As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the belief in the power of the printing press to diffuse knowledge was widespread among the elites of nineteenth-century Norway. One of the most eager supporters of the
Skilling-Magazin and these enlightenment efforts was Henrik Wergeland. Wergeland was one of the period’s most prolific, influential and controversial writers. He wrote not only tributes to the art of printing but also published his own educational journals
For Almuen [For the Common Man] and
For Arbeidsklassen [For the working classes] in the 1830s and early 1840s. In the future, Wergeland argued,
Skilling-Magazin had the potential to become a ‘house library’, a ‘comfort for the peasant to take up and read out loud in the winter nights when he comes home from work’.
Skilling-Magazin would be ‘ranked only after the Bible and the Psalm book and could be put beside Snorro since its usefulness in daily life will always be felt’.
1 H. Wergeland, ‘Om Skilling-Magazinet (Indsendt)’, Statsborgeren, 25 October 1835, in H. Jæger and D. Arup Seip, Samlede skrifter: trykt og utrykt, vol. 3, b. 2, Artikler og småstykker: polemiske og andre 1833–1836 (Oslo, 1933), pp. 246–7. ‘[…] bliver [Skilling-Magazinet] og eengang i Tiden, eftersom det gaaer fremad et Huusbibliothek, der bliver en Vederqvægelse for Bonden at tage for sig og læse høit af i Vinterqvellene, naar han kommer ind fra sit Arbeide, og det kan blive en nyttig Haandbog, hvori han kan kaste op om nyttige Tings Tilberedelse o.s v. Skillings-magazinet faaer altsaa Rang efter Bibelen og Psalmebogen, og kan lægges ved Siden af Snorro, da Nytten af Skillingen i daglig Liv altid føles’. Snorro refers to the Icelandic historian, poet and author of the history of Norwegian kings, Snorri Sturluson. Wergeland expressed lofty beliefs about the importance of the
Skilling-Magazin and the enlightenment efforts more generally. But how widespread was
Skilling-Magazin? And who were its readers?
As no subscription lists survive, it is hard to say anything definitive about circulation numbers or who actually read the
Skilling-Magazin. As we have seen,
Skilling-Magazin was initially considered a success, boasting two thousand subscribers in 1835. This was a substantial number for Norway at the time, a country of around 1.2 million inhabitants of whom only around 130,000 lived in urban areas.
2 ‘Hjemmehørende Folkemengde’, Statistisk sentralbyrå, <www.ssb.no/a/kortnavn/hist_tab/3-1.html> [accessed 29 September 2021]. In comparison, the leading daily newspaper
Morgenbladet had around 850 subscribers in the early 1830s, reaching 1,500 in the 1840s.
3 Y. Hauge, Morgenbladets historie, vol. 1, 1819–1854 (Oslo, 1963). However, it seems that the initial novelty of the
Skilling-Magazin soon faded. The number of subscribers probably decreased slowly, to somewhere between 1,500 and 1,600 in 1838.
4 This figure is mentioned by Guldberg & Dzwonkowski in an article in Morgenbladet. ‘Svar fra Skilling-Magazinets Redaction til Indsenderen i Morgenbladet No. 295’, Tillægg til Morgenbladet no. 23, 23 January 1839. By the early 1860s the number of subscribers had increased again, probably to well over 2,000.
5 In 1863 and 1866 around 2,000 subscriptions of Skilling-Magazin were sent by post, half of them to the eastern part of Norway. Probably, the actual circulation figures were higher, as many would subscribe within the city of Christiania or its immediate surroundings. The figures are from B. J. Langseth, ‘Christian Johnsens “Almuevennen”: en analyse av ukebladets innholds- og utbredelsesstruktur i tidsrommet 1849–1873’ (MA thesis, Oslo, 1975), pp. 144–6. Subscriptions were important, but the number of subscribers does not tell the whole story about who had access to the magazine. There was a widespread practice of sharing subscriptions, within a single household and between several households.
6 Hauge, Morgenbladets historie, vol. 1, p. 136. Skilling-Magazin could also be read in Christiania and across the country at reading clubs and commercial lending libraries or in book collections.
7 See e.g. E. S. Eide, Bøker i Norge: boksamlinger, leseselskap og bibliotek på 1800-tallet (Oslo, 2013); E. S. Eide, ‘Reading Societies and Lending Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Norway’, Library & Information History, 26:2 (June 2010), 121–38. Wergeland played an important role in establishing book collections aimed at common people around the country from the 1840s, and
Skilling-Magazin became a favoured item.
8 In 33 of the 88 book collections Eilert Sundt investigated in the 1860s, Skilling-Magazin and Almuevennen were the most loaned out items. See A. Arnesen, ‘Eilert Sundt’, in Fire foregangsmænd: Peder Hansen, Henrik Wergeland, Eilert Sundt, H. Tambs Lyche, Norsk bibliotekforenings småskrifter, 3 (Kristiania, 1917), p. 52. As for who the readers were, there are some indications that subscribers to the magazine in the 1830s and 1840s were a mix of educated craftsmen, middle class merchants and more educated people of the ‘upper classes’.
9 See I. Stensrud, ‘The Magazine and the City’, p. 113. From his meticulous diaries we also know that the linguist Ivar Aasen read Skilling-Magazin in the 1830s and was a subscriber in the 1860s. I. Aasen, Brev og dagbøker, vol. 3, Dagbøker 1830–1896, ed. R. Djupedal (Oslo, 1960). The editors of
Skilling-Magazin stated in 1838 that it was a common misconception among the public that the main target for the magazine was the peasant population. It was rather aimed at all who wanted to obtain useful knowledge, ‘whether peasant or bourgeois’. In fact, they argued, most of the people who subscribed to the magazine were people of the ‘so-called middle classes’.
10 ‘Svar fra Skilling-Magazinets Redaction til Indsenderen i Morgenbladet No. 295’, Tillægg til Morgenbladet no. 23, 23 January 1839. While the magazine clearly aimed to foster an educated common man, it seems that the magazine was just as popular among the wealthier, already book-buying public. A review in the
Morgenbladet newspaper in 1835 confirms this. It states that ‘the goodwill with which several of Christiania’s better citizens have met this beneficent endeavour deserves the nation’s highest gratitude’.
11 ‘Skilling-Magazin (indsændt)’, Morgenbladet, 4 June 1835. It seems that at least some of the initial support for the
Skilling-Magazin was as much a support for the cause of diffusing useful knowledge to the common man as it was a genuine interest in the magazine’s content.
Skilling-Magazin, like
Penny Magazine and other illustrated educational magazines, must be seen as a part of and a continuation of an enlightenment project. As French theorist Michel de Certeau has argued, the ideology of enlightenment claimed that printed texts could ‘transform manners and costumes, that an elite’s products could, if they were sufficiently widespread, remodel a whole nation’.
12 M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. F. Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), p. 166. As we saw above, this sentiment was also clearly a part of the Norwegian state-supported enlightenment project at the time. However, in the case of the
Skilling-Magazine it is unclear how successful it was. The magazine certainly received support and many subscribers. But part of the support can no doubt be attributed to an elite supporting an elite project.
What set
Skilling-Magazin apart from similar educational journals in Norway at the time – like those published by Henrik Wergeland – was its use of images. The images in
Skilling-Magazin were no doubt seen partly as a way to ‘lure the people in’ and to make them interested. This extensive use of illustrations also implied a particular audience to the learned elite. As the writer Aasmund Olavsson Vinje put it, illustrations were mainly there for ‘women and children’, but he had to admit that portraits and technical illustrations could be useful ‘for adults as well’.
13 A. O. Vinje, ‘Bladsjaa’, Dølen. Eit Vikublad, no. 8, 12 December 1858, p. 30. ‘[S]like Afskjeldringar ere for Kvennfolk, og Smaaborn, og mange, sosom Mannslik (Portræter) og Reidskaper, for vaxne Folk og’. But wood engravings could also be important for teaching the common people a sense of form and aesthetics. In an article on wood engraving as a tool of popular education, art historian Lorentz Dietrichson argued that the cold Norwegian climate meant that urban spaces were not as much used as in southern countries. Adornments on buildings and public spaces could therefore not play the same role in fostering an aesthetic sense among the public as they did in places such as Italy or southern Germany. This made wood engravings even more important in the Nordic countries, Dietrichson argued.
14 L. Dietrichson, ‘Træsnittets Betydning Som Folkedannelsesmiddel Med Specielt Hensyn Til de Nordiske Nationer’, Nordisk Tidskrift for Literatur og Kunst, vol. 1 (1863), 309–16.To Wergeland, as to Dietrichson, the images were not only a tool to get people to read the articles but played an important educational role in themselves. Wergeland argued that the images in
Skilling-Magazin could give a ‘new liveliness’ to the imagination of the common people. As an example of this, Wergeland claimed to have witnessed a peasant attempt to draw a picture of a leopard he had seen in the first issue of
Skilling-Magazin. In the end, the peasant could not finish the drawing, and his cat had to help him out. To Wergeland, this little story showed how the
Skilling-Magazin could help foster imagination and fantasy, capacities that lay dormant in the minds of the common people.
15 H. Wergeland ‘Træk af den periodiske Litteraturs Indflytelse paa Almuesmand’, Morgenbladet, 20 August 1835, in Artikler og småstykker 1833–38, pp. 232–3.Wergeland’s observations point us to the notion of reading as a creative practice. Regardless of their success, publications such as
Skilling-Magazin can easily be discarded as attempts of the more powerful to impose their values and ideology on the less powerful. However, as de Certeau reminds us, the ‘strategies’ of those in power are met with the ‘tactics’ of those whom power is asserted upon. Readers are like travellers, de Certeau states, they ‘move across lands belonging to someone else’.
16 M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. In moving across those lands, they always reshape the landscape. This allows the reader freedom. The fleeting nature of reading also makes historical reading practices hard to capture.
While it is hard to know exactly how the Skilling-Magazin was read by individual readers, we can say something general about the reception of the magazine. The magazine was clearly at first seen as a success, but as the novelty disappeared it also lost some of its subscribers. However, the magazine proved long-lasting, ceasing publication in 1891. The fact that the magazine lasted can be attributed to its state support. But it could also be that it found its audience among the more affluent as well as the interested readers among the common people. In addition, its extensive use of images could be one of the reasons the magazine had a continued appeal. Lastly, Skilling-Magazin can represent the dual nature of the state-driven enlightenment project. It was an elite project intended to impose elite values and interests on the common people. At the same time, as both Wergeland and de Certeau remind us, printed texts and images can be appropriated and used in many ways.