1 - ‘One of the finest capitals of Europe’: Some British Romantic Views of Copenhagen

Summary

In the second volume of his Life of Nelson (1813), Robert Southey (1774–1843) describes Copenhagen as ‘the best city of the north, one of the finest capitals of Europe; visible, with its stately spires, far off’. There had been some dissenting voices, of course, notably including Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–97) gloomy account of Copenhagen in her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), the book which Robert Southey told his brother made him ‘fall in love with a cold climate & frost & snow, with a Northern moonlight’. For the most part, however, in his account of Copenhagen, Southey was merely repeating what had been a commonplace of British travel writing about the Nordic countries for at least the previous thirty years. In his Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1785), for example, the celebrated traveller William Coxe (1748–1829) had affirmed that ‘Copenhagen is the best-built city of the north’, and most of those who came after him had agreed. Forty years later, this consensus remained: Richard Jones (dates unknown) in his highly detailed compendium Copenhagen and its Environs (1829), designed as a handbook for British tourists, confirms that Copenhagen is not only ‘one of the most ancient and powerful Cities of Europe’ but also ‘one of the handsomest’. And yet, despite the extent to which the Danish capital became ostensibly familiar to British travellers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Copenhagen often also remains in the literature of the period very much an imaginary space, the representation of which was inextricably bound up with wider ‘Romantic’ attitudes to ‘the North’. Such tensions are plainly visible, for example, in the three stanzas which the nineteen-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) sent to his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862) on 11 January 1811, and which he later worked up into a ‘Fragment of a Poem; the original idea of which was suggested by the cowardly and infamous bombardment of Copenhagen’.