4 - ‘The brothers of Englishmen’: British Reflections on the Danish National Character

Summary

Not the least striking of the many striking passages in that most sensational of Gothic novels, The Monk (1796), by Matthew Lewis (1775–1818), is found in Chapter I of Volume III, where two nuns discuss the Danes, inhabitants of a country which, they are told, is ‘terribly infested by Sorcerers, Witches, and Evil Spirits’. One nun asks, ‘[A]re not the People all Blacks in Denmark?’, to which the other replies, ‘By no means, reverend Lady; They are of a delicate pea-green with flame-coloured hair and whiskers.’ ‘Mother of God!’ replies the first: ‘Pea-green? […] Oh! ’tis impossible!’, at which point the Porteress, who has been listening, interjects with ‘contempt’: ‘Impossible? […] Not at all: When I was a young Woman, I remember seeing several of them myself.’

In Lewis’s novel, this humorous passage is merely one of many which serve to illustrate the credulity of the Spanish Catholic nuns, and presumably, by implication, of Catholics more generally. But the conversation between the nuns should also be seen in a wider context, because discussion of the national character of the Danes was a persistent and surprisingly extensive strand of British writing about Denmark during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – and Lewis, as we have seen in Chapter 3, was certainly familiar with at least some of that writing. Nor, indeed, is Lewis’s vision of exotic Danes altogether unique. The Scottish historian and traveller William Thomson (1746–1817), for example, in his Letters from Scandinavia – published in 1796, the same year as Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–97) Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark – remarks that ‘the Danes are rather bizarre in their appearance […] They have many of them a sickly appearance and others look as if they painted [i.e. used makeup]’, something stereotypically associated, at the time, with the French. And, of course, this British discussion of the Danish national character itself took place within the still-wider context of the ongoing debate about national character in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, which can be traced back at least as far as the essay ‘Of National Characters’ first published by David Hume (1711–76) in 1748, in which Hume uses the ‘supposed’ contrast between an Englishman and a Dane as one of his early, illustrative examples.