Literacy was widespread in Norway in the period (see Haarberg in this volume). However, the population’s capacity to read was not matched by the infrastructure of a modern book market steadily supplying new books in different parts of the country. A number of formats in collecting books and making them available to a wide range of readers were established across the eighteenth century in order to fill this gap. Wealthy individuals such as Claus Fasting,
1 A. Nøding, Claus Fasting: Dikter, journalist og opplysningspioner (Oslo, 2018). Peter Frederik Suhm
2 E. Krefting, ‘De usminkede sannhetenes forsvar. Peter Frederik Suhms publikasjonsstrategier og offentlighetsidealer under det dansk-norske eneveldet’, in A. M. B. Bjørkøy et al. (eds), Litterære verdensborgere: Transnasjonale perspektiver på norsk bokhistorie 1519–1850 (Oslo, 2019), pp. 332–76. or Carl Deichman would assemble impressive book collections. These private collections were often available to friends and, after the death of their owners, later made accessible to the general public. Carl Deichman’s collection, for example, is today the foundational stock of Oslo City Library, still called ‘Deichmanske’.
3 N. J. Ringdal, By, bok og bibliotek (Oslo, 1985). Schools also had their own libraries where current students and alumni could borrow books. This applies both to the ‘cathedral schools’ and to the military schools in the major cities. Groups of citizens started initiatives to found reading societies, where a stock of books would be bought jointly and could be borrowed for a fee. Publishers and booksellers in various towns across Norway also established commercial lending libraries as a side business. These formats of reading societies and circulating libraries draw on well-known models, especially in Germany
4 B. M. Milstein, Eight Eighteenth-Century Reading Societies: A Sociological Contribution to the History of German Literature (Bern, Frankfurt, 1972); R. Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1974). and England.
5 E. Jacobs, ‘Eighteenth-Century British Circulating Libraries and Cultural Book History’, Book History, 6 (2003), 1–22; J. Raven, ‘Historical Introduction: The Novel Comes of Age’, in J. Raven and A. Forster, with S. Bending (eds), The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (Oxford, 2000), pp. 15–121.The range of book collections accessible to readers in eighteenth-century Norway is broad, and individual collections often move across the divide between the public and the private spheres. The library of the Royal Academy in Trondheim opened its doors to the public as far back as in 1766. Private collections were often made available to the public on their owner’s death, like the collections of Fasting and Deichman, or donated to larger established collections, like Suhm’s collection left to the Danish National Library. As momentum gathered towards the end of the century to establish a university in Norway, a solid book collection was seen as an indispensable precondition, and various citizens of Christiania (Oslo) devoted their efforts to this goal. After Norway had given itself a constitution in 1814 and the union with Denmark was dissolved, the general upsurge of new institutions and new projects also brought new reading societies, parish libraries and lending libraries across the country. The nineteenth century saw a veritable explosion of new opportunities to read in Norway.
6 E. Eide, ‘Reading Society and Lending Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Norway’, Library and Information History 26:2 (2010), 121–38; L. Byberg, Brukte bøker til bymann og bonde: bokauksjonen i den norske litterære offentligheten (2007), p. 98.Elisabeth Eide, who has studied reading societies and book collections in nineteenth-century Norway, points to a decisive shift from foreign-language books towards books in Danish during the nineteenth century in these libraries that were now also open to artisans, manual workers and servants.
7 See E. Eide, ‘Reading Society and Lending Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Norway’, p. 132. In the eighteenth century, however, book collections were closely tied to a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ and included much foreign literature in translation as well as in foreign languages.
8 See E. Eide, ‘Reading Society and Lending Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Norway’; Byberg, Brukte bøker til bymann og bonde; G. Dahl, Books in Early Modern Norway (Leiden, 2011). The city of Bergen with its population of merchants and immigrant workers, for example, had a foreign-language lending library with a collection predominantly of German books and translations into German. A bourgeois educated public, either as alumni of the cathedral schools or as members of a circle of friends around figures such as Carl Deichman, could arguably read literature in the major European languages and was interested in the latest literary trends from abroad. Eighteenth-century book collections in Norway served to keep multilingual citizens abreast of what was going on in the European world of letters.
These collections have not been as thoroughly researched as the book collections that emerged after Norway thought of itself as its own country in 1814. Some still exist, such as the collection of Christiania Cathedral School, the collection of the Trondheim Royal Academy and Carl Deichman’s collection. Most eighteenth-century collections, however, can only be reconstructed from catalogues, advertisements and sales catalogues. These catalogues demonstrate that, unlike parish libraries, all these public and private collections also carried novels, plays and narrative poetry, often classified as ‘literature’ (‘Litteratur’) in the catalogues, in addition to history books, travel narratives, biographies etc.
9 The classification of books is by no means consistent across catalogues (indeed, many of the commercial book collections are not categorised). The catalogue for Deichmanske uses the category ‘Litteratur’ to include novels, plays and narrative poetry. Modern literature is classified as ‘skjønnlitteratur’ (belles lettres). The Royal Academy in Trondheim uses ‘Philologie og skjönne videnskaber’ as a category under which it subsumes ‘literature’, while the catalogue of Christiania military school uses ‘Aesthetik’ as the larger category under which it counts ‘Poesie’, ‘Romaner’ and ‘Comedier’. I have chosen ‘literary fiction’ as a term for the works recorded in the database, because it most clearly captures for today’s users the genres featured, namely novels as well as narrative poetry and plays. In many book collections built by institutions and individuals such as Deichman, novels, plays and narrative poetry would only make up a very small proportion of the books. They account for a larger proportion of the commercial lending libraries of booksellers. In her survey of books in early modern Norway, Gina Dahl observes a similar distribution. Moreover, she highlights a related shift in the genres of entertainment literature.
10 G. Dahl, Books in Early Modern Norway, chapter 9. She refers to early predominance of formats such as almanacs, ballads and broad sheets, which give way in the late eighteenth century to the novel that was supplied by the lending libraries and reading societies.
11 Ibid. p. 191.Private and public book collections in eighteenth-century Norway, then, do not cover the entire reading material available to readers. They serve a bourgeois public interested in ideas and fashions from Europe and, generally, capable of reading a book in German, French and/or English. These book collectors, reading societies and to some extent lending library owners can be considered ‘propagators of taste’ (‘Geschmacksträger’), as Levin Schücking describes them: public figures and institutions who serve as brokers of literary taste in their communities.
12 L. I. Schücking, The Sociology of Literary Taste (Routledge, 1966), p. 84. For my investigation of ‘multilingual readers’ in eighteenth-century Norway, I will focus on the book collections used by this particular segment of society. Considering religious books and their possibly multilingual readers (in Latin, Greek and Hebrew) or considering the parish libraries with their decidedly ‘practical’ focus in reading materials would be a different project. However, my focus on the bourgeois multilingual reading public allows me to trace different ways in which Norway’s reading infrastructure imitates models from Europe and how it imports books, reading practices and literary traditions from the European republic of letters (see also Nøding in this volume).
The basis for this investigation is a database of book collections in Norway in the eighteenth century, compiled by Marit Sjelmo and me. The database captures a representative selection of book collections of different types (private collections open to the public, school libraries, reading societies and booksellers’ lending libraries) and from different areas of Norway (Christiania, Bergen, Trondheim and Drammen). It records novels, short stories, plays and narrative poetry in Danish, in foreign languages and in translation from the (published) catalogues of these book collections. The database thereby makes a selection of texts recognisable to today’s readers as ‘literary fiction’ (see note 11). The works included are published as stand-alone books or collections of plays and stories. Works serialised in the periodicals (like Fielding’s
Tom Jones in
Det nye Magazin indeholdende Fortællinger) could be found in the book collections, too (in this case in the Trondheim Reading Society). Identifying and recording such serialisations systematically, however, lies outside the scope of the current version of the database. The database can be accessed on the website of the National Library of Norway.
13 <www.nb.no/forskning/skjonnlitteratur-i-norske-bibliotek-pa-1700-tallet>. A full list of the catalogues included can be found at the end of the article.Literary Fiction in Norwegian Book Collections offers a survey of novels, plays and narrative poetry in the public and private collections available to Norwegian readers before 1800. It does not cover all Norwegian book collections from the eighteenth century that have drawn up catalogues and not all texts categorised under ‘literature’ in the period. This would have been a much more comprehensive project. Instead, ten collections have been selected as an indicative sample, relying on previous discussions of book collections in the research literature. The literary texts recorded in their catalogues are the basic entries for a database that can be searched for collections, languages and genres. We often needed to supply author names and information about the edition (where possible) ourselves, because that kind of metadata is not necessarily given (in particular in the catalogues of lending libraries). The database is openly accessible and intended to support all kinds of explorations into the popularity of certain works and authors in eighteenth-century Norway, rather than provide absolute figures.
The database records 876 titles. It gives an overview of literature available in the genres novels, plays (including libretti), narrative/epic poetry, stories (including novellas, contes and fables), as well as story collections. Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote, for example, can be found in seven of the ten collections sampled, mostly in the Danish translation by Charlotte Biehl but also in French and Spanish. The library of Christiania Cathedral School even holds Lesage’s French version of Avellaneda’s spurious ‘continuation’ of the Quixote, which prompted Cervantes to rewrite the second part. Henry Fielding’s novels are available in book form in Danish translation with the booksellers Diurendahl and Schousted, but in English at the library of Christiania Cathedral School and the military school. Sophie von La Roche’s sentimental bestseller Das Fräulein von Sternheim is available in German in the Bergen societies and in Danish elsewhere in Norway.
The milestones of literary fiction in the eighteenth century can be found in book collections across the country, either in the original language or in Danish translation. With access to multiple collections (not only in the metropolis Christiania, but also in Bergen and Trondheim), it was possible to get a reasonably good overview of French classical drama (Racine, Molière and Corneille), but also fashionable contemporary plays from France and Germany. Readers could find a broad selection in novels and plays but also narrative poems. In the latter category Ludvig Holberg’s mock-heroic Peder Paars dominates, but also Boileau’ Satires and Voltaire’s Pucelle can be found as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost and (in multiple copies) Macpherson’s Ossian in English or Danish translation. Norwegian readers could already navigate European literature with the works available in Danish. If they could also read German and French, it was possible to get a relatively comprehensive view of contemporary, eighteenth-century literature. Different from the recording of publication figures, as Stangerup practises it for the Danish novel, these book collections trace both current reading tastes and the broader cultural horizon. A number of unexpected findings in the database shall serve as the starting points for three explorations into book history, history of reading and literary history in what follows.