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Diffusing Useful Knowledge: Skilling-Magazin, Transnational Images and Local Communities
Iver Tangen Stensrud
Around 180 printers, booksellers, writers and other interested people gathered on 24 June 1840 for a grand celebration in the Norwegian capital Christiania, now Oslo.
1 This chapter is based on my PhD thesis: ‘The Magazine and the City: Architecture, Urban Life and the Illustrated Press in Nineteenth-Century Christiania’ (PhD thesis, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, 2018), <http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2501383>. The occasion was the four-hundredth anniversary of the invention of the art of printing. Celebrations such as these had been held on every anniversary in Germany and in centres of printing in Europe and were important in cementing Gutenberg as the inventor of printing.
2 In Europe the 1840 celebrations had a more radical edge than earlier celebrations. Especially in French and German regions calls for press freedom served as a prelude to the revolutions of 1848. See: E. Eisenstein, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (Philadelphia, 2011), pp. 170–8. This, however, was the first time such a celebration had been held in Norway. The initiative came from an article in the
Morgenbladet newspaper signed ‘a printer’. While the celebration in Norway may be insignificant compared to festivals held in other countries, ‘I do not in any way doubt’ the printer stated, ‘that every printer in the country would see it as appropriate that Norway, the freest country in Europe’ would join the celebrations.
3 Quoted from Morgenbladet, 12 May 1840. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Norwegian to English are my own. See also: Beretning om Sekularfesten i Christiania den 24. Juni 1840 i Anledning af Bogtrykkerkunstens Opfindelse (Christiania, 1840); O. A. Øverland, Den Norske bogtrykkerforening 1884–1909: med træk af boghaandverkets historie og arbeidskaar i Norge (Kristiania, 1909), p. 54ff. In 1814 Norway had passed a new democratic constitution (see Hemstad’s chapter in this book). Article 100 of the constitution stated that ‘there shall be freedom of expression’.
4 Quoted from the English translation on the Norwegian parliament’s website: ‘The Constitution, as Laid down on 17 May 1814 by the Constituent Assembly at Eidsvoll and Subsequently Amended, Most Recently in May 2018’, <www.stortinget.no/globalassets/pdf/english/constitutionenglish.pdf> [accessed 3 November 2021]. As Norwegian historian Francis Sejersted has pointed out, this article, together with article 85 (today 84) which stated that the Parliament ‘shall meet in open session, and its proceedings shall be published in print’,
5 ‘The Constitution, as Laid down on 17 May 1814’. established a principle of openness, publicity and transparency in the political system. This showed the commitment of the constitutional founders to the idea of what Jürgen Habermas called the public sphere.
6 F. Sejersted, Norsk Idyll? (Oslo, 2000), pp. 62, 75–6; J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA, 1989). Norway was one of the last countries in Europe in which the art of printing had been introduced, yet now the development of the art went hand in hand with ‘the free progressive life which now moves all around the country’, editor and publisher of
Skilling-Magazin Carl August Guldberg wrote in his history of printing published for the Gutenberg quatercentenary.
7 C. A. Guldberg, Historisk Udsigt over Bogtrykkerkonsten fra dens Begyndelse til nærværende Tid: et Indbydelsesskrift til Sekularfesten i Christiania d. 24 Juni 1840 (Christiania, 1840), p. 24. The author Henrik Wergeland’s cantata
Vord lys! [Be Light!] was performed at the mass held in the Church of Our Saviour in the main square in Christiania. Wergeland here depicted the printing press as a light that would diffuse knowledge and education to all classes of society. In his sermon for the occasion, the local bishop mostly agreed with Wergeland: Gutenberg’s art was given to mankind to drive out darkness, to promote enlightenment, truth and brotherly love. But the bishop also provided some warnings. The most dangerous products of the press were ‘those publications that endanger innocence and morality’, he argued. Mainly ‘the countless army of novels, many of which must be understood to be a terrible nuisance, as their reading leads to reverie and a distaste for useful activities, fills the brain with overwrought ideas and opens the heart to dangerous temptation’.
8 Bishop Christian Sørensen’s sermon is quoted in Øverland, Den Norske bogtrykkerforening 1884–1909, p. 62. ‘Langt farligere have ufeilbar de Skrifter været, som have været til Skade for Uskyld og Sædelighed, den talløse Hær af Romaner nemlig, hvoraf mange maa ansees som en frygtelig Plage, da deres Læsning forvilder Forstanden, leder til Sværmeri og Afsmag for gavnlig Virksommhed, fylder Hjernen med overspændte Ideer, ophidser Indbildningskraften og aabner Hjertet for farlige fristelser’.The celebrations expressed a general belief in the power of the printing press to change society. However, as the bishop reminded the printers and booksellers gathered in the church that day, not all products of the press were useful or morally edifying. One way to combat the reading of immoral novels or dangerous political texts was to provide the public with useful, entertaining knowledge.
The Gutenberg quatercentenary is connected to the aforementioned Norwegian illustrated periodical Skilling-Magazin (published from 1835 to 1891) in many ways. Its editor-publisher were one of the driving forces behind the celebrations. The celebrations also show the belief in the early nineteenth century in the printing press to change society and echo the motivation behind creating an illustrated educational magazine such as Skilling-Magazin. Moreover, just as the Gutenberg centennial was inspired by similar celebrations in cities across Europe, Skilling-Magazin took inspiration from the British educational Penny Magazine and similar periodicals. Skilling-Magazin was a node in a transnational network of magazines that not only shared the same form and general purpose, forming recognisable ‘brands’ in the eyes of their readers and publishers, but also engaged in a lively exchange of texts and images. However, like the Norwegian Gutenberg centennial, Skilling-Magazin also needs to be understood in its local context, as a part of a local community of publishers, writers and readers.
The publishers and readers of
Skilling-Magazin were literary citizens. They took part in a transnational literary community of publishers, writers, editors, engravers, draftsmen and readers.
Skilling-Magazin and other educational periodicals were transnational products. The transnational context of the illustrated press shaped the format of the periodicals, the techniques used to make the images and the discourse around these periodicals.
9 T. Smits, The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational Visual Culture of the News, 1842–1870 (London, 2019); I. Stensrud, ‘The Magazine and the City’. Audiences from all over the world not only expected the images from these illustrated periodicals to look a certain way, but also to a large extent looked at the same images.
10 T. Smits, The European Illustrated Press, p. 19. Skilling-Magazin also shared the ethos of other illustrated educational magazines, namely to diffuse useful knowledge; to educate and enlighten the common man.
However,
Skilling-Magazin was also part of a local community of printers, publishers, writers and readers with different organisational and technical resources to those we find in the centres of printing in England, Germany or France. The magazine’s educational efforts were also connected to a state-supported enlightenment drive in nineteenth-century Norway. In the scholarly literature, illustrated educational magazines of the 1830s are most often placed in the context of a burgeoning mass market for periodicals and the beginning of popular magazine publishing in the nineteenth century.
11 See e.g. P. J. Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860 (Oxford, 1991). In this chapter I argue that we can place
Skilling-Magazin at a historical and geographical crossroads, between the Northern Enlightenment and nineteenth-century mass publishing.