The presence of anecdotes, private lives and secret histories in the two very different libraries, as well as the clear traces of the genres in the unpublished writings of Biehl and Suhm, show how this pan-European current of literature reached readerships of different kinds in Denmark
–Norway during the latter part of the eighteenth century. The popularity of the texts revealing the hidden sides of politics and contemporary history spanned from the intellectual elite in Copenhagen to the broader, bourgeois book consumers, including women, in Christiania. The two libraries share an astonishing international outlook and interest in current affairs of Europe, while Drejer’s club also confirms the multilingual characteristic of Scandinavian literary culture in the late eighteenth century.
1 See M. Björkman, ‘Läsernas nöje’, p. 336. However, Diurendahl’s shows that anecdotes, private lives and secret histories were not only imported and read in foreign languages. Many of the ‘secret’ accounts from foreign courts, even the Swedish court of Gustav III, were translated into Danish, which indicates that translators and booksellers saw the commercial potential in this hybrid literature, appearing enticingly at the boundaries between fact and fiction, public and private worlds, entertainment, moral instruction and politics. In the news press the translations were advertised among titles of a more political kind as well as among light entertaining fiction or didactic books, many of them specifically addressing female readers such as the popular genre of ‘New Year’s gifts’.
How the different titles in foreign languages and Danish translations were actually read and potentially discussed among the users of the two libraries, we cannot know. I have not tried to broach the complicated task of tracing individual readers’ reactions or discussions in this chapter. We might, however, assume that they influenced political awareness and discussion among the consumers at some level. Given what Færch has argued about the impact on political awareness and public opinion of manuscript libels with slanderous and erotic content involving people in power, the potential impact of the printed anecdotes, private lives and secret histories on the individual as well as the collective attentiveness to the hidden structures of power and authority is considerable – despite the fact that the majority of the available titles mainly centred on foreign politics and contemporary history. The German account in Drejer’s club of the secrets of the Danish court ‘after the revolution of Struensee’ is the exception. This Geheime Hof und Staats-Geschichte was undeniably a text of high political significance, and its very presence in a Danish collection raises intriguing questions. Moreover, together with the anecdotes from the Swedish court this publication also demonstrates how accounts of this kind not only travelled from Europe to Scandinavia, but even from Sweden and Denmark–Norway to the continent, and back again.
The unpublished manuscripts of Charlotta Dorothea Biehl and Peter Frederik Suhm are the most explicit witnesses of a sophisticated familiarity with the scandalous and critical genres of anecdotes, private lives and secret histories in Denmark–Norway. The texts by these two literary citizens of the world do not only attest to a deeply political reading and understanding of this European current of literature. Their careful adaptations of the transnational genres of ‘chroniques scandaleuses’ and ‘secret history’ in a contemporary, Dano-Norwegian political setting also demonstrate how these genres held the potential of a deep political critique of absolute, hereditary monarchic rule. The potential political effects of this kind of ‘politics of disclosure’ explain why the two texts remained ‘unpublishable’ until long after the end of absolutism in Norway and Denmark.