Book collections and the first Norwegian novel

Collett enacts in this conversation the conflict between generations around which her novel revolves, namely between parents’ decision-­making and a young woman’s choice of marriage partner. All four daughters of district governor Ramm are faced with difficulties in courtship and marriage, as Collett plays through multiple possible unhappy constellations in her novel. The main plot, however, gains a larger resonance through the links to popular reading practices and reading materials. Indeed, Collett’s District Governor’s Daughters, considered the first Norwegian novel of substance today,2 T. Selboe, ‘Camilla Collett (1813–1895)’, in E. B. Hagen (ed.), Den norske litterære kanon: 1700–1900 (Oslo, 2009), pp. 66–74. avails itself of the reading culture we traced in the book collections in order to establish its take on love and feelings and in order to situate this perspective vis-à-vis the reading backgrounds of its Norwegian audience.

The novel, published in 1854/5, is set in the 1830s. Its protagonists quote (mostly) Schiller from memory throughout the dialogue, but also Heine and Goethe (with Clara’s song from Egmont) make an appearance. Two male protagonists are associated with major authors of the turn of the century, based on two portraits they resemble: Brøcher, the suitor of Amalie Ramm, with Goethe; and Kold, the love interest of Sofie Ramm, with Byron (p. 229). Intertextual references provide characterisation, such as when Kold is given the emotional appeal of a British romantic, but they also support the motivation of the plot. When Sofie is assaulted by Lorenz Brandt, Kold comes to the rescue, and Collett’s narrator comments ‘No winged god of old, no hero out of the stories of Lafontaine or Clauren could, under similar circumstances, have arrived at a more perfect moment than Kold did just then’ (191).3 ‘Ingen lafontainisk eller tromlitzsk Romanhelt kunde komme mere á propos end Cold i dette Øieblik’ (p. 184). Lafontaine, as we have seen, is well represented in Norwegian book collections as far back as the eighteenth century; in the novel even Sofie’s mother reads him. (Heinrich Clauren’s major commercial successes are not published until the nineteenth century and therefore do not register in the database).

Another text from the database might have served as inspiration for the entire novel: Johann Friedrich Hoche’s Des Amtmanns Tochter von Lüde (1797).4 J. G. Hoche, Des Amtmanns Tochter von Lüde. Eine Wertheriade (Bremen, 1797). The novel is registered in the Bergen reading society for foreign-­language literature, so it is not possible to claim that Collett, who lived in Christiania, Copenhagen and elsewhere on the continent, came across this particular narrative in a Norwegian book collection, and I have not been able to locate evidence that Collett has read Hoche’s book from her correspondence. Yet, while Collett does not copy straightforwardly from Hoche, the resonances between Amtmandens Døttre and Des Amtmanns Tochter arguably go well beyond the title.

Hoche’s novel revolves around the fate of two young women, Mariane and Elise. They fall in love with their house teacher Wilhelm Wallheim, who in turn promises marriage to them both. While Elise enters a marriage of convenience after she finds out about Wallheim’s duplicity and commits suicide on her wedding day, Mariane falls pregnant, is abandoned and dies in childbirth. The novel’s main protagonist is Eduard, who then encounters the pregnant Mariane and hears the tragic story from her father, Amtmann Walder. After the death of Mariane, Eduard is adopted by Walder. The son of Collett’s district governor is also called Edvard. The parallels are not exact, however, as Collett’s main male protagonist is not Edvard, but Georg Kold, whose role is comparable to Edvard in Hoche. In Collett’s novel we find not two but four daughters: Marie, who enters a marriage of convenience under pressure from her parents and dies young; Louise, who is unhappily married to the former house teacher Mr Caspers; Amalie, who reads Ossian (p. 209) and is engaged to the poor theologian Adolf Brøcher; and Sofie, who needs to make a choice between Georg Kold, the current house teacher, and Mr Rein, a well-established dean.

Hoche’s novel is subtitled as a ‘Wertheriade’ (a novel written in imitation of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther). Hoche’s Wallheim redoubles Werther’s passion. Werther’s famous yellow waistcoat is explicitly echoed, as Wallheim wears a blue waistcoat when declaring himself to Elise and a green waistcoat when declaring himself to Mariane. When his intense feelings are rejected, he commits suicide, like Werther, with a pistol. Collett, even though she explicitly associates Georg Kold with ‘Werther-like dreaming out in nature’ (167),5 ‘nogen Trang til et werthersk Drømmerie i Naturen’ (p. 160). is much less dramatic than Hoche. However, the two eldest daughters of her district governor are also linked to death. Marie dies young. Sofie imagines her doll Louise as dead on the wedding day of her sister Louise and Mr Caspers (‘I no longer spoke to her, because she was dead. She should, she must be dead’ (107).6 ‘Jeg talte ikke mere til hende; thi hun var jo død. Hun skulde, hun maatte være død’ (p. 102). She buries the doll in a ceremony not very different from what Hoche describes for Elise’s funeral (p. 238). Further resonances run through the entire novel: both Elise and Sofie find refuge in a grotto, both Caspers and Wallheim are judged by their narrators for their disrespect of women’s superior capacity for feeling, and both novels include in their moral argument the misguided affections of daughters as well as the failings of parents. Hoche, like Collett, chooses a different format from the epistolary novel (to which The Sorrows of Young Werther belongs) with a loosely plotted prose narrative where occasional letters, songs and diary entries provide moments of emotional intensity. Like Collett’s Georg Kold, Hoche’s Eduard also has an older female correspondent, who attempts to help him sort out his feelings.

Individually, each of these features is common enough in late eighteenth-century fiction. Collectively, however, they suggest that Collett might have read Hoche’s novel at some point. Amtmandens Døttre riffs on similar concerns and narrative figures as we find in Des Amtmanns Tochter. Collett, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, however, writes with a different ambition and historical perspective. In Hoche’s novel the intertextual references link to current literary and musical production and serve to characterise and moralise in a strictly contemporary fashion. Collett, on the other hand, chooses to combine separate literary lineages such as Byron, Lafontaine and the comedies of Karoline Møllerup to sculpt a more complex resonance chamber for the stories of her protagonists.

To all intents and purposes, Sofie chooses Mr Rein for a husband when she visits his house. She is pleased by the elegance of its eighteenth-century décor, the pastoral paintings ‘in the manner of Boucher’ (226),7 ‘i Bouchers Maneer’ (p. 219). the rococo mirrors and the chinoiseries as well as the dean’s library that is open to anyone who wishes to use it (p. 224), much like the book collections of the eighteenth-century Norwegian bourgeoisie. Kold, on the other hand, estranges Sofie’s affections when she overhears his sardonic, perhaps even Byronic, comments on her emotional sincerity. It appears that a move into the literary past is necessary for the Norwegian ‘femme emancipée’ (p. 199), because in the contemporary environment her emotional life finds little respect.

Even though the portraits of Goethe and Byron are replaced by a painting of a female ancestor of the daughters in the end, literature does its service as a resonance chamber for the characters’ thoughts and feelings throughout the novel, and Collett spins a complex web of national and international literary references. Lorenz Brandt, the unwelcome suitor, is ‘a Norwegian of the good old sort’ (190),8 ‘Han er en Nordmand af det gode, gamle Kuld’ (p. 184). whereas Kold is linked to the project of 1814 when we learn that the copy of Byron’s portrait that resembles him was printed that year (p. 229). Rein belongs to the earlier generation that cultivated cosmopolitan habits and multilingual book collections.

It is obvious that Amtmandens Døttre draws on the European tradition of the novel. Siv Gøril Brandtzæg has traced its links to epistolary novels featuring similar character constellations between young women, their fathers and house teachers, particularly Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse and Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné,9 S. G. Brandtzæg, ‘“Jeg ridsede mit Navn paa Héloïses kolde Bryst”: Camilla Colletts Amtmandens Døttre i lys av den europeiske sentimentale roman’, Edda, 102:2 (3 June 2015), 94–109. while Tone Selboe foregrounds Collett’s debts to Jane Austen.10 See T. Selboe, ‘Camilla Collett (1813–1895)’. One can also argue for The Sorrows of Young Werther and the Werther imitations as a feature in the resonance room of Collett’s novel. After all, Lotte in Goethe’s novel is also the daughter of a district governor (Amtmann). Analysing Amtmandens Døttre against the holdings of book collections of the eighteenth century takes us a step further in this critical project, as it underlines that the first Norwegian novel builds on the long tradition of Norwegian readers as literary citizens of the world. This tradition is also recorded by Conradine Dunker in her memoire Gamle dage, for example, where she chronicles bourgeois cultural life in Christiania at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Dunker’s Gamle dage was written in the 1850s, which is when Collett published her novel.11 C. Dunker, Gamle dage. Erindringer og tidsbilleder (Copenhagen, 1871). For Collett, the tradition of the multilingual citizen of the world includes both the fate of Karoline Møllerup and the promise of Mr Rein.

Norwegian book collections in the eighteenth century carried a broad variety of literary texts bringing the European republic of letters to the Far North. As we have seen through the three exploratory case studies of Pamela, the German Geheimbundroman and Amtmandens Døttre, these book collections contributed to cultural practices of reading and performing texts that further link Norway to developments in Europe. For reading societies in Germany, France and Britain in the late eighteenth century, Wittmann identifies two ‘decisive achievements’: providing an infrastructure for ‘extensive reading’ as well as a social organisation that reflects the ‘public sphere’ of private individuals.12 See R. Wittmann, ‘Was there a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?’, pp. 308–9. We see similar ‘achievements’ in Norway, but our analysis of the book collections and their multilingual holdings suggest that the horizon is European, firstly because the collections mirror not simply the trends from Copenhagen, and secondly, because the Danish translations lag behind international trends recorded in the book collections. The situation will change for the book collections of the nineteenth century, as Eide has shown, when Danish comes to be the dominant language. In the eighteenth century, as well as in the representation through Collett’s nineteenth-century novel, the book collections stand for a European context with and against which Norway begins to define itself as a political and literary nation.