contours of the landscape. With this composition, the painter arguably provides an easy path for the spectator to perceive the two conflicting tempers as one complex unity. At the same time, he renders the romantic moment persuasively by combining the great themes of life with the commonplace landscape of a provincial town in a somewhat remote province that was not generally considered especially romantic.49 The motif of the gathering storm, which allows for a dramatically focused light, is common perhaps for that reason, but it also goes without saying that much can be associated with the brooding tempers it represents. This fits quite seamlessly with the principles Kiærskou applied in his oeuvre, but one wonders why we only know of one landscape painting from Maribo. It is peculiar, in fact, that Kiærskou painted so few depictions of Lolland, because he had good reason to be there more than once. His wife’s brother, Otto Joachim, lived most of his married life in Rødby (15 km from Maribo), or nearby on Lolland, and the family of Otto Joachim’s wife came from the island. Sadly, they both died in 1860 and their seven children afterwards lived with various relatives.50 In the census of 1870, it appears that one sibling was still in Rødby, three siblings lived in Maribo in the household of the eldest sister, by that time married, and one sister, Constance, was living with the Kiærskous at Charlottenborg. In 1871, the youngest Kiærskou brother, Thorvald Ejnar Joachim (1838–1911), married Constance (Ida Beate Constance Ginderup, c. 1849–1935). That same year, her younger sister Olivia (Margrethe Olivia Gindrup, 1853–1939), aged sixteen or seventeen, moved to Copenhagen to live with her paternal aunt and, in 1873 the elder Kiærskou brother, Hjalmar Frederik Christian, married his cousin Olivia, who was 18 years his junior.51 These are all plausible reasons for Kiærskou to have gone to Maribo, as was the occasion of his trip to nearby Møn, where he painted a picture in, or before, 1838. He might have visited the area to see that part of the family at any time in 1860s, starting with the death of his brother and sister in-law and later perhaps to bring Constance to Copenhagen. In any case, a 49 Oelsner, ‘Udsigt til guldalderen: politiske landskaber’: 28, or Oelsner and Bugge, Thorald Brendstrup: i guldalderens skygge, 51. 50 Kay Bille, Gindrup Slægten (Copenhagen, 1943). The dates are, according to this, the most accessible source, but it is unfortunately not entirely reliable. More precise information may be found in church registers and census data. 51 Ibid.; Christensen, ‘Kjærskov, Hjalmar Frederik Christian’.

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possible sketch from Maribo Lake done at some point in his career could later have been used for the Maribo Lake painting. Perhaps events in the early 1870s triggered the use of such a sketch and inspired him to make the painting titled Gathering Storm over Maribo Lake.

The Critique of Kiærskou – and His Journey into Oblivion Jeg har gjort det saa godt jeg kunde; men jeg er nu gammel og gaaet i Frø, og saa siger et gammelt Ordsprog: Den, der er slaaet til en Skilling bliver aldrig en Daler … Han synes født til Bagateller og noget stort han blev ei heller … [I have done as well as I could, but now I am old and have run to seed, and as an old proverb says: What is minted as a Penny, will never become a Shilling … To trifles he seemed born, nor great did he become …]52

This seems a somewhat surprising self-critique from a professor at the Academy. Nevertheless, it is what Kiærskou wrote in 1866. The letter continues: ‘De faar saaledes mere se paa den gode Villie, end paa Tingen selv’ [Thus you must take the will for the deed, not looking at the deed itself].53 Perhaps Kiærskou, then aged 61, in this letter sent with a wedding present, was already feeling less well received by art critics. From the very early letters, he offers excuses for his poor ability as a letter writer, and does so, too, with friends later in life – this could also be the reason why his few letters appear somewhat stilted. But, the sentiment he expresses, reflects a full-blown debate in Denmark, perhaps most heated in the 1870s, over the ideals to which Kiærskou adamantly adhered. A newspaper review of the spring exhibition at Charlottenborg featured a polemical text which, while ostensibly aimed at the landscape painter Vilhelm Kyhn, encapsulated a larger concern. The reviewer expressed dismay over what he saw as the ‘modern’ trends of Kyhn’s work: grey colours and the failure to catch and render the poetry of the landscape, the airy (lofty) views and lucidly rendered vegetation.54 By contrast, the reviewer describes how, in a Kiærskou painting, the road me52 C. F. Kiærskou, ‘To Collin, E., dat 6. 5. 1866’, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Troensegaards autografsamling I.1. 53 Ibid. 54 For Kyhn, see Oelsner and Grand, Vilhelm Kyhn og det danske landskabsmaleri. Kyhn published a critique of recent developments on the Danish art scene at this time. In the 1870s, Kyhn was involved in several public discussions, see Finn Terman Frederiksen, ‘Kyhns Mareridt. Kunstnerens udvikling og selvforståelse i 1870’erne’, in Vilhelm Kyhn og det danske landskabsmaleri, ed. by Gertrud Oelsner and Karina Lykke Grand (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2012). The explanation for the ‘greyness’ lamented over in Morgenbladet could be the tristesse after 1864, resulting in many canvasses featuring rainy scenes and other sombre motifs: Karina Lykke Grand, ‘Danmark er et dejligt land. Vilhelm Kyhn og det nationale maleri’, ibid., 97–101.

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andering into the landscape invites the viewer to enter the scene – so deceptively close to nature is it, and extremely pleasant, that one becomes captivated. In addition, Kiærskou uses colours to support the beauty of his motif. In short, according to this reviewer: ‘Kiærskou vælger altid smukt’ [Kiærskou always chooses beautifully].55 The reviewer goes on to note that in landscape painting there is a requirement comparable to that which operates in portraiture. As in landscapes, the portrait painter is expected to show the best qualities of the sitter. Polemic or not, this is in fact exactly what had earlier been said by J. C. Dahl (who died in 1857), among others. Indeed, art historian David Jackson cites such a statement in an essay in 2017, to introduce a discussion of the appreciation of ‘feeling’ in art in this period.56 In any case, Kiærskou’s forebodings in 1866 turned out to be prescient. He apparently perceived that attitudes were changing at this time. In 1887, another pictorial atlas of Denmark was published, by M. Galschiøt: Danmark i Skildringer og Billeder [Denmark in descriptions and pictures], with the subtitle af danske forfattere og kunstnere [by Danish authors and artists].57 The four volumes are richly illustrated, to the scale of around 900 illustrations. Among these, there is not a single illustration by Kiærskou (nor any by Brendstrup, who died in 1883). Recalling the iconic character of Kiærskou’s description of locations like Stevns, there is a similarity in Under Stevns Klint by Henrik Jespersen, but Nicolaus Lützhoft’s Udsigt fra Fortunen, set mod København [view from Fortunen, towards Copenhagen] depicts a landscape of an altogether different character: much more open, and with no trees in the foreground. It seems, therefore, that when Galschiøt published in 1887 he had no interest in the iconic depictions that so often appeared at mid-century. When Kiærskou died, in 1891, an obituary was published in Illustreret Tidende, which stated: ‘den flittige gamle Landskabsmaler’ [the diligent old landscape painter]. While it appears that he was afforded little regard among art critics, the obituary continued, he seemed still to have admirers in the public sphere, and it would no doubt have comforted him to hear the way people were talking at the last [Charlottenborg] exhibition. This was followed by a description of the Munich influence on Kiærskou, noting that he had the same idealized approach as Carl Rottmann (1797–1850), and that he persisted in this for his whole life, ignoring the original excellent national spirit of art developed by Høyen’s school. According to this text, he enjoyed much appreciation for as long as he lived.58 55 ‘Fra Kunstudstillingen’, Morgenbladet (København), 23.04 1876. As example the painting Egekrat ved Langå i Jylland. 56 Jackson, ‘Nordic Romantic Landscape: A Double Helix’. 57 M. Galschiøt, Danmark i Skildringer og Billeder, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Philipsen, 1887). Jespersen in vol. 2:1: 306, and Lützhof in vol. 2:2: 707. 58 ‘Professor Kiærskou’, Illustreret Tidende, no. 37 (1891).

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Fig. 9: F. C. Kiærskou, Klippelandskab. Djupadal i Bleking [Rocky landscape. Djupadal in Blekinge], 1855. Oil on canvas, 136.5 x 206 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst, www.smk.dk, public domain.

This appreciation was soon to die out. A comparison between two first editions (1893–1911 and 1915–1930) of the most established Danish encyclopaedia, Salmonsens Konversationsleksikon, indicates nascent developments in twentieth-century attitudes toward Kiærskou’s work.59 Both editions state that Kiærskou ‘spent a couple of years in Germany, mostly in Münich, where his art was influenced in a way from which he never managed to free himself ’ [emphasis mine]. He ‘won an audience’ back in Denmark by ‘sin net arrangerede Komposition og pyntelige Udførelse’ [his neatly arranged compositions and dainty execution]’; but his production particularly later in life ‘bærer stærkt præg af at være blevet til med hurtigt og prisbilligt salg for øje’ [is strongly marked by having been created in order to sell quickly and inexpensively]; and even in his best works, his use of colour was conventional and ‘spids i foredraget’ [overly finicky]. The first edition goes on to observe that his works ’kan dog opnaa en vis dekorativ Virkning, og tiltale ved god redegørelse for Afstande og Former [do achieve a somewhat decorative effect and please by an able exposition of distance and form].

59 J. B. Halvorsen, Salmonsens store illustrerede Konversationsleksikon, en nordisk Encyklopædi (Copenhagen: Brødrene Salmonsen, 1893). Christian Blangstrup, Salmonsens Konversationsleksikon, 2nd ed. (Copenhagen: Projekt Runeberg, 2011).

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The second edition, however, concludes that ’i sine senere aar arbejdede han i høj grad paa en Rutine, der havde mistet al Forbindelse med ægte Naturfølelse [in his later years to a high degree his work became routine, and lost all connection with any real sense of nature]. Apparent here is the same prejudice that seemed to operate in Galschiøt: not only is the romantic principle of composition not interesting but the painterly technique is wrong, too, and this results in the artist being accused of having no connection with the nature he spent his whole career depicting. Danish art history writing in the early twentieth century was unambiguous in its critique of those artists it loosely referred to as the ‘Europeans’. In the midtwentieth century, art historical literature did simply not discuss these painters.60 Oelsner emphasises that the rendering of Denmark in Bærentzen, which was consistent with standard representational style until about 1875, was to a considerable extent created by artists who today are virtually unknown in Danish art history surveys. Consequently, their contribution to this shared image of Denmark is disregarded. Historian Palle Lauring, in the preface to his 1977 history of Denmark, quite typically dismissed these nineteenth-century masters as ‘jævne’ [(distinctly) average].61 Lauring is, in this way, a product of his time; his judgment reflects the undisputed art historical verdict of the moment. The present study contributes to a current trend that wishes to reclaim awareness of these omitted artists while interrogating the historiographic and rhetorical reasons for their consignment to oblivion. As a critical lens, the ‘great unseen’ is helpful in restoring their achievement to the historical record, particularly as it pertains to the mid-nineteenth-century national image of Denmark. Additionally, as the case of Kiærskou makes clear, the present-day perception of the contours of the nineteenth-century image of Denmark has been seriously compromised by the agendas and consequent redactions of twentieth-century art history.62 The criticism of repetitiveness, which is indeed supported by a ‘distant reading’ of Kiærskou’s titles, might be seen as a motivation behind the current critical assessment of his importance. Recent studies, however, suggest that his preference for the Dresden/Munich aesthetics of the European School had a greater impact in the long run. They point out that following other stylistic ideals than those promoted by Høyen was detrimental to a painter’s appraisal in Denmark, and resulted in Kiærskou not being given the historical place ‘han 60 William Gelius, ‘Tysk landskabsmaleri i dansk guldalderoptik’, in Under samme himmel: land og by i dansk og tysk kunst 1800–1850, ed. by Stig Miss and William Gelius (Copenhagen: Thorvaldsens Museum, 2000), 80–84. 61 Oelsner, ‘En fælles forestillet nation: Dansk landskabsmaleri 1807–1875’, 189, 191. Oelsner, ‘Udsigt til guldalderen: politiske landskaber’, 26; also in this article Oelsner comments on the very high number of images by Kiærskou (p. 28). 62 Ibid., 300 and 377.

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fortjener’ [he deserves].63 It even appears, from the text published by the Royal Collections, Buckingham Palace, that ‘[Kiærskou] worked mostly in Munich, exhibiting there as well as in Vienna’.64 That may be, but Kiærskou certainly worked in Denmark, exhibited in Denmark, and is part of the shared visual identity of Denmark.

Fig. 10: F. C. Kiærskou, Parti ved Skarritsø [View of Skarritsø], 1868. Oil on canvas, 54.5 x 75.8 cm, Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, photo: Ole Akhøj.

63 I am grateful to Asger Aabenhuus and Maria Louise Sargent, Folketinget, for this information. The quote is from Folketinget’s collections database, and the text is written by Lisbeth Bonde (2013). 64 Royal Collections, ‘Bernstorff House and Park. Signed and Dated 1863’.

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros (Lund University)

Translating ‘unprejudiced, bright, and philanthropic views’. Henry Brougham and Anglo-Swedish Exchanges in the Early Nineteenth Century1

Abstract During the romantic period, translation played a key role in the mediation of reform ideas from Britain to the Nordic countries, and many translators of texts aiming at social reform wished to instigate change in their home countries. This article focuses on how Henry Brougham’s programme for popular education, as presented in his Practical Observations upon the Education of the People: Addressed to the Working Classes and Their Employers (1825), was made available to Swedish readers in a translation by Frans Anton Ewerlöf, in 1832. The translation process and the representation of Brougham in Sweden in the 1820s and 1830s are discussed. Ewerlöf read and decided to translate Brougham’s text in 1827, and a few years later he travelled to Britain to observe how Brougham’s ideas had been put into practice. As a result, the Swedish translation combines travel writing with Ewerlöf ’s own reflections on Brougham’s text, offering a foreigner’s assessment of what had transpired in Britain after Brougham wrote his book. Keywords Brougham, Ewerlöf, Education, Translation, Cultural exchange, Sweden

Introduction Henry Brougham (1778–1868) is well known to scholars of British romanticism as one of the most prominent and controversial public figures of the period. In 1802, he founded – along with Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850) and others – the influential Edinburgh Review, and his more than 200 contributions to that magazine comprise articles on education, abolition, parliamentary representation, natural philosophy, and, of course, a famously negative review of Byron’s (1788– 1824) first major work: Hours of Idleness (1807).2 As a man of law, Brougham 1 This article is based on research carried out within the project Translations with an agenda: The Swedish introduction and translation of 19th-century British social-reform literature, funded by the Swedish Research Council. 2 Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu, introduction to Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu,

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made a name for himself as Attorney General, in 1820, when he defended Caroline of Brunswick (1768–1821) in the divorce proceedings brought against her by George IV of England (1762–1830). By then, Brougham was also a highprofile Whig politician. William (1770–1850) and Dorothy Wordsworth (1771– 1855) had criticised his activities during the campaign for the Westmoreland Seat in 1818, when Dorothy likened him to ‘French demagogues of the Tribunal of Terror at certain times’, and William, in his pamphlet Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland (1818), described his campaign as ‘at enmity with the bonds by which society is held together, and Government maintained’.3 So far, so familiar to scholars of British romanticism. What may be less familiar, however, is the international impact of Brougham’s ideas about popular education. As will be demonstrated, Practical Observations upon the Education of the People (1825) had an influence on the development of educational thought in Sweden as well, and the nature of this influence also helps to illustrate the key role played by translation in the mediation of ideas from Britain to the Nordic countries during the romantic period and beyond. In what follows, I first describe the historical and material context for the transmission of Brougham’s ideas to Sweden and the principal actors involved. From there, I proceed to discuss how and to what extent Brougham’s main proponent in Sweden, the civil servant Frans Anton Ewerlöf (1799–1883), rewrote Brougham’s text to publicize his own vision of Swedish popular education. The point of contact between translator and subject matter affected the manner, in which the translation came to be presented to the intended audience. The way in which Ewerlöf combined travel writing with reflective comments on Brougham’s text will also be discussed, as well as some paratextual considerations, to show how these affected the way in which Brougham’s educational programme was presented to Swedish readers. In a brief coda, I conclude by considering the light which translation studies can throw upon the dynamics of the transfer of texts across national and cultural boundaries during the nineteenth century.

eds., British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 3; Brougham, ‘Review of Hours of Idleness: A Series of Poems, Original and Translated by George Gordon, Lord Byron’, The Edinburgh Review (January 1808): 285–289. See also Per Sörbom, Läsning för folket: Studier i tidig svensk folkbildningshistoria (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1972), 26; Joanne Shattock, ‘Politics and Literature: Macaulay, Brougham, and the Edinburgh Review under Napier’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 16 (1986): 33. 3 Quoted in William Anthony Hay, The Whig Revival, 1808–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 75; William Wordsworth, Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland (Kendal, 1818), ‘To the Reader’.

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Bringing Brougham to Sweden Ewerlöf first contacted Brougham in August of 1827 upon reading a French translation of Practical Observations. As Ewerlöf later phrased it in the preface to his Swedish translation of the book, he had been struck by its ‘fördomsfria, ljusa och menniskoälskande åsigter’ [unprejudiced, bright, and philanthropic views] about adult education and had therefore decided to make Brougham’s ideas available to Swedish readers.4 As he did not have access to the English original, Ewerlöf asked Brougham for a copy and for supplementary information about some of the educational institutions mentioned in the book.5 Brougham’s swift response discloses his delight in Ewerlöf ’s plan, and the book was immediately dispatched to Ewerlöf via the Swedish legation in London, along with a number of brochures published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which Brougham had founded in 1826 to facilitate education for working-class men through lectures and inexpensive, edifying publications.6 The correspondence in 1827 between Ewerlöf and Brougham discloses the first steps of a translation project aimed at a Swedish import of British ideas concerning popular education. One reason why Ewerlöf was attracted to Brougham’s educational programme was no doubt its connection to an overall social and political engagement. Brougham was an influential force in British politics and education, and by the time Ewerlöf read Practical Observations, Brougham’s position in Britain, and his rhetorical skills, were also well known to the readers of Swedish newspapers. In Practical Observations, Brougham emphasises the value of adult education both for the individual and for society. As McManners puts it, for Brougham, ‘educational progress was the obvious concomitant of the advent of the wider franchise on the one hand and of the Industrial Revolution on the other’.7 To encourage the working class to pursue education was important, according to Brougham, as ‘the true principles of the constitution, ecclesiastical and civil, should be well understood by every man who lives under it’.8 He argued that to facilitate widespread education of adult workers, it was essential to make edu4 Henry Brougham, preface to Om folkbildning af Brougham, Lord-stor-canzler af England. Öfversättning med anteckningar om de i England befintliga handtverks-instituterna och sällskapet för nyttiga kunskapers spridande, samlade under en resa i nämnde land, åren 1830– 1831, af F. A. Ewerlöf, Förste expeditions- sekreterare, R. W. O., trans. Frans Anton Ewerlöf (Stockholm, 1832). (Translations are my own.) 5 Frans Anton Ewerlöf, Letter draft to Henry Brougham (9 August 1827), Lund University Library. 6 Brougham, Letter to Frans Anton Ewerlöf (25 August 1827), Lund University Library. 7 T. McManners, ‘The work of Lord Brougham for English education’ (MA thesis, Durham University, 1952), 198. 8 Henry Brougham, Practical Observations upon the Education of the People: Addressed to the Working Classes and Their Employers (London, 1825), 5.

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cation affordable: ‘The peace of the country, and the stability of the government, could not be more effectually secured than by the universal diffusion of this kind of knowledge’.9 Richardson states that although reformist, Brougham’s programme ‘must also be seen as reactionary [in that his] advocacy of “sounder” political views in Practical Observations tacitly evokes the rival views they are meant to contest’.10 Ewerlöf ’s contacts with Brougham and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) have been investigated, most notably by Sörbom, although not much attention has been paid to way in which Brougham’s educational manifesto was relocated to serve the early popular education movement in Sweden.11 In particular, whilst the transmission of Scandinavian and Germanic texts in translation to Britain during the late eighteenth century and romantic period are comparatively well documented, the transmission to Sweden of Brougham’s Practical Observations is a case in point of the extent to which research on nineteenth-century transnational exchanges of ideas has often overlooked the means by which ideas from high-status cultures like Great Britain travelled to more peripheral countries, such as Sweden, by way of translation, and the fact that most readers on the outskirts of Europe encountered progressive ideas in the form of translations carried out by their own countrymen. Importantly, translators of reform texts who were themselves engaged within the field of the texts they translated often took a strategic approach to translation in the sense that they adapted the target text to fit their own aims. Although Ewerlöf ’s translation, which was published in 1832, was not a success in terms of copies sold, it indicated the significance of translation as a strategy in the importation and adaptation of foreign ideas in periods of transition. Drawing on recognized foreign ideas, in order to promote change at home, was an established strategy among social reformers in nineteenth-century Sweden, and Ewerlöf was characteristic of his time and context in that he did not translate Brougham’s book for monetary gain but out of a pronounced wish to disseminate to his fellow countrymen specific insights that he had himself gained. Furthermore, the translation project enabled him to claim ownership of those ideas in Sweden.

9 Ibid. 10 Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780– 1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 222. 11 Per Sörbom, Läsning för folket: Studier i tidig svensk folkbildningshistoria (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1972). The main focus of Sörbom’s study is Läsning för folket [Reading for the people], the journal published by the Swedish Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.

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Popular Education in the 1820s and Early 1830s Brougham used the expression ‘popular education’ when he first presented his educational programme in an 1824 article in the Edinburgh Review. His definition is not entirely consistent, however: sometimes he includes all ages in the concept and sometimes he refers to education for adult workers.12 In 1825, in his preface to Practical Education, Brougham states that his discussion concerns ‘the Education of Adults’ and that he intends to discuss ‘the best means of aiding the people in using the knowledge gained at school, for their moral and intellectual improvement’.13 The kind of education addressed in Practical Education should thus be seen as an optional further education made available to working men. Swedish popular education developed at a time when the romantic striving for autonomy and liberation amongst individuals was met with a national demand for integration and discipline.14 Tøsse describes the tradition of popular education in Scandinavia as having emerged from ‘the twin influences of the Enlightenment and Romanticism’.15 What in Sweden came to be known as folkbildning was, in Britain, alternatively referred to as ‘adult education’ or ‘popular education’. Although these are all overlapping concepts, the Swedish bildning goes back to the German term Bildung and indicates not only the acquisition of knowledge but also self-cultivation.16 As with the term ‘popular’, the Swedish ‘folk’ suggests an all-inclusive category encompassing all strands in society. In reality however, as Tøsse points out, early endeavours at educating the working classes were often dictated from above.17 Thus, what was referred to as the ‘education of the people’ involved a patrician as well as a romantic discourse. Those involved in establishing the early stages of popular education movements in Britain, as well as in Sweden, belonged to an educated, socio-political elite. In Sweden, when Ewerlöf and his associate Carl af Forsell (1783–1848) began to develop a programme for popular education and set about translating certain British SDUK texts, they quickly encountered a problem: they realised that these texts were too advanced for the average Swedish reader and thus risked being comprehensible only to an already well-educated minority.18 12 Henry Brougham, ‘Scientific Education of the People’ Edinburgh Review, XLI (October 1824): 96, 116, 117. 13 Brougham, preface to Practical Observations. 14 Gunnar Sundgren, ‘Tema: Folkbildning och folkbildningsforskning’, Utbildning & demokrati 11 (2002): 7. 15 Sigvart Tøsse, ‘Popular Adult Education’, in Kjell Rubenson, ed., Adult Learning and Education (London: Academic Press, 2011), 119. 16 Elof Hellquist, Svensk etymologisk ordbok (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerups förlag, 1922). 17 Sigvart Tøsse, Folkbildning som universellt fenomen: Om betydelser och motsvarigheter i historiskt och internationellt perspektiv, (Linköping: Linköpings universitet, 2009), 24. 18 Carl af Forsell, Letter to Frans Anton Ewerlöf (6 December 1832), Lund University Library.

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As already noted, SDUK was founded by Brougham in 1826 to facilitate the education of working-class men. Although not a missionizing body, the Society nonetheless encouraged the establishment of societies for the diffusion of useful knowledge in other countries; as Brougham declares in his letter to Ewerlöf in 1827, ‘nous interesses infiniment à ce que notre plan est bien recu dans l’etranger ou l’on pense exferer que nos principes seront adoptés et des societés semblances fondées’ [we are most interested in the positive reception of our plan abroad, where we hope our principles will be adopted and similar societies will be founded].19 Ewerlöf understood this, and a constitutive meeting for a Swedish version of the SDUK was held in December 1833.20 Societies for the diffusion of useful knowledge were launched elsewhere, as well – in Portugal, for instance, as early as 1827.21 The notion of adult education also spread outside of Europe; as Palmelund Johansen has shown, the SDUK ‘was closely connected to missionary groups who were greatly involved in the import of British knowledge into imperial contexts’ in India as well as China.22 A comparison between Brougham’s and Ewerlöf ’s educational endeavours discloses some interesting parallels. As he was writing Practical Observations, Brougham was planning for what soon developed into the SDUK and, seven years later, Ewerlöf hoped to initiate a similar project in Sweden. This means that while translating Brougham’s book, Ewerlöf found himself in a position very similar to that of the author. Undeniably, the time gap between source text and translation had an impact on the way in which Brougham’s argument was translated. For instance, Brougham’s statement, ‘I am not without hopes of seeing formed a Society for promoting the composition, publication, and distribution of cheap and useful works’, was not included in the translation.23 Since the SDUK had been in existence for several years by the time Ewerlöf translated Brougham’s book, Ewerlöf instead emphasises the benefits of becoming a 19 Brougham, Letter to Frans Anton Ewerlöf (25 August 1827), Lund University Library. Ewerlöf ’s request was written in French, which explains Brougham’s use of that language in his response. 20 Per Sörbom, Läsning för folket, 80. 21 Jorge Pedro Sousa, Elsa Simões Lucas Freitas, and Sandra Gonçalves Tuna, ‘Diffusing political knowledge in illustrated magazines: A comparison between the Portuguese O Panorama and the British The Penny Magazine in 1837–1844’, in Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma Taavitsainen, eds., Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), 162. 22 Thomas Palmelund Johansen, ‘The World Wide Web of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: On the Global Circulation of Broughamite Educational Literature, 1826–1848’, Victorian Periodicals Review 50 (2017): 709, doi: 10.1353/vpr.2017.0051. See also Songchuan Chen, ‘An Information War Waged by Merchants and Missionaries at Canton: The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, 1834–1839’, Modern Asian Studies 46 (2012): 1705–1735, doi: 10.1017/S0026749X11000771. 23 Brougham, Practical Observations, 10.

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member of such a Society. Being able to confirm Brougham’s prediction for the positive results of popular education, Ewerlöf, therefore, translates Brougham’s expectations into a confident statement of accomplishment.

Henry Brougham: A Controversial Model Brougham was of course involved in the parliamentary debates surrounding the Education Bill in England in 1820. As a theorist of education, however, his influence rested less on the originality of his thinking than on his ability to popularise and spread the romantic notion of life-long learning for individual as well as for national improvement.24 Contemporary sources describe Brougham as a rhetorically skilled and sharp-tongued speaker, but also claim that he lacked imagination, and that he radiated encyclopaedic knowledge rather than deep thinking. In 1851, newspaper editor and politician Edward Baines (1800–1890) claimed that ‘[t]o no one individual, perhaps, has the modern progress of education been so much owing as to Henry Brougham’, although he also stated that Brougham ‘was too eagerly bent on the accomplishment of his great object to wait patiently for the working of some of his own principle’.25 Determination, possibly at the expense of reflection and diplomacy, can be seen in much of this remarkable man’s oeuvre as well as in comments about him. In 1830, The New Monthly Magazine explained Brougham’s public appeal somewhat ambiguously as being ‘the result of memory and self-confidence, and of a Napoleonic power of concentrating his mind and knowledge at will upon a single point, rather than of the reasoning of inventive faculties’.26 In April the following year, the Swedish newspaper Stockholmsposten ran an article titled ‘Lord Broughams karakteristik som talare’ [A characterization of Lord Brougham as a speaker], which consisted of translated passages of the New Monthly Magazine article.27 Interestingly enough, when Brougham was mentioned in Swedish newspapers, it was these rhetorical skills rather than any contents of his politics that were conveyed to Swedish readers. Brougham’s programme for popular education in Britain was first outlined in October 1824, in a review article in the Edinburgh Review discussing a book by William Davis titled Hints to Philanthropists: Or, a Collective View of Practical 24 Edward Baines, The Life of Edward Baines, Late M. P. for the Borough of Leeds (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), 107; McManners, ‘The work of Lord Brougham for English education’, 108. 25 Baines, Life of Edward Baines, 114. 26 ‘Speakers and Speeches in Parliament, No. 1’, The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Part II, Original Papers, 29 (1830): 600. 27 ‘Lord Broughams karakteristik som talare’, Stockholmsposten (8 April 1831): 3–4.

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Means for Improving the Condition of the Poor and Labouring Classes of Society.28 As Benchimol states, Brougham’s argument in this article was ‘relevant to the ideological purposes and educational aims of the SDUK’.29 Brougham focuses on some principles that later became central for the SDUK, such as ‘the encouragement of cheap publications’ and the establishment of institutions for teaching designed to cater to the needs of workers who did not have much time to spare for evening classes.30 Just three months later, in January 1825, the Edinburgh Review announced the forthcoming publication of Brougham’s own book Practical Observations upon the Education of the People.31 The volume was sold for the benefit of the recently established London Mechanics’ Institution, and in a dedication to its President, George Birkbeck (1776–1841), founder of Birkbeck University, London, Brougham clarifies that his observations form part of an ongoing development plan for British education. Practical Observations upon the Education of the People went through twenty editions within its first year, making it ‘spectacularly successful’ in its genre.32 Approval of Brougham’s ideas was far from unanimous, however: in Blackwood’s Magazine, for instance, a review nearly as long as Brougham’s entire book described it as ‘a very sorry performance and … [as] miserably romantic and defective’.33 Another severe critic was Reverend Edward William Grinfield (1785– 1864), whose pamphlet Reply to Mr. Brougham’s ‘Practical Observations’ (1825) criticised Brougham’s political ambitions and what Grinfield saw as the ‘false directions’ of popular education: It is attempted to be made too scientific and philosophical, instead of being chiefly moral and religious; and the knowledge of particular arts and sciences is recommended as the channel of Popular Improvement, instead of that general knowledge which is the best manure of the mind.34

28 Brougham, ‘Scientific Education of the People’, 96–122. 29 Alex Benchimol, Intellectual Politics and Cultural Conflict in the Romantic Period: Scottish Whigs, English Radicals and the Making of the British Public Sphere (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 126. For a list of Brougham’s articles on education for the Edinburgh Review – some of which were later incorporated in his Practical Observations – see W. D. Sockwell, Popularizing Classical Economics: Henry Brougham and William Ellis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 206–207. 30 Brougham, ‘Scientific Education’: 99, 102–104. 31 Review of Practical Observations upon the Education of the People, Edinburgh Review XLI (January 1825): 508–510. 32 Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 75. 33 ‘Brougham on the Education of the People’, Blackwood Magazine XVII (May 1825): 534. 34 Edward William Grinfield, A Reply to Mr. Brougham’s ‘Practical Observations Upon the Education of the People: Addressed to the Working Classes and Their Employers.’ (London: C. and J. Rivington, 1825), iii–iv.

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Grinfield also levelled harsh criticism against Brougham’s opinions on the education of children, which is somewhat curious since this is not what Brougham’s book deals with, as was soon pointed out by an anonymous commentator in The Edinburgh Magazine.35 A full decade before the translation of Practical Observations, Swedish newspapers had acknowledged Brougham as a prominent British politician. The earliest Swedish newspaper reference to him that I have found concerns a petition against slavery in 1810, but a search in digitalised Swedish newspapers from the 1820s and early 1830s shows that by that time, Brougham was frequently mentioned in reports of British parliamentary debates.36 Swedish newspapers like Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, Dagligt Allehanda, and Stockholmsposten, presented him as an influential orator. Reporting on an English parliamentary debate in May 1827, for instance, Stockholmsposten referred to Brougham’s ‘satirisk[a] tal’ [satirical speech], and a month later, the same newspaper published a translation of a French traveller’s description of Brougham: Kraftfullt och mäktigt är allting hos Hr Brougham: hans stämmas omfång, hans armars rörelser, hans genomträngande blick, hans bittra ironi, hans blossande förtrytelse, grundligheten af hans räsonnementer, hans replikers alltid träffande udd, hans senfulla stils trollbehag. [Everything about Mr Brougham is powerful and grand: the range of his voice, the movement of his arms, his penetrating gaze, his bitter irony, his blazing indignation, the thoroughness of his reasoning, his always precise remarks, his enthralling, sinewy style.]37

Brougham certainly made a strong impression on foreign visitors to Britain. In 1843, the Danish theologian and educationalist N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) wrote to his wife after a visit to the House of Lords that he had listened to several speakers, ‘blandt hvilke dog Ingen, uden Brougham særdeles udmærkede sig’ [among whom No One apart from Brougham distinguished themselves].38 35 ‘Fourth Report of the Directors of the Edinburgh School of Arts – Grinfield’s Reply to Brougham on Popular Education’, The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany (June 1825): 663–664. For a full discussion of the debate in the wake of the publication of Practical Observations, see Ann Firth, ‘Culture and Wealth Creation: Mechanics’ Institutes and the Emergence of Political Economy in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, History of Intellectual Culture, 5 (2005): 1–14. 36 ‘Tidningar från utrikes orter’, Stockholmsposten, 10 July 1810, 1; Svenska Dagstidningar, National Library of Sweden, accessed 15 March, 2018, https://tidningar.kb.se/?q=% 22brougham%22&from=1820-01-01&to=1832-12-31. 37 ‘Tidningar från utrikes orter’, Stockholmsposten (26 May, 1827): 2; ‘Brougham (Skildrad af en resande Fransmand)’ Stockholmsposten (30 June, 1827): 2. 38 Jørgen Fabricius, ’N. F. S. Grundtvigs breve til hans hustru under Englandsrejsen 1843’, Grundtvig Studier 5 (1952): 43.

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Grundtvig had been interested in British liberal ideas long before this; as early as the 1820s, he subscribed both to the Westminster Review and to the Edinburgh Review.39 Brougham was also known in Sweden because of his role in the so-called Queen Caroline affair, which Swedish newspapers followed closely: in 1820 alone, Stockholmsposten mentioned Brougham in over 30 articles, almost exclusively in connection with the Royal divorce proceedings, and Stockholms Posttidningar reported more than 20 times that year about the same issue.40 News travelled relatively quickly; many of the Swedish articles about the Queen Caroline Affair referred to proceedings only a fortnight after they had taken place and been reported in the British press. A few years later, it was not only Brougham’s political and legal activities which were addressed by the Swedish press: in 1825, Dagligt Allehanda published a long and detailed account of a banquet held in honour of Brougham as he had been elected Chancellor of Glasgow University. The article, based on a piece from the British newspaper, The Sun, is another indication that British newspapers were read in Scandinavia and of how their content was adapted to a Swedish audience.41 Brougham had travelled widely in his youth, and one reason for his enthusiastic response to Ewerlöf in 1827 might have been his personal recollections of Sweden as a country in great need of enlightenment. In his letter to Ewerlöf, he mentioned that he had visited Sweden many years previously.42 In the company of a friend, he spent about two months in Sweden in the autumn of 1799. Many years later, whilst preparing his autobiography, Brougham included his detailed travel journal of this Scandinavian trip, in which he had recorded various Swedish cultural habits and political issues. He had been truly shocked in Stockholm by the ‘manners of the people in this capital [which] are extremely dissolute … The instances of profligacy about Court almost exceed belief in so northerly a situation’.43 When editing his notes in the 1860s, Brougham added a comment to clarify that he had not been the only British visitor to observe what was perceived as the immoral condition of the Swedish capital; although Samuel Laing’s A Tour in Sweden in 1838: Comprising Observations on the Moral, Political, and Eco39 Kaj Baagø, ’Grundtvig og den engelske liberalisme’, Grundtvig Studier 8 (1955): 22. 40 Svenska Dagstidningar, accessed 15 March, 2018, https://tidningar.kb.se/?q=brougham& from=1820-01-01&to=1820-12-31. 41 ‘Blandade ämnen’, Dagligt Allehanda (7 May, 1825): 1–2. I have not been able to locate the source The Sun, but several British newspapers and periodicals reported on this particular dinner, which took place on 5 April, over the next month, e. g., ‘British Chronicle, April 5 – Dinner to Mr Brougham’, The Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany (May 1825): 624– 626. 42 Brougham, Letter to Frans Anton Ewerlöf (25 August 1827), Lund University Library. 43 Brougham, The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, vol. 1 (Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871), 165.

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nomical State of the Swedish Nation (1839) was written several decades after Brougham’s visit to Sweden, Brougham noted that it corroborated his observations. In the same footnote, he also refers to the Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865), stating that her novels ‘let the reader into the secret of social life by her reference to those sins which prove sore temptations to the heroines whose virtue overcomes them’.44 Thus, by the time Practical Observations appeared, Brougham was an internationally renowned Whig politician. This circumstance most certainly helped to market his ideas abroad, and several translations of Practical Observations were made within a few years. 1826 saw the French translation which Ewerlöf read, as well as a Dutch one; and in 1827, a German translation was published.45 This volume was probably translated by the educator and geographer Karl Friedrich von Klöden (1786–1856), and it appears to have gained wide recognition in Germany, having been ‘recommended by the Minister to all the local administrations, and supplied by the magistrate to the district authorities’.46 While Ewerlöf first encountered Brougham’s text in French translation, a citation of von Klöden’s German translation in one of Ewerlöf ’s footnotes suggests that Ewerlöf also had access to that edition.47 Moreover, the German edition contains a translation of the French preface. Such links between different translations indicates not only transnational contacts but indeed the multi-layered nature of translation and relay translation as a transmitter of ideas.

Ewerlöf: A Civil Servant with an Agenda Frans Anton Ewerlöf was a high-ranking Swedish civil servant and diplomat. From 1825, he was posted to the Norwegian capital Christiania (now Oslo) as Secretary for the Swedish Governor-General – at the time Norway was in personal union with Sweden – and from 1833, he served for many years as SwedishNorwegian Consul General in Denmark. After university studies at both Lund and Uppsala, Ewerlöf considered a career in the church or as a military officer, but 44 Ibid., 166n. 45 Henry Brougham, Observations pratiques sur l’e´ducation du peuple: Adresse´es aux artisans et aux fabricans (Paris: Bossange Fréres, 1826); Henry Brougham, Over eenige hulpmiddelen tot vermeerdering van beroepskunde bij ambachtslieden (’s-Gravenhagen & Amsterdam: van Cleef, 1826); Praktische Bemerkungen über die Ausbildung der gewerbtreibenden Classen: An die Handwerker und Fabrikanten gerichtet, (Berlin: Dunder und Humblot, 1827). 46 Karl Friedrich von Klöden, The Self-Made Man: Autobiography of Karl Friedrich von Klöden, ed. Max Jähn; trans. A. Mö. Christie, vol. 2 (London: Strahan & Company, 1876), 326 (Appendix). 47 Brougham, Om folkbildning, 24.

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was advised by his mentor Henric Brandel (1739–1828) to aim for consular work.48 Ewerlöf ’s mother, who was of Spanish descent and born in Algiers, had been brought up in Brandel’s household while he served as Swedish Consul General there. As a child, Ewerlöf also spent much time with the Brandel family, by then living in Helsingborg in southern Sweden.49 Ewerlöf knew French from his mother and through his contacts with the Brandel family; he was also proficient in English, although it is not clear when and how he learned it. He regularly corresponded with his British contacts in English, and he wrote articles in English about Scandinavia for SDUK periodicals.50 Five years passed between 1827, when Ewerlöf first read Brougham’s book and contacted him, and the publication of his translation in 1832. From surviving letters, and from the translation itself, it is possible to trace some decisive stages of the extended process of disseminating Brougham’s ideas to Swedish readers. The delay was primarily due to other commitments, as Ewerlöf ’s working situation prevented him from undertaking the translation at once. Importantly, however, his preface for the Swedish translation declares that by the time an opportunity to travel to England arose, he had already made up his mind to postpone the translation until he had ‘genom vistandet i nämnde land hunnit göra mig mera bekant med ämnet’ [managed to learn more about the topic by sojourning in that country].51 This decision turned out to be crucial for the outcome of the project. Although the main purpose of Ewerlöf ’s journey was to learn more about the SDUK and about the so-called Mechanics’ Institutes, Ewerlöf ’s time in Britain turned out to provide an important general context for his translation project. Ewerlöf embarked on this journey in 1830, and, once in Britain, he literally followed in the footsteps of Brougham, whose book provides information about educational establishments in different parts of the country. Ewerlöf ’s stay in the British Isles took him to London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Dublin and 48 Elise Adelsköld, ‘Frans Anton Ewerlöf ’, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, accessed 15 March, 2018, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/SBL/Presentation.aspx?id=15576. Apart from his longstanding career as a diplomat, Brandel developed a system which aimed to bring together different chronological systems. He called it ‘Myriaden’ [the myriad] and published an annual almanac in French based on this system. Many years later, to commemorate his mentor, Ewerlöf published a book – also in French – explaining Brandel’s system: La myriade système Chronologique pour une période de dix mille ans, par Henri Brandel, exposé par F. A. Ewerlöf (Copenhagen, 1853). 49 Martin Weibull, Frans Anton Ewerlöf (Stockholm: Ivar Haeggströms tryckeri, 1884), 2. 50 That French nonetheless was Ewerlöf ’s preferred foreign language is clear from a letter to Thomas Coates, Secretary of the SDUK: ‘Je vens ecris en français, parcqu’il me faut trop de tems pens m’expliquer même aper mal, en anglais’ [I have written in French, because it takes too long for me to explain myself, even badly, in English]. 9 May 1831. University College London Special Collections. 51 Brougham, preface to Om folkbildning.

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Belfast, as well as to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Ewerlöf returned to Christiania in 1831, and his Swedish translation of Brougham’s Practical Observations was published by Peter (Per) Adam Wallmark (1777–1858) in the autumn of the following year.52 Wallmark is probably best known as a member of the Classicist school and a main target for the criticism waged by Swedish romantic poets against ‘old-school’ ideals. He was librarian at the Royal Library, a poet and a newspaper publisher, and he shared Ewerlöf ’s educational interests. When Ewerlöf approached him in or around 1832, Wallmark expressed considerable enthusiasm concerning the task of publisher: ‘Ämnet intresserar mig för mycket för att jag skulle kunna undandraga mig ett sådant uppdrag’ [The subject interests me too much for me not to undertake such a commission].53 The connection between the translation and Ewerlöf ’s wider concerns are central, as he wished to lay the foundations for a Swedish popular education project similar to the one that had developed in Britain. The five-year interval between his initial decision to translate the book and its publication allowed him to read and make use of tracts subsequently published; for instance, texts published by the SDUK. In preparation for a Swedish SDUK, Ewerlöf corresponded for several years with Thomas Coates (1802–1883), Secretary of the SDUK. The collaborative efforts of Ewerlöf and his associate Forsell were certainly crucial for the early development of Swedish popular education, but it should be noted that it was actually Forsell, who lived in Stockholm and who was thus closer to the authorities, whose approval was needed, who was the driving force behind the establishment of the Swedish SDUK. In contrast to Brougham, Ewerlöf does not appear to have been involved in intellectual debates or party politics. Historical records, as well as his own personal correspondence, paint a picture of him as an able civil servant having sympathy with popular education and philanthropy. The only controversy recorded by his biographers occurred towards the end of his posting in Norway, when he at one point found himself embroiled in political turmoil: as the representative of the Swedish King, Ewerlöf was criticised by the young radical poet Henrik Wergeland (1808–1845) in connection with a theatre performance in the Norwegian capital, which generated a massive Norwegian protest, against Swedish rule.54

52 Sörbom, Läsning för folket, 55. 53 Peter Adam Wallmark, Letter to Frans Anton Ewerlöf (13 August, 1832). Lund University Library. 54 Adelsköld, ‘Frans Anton Ewerlöf ’, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon; Sörbom, Läsning för folket, 152.

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Sharing British Ideas with Swedish Readers Everlöf ’s journey resulted in an analysis of how Brougham’s ideas had been put into practice in Britain since the publication of Practical Observations. In the preface of his translation, Ewerlöf outlined his aims as well as his working method. In this respect, Ewerlöf ’s work provides a remarkable insight into his strategy. Like other translators of reform texts at the time, he acknowledges the importance of drawing on a foreign debate to achieve change in Sweden, but his approach was very unusual, in the sense that he describes how he aimed to recontextualize the source text in order to better serve his own purpose. Ewerlöf no doubt revised Brougham’s text, since certain elements were not relevant to the Swedish context. More importantly, however, a substantial part of the translation consists of Ewerlöf ’s own discussion of how Brougham’s ideas had been turned into practice since the book was published and how the knowledge, he had thus gained, could help to implement similar ideas in Sweden. Hence, the Swedish publication merges translation with Ewerlöf ’s own original travel account and, also, with his own observations on the outcome of Brougham’s programme for popular education. By thus negotiating between translation, rewriting, and commenting on the source text, Ewerlöf provides a foreigner’s assessment of the development of the British adult education movement while suggesting ways of adapting and applying it in Sweden. The translation contains passages which demonstrate how Ewerlöf saw himself as a travel writer reporting to his fellow countrymen. The translator-cumtravel writer thereby resembles an explorer who describes new-fangled social and technical innovations to his compatriots in order to instigate change at home. Such information-sharing elements can be found in other Swedish nineteenthcentury travel writing. One example close at hand is Ewerlöf ’s associate Carl af Forsell, who wrote a book after having returned from a trip to England. An internationally acknowledged statistician and steam engine pioneer, Forsell had a keen interest in British educational, as well as social and technical development.55 In Anteckningar i anledning af en resa till England i slutet af sommaren år 1834 [Notes on account of a trip to England in late summer of 1834], he mixed information about his visits to British infant schools and temperance societies with an account of how he travelled by railway between Manchester and Liverpool, and of how he almost succumbed to cholera upon arriving in England.56

55 Henrik Höjer, Sveriges argaste liberal: Carl af Forsell, officer, statistiker och filantrop (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2007). 56 Forsell, Anteckningar i anledning af en resa till England i slutet af sommaren år 1834 (Stockholm: Hörberg, 1835).

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Liberal-minded travellers like Forsell and Ewerlöf were well-connected and thus in a position to gather information about Britain as a pioneering country that they could share with their fellow countrymen. As Ewerlöf later recorded, he had been introduced to the centres of power in the British capital during the winter of 1831 by the Swedish Minister in London, Count Magnus Björnstjerna (1779– 1847).57 Sörbom has identified Ewerlöf as the author of a number of articles about British public life and bodies of social reform, which were published in the Swedish newspaper Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, on his return.58 These articles cover subjects as diverse as begging in Dublin, co-operatives in England, and politics. A handful of articles entitled ‘Twenne Presentationsdagar vid Engelska Hofvet 1831 (Ur en Swensk resandes dagbok)’ [Two reception days at the English court 1831 (from a Swedish traveller’s diary)] also give detailed glimpses of Ewerlöf ’s impressions and experiences in London. In these travel letters, Ewerlöf relates to Swedish newspaper readers how he was presented at Court and saw the King, foreign dignitaries, as well as British public figures, such as the Duke of Wellington (1769–1852), Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), and Brougham, whose educational writing was the reason for Ewerlöf ’s being in London in the first place.59 Swedish readers are informed in great detail about British political and cultural practices, but Ewerlöf ’s texts also contain their fair share of celebrity gossip and descriptions of clothes and features of the famous people whom he encounters. Like other foreign visitors to London, Ewerlöf ’s description of Brougham evinces the strong impression made by the British statesman. Brougham is presented as a highly unconventional man, dressed in a black silk cape with bows and golden braids which, according to Ewerlöf, looked ‘högst kuriöst’ [very odd], although Brougham – who was by then Lord Chancellor – was most likely wearing a Court uniform in accordance with his position. Nonetheless, Ewerlöf clearly perceived Brougham as eccentric; and he also informed his Swedish readers that, having arrived late at the King’s reception, Brougham had audaciously taken a short cut through a palace gate through which only royal coaches were to pass.60 Ewerlöf ’s travel letters are interesting in that they convey to Swedish readers a glimpse of the big world, while focussing on personal aspects of the dignitaries referred to. In one letter, for instance, Ewerlöf draws what might be the earliest Swedish personal portrait of the future Queen Victoria (1819–1901):

57 Frans Anton Ewerlöf, Efterlämnade papper. Lund University Library. 58 Sörbom, Läsning för folket, 51. 59 Ewerlöf, ‘Twenne presentationsdagar vid Engelska hofvet 1831 (Ur en swensk resandes dagbok)’, Post- och inrikes tidningar (28 February 1832): 1–2; ibid. (1 March 1832), 1–2. 60 Ewerlöf, Post- och inrikes tidningar (8 March, 1832): 2.

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Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros För sin ålder, 11 a 12 år, är Prinsessan Victoria liten till växten, men ansigtet är så formeradt, att det tycks tillhöra en 17 eller 18 års flicka, och har ett uttryck af ovanlig stadga. Hon är icke vacker, och skall vara särdeles närsynt, hvilket också kan skönjas. Drägten var utan all i ögon fallande prakt, och håret bart. [For her age, 11 to 12 years, Princess Victoria is small in stature, but her face is shaped in a way that seems to belong to a girl of 17 or 18 years of age, and it has an expression of unusual firmness. She is not beautiful, and is said to be very short-sighted, which can also be discerned. Her dress was without any ostentatious splendour and her hair was bare.]61

Ewerlöf reports that Princess Victoria’s upbringing is said to be ‘ganska okonstlad och utan ceremoni’ [quite unaffected], and he relates how her mother, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Duchess of Kent (1786–1861), had once hindered a visiting lady from rising when the Princess entered the room, saying, ‘Sitt stilla min fru; hon är bara barn ännu’ [Remain seated, my lady; she is still only a child]. The modest way in which the future Queen of England was raised made a strong impression on Ewerlöf, who told his readers that ‘Sådana drag, så likgilltiga de kunna tyckas vara, sakna icke betydelse’ [Such characteristics may seem unimportant but do matter].62 Significantly, during his stay in England, Ewerlöf came to realise that the Swedish translation ought to reflect the substantial development of adult education which had taken place there since Brougham’s book was first published. In his preface, Ewerlöf explains that: Detta föranledde mig att förändra min plan; och istället för att blott gifva en öfversättning af hela Skriften, trodde jag det vara ändamålsenligare att derutur endast meddela de stycken som innehålla grunddragen till undervisningssystemet, och sedan tillägga de anteckningar öfver särskilta delar, som jag sjelf samlat. [This made me change my plan, and instead of merely providing a translation of the whole text, I thought its purpose would be better served by only reporting those passages that contain the essential features of the educational system, and then to add my own collection of notes on certain aspects.]63

Although Ewerlöf here signals that he made a distinction between translation and his own additions, he nevertheless says nothing specific about where he adapts his translation to match his own observations. In the Swedish translation of Practical Observations, Ewerlöf ’s roles as translator, travel writer, and commentator merge in the parts of the translation which are based on his own observations and also in certain passages that follow Brougham’s source text closely. In the first part of his book, Brougham presents 61 Ibid. (5 March 1832), 2. 62 Ibid. (5 March 1832), 2. 63 Brougham, preface to Om folkbildning.

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the foundation of popular education, and some topical passages about the value of adult education appear in italics in the translation. Sections, to which Ewerlöf may have paid particular attention while reading Brougham’s text, are thus highlighted to Swedish readers. The italicised parts concern the importance of promoting popular tracts on topics such as political economy, and the importance of education for national peace and order.64 The relation between individual and collective efforts is likewise brought to the fore, as Ewerlöf italicizes Brougham’s argument for setting up an organisation for the diffusion of useful knowledge.65 Brougham addresses the responsibility of the individual worker in his text, and the translation highlights to Swedish readers Brougham’s view that learners themselves must pay for their education and that they should take an active part in its execution.66 Such shared responsibilities seem to be of principal value to Ewerlöf. For instance, one of his footnotes states that education should come to a certain cost, as people only value that which involves a kind of sacrifice. The text of this footnote originates in a remark by von Klöden in the German translation of Practical Observations.67 Brougham’s original statement thus gains a double emphasis, involving both Ewerlöf ’s own adaptation and the supplement of a paratextual comment from another translation. As Ewerlöf reaches passages in which Brougham outlines and discusses different educational establishments, he transitions from translating, to commenting on, the source text. He thereby invites the Swedish reader to accompany him through an educational landscape that has altered since the publication of Practical Observations. This means that whereas Brougham’s text seeks support by presenting an ongoing formation of educational bodies, Ewerlöf, by reporting about recent success, is able to draw on several years of British experience and single out for presentation what he assumes will be of relevance to Swedish readers. Some additional comments serve to inform the reader of Ewerlöf ’s personal acquaintance with the matters under discussion. For instance, by providing an outline of the SDUK – which had been founded one year after the publication of Practical Observations – Ewerlöf informs Swedish readers that he is corresponding with the current secretary of the organisation, Thomas Coates, and that he had been in direct contact with Brougham himself before the latter became Lord Chancellor. In a footnote to his translation, Ewerlöf expresses deep gratitude for the ‘ädla öppenhet och förekommande tjenstvil-

64 65 66 67

Brougham, Om folkbildning, 10–11; Brougham, Practical Observations, 5. Brougham, Practical Observations, 10. Brougham, Om folkbildning, 11; Brougham, Practical Observations, 15. Brougham, Praktische Bemerkungen, 78; Brougham, Om folkbildning, 24.

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lighet’ [honourable openness and courteous support] of his British contacts during his interrogations.68 A few years later, Ewerlöf was less positive towards Brougham. For reasons that remain unclear, the British statesman had by then declined an honorary membership in the Swedish version of the SDUK and, also, refused to let Ewerlöf and Forsell use woodcuts from the SDUK periodical Penny Magazine for the Swedish periodical Läsning för folket. Instead, these attractive woodcuts were sold to the Swedish publisher Lars-Johan Hierta (1801–1872), who used them in his periodical Lördags-Magasinet. One possible explanation for Brougham’s withdrawal of support is that the Swedish minister in London, who acted as an intermediary, may have tried to get access to the woodcuts for free, which might in turn have aggravated the British SDUK as such an action failed to adhere to Brougham’s tenet that education should come at a cost.69 One effect of Ewerlöf ’s translation following several years after the book was first published can be traced in its account of the London Mechanics’ Institute. Brougham describes the foundation and structure of this establishment, paying tribute to George Birkbeck, who was instrumental in setting it up. By the time of Ewerlöf ’s translation, however, this institution was much more widely developed, and he shares details about membership and activities. From his stay in London, for instance, Ewerlöf records how ‘en simpel murare’ [a simple bricklayer], who had joined the institute six years previously, ‘okunnig i vetenskapens enklaste grunder’ [ignorant of the very basics of science], had won a competition with a scientific thesis on the qualities of the pendulum. The essay was ‘författad med en skarpsinnighet och geometrisk kunskap som förvånade de vetenskapligt bildade Domarne’ [written with a sharpness and knowledge of geometry, which surprised the scientifically educated judges].70 Ewerlöf mentions that one of these judges was Brougham. This circumstance perhaps inadvertently offers a reflection on Brougham’s continuous engagement with the popular education movement. As a young man, Brougham had been a student of science himself; indeed, in 1796, at the age of 17, he even published an article in Philosophical Transactions, probably being the youngest contributor ever to that periodical.71 68 Brougham, Om folkbildning, 102n. 69 Sörbom, Läsning för folket, 135–136; Lena Johannesson, Xylografi och pressbild: Bidrag till trägravyrens och till den svenska bildjournalistikens historia (Stockholm: Nordiska museets handlingar, 1982), 127; Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros, ‘Transnational exchange between British and Swedish periodicals in the 1830s’, in David Finkelstein, ed., Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, vol. 2, Expansion and Evolution, 1800–1900 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). 70 Brougham, Om folkbildning, 39. 71 Noah Moxham, ‘Mocking your elders’, The Repository, The Royal Society (4 May 2016), accessed 15 March, 2018, https://blogs.royalsociety.org/history-of-science/2016/05/04/mok king-elders/.

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Ewerlöf ’s addition of success stories like the one about the scientific bricklayer not only shared a British example with Swedish readers but also invited them to embark on an educational journey parallel to that of the worker. The progress of the unschooled bricklayer reads like a metaphor for the development of Brougham’s overall educational project, and we see here how Ewerlöf was able to capitalize on the fact that by the time he shared Brougham’s ideas of popular education with Swedish readers, the British had started to see the outcomes of those endeavours.

Framing Brougham’s Ideas for the Swedish Market A comparison of the title pages of Practical Observations with those of its Swedish translation provides insight into the decision-making process involved in Ewerlöf ’s translation and its marketing. Functioning as thresholds by which the reader approaches the text, paratextual elements in translations serve to promote the text by introducing it to readers in a new context. Brougham’s title informs the reader about the content of the text, and his subtitle asserts the dual beneficiaries of adult education, the book being addressed to both workers and their employers. Whereas the titles of the French, Dutch, and German translations all closely align with Brougham’s original, the Swedish title is much more elaborate, indicating the contents of the book as well as highlighting the translator’s role in their transmission: Om folkbildning af Brougham, Lord-stor-canzler af England. Öfversättning med anteckningar om de i England befintliga handtverks-instituterna och sällskapet för nyttiga kunskapers spridande, samlade under en resa i nämnde land, åren 1830–1831, af F. A. Ewerlöf, Förste expeditions-sekreterare, R. W. O. [On popular education by Brougham, Lord Great Chancellor of England. Translation with notes concerning the existing mechanics’ institutes in England and the Society for the diffusion of useful knowledge, collected during a journey in that country, during 1830–1831, by F. A. Ewerlöf, Secretary for the Swedish Governor-General, Knight of the Royal Order of Vasa]. The Swedish title page presents the publication as a translation, although large portions of the book were, in fact, penned by Ewerlöf himself. Ewerlöf acknowledges that he has added his own observations, but he went one step further in that he also adapted the source text so that Brougham’s argument, which of course concerned Britain, was redirected to a Swedish audience. In an obituary of Ewerlöf, the historian Martin Weibull (1835–1902) refers, in passing, to the translation as a ‘fri bearbetning’ [free adaptation].72 This was a term com72 Weibull, Frans Anton Ewerlöf, 6.

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monly used in nineteenth-century Sweden for translations which contained altered passages and additions based on the translator’s own objectives. Although Practical Observations contains no illustrations, the Swedish translation features a frontispiece portrait of Brougham. Portraits of Brougham were published from the year of the publication of Practical Observations; Mechanics’ Magazine (a periodical mentioned several times in Brougham’s book), for instance, printed a frontispiece portrait of him, in 1825.73 Ewerlöf and Wallmark, however, desired a recent portrait of Lord Brougham as Lord Chancellor, and Brougham is also identified in that capacity on the title page of the translation. Brougham had not held the position of Lord Chancellor when the book was published in 1825, but did when the Swedish translation was published seven years later; and presenting the author of the book as a high-ranking English official was no doubt intended to confer upon the Swedish translation an enhanced authority. Correspondence between Ewerlöf and Wallmark confirms that the frontispiece was added for marketing purposes: Wallmark uses the word ‘Embellishment’ to motivate its inclusion.74 The portrait was mentioned when the translation was advertised in the Swedish press, and it was also sold separately, together with Brougham’s signature in facsimile.75 Procuring a suitable portrait turned out to be a complex operation. Ewerlöf and Wallmark discussed ways of obtaining a portrait from London in order to prepare a lithographic print in Stockholm and, in February 1832, Ewerlöf consulted Thomas Coates on the matter, asking him to procure ‘a good likeness of Lord Brougham, in copper or well “lithographized” (especially if there is any representing him as Lord Chancellor); if I am not mistaken I have seen his portrait in copper in the London Mechanics’ Institution. I therefore hope it is yet to be had’.76 The following month, Coates responded that: The only good portrait of Lord Brougham is one recently published & sold only to publishers. It is from a portrait of Sir Thomas Lawrence & is the finest specimen of Engraving that I ever saw, but it is rather expensive viz £ 3.3.0 & I will not purchase it for you until you shall have authorised me to do so. It will then give me great pleasure to procure it & see it carefully packed for you.77

Instead of the coveted portrait of Brougham as Lord Chancellor, the one Coates here recommends appears to be an engraving by William Walker (1791–1867) 73 ‘Henry Brougham, Esq.e MP & FRS’, The Mechanics’ Magazine 3 (1825), Frontispiece. 74 Peter Adam Wallmark, Letter to Frans Anton Ewerlöf (13 August, 1832), Lund University Library. 75 For example Göteborgs allehanda (20 November, 1832): 4; Dagligt allehanda (24 October, 1832): 3. 76 Frans Anton Ewerlöf, Letter to Thomas Coates (3 February 1832), University College London Special Collections. 77 Thomas Coates, Letter to Frans Anton Ewerlöf (17 March 1832), Lund University Library.

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from 1830, after the portrait made by Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), which had been painted five years previously.78 Notwithstanding Coates’ recommendation, the portrait ultimately selected for the Swedish translation appears to have been the one Ewerlöf originally wished for, which probably was a mezzotint engraving published in 1831 by John George Murray and by John Porter, after a portrait painted by Robert Bowyer (1758– 1834).79 Extant letters do not provide complete information on how that portrait was obtained, but Wallmark was able to borrow a copy from England, and in the early autumn of 1832, a skilled lithographer in Stockholm produced the version used for the frontispiece. This method was used to cut costs; according to Wallmark, a copper plate would be too expensive.80 Their wish to ‘embellish’ the translation with a portrait of Brougham as Lord Chancellor is a concrete manifestation of the independence assumed by Ewerlöf and Wallmark vis-à-vis the source text. This adaptation must also be seen in relation to the perceived influence that the gravitas of the author of the source would lend to the Swedish publication, a gravitas which would be extended to include the translator’s own additions. A central paratextual element in Brougham’s text is his dedication to George Birkbeck, which serves as a preface, clarifying the background of the book. Interestingly, that dedication is not included in the Swedish translation; in its place, Ewerlöf ’s own preface introduces the Swedish reader to Brougham’s book, to the translation project, as well as to its hoped-for implications for Swedish popular education. Ewerlöf explains that instead of translating the full text, his aim has been to share the main features of British popular education as presented by Brougham, in combination with his own notes from his travels to England. He hastens to add that what has been left out from the original is of no overall importance, and that his additions provide ‘en enkel framställning af hvad jag på stället sett och erfarit’ [a simple presentation of what I have seen and experienced in that place [i. e. England]].81 One result of Ewerlöf assuming the role of commentator on the text he translates is that towards the end of the translation, Brougham’s text actually metamorphoses into Ewerlöf ’s own treatise: ‘de sanna och kraftiga ord, hvarmed Brougham slutar den skrift, som föranledt närvarande uppsats, skola till alla delar finna tillämpning i Sverige’ [the true and powerful words with which Brougham ends the text, which has brought about the present essay, will in all respects be 78 William Walker, ‘Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux’, Stipple engraving, 1831. National Portrait Gallery D19111. 79 John George Murray and John Porter, ‘Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux’, Mezzotint, 1831. National Portrait Gallery D32199. 80 Wallmark, Letter to Frans Anton Ewerlöf (13 August 1832), Lund University Library. 81 Brougham, preface to Om folkbildning.

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applicable in Sweden].82 When Ewerlöf at this late stage of the text translates passages from Brougham’s book, he does so by referring to Brougham’s text with phrases like ‘jag citerar’ [I quote] and ‘tillägger Hr Brougham’ [Mr Brougham adds].83 Ewerlöf ’s role as translator thus merges with that of writer, not only in the parts of the book that have been based on his own observations, and thus been penned by himself, but also in the passages that have been transferred from Brougham’s source text.

Conclusion Nineteenth-century Sweden was receptive to British romantic-period ideas about education, and translation was a key medium for such transnational contacts and influences. Ewerlöf was one of many Swedish nineteenth-century social campaigners who employed translation as a means of expressing his own concerns and ideas. In Brougham’s Practical Observations, Ewerlöf found a vehicle for his own observations on adult education, and his Swedish translation of Brougham’s book provides a unique insight into the workings of such translation practices. Ewerlöf ’s translation was intimately connected with his desire to establish a programme for practical education in Sweden and crossed the boundaries of genre to offer a foreigner’s assessment of what had transpired in Britain after Brougham wrote the book. Although not nearly so successful as the original, the significance of Ewerlöf ’s translation should not be underestimated as it was instrumental to the work done by Ewerlöf and his colleagues in blazing a path for Swedish popular education. It thus marks a significant point of contact between one of the most prominent political figures of the romantic period in Britain and the development of educational theory in Sweden.

Coda This essay has taken a historical approach, focussing on the material circumstances underlying the transnational relocation of Brougham’s programme for popular education from Britain to Sweden. However, text transfers such as the one exemplified in Ewerlöf ’s mediation of Brougham also lend themselves to investigations from a translation studies perspective, especially since translations with a purpose are arguably co-authored by the translator.84 In this brief 82 Ibid., 105. 83 Ibid., 105, 108. 84 A common position within translation studies is that translations per definition are inter-

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coda, I want to consider the light that translation studies can shed on the EwerlöfBrougham case. Since an ideologically motivated translation expresses not only the agenda of the source text author but also that of the translator and other agents involved in relocating the text, the purpose of a translation is central to the changes that take place in the process of translation. This is especially so when the translation is of a high-profile text: one which was presented as innovative and even radical when first introduced to a new audience. Translations of reform texts are thus never merely linguistic transfers from one language to another; they also include the relocation and, indeed, adaptation of certain foreign ideas. When the translator’s own ideological objectives and expertise are closely linked to the purpose of the translation, the result takes the form of an adaptation in which the translator assumes co-authorship of the translated text.85 If we approach Ewerlöf ’s translation of Brougham’s Practical Observations from a translation studies perspective, it is evident that the translator assumes a certain level of authorship. It is, however, also essential for Ewerlöf – and for the success of his translation – that the reader remains aware of the standing of the original author, since his name is the selling point of the work. Ewerlöf ’s voice amalgamates with the authorial voice of Brougham’s text in a way that readers of the translation would not have been able to distinguish. An example of how intricately Ewerlöf, by taking on such an authorial voice, merges his roles of translator and commentator is found in the very beginning of the translation. Brougham opens his book thus: I begin by assuming that there is no class of the community so entirely occupied with labour as not to have an hour or two every other day at least, to bestow upon the pleasure and improvement to be derived from reading … Let us consider how the attainment of this inestimable advantage may be most successfully promoted.86

In Ewerlöf ’s translation, the opening first personal pronoun ‘I’ becomes ‘Herr Brougham’ [Mr Brougham], and the exhortative ‘Let us consider’ is altogether removed in favour of a declaration of the translator’s purpose: ‘Huru denna oskattbara fördel med mesta framgång skall kunna ernås, är föremålet för närvarande undersökning’ [How this inestimable advantage may be most sucpretations and rewritings, even manipulations. See e. g. Theo Hermans, ed., The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985) and Andre Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London: Routledge, 1992). 85 For a discussion on the notion of translators as co-authors, see Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros, ‘Who is the author of the translated text? The Swedish translation of Dinah Mulock’s A Woman’s Thoughts about Women’, in Hanne Jansen and Anna Wegener, eds., Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation, vol. 2 (Montreal: Vita Traductiva, 2013). 86 Brougham, Practical Observations, 1.

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cessfully attained is the object of the present investigation].87 From the very first line, Ewerlöf thus comments on the text he translates. Throughout the translation, a wavering use of pronouns is noticeable, which leads to a displacement of the authorial ‘I’, in that it shifts from indicating the implied author of the source text to that of an implied translator, to use Schiavi’s term.88 In the opening sentences of the translation, the original authorial voice has been reduced to a third-person referral, and as the text proceeds, Ewerlöf progressively takes over as author of the text. The voices of nineteenth-century translators of social reform texts, whose reason for translating was to achieve change in their own country, often go beyond the role of the implied translator. The translator’s authorial ‘I’ will then merge with the authorial voice of the source text. What makes Ewerlöf ’s translation stand out is the use he made of the seven-year gap between the source text and the translation. Instead of simply adapting the text for his intended audience, Ewerlöf added another layer to the text by letting his own voice comment, in retrospect, as it were, on the source text, in order to bring it up to date. The changes that nineteenth-century reform texts went through in translation regarding contents, style, and tone were rarely advertised to the reader. As a result, translators were able to use foreign texts not only to introduce foreign ideas but also to promote their own thoughts. In the nineteenth century, most readers would encounter foreign authors and their ideas in translation, and the fact that these translations were ideological statements of their own is a circumstance which needs to be considered in research based on historical text materials.

87 Brougham, Om folkbildning, 1. 88 Giuliana Schiavi, ‘There Is Always a Teller in a Tale’, Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 8 (1996): 1–21, doi: 10.1075/target.8.1.02sch.

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Philipp Hunnekuhl (Universität Hamburg)

Henry Crabb Robinson, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and William Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra

Abstract The various merits of Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) have begun to emerge more fully in recent years. After studying at the University of Jena (1802–1805) and becoming a pioneering philosophical and literary disseminator between Britain and Germany, Robinson had two spells as a war correspondent for The Times – in Danish Altona in 1807 and Corunna in 1808–1809. This article discusses, for the first time, his long-neglected review of William Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra (both published in 1809) against the backdrop of Robinson’s profound understanding of German philosophy and first-hand experience of the Napoleonic Wars. I argue that the ethical and cosmopolitan elements that Robinson found in the work of Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860), whom he had met in Stockholm in 1807, match the critical principles underpinning Robinson’s activity as a cross-cultural literary disseminator, and that he applied these principles in his review of Wordsworth’s pamphlet. These principles gain significance in the light of the present ‘ethical turn’ in romantic studies. Keywords English romanticism, German philosophy, Napoleonic Wars, Spain, Scandinavia

On 1 November 1809, Richard Cumberland’s The London Review published a long article entitled ‘The Spanish Revolution’. After comparing the French Revolution to the Spanish uprising during the spring of 1808, the article’s anonymous author quotes a substantial passage from Ernst Moritz Arndt’s Geist der Zeit [Spirit of the age] surveying the history and national character of the Spanish people, before moving on to review William Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra. The following is the final paragraph of the passage from Arndt: [The Spanish] are the genuine champions of Europe … Europe cannot dispense with her champions, we cannot forego the hope that from the chaos in which we are, there may still arise a world of order and joy; till this hope be renounced, Europe cannot dispense with her champions. From the North came her redeemers and deliverers, from the South her cultivators. Northern greatness borders on Spanish elevation. May the loveliness and tenderness of the South form an invisible bond between them and draw them together; and may the scales of justice, beauty, and humanity, be raised by them;

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Philipp Hunnekuhl and may Europe, which has so foolishly stained herself with blood, cultivate in common, the virtues and energies of humanity.1

The author of the article was Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867). Born in Bury St Edmunds into a family of Protestant Dissenters, he was ruled out from attending the English universities, which at the time still exacted subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Robinson, therefore, educated himself thoroughly during his apprenticeship and work as a legal clerk, before an inheritance enabled him to spend the years 1800–1805 in Germany.2 Already during the first half of this stay, he became the most lucid and accurate transmitter to date of Kant’s philosophy to England, as well as a prescient critical admirer of Goethe and Schiller as epigrammatic poets.3 Subsequently, during his time as a student at the University of Jena (1802–1805), Robinson studied under Schelling and tutored Germaine de Staël in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy.4 After his return to England in September 1805, Robinson settled in London, and, for some five years, worked as a professional man of letters, undertaking a wide range of literary ventures. One such venture is the above-cited article, while earlier ones include prolonged spells as a war correspondent for The Times at Danish Altona (1807) and Corunna (1808–1809). This article aims to unearth the nexus linking Robinson’s Kantian convictions, his stays in Denmark and Spain, and his invocation of Arndt (whom he had met in Stockholm, after Robinson’s narrow escape from Altona) in defence of Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra. I argue that the ‘scales of justice, beauty, and humanity’, or the ‘virtues and energies of humanity’, addressed in the translation from Arndt, represent the key elements at the heart of Robinson’s unique critical approach to 1 Henry Crabb Robinson [anon.], ‘The Spanish Revolution’, The London Review IV (1 November 1809): 231–275, 245. For the original passage, see Ernst Moritz Arndt, Geist der Zeit, I (1806): 230–251, 250–251. The work was published in five parts, between 1806 and 1854. Robinson’s copy of the second part (1809), signed by the author, still survives in the Robinson collection at Dr Williams’s Library, London (hereafter DWL). I wish to thank the Trustees of the Dr Williams’s Trust for their permission to quote from Robinson’s manuscripts in their keeping, as well as the library’s Director, Dr David L. Wykes, and the Conservator, Ms Jane Giscombe, for their continued support in making these manuscripts available to me. I would also like to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the generous three-year postdoctoral fellowship that enabled me to carry out the research at the heart of this essay. See www.crabbrobinson.co.uk for the on-going Robinson editorial project. I shall hereafter refer to Robinson as HCR. 2 See Jane Giscombe, ‘Henry Crabb Robinson’s Reading Experiences in Colchester, 1790–96’, unpublished M.A. dissertation (School of Advanced Studies, University of London, 2013), for a persuasive account of Robinson’s autodidacticism during his legal apprenticeship. 3 For a scholarly edition of Robinson’s articles on Kant, see Henry Crabb Robinson: Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics, ed. James Vigus (London: MHRA, 2010). A reassessment of Robinson’s transmission of Goethe has recently been published: Gregory Maertz, Literature and the Cult of Personality: Essays on Goethe and His Influence (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2017), especially 71–75. 4 Robinson: Essays, 6–15, 28–55, 120–138.

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literature. This approach, based on an unrivalled inter-cultural awareness and philosophical erudition, informed his activity as a critical disseminator of literature. It was his intention to enhance ethical discourse across cultural and political borders in a similar way to the ‘bond’ proposed by Arndt.5 Robinson’s critical approach is unique and pioneering because it centres on literature’s non-didactic appeal to morals. I label it ‘free moral discourse’ since it encompasses an astute adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy according to which an author provides only the discursive framework for morals and art to merge in the mind of the reader. In this, Robinson prefigures Walter Benjamin’s observations that the critical approaches of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, through extended models of Kantian aesthetic autonomy, attempted to ‘uphold’ and ‘approximate’ an ideal of humanity – models according to which the ‘true reader must be the extended author’ for he or she ‘is the higher authority that receives its subject matter precast from the lower authority’.6 But Robinson’s critical approach also offers an original contribution to the present ‘ethical turn’ in Romantic and literary studies, characterized by its concern with ‘notions of agency and responsibility’ and opposition to concepts of artistic indifference.7 Where scholars such as Thomas Pfau, Timothy Michael, and Paul Hamilton explore different ways of collapsing the conceptual binarism of knowledge and action, Robinson, making the subtle Kantian analogy of art and morals the basis of his critical approach, represents an ingenious Romantic precursor. In other words, to read, for Robinson, was always to negotiate responsible action, and not a detached exercise of the mind.8 He thus consciously wrested disinterestedness away from art, and handed it, in a moral sense, over to the reader.

5 For a comprehensive discussion of this approach, see Philipp Hunnekuhl, Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist (forthcoming). 6 Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 40. 7 Uttara Natarajan, review of Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge by Thomas Pfau and British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason by Timothy Michael, European Romantic Review 28.1 (2017): 111–115, 111. 8 For Robinson’s acute observation of an analogous relationship between Kant’s concepts of art and morals, see James Vigus, introduction to Robinson: Essays, 21–22. Paul Hamilton, Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For Pfau’s and Michael’s titles, see preceding footnote.

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Robinson’s Philosophical Convictions and Political Engagement, 1795–1807 The passage immediately succeeding the initial quotation alludes to the uprisings against Napoleon’s troops across Spain which the spring of 1808 had seen. But the passage also gives an indication of the philosophy underlying Robinson’s appreciation of Arndt: The majority of men, belonging to the class of those ‘Who think that nothing is but what is seen’, would certainly before the spring of last year have considered this eloquent and beautiful eulogy of the Spaniards, as the rhapsody of a man who had formed his notions of their national character from tales of the Moorish wars, and the ballads of the Cid, the Campeador; the reader into whose hands it might subsequently have fallen, without a testimony of its existence before that period, would have believed it to be designedly adapted to known events, rather than an anticipation of them.9

The criticism of that ‘class’ of men ‘who think that nothing is but what is seen’ reiterates Robinson’s very own trajectory, from Anglo-French empiricism and the philosophical necessitarianism of William Godwin and Joseph Priestley to Immanuel Kant and German idealism. When an apprentice clerk at Colchester between 1790 and 1795, the teenage Robinson, with the support of his environment of Dissenters, had developed a strong philosophical reading habit with a particular focus on the radical polymath Joseph Priestley.10 Priestley’s philosophy, in line with the Unitarian emphasis on rational enquiry, experimentation, and observation, elaborates a system of strict necessity – of purposes in nature and motives in the mind – that explicitly precludes free will. Such a pursuit of rational religion often – as it did in Robinson’s case – resulted in religious scepticism, since it subjected God, and in particular the biblical miracles, to strict empirical enquiry.11 Robinson’s necessitarianism was thereafter consolidated through his study of William Godwin’s proto-anarchic Political Justice, resulting in his veneration of the philosopher, from 1795 onwards.12 Godwin too, coming from the 9 Robinson, ‘The Spanish Revolution’, 245. 10 Giscombe, ‘Henry Crabb Robinson’s Reading Experiences’, 19. 11 See James Vigus, introduction to Robinson: Essays, 2, for a subtle differentiation between Priestley’s and Robinson’s approach to the biblical miracles and divine revelation. See Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes, eds., Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), for an authoritative, multi-faceted assessment of Priestley. For Priestley’s radical rhetoric, see Stephen Bygrave, ‘ “I Predict a Riot”: Joseph Priestley and Languages of Enlightenment in Birmingham in 1791’, Romanticism 18:1 (2012): 70–88, doi.org/10.3366/rom.2012.0065. 12 William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (London: Robinson, 1793). Robinson’s second publication is a defence of Political Justice: Henry Crabb Robinson [‘Philo Godwin’], ‘Godwin’, Cambridge Intelligencer 107 (1 August 1795): 4. The article is reprinted, placed in its wider context, and discussed in

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same Unitarian tradition as Priestley, places his key moral principle of disinterested benevolence – an ‘enlarged morality’ insofar as it uncompromisingly places the benefit of society at large over personal obligations such as gratitude – on a necessitarian footing.13 While Godwin’s notion of disinterested benevolence was amplified for Robinson through his first-hand study of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy from mid-1801 onwards, Kant’s concept of pure reason as the foundation of the active mind irreversibly undid Robinson’s underlying necessitarian logic. The ‘conversion’ to Kant that Robinson underwent in the process found its immediate expression in his three ‘Letters on the Philosophy of Kant’ published in the Eurocentric Monthly Register and Encyclopaedian Magazine between August 1802 and April 1803. A fourth letter, intended for the same journal, however, remained unpublished at the time.14 By frequently referring to key thinkers from the Anglo-French empiricist tradition for his English home audience, these letters lucidly and accurately cover the cornerstones of Kant’s philosophy. They encompass the a priori as the independent principle of the active, synthesizing mind (not innate ideas, as Thomas Beddoes had previously claimed); the inevitable incompleteness of all knowledge thus generated which, notably, does not lead to religious scepticism but instead to an awareness of the existence of God that finds its felt expression in the moral sense, or the Kantian categorical imperative, and is compatible with Godwin’s moral philosophy; as well as the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgement which, contrary to Priestley and Godwin, points towards the freedom of the will.15 From here onwards, Robinson has taken a crucial, permanent step away from ‘those “Who think that nothing is but what is seen” ’, which he illustrates in a December 1804 letter from Jena to his childhood friend and philosophical correspondent Catherine Clarkson (née Buck, 1772–1856; from 1796, she was the wife of the anti-slave-trade campaigner Thomas Clarkson). Robinson here writes that [formerly,] high & lofty Sentim[en]t & generous ffeeling were held to be airy nothings because they could not be laid on the Anatomist’s bench or put under the mikroscope of the optician – hence no Wonder that in the School of Locke & Hartley the french – It sho[ul]d be the fashion to laugh at the idea of a moral sense.16

13 14

15 16

Timothy Whelan, ‘Henry Crabb Robinson and Godwinism’, The Wordsworth Circle 33 (2, Spring 2002): 58–69. Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 5. The letters are reprinted in Robinson: Essays, 28–49. A fifth letter, aiming to merge Robinson’s series on Kant with his parallel series ‘on German Literature’ in the Monthly Register, treats ‘Kant’s Analysis of Beauty’, and is also reprinted in Robinson: Essays, 50–55. Robinson: Essays, 4, 8, 12, 20–23, 29, and 36–38, especially 37n.50. HCR to Catherine Clarkson, December 1804, Correspondence 1804, Letter 75, DWL. For the relevance of this letter with respect to the relationship between Robinson and Coleridge, see Philipp Hunnekuhl, ‘Constituting Knowledge: German Literature and Philosophy between

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This was Robinson’s newfound philosophical explanation of any ‘rhapsody’ (such as Arndt’s conjecture of a successful Spanish uprising against Napoleon) that had previously, in the empiricist tradition, all too easily been discarded or ridiculed. The ‘high & lofty Sentim[en]t’, then, amounts to precisely Kant’s elaboration of the ‘moral sense’, a sense not founded on empirical observation but instead on the inner workings of the mind that are the central subject of Kant’s critical philosophy. These Kantian convictions lie at the heart of Robinson’s activity as a cultural, philosophical, and literary disseminator between several European countries after his return to England in September 1805. For instance, in the 1806 preface to his translation of Gustav von Schlabrendorf ’s Napoleon Buonaparte wie er leibt und lebt, und das französische Volk unter ihm [Napoleon Bonaparte as he is to a tee, and the French people under him], he praises the author in a quasiKantian manner for having assembled and ‘embodie[d]’ – synthesized and made intelligible – a new image of Napoleon.17 Robinson, thereafter, claims that Napoleon has ‘confounded’ the ‘moral sense’ of the French, and unduly ‘raised to the rank of paramount principles of absolute worth’ the lesser virtues of loyalty and patriotism.18 Hence, according to Robinson, Napoleon’s subversion of universal yet transcendental Kantian morals in favour of worldly particulars ‘may threaten the ruin of the world’, which is why the war against France, unjustified as it had been during the inception of the French Revolution, now needs to be fought and won, so that the true ideals of the Revolution may at last, gradually, be put into practice.19 Robinson had witnessed Napoleon’s troops occupy the Rhineland in 1801, during his first stay in Germany, but later, too, repeatedly and more directly, became embroiled in the intensifying war. In January 1807, he was commissioned by John Walter Jr (1776–1847), editor of the London Times, as a foreign and war correspondent to Altona, which today is a borough of Hamburg, but was then an independent town on Danish territory, thus neutral and beyond Napoleon’s direct reach. Here, Robinson’s ‘mission was to send information from the Coleridge and Crabb Robinson’, European Romantic Review 28:1 (2017): 51–63, doi.org/10. 1080/10509585.2016.1272844. 17 HCR [anon.], preface to Gustav von Schlabrendorf [anon.], Napoleon, and the French People under his Empire (London: Tipper and Richards, 1806), iv. Schlabrendorf (1750–1824), a Prussian count, had spent six years in England, and then settled in Paris shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution. He narrowly escaped execution during the Reign of Terror, and after Napoleon had become Consul (1799/1802) and Emperor (1804) attacked him in a series of anonymous publications. Schlabrendorf never left Paris. See Theodor Heuss, Schattenbeschwörung: Randfiguren der Geschichte, ed. Friedemann Schmoll (Tübingen: Klöpfer & Meyer, 2009), 105–116. 18 HCR, preface to Schlabrendorf, vii. 19 HCR, preface to Schlabrendorf, vii.

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banks of the Elbe about the movements which resulted finally in the fall of Danzig and the Treaty of Tilsit’.20 Robinson’s manuscript ‘Memoranda for 1807’ reveals that this ‘mission’ usually encompassed the collecting, translating, and passing on of newspapers not available in Britain, but also the composition of articles, or letters, expressing his personal experiences and observations.21 These letters, accordingly entitled ‘Private Correspondence from the Banks of the Elbe’, were published in The Times between 26 February and 26 August 1807. After his escape from Altona, Robinson submitted three more letters, from Stockholm and Gothenburg.22 Robinson’s informal correspondence from around this time (mainly with his brother Thomas back in Bury St Edmunds) shows that he actively tried to resist the deceptive calm that his routine of reading, writing, socializing, and learning Italian at Altona had soon established: I have been in danger of forgetting that the continuance of this most agreeable life is very precarious indeed. I am of the opinion that it cannot possibly last long. Should In all probability we shall soon hear of a peace with Russia or of a general engagem[en]t which, it is 10 to 1, will end in the defeat of the allies. In either event I have no doubt the French will take possession of Holstein.23

Robinson afterwards reassures his brother that, in case of his arrest, ‘the worst would be imprisonment’.24 However, Morley is certainly right in her observation that, compared to other foreigners residing at Altona, ‘Robinson himself was in more danger, for he was really “wanted” ’ by the French because of his activity as a political informant.25 What exact dangers such being ‘wanted’ entailed can be gauged by the fact that, in the previous year, the Nuremberg bookseller Johann Philipp Palm had been executed for publishing the anti-Napoleonic pamphlet Deutschland in seiner tiefen Erniedrigung [Germany in her deep humiliation].26 Arndt was widely assumed to be the author of this pamphlet, which is why he had since fled to Sweden where Robinson was soon to meet him. On 16 August 1807, then, British forces launched their bombardment of Copenhagen in order to prevent Napoleon from capturing the Danish fleet. Rob20 Edith Morley, The Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson (London: Dent & Sons, 1935), 41– 42. 21 HCR, ‘Memoranda for 1807’, DWL. This pocket diary, as well as Robinson’s ‘Notebook for 1806’ and ‘Memoranda: 19 July 1808–18 January 1809’, cited below, are due to be published as part of The Early Diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Philipp Hunnekuhl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 22 Morley, Life and Times, 42. 23 HCR to Thomas Robinson, 7 June 1807, Correspondence 1805–1808, Letter 89, DWL. 24 HCR to Thomas Robinson, 7 June 1807. 25 Morley, Life and Times, 44. 26 For Robinson’s discussion of Palm’s trial and execution, see HCR, Preface to Schlabrendorf, xxiii–xxx.

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inson’s escape from Altona on that very day is owed (along with his life, quite possibly) to the connections and friendships he had forged up to that point. A certain Major von Spät, ‘second in command’ at Altona, had repeatedly assured Robinson that he ‘had noth[in]g to fear even sho[ul]d a war break out bet[ween] Eng[land] & Denmark’.27 When British troops landed on Zealand to prepare the bombardment, and the mayor of Altona was ordered ‘to retaliate by arresting every Englishman’, von Spät kept his word and tipped off Robinson ‘that he must depart forthwith’.28 So Robinson crossed over into Hamburg on the same night. Once arrived, he stayed with Isaak Aldebert, a merchant with whom Robinson had first travelled to Germany in 1800 and whose contacts in the Frankfurt area had then introduced him to the literary circles around the Brentano family. Though Robinson’s first impression was that, at Hamburg, ‘there is no wish to seize us [the British] on either side’, here, too, he turned out to be an object of particular interest to Napoleon.29 He thus notes in his ‘Memoranda’, immediately after the incident described below, that it was once more von Spät who had sent a warning: This notice perhaps saved me by mak[in]g me attentive to what was taking place before me. I was return[in]g to my lodg[ing]s when I observed a fellow runn[in]g on the other side of the way & beckoning with vehemence tow[ard]s some persons whom I at once perceived to be Gens d’Armes & who were stationed not far from my lodgings – The fellow looked back upon me so that I co[ul]d have no doubt as to his object. I instantly took to my heels & did not stay till I had reached Mr Spaldings. Here I dined & relat[in]g my story & my determin[atio]n not to sleep again in my old lodgings I was invited by Mr Sp[alding] to stay with him And it was further agreed that we sho[ul]d go tog[ethe]r to Dobberan … 27 At ½ past five Mr Sp[alding] & I left the walls of Hamb[urg] behind us And as I afterw[ard]s learned abo[u]t 6 hours afterw[ard]s Gens d’Armes came to my old lodgings & instantly mounted to my garret they expressed great rage at hav[in]g missed me & vowed vengeance ag[ains]t the people of the house if they dared to conceal me.30

Such was Robinson’s second narrow escape within less than a fortnight. He decided not to push his luck for a third time just yet, so instead of choosing the direct but much more dangerous way home to England, he travelled eastwards –

27 Morley, Life and Times, 43; HCR, ‘Memoranda for 1807’, 16 August. 28 Morley, Life and Times, 44. 29 HCR to John Dyer Collier, 22 August 1807, Correspondence 1805–1808, Letter 94, DWL. Collier was a long-standing friend, previous editor of the Monthly Register (where Robinson’s letters on Kant and German literature had appeared between 1802–1803), and a key influence behind John Walter Jr appointing Robinson as a foreign correspondent. 30 HCR, ‘Memoranda for 1807’, 25–27 August.

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first to Bad Doberan and then to Wismar, where, on 8 September, he embarked a packet-boat that landed at Dalarö, south-east of Stockholm, six days later.31 On 15 September, Robinson entered Stockholm – and with that, made contact with another network of old friends and acquaintances. The closest of these was Amalia von Helvig (née Imhoff, 1776–1831), who used to be the lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Weimar when Robinson was a student at Jena, and whom he had known since then.32 It was during a dinner at Mrs Helvig’s three days later that Robinson met Arndt for the first time. Robinson had read Arndt’s Geist der Zeit in August 1806, and was, therefore, well prepared for the following critical observations and comparisons, made in his ‘Memoranda’: Prof: Arndt dined with us he is a lively, agreeable man – & his convers[atio]n w is interest[in]g he had none of that affectation of mystery & profund[it]y which is too often apparent in his books – Yet he has the modern philosophical tone with[ou]t being desirous of belong appearing to belong to the school – Spent the whole day most agreeable came home late with Prof: A[rndt].33

Both men returned to Mrs Helvig’s the next morning to continue their conversation over breakfast, before Robinson, on the following day, departed for Gothenburg. Robinson reiterates his encounter with Arndt in a letter to his brother, written ‘On board the King George Packet’ during the final leg of his escape, between Gothenburg and Harwich: I p[ai]d Mad de Helwick a morn[in]g visit & did not leave her till late in the Even[in]g She had invited Professor Arndt a German writer who has distinguished himself by one or two very eloquent political works ag[ains]t Bonaparte, a man of great powers a[n] eloquent writer & a very profound thinker – as a companion gay & even boy like I became almost intimate in a day & sho[ul]d accident throw us near each other, our future further acquaintance is certain.34

It was this lively, philosophical, anti-Napoleonic ‘falling in’ with Arndt that ‘occasioned’, as Robinson would recall much later in his ‘Reminiscences’, the ‘translat[in]g entire his prophecy in the year [1806] of the insurrection of the Spaniards which actually took place within less than a year after our re n contre in Sweden’.35 And this is precisely what we must bear in mind when it comes to Arndt’s influence on Robinson, as it is tangible in the latter’s review of Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra in the London Review: as enthusiastic as all of these

31 HCR, ‘Memoranda for 1807’, 8 and 14 September. He had never been received with greater hospitality than at Dalarö, Robinson notes in his diary entry under the latter date. 32 Morley, Life and Times, 45. 33 HCR, ‘Memoranda 1807’, 18 September. For Robinson reading Arndt’s Geist der Zeit, see HCR, ‘Notebook for 1806’, Bundle 6.VIII, DWL, inside of front cover. 34 HCR to Thomas Robinson, 4 October 1807, Correspondence 1805–1808, Letter 100, DWL. 35 HCR, ‘Reminiscences’ I (1807), DWL, 381.

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accounts of Arndt are (strictures as to the occasional ‘affectation’ of his style aside), their traceable impact on Robinson’s writing is highly selective, indicating Robinson’s preference of certain elements in Arndt’s work over others. To be clear: what attracted Robinson, the opponent of patriotism as a ‘principle of absolute worth’, were not the ethno-nationalistic and anti-Semitic elements that can be found elsewhere in Arndt. (These elements were appropriated and abused during the Nazi period; they make Arndt the controversial figure that he is in present-day Germany). Robinson treasured Arndt’s emphasis on the ‘scales of justice, beauty, and humanity’ ‘raised’ by the Spanish precisely insofar as they ought to forge a ‘bond’ between the nations of Europe and thereby help to conquer the conqueror, as it were – to overcome the current crisis and create a shared outlook along the lines of Kantian universal morals.

‘The Spanish Revolution’ and Transcendental Morality After his disembarkation at Harwich, Robinson returned to London without delay, where he continued to work for The Times. In November 1807, Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal and the tightening of his grip on Spain marked the beginning of what was to become the Peninsular War. Momentarily, however, a quick end to the conflict seemed in sight when the aforementioned Spanish revolt of 1808, predicted by Arndt, severely weakened Napoleon’s rule on the Iberian Peninsula. The British subsequently carried out their own invasion of Portugal in order to take advantage of the situation and put an end to the French occupation. It was in this optimistic atmosphere that Robinson received his second commission as a war correspondent, this time to Corunna. The task was very similar to the one he had had at Altona: collect information from local newspapers, relay it to Britain, and comment on it.36 Through a fairly short, but determined, effort he rose to the challenge of mastering Spanish.37 Robinson’s articles were again published in The Times, between 9 August 1808 and 26 January 1809, now under the title ‘Private Correspondence from the Banks of the Bay of Biscay’.38 These pub36 Morley, Life and Times, 51. 37 Robinson’s ‘Memoranda: 19 July 1808–18 January 1809’, DWL, vividly testifies to the consistency with which Robinson read an unspecified Spanish grammar as well as a number of literary works, and also decidedly conversed in Spanish, from his arrival in Corunna onwards. 38 For recent Spanish takes on these articles, see Elías Durán de Porras, La prensa británica en los comienzos de la guerra de la independencia: Henry Crabb Robinson y la corresponsalía del The Times en España (Valencia: Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera, 2006) and Elías Durán de Porras, Venturas y desventuras de un periodista inglés en La Coruña: Henry Crabb Robinson y la corresponsalía del Times en España, 1808–1809 (Madrid: Universidad San Pablo, CEU, 2003). See also John Milton Baker, Henry Crabb Robinson of Bury, Jena, The Times, and Russell Square (London: Allen & Unwin, 1937), 170–181, for further details of

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lications, as a matter of necessity, reflect the trajectory of the British peninsular campaign – from the exuberance after the initial victories in Portugal, to the disbelief at the Convention of Cintra (signed on 30 August 1808) that permitted the French to evacuate their troops with little loss and no further engagement, to Napoleon taking military affairs in Spain into his own hands and invading the country afresh in November 1808, to the dejection at the British being pushed back towards Corunna and their final, ill-fated battle there on 16 January 1809. Robinson once again recorded his personal experiences, impressions, and feelings amidst these events in a pocket diary, which concludes with the French cannon firing at the departing British ships, one of which, bound for Falmouth, was carrying Robinson and several of his Spanish friends.39 This close personal and professional involvement in Spanish affairs underpins Robinson’s review of Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra that follows the lengthy invocation of Arndt in the London Review article ‘The Spanish Revolution’.40 And as is the case with Arndt, Wordsworth’s pamphlet evinces a ‘fascination’ with Spanish matters – a fascination which, as Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez de Coletes has recently argued, grew out of ‘anger’.41 Robinson’s review is very much concerned with this ‘fascination’. It may be riddled with rhetorical concessions to a more conservative or right-leaning readership, and does not overtly mention Kant – a circumstance explained by the widespread likening of Kantianism to Jacobinism during the first decade of the nineteenth century that Monika Class has emphasized.42 Yet Robinson’s Kantian morality prevails in his review, establishing, in a further development of Arndt’s passage on Spain and Portugal, a

39 40

41

42

Robinson’s deployment in Spain. Baker mentions the review of Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra, but does not discuss it. HCR, ‘Memoranda: 19 July 1808–18 January 1809’, 17 January 1809. William Wordsworth, Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal to Each Other, and to the Common Enemy at this Crisis; and Specifically as Affected by the Convention of Cintra: The Whole Brought to the Test of those Principles, by which Alone the Independence and Freedom of Nations can be Preserved or Recovered (London: Longman et al., 1809). The three further titles mentioned at the outset of Robinson’s review are discussed on the final pages only (pp. 273–275), but give an idea as to the topicality of the subject matter: Adam Neale, Letters from Portugal and Spain: Comprising an Account of the Operations of the Armies under Their Excellencies Sir Arthur Wellesley and Sir John Moore (London: Philips, 1809); James Wilmot Ormsby, An Account of the British Army, and of the State of the Sentiments of the People of Portugal and Spain, during the Campaign of the Years 1808 and 1809 (London: Carpenter, 1809); and the anonymous Letters from Portugal and Spain; Written during the March of the British Troops under Sir John Moore (London: Longman, 1809). Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez de Coletes, ‘Wordsworth’s Spain, 1808–1811’, in Spain in British Romanticism 1800–1840, ed. Diego Saglia and Ian Haywood (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 75–94, 76. Monika Class, Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817: Coleridge’s Responses to German Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 27.

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liberal undercurrent to his argument that effectively undermines any jingoistic connotations that may have been conjured up by the aforementioned concessions. All the while, Robinson stands firm in his opposition to Napoleon – for instance when he addresses the long-standing (and current) oppositional viewpoints between the Corsican as the newfound tyrant of Europe or the bearer of hardwon liberties. One specific focus here is the claim that Napoleon was bringing religious tolerance to the lands conquered. Robinson was a lifelong Unitarian, religious reformer, and active participant in the foundation of University College London as a secular alternative to Oxbridge that would allow students irrespective of their religious allegiance to gain a university education. He is, therefore, at pains to refute such a notion as that of Napoleon’s. He writes: And what lessons of religion can be promulgated by an hierarchy of cardinals and bishops, who have prostituted themselves by blasphemously sanctioning his atrocities? By the triumph of such monstrous guilt, and chiefly by the assent of those to whom the world at large look up for instruction, all moral relations and ideas are destroyed. … But it is this constant reference to contingent effects, and to the physical comfort or misery promoted or occasioned by the conduct of courts and governments, which is one of the most lamentable corollaries from a degrading philosophy. It is not by an enumeration of the murders perpetrated, or the cities sacked in Spain, that the most painful and disgusting impressions are raised, but the desolation of all moral principle which we witness. The sieges of Gerona, Valencia, and Saragossa, &c. are the consolatory incidents of the revolution; for they shew how great crimes have produced great virtues.43

Robinson makes explicit his Kantian subordination of empirical principles – the latter labelled here ‘a degrading philosophy’ and represented by the ‘enumeration of the murders perpetrated’ – to the transcendental and universal ‘moral principle’ that pervades his entire line of argument. His embracing of the Spanish regardless of their overwhelmingly Catholic allegiance, then, as well as the many friendships with Catholics that he made throughout his life, as well as his character as an enduring proponent of religious tolerance, rule out the assumption that the phrase ‘prostitut[ing]’ and ‘blasphem[ing]’ cardinals and bishops amounts to crude anti-Catholicism. If not rhetorical concessions for his home audience, such a phrase echoes the laicism of Robinson’s erstwhile radical – at its earliest stage even Jacobinic – adherence. Or, as is the case with patriotism; adherence to a particular religion must never be a ‘paramount principle of absolute worth’ but subject to the obliquely felt but universal ‘moral sense’. A smidgen of this adherence as yet prevails, since Robinson feels the need to deny Napoleon the claim as its herald. He, therefore, explains what was referred 43 HCR, ‘The Spanish Revolution’, 257. Gerona, Valencia, and Zaragoza were strongholds of the Spanish revolt and soon came to stand as symbols for it.

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to above as a ‘moral principle’ in considerable detail in his introduction to Wordsworth’s pamphlet: The anti-jacobin character of Buonaparte’s invasion of Spain, is the most remarkable feature of that most outrageous and profligate transaction, which bears no resemblance to any of his preceding aggressions against the rights of independent nations. The moral qualities of this unparalleled act; the moral character of that resistance which so unexpectedly sprang up in the peninsula, notwithstanding the state of unexampled abandonment and disorganization, in which, through the arts of the oppressor, the people of Spain were sunk; and the moral relations which thence arose between that people and the British government, which with laudable promptitude came forward to their succour, form the theme of Mr. Wordsworth’s very striking and original performance.44

The phrase ‘arts of the oppressor’ denotes Napoleon’s dissimulations for his own political ends, of course – that is to say, his purposeful divergences from moral truth. But with the ‘moral relations’ between Spain and Britain, Arndt’s hoped-for ‘bond’ has since begun to materialize, Robinson implies. That this bond is ‘moral’ in essence becomes crucial in the light of Robinson’s Kantian convictions outlined above: Kant’s morality, to reiterate, is founded on the inevitable incompleteness of knowledge produced by the synthesizing mind, thus not subject to empirical scrutiny, and elevated above worldly particulars and one’s adherence to them (most notably, in the present context, in the forms of patriotism and individual religions).45 The concept of the nation, then, is maintained with its erstwhile Jacobinic connotations as wresting the legitimisation for political rule out of the hands of the monarchy (including Napoleon, officially the Emperor of France since 1804), not as an exclusive demarcation from other nations. This is why Robinson clarifies that Wordsworth’s publication is not a political pamphlet, but an ethic essay on a political subject, in which the philosophy of human nature, and the principles of an high-toned and pure morality, are applied to the conduct and fate of nations: it depends so little upon temporal and local feelings, though the subject embraces the occurrences of the day, that the reader would do well to forget the last gazette, the fate of Sir John Moore, and the dispatches of Sir Arthur Wellesley.46

This timeless ‘ethic’ truth lies at the core of Robinson’s attack on the ‘arts’ of Napoleon whilst it also constitutes the key parallel between Wordsworth’s pam44 HCR, ‘The Spanish Revolution’, 250. 45 Robinson explained the Kantian connection between the incompleteness of knowledge and universal morality to Madame de Staël in 1804; see Robinson: Essays, 9 and 123. 46 HCR, ‘The Spanish Revolution’, 250–251. Wellesley, the later Duke of Wellington, had led the British troops during the invasion of Portugal and the victory over the French there, and refused to sign the Convention of Cintra. He was overruled and replaced by Moore, who was killed during the Battle of Corunna.

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phlet and Arndt’s passage on Spain and Portugal. Both Wordsworth and Arndt have developed a morality which, at some point or other, may find its materialization in history, but whose essence is independent of that materialization and, in this transcendental characteristic, universally true. Against this backdrop, the conceptual binarism of knowing and acting collapses: these two categories do not necessitate one another through mutual exclusion, but instead permeate each other haphazardly. The timeless realm of morality provides the fabric, and thus opens up a third, all-embracing category, to this non-necessitarian interplay.47 What precisely constitutes this timeless moral truth permeating Arndt’s and Wordsworth’s ethical historiography, so to speak, emerges from Robinson’s subsequent discussion of select passages from Wordsworth’s pamphlet. Robinson first denies his home audience the moral high ground – a greatly effective move amidst his rhetorical concessions which pave the way for his central argument – and asserts that ‘the strong emotions which were raised in this country, by the unparalleled invasion of Spain, proceeded principally from the proof it afforded of the absolute and frightful power of France; and that it operated more upon our selfish than our moral feelings’.48 In other words, the shock of Napoleon’s successful re-taking of Spain that his home audience had previously felt was not due to that trans-national moral ‘bond’, but to the sheer force with which the previous strongholds of the revolt were overrun and Moore’s troops pushed back, which boded very badly indeed for a much-apprehended invasion of Britain. Robinson argues that this grievance will be remedied by Wordsworth’s and Arndt’s works. They restore a moral awareness, and forge an according ‘invisible bond’, that will improve the outlook of continental, as well as British affairs. At the basis of this bond, however, must lie the recognition of one another on equal and independent terms. This, Robinson claims, is Wordsworth’s ‘first striking and original point of view’, before citing a key passage from the Convention of Cintra: Spain had risen not merely to be delivered and saved; – deliverance and safety were but intermediate objects; – regeneration and liberty were the end, and the means by which this end was to be attained; had their own high value; were determined and precious; and could no more admit of being departed from, than the end of being forgotten. – She had risen – not merely to be free; but, in the act and process of acquiring that freedom, to recompense herself, as it were in a moment, for all which she had suffered through ages. …

47 Compare Hamilton’s exploration of Realpoetik as a ‘third position’ through which an author may direct conflicting interests towards political innovation, rather than resolve them pragmatically in the zero-sum game of Realpolitik; Hamilton, Realpoetik, 4. 48 HCR, ‘The Spanish Revolution’, 251.

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If an Angel from heaven had come with power to take the enemy from their grasp … they would have been sad; they would have looked around them; their souls would have turned inward; and they would have stood like men defrauded and betrayed.49

In other words, the Spanish Revolution was national myth creation in progress, obstructed by a British interference that placed the material outcome, insofar as it was in its own interest, over the cultural psychology and self-respect of its ally. This is one instance of the ‘countervailing’ that Spain ‘reflected and refracted’ about Britain as exemplified by Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra.50 The Spanish are not understood on their own terms, but appropriated, whether deliberately or not, for British purposes – a clear violation of Kant’s categorical imperative. Robinson’s observation on this is crucial: The English ministry had a sincere desire to assist in the deliverance of the peninsula from the enemy; but they were able only to add an auxiliary force of a few thousand men and did not consider whether the physical aid they brought might not be more than outweighed by the moral energy they took away. Their generals too were utterly regardless of all that was characteristic and peculiar in the state of Portugal and Spain.51

This set the tone for the negotiations that culminated in the Convention of Cintra: the tangible objectives that the British negotiators deemed pertinent were prioritized, and those of the originators of the revolt and the disseminators of its spirit neglected. The lamentable result, then, was not so much the material aspect that is the unhindered evacuation of the French troops, but the maladroit crushing of the ally’s morale. We are back with Robinson’s invective against that ‘class’ of men ‘ “Who think that nothing is but what is seen” ’, in his discussion of Arndt’s Geist der Zeit. What should have been done instead? The paramount truth that cannot ‘be laid on the Anatomist’s bench or put under the mikroscope of the optician’ finds its expressions in the ‘mild and humane delusions’, as Robinson quotes Wordsworth, which should have been employed in support of the Spanish and Portuguese cause.52 These delusions ‘spread such a genial grace over the intercourse, and add so much to the influence of love in the concerns of private life’.53 Thus feigning to be at eye level in terms of actual power may constitute an untruthful act of condescension at the time of utterance, but crucially, through sustaining morale, entertains the prospect of the lesser ally ever rising up to that

49 Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, 109–110. For Robinson’s altered citation, see HCR, ‘The Spanish Revolution’, 254. 50 Diego Saglia and Ian Haywood, introduction to Spain and British Romanticism, 1–16, 6. 51 HCR, ‘The Spanish Revolution’, 253. 52 Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, 71. For Robinson’s quotation, see HCR, ‘The Spanish Revolution’, 255. 53 Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, 71. HCR, ‘The Spanish Revolution’, 255.

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level – and thereby attaining that very truth. This insight is behind Robinson’s quotation of Wordsworth that the true point of comparison does not lie between what the Spaniards have been under a government of their own, and what they may become under French domination; but between what the Spaniards may do (and in all likelihood will do) for themselves, and what Frenchmen would do for them.54

Negotiating the Convention of Cintra along the unconcealed lines of power, as it did happen, however, impaired the very prospect of the British allies to elevate themselves to eye level – of ‘what the Spaniards may do (and, in all likelihood, will do) for themselves’. The disintegration of this egalitarian prospect, Robinson finds in his review of Wordsworth’s pamphlet, ultimately proved counterproductive to the British cause as well. This is not to say that the material support of the Spanish uprising was unjustified. It is, however, to say that any material support ought to have been subordinated, very much in the same manner as empirical principles are subordinate to the workings of the mind in the philosophy of Kant, to the universal moral ‘bond’ that requires each participant to be treated as an autonomous end in her- or himself.

Conclusion Henry Crabb Robinson saw both Arndt’s Geist der Zeit and Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra as catalysts for a pan-European moral truth that had been elaborated by Kant but was in the process of being subverted by Napoleon’s foreign campaigns. The independence and democratic self-governance of nations underpins Robinson’s application of Kantian morality to politics, yet in this respect one must not forget two key elements: firstly, the historical context in which national autonomy evolves as a legitimising principle out of, and in opposition to, monarchy; and secondly, that Robinson, along the lines of Kant, unambiguously subjects any such geo-political particularities to the universal ‘virtues and energies of humanity’ that Europe needed (and still needs) to ‘cultivate in common’ in order to be able to deal with political crises. In short, morality beats nationality, anytime and unconditionally. In this, and despite any rhetorical concessions to a more conservative readership in ‘The Spanish Revolution’, there survives a radical element in Robinson that stems from the Unitarian tradition – especially Richard Price’s sermon On the Love of our Country, which promulgated patriotism as the abiding by the principles of the French Revolution. Price had thus ignited the Revolution Controversy in Britain, in which Burke, 54 Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, 170; HCR, ‘The Spanish Revolution’, 257–258.

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Wollstonecraft, Paine, and others would soon engage.55 Between 1800 and 1805, Robinson had found a new metaphysical elaboration of Price’s cosmopolitanism in Kant; Robinson conducted his invocation of Arndt in his review of Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra against the backdrop of precisely this elaboration.

55 Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (London: Cadell, 1790). Robinson had read this pamphlet, as well as the responses to it, with great avidity during his years at Colchester.

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Peter Brix Søndergaard (Aarhus University)

‘Something strangely perverse’. Nature and Gender in J. E. Millais’s Ophelia

Abstract This paper analyses J. E. Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite painting Ophelia. Drawing on ideas formulated by Hermann Broch regarding the origins of romanticism and Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of a dialectic of Enlightenment, the analysis focuses on the complex handling of gender and nature in the painting in order to show the shifting and contradictory constellations of meaning inherent in the subject. Central to the argument is the relationship between the characterization of Ophelia as a femme fragile and the nature that surrounds her, rendered with an almost hallucinatory clarity. Both nature and woman are shown to be capable of both conforming to and escaping from Millais’s painterly control. The painting turns out to be a vehicle for a young middle-class Victorian and his anxieties and yearnings. Keywords Pre-Raphaelite painting, J. E. Millais, Ophelia, Gender, Femme fragile.

Ophelia (oil on canvas, 1851–1852; fig. 1) by John Everett Millais (1829–1896) is probably the most well-known and most popular painting of English Pre-Raphaelitism. As Julia Thomas points out, his ‘focus on nature … situates Millais as an inheritor of Romantic ideals …’. The painting, however, contains a doubleness: ‘In this picture, nature has the dreamlike and mystical qualities that characterize earlier romantic paintings, but it is juxtaposed with a photographic realism …’.1 A discussion of this interrelatedness forms the focus of what follows. Ophelia depicts a tightly enclosed space reminiscent of a bower, which engenders an encapsulated and claustrophobic spatial effect enhanced by the upper round arch. In an odd manner, it is like looking into a diorama designed to recreate the natural habitat of various stuffed animals. It is not, however, a specimen of English fauna that resides behind the glass in this apparent nature 1 Julia Thomas, ‘Ophelia 1851–52. Painting by John Everett Millais’, in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, Volume 2, ed. Christopher John Murray (N.Y. & London: Taylor & Francis, 2004), 829. Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999), 21ff. The latter source gives a good account of the way that PreRaphaelitism grew out of romanticism.

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Fig. 1: John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–1852. Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 11.8 cm. Tate Gallery, London.

idyll, but a delicate young beauty, Ophelia, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, floating on her back in the darkish water of a brook on her way to ‘muddy death’. This endows the picture with an undercurrent of tragic morbidity somehow at odds with the almost hallucinatory clarity and nearly overwhelming density of the female protagonist’s obsessively detailed surroundings. In any case, a reviewer writing for The Times found reason to make a critical comment on Millais’s handling of the subject exactly along these lines when the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852: ‘[T]here must be something strangely perverse in an imagination which souses Ophelia in a weedy ditch … while it studies every petal of the darnel and anemone floating on the eddy and pricks out a robin on the pollard from which Ophelia fell …’.2 After a few remarks on the iconography of the picture, the present study will explore the background of this peculiar juxtaposition of excessive scientific accuracy and, an apparently resigned, late romantic version of the Liebestod-motif to point out the strong tensions and contradictions that this involves in the meaning-making processes. Ophelia was the daughter of the old courtier Polonius who went mad because of Hamlet’s scorn and the death of Polonius at the hands of Hamlet. The episode, 2 Quoted in Kimberley Rhodes, Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture (London & N.Y.: Routledge, 2008), 90.

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which provides the literary source for Millais’s painting is described as follows, by Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother (IV; VII): There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; There with fantastic garlands did she come Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them: There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element: but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.

This depiction of Shakespearian erotic death or ‘love death’, is framed by richly varied flora painted with minute botanical correctness and in part carrying symbolic values. Some of these flowers and trees are identified in Shakespeare’s text. This is true of the weeping willow, the nettles, and the daisies, which signify forsaken love, pain, and innocence, respectively. Others are introduced by Millais, such as the poppy beside the floating daisies, which represents death and sleep, and the forget-me-nots situated on the far bank, at the right edge of the picture plane. To the left of these, we see a configuration of light and shadow vaguely resembling a skull. This common memento mori may refer to both Ophelia’s death and the famous graveyard scene that follows the scene of her death in the play (V, I). Millais has also painted a robin as a reference to one of the songs Ophelia sings (‘For bonny sweet Robin is all my Joy’) in the throes of madness (IV, V).3 Let us begin, however, by considering Ophelia. Her pose was based on that of Millais’s model, Elizabeth Siddal, as she floated in a bathtub filled with tinted water. Millais inserted this figure into the scene on returning to his London studio from a trip to the Hogsmill River in Ewell, where he painted the surrounding scenery. If we follow the Austrian novelist and essayist Hermann Broch’s ‘Notes

3 Cf. the essay on Ophelia in Alan Bowness, ed., The Pre-Raphaelites (exhibition catalogue, London: Tate Gallery/Penguin Books, 1984), 96f.

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on the problem of kitsch’, this figure is a product of the precarious handling of sexuality found in the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois response to the threat of sexuality was often asceticism, which had an understandable strategic appeal to this new, power-seeking class in whose interest it was to advocate puritan ideals at sharp variance with the extravagances of the nobility. Asceticism, however, was problematic for the Enlightenment which ‘did not favour the ascetic spirit (it is not mere chance that it produced libertinage)’.4 The spirit of Enlightenment, with its comparative moral laxity, was not to be denied: ‘nor was it possible to restore the old faith which had provided the incentive for asceticism’.5 Accordingly, the bourgeoisie faced the seemingly insoluble problem of how to preserve the ascetic spirit while at the same time making allowances for new Enlightenment norms. The solution to the problem, according to Broch, was a sublimation of sexual impulses resulting in an overwrought, religiously inflected tension that manifested itself as romanticism in art and literature: Puritanism certainly did not impose a monastic type of chastity, but strict monogamy … Monogamous love was saved by being intensified to a level of exaltation which at one time had been severely condemned by asceticism. Puritan frigidity was transposed into passion. Every causal act of love was raised to the astral plane …6

By means of this pseudo-overcoming or rather pseudo-reinstatement of the ascetic tradition, the bourgeois middle classes wanted not only to solve their erotic problems but also to reach a compromise between their puritan art-asceticism and their enjoyment of decoration: Even if courtly-feudal decorative art secretly appealed to them, they had to disdain it so as to remain faithful to their own ascetic tradition; and if they were now able to grant freedom to their taste for decoration, the result was to be a form of art that was more serious, more elevated and more cosmic than that of their predecessors. One is immediately struck by the parallel with the erotic and sentimental situation …: the aesthetic pleasures of the libertine are looked down on, but the bourgeois would also like to indulge in them, even if on a higher plane. And in fact just as, in the sphere of erotic relationships, love itself has to come down from its celestial heights to consecrate and take part in every human act of love, so in the aesthetic field beauty has to be incarnated in every work of art and consecrate it.7

4 Hermann Broch, ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’, in Gilles Dorfles, ed., Kitsch. The World of Bad Taste (New York: Universe Books, 1970), 54. Originally read at Yale in 1950, the paper is still, in spite of its stamp of modernism typical of the time of writing, worth reading. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 56. 7 Ibid., 58.

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Sublimated love and its attendant cult of beauty are condensed in the Pre-Raphaelite female ideal, as primarily incarnated by Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris. Without wanting to contest the artistic merits of the Pre-Raphaelites, Broch states that ‘the goddess of beauty in art is the goddess kitsch’, a remark expanded on later in his text: ‘Into what type of work of art, or rather artifice, does kitsch try to transform human life? The answer is simple: into a neurotic work of art, i. e. one which imposes a completely unreal convention on reality, thus imprisoning it in a false schema.’8 To be sure, modernism as an artistic praxis, and as a set of ideas through which the history of art is represented and its artefacts explained and judged, has lost its monopoly and narrative painting is being critically rehabilitated and re-evaluated. In this context, the labelling of Pre-Raphaelite art as kitsch no longer seems to stand to reason. As will be demonstrated, however, that does not rule out the possibility of such art being neurotic. With regard to representations of women, Ariane Thomalla has expressed the aforementioned sublimated cult of beauty in terms of the femme fragile, a view of women which, according to Thomalla, often inflects Pre-Raphaelite work and its shaping and staging of this specific representation of woman. Friederike B. Emonds goes further, tracing it back to early romanticism.9 The femme fragile has a childlike body, lithe and slender, without fully developed sexual characteristics: ‘a body which denies its sexual predestination’ and ‘ends its artificial existence in perverse over refinement.’10 While her delicate figure is the carrier of ‘the germ of consumption’, her facial features radiate pathological tiredness and exhaustion like a reflection of the beyond.11 The femme fragile with its asexual, ethereal apathy tending towards the morbidly delicate, is symptomatic of a repressed attitude towards the erotic and can be seen as a counterpart to the women found in the later, Symbolist-oriented Pre-Raphaelitism of D. G. Rossetti and E. BurneJones: i. e. the femme fatale, characterized by erotic lasciviousness and calculating cruelty. Both types can be understood as being bound up with the sexual nervousness that conflicted with tightly-laced Victorian sexual morality. Both the femme fragile

8 Ibid., 59 and 63–64. 9 Ariane Thomalla, Die “femme fragile” (Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann-Universitätsverlag, 1972), 7. Cf. Magda Romanska, ‘Ontology and Eroticism. Two Bodies of Ophelia’, Women’s Studies 6 (2005): 497: ‘With her vulnerable, consumptive beauty, Millais’ model, Elizabeth Siddal was one of the most popular models of her times. Revered for her death-like pallor and deep, aloof gaze she was the perfect femme fragile’. Friederike B. Emonds, ‘Femme Fragile’, in The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature, eds. F. Eigler & S. Kord (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997), 165–166. 10 C. Moreck, Das weibliche Schönheitsideal im Wandel der Zeiten (München: Franz Hanfstaengel, 1925), 268. 11 Ibid., 269.

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and the femme fatale are attempts to master this sexual anxiety by way of specifically male aesthetic constructions of femininity. The figure of the femme fatale can thus be seen as the expression of an anticipatory escapism into an exoticism of the senses: into a world of unleashed erotic phantasies, eventually into perversion. This phenomenon is at once a protest against rigid bourgeois morals and expressive of the fear of the potential pitfalls of sexuality, a fear which by way of projection became represented by the diabolical and demonic lascivious woman, venus lasciva. Femininity is here cast as the Other, which, by an autonomous, ego-strong bourgeois male is perceived as unpredictable and destructively threatening. In the Pre-Raphaelite version, to be sure, the phantasies are relatively luxurious and marked by energy strong enough to invest the figure of the femme fatale with a masochistically flavored fetishistic fascination.12 We do not find the hateful panic-fear that characterizes works such as those by the German painter Franz von Stuck (e. g. Sensuality/Eve and the Snake, 1891) at about the same time.13 The other type of woman, the femme fragile, represents an escape into repression and, consequently, as a corollary to perversion, into neurosis. The femme fragile represents surrender to and resigned identification with normative morality in order to counter and perforate its intolerable pressure. The Victorian interpretation of femininity did not make allowances for sexual drive. The defining essence of womanhood consisted in idealistic love, delicate feelings, and moral sensitivity. Because of her morbid spiritualization, the femme fragile carries such characteristics to a pathological extreme, a state of mind implying a field of tension between acceptance and (unconscious) resistance. She is regarded as a point of ‘access to a mental spiritualized nature which transcends all bodily and sexual desire’.14 The femme fragile can thus be seen as a symptom of the latent tragedy of navigating precariously between sinful, tabooed profane sensuality on the one hand and profound sublimation on the other: a tragedy that stems from the impossibility of ideal love as reflected in Wagner’s musical drama Tristan und Isolde and Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Broch points to an atmosphere of necrophilia resulting from these circumstances.15 12 Cf. Griselda Pollock, ‘Woman as sign: Psychoanalytic readings’, in Vision & Difference (London & N.Y.: Routledge, 1988). 13 Simonetta Falchi argues that Ophelia is also able to embody the femme fatale: Through time Ophelia has become ‘a multifaceted heroine apt to embody all the victims of patriarchal domination, but also … the Belle Dame Sans Merci, who would annihilate her tormentor’. With specific regard to Millais’s Ophelia, Falchi suggests that the open arms and the watery death suggests mature sexuality and a fallen woman. See Simonetta Falchi, ‘Re-mediating Ophelia with Pre-Raphaelie Eyes’, Interlitteraria 2 (2015), 181 & 177. This paper argues for a reading of Ophelia as an unambiguous femme fragile. 14 Cf. Regina Schaps, Hysterie und Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag, 1983), 141. 15 Hermann Broch, ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’, 56.

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Millais’s Ophelia shows yet another way of coping with such perilous negotiation: namely, a regression to the womb of nature, a yearning for oblivion in its boundless organism. Indications of this can be found in the closed, uterus-like space of the painting and in the lack of demarcating contours between Ophelia and the nature that surrounds her, the diffuse melting together of the two elements. This does not apply, however, to the rest of Millais’s description of scenery, which is characterized by minute precision. As described by a reviewer from the Athenaeum, Ophelia’s surroundings suggest the ‘botanical study of a Linnaeus’ saturated with a Protestant work ethic.16 This is evinced in the following anecdote told by Millais: ‘Perhaps the greatest compliment ever paid to “Ophelia”, as regards its truthfulness to Nature, is the fact that a certain Professor of Botany, being unable to take his class into the country and lecture from the objects before him, took them to the Guildhall, where this work was being exhibited, and discoursed to them upon the flowers and plants before them, which were, he said, as instructive as Nature herself ’.17 Millais’s uncompromising investment in an exhaustive work process (he spent around fifteen hundred hours at the easel) combined with his reductive treatment of nature as nothing more than botanical facts, signalled a strong wish to bring the world under clear-eyed control. The Pre-Raphaelites at this point in time were obsessed with reality, or ‘nature’, an obsession underpinned by the notion that utmost reliability and truthful reporting of observable facts would, by a sort of osmosis, produce a spiritual reality on a higher level. Inspired by the leading Victorian art critic, John Ruskin, the literal fact was endowed with an almost sacred aura, as if visual fact were truth itself. Scientific truth and divine truth converged. Empirically certified visual fact became a metaphor for spiritual light and truth, and the mere accumulation of visual facts amounted to a revelation of a divinely ordained moral order, expressed through physical beauty. The overwhelmingly telescopic clarity of Millais’s approach corresponded to the Pre-Raphaelite belief that art must be true to nature to be morally reliable. Style and meaning were considered as one and the same thing.18 Millais’s Ophelia thus appears as a painstaking transcription of the chosen locality at a given time, although the specific circumstances in terms of light, weather, and even vegetation of course change during a period of several months. Millais circumvented such problems by adopting an isolated, myopic view of his subject matter. Microscopic, natural detail appears at the expense of 16 Quoted from Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 17 J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 145. 18 This argument is developed throughout John Ruskin, Modern Painters I–V (London: Dent, ca. 1906).

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space, atmosphere, or any feeling of light and shadow. Shadows do appear in the green vegetation, but they do not indicate a particular time of day. Questions of atmosphere and weather are also ignored by Millais, who instead creates a near-vacuum, characterized by intense concentration on botanical details. The Pre-Raphaelite critique of academic painting, as codified in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s normative lectures at the Royal Academy of Arts, clearly informed Millais’s dismissive attitude toward the use of composition and lighting to indicate important areas of the canvas.19 The surface as a whole is characterized by the same penetrative, detailed realism, in prismatic colours, so that everything demands the same degree of attention. The result is a strong tension between depth and surface. The background is resolved as distinctly as the foreground, which results in space tilting onto the picture plane and forcing accumulated details to crowd into a shallow foreground. This effect is heightened by a brilliant luminosity, which results from Millais’s use of a fresco-like, wet, white ground that enhances every little detail. Despite the Pre-Raphaelite obsession with fact, and the requirement of a direct and sustained confrontation with nature, artistic reality was nevertheless always already ‘elevated through the choice of beautiful people’, in this case in the form of Elizabeth Siddal.20 It was not enough for the Pre-Raphaelites to reject conventional, standardized, academic formulas. The handling of the medium, in itself saturated with moral significance, was supposed to enter an alliance with improving subject matter. Victorian morality thus intervened as a kind of mediating and purifying filter between image and reality. The theme of the painting had to be ennobling. The representation of nature in Ophelia, however, may also indicate a scientific wish to control the world: to effect a ‘botanical study of a Linnaeus’. The figure of Ophelia, in relation to her surroundings can be seen to be both in conformity and in conflict with this controlling intention. In Millais’s Ophelia we are witnessing a sort of dialectic of Enlightenment on a micro-scale. As conceptualized by the German philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer, the Enlightenment within the development of Western civilization has resulted in the liberation of mankind from the restrains of nature by instrumental reason and its scientific objectification and made the domination and mastery of external nature possible. The domination, however, had got to a point where the consequence was a suppression of both the external and the internal, human nature resulting in alienation:

19 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (London: Forgotten Books, 2012). 20 A. Neumeier, ‘Die präraffaelitische Malerei im Rahmen der Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literatur und Geistesgeschichte, 9, 1 (1931).

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It is not merely that domination is paid for by the alienation of men from the objects dominated: with the objectification of spirit, the very relations of men – even those of the individual to himself – were bewitched. The individual is reduced to the nodal point of the conventional responses and modes of operation expected of him.21

The Enlightenment, which aimed to liberate men from external restraints of nature, is thus transformed into a second nature itself: The social world confronts the individuals embedded in it like a second nature in which nature avenges itself, by forcing on its enlightened masters, constrictive social manners by which they are injuriously affected. Nature is now only to be experienced in a culturally mediated form, as the feared Other, perceived relative to reason and morality as that which must be dominated or repressed but which continually threatens to return. This applies to woman as well. ‘She became the embodiment of the biological function, the image of nature, the subjugation of which constituted that civilization’s title to fame’.22 As art historian Gert Schiff has pointed out, these abstract determinations are manifesting the need of rigid, Victorian, sexual morality to control inner human nature: ‘The pressure of these morals produced jamming of sexual urges, contact disorders, and fear of sin all of which grew to a sense of an all-embracing fatality; along with naturalness, happiness also seems to be banished from this moral order’.23 With special reference to women, it could be claimed that they gained admission to a male-dominated world, but only in a broken form. In her spontaneous submission she reflects for her vanquisher the glory of his victory, substituting devotion for defeat, nobility of soul for despair, and a loving breast for a ravished heart … Art, custom, and sublime love are masks in which nature reappears transformed into her own antithesis. Through these masks she acquires the gift of speech; out of her distortion emerges her essence. Beauty is the serpent that exhibits a wound in which a thorn was once embedded.24

When the erotic and the sexual are universal taboos, the figure of the femme fragile enters the frame (for instance, in Millais’s canvas) as an ambivalent way of coming to terms with anxiety. Notwithstanding her otherwise unnatural appearance, it is only as a femme fragile that Ophelia can be at one with nature, as nature appears in Millais’s painting: that is, as controlled nature, as a ‘botanical study of a Linnaeus’. In her ethereal, feeble passivity, she represents an absolute availability to man. In contrast to the femme fatale, she does not represent ‘the demonic nature untamed by bourgeois culture’ (Meyer, 1975, 33). Neither does 21 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment (London & N.Y.: Verso, 2010 [1944]), 28. 22 Ibid., 248. 23 Gert Schiff, ‘Zeitkritik und Zeitflucht in der Malerei der Präraffaeliten’, in Beiträge zur Motivkunde des 19. Jahrhunderts (München: Prestel-Verlag, 1970), 178–179. 24 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 249.

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Millais’s nature, in its reduction to scientific, botanical facts. The Other, nature and woman, is seemingly brought under control. In this sense nature and woman do not, as The Times’s reviewer thought, contrast with each other. On the contrary, nature and woman are subjected to the same logic. By minimizing the expressivity of both nature and female, Millais makes the painting uncanny. An almost surreal effect similar to that experienced in a waxwork show is achieved and reinforced by the vacuum-like lack of atmosphere. The model is frozen, a freeze which could be perceived as the result of fear of getting too close to the opposite sex and thus opening up forbidden yearnings, or as a reaction to the fear of femininity, whose element is water. The female body reminds the male of his mortality. According to Julia Kristeva it is not so much woman but first of all motherhood which is suppressed in patriarchal society: motherhood as a reminder of the blind continuity of the species at the expense of the individual ego. The periodic fluctuations of the female body call attention to the organic, to change – birth, growth, death, birth. Still, according to Kristeva, men repress all of this in order to keep the illusion of their immortality. All change, including fluid change and changes in form, must be kept at a distance.25 Ophelia appears unnaturally alabaster-white, without a life of her own, as an artificial product. As a femme fragile, she is an object of projection, of a masculine defence mechanism, and as such she is reassuring as the bearer of an aversion to reproduction, of ‘a body which denies its sexual predestination’ (cited above). As mentioned above, the figure of the femme fragile is ambiguous, and this ambiguity points to the price paid by the bourgeoisie in its attempts to save the ascetic tradition. Caught between consciousness of guilt and an all-embracing sense of fatality, on the one hand, and unattainable, ideal love and religiouslymotivated spiritual exaltation within the framework of strict monogamy on the other, the controlling ambition develops cracks, and out of the cracks seep neurotic, hopeless tragedy, romanticization of death, and regressive longing. By pushing the representation of the figure to the verge of the morbidly pathological, the things, which the femme fragile as an instrument was intended to help repress, return. Viewed this way the reviewer of The Times carries his point: A friction arises between the natural and the human element in the painting. Interestingly, however, the representation of nature in Ophelia is not without ambiguity. The minutely detailed realism of Pre-Raphaelite paintings radically expresses the ethos of a scientific spirit, but although the world is present to an overwhelming extent it does not seem to cohere. It does not constitute an organic whole but appears fragmented, put together from bits and pieces, from mutually isolated and isolating colours and forms, without order and meaning. Karl Heinz Bohrer sees the effect of Pre-Raphaelite paintings as similar to a psychotic 25 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).

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experience of a deep-seated alienation in relation to the ‘“being” that surrounds them ….’26 The predominant characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite style–colouristic disharmony, insistent linearity, the crowding of equally important details in a shallow foreground, the anti-focal treatment of the picture plane – all serve to undermine the conventions of our perceptual apparatus, which would otherwise organize the visual field in terms of visual hierarchy and figure/ground relationships. In their manic pursuit of reality, Pre-Raphaelite painters ‘looked at the world without eyelids’, and thereby transformed what was acted upon: ‘[T]he labor that went into the copying of each particle was sharpened by a kind of frenzy which goaded them into a burnishing and polishing of their handiwork to a point beyond representation, at which it shone with feverish clarity’.27 This specific approach to assimilating the world had the paradoxical result that it began to slip from their grasp, suggesting that the representation of nature is also infected with a sort of visual dialectic of Enlightenment, which means that the natural and the human element in Ophelia once again converge, but this time in the form of a shared escaping from control. The controlling ambition is now collapsing as a whole. Millais’s choice of a well-known subject certainly helps to explain the notorious popularity of the painting. Because of its continually shifting and contradictory constellations of meaning, Ophelia is also centered on the tense interrelationship of gender and nature and, through this lens, provides a mental portrait of a young, middle-class Victorian and his self-perception, his understanding of the world, and his more or less unconscious anxieties, yearnings and dreams.

26 Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Ästehtik des Schreckens (Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1983), 55. 27 R. Ironside and J. Gere, Pre-Raphaelite Painters (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948), 13.

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Uffe Hansen Translation: Kasper R. Guldberg and Hannah Uldahl Persson

On the Unconscious

Abstract This article presents what has been called the long past and the brief history of the psychology of the unconscious. Laying out the main developments in 18th-century psychological research, paranormal experimentation, and philosophy of mind, it expands on the belief, held by a few controversial but brilliant minds, that empirical science could put the foundations under some of the main tropes of romantic literature – and that the mysteries of the soul could be unlocked through systematic research. A thorough section on the phenomenon of somnambulism discusses the belief that radically differently personalities exist side by side in the human psyche, which doubles as a portrait of an era when scientists and artists appeared united in the pursuit of comprehending the human condition – and to some degree learned from each other in the process. The article also contains an analysis of Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘The Engagement in St. Domingo’ and argues that it can be appreciated as a dramatization of some of the thinking and science discussed in earlier sections. Keywords The psychology of the unconscious, Puységur, Kleist, Animal magnetism, Mesmerism, Hypnotism

Foreword by Associate Professor Lilian Munk Rösing, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen Uffe Hansen (1933–2016) held a Dr Phil in German literature with a minor in Egyptology. As Associate Professor of German and Reader in comparative literature at Copenhagen University, he was a transformative influence on several generations of students who benefited from his remarkable ability to combine subtle, close reading with perspectives from general history and the history of ideas. His major research projects concerned an alternative trend in European thought: the hypothesis of the independent life of the spirit liberated from matter, which he located in Gnosticism and mesmerism, and traced through the works of Uffe Hansen, Romantik 07|2018, 127–156 Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0

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Kleist, Schiller, Goethe, Kafka, and Lagerlöf. As well as a doctoral thesis (Conrad Ferdinand Meyers: “Angela Borgia”. Zwischen Salpêtrière und Berggasse) and a book about the Danish hypnotist Carl Hansen (Psykoanalysens fortrængte fortid [The repressed past of psychoanalysis]), his publications include articles on narratology and psychoanalytic textual analysis. To this day, his work remains a source of instruction and inspiration for students of comparative literature in the Danish academy. The necessary precondition for the observations that follow is the hypothesis that ‘there existed in Europe a widely extended, clear, and fairly concurrent network of thoughts, opinions, and convictions which relate to the concept “romanticism” ’.1 Among the cognitive discourses partaking, in fictionalized form, of this network, romantic anthropology holds an important place, and within it ‘the unconscious’ represents a central problem. Simultaneously, it is historically specific in that it does not constitute a common central field of reference for either the immediately previous epochs (the Enlightenment and classicism) or the immediately subsequent epochs (realism and developments parallel to it) with respect to the specific ‘Form der Weltzuwendung’ [form of world attentiveness] of these epochs.2 This is not to suggest that the relationship between rationality and ‘its other’ does not implicate individual authors, or groups of authors, before or after romanticism. The challenge is to determine what kind of ‘unconscious’ is unique to romanticism – which particular, historically conditioned, anthropology it engages. It would appear that we are looking at a core field so narrow that it is of no use as a general criterion for any text’s classification as ‘romantic’; however, as a core field, it extends to and touches other, less specific conceptualizations of the unconscious, of interest to romanticism – and beyond into the anthropology of the period. In the same way, as psychology in general, the psychology of the unconscious has ‘a long past and a brief history’3, by which I mean that the systematic explication of the relationship between reflexive consciousness and psychological processes, occurring beyond the subconscious, was introduced around the beginning of the eighteenth century. The word itself (the unconscious) emerges in 1751, in the Scottish philosopher Henry Home Kames’s Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion. In the Germanic world, Ernst Platner is the first to employ the word ‘Unbewuβtsein’, in 1776 in his Philosophische Aphorismen where it denotes faint, nearly unnoticeable perceptions. The corre1 Henry H. H. Remak, ‘Ein Schlüssel zur westeuropäischen Romantik’, in Helmut Prang, ed., Begriffsbestimmung der Romantik (Darmstadt, 1968), 429. 2 Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre (Frankfurt a.M., 1993), 24. 3 H. Ebbingshaus, Grundzüge der Psychologie (Lpz., 19194), quoted in Ludwig J. Pongratz, Problemgeschichte der Psychologie (Munich, 19842), 197.

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sponding adjective is ‘bewuβtlos’, which (but for one exception4) is the current and standard term all the way up to approximately the beginning of the nineteenth century when competition is exerted from ‘unbewuβt’ / ‘das Unbewuβte’.5 In the French-speaking domain, ‘inconscient / l’inconscient’ do not make an appearance until the mid-nineteenth century. What was understood by this concept up through the eighteenth century? A brief historical presentation reveals that the background in this instance was a powerful counter-reaction around the year 1700 against John Locke’s empiricism, and especially against Descartes’s clear dividing line between the psysical world (res extensa) and the soul (res cogitans). Descartes equated soul and cogitatio (reflexive consciousness). One consequence of this very narrow definition of the physical was that not only the external material world, but everything belonging to the human body not exhibiting the clarity of consciousness fell under the rubric of res cogitans, and in this way Cartesian dualism acquired a materialistic imbalance. Several alternative accounts stand in opposition to this view, each with its own conceptualization of the unconscious. One encounters the first systematic exploration of the cognitive (i. e. perceptual) unconscious in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Countering Descartes, his notion of psycho-physical parallelism makes his standpoint monistic. The processes of body and soul are akin to two watches carefully and mutually attuned (‘prästabilierte Harmonie’ [pre-established harmony]). For each bodily process there is a corresponding process in the soul, and only a small share of the latter ever reaches consciousness. The majority remain ‘petites perceptions’, i. e. faint, fleeting, obscure perceptions, conceptions, emotions, acts of volition, and pre-states to thought, below the threshold of reflexive consciousness. But this threshold is not absolute. The advancing levels, from the most obscure psychological processes to the most clearly conscious, constitute a gradual continuum, and that, which at one point is unconscious can under certain conditions in the memory be called forward into consciousness. We may then speak about the ‘relatively unconscious’ or the ‘latently unconscious’. This conceptualisation of the unconscious reappears in Christian Wolff (1679– 1754), a student of Leibniz, as well as in a considerable number of thinkers after Leibniz, e. g. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779), Ernst Platner (1744–1818), and Johann Nicolaus Tetens 4 In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s An der Mond (1777), the adjective ‘unbewußt’ [unconscious] is used. In later versions of the poet, that word has been replaced by ‘nicht bewußt’ [not conscious]. 5 The adjective-turned-noun ‘das Unbewußte’ has its first appearance in Jean Paul’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, par. no. 13 (1804): ‘Das Mächtigste im Dichter, welches seinen Werken die gute und die böse Seele einbläst, ist gerade das Unbewußte’ [The greatest thing in the poet, which ushers in the good and the evil in his works, is precisely the unconscious].

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(1736–1805) the latter of whom was a source par excellence for Kant’s psychological thinking.6 Representing a relatively late, but obvious example of the force of the Leibnizean ideas, one could point to Platner’s ‘Neue Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise’ (1790) [New anthropology for physicians and the worldly-wise]. According to Platner, human beings possess ‘ein zweifaches Seelenorgan’ [a dualistic soul organ], namely ‘ein geistiges’ [a spiritual] and ‘ein thieirisches’ [an animal] soul organ (p. 71), both of which affect the soul in different ways. While the spiritual soul organ’s field of competence is linguistically involved perceptions, remembrance of the external world, conceptual thinking, and moral judgements, we learn this about its counterpart: Das thierische Seelenorgan ist das unwesentlichere und unedlere, und erweckt in der Seele jene verworrenen, aus iner zahlenlosen Vielheit undeutlicher Gefühle zusammengesetzten Vorstellungen von dem Zustande, theils des thierischen Körpers überhaupt, theils seiner einzelnen Werkzeuge, und die von diesen Ideen abhängenden angenehmen, oder unangenehmen Empfindigungen [The animal soul is comparatively less significant and noble and gives rise in the soul to confused notions, composed of innumerable indistinct emotions, about the state both of the animal body as such and about its particular tools as well as the agreeable or disagreeable sensations associated with these notions] (p. 72).

However, the cognitive unconscious is not limited to what at any one moment goes on beyond the threshold of perception and attention. In Sulzer’s estimation, Leibniz’s ‘dunkle Ideen’ [obscure ideas] include such ideas ‘die sich von den Jahren unsrer Kindheit herschreiben, und welche die Zeit ganz verdunkelt hat’ [which stem from our childhood and which the passing of time has shrouded in obscurity].7 By dint of early-childhood conceptions’ ability to elude the control of thought and affect the person’s ‘Empfindung’ [sensation] directly, they can push rationality aside and force us to act ‘gegen unser Gutbefinden’ [against our wellbeing].8 Aside from this significant ontogenetic dimension, which was to be a central issue for psychoanalysis, Sulzer points to a motivational dimension that is equally important: In dem Innersten der Seele sind Angelegenheiten verborgen, die uns zuweilen auf einmal, ohne alle Veranlassung und auf eine unschickliche Art, handeln oder reden, und 6 Cf. Hans Adler, ‘Fundus Animae – der Grund der Seele. Zur Gnoseologie des Dunklen in der Aufklärung’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 62 (1988): 197–220. 7 Johann Georg Sulzer, ‘Vom dem Bewußtseyn und seinem Einflusse in unsre Urtheile’ (1764), 110. This province of the unconscious was also a central concern for Karl Philipp Moritz (1756– 1793), the publisher of the first European journal on psychology, Gnothi Sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde al sein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte (1786–1793). 8 Ibid., 108. Fridriech Schiller employed this psychological motif in the play Die Räuber (1781/ 1782). Cf. Wolfgang Riedel, ‘Die Aufklärung und das Unbewußte. Die Inversionen des Franz Moor’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft 37 (1993): 218–220.

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ohne daβ wir daran denken, Dinge sagen lassen, die wir schlechterdings verbergen wollen [In the soul’s innermost parts lie hidden those issues which, sometimes suddenly, unoccasioned and inappropriately, compel us to act and speak, and which, without any thought process, compel us to say things we strongly desire to hide].9

For this volitional unconscious, the terms ‘Begehren und Wollen’ [desire and will], ‘Affekte und Leidenschaften’ [affects and passions], and ‘Bedürfnis und Trieb’ [needs and drives] were used in the eighteenth century. We now approach the other strand of eighteenth-century conceptualisations of the unconscious, namely the vital unconscious, also known as the irrational unconscious. Already, the German physician Georg Ernst Stahl (1660–1734) had rejected Descartes’s mechanistic understanding of the human organism (described and explained by means of the categories expansion and motion) and claimed that the ‘vital force’ associated with the soul was the foundation of the physical organism, and that in the human body the soul was an omnipresent organizing and active force. The force under consideration here is, unlike what Leibniz thought, a psychological unconscious, which is inherently unavailable to consciousness. Stahl’s vitalism elicited only a limited number of adherers at the beginning of the century, although, at the end of that century, it enjoyed a tremendous renaissance in France10 and Germany. The aforementioned Ernst Platner, for instance, adopted the perspective of vitalism at the close of the 1780s and began to agree that die Bewegungen der thierischen Werkzeuge als Thätigkeiten der Seelenkraft, welche, mittelst der den Nerven beygebrachten und bis zur Seele fortgepflanzten Reize erregt warden [the movements of the animal tools are, like the activities of the soul power, aroused by stimuli brought to the nerves and are relayed to the soul].11 9 Johann Georg Sulzer, ‘Zergliederung des Begriffes der Vernunft’ (1758), in J. G. Sulzer, J.G. Sulzer’s vermischte philosophischen Schriften (Leipzig, 1793), 261. 10 E. g. Paul Joseph Barthez, Nouveaux élémens de la Science de l’Homme (1778). Cf. Charles de Villers, Le magnétiseur amoureux. Introduction et notes par François Azouvi (Paris: 1978), 237. 11 Ernst Platner, Neue Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Physiologie, Pathologie, Moralphilosophie und Ästhetik, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1790), 97. Cf. Anneliese Ego, Animalischer Magnetismus oder Aufklärung. Eine mentalitätsgeschichtliche Studie zum Konflikt um ein Heilkonzept im 18. Jahrhundert (1991), 98: Hatte im dualistischen System des Mechanismus die Seele zumindest beim Menschen ihre Daseinsberechtigung behalten, so kamen die Vitalisten, da sie Gefühle ohne Bewußtsein zuließen, ohne sie aus. Wer die Materie Seele sein läßt, läßt die Seele materiell sein [In the dualistic system of mechanism, the soul had at least kept its right to exist in the human being. The vitalists manage without it, insofar that they permit feelings without consciousness. He who lets the material be soul, lets the soul be material].

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This conceptualization of the unconscious emphasizes the physchophysical unit (‘die Lebensseele’ [the life soul]). Resonating with vitalism is the thinking of Herder for whom Leibniz’s cognitive unconscious was a much too circumscribed approach. His Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seelen [On the human’s soul’s perception and emotion] (1778) contains this passage: Der innere Mensch mit allen seinen dunklen Kräften, Reizen und Trieben ist nur Einer. … Im Abgrunde des Reizes und solcher dunkel Kräfte liegt in Menschen und Thieren der Same zu aller Leidenschaft und Unternehmung. … Vor solchem Abgrunde dunkler Empfindungen, Kräfte und Reize graut nun unsrer hellen und klaren Philosophie am meisten: sie segnet sich davor, als vor der Hölle unterster Seelenkräfte und mag lieber auf dem Leibnitzischen Schachbrett mit einigen tauben Wörtern und Klassifikationen von dunkeln und klaren, deutlichen und verworrenen Ideen, vom Erkennen in und auβer sich, mit sich und ohne sich selbst u. dgl. Spielen [The inner human being with all its obscure forces, attractions, and drives is only one … In the abyss of the attraction force and such obscure forces lies, in human beings and animals, the seeds of all passion and initiative … Such an abyss of obscure notions, forces and attraction is what our light and clear philosophy most dreads: it resists it as if it were the nethermost mental faculties’ hell and would rather play on the Leibnizean chessboard with some deaf words and classifications of obscure and clear, distinct and confused notions, recognition within and without, with itself and without itself].12

From this inaccessible ‘deepest abyss’ of the soul, from the elementarily physiological, from the ‘natural forces’, the best emotional, moral, and creative life utterances well up. The powerful degree to which Herder’s psycho-physical monism influenced Goethe is well known. In Goethe, we locate an insistent emphasis on this idea of continuity (‘Steigerung’ [increase]). It reached its perhaps clearest poetic expression in the novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) (Elective Affinities), most particularly in the personality of Ottilie in whom an extremely sensitive and aware sense of the unconscious life of the body – including even wholly nonorganic physical phenomena – blends with the highest intellectual, moral, and religious imaginings in a synthesis of personality. To Goethe, Luigi Galvani’s discovery of ‘animal electricity’13 became the strongest indicator of a close connection between body and soul, a view he found fully defended in J. W. Ritter’s Der Siderismus oder neue Beyträge zur nähern Kenntnis des Galvanismus [Siderism or new contributions to a deeper under-

12 Johann Gottfried Herder, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by von B. Suphan, vol. 8, 178ff. 13 Luigi Galvanis’s De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius was published in 1791 and translated into German in 1793.

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standing of galvanism] (1808).14 A rather characteristic articulation of Goethe’s Spinozistic belief in ‘the one nature’ appears in a letter to Zelter (June 22 1808): Der Mensch an sich selbst, insofern er sich seiner gesunden Sinne bedient, ist der gröβte und genaueste physikalische Apparat den es geben kann [The human being in itself is, insofar as it is utilizing its healthy senses, the greatest and most precise physicalist instrument in existence].

One commonality between these two major strands in eighteenth-century conceptualizations of the unconscious is the great emphasis on continuity, that is the gradual shadings connecting not only the ‘obscure imaginings’ and the reflexive consciousness, but also body and soul, spirit and nature. In the late eighteenth century especially, it became the norm to encounter a philosophical argument for this continuity notion in the emanation concept of Neoplatonism. Generally, notably in Goethe’s and Schelling’s works, Plotinus’s spirit/material dualism was dismissed in favour of the gradual shadings from the divine unit (pleroma) through the spirit, the soul, and on to the material (kenoma) – all of which constitutes a monistic interpretation of Plotinus. An important aspect of the cognitive conceptualization of the unconscious (as opposed to the vital one) is the emphasis on the unity of the psyche, the substantive identity of the I. It signalled in an energetic opposition to Hume’s sensualism (among other things) according to which ‘the I’ is ‘nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions united by certain relations’ (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748). Like Voltaire and others (including the encyclopedists and, especially, Condillac) had done before him, Hume – with this position – perpetuated Locke’s empiricism, central to which was the thesis that consciousness is the result of passively received perceptions. Empirical psychology (experimental psychology), the main contours of which I have briefly sketched above, was at an advanced developmental stage in the 1780s and boasted impressively perceptive descriptions and analyses of a broad range of unconscious factors, on which the highest conscious processes were assumed to be predicated or passively dependent. However, every theory of the unconscious – including the present ones – runs into the problem pointed out by Freud in his Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) (1916–1917) that the unconscious, on the face of it, appears to be ‘eine Tatsache, die sich in ihrer Benennung selbst aufhebt und doch etwas Wirkliches sein will, eine contradiction in adjecto’ [a fact, which dissolves itself when mentioned yet nonetheless aspires to be something real, a contradiction in adjecto] (SA, vol. 1, p. 188). Accordingly, the author of Prob14 Cf. Michael Holtermann, ‘Thierischer Magnetismus in Goethes Roman “Die Wahlverwandtschaften” ’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft (1993): 164–197.

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lemgeschichte der Psychologie (1984), Ludwig J. Pongratz, declares ‘the unconscious’ to be a hypothesis, but then adds: Gedankliche Konstruktion beziehungsweise Rekonstruktion ist nicht gleichbedeutend mit ‘Artefakt’. Als solches wäre – vom empirischen Standpunkt – allenfalls ein substantialisiertes Unbewuβte zu bezeichnen. Sofern das Unbewuβte nicht unmittelbar gegeben ist, ist es im strengen Sinne aber auch kein Faktum. Immerhin ist es als constructum, als cogitatum, als hypotheticum eine unbestreitbare Erlebninsgegebenheit, die auf eine unbewuβte Determination von hier und jetzt angetroffenem Erleben und Verhalten verweist [Intellectual construction or reconstruction is not synonymous with ’artifact’. As such, from the empirical point of view, at best, a substantialized unconscious could be designated. Unless the unconscious is immediately given, it is not a fact in the strict sense. Yet, as constructum, as cogitatum, as hypotheticum, it is an indisputable experiential condition that points to an unconscious determination of the experience and behavior encountered here and now] (p. 238).

From the standpoint of science studies, then, there is not much that differentiates ‘the unconscious’ as an explanatory hypothesis and many of the theories of elementary physics. This, for the empirical psychologists, was a regrettable empirical defect. And yet, in 1784 it appeared as if a means had suddenly emerged to enable the observation of unconscious psychological phenomena and their impact on not only consciousness but also the whole physical organism. That year saw the publication of the first volume of Mémoires pour server à l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal [Memories contributing to the history and establishment of animal magnetism] by Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, marquis de Puységur (1751–1825). Puységur was a student of the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer who, starting in February 1778, was successful in his treatment of thousands of patients in Paris and other French cities using a method we might call hypnotic suggestion today. In the view of Mesmer himself, the universe was charged with a force whose vibrancy in living organisms depended on their being charged with ‘animal magnetism’. In cases where an individual’s charge was ‘disharmonic’, he could, through his own uniquely developed method, regulate the animal magnetism in his patients. Exposing his patients to direct touch or ‘magnetising’ objects, he would enable the magnetic ‘fluidum’ to stream into the patient and thereby catalyze their ‘crisis’ (convulsions, lethargy, trance-like states) which would eventuate their cure. The long and short of Puységur’s pioneering contribution is that, following a series of practical experiments and rather brilliant analyses of his processes, he rejected Mesmer’s physical theory and – eventually – replaced it with a purely psychological one. To Mesmer, the brief and dramatic crises were in themselves rather uninteresting auxiliary phenomena, whereas Puységur started giving his undivided attention

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toward what really went on inside the patients during these transitional phases. He surmised that healing occurred during the latter rather than in the earlier process of ‘magnetic charging’. By carefully ‘magnetizing’ the patient and refraining from intervening beyond that, he now realized that he could induce a brief sleep-like state which finally culminated in ‘somnambulism’ – a state in which the patient apparently woke up again and regained motor and verbal control. But the ‘personality’ now manifesting itself through action and speech was radically different from the default personality. Disregarding the (for our purposes) less relevant curiosities (highly important though they be in a therapeutic context), the somnambulant personalities in different individuals appear to have the following things in common: 1. Hypermnesia. The somnambulant personality commands a much greater library of memories than the default personality. The highly detailed memories of early childhood, erased by oblivion in the default personality, are particularly striking. The veracity of the memories was amenable to corroboration through questions directed at elder family members. 2. One-way amnesia. The somnambulant personality possesses a complete recollection of not only previous somnambulant states but also of the default personality’s experiences. However, the default personality has no access to the consciousness or recollections of the somnambulant personality. 3. An increase in intellectual capability, and a marked change to the subject’s language. Speakers of a dialect were found to command the country’s official dialect when in the somnambulant state, and, in some cases, they were even able to speak one or more foreign languages. 4. A heightened sense of awareness. It is true of all five senses that the threshold level of conscious perception is lowered to abnormal levels. The somnambulant personality may, for example, be aware aurally (or olfactorily) that a certain person is approaching the house much sooner than an onlooker to the experiment. 5. The ability, thanks to greatly enhanced ‘general perception’15 to realize, i. e. visualize, the condition of one’s own internal organs. The ability to psychically affect physical processes in one’s own organism (the physical processes ordinarily lie beyond volitional command). 6. Between the magnetizer and the somnambulant person may arise a psychic interaction (‘rapport’) so powerful that thoughts and imaginings appear to pass from one person to the other.16

15 G. H. Schubert speak of ‘einem geschärften Gemeingefühl’ [a sharpened sense of community]. See his Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (1808), 337. 16 I am here going to omit the controversial issue that the somnambulant person occasionally gained clairvoyant powers, i. e. the ability to perceive the surrounding world independent of

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It was Puységur’s and his students’ conviction that every human being carries a latent somnambulant personality. The phenomenon of posthypnotic suggestion was held to legitimize the hypothesis that the somnambulant personality was not merely a brief abnormal state but rather constantly present under the default personality. Upon hearing a command from the magnetizer, the somnambulant person would, at some time after his return to the default personality, carry out the requested action regardless of its inherent absurdity and without allowing the normal personality to discover the true incentive.17 The psychological status of the somnambulant personality is bivalent. From the viewpoint of the default personality – the rational subject of the Enlightenment – it belongs to the unconscious domain, inevitably inaccessible to normal consciousness. Owing to one-way amnesia, it cannot be integrated into normal consciousness, and the posthypnotic experiment shows that even when an element from the somnambulant state intrudes to motivate actions in the life of the default personality, only the action can be appreciated, not the motivating incentive. On the other hand, the somnambulant personality – in its sensing, thinking, recollecting, speaking, and acting manifestation – possesses a clearly reflexive self-consciousness. As the somnambulant personality is superior to the default personality in practically every respect – and even boasts a greater internal continuity than that of normal consciousness, as a result of hypermnesia and one-way amnesia (allowing, as it does, for full awareness of the contents of the normal consciousness) – it merits consideration as a more complete consciousness.18 But, normally this consciousness is only latently present in the individual. Aside from a few spontaneous cases of shifts between the two types of consciousness, extraordinary means are required for actualizing it.19 time and space. In this curious feature of the somnambulant person’s perception of the world, Puységur’s most outstanding student Joseph-Philippe-François Deleuze recognized an empirical confirmation of Kant’s determination that time, space, and causality were the forms of the intellect, notably that pertaining to the normal state, whereas the somnambulant person’s altered ‘sensorium’ was not hampered by these limitations. Cf. The Marquis de Puységur, Histoire critique du magnetisme animal (Paris, 1813), 281. 17 De Mouilleseaux, Appel au public sur le magnétisme animal [Strasbourg, 1787].) 18 G. H. Schubert (note 15): ‘eine höhere Stufe des wahren Zustandes der Seele’ [a higher level of the true state of the soul] (p. 348). 19 Ludwig J. Pongratz distinguishes between ‘Mitbewußtes’ [the ‘co-conscious’] (that which is not available to the focus of conscious attention and which can be made conscious without substantial changes) and ‘Unbewußtes’ det ubevidste which is delineated thus: ‘Es ist nicht wie das Mitbewußte mühelos der Präsenz zugänglich, sondern wird “schwer” bewußt; in der Regel sind gezielte Methoden nötig, um es klar bewußt zu machen. Ein drittes Unterscheidungsmerkmal kommt hinzu: Mitbewußten wird present, ohne das Erleben und Verhalten der Persönlichkeit bedeutsam zu verändern. Das Präsentwerden von Unterbewußtem hingegen hat personale Modifikationen im Gefolge. Auf dem Niveau der kognitiven Präsenz erscheint es mit dem Index der Verwunderung, Erleuchtung, Betroffenheit und dergleichen

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Rather than speaking of consciousness versus unconsciousness, in the interest of defining the nomenclature, one ought to speak of di-psychism as a consequence of the discovery and investigation of the somnambulant personality.20 The human being does not contain one but two functionally separate consciousnesses or personalities21 of which the comparatively narrow one (the default or normal personality), in order to accommodate the current societal reality, is amputated, rudimentary.22 It is with this insight that the new psychology (for which Puységur’s was a trailblazer) brings into question the coherent rationality principle of the Enlightenment while also signalling the discontinuation of the continuity idea which, in thinkers from Leibniz to Schelling and Goethe, had been an important issue for all previous explorations of the unconscious. Let me add that this doubled as a break from Neoplatonism – or rather, its monistic articulation. Puységur’s theory – on the di-psychism fundamental to human [It is not, like the ‘co-conscious’, easily available to what is manifest but is rather made conscious with ‘difficulty’; generally, purposeful methods are necessary in order to make it clearly conscious. A third differentiation should be mentioned: the ‘co-conscious’ is made manifest without altering the experience and behaviour of the personality considerably. On the contrary, the manifestation of the unconscious catalyses personal modifications. At the level of cognitive presence it is to be recognized by such indications as bewilderment, illumination, trembling, and the like] (p. 240). 20 Marquis de Puységur, Essair sur les probabilities du somnambulisme magnétique, pour sevir à l’historie du magnétisme animal, vol. 1 (Amsterdam, 1784–1785), 20: J’ai fait ce que j’ai pu pour lier leurs idées dans le passage d’un état à l’autre, soit en entrant en crise, soit en sortant, cela m’a été impossible. La démarcation est si grande, qu’on peut regarder ces deux états comme deux existences différentes [I have done what I could to find linkages in the thoughts they expressed while passing from one state to another, either as they were entering into a crisis or coming out of one, but I was unable to do it. The difference between these two states is so pronounced that they can be seen as two different manners of being]. 21 G. H. Schubert, who bases his understanding of animal magnetism on material from the German Puységurists (Eberhard Gmelin, Johann Heineken, Johann Nathanael Pezold, and Arnold Wienholt), presumes the existence of three personalities in one and the same individual, able to express itself as states of normal consciousness – or somnambulism, or ‘Doppelschlaf ’ [double sleep] (note 15, p. 348). 22 Joachim Dietrich Brandis, Über psychische Heilmittel und Magnetismus (Copenhagen, 1818), 98–99: Frey von allen Banden, welche die momentane sinnliche Außenwelt dem Leben Anlegt, frey von allem Fachwerk des Denkens, wo nur das zum momentanen Bewußtsein kommen kann, was in diese sinnliche Außenwelt für den Augenblick paßt, liegt dem Magnetisirten auf einmal offen, was je in seinem Leben vorgegangen ist, ungeordnet, aber auch ungebunden [Free of all ties which the actual world of the senses imposes on his life, free of all the constraints of mind – where only that which in the world of the senses is appropriate for the present moment is allowed to enter his present consciousness – everything that has happened during his life lies open to the magnetized, disordered yet also unbound.]. Cf. Schiller who in Über die ästhetische Erziehung had spoken about ‘durch Abstumpfung der Gefühle den Charakter sicher zu stellen’ [securing the character by blunting the emotions] (NA XX, p. 351).

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consciousness and the comprehensive impact from the human psyche on the physical organism – is closely related to the Renaissance which, around the same time, characterized dualistic Gnosticism that (in an extreme form) was presented in the writings of the French mystic Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803).23 Nor were the eighteenth-century positions on the unconscious invulnerable to modification as a consequence of the studies of somnambulant consciousness. The reason was that as a consequence of the lowering of the threshold for perception, hypermnesia, and the enhanced general perception– both Leibniz’s ‘petites perceptions’ [small perceptions], Sulzer and Moritz’s forgotten, but unconsciously active, childhood memories, and Herder’s physiological unconscious grew to be considered elements of somnambulant consciousness, the state from which they were easily verbalizable. Thus personality, as a concept, could lay claim to a much wider expanse and range than hitherto, although it became fractured and now emerged as a personality conglomerate, the joint existence of widely disparate psychological persons in one physical body. On top of that, the phenomenon of magnetic rapport revealed the streaming of imaginings from one individual to another without the conveyance of sense organs; e. g., the magnetizer’s will could be seen to inhabit the magnetized person’s will and through it elicit physical changes in him.24 While the ‘rationality subject’ of the Enlightenment had enjoyed an ideally-perceived stable identity, clearly demarcated and imbued with a proportional, high degree of autonomy, the anthropology ushered in by animal magnetism left the same subject open and without 23 E. g. Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, Des Erreurs et de la vérité (1775). The German translation was done by Matthias Claudius and published as Irrtümer und Wahrheit … in 1782. Also, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, Tableau naturel des rapports qui existent entre Dieu, l’Homme et l’univers (1782) On Puységur’s relation to Saint-Martin, see Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud (New Haven and London, 1993), 68–69. See also Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 68. On Gnosticism in European culture, see P. Sloterdijk, Weltrevolution der Seele. Ein Lese- und Arbeitsbuch der Gnosis, ed. by T. H. Macho (Zürich, 1993). This title reprints an excerpt from Des erreurs et de la verité (pp. 721–727). 24 Marquis de Puységur, Essair sur les probabilities du somnambulisme magnétique, pour sevir à l’historie du magnétisme animal, vol. 1 (Amsterdam, 1784–1785), 17: ‘Le malade, dans cet état, entre dans un rapport si intime avec son magnétiseur, qu’on pourrait Presque dire qu’il en fait partie’ [In this state, the patient enters into a rapport with the magnetizer so intimate that one could almost say he becomes part of him]. Cf. Tardy de Montravel, Essai sur la théorie du somnambulisme magnétique (London, 1785), 67: ‘Les deux individus ne font plus qu’un seul instrument harmonique, dans lequel les discordances seules retentissent, & c’est aussi par cette raison que le Somnambule verra mon foie est malade’ [The two individuals are no more than a single harmonic instrument in which only discordances resound, and it is for that reason that the somnambulist will see that my liver suffers from a malady]. The idea is that the diseased organ is perceived by ‘the sixth sense’ (ibid., 70–71) because its condition deviates from harmony.

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demarcation – inwardly to latent personalities and – outwardly to other individuals’ wills and thoughts.25 The observations and theories of Puységur and his French students were already spreading rapidly – from Strasbourg (where the Puységurists cohered) to Germany – before the revolution, which put a temporary stop to practitioners of animal magnetism. The main figures of the German phase were the mathematician and physicist Johann Lorenz Böckmann (1741–1802), the anatomist and physicist Johann Heineked (1761–1851), the physician Arnold Wienholt (1749– 1804), and – the most brilliant among them – the physician Eberhard Gmelin (1751–1808). It was on the work of these four pioneers that the physician and philosopher Gotthilf Friedrich Schubert based his presentation of animal magnetism (lectures 13 and 14) when in 1808 he published his Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft [Views from the nightside of science], a work which was to greatly influence the German romantics. Unlike the Frenchmen who overwhelmingly were interested in the therapeutic aspects, the German scientists tended to direct their attention to the general anthropological consequences. This is probably the reason why they had an evident impact on the poetry and philosophy of the day. The hypothesis that the phenomenon of one-way amnesia had consequences for the identity of the I can be traced as far back as Eberhard Gmelin, who surmised that this was so. In his magnum opus, appropriately entitled Materialien für die Anthropologie [Materials for an anthropology] (1791), he follows Augustine26 in equating ‘personality’ with the I’s recollections of previous perceptions and reactions (‘Gegenwirkungen’, p. 65). Whether rendered som-

25 The concept of ‘sympathy’ (like the other sym-activities which greatly interested the German romantics) thus underwent a very specific increase in psychological significance. Tardy de Montravel claims that through the somnambulant experiment ‘on découvre la cause physique des sympathies, des antipathies qu’on a connues, dont on a parlé de tout temps, sans pouvoir en render raison’ [one discovers the physical background for the sympathies and antipathies one has been experienced and talked about all along, without being able to explain them] (op. cit., p. 69). Cf. Chevalier de Barbarin, Système raisonné du magnétisme universel. D’après les principes de M. Mesmer (Paris, 1786), 80: ‘On sait en second lieu, que les ames ont la faculté d’agir les unes sur les autres’ [Secondly, we know that souls are capable of influencing one another]. As evidenced by Schiller’s letter to his friend Körner (17 May 1788), Herder too was among those greatly fascinated with this aspect of animal magnetism ‘woraus er die Sympathien und Antipathien … erklärt’ [from which he explains sympathies and antipathies]. An equivalent viewpoint is expressed in the Swiss physician Johann Rahn’s work Über Sympathien und Magnetismus (1789). An entire chapter in C. A. Eschenmayer’s Psychologie in drei Theilen als empirische, reine und angewandte (Stuttgard/Tübingen, 1817) is devoted to ‘Die Stufe der magnetischen Sympathie’ [the level of magnetic sympathy] (p. 241ff.). The literature on animal magnetism contains plenty of other examples detailing the attempt to nest the concept of sympathy inside magnetic rapport. Cf. Crabtree (note 23), 120–122. 26 Saint Augustine, Confessiones, book X.

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nambulant spontaneously or via artificial means, it is true of the somnambulant person that Es was also veränderte Persönlichkeit; es was eine andere Person, welche im Anfall handelte und empfand; eine andere, welche im natürlichen Zustan handelte und empfand [It was a changed personality, then; it was another person who was acting and feeling during the attack; another person who, in a natural state of mind, was acting and feeling] (pp. 50–51).

And this ‘other person’ ‘bleibt also ein freies moralisches Wesen und ist kein bloβ materielles Automat’ [thus remains a free moral being and not a mere material automat] (p. 253). Indeed, he ought to be regarded as occupying a higher state of delevopment than the default personality, insofar that ‘Der ganze Mensch wird in den zu Einem vereinigten geistigen und thierischen Grundtrieben erhöhet und veredelt’ [the whole person becomes one, elevated and ennobled, out of these combined spiritual and animal base drives] (p. 365). And – not surprisingly – the criterion for whether the test person really is somnambulant is ‘subjectiv erhöhetes Empfindungsvermögen und subjective erhöhete Seelenfähigkeiten’ [a subjectively raised emotional register and subjectively raised mental faculties] (p. 255). What proved controversial was the evaluation of somnambulism. The author of Versuch einer Darstellung des animalischen Magnetismus als Heilmittel [Attempt to depict animal magnetism as a cure] (Berlin, 1811), Carl Alexander Ferdinand Kluge, sums up his notes on the curiosity of the somnambulant state this: Wir wurden … nicht abwärts zur Sinnlichkeit übergeführt, sondern stiegen vielmehr aufwärts, und näherten un simmer mehr dem inner geistigen Menschen [We were not led downwards to sensuality but rather ascended and were getting closer and closer to the inner spiritual person].

What he had found was keine Truggebilde einer exaltierten Phantasie, sonder höhere, erweckte Kräfte, die zwar ungekannt und ungeahnet in dem Innern des Menschen schlummerten [no phantasm from an exalted fantasy but higher, aroused forces which nevertheless were slumbering in human beings] (18152, p. 307).

In Schelling’s view, on the other hand, the somnambulant phenomena were indications of the human connection with what lies beneath, with the general psychical and chemical laws of nature, with the forces of the universe.27 In this, he 27 F. W. J. von Schelling, Aphorismen zur Einleitung in die Naturphilosophie (1806):

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concurs with the rationalist Ernst Platner who (in Neue Anthropologie), as already stated, had declared that Das thierische Seelenorgan ist das unwesentlichere und unedlere, und erweckt in der Seele jene verworrenen, au seiner zahlenlosen Vielheit undeutlicher Gefühle zusammengesetzen Vorstellungen von dem Werkzeuge, und die von diesen Ideen abhängende angenehmen, oder unangenehmen Empfindungen [the animal soul organ is of comparatively less significant and noble and gives rise, in the soul, to both the confused notions about the state, composed as it is of innumerable indistinct emotions, and to the agreeable or disagreeable feelings that depend of these notions] (p. 72).28 Auch die hartnäckigste Angewöhnung, in der Natur die bloße Objektivität zu sehen, hätten längst die Erscheinungen außerordentlicher Zustände des Menschen, an welchen, selbst nach der gemeinen Vorstellung, die Seele keinen Theil hat, überwinden können, z. B. die geschickten und sicheren Handlungen des Nachtwandlers, die völlig so bewußtlos geschehen, und dennoch nicht selten ebenso viel Zweckmäßigkeit verrathen als die Handlungen der Thiere, der beständigen Somnambulisten [Even the most obstinate habit of seeing mere objectivity in nature could no doubt long ago have been overcome by contemplation of man’s extraordinary states, in which the soul, according to ordinary understanding, plays no role; for example, take the elegant and certain movements of the sleepwalker, which occur completely unconsciously, and yet not infrequently betray just as much effectiveness as the actions of animals, those constant somnambulists.]. 28 From a psychoanalytic perspective, the phenomena of somnambulism must be categorized as belonging to the ‘preconscious’ or ‘unconscious’ system, or (in the nomenclature later adopted by Freud) the unconscious part of ‘das Ich and das Es’, the ego and the id. It is a fairly common understanding that these psychic areas or functions deserved to be viewed as rather primitive or infantile, the residual derivates of atavistic drives and libidinous and aggressive ideas and energies. This portrait of the unconscious, however, seems incompatible with observations concerning the somnambulant unconscious which a large group of scientists collected and systematized over half a century starting in the 1780s. It goes without saying that the early magnetizers and Freud represent very different, historically determined ‘Vorverständnisse’ [preconceptions] with regards to what a human being fundamentally is. To the magnetizers, the three parts constituting a human being – mind, soul, and body – were equally real, while Freud in his premature declaration proved himself an heir of the political theory of liberalism, the ontological materialism of positivism, and Darwin’s hypothesised idea that the primitive and undifferentiated evolved biologically to become highly developed and specified. Having said that, psychoanalysis is not quite as simplistic as is often assumed. It is interesting to note how Freud, in his life-long attempts to pin down ‘the unconscious’, ‘the primary process’, and ‘das Es’ (the id), oscillates between a low and a high taxonomy, as energetically pointed out by Anton Ehrenzweig (The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing, 1953). As early as Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) (1900), Freud presented the ‘high’ taxonomy, e. g. in the remark about ‘die Hypermnesie des Traums’ (SA II, 560) and in the following characteristic: ‘In dem Traumgedanken fanden wir die Beweise einer höchst komplizierten, mit fast allen Mitteln des seelischen Apparats arbeitenden, intellektuellen Leistung’ [In the dream thoughts we located evidence for a highly complicated intellectual achievent, involving all the means of the mental apparatus] (ibid., 561). In Das Ich and das Es (1923), the trend is even more evident: Wir haben einerseits Belege dafür, daß selbst feine und schwierige intellektuellen Arbeit, die

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Primarily, animal magnetism offered the romantic poets a picture of the anthropological consequence of di-psychism. The somnambulant state reveals the potentials inherent in the human being, reveals what it might become. Not considered by the developmental model (which includes the belief in human enlightenment and progress), this potential is already fully manifested in each human being and is not the result of an ‘Erziehung des Menschengeschlects’ [The education of the human race], the long road from religious through metaphysical on to rational thinking, to borrow the French physiocrat Turgot’s words from 1750. The view that progress would happen as a result of the passing of time is replaced by the notion of psychic epiphany, the emergence of the hidden; in other words, a qualitative shift to another latent personality system. This conception, combined with outright spiritualism, is in my view the core field of romantic anthropology. But this view entails the realization that ‘romantics’ like Schelling and Ritter, as far as their anthropological perspective is concerned, must be said to hold on to and promote the continuity-stressing cognitive and vital conceptualisations of the unconscious that were the product of the Enlightenment. It is hardly a coincidence that Jean Paul (the first person to use the term ‘das Unbewuβte’) who in the science of the period accords animal magnetism such centrality of place that it acquires an almost messianic dimension: Es ist ein wohlthätiges Wunder, daβ derselbe Magnet, welcher uns mit seiner Nadel die zweite Hälfte des Erdballs zeigte und gab, auch in der Geisterwelt eine neue Welt entdecken half. Schwerlich hat irgend ein Jahrhundert unter den Entdeckungen, welche auf die menschliche Doppeltwelt von Leib und Geist zugleich Licht werfen, eine gröβere gemacht als das vorige am organischen Magnetismus; nur daβ Jahrhunderte zur Erziehung und Pflege des Wunderkindes gehören, bis dasselbe zum Wunderthäter der Welt aufwächst [It is an satisfying wonder that the same magnet whose needle gave us the other half of the globe also helped us discover a new world in the spiritual world. It is hard to point to another century in which a greater discovery was made by those who simultaneously shed light on the human double world of life and soul than the previous century with its

sonst angestrengtes Nachdenken erfordert, auch vorbewußt geleistet warden kann, ohne zum Bewußtsein zu kommen. … Wollen wir zu unserer Wertskala zurückkehren, so müssen wir sagen: Nicht nur das Tiefste, auch das Höchste am Ich kann unbewußt sein [We are, on the one hand, justified in this because even fine and intellectual work, though it ordinarily demands challenging reflection, can be carried out subconsciously without being made conscious. Returning to our scale of value, we discover: Not only the deepest but also the highest in the I can be unconscious] (SA III, 295). One need not turn to Ludwig Klages (Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 1929–1932), Jung, or Viktor E. Frankl (Der unbewußte Gott, 19492) to locate contemporary parallels to Puységur and his followers.

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organic magnetism: it takes centuries only to raise and nurture this prodigy before it grows into one capable of doing miracles in the world].29

Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘the greatest thinker of romanticism’30, offers an almost higher estimation. While writing the first volume of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, 1819), he still seems to share Schelling’s standpoint.31 But in 1836, in the text Über den Willen in der Natur (On the Will in Nature), in which with regret he registers his lack of comprehension of the full consequences of animal magnetism (‘eine direkte Bestätigung meiner Lehre’ [a direct confirmation of my theory])32, he has altered his view considerably to share Puységur’s purely psychological conception, augmented with powerful philosophical implications: Der animalische Magnetismus tritt demnach geradezu als die praktische Metaphysik auf …: er ist die empirische oder Experimental-Metaphysik. – Weil ferner im animalischen Magnetismus der Wille als Ding an sich hervortritt, sehn wir das der bloβen Erscheinung angehörige principium individuationis (Raum und Zeit) alsbald vereitelt: seine die Individuen sondernden Schranken warden durchbrochen; zwichen Magnetisur und Somnambule sind Räume keine Trennung, Gemeinschaft der Gedanken und Willensbewegungen tritt ein: der Zustand des Hellsehns setzt über die der bloβen Erscheinung angehörenden, durch Raum and Zeit bedingten Verhältnisse, Nähe und Ferne, Gegenwart und Zukunft, hinaus [Animal magnetism therefore acts just like the practical metaphysics … it is empirical or experimental metaphysics. Furthermore, in animal magnetism the will appears as a thing in itself, and we therefore see that the ‘principium individuationis’ pertaining to mere appearance is made superfluous: those barriers that separate individuals are penetrated; between the magnetizer and the somnambulant there are no separating rooms, (so) a community of thoughts and volition arises: an enlightened state transcends those realities appertaining to strict appearance and those realities merely dependent on space and time, nearness and remoteness, presence and future].33 29 Jean Paul, Muthmaßungen über einige Wunder des organischen Magnetismus (1814), in Jean Pauls sämtliche Werke, vol. 16, Hist.-krit., part 1 (Weimar, 1938). More than 25 years before, Jean Paul had turned his attention to animal magnetism. He wrote notes to Eberhard Gmelin (Über Thierischen Magnetismus [Tübingen, 1787]) between 1788 and 1789 and to the journal Magnetisches Magazin für Niederdeutschland, ed. by J. H. Cramer (Bremen 1787– 1788). Cf. Götz Müller, Jean Pauls Exzerpte (Würzburg, 1988). 30 Ludwig Marcuse, ‘Reaktionäre und progressive Romantik’, in Helmut Prang, ed., Begriffsbestimmung der Romantik (Darmstadt, 1968), 379. 31 Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Wolfgang Frhr. Von Löhneysen (Darmstadt, 1968), 1:224: ‘Der andere, diesem entgegengesetzte Fall ist der, wo ungekehrt das Licht der Erkenntnis in die Werkstätte des blindwirkenden Willens eindringt und die vegetativen Funktionen des menschlichen Organismus beleuchtet: im magnetischen Hellsehn’ [The other case, which runs counter to this, sees the light of realization penetrate into the blindly operating will’s workshop illuminating the vegetative functions of the human organism]. 32 Ibid., vol. III, 423. 33 Ibid., vol. III, 429. As early as 1813, Deleuze had proclaimed that the phenomena of som-

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And finally we have – in Versuch über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt (Essay on Spirit Seeing and everything connected therewith), Schopenhauer’s great 1851 treatise which sums up the philosophical consequences of animal magnetism while anticipating important, but frequentlyignored aspects of Freud’s psychoanalysis – his definitive opinion: Der animalische Magnetismus ist freilich nicht vom ökonomischen und technologischen, aber wohl vom philosophischen Standpunkt aus betrachtet die inhaltschwerste aller jemals gemachten Entdeckungen; wenn er auch einstweilen mehr Rätsel aufgibt als lost [Animal magnetism is – seen not from an economic or technological perspective but from a philosophical perspective – one of the most content heavy of all discoveries, in spite of the fact that it sometimes poses more riddles than it resolves].34

Some of the things which Schopenhauer realized philosophically relatively belatedly had, however, already been introduced into the conceptual repertoire of the poets in the early phase of German romanticism.35 It is important here to nambulism provide and experimental proof that Kant was right to consider time, space and causality properties of the intellect (in its normal state, that is) and not properties existing in the world. This perspective reappears in the medical professor Dietrich Georg Kieser’s foreword to volume 1 of his journal Archiv für den thierischen Magnetismus (Lpz., 1817). 34 Ibid., vol. IV, 323. 35 The very simple – and historical – reason why I am here talking about German romanticism exclusively is that the animal magnetism became a research discipline and general cultural factor much earlier in Germany than in other Western countries. The French Revolution of 1789 brought the exploration of animal magnetism to a screeching halt, and the hiatus lasted more than 25 years (cf. Dominique Barrucand, Histoire de l’hypnose en France [Paris, 1967], 31). In his historical overview of 1813, Deleuze (cf. note 16, 35) describes how any engagement with the controversial topic caused practitioners to be persecuted. One such victim was Puységur himself who suffered two years’ incarceration and only saved his life because, being an artillery officer, he was more useful if sent to the army than the guillotine. Following the revolutionary wars the research started up again, but it never gained the same status and popularity as in romantic Germany. Only in Balzac (e. g. his Ursule Mirouet, 1841) can the influence be detected. The situation was unchanged until 1880 when it suddenly altered so radically that, from then on, research in France into the fields of hypnosis, suggestion, and paranormal phenomena was unrivalled by any other country in Europe. The central contributors were Hippolyte Bernheim and Pierre Janet (Freud’s mentors). In England, Puységur’s ideas gained a foothold in the 1790s (J. B. de Mainauduc and John Bell; cf. Crabtree [note 23]) but the situation changed after the turn of the century when the ‘foreign’ ideas began to be regarded with indifference or suspicion. In the following years, not much changed: ‘The mesmeric movement in England from 1800 to 1837 was a pale and scattered shadow of continental activities. The movement had no public presence of any consequence in England for almost forty years’, writes Fred Kaplan in Dickens and Mesmerism. The Hidden Springs of Fiction (1975), 11. On the other hand, that situation was redressed over a surprisingly brief time, due primarily to the pioneer John Elliotson (a medical professor in London) but also subsequently to the physician James Braid’s outstanding work on hypnosis (his preferred term for animal magnetism) between 1843 and 1860. In the USA, specifically New England, the late 1830s and 1840s were booming times for animal magnetism (cf. Crabtree [note 23], 213). The traces hereof are evident in Edgar Allan Poe’s writings.

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distinguish between two entirely different ways of fictionalizing animal magnetism. The negative type places great importance on partly the dissolution of personality and partly the unsettling consequences of having a stranger’s consciousness intrude into the will and imaginings of one’s psyche. Conversely, in the positive perspective the flickering emergence of the unconscious personality is viewed as a way to reach a deeper truth about the human being and its infinite possibilities. It is tempting to regard the negative perspective as a colourful and melodramatic fictionalization of the psychological body of problems. However, such an approach ignores the fact that the poets – with their plastic and tensioncharged concretisations in which intra-psychic relations were dramatized as the conflicts between acting characters – frequently were able to present psychological insight far exceeding, in perspective and richness of nuance, the clinical and theoretical presentations. Exemplifying such a contribution to insight as a result of the symbolizing process are the literary motifs of the ‘doppelgänger’ and ‘the heteronomous individual’. It is not a long way from the anthropological idea of the fundamentally fractionated consciousness of human beings to the notion that the hidden personality might liberate itself from the total personality and, like some doppelgänger, physically and psychologically live its own life while, at the same time, separate from and intervening in the life of the person. The word ‘doppelgänger’ in European literature is first used by Jean Paul in the novel Siebenkäs (1796/1797). Alongside actual doppelgängers, his later novels also contain the motifs of the mirror image – specifically, the fear of uncanny mirror reflections. In these texts as well as in the works of other romantics (Hoffman, Brentano, and Chamisso), the doppelgängers or mirror-selves are unrecognized, or denied sub-personalities, incompatible with or unacceptable to the individual’s previous self-image and, for that reason, frightening.36 It ought not be necessary to further pursue this familiar central romantic motif, which is so closely connected to the new ideas driving the anthropology of the era. Less clearly defined and less thoroughly explored as a literary motif is ‘the heteronomous individual’, subject to external orders and represented as the relationship between magnetizer and magnetized, in which the person ex-

36 The best-known example from Danish literature is probably H. C. Andernsen’s ‘Skyggen’ [The shadow] (1847), which ingeniously unfolds an element of the poetic potential of Hoffmann’s short story ‘Das öde Haus’ (‘The deserted house’). Cf. Uffe Hansen, ‘Det tomme hus. Om H. C. Andersens eventyr “Lygtemændene ere i Byen, sagde Mosekonen”’, Nordica (1995). The similarly frequently occuring motif of the marionet must be comprehended with appeal to vitalism (although not in Kleist, as the following will show). The marionet is the machine (cf. La Mettrie, L’Homme machine, 1747) absent ‘vital force’.

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presses itself through actions, which unbeknownst to the person, have been implanted in him or her (posthypnotic suggestion). Prior to romanticism, poetry is characterised by the almost inevitable feature that the forces determining the thoughts and actions of its fictional characters stem from their own autonomous personalities: Handlungen und Ereignisse sollen ‘wahrscheinlich’ und auf die Absichten der Figuren widerspruchsfrei bezogen sein, diese müssen jene begründen und umgekehrt [Acts and events need to be ‘plausible’ and consistently related to the intentions of the characters; these must justify them and vice versa].37

This also applies to ‘im Irrationalismus der Affekte’ [in the irrationalism of affects], where – in spite of all unreason – ‘eine weltumspannende Übereinstimmung des Menschen mit sich selbst’ [a total accord of the human being with itself] is present.38 One might even justifiably argue that the more emphatically a character’s emotional quality, imaginative propensity, even folly, are represented, the more originally individual, unified although complex, and characterologically complete does the he or she appear. Autonomy is, therefore, not necessarily the equivalent to ‘sensible action’, but might also mean the concordance between a person’s actions and his collective cognitive, emotional, and volitional qualities. This is evident from the paragon examples of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Wieland’s Agathon, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. But what about characters such as Hoffmann’s? Medardus, the little kind monk from the novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir) (1815/1816) is, from a certain moment in the story, governed not by his own intentions nor passions but by forces which clearly operate from outside of his personality and which force him to relive the dissolute lives of his forefathers.39 The clumsy, provincial student Anselmus, in Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot) from 1814, whose spiritual horizon reaches no further than coffee with rum, beer, and girls, experiences all of a sudden a veritable invasion of strange visions and skills surprising to himself, all of which stem from the kindly, but demanding wizard and archivist Lindhorst. Considering Hoffmann’s great conversancy with the literature on animal magnetism and his familiarity with several of its practitioners, it is perhaps no wonder that he suggests a connection between the heteronomy of several of his characters and the alleged reality of telepathy so central to ‘magnetism’. The short story ‘Das öde Haus’ (‘The Deserted House’) (1817) 37 Rolf Grimminger, Die Ordnung, da Chaos und die Kunst. Für eine neue Dialektik der Afklärung. Frankfurt a.M. 1990 (19861), 45. 38 Ibid., 89. 39 The ‘familial unconscious’ (cf. Pongratz [note 3], 224ff.), a favourite motif in romanticism, manifests itself, among other places, in the genre ‘fate tragedy’ and in anti-Bildungsromans such as Eduard Mörike’s Maler Nolten (1832).

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features ‘ein junger, dem Magnetismus ergebener Arzt’ [a young physician dedicated to the art of magnetism], who offers an explanation of certain mysterious occurrences, puzzling to the first-person narrator, by referring to the common experience that a strange idea can suddenly take control over ‘our entire selves’. And he then rhetorically asks: Wie wenn dies plötzliche Hineinspringen fremder Bilder in unsere Ideenreihe, die uns gleich mit besondere Kraft zu ergreifen pflegen, eben durch ein fremdes psychisches Prinzip veranlaβt würde? Wie wenn es dem fremden Geist unter gewissen Umständen möglich wäre, den magnetischen Rapport auch ohne Vorbereitung so herbeizuführen, daβ wir uns willenlos ihm fügen müβten? [What if the sudden emergence in our thoughts of these foreign images, generally manifesting themselves with remarkable force, is caused by a foreign psychic principle? What if under certain conditions it is possible for the foreign spirit, even without prior effort, to conjure the magnetic rapport so that we involuntarily must obey it?].40

As should be evident, the heteronomous personality offers a conceptualiztion of the unconscious that is quite different from the one emerging from the doppelgänger stories. Doppelgängers, mirror reflections, and shadows undeniably constitute separated parts formerly making up one and the same personality conglomerate, whilst the emotions and notions that govern the actions of the heteronomous individual are conveyed by psychic infusion, so to speak, from one or more other individuals. No doubt the guiding empirical evidence for such a trans-personality was the demonstration, provided by animal magnetism, that telepathy could occur in situations involving rapport; however, it would be wrong to reduce the meaning of the motive to a fictionalization of a more-or-less wellfounded set of psychological – or parapsychological – observations. The opportunity for making new observations is highly dependent on the entirety of the historical moment, as well as the available enabling paradigms. In the context of history of ideas, we are, therefore, dealing with something rather more comprehensive, namely the gradual emergence of a doubt as to whether the autonomous rational subject of the Enlightenment and the organically growing personality in classicism really are so securely railed off from other psyches. The question is if the ‘kopernikanische Wende’ [Copernican turn] of individualism during the last half of the seventeenth century, the violent insistence on the ‘Einmaligkeit’ [singularity] of the individual and its autonomy (reflected in the poetry, philosophy, and political theories of the time) are not indicators of the fact that the individual has, at this point, become a problem. When so much is said on the subject, the reason may be that it is no longer self-evident; rather, the individual’s a priori right to be appears to be under attack from different sides which 40 E. T. A. Hoffmann, Phantasie- und Nachtstücke, (Munich: Winkler, 1967), 476–477.

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necessitates that an argument and a defence for it be provided.41 In a remarkable analysis, Rolf Grimminger has shown that the more rationalism keeps emphasizing ‘das zweckrationale Streben in die Zukunft’ [the instrumentally rational striving for the future], the less legitimacy is the individual granted: So wird man zwar reich an rational planbarer Zukunft, aber auch arm an unverplant lebendiger Gegenwart. Man organisiert sich zum Mittel für Zukünftiges, das noch nicht ist, während, was ist, nicht bei sich selbst verweilen darf, weil es ständing voraus in die Zukunft werweisen muβ [One then gets rich in rationally calculable future, yet also poor in the unplanned living present. One makes plans as a means to a future, which as yet is not, while that which is, is not allowed to remain as it is, because it must always be relegated to the future].42

And Michel Foucault has described how, precisely in this period, when the individual is ideologically liberated from previous bonds, the power of institutions begins to dominate so powerfully that only ‘disciplinary individual’ is welcome, i. e. an individual who has absorbed and can regard foreign regulations as authentic parts of the self. From that perspective, those of Hoffmann’s characters who do not think their own thoughts exclusively or carry out their own authentic actions, gain a certain historical and socio-psychological dimension that reaches far beyond the merely individually psychological.43 My reason for describing these two motivational complexes as ‘negative’ variants of the anthropology of animal magnetism is the fact that they negate the ruling fundamental premise of personality psychology: ‘the I’ is an indivisible entity clearly separate from every other person’s I. But this negation of individuality might with equal plausibility be turned into a positive qualification. This is what happened when Schopenhauer, after the first publication of the first volume of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819), returned to the original understanding of animal magnetism and now decided to define the somnambulant personality as that in which ‘unser innerstes Wesen oder das Ding an sich’ [our inmost being or the thing-in-itself] were permitted to emerge.44 In this radical rendition of Kantian idealism, the person could, utilizing his or her ‘Traumorgan’45 [dream organ] (an ability to perceive unrestrictedly by the five senses and the a 41 Marianne Kesting, ‘Der Abbau der Persönlichkeit.Zur Theorie der Figur im modernen Drama’, in Werner Kellere, ed., Beiträge zur Poetik des Dramas (Darmstadt, 1976), 212. 42 Grimminger (note 36), 51–52. 43 The actual age of mass psychology was admittedly not before the 1880s – cf. Susanne Barrow, Distorting Mirrors. Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven and London, 1981) – but the psychological groundwork was already established by the time of animal magnetism. 44 Arthur Schopenhauer, Versuch über das Geistersehen, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Wolfgang Frhr. Von Löhneysen (Darmstadt, 1968), 1:319. 45 Ibid., 336.

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priori forms of the intellect), realize the will ‘der ja der Kern des ganzen Menschen ist’ [which is the core of the whole person] as the true foundation of the phenomenal world. It is, however, Schopenhauer’s view that a person’s discovery that the ‘principium individuationis’ amounts to a trick of the will is predicated on this type of perception. These thoughts entail this significant insight (fundamental for Schopenhauer’s ethic): Bejahung des Willens zum Leben, Erscheinungswelt, Diversität aller Wesen, Individualität, Egoismus, Haβ, Bosheit entspringen au seiner Wurzel; und ebenso andererseits Welt des Dinges an sich, Identität aller Wesen, Gerechtigkeit, Menschenliebe, Verneinung des Willens zum Leben [On the one hand, the affirmation of life, of the phenomenal world, of the diversity, individuality, egoism, hatred, and evil of all beings, springs from one root; and on the other hand, the same is true for the world in itself, for the identity, justice, and philanthropy of all beings and for the denial of the will to life].46

This sudden and brief appearance of a free and knowing personality – struggling with the bounded and restricted, but absolutely domineering, normal personality – is the foundational theme in the works of Heinrich von Kleist.47 Instead of presenting the important function of the somnambulant personality in those of his works that thematize it expressis verbis (e. g. in the plays Das Kätchen von Heilbronn and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg) I shall consider one of his short stories, ‘The Engagement in St. Domingo’ (1811), in which the problem of the dual personality may seem less evident but nonetheless determines the turning point of the story. The historical framing is the Haitian Revolution of 1794, ‘in the days when the blacks were killing the whites’.48 The old Negro, Congo Hoango, has butchered his master and his family and now wanders the surrounding area heading an armed throng, in order to kill white runaways heading for Port au Prince, the last of the French fortresses. He has left his partner, the old Babekan, and her beautiful, fair-skinned, 15-year-old daughter, Toni, on the plantation. The two women are tasked with luring passing white refugees into thinking it safe for them to rest 46 Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 2, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Wolfgang Frhr. Von Löhneysen (Darmstadt, 1968), 2:780–781. 47 Cf. Uffe Hansen, ‘I det gotiske laboratorium’, Ny Poetik, 1 (1993): 22–23; also, Uffe Hansen, ‘Der Aufklärer in extremis. Heinrich von Kleists “Die Marquise von O…” und die Psychologie des Unbewuβten im jahre 1807’, in Aufklärung als Problem und Aufgabe. Festschrift für SvenAage Jørgensen (Munich/Copenhagen, 1994), 216–234. Concerning Kleist’s earlier contact with the German branch of the Puységurarians, cf. Uffe Hansen, ‘Der Schlüssel zum Rätsel der Wüzburger reise Heinrich von Kleists’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 51 (1997): 170–209. 48 Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O- and Other Stories, trans. by Martin Greenberg (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing C., 1973), 193. For the German original, see Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner, 2 vols. (Munich, 1993), 2:160.

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there a few days, upon which Congo Hoango is notified in order that he may happen upon the unsuspecting. They perform this task with the greatest cunning and without the slightest misgivings. One night, a young Swiss officer, Gustav von der Ried, knocks on the door and asks for help on behalf of himself and his relatives hiding in a nearby forest. With Toni as decoy, Babekan manages, under various pretexts, to persuade Gustav to stay the night and not let his relatives join him at the plantation until next day. Her plans, however, are foiled when Toni, suddenly gripped by ‘a human feeling’, chooses to tie her fate to the young Swiss and deceive her mother by pretending to still be in on the murderous plan. By dawn, just as Babekan has begun to suspect her daughter, Congo Hoango and his men suddenly show up and, in order to save Gustav from being killed, immediately, Toni ties the drowsy young man to the bed, pretending to have merely feigned love for him the whole time in an attempt to secure the delivery of him to his executioners. She is successful in warning Gustav’s relatives enabling them to carry out a surprise attack and free the prisoner. Gustav, however, fails to realise Toni’s self-sacrificing deceit and shoots her out of boundless disappointment and hate. His relatives inform him of the correct circumstances, and then, upon hearing the dying Toni’s final words (‘you should not have mistrusted me’), he fires a bullet into his head. It is a blood-soaked tale of great and inexplicable love – or of man’s difficulty grasping ‘the mysterious ways of the world’. At any rate, this is how interpreters of the story have commonly received it. Literary scholars tend, when approaching psychological issues, to be painstakingly modest and ahistorical; in extreme instances, when everyday psychology (whatever that is) is deemed to be insufficient, say, then Freud – at his most biologistic and therefore ahistorical – is revisited. But Kleist dramatizes a historically specific psychology. The story’s underlying structure is the Puységurists’ conviction that the di-psychism central to human beings endows it with two systems of cognition: the normal person’s rational cognition and the somnambulant person’s transcendental insight. In this context, the story’s beginning and end are fully programmatic in that they both reveal the defects of the functional mode associated with normal personality. The backdrop to the main narrative – concerning Congo Hoango’s relationship to his master Guillaume de Villeneuve – includes so many positive aspects that the logical conclusion should have involved the freed slave sacrificing himself in order to save his benefactor. But that is not how it turns out: the rational mind comes up short due to a series of unpredictable factors playing themselves out between the story’s initial premise and outcome.49 The same divide separating 49 In Congo Hoango’s case, one of these factors consists in his ignoring his own individuality and his own personal relations with Mr. de Villeneuve, and switching to the collective consciousness, ‘remembering the tyranny that had torn him from his native land’ (p. 194).

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premise and outcome haunts the denouement of the story: the clear intellect of the freed Gustav must conclude that Toni is a diabolical hypocrite and opportunist. How in the world can he integrate into his normal perceptive apparatus the ‘wonder’ that is Toni’s – to herself – unfathomable and unconditional love for him, a stranger? The ‘extraordinary event’ of the story is the psychological shift in her. Everything in her previous life – her unchallenged loyalty to Babekan and Congo Hoango, her coldblooded faux seduction act and complicity in the murders of a contingent of white men (p. 211) – would set her up to beholding in Gustav only a member of a despised race. When, nevertheless, her mental disposition, in one instance, is inverted, the narrator carefully omits all suggestion that this is either due to moral scruples, on the one hand, or blossoming love, on the other. Instead, what has happened is that she, to begin with, ‘took a seat next to him, her elbows propped on the table, and stared into his face as he ate’ (p. 201). A little later, ‘leaning her head pensively on her hand’ (p. 202), she reacts to Gustav’s tale of the young negress who, out of vengefulness, deliberately infects her white paramour with the plague by ‘looking down confused’ (p. 204). Her mental state when she is finally, on Babekan’s order, alone together with the stranger is given this description: ‘she hestitated dreamily for a moment …, as a charming blush flamed in her sunburned face’ (p. 206), ‘dreamily’ (p. 206) an culminating in: ‘a feeling of compassion, awakened by many things, came over her; with an abrupt movement she followed him to the window, threw her arms around his neck, and mingled her tears with his’ (p. 208). Upon giving herself to Gustav, she enters a paralyzed, trance-like state: ‘hung lifelessly’ (p. 209). It should be clear that Kleist is weaving together keywords associated with the emergence of the somnambulant personality. Not until her departure from Gustav does consciousness of the present manifest situation make a return to her – although only to the degree that her subsequent conversation with an understandably puzzled Babekan is punctuated by her avowal of now having moral doubts for contributing to the unfolding ‘abominations’ (p. 211). Following this, her prior craftiness and imagination make a come-back, although this time these are guided by her noble motive engendered during her dreamily absent episode and still manifesting itself in her normal state (‘posthypnotic suggestion’, as described by De Mouilleseaux, cf. note no. 17). A significant aspect of what I consider the emergence of her spontaneously somnambulant personality is that she, in Gustav’s eyes, at first unconsciously50

50 Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner, vol. 2 (Munich, 1993), 172: ‘Dabei fiel ihm eine entfernte Ähnlichkeit, er wuβte noch selbst nicht mit wem, auf, die er schon bei seinem Eintritt in das Haus bemerkt hatte, und die seine ganze Seele für sie in Anspruch nahm’ [At the same time he noticed a faint resemblance to somebody, though

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but later most obviously, blends with Mariane Congreve, his fiancé in Strasbourg, who during the revolution offered up her own life to save him from the guillotine – notably in an act whose clear Biblical allusions (‘I don’t know this man!’ [p. 208]) casts it as the prototype of disavowal and faithlessness. What in Gustav’s eyes is two women’s ‘amazing resemblance’ (p. 207) can hardly be so due to external likeness given the narrator’s explicit mention of Toni’s ‘sunburned face’ (p. 206). The perceived similarity might be due, rather, to Gustav’s unconscious and nonchronistic – in fact, clairvoyant – recognition that Toni’s heroic devotion is congruent with Mariane’s.51 This identification – in which the principle of individuation is of no import – is a consequence of the somnambulant rapport with Toni in whom it actualizes the very same latent, ennobled somnambulant personality that Puységur and his successors all the way up to Schopenhauer had described. If Toni is the apotheosis of the somnambulant personality, then Gustav embodies the tragedy central to the double personality. Just like the young man in Kleist’s treatise Über das Marionettentheater [On the marionette theatre], who unconsciously possesses ‘eine wunderbare Anmut’ [a wonderful grace], which he loses upon learning that he possesses it, Gustav is incapable of holding on to his vision of a faith beyond all understanding and regresses – once he has returned to his normal social situation – to the kind of reasoning of which the rational personality is capable. In a few brief nocturnal moments, however, he embodies what in Über das Marionettentheater is described thus: Wir sehen, daβ in dem Maβe, als, in der organischen Welt, die Reflexion dunkler und schwächer wird, de Grazie darin immer strahlender und herrschender hervortritt [We see that in the organic world as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively].

This ‘Grazie’ [grace] is fundamentally different from both Shaftesbury’s ‘moral beauty’ and Schiller’s ‘Anmut’ [grace] as it is defined in the great treatise Über Anmuth und Würde [On grace and dignity]: In einer schöen Seele ist es also, wo Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft, Pflicht und Neigung harmonieren, und Grazie ist ihr Ausdruck in der Erscheinung [Thus it is in the fair soul that sensuality and reason, duty and propensity are in harmony, and grace is its manifest expression].52 exactly to whom he himself could not say, which had struck him on first entering the house and which had won his heart completely]. 51 An exact parallel to this appears in the contemporary drama Prinz Friedrich von Hamburg in the introductory scene of which the declared somnambulant prince clairvoyantly foresees the drama’s ending. 52 Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, vol. 20, (Weimar, 1962), 288. Ironically enough, in 1793 Schiller approaches animal magnetism’s concept of personality. He introduces di-psychism – under the strong influence of Puységur’s most important German

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According to Kleist, the dispute is not – as it is in Shaftesbury and Schiller – between the physical and spiritual (moral) aspect of the person but rather between the normal time-and-space-inhabiting normal personality (whom also social and cultural factors constrict) and the super-normal, intermittently emerging personality ‘wo die menschliche Natur die Anker nach einer schöneren Heymath lichtet’ [where the human nature weighs anchor in order to find a fairer home].53 It cannot be emphasised enough that the conceptualisation of somnambulant phenomena endorsed by the Puységurists is completely void of any occultism. In the interest of completeness, however, it should be mentioned that as far back as the 1780s – when Mesmer’s mechanicist and Puységur’s psychological understanding of animal magnetism were current – a new interpretation of somnambulant phenomena emerged which, owing something to Swedenborg and St. Martin, viewed such phenomena as either the communication of souls cut off from sensory collaboration or direct messages from the spiritual realm.54 The former variant makes an appearance in the central figure of the so-called Lyon School, le Chevalier de Barbarin, whose viewpoints are expressed in the anonymous Système raisonné du magnetisme universel. D’après les principles de M. Mesmer [Reasoned system for a universal magnetism] (1786). In German romanticism, the radically spiritualistic viewpoint is primarily put forward by the poet Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling in Theorie der Geister-Kunde [Theory on the knowledge of ghosts] (1808), which considerably influenced Clemens Brentano, Justinus Kerner, and others. With such observations, we part with the conceptualization of the unconscious that is historically specific for the era of the romantic movement and approach a type of unconscious the universal quality of which is similar to that of demonology and spiritism. The historically unspecific mode is a characteristic of another conceptualisation of the unconscious, neglected in the present article: the metaphysical unconscious, i. e. an a priori determined unconscious whether ap-

student, Eberhard Gmelin – as a psychological pattern in the Wallenstein-trilogy (1798/1799). Cf. Uffe Hansen, ‘Schiller und die Persönlichkeitspsychologie des animalischen Magnetismus. Überlegungen zum Wallenstein’, in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 1995. 53 G. H. Schubert (note 15), 360. 54 It goes without saying that the direction is strongly represented in Sweden, pivoting in the Swedenborgian Exegetiska och Philantropiska Sällskapet. Cf. Crabtree (note 23), 70–72, and Karin Johannisson, Magnetisörernas tid. Den animal Magnetismen i Sverige (Uppsala, 1974). Among other things, Johannisson’s book is remarkable in that it contains a much more precise and differentiated overview of the development of animal magnetism in Germany than the otherwise admirable pioneering work on the unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York, 1970).

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pearing as innate ideas (Platonic anamnesis) or as the underlying principles of the intellect (Kantian apperceptive unconscious). In closing, I shall try to provide some answers to a question the sceptical reader is likely to ask: if the somnambulant unconscious is really so central to romanticism, how come it has inspired so few programmatic statements from the poets of the day? One answer is that the new conceptualisation of the unconscious was so far-reaching in its implications both theoretically and practically that it posed a challenge to the fundamental thoughts of European civilization far beyond the challenge posed by the familiar programmatic ideas of romanticism. While the new aesthetic opinions of romanticism were certainly controversial and pioneering, they were also fundamentally resonant with the brand of individualism which had increasingly characterized the thoughts of the second half of the eighteenth century. The same is true of both philosophy of nature – which across vast stretches of history completes the anti-Cartesian continuity notion – and historicism. The fact of the romantics’ support for the national state and the community-generating new mythology was relatively compatible with the superordinate political trends in the era of the revolutionary wars. This was not true when it came to animal magnetism, as Jean Paul and Schopenhauer fully recognized. For the contemporary scientific public it was true then as it is now that ‘men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn’, to quote from Aldous Huxley’s caustic and carefully entitled essay on the history of hypnosis ‘A Case of Voluntary Ignorance’ (1956). Furthermore, the phenomena of animal magnetism were so extremely incompatible with dominant axioms that they were rejected out of hand as tall tales – or, to quote Puységur’s student Jean François Fournel (1745–1820) on the reaction of several scientists: ‘Even if they were permitted to behold these phenomena with their own eyes, they would not believe them’.55 Alexander von Humboldt put it thus: ‘And were I to see and feel myself all these wonders, I would not believe in them for they go against the perennial laws of nature’. This, the reader will agree, presupposes that these ‘perennial laws’ had been uncovered once and for all and were, therefore, not up for debate. The only investigation of magnetic therapy carried out by official medical practitioners (i. e. the 1784 report of the royal French commission) was so commissorially limited (the object was to explore Mesmer’s claim that a hitherto unknown physical force was achieving magnetic healing) that the result was known in advance. The report concluded that the effects (which were not queried) were exclusively caused by patients’ imagination, at which conclusion the authors of the report embarked on attempts to explain the 55 Jean François Fournel, Essair sur les probabilities du somnambulisme magnétique, pour sevir à l’historie du magnétisme animal (Amsterdam, 1785), 20.

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relevant ‘imagination’, including precisely which organic changes might be imaginatively elicited. Furthermore, Mesmer had been so bold – or naïve – as to claim that his cure could heal all maladies. As a result of his tremendous success, physicians across the board dreaded losing their livelihood, which, in turn, led the medical institutions to immediately threaten all members with excommunication if they implemented mesmeristic procedures while treating patients. This proved a strong contributing factor to the all but total usurping of animal magnetism, including Puységur’s empirically scrupulous psychological scholarship, which consequently suffered being slandered as charlatanism.56 This unhappy status is the reason why Eberhard Gmelin entitled his 1791 magnum opus on the therapeutic possibilities of animal magnetism Materialien für die Anthropologie. He states in the preface that Ich wählte die vorstehende Ueberschrift meines Buches deβwegen, weil ich wünsche, das gewisse Dilettanten des hier abgehandelten Gegenstandes darauf nicht aufmerksam, andere dagegen, welchen der gewöhnliche Name desselben nach ihrem eigenen Vorgeben Eckel erregt, durch die Ueberschrift gerade darauf aufmerksam gemacht würden [I chose the above-mentioned title for my book because it is my wish that certain dilettantes of the topic in question will not become aware of it and, conversely, that others who abhor the common name for the same are made aware of it by precisely my title] (p. iii).

Similarly, at the midpoint of romanticism, G. H. Schubert deemed it mandatory to introduce chapter 13 of Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, in which somnambulism is portrayed as the pinnacle of human development, with the words Ich weiβ zwar wohl, daβ die Gegenstände meiner heutigen Vorlesung, zu den am meisten anstöβigen und verkannten gehören, und daβ man sie, weil sie aus der gewöhnlichen Theorie nicht wohl zu erklären sind, lieber gänzlich abzuläugnen pflegt, ich werde mich jedoch hierbey mehr an dasjenige halten was wahr ist, als an das was mit der gewöhnlichen Meynung übereinstimmt 56 A late rehabilitation of ‘the early magnetizers’ occurred when one of the great French psychologists, Pierre Janet, in his 1889 thesis L’automatisme psychologique posited ‘that there were real scientists among them who were so much more devoted to their science although they could win neither honour nor advantages of any kind. They dedicated their lives to studying phenomena of such extremely extensive and complicated natures that the scant hypnotism of today reveals nothing about it, and on this study they expended a patience, stubbornness, and astuteness which deservedly should have met a better fate’ (p. 141). In light of the psychosomatic renaissance in the 1990s, this assertion seems well founded. Cf. the American psychiatrist Frank W. Putnam’s work about multiple personalities, and Ian Hacking’s Rewriting the Souk. Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, 1995). In Denmark, this branch of research is represented by, among others, the psychologist Bobby Zachariae (Visualisering of helbredelse, 1992).

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[I know that the articles appertaining to today’s lecture are among the most offensive and misunderstood and that because they are not explained by the ordinary theory they are generally rejected completely. I will, however, spend more time on what is true than on what agrees with general opinion].

A physician might, as in the example of Schelling, openly be an adherent of vitalism, regardless of the degree to which it was a speculative discipline – or even of Dr Gall’s grotesque phrenology – but the line was drawn at the psychosomatic claims of animal magnetism. Presumably, this tangible factor – i. e. the fear of being associated with a thought system dismissed or sceptically regarded by the majority of contemporary scientists – is a contributing cause to the poets’ reservations or hesitancy when it came to programmatically expounding on animal magnetism. However, the fact that conceptual delineations are so few and far between does not preclude the fact that, either consciously or unconsciously57, the controversial new psychology of personality had an influence of the poetry of romanticism, including where it was not explicitly referenced. Conceivably, literature might ‘function as a kind of asylum for difficult issues which the official scientific discourse has pushed aside and neglected to “solve” anthropologically’.58

57 Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel (Princeton, N. J., 1988), xvii: ‘There are … implicit or incompletely explicit assumptions, or more or less unconscious mental habits, operating in the thought of an individual or a generation’. 58 Wolf Lepenies, ‘Der Krieg der Wissenschaften und der Literatur’, in Wolf Lepenies, Gefährliche Wahlverwandtschaften. Essays zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1989), 64.

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Romantikkens univers The universe of romanticism By Geir Uthaug Oslo: Dreyers Forlag, 2017 412 pp., illustrated, NKR 349.00

Take any university-employed specialist in romantic-period literature, tie him or her up, and apply mild torture: you will not get a simple and straightforward answer to the question ‘What is, in fact, romanticism?’ Much has happened in romantic studies since the time of René Wellek and today’s scholars are more than reluctant to venture an overall definition of European romanticism in the singular. We speak more cautiously of the ‘romantic era’ (or even ‘the period formerly known as romanticism’) – or use the term romanticism in the plural, ‘romanticisms’, as in the title of this journal. The author of this comprehensive study of European romanticism, Geir Uthaug – who is not part of academia but has since the 1970s translated English romantic poetry into Norwegian – has no such qualms. Significantly, the Norwegian title of his book uses the r-word in the singular definite, Romantikkens univers. What, then, is the romantic, according to Uthaug? First and last, romanticism is an idea, a vision, an outlook on culture and on life (p. 13), the essence of which is the reaching out or yearning for a remote and possibly unattainable goal. To illustrate this, Uthaug evokes the star-like lantern on Daisy’s landing stage, beckoning Jay Gatsby across the bay. This lantern on which Gatsby fixes his impossible desires and yearnings is a ‘strongly romantic motif ’ (p. 23).1 Opening his study with The Great Gatsby (1925), Uthaug signals that romanticism to him is not, or not primarily, a period. Indeed, most of the works discussed in his book were created during the first decades of the nineteenth century; however, not every work written in this period can, in the author’s opinion, be labelled romantic (Uthaug’s prime example is Jane Austen’s novels). Conversely, romanticism as an idea transcends its historical context and may be encountered in works of art and literature of more recent date. Though subscribing to the belief in a romantic essence, Uthaug is not blind to the fact that the urge to transcend borders and reach out for the unattainable comes in a variety of forms. Romantic poets and artists did not necessarily agree 1 All quotations from the book are translated into English by the reviewer.

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in their views on art, society, religion, politics, and nature. In fact, their positions were quite often contradictory. It is this multiplicity in unity that constitutes the universe of romanticism. Uthaug’s focus is on romantic literature in major European languages – English, German, French – though he occasionally includes works by Polish, Russian, Italian, and – in particular – Norwegian romantics, and also ventures into other art forms, first of all romantic painting (the book is richly and beautifully illustrated). In keeping with the overall conception of romanticism as an idea rather than a period, the arrangement is thematic rather than chronological. With regard to its European outlook, its thematic arrangement, and its inclusion of other art forms, Romantikkens univers may be compared with Tim Blanning’s The Romantic Revolution (2010), which is also one of Uthaug’s sources; but Uthaug’s study is more comprehensive, numbering over 400 pages divided into ten chapters of uneven length. Whereas the first chapter, ‘What is Romanticism?’, serves as an introduction to the romantic idea and to the book as such, the following four chapters, ‘The Romantics and the World’, ‘Art and Nature’, ‘The Romantic Mind’, and ‘Myths and Religion’ explore themes and issues of central importance to the romantics. ‘The Romantics and the World’ addresses the craving for freedom and the spirit of revolt in the Storm and Stress movement and early romanticism. As Uthaug points out, the romantic rebellion was directed not only against the ties and conventions of an oppressive and unjust social system, but also against aesthetic conventions and rules. A central issue in this chapter is, of course, the romantics’ attitude towards the French Revolution, the great event of the age. While many romantics were radicals who, at least in the initial stages, supported the revolution, others, for instance the French aristocrat Francois-René de Chateaubriand, took quite a different stand. And of course, the ensuing Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars elicited a mixed response. Whereas Byron, in Uthaug’s words, was both ‘fascinated’ and ‘appalled’ (p. 65) by the war, others, for instance the Spanish painter Goya, depicted its atrocities, and others again wrote pacifistic poetry. In Germany, the Napoleonic wars stimulated the cultivation of the German Volksgeist. ‘Art and Nature’ discusses romantic ideas of poetry, imagination, inspiration, and genius, venturing into other art forms such as instrumental music, according to E. T. A. Hoffmann ‘the most romantic form of art’ (p. 100), and architecture. A subsection deals with the romantic fascination with the sublime and the heroic. Observing that the German romantic Wilhelm Wackenroder distinguishes between ‘two sacred languages, that of nature and that of art’ (p. 95), Uthaug proceeds to romantic philosophy of nature (Schelling) and the understanding of nature as organic (rather than mechanic) and dynamic. The chapter closes with a brief look at romantic landscaping and on landscape and nature in romantic poetry.

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Taking as his point of departure the lives of the poets Hölderlin and Gérard de Nerval, Uthaug characterizes the romantic mind as divided between two widely different aspects, the cheerful, naïve, childlike and idealizing disposition on the one hand and the darker, more sombre aspect on the other. The chapter ‘The Romantic Mind’ explores the romantic fascination with subliminal states of mind (the subsection ‘Dream and Intoxication’) and attitudes towards love and eroticism. The chapter also provides a catalogue of romantic moods and feelings: yearning, passion, enthusiasm, melancholy, etc. A subsection on ‘The Romantic Death’ closes the chapter. ‘Religion and Myth’ discusses the romantics’ rather different attitudes towards institutionalized religion and romantic mythmaking (Blake) before zooming in – somewhat arbitrarily – on three romantic myths: S. T. Coleridge’s albatross, John Keats’s Endymion, and Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. Chapter VI, ‘The Hotbeds of Romanticism’, deals with romantic places and geographies in a dual sense. On the one hand, Uthaug maps the national cradles of romanticism and discusses different national variants of the romantic idea: The English, the German, the French, the Polish, etc. On the other hand, he explores nations, regions, and places that fuelled the romantic imagination: Goethe’s Italy, Byron’s Greece, and the Orient, but also the Rhine and the Alps. Chapter VII, ‘The Dark Romanticism’, is quite short and deals with Gothic fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in particular. Chapter VIII, ‘Romantic Elements’, returns to natural phenomena as it discusses representations in romantic art and literature of light and darkness, the night, the stars, the ocean, flowers, rivers and lakes, mountains, caves, and birds. The chapter closes with nature’s opposite, the city. Chapter IX, ‘Marginalia’ includes various observations, which the author apparently could not fit into the other chapters, for instance the romantics’ fascination with Shakespeare and Goethe’s ambivalence towards romanticism. Finally, Chapter X, ‘Epilogue’, poses the question: What happened to romanticism? As Uthaug sees it, the romantic idea foundered on the scientism, rationalism, and materialism of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The romantics wanted to poeticize the world, he writes, but ‘now the point was to depoeticize poetry and bring it down to earth’ (p. 355). However, the romantic idea was never quite extinct, and the author sees in present-day culture signs of its revival. One such sign is that fantasy, myth and magic have once again become part of literature. He might have added the contemporary concern with the environment, climate change, and animal rights, which has once again propagated a holistic view of man and nature. Uthaug includes Polish and Norwegian romantics, but otherwise his canon is quite conservative. His book does not offer any new perspectives on romanticism, nor does it engage with new research in the field. However, it would be unfair to hold this against a work that never pretends to be cutting-edge schol-

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arship. On its own terms, Romantikkens univers is a wonderfully rich book. Uthaug has extensive knowledge of (and great love for) European romanticism and he is an engaging storyteller. His book is quite simply a good read, lucidly written and accessible even to those who have never read a single line of romantic poetry. One of the (many) attractions of Romantikkens verden is its generous inclusion of short as well as longer extracts from romantic poems and prose works. But why does Uthaug in a few cases cite romantic poetry in the original language when everything else is translated into Norwegian? Uthaug is himself a gifted translator of English romantic poetry – why has he not put in the small extra effort and translated, for instance, the two short stanzas from Blake and Shelley on pages 90 and 91? Furthermore, the reasons for his arrangement of his vast material are not always crystal clear. The brief chapter ‘Dark Romanticism’ (Chapter VII) ties in with the chapter on the romantic mind (Chapter IV), so why not place it there? Parts of the chapter ‘The Romantic Hotbeds’ (VI) overlap with Chapter VIII, ‘Romantic Elements’. And Chapter IX, ‘Marginalia’, is too much of a mixed bag. However, these minor shortcomings should not deter the reader! Romantikkens univers is the first comprehensive introduction in Norwegian to European romanticism. But the book is more than just that. It is an inspired guide to the enchanting world of romantic literature and art. Students with an interest in romanticism will love it. Also, specialists should read it – if only to be reminded of what first drew them to romantic poetry. Lis Møller Aarhus University

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Studien zur Englischen Romantik. Studies in English Romanticism Ed. by Christoph Bode, Jens Martin Gurr, and Frank Erik Pointner (general editors)

Narratives of Romanticism: Selected Papers from the Wuppertal Conference of the Germany Society for English Romanticism Ed. by Sandra Heinen and Katharina Rennhak Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017 274 pp., € 31.50

Romantic Ambiguities: Abodes of the Modern Ed. by Sebastian Domsch, Christoph Reinfandt, and Katharina Rennhak Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017 308 pp., €35,00

Romanticism and the Forms of Discontent Ed. by Christoph Bode Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017 216 pp., € 26,50

British romanticism is intrinsically marked by the precedent of German Idealism and Frühromantik, mainly due to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s important – but also controversial (due to accusations of plagiarism) – role as a go-between. This German context is not always invoked by scholars of Blake, Wordsworth, and their peers, and sometimes the result is a notable blind spot. The German Society for English Romanticism is excellently placed to compensate for such oversight. It is one of several strengths of these three volumes that they are attuned to a general European ambit, and, also, a specifically German-language context for British romanticism. They also go far beyond such a focus, though, approaching a wide range of texts and figures from a variety of different interpretive angles. The three publications constitute volumes 19, 20, and 21 in the series Studien zur englischen Romantik [Studies in English romanticism], under the general editorship of Christoph Bode, Jens Martin Gurr, and Frank Erik Pointner. Although

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edited by German scholars and including many German contributions, the first two volumes are particularly marked by a decidedly international profile. Among the many familiar scholars featured here are Claire Connolly, David Duff, Angela Esterhammer, Nicholas Halmi, Peter Kitson, Timothy Michael, Michael O’Neill, and Tilottama Rajan. From Scandinavia, Cian Duffy and Lis Møller also contribute. The three volumes are all academically strong, providing interesting and thought-provoking research. The first volume, Narratives of Romanticism, edited by Sandra Heinen and Katharina Rennhak, presents selected papers from the 2015 conference of the German Society for English Romanticism. The focus is both on narrative texts and, more abstractly, on concepts and ideas of narrative – including narratives of and about romanticism in general. The volume is marked by the expansion, in recent decades, of the romantic canon to include regional romanticisms: several of the essays relate to Irish romanticism, and Scottish and Danish writings are addressed, too. Among the less canonized authors in evidence is the Irishman Thomas Colley Grattan. Raphael Ingelbien’s article argues convincingly that the peripatetic life of Grattan has made it hard to frame him within nation-based canons; yet he does not quite manage to dispel the sense that there were other good reasons for the author’s critical neglect: ‘Grattan’s fiction was to some extent always derivative’ (p. 94), Ingelbien admits. On the other hand, more canonized and traditional critical favourites, whose literary value is undisputed, are in evidence. Core poets of the canon of British romanticism are analyzed, as Jan Alber addresses narratives of the Orient in Keats, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, Mathelinda Nabugodi compares Shelley’s Queen Mab and Hellas, while Michael O’Neill addresses narrative play and creativity in Byron’s Beppo and Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas. In a particularly thought-provoking piece, David Duff explores the concept of the ‘event’ in romantic lyrics, making use of the theories of the Narratology Research Group at Hamburg. Although Duff ’s essay risks being construed as an imperial gesture on behalf of narrative’s ever widening and amplifying dominance among the literary modes, his finely-tuned application of ‘transgeneric narratology’ to Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’ and Coleridge’s ‘The Nightingale’ is an interesting experiment. Also notable for its work with literary genre is Ian Duncan’s accomplished essay on Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, which argues that the ‘novelistic plot’ of de Staël’s celebrated text, ‘with its imperative of socialization through marriage, cancels Bildung, with its imperative of self-realization through art’ (p. 18). Sebastian Domsch, Christoph Reinfandt, and Katharina Rennhak are the editors of the volume entitled Romantic Ambiguities: Abodes of the Modern. In their acknowledgements, they pay a special tribute to Christoph Bode, an outstanding scholar who has long been a key figure for the study of British romanticism in Germany. Although Romantic Ambiguities does not explicitly pitch

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itself as a Festschrift for Bode, his work is referred to – either in passing or, in some cases, more thoroughly – in most of the contributions. His definitions of ambiguity in the monograph Ästhetik der Ambiguität: Zur Funktion und Bedeutung von Mehrdeutigkeit in der Literatur der Moderne (1988) and the essay ‘The Aesthetics of Ambiguity’ (1991) are used as touchstones in the volume. Bode’s general definition of ambiguity as a characteristic feature of all literary texts provides a complement to his more specific definition of literary modernism as being self-reflective and involving a ‘semiotic take-off ’ where ‘liberated signifiers become multiply interpretable’ (p. 2). Many of the essays follow Bode’s example in interpreting romantic texts as anticipating, or pointing the way towards, modernism, by virtue of their ambiguity. This might be interpreted as a somewhat restrictive remit, given recent critical challenges to the centrality of traditional ideas of modernism in literary history. Surprisingly few of the contributions also acknowledge the rich theoretical tradition of work on literary polysemy, particularly important in New Criticism and post-structuralism. Nevertheless, most of the 19 articles included in Romantic Ambiguities present incisive and well-argued interpretations of romanticism and its legacy. The traditional scholarly virtue of close reading is much in evidence. The volume’s opening three essays – by Mark J. Bruhn, Nicholas Halmi, and Ralf Haekel – are all devoted to Wordsworth and as such have a difficult challenge. The ambiguities of Wordsworth have been a staple of the criticism for many decades. Yet all three scholars present impressive interpretations, with perhaps Bruhn’s affect-centred reading providing the highlight. James Vigus’s close inspection of Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Going on a Journey’ is also a notable piece, engagingly written and striking in the insights it manages to bring out of what might appear to be a minor essay. Furthermore, Frank Erik Pointner and Dennis Weissenfels provide an interesting explication of the changing role of the poetic speaker, from a narrative point of view, in Byron’s major works. Although it is packed with impressive readings of such classics, Romantic Ambiguities does thankfully also journey on less well-trodden paths. Stefanie Fricke’s interpretation of different versions of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is hampered by the hypothetical nature of her speculations about the earliest drafts of the novel, but the comparison between the published text and the YouTube web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is well done. Sabrina Sontheimer contributes a fine reading of illustrated versions of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, presenting an especially thought-provoking explication of Hunt Emerson’s cartoons. Ian Duncan’s piece on ‘The Novel and the Romantic “Moment”’ argues that ‘traces and recollections of British Romanticism … mark a deliberate disruption of the project of Victorian realism, in their opening of a critical space of Romantic ambiguity … within the normalizing apparatus of midcentury novelistic practice’ (p. 202). This interpretation provides a probing and

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unconventional look at Dickens’s Bleak House, and – by highlighting how narrative texts are derailed and complicated by lyrical elements – might be taken as a poetic riposte (or at least complement) to Duff ’s reduction of lyric to narrative in the preceding volume in the series. The third volume at hand, Romanticism and the Forms of Discontent, is based on a panel from the 2016 NASSR conference in Berkeley. This is a more compact and focused volume than its two predecessors. Freud’s seminal work Das Unbehagen in der Kultur provides a central reference point for the seven contributions, and several of those contributions are tuned into the difficult navigation involved in moving from Freud’s German title to its English translation as Civilization and Its Discontents. Romanticism is interpreted as a forerunner for twentieth-century unease, as culture and its institutions function as restrictive forces rather than enabling matrices for the individual and its instinctual gratification. After a short preface, editor Christoph Bode unfolds a labyrinthine meditation on ‘Romanticism as a Form of Discontent’ over no less than seventyfour pages. Despite being overly digressive and loose in its form, his essay includes insightful reflections on theorists such as Freud, Herbert Marcuse, and Norbert Elias, and manages to link their work meaningfully with key romantic texts and biographies. The other six articles are of a shorter length, all establishing a productive dialogue between the Freudian concept of unease, on the one hand, and romantic texts and concerns on the other. In Nicholas Halmi’s ‘Past and Future, Discontent and Unease’, romantic unease shows itself temporally. The ‘monomyth’ of progress is countered by ‘nostalgia for a past understood to be unrestorable and anxiety about a future understood to be unpredictable’ (p. 89). Concentrating on texts preceding 1800, Halmi mainly focuses on Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, supplemented by engagements with Descartes, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, and Kant. Thomas Michael’s essay is more concentrated in its focus, elegantly detailing the unsettling imbrication of pain and pleasure in Keats’s poetry. Also Katharina Pink focuses on romantic poetry: despite bearing a rather obtuse title (‘Romantic Discontent and its Discontents’), her essay is a lucid and helpful analysis of the romantic critique of solitary withdrawal in Wordsworth’s The Excursion, Shelley’s Alastor, and Keats’s Endymion. In Rolf Haekel’s piece, discontent is shown to be at work both formally and thematically in Shelley’s Laon and Cythna and The Triumph of Life. Where Haekel draws on Adorno’s negative dialectics as a theoretical complement to Freud in his reading of Percy Shelley’s poetry, Katharina Rennhak’s essay draws on Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’ to support her analysis of Mary Shelley’s fiction. Rennhak’s ‘Mary Shelley’s Fictions of Cultural Discontent: Attachments of Cruel Optimism in Frankenstein, Matilda and Lodore’ presents an ambitious and complex argument that perhaps deserves more space for full

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clarification. In the final essay of the volume, Christoph Reinfandt presents an interesting comparison between Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp, bringing in the British modernist B. S. Johnson as a third party in its later stages. Although the essay problematically identifies Knausgård as a ‘postmodern’ counterpart to Wordsworth’s romanticism, this is a strong finale to a volume that fruitfully explores romanticism in relation to Freud and other recent formulations of cultural unease. Charles I. Armstrong University of Agder

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination in Britain, 1783–1786 By Clare Brant Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017 343 pp., £25.00

To readers who have wondered what to make of gestures like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s floating of sonnets in balloons, Clare Brant’s Balloon Madness will offer more than one answer. Her book takes its place among several recent studies that explore aerial voyages and the wider scientific and cultural production spurred by investigations of air (Michael R. Lynn, The Sublime Invention [London & New York: Routledge, 2010]; Marie Thébaud-Sorger, Une Histoire des Ballons [Paris: Éditions du Patrimoine, 2010]; Richard Holmes, Falling Upwards [New York Pantheon Books, 2013], for instance). While interest in air sprawls throughout the long eighteenth century, Brant shows that the focus on aerial means of transportation in the shape of air balloons is a more concentrated chapter. Her study covers a short, but intense period of time before the French Revolution from 1783–1786, delving into the beginnings of aeronautic experience, the rapid spread of balloon frenzy and the different areas that it affected. People of diverse ranks, international circulation of balloon news, fashion, print culture, kings, and wars appear in Brant’s study and reanimate key aspects of the first flight experiences. The beginnings traced by Brant lie in France, where the brothers Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier, papermakers by profession, were the first to launch a paper hot-air balloon in June 1783. From there the hype crossed the Channel, was highly publicized in Britain, and stayed for some years. These were years in which not only balloons but also the hope took off that the sky could become as traversable a space as land and water. It remained a short-lived hope, at first. Three years of experimentation and witnessing of numerous ascents convinced specialists and spectators that balloons were a quirky, uncertain construct, too unwieldy to be turned into dependable means of transportation. Brant relates catastrophic and bathetic balloon travels like Jean-Pierre Blanchard’s and John Jeffries’s crossing of the Channel and whose ascent succeeded only after the travellers relieved the balloon of all their belongings, and finally, to shed any dispensable weight, relieved themselves urinating into spare bladders. To their satisfaction, the balloon rose and reached France on 7 January

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1785. As Brant painstakingly shows, these first experiences of aerial mobility deserve attention because they planted in people the awareness of the dawn of the aerial age. Brant argues that we must retrieve balloons from the scientist’s cabinet for the sake of this awareness that had wide-ranging ramifications: ‘To lock balloons into a history of science, even of imaginative science, means losing their history in imagination’ (p. 9). In the heyday of ‘balloon madness’ – a phrase frequently used in the first two years to capture epidemic balloon enthusiasm, if not addiction – balloons inspired the scientist, the politician, the philosopher, the satirist, the poet, the moralist, the man and woman of fashion, children and parents, monarchs and milliners, military men, criminals, and charlatans ready to draw profit from balloon sensationalism. Even animals had a part to play. The second balloon ascent organized in September 1783, by the Montgolfier brothers for Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and a sizeable crowd at Versailles, saw a duck, a cock, and a sheep as the first aerial passengers. After these animals’ safe landing, humans would ascend balloons. In Britain, Brant investigates the key centres of balloon experimentation and the people who directed them: Patrick Copeland in Aberdeen, James Tytler in Edinburgh, Weller and Deeker in York, Vincenzo Lunardi in Newcastle, Thomas Baldwin and Lunardi in Liverpool and Chester, Richard Crosbie in Dublin, James Sadler in Manchester and Oxford, and Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Stuart Arnold in London. Brant carefully relates the marriage of amusement and money inaugurated by the new invention. Drummed up as a spectacle, balloon viewing attracted large crowds ready to pay for the new sensation. However, as Lunardi sourly recognized, balloon spectacle was a democratic affair, as the floating globe could be viewed from the ground by non-paying bodies. But commerce would pave its way to profit from and fuel the balloon vogue. Perhaps the most memorable item was the balloon hat for women, called the Lunardi bonnet: large and colourful, it claimed space and signalled by its spherical shape a woman’s sphere of influence. For some, it fittingly suited the female character by satisfying visual appetite as much as reminding viewers of women’s waywardness and ephemeral beauty. Ephemeral could be an epithet to describe ‘balloonomania’ (Horace Walpole’s coinage), and the doubtful status of balloons as scientific objects. They were scientific objects insofar as they required a combination of knowledge of chemistry, physics, and more. But their public appearance as well as the aesthetics which rendered them beautiful objects, not least for the purpose of attracting wealthy sponsors, incited definitions from all sorts of people beyond the scientific community. This is where the levity and gravity surrounding balloons enter. (Tellingly, Thomas Baldwin titled his narrative of a balloon excursion Airopaidia (1785), tying air with childish amusement.) The heart of Brant’s book elaborates on these complementary sides in the reception of balloons. The satirist and sceptic harped on about balloons’ resemblance to bubbles, activating the anxiety connected to financial

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schemes like the South Sea Bubble or the fear of air becoming taxable like light (i. e. wax candles). To others, who saw in balloons flying globes and miniatures of the earth, the new mobility held the promise, or the threat, to expand imperial desires in unprecedented form. Quickly, conquest of the air translated into conquest of land. Although the first balloon to be employed in a war, at the Battle of Fleurus in 1796, produced little effect, warfare seemed to have been at the origins of the invention. It was the Franco-British war on the island of Gibraltar that incited Joseph Montgolfier in 1782 to imagine an assault from the air, a flight of imagination leading to his hot-air balloon. Not surprisingly, balloons acquired something of a Promethean quality, a sign of man’s growing ability and presumption (presumption being the word later associated with Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus). The period discussed in Balloon Madness may be short, but Brant’s patience in mapping the rhizomatic spread of the awareness of the arrival of the aerial age is amply rewarded. She also succeeds in showing that despite the waning of balloon enthusiasm, the opening of aerial possibilities had an abiding influence. In one of the most enlightening chapters, Brant asserts that aerial voyages expanded existing definitions of the sublime, adding to visual encounters with sublime soundscapes. Not surprisingly, and despite (or due to) their rocky descents, balloons would lend themselves to the sublime which was increasingly associated with elevation. However, what astonished aeronauts among or above clouds was an experience of calm described as nothing but sublime, for which Brant finds in Blake’s Jerusalem a perfect rendering: ‘silent, calm, & motionless, in the mid-air sublime’. Brant’s references to literary works will delight students of literature; indeed, imaginative responses frame her story, which sets out with a balloon sonnet by Hester Piozzi and concludes with a chapter on the balloon attraction shared by poets, visual artists, and children. Enit K. Steiner University of Lausanne, Switzerland

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Journal for the Study of Romanticisms (2018), Volume 07, DOI 10.14220/jsor.2018.7.issue-1

About the Authors

Susanne Bangert is currently a postdoc at the Institute of Art History, Aarhus University, in affiliation with Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, Denmark. Her research investigates romantic landscape painting, specifically its role in the formation of regional and national identity. She has worked at both fine art and cultural history museums in Denmark, and at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Her publications reflect her research interests in national identity including history of collecting and history of archaeology, nineteenth-century studies, museum education, and Byzantine art. She holds a PhD in art history from Copenhagen University and an MPhil in Byzantine studies from Oxford University. Aarhus University, Faculty of Arts/Department of Communication and Culture Langelandsgade 139, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark [email protected]

Uffe Hansen (1933–2016) was Associate Professor of German and a Reader in comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen.

Philipp Hunnekuhl gained his PhD from Queen Mary University of London in 2012 and is a Fellow of the German Research Foundation in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg, and a Visiting Fellow of the Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English. He is a member of the international Crabb Robinson Editorial Project, the editor of The Early Diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and an assistant editor of The Hazlitt Review. His journal articles so far have focused on Hazlitt, Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, and Crabb Robinson, and his monograph, entitled Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, is currently in preparation. He is also a committee member of the Hazlitt Society, web officer of the Charles Lamb Society, and a member of the German Asso-

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ciation for the Study of English (Anglistenverband) and the British Association for Romantic Studies. Überseering 35, Postfach #23, 22297 Hamburg, Germany [email protected]

Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros is a Senior Lecturer of English Literature at Lund University. Her genre study The Victorian Governess Novel (2001) is based on a comprehensive set of nineteenth-century novels and the contemporary debate on female education and paid employment. Within the field of nineteenth-century studies, she has also carried out research on the manifestation of nineteenthcentury self-improvement issues such as time management and punctuality in fiction and non-fiction. She is currently investigating the introduction and translation of British social-reform literature in Sweden. Her current research topics also include academic writing and the teaching of writing. Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University Box 201, 221 00 Lund, Sweden [email protected]

Peter Brix Søndergaard is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Communication and Culture. He has published on subjects such as Rococo painting, German Romanticism (the Nazarenes, Ph. O. Runge, and C. D. Friedrich), E. Manet, product design, fashion, and film. Aarhus University, Faculty of Arts/Department of Communication and Culture Langelandsgade 139, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark [email protected]

Tim van Gerven is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on Scandinavianism as a cultural movement and is primarily concerned with the interactions of this cultural strand with the nation-building processes in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. He has also been involved in the ERNiE-project (Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe) of the Study Platform of Interlocking Nationalisms (SPIN). Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES) Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands [email protected]

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