Diurendahl’s lending library in Christiania, the unofficial capital of the Norwegian realm, was a completely different reading institution compared to Drejer’s club in Copenhagen. The commercial lending library grew out of Andreas Diurendahl’s bookseller business in 1785.
1 Diurendahl’s was probably the first successful public lending library in Norway. The number of lending libraries and private reading societies in Norway increased decisively from the early nineteenth century. See E. S. Eide, ‘Reading Societies and Lending Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Norway’, Library and Information History 26:2 (2010), 121–38. See also K. Kukkonen’s chapter in this volume and M. Björkman, ‘Läsarnas nöje. Kommersiella lånbibliotek i Stockholm 1783–1809’, PhD thesis (Uppsala, 1992), concerning Sweden. Christiania readers could borrow books from Diurendahl against a fee, the size of which varied according to the title. During the eighteenth century, private and public book collections were made accessible to a range of different readers in various ways across Norway. From 1785 Christiania readers could borrow books from Carl Deichman’s private library. Deichman’s collection was much larger, it was free of charge, but it also had a more learned and exclusive profile than Diurendahl’s library. As a commercial lending library, Diurendahl’s selection of titles was certainly more adapted to the interests and tastes of a broader, bourgeois readership, and the more extensive opening hours (12 hours a day) contributed to the success of the library.
A catalogue of Diurendahl’s lending library was published in 1797, as an advertisement, and included the lending conditions.
2 A. Diurendahl, Fortegnelse over Endeel indbundne Bøger, Som ere til Leje hos Boghandler Diurendahl i Christiania, paa efterstaaende Conditioner (Christiania, 1797). It contains 241 titles, of which some had several volumes and others were books that assembled several individual titles, ordered alphabetically. The lack of conventional religious or edifying books is striking, light entertaining prose genres dominate (novels and gallant novellas, collections of moral tales and traditional legends, exotic travel narratives and various kinds of history books, including biographical literature), and the focus on women, practical education and domestic life in quite a number of titles indicate a substantial female readership.
3 The turn from edifying literature to worldly practical advice books and all kinds of history in women’s reading in late eighteenth-century Scandinavia is demonstrated by L. Byberg, ‘“Jeg gik i ingen Skole, jeg havde min Frihed hele Dagen og Nøglen til hans Bogskab”. Kvinners lesning på 1700-tallet’, Historisk tidsskrift, 90:2 (2011), 159–88, and M. Björkman, ‘Läsernas nöje’. With very few exceptions, the books are in Danish, many of them translations of important foreign literary works, especially novels (
Pamela,
Anti-Pamela,
Don Quixote for instance). Most interesting in our context, however, is the supply of titles belonging to the current of hybrid political-historical literature. Diurendahl’s lending library holds a number of anecdotes, private lives and secret histories from courts across Europe. Thus, it provides the readers with peepholes into the world of European politics and contemporary history from a perspective that the authors pretended to convey the secret, inside version of events, which could not be found in conventional accounts.
The sixth entry in Diurendahl’s catalogue is
Anecdoter om Peter den store [Anecdotes of Peter the Great], which is probably identical to
Original-Anekdoter om Peter den Store. Samlede af Anseelige Personers mundtlige Fortællinger i Moskau og Petersborg, og opbevarede for Efterslægten, af Jacob von Stählin, translated into Danish by a Christian Dreyer in 1793. Stählin presents the curious and entertaining stories from the Russian court as authentic and partly initiated by the tsar himself.
4 The German historian, writer on music and fireworks designer Jacob Stählin held several positions at the imperial court in St Peterburg from 1735. The Danish translation was advertised repeatedly in KA (including, on 21 May 1793, a note on how the anecdotes are amusing and useful/instructive at the same time). It was also advertised in Norske Intelligenz-Sedler (NIS) in Christiania. The following catalogue entry is a collection that includes several titles, listed as follows:
Anecdoter og Efterretninger om Gustav den 3die, samt om hans Brødre og Søn [Anecdotes and Histories of Gustav III and his Brothers and Son]; 2)
Hemmelige Efterretninger fra Satans Hof [Secret histories of the court of Satan]; 3)
Campes Advarsel for den mandlige Ungdom [Warning for the male youth by Campe]; 4)
Henzes opdagede Hemmelighed ved Børneavlinger [The secret of procreation discovered by Henze], etc., etc. The first is probably an abridged Danish translation from
Characters and Anecdotes of the Court of Sweden by the proliferous Swedish literate Adolf Fredrik Ristell, published in English in London in 1790. While the Swedish translation of these supposedly trustworthy anecdotes and secret histories from the hidden, private world of Gustav III and his brothers did not appear until 1820, the Danish translation is from 1792. Gustav III had seized power from the government in a coup d’état in 1772 and restored absolutism in Sweden. He was assassinated by a gunshot during a masked ball in 1772, a dramatic incident that gave rise to the Danish translation, whose precise title is ‘Anecdotes and relations of the recently killed Gustav III’.
5 The book is advertised for sale at Diurendahl’s bookshop several times in the local Christiania newspaper NIS (6 June and 13 June 1792 and again on 28 January 1795). Also advertised in KA (27 April 1792, 27 April and 7 May 1796). It is briefly reviewed in Tode’s Copenhagen review journal Kritik og Antikritik in 1792 (pp. 114–15). The second text that figures in the collection of ‘secrets’ in the seventh entry is the satirical ‘Secret histories of the court of Satan, with an introduction’ by Anton Franz Just, published in the Danish town of Viborg in 1794.
6 Hemmelige Efterretninger fra Satans Hof was advertised in NIS (9 September 1795). This pure satirical use of the ‘secret history’ shows the extent to which the genre had developed a recognisable identity, open to mock versions, even in Denmark–Norway.
Diurendahl’s lending library also holds
Geheime Beretning om Kong Georg den førstes Gemahlinde, hendes ulykkelige Historie (Secret account of the wife of King George I, her sad story), whose full title is
Geheime Beretning om Danmarks og Norges Rigers Dronning Caroline Mathildes Frue Olde-Moder, Kong Georg den Førstes af Stor-Britannien Gemahlinde: denne ulykkelige Printsesses vanheldige Skiebne, hendes Fengsel paa Slottet Ahlen, samt hendes geheime Underhandlinger med Greven af Kønigsmark, som mistænkt blev myrdet. This ‘secret history’ of the great-grandmother of Queen Caroline Mathilde was published in Viborg in 1773, shortly after the queen’s exile following the Struensee affair.
7 Geheime beretning was advertised repeatedly in NIS (14 October 1789, 5 May 1790, 13 April 1791, 18 July 1792). The library also offers
Anecdoter om Friederich den 2den, Konge i Preussen [Anecdotes of Frederick II, King of Prussia], which is probably identical to the
Anecdoter om Kongen av Preussens private Liv in the library of Drejer’s club, by the German musician Johann Adolph Schribe and translated into Danish anonymously as
Nyeste Anekdoter om Kongen av Preuszens Privat-levnet, tilligemed Anmerkninger over de Preusiske Armeers Krigs-forfatning and published in Copenhagen in 1778 (by Christian Gottlob Proft). Also listed is the
Hemmelige Efterretninger om det Berlinske Hof [Secret histories of the court of Berlin], a Danish translation by J. H. Meier from 1790 of the same controversial book by Mirabeau (
Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin, ou correspondance d’un voyageur français) that we find in a German version in the library of Drejer’s club. Diurendahl’s also includes
Baron Trencks politiske undersøgelse af samme [Count Trenck’s political investigation of the same] in Danish translation from 1790. Mirabeau’s unscrupulous use of information that he had gathered on his secret mission in Berlin to disclose the amorous and political intrigues of the Prussian court caused a diplomatic scandal in France, and the book was banned shortly before the outbreak of the revolution in 1789. The ban apparently fuelled its popularity, and Friederich von der Trenck, who had served under Frederick the Great, took on the job of refuting Mirabeau’s scandalous accounts. In his
Examen politique d’un ouvrage intitule Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin (1790) the author claims to establish the genuine and reliable truth about ‘the Prussian court and the springs of the Prussian machine’.
8 Trenk contra Mirabeau, eller Politisk og Kritisk Undersøgelse af Skriftet: Hemmelige Efterretninger om det Berlinske Hof, eller en reisende Franskmands Brevvexling (Copenhagen, 1790), p. 4. Diurendahl’s library offers the readers both versions of the state of affairs in the absolute monarchy of Frederick II’s Prussia.
The stock of anecdotes, private lives and secret histories in Diurendahl’s commercial lending library gives a good indication of the relatively broad popularity of this current of literature in Christiania during the 1790s. As with the books in Drejer’s club, we cannot know for certain how the readers responded to them. They must have appealed to the readers’ appetite for entertaining, piquant narratives and to a genuine interest in current affairs in Europe. Many of the titles held by the two libraries, both original and in Danish translations, were widely advertised in newspapers and weeklies among other light entertaining books as well as more prominent enlightenment publications. When the Danish translations of Mirabeau and Trenck are reviewed in the major learned journal
Lærde Efterretninger, the books are taken as signs of a general appetite for ‘the scandalous and the critical’ as well as for ‘libels’ (
paskviller) and their refutations among the reading public. However, both reviewers side with Mirabeau in his ‘secret’ accounts of Prussian politics.
9 The Danish translation of Mirabeau’s secret histories was advertised in KA 2 December 1789. The advertisement also refers to the forthcoming Trenk contra Mirabeau by the same translator. Trenk contra Mirabeau was also advertised several times in NIS during 1791 and 1792. Mirabeau’s text in Danish was reviewed in the Copenhagen journal Lærde Efterretninger (1790, pp. 185–90) and very briefly in Tode’s Kritik og Antikritik (1790, p. 109). Trenk contra Mirabeau was reviewed, probably by the same reviewer, in Lærde Efterretninger in 1791 (pp. 13–15) and extensively in Tode’s Kritik og Antikritik. While the reviewer questions Trenck’s refusal of Mirabeau’s revelations, he recommends the book to both ‘the thoughtful as well as the purely curious reader’ (vol. 7, p. 187). The readings by the borrowers from Diurendahl’s more popular library probably varied from the naïve and curious to the more sophisticated and critical. These books can have been read as pure entertainment or as a kind of moral lessons in line with the
historia magistra vitae paradigm, but they still provided a certain kind of insight into contemporary history and the political worlds and mechanisms in Europe at the time. Titles in Diurendahl’s such as
Secret histories from the court of Satan show that the readers were even offered self-conscious, playful versions of this particular genre of historical writing, which is often claimed to be based on truthful facts but not always meant to be taken literally.
Satirical or historical, fictitious or not, anecdotes and secret histories of the kind we find in Diurendahl’s library nevertheless expose – even for broader readerships of both sexes in the provincial town of Christiania – a hidden side of statecraft and contemporary history. Most of them do convey a general impression of decadence and despotism. Moreover, while all the titles in Diurendahl’s catalogue focus on foreign rulers and courts, we can assume that readers would be able to relate the hidden affairs and mechanisms as well as the politics of disclosure itself to the Dano-Norwegian context. Here, politics was still officially defined as the private business of sovereigns and banned from the public discourse in most forms.