Abstract
The Introduction surveys existing scholarship on Anglo-Nordic relations during the period in question and establishes our argument about the centrality of cultural exchange to the development of romanticisms and romantic nationalisms in Britain and the Nordic countries. It focuses on key elements such as the development of antiquarian interest in the ancient culture of the North during the eighteenth century, the emergence of new ‘romantic’ attitudes to nature and society, and the transformative impact on Britain and ‘the North’ of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
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Notes
- 1.
The quotation in our title is taken from John Murray, Hand-Book for Travellers in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Russia, Being a Guide to the Principal Routes in Those Countries, With Minute Description of Copenhagen, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. With a Map and Plans (London, 1839), p. v. We return to the Hand-Book and its characterisation of ‘the North’ later in our Introduction.
- 2.
For a recent history of the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on Scandinavia, see Rasmus Glenthøj and Morten Nordhagen Ottosen, Experiences of War and Nationality in Denmark and Norway, 1807–1815 (London: Palgrave, 2013).
- 3.
Angela Byrne, Geographies of the Romantic North: Science, Antiquarianism, and Travel, 1790–1830 (London: Palgrave, 2013). Robert Rix, Norse Romanticism: Themes in British Literature, 1760–1830 (Romantic Circles: www.rc.umd.edu/editions/norse); last accessed 8 March 2017. Marilyn Butler, Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). We return to antiquarian interest in Classical Scandinavian culture later in our Introduction.
- 4.
Peter Fjågesund and Ruth A. Symes, The Northern Utopia: British Perceptions of Norway in the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 13, 12, 31.
- 5.
Peter Fjågesund, The Dream of the North. A Cultural History to 1920 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), p. 17.
- 6.
See Göran Rydén ed., Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World: Provincial Cosmopolitans (London: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 6, 12. See also Rydén, Leos Müller, and Holger Weiss, (eds.), Global historia från periferin: Norden 1600–1850 (World history from the periphery: the Nordics, 1600–1850) (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009).
- 7.
Mark Davies, A Perambulating Paradox: British Travel Literature and the Image of Sweden, c.1770–1865 (Lund: Lunds Universitet, 2000). ‘Was there a characteristically “British” idea, experience and interpretation of this nation [i.e. Sweden]’, Davies asks, ‘and, if so, how was this expressed through the medium of travel literature? Likewise, to what extent is Britain itself identified, and how?’ (p. 10).
- 8.
Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (ed.), Northbound: Travels, Encounters, and Constructions 1700–1830 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007), pp. 16, 15.
- 9.
Robert Rix, ‘Introduction: Romanticism in Scandinavia’, European Romantic Review 26/4 (July 2015), pp. 395–400 (395).
- 10.
We are also of course aware that such cultural exchanges took place within the context of, and can therefore never entirely be dissociated from, other modes of exchange, such as the commercial relationships documented at length by Heinz Sigfrid Koplowitz Kent in War and Trade in Northern Seas: Anglo-Scandinavian economic relations in the mid-eighteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- 11.
Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 21. For a more recent expansion of this definition of romantic nationalism as ‘the celebration of the nation (defined in its language, history, and cultural character) as an inspiring idea for artistic expression; and the instrumentalization of that expression in political consciousness-raising’, see Joep Leerssen, ‘Notes towards a definition of romantic nationalism’, Romantik: Journal for the Study of Romanticisms 2 (2013), pp. 9–35 (28).
- 12.
Leerssen, National Thought in Europe, p. 17.
- 13.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992; revised 2009).
- 14.
See, for example, Michael Roberts, Sverige under frihetstiden (Stockholm: Prisma, 1995; English translation The Age of Liberty: Sweden 1719–1772 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]); and Bente Scavenius, The Golden Age in Denmark, Art and Culture 1800–1850 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994).
- 15.
Fjågesund, Dream of the North, p. 17. This is not, of course, to suggest that no other paradigms of cultural or national identity were extant. In her study of Nordic Orientalism, to take just one counter-example, Elisabeth Oxfeldt argues that rather than defining themselves in opposition to an oriental ‘other’, Danes actually ‘embraced an imaginary Orient in an effort to identify and construct themselves as a modern, cosmopolitan nation’ (see Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism [Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2005], p. 12). Hence being ‘Danish’ did not just mean being ‘northern’.
- 16.
Povlsen, Northbound, p. 14. Considerations of scope alone prevent us from examining in this volume the extent to which Germany, or northern Germany at least, might be said to have belonged to, and was perceived as belonging to, ‘the North’, during the period on which we focus. Much has been written about the influence of German culture not just on the development of romanticism in England but also on the development of romanticism in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It is undoubtedly the case that cultural exchange between Germany and the Nordic countries was substantial and sustained throughout the late eighteenth century and romantic period. Many significant Danish romantic poets, such as Jens Baggesen (1764–1826) and Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850), had important connections with Germany. The same was true for Scandinavian artists, such as the leading Norwegian romantic nationalist painter Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857), who spent two years (1818–1820) working at the academy in Dresden, and German artists, such as Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), who studied at Copenhagen. The seminal romantic-period assessment of German culture as belonging to a distinctively Northern rather than to a Classical, Southern culture would be De l’Allemagne (1810, 1813) by Germaine De Staël (1766–1817), but many other examples could be adduced. Once again, it is considerations of scope alone which mean that we consider only in passing here the place of Germany in ‘the North’. For recent, detailed discussion, see Fjågesund, The Dream of the North, esp. pp. 314–21, 468–75.
- 17.
Nelson’s note is preserved in the British National Archive (ADM 1/4 (Ha 54)). A facsimile is available at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nelson/gallery6/popup/ultimatum.htm (last accessed 8 March 2017).
- 18.
Hildor Arnold Barton, Northern Arcadia: Foreign Travellers in Scandinavia, 1765–1815 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), p. 3. Mallet published with the sponsorship of the Danish government Introduction à l’histoire du Danemarch où l’on traite de la religion, des moeurs, des lois, et des usages des anciens Danois (1755) and Monumens de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes, et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves (1756), the latter containing extracts from both prose and poetic Eddas.
- 19.
For more on British and Nordic literary responses to ancient Norse culture in the late eighteenth century and romantic period, see, for example: Butler, Mapping Mythologies; Sigurd Hustvedt, Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain during the Eighteenth Century (New York: American Scandinavian Foundation, 1916); Karen Sanders, ‘“Upon the bedrock of material things”: the journey to the past in Danish archaeological imagination’, in Klitgaard (ed.), Northbound, pp. 151–70; Rix, Norse Romanticism, and ‘“In darkness they grope”: ancient remains and romanticism in Denmark’, European Romantic Review 26/4 (July 2015), pp. 435–51; Rix’s essay in the present volume; and Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon & London, 2004).
- 20.
Barton, Northern Arcadia, p. 3; Rix, Norse Romanticism (‘Introduction/Reception of Norse Poetry’, paragraph 3).
- 21.
Barton, Northern Arcadia, p. 3; see also pp. 140–4, 150–6.
- 22.
Percy, Northern Antiquities, 2: 195–6; Rix, Norse Romanticism (‘Introduction/Norse Poetry and Britain’, paragraph 1; ‘Introduction/The Anthology’, paragraph 5); Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 250, 227–33, 250–86 (250).
- 23.
Rix, Norse Romanticism (‘Introduction/Reception of Norse Poetry’, paragraph 7).
- 24.
See, for example, James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 67–71. The ‘hand-books’ series was begun under the auspices of John Murray II and continued and expanded by his son, John Murray III.
- 25.
For an examination of the relationship between travel writing and the novel, see Percy Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 1983) and Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. Catherine Matthias (London: Palgrave, 2000).
- 26.
Buzard, Beaten Track, p. 67.
- 27.
Murray, Hand-Book for Travellers, p. v.
- 28.
For a seminal academic account of the place of the Grand Tour in eighteenth-century British culture, see Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (London: Sutton, 1992).
- 29.
Joseph Addison, A Letter from Italy (London, 1701), l. 12.
- 30.
Robert Everest, A Journey through Norway, Lapland, and a Part of Sweden (London, 1829), pp. viii–ix.
- 31.
Robert Southey, letter to Thomas Southey of 28 April 1797 (quoted from Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford, and Ian Packer (eds.) The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, pt. 1 (ed. Lynda Pratt), at: http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_One/HTML/letterEEd.26.213.html (accessed 8 June 2015). For a flavour of the discussion surrounding Wollstonecraft’s Letters see e.g.: Per Nyström, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Journey, Acts of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Gothenburg, Humaniora 17 (1980); Richard Holmes, ‘Introduction’ to ed., A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs of The Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (London: Penguin, 1987); Mary A. Favret, ‘Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark: Travelling with Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Claudia L. Johnson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 209–27; and Christophe Bode’s discussion in Chapter ‘Bias and Openness’ in the present volume.
- 32.
Black, The British Abroad, p. 69. For an excellent study of ‘the composite picture of the Nordic world’ given by writing about Scandinavia in the eighteenth century and romantic period, see Barton, Northern Arcadia (p. 5). Barton notes that Samuel Bring’s bibliography of travel writing about Sweden, Itineraria Svecana (1954), ‘lists and describes no fewer than 210 accounts of travel undertaken between 1765 and 1815 [of which] ninety-eight were written by (or in some cases, about) foreign visitors’ (Northern Arcadia, p. 5). Fjågesund notes ‘more than fifty British travelogues published about Norway alone in the period before 1830‘(The Dream of the North, p. 301).
- 33.
Consett, Tour, p. 2; Swinton, Travels, p. v. Swinton had visited Scandinavia three times by 1788.
- 34.
John Carr, A Northern Summer; or Travels round the Baltic, through Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Prussia and Part of Germany, in the Year 1804 (London, 1805), p. 4. Scandinavia, in Barton’s opinion, came to be seen as offering the British traveller many of the same attractions which would previously have drawn them to Switzerland: sublime landscapes, a sense of unspoilt communities, and political liberties. See Northern Arcadia, pp. 156–7.
- 35.
‘Accounts of Scandinavia by foreign travellers come to be’, in Barton’s words, ‘increasingly filled with lengthy descriptions of natural wonders’ (Northern Arcadia, p. 147). In Wollstonecraft’s opinion, travelling to ‘the North’ could also have an educative function, as an illustration of the stadial ideas of social progress developed during the Enlightenment: although no compliment to the Nordic countries, Wollstonecraft suggests that ‘If travelling, as the completion of a liberal education, were to be adopted on rational grounds, the northern states ought to be visited before the more polished parts of Europe, to serve as the elements even of the knowledge of manners, only to be acquired by tracing the various shades in different countries’ (Letters, p. 217).
- 36.
Lars Berglund, ‘Travelling and the Formation of Taste: The European Journey of Bengt Ferrner and Jean Lefebure’, in Rydén (ed.), Provincial Cosmopolitans, pp. 95–119 (95).
- 37.
Fjågesund, Dream of the North, p. 297. For Rix, Steffens ‘perhaps more than any other figure […] stands as an important catalyst for early nineteenth-century reorientations’ in Scandinavian romanticism (‘Introduction’, European Romantic Review 26/4 [July 2015], p. 395). Once again, both Fjågesund and Rix remind us of the extent to which Germany could be, and often was, considered part of ‘the North’ during the late eighteenth century and romantic period.
- 38.
In his study of British travel writing about Sweden, for example, Mark Davies traces the ‘reciprocal relationship’ of travel writing and travel: ‘the Tour and the Tour were mutually reinforcing and sustaining’ (Davies, A Perambulating Paradox, p. 51). Cp. Barton, Northern Arcadia: ‘Scandinavia comprises both a typical and in certain ways unique example of travel and its uses during the eighteenth century. What literary travelers found in the Northern kingdoms – as well as what readers derived from their accounts – was as much the product of their own cultural and personal backgrounds as of what they actually saw and experienced’ (p. 4).
- 39.
Barton, Northern Arcadia, pp. 165–6.
- 40.
Wollstonecraft, Letters, p. 59.
- 41.
William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (Peterborough: Broadview, 2001), p. 95.
- 42.
Wollstonecraft, Letters, p. ii (advertisement).
- 43.
For a recent anthology of British eighteenth-century and Romantic-period travel writing about Finland, see Tony Lurcock (ed.), ‘Not So Barren or Uncultivated’: British Travellers in Finland, 1760–1830 (London: CB Editions, 2010.
- 44.
Lurcock, Travellers in Finland, pp. 1–2.
- 45.
The Critical Review, XL (1775), p. 36; emphasis added. This is the review from which Lurcock draws his title and epigraph.
- 46.
Carl Von Linné, Lachesis Lapponica, or A Tour in Lapland, Now First Published from the Manuscript of the Celebrated Linnaeus, ed. James Edward Smith, 2 vols. (London, 1811). Linnaeus’ collection had first been offered to Joseph Banks.
- 47.
For studies of Scott’s reputation in Europe, see Murray Pittock, The Reception of Walter Scott in Europe (London: Continuum, 2006; paperback Bloomsbury, 2014); and Annika Bautz, The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study (London: Continuum, 2007).
- 48.
In this respect, Rix’s essay might be said to complement Elisabeth Oxfeldt’s work on romantic-period ‘Orientalism’ in Scandinavia, which similarly seeks to ‘problematize’ the adequacy of the paradigms developed by Said to describe the place of Orientalism in the cultural history of nineteenth-century Denmark and Norway (see Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, pp. 12–13).
- 49.
Such a blend is, of course, a prominent feature in a wide range of eighteenth-century and romantic period writing about travel and ‘natural philosophy’ at a moment before the disciplinary boundaries had been drawn between ‘scientific’ and other modes of describing the world. For a useful introduction to the discursive complexities of ‘natural philosophy’ at the time, see Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Collins, 2008). Barton notes that for ‘literary travelers and their readers, the far northern periphery […] represented the ultimate Nordic experience, expressing the most basic motive for travels in the North: exoticism, primitivism, and escape from Mediterranean classicism’ (Northern Arcadia, p. 116).
- 50.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 2 vols. (London, 1818), vol. 1, p. 2. For a detailed consideration of the extent to which Walton’s expectations reflect contemporary speculation about the Polar Regions, see Cian Duffy, The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830: ‘classic ground’ (London: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 102–105, 124–34.
- 51.
William Epps Cormack, Account of a Journey Across the Island of Newfoundland (Edinburgh, 1824), pp. 17–18.
- 52.
Thomas Cochrane, letter to Thomas Hyde Villiers of 26 November 1826; now held in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh: MS 2370, f. 26 (and quoted by kind permission).
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Duffy, C. (2017). Introduction: ‘the less known, but equally romantic, regions of the north’. In: Duffy, C. (eds) Romantic Norths. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51246-4_1
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