3 - ‘A mine yet to be explored’: Romanticism and Anglo-Danish Literary Exchanges

Summary

On 1 July 1819, The New Monthly Magazine ran a six-page article entitled ‘Notices of Danish Literature’. It consists, for the most part, of ‘extracts translated’ from a book in German about ‘those Danish poets who have flourished during the last 35 years’, written by the Danish lawyer Jens Kragh Høst (1772–1844), who had been one of the founders of the Nordic Literature Society [Det skandinaviske litteraturselskab] at Copenhagen in 1796. The author of the ‘Notices’ remains unidentified and seems markedly unsure, themselves, about the ‘merits’ of contemporary Danish literature – and very possibly did not actually read Danish. The final paragraph of the ‘Notices’ suggests, circumspectly, that because of ‘the partiality of patriotism’, Høst might ‘have somewhat over-rated’ the writers whom he discusses, but also allows that ‘upon examination, some might doubtless be found worth translating’ – the implication being that the author of the ‘Notices’ has themselves little or no independent familiarity with contemporary Danish literature. ‘The recent poetry of that country’, the ‘Notices’ concludes, more encouragingly, ‘may at least be regarded as a mine yet unexplored by the literati of Great Britain.’

The mixture of scepticism and apparent unfamiliarity with which the author of the ‘Notices’ handles contemporary (‘recent’) Danish poetry is, to a certain extent, indicative of wider British attitudes to modern Danish arts and letters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), for example, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) suggests that there were ‘few literary characters, and fewer artists’ to be found at Copenhagen and that those ‘few’ lack ‘encouragement’. Such assumptions have found a legacy, too, in a story often told by scholars in the twentieth century and which has only recently begun to be challenged: namely, the idea that while British Romantic-period literature, in original and translation, found an increasing audience in Denmark in the early nineteenth century, the reverse was not true for contemporary Danish writing in Britain. As Lis Møller puts it: ‘Anglo-Danish literary relations in the romantic period are usually thought of as a strictly one-way affair with Britain as the centre from which influence flowed and Denmark as the receiving periphery.