In my City, a Stranger

<1> Faced with a city, our eyes and imaginations are challenged. The city is too large an entity, too facetted and winding, to grasp in a single glance or gesture. Frequently, writers use natural metaphors to describe this overwhelming experience, and the skyscrapers of New York have often been described as a mountainous scenery, while Los Angeles rather tends to feature as a jungle (Schlögel 304). In this vein, the German writer Alfred Döblin has called Berlin a sea of stones, Michel de Certeau has pictured Manhattan as an ocean, and a city may even be described as a prairie of architecture—the term used by Walter Benjamin to characterise his experience of Moscow (Döblin 214; de Certeau 91; Benjamin 72). To resort to natural metaphors seems to happen particularly frequently when writers find themselves in a city for the first time. Faced with a foreign city, they estrange themselves even further from it by interpreting what is, essentially, a cultural product in terms of natural imagery.

<2> While an important part of the urban experience is that one is constantly surrounded by people of whom one has no personal knowledge—the city is a world of strangers—certain situations lend themselves particularly well to picturing what is involved in being a stranger in a city (Lofland 56-65). One of these is travel. The traveller is in a doubly estranged situation. Not only is the city itself strange and unknown, often the local language, social codes, institutions, and signs are difficult to understand. It therefore should not be surprising that there is a large amount of fiction and autobiographical work dealing with the experience of travelling to a new city (Wilson 135-6).

<3> This article explores a travel account of a foreign city by an early modern female traveller, the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft visited the city of Copenhagen in 1795 and later published her impressions of that city as part of a collection of travel writing called Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). In the letters, the depiction of Copenhagen is folded into a complex discourse built around binary conceptual pairs such as metropolis vs. city, nature vs. urban life, and civilisation vs. provinciality—conceptual pairs where the first element is valued positively and contrasted with the latter. The argument of this article is that Wollstonecraft’s particular situation as a traveller in Copenhagen is crucial in establishing her particularly critical gaze on this city. Wollstonecraft’s deliberations on what constitutes a good urban life provide insight into the way the urban predicament is experienced and evaluated around the turn of the nineteenth century, considerations that do not merely illuminate Wollstonecraft’s experience of the city she is travelling to, but which also provide a picture of the city from which she has come: the burgeoning metropolis of London. This involves an implicit comparative discourse on two European capitals at the time when Wollstonecraft is writing and, as a kind of inverse geography, the travel account illuminates the ways in which the imperial city of London would form a metropolitan paradigm as a world city.

<4> For Wollstonecraft, it is the encounter with a foreign urban environment that provides the traveller with a heightened level of attentiveness and for a traveller like Wollstonecraft, it is possible to assume that the particular situation of travelling opens up new understandings of places and spatial categories. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, the German Jewish cultural critic Walter Benjamin reflected upon this issue in a particularly informing way. His travel writing emphasises that when confronted with a foreign city, our perception and ability to ask questions about the urban predicament are sharpened and he states that the encounter with a foreign urban fabric may come as an opportunity to reflect back on the urban environment from which we have originally come (Benjamin 316; Steiner 300).

<5> Another example is the way in which, as an effort to regain orientation in the harassed situation of exile, Benjamin embarked on a conscious recollection of images of his childhood city, Berlin. His thoughts were later published as a collection of small prose pieces in the book Berliner Kindheit um 1900. The book provides an insight into a recollection of the unmediated impression of the city as experienced by the child (Barlyng and Reeh 9-18). Benjamin illustrates that childhood, like travelling, is a situation in which we approach the urban setting as strangers in a particularly significant way. To the child, the city is an unknown territory; it provides a bewildering and thrilling spatial experience not yet governed by the calming force of habit dominating the urban experience of the adult. When Benjamin, now in exile, tries to see the city of Berlin the way he did as a child, the situation of estrangement is doubled once more. At the time of writing, he had not only left the city, he was looking back on an urban configuration that no longer existed in the same way. Like travelling, this is a situation in which the relationship between the familiar and foreign is characteristically sharpened. And so, new knowledge can arise. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s travel account from Copenhagen, similar conditions prevail. As an attentive traveller, she provides an idiosyncratic and sometimes unexpectedly critical characterisation of Copenhagen and its inhabitants around the turn of the nineteenth century.

Nature, City, Metropolis

<6> The historical context in which Wollstonecraft is writing constitutes a significant moment in the history of European urban culture in the pre-industrial period. A period of transition and cultural re-orientation, European cities were moving away from the representational architecture and urban planning of the absolute monarchs and towards the urban paradigm of the nineteenth century dominated by historicist architecture preferred by the bourgeoisie. The discursive underpinnings of Wollstonecraft’s account of Copenhagen provide a new perspective on this period of transition. Her criticism of Copenhagen originates in the way she sees the city as squeezed in between the sublime natural sceneries she has experienced in rural Scandinavia (against which the urban culture of Copenhagen is seen as artificial, superficial, and high-flown) and the metropolitan life of London (against which Copenhagen is an inferior, provincial city lacking outlook and civilisation). This makes the way she compares and contrasts the urban configurations of city and metropolis and places them against key terms of nature and civilisation crucial.

<7> In modern usage, the word ‘metropolis’ denotes an unusually large city—typically one with more than half a million inhabitants in the city proper. A metropolis is generally thought of as a significant economical, political, and cultural centre of a country or region. It is a word that has come to denote our modern cities when these grow to a particularly large scale and importance. Etymologically, the word metropolis comes from ancient Greek and denotes the city or state of origin of a colony, a mother city (OED). In 1800, London, with almost one million inhabitants, was by far the largest city in the world, followed only by the 500,000 people who lived in Paris. Yet, in 1800, only 1.7 percent of all cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants (Mumford 529). A city of 120,000 inhabitants, Copenhagen was, at least in terms of scale, of significance. This article follows the way the discourse on metropolis and city is played out in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and shows how it makes them reflect a complex and layered structure. This will be done with respect to three distinct but interwoven levels of analysis.

<8> The first line of argument considers the way Wollstonecraft’s position as a stranger in Copenhagen provides her with a particular point of view from which she can give critical judgement. Her account of Copenhagen puts a new perspective on the otherwise self-assured cultural interpretations of the period as a Danish Golden Age— interpretations that have persisted till the present day. It is therefore significant that she publishes her travel account as a collection of letters. Even if it was later edited by the author, the combination of the genre of the travel account with that of the collection of letters should be seen as an attempt at supplying first-hand accounts of what she experienced on her journey, a realistic representation of the fragmented order of singular moments, impressions, and moods that made up her journey and that were accounted for in individual letters.

<9> The second point reflects the more complex assumption concerning what it means to be a stranger in a new city. While it first has to be said that Wollstonecraft may very well be right in her observations on the urban life of Copenhagen, the force with which she feels necessary to belittle the Copenhageners and their city is striking. Despite its somewhat peripheral position, Denmark was, at the time of Wollstonecraft’s visit and at least for a little while longer, by no means a peripheral European power. Copenhagen was capital and seat of a kingdom stretching from the Elbe to the North Cape. The empire included the territories of Schleswig-Holstein, Norway, Iceland, and Greenland, as well as other overseas colonies, and the Danish King was in possession of one of the biggest navies in Europe. Wollstonecraft does not make these facts clear: her verdict of Copenhagen is that it is provincial, unsophisticated, and lacking civilisation and outlook. As my reading will show, in Wollstonecraft’s Letters, London constitutes a positive, metropolitan counterpoint to this provincial setting.

<10> The third point regards the more precise themes Wollstonecraft brings into play in her evaluation of the urban environment of Copenhagen, where many parallels to contemporary Danish writers can be uncovered. This particularly concerns the themes of domesticity and the relationship of city and nature. It shows that Wollstonecraft is grappling with themes that were to become particularly important in the nineteenth century, connecting her account with later, typical discourses. This reading will suggest that it is precisely the confrontation with the new city that allows her to evoke these burgeoning cultural themes and figures.

Golden Days and Dark Nights

<11> Mary Wollstonecraft, who lived 1759-1797, was what one would probably today call a cultural critic. She wrote novels, treatises, and historical accounts, a conduct book, a book for children, as well as the travel account from Scandinavia. She is best known for what is considered an early feminist work, the book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. As a historical figure, Wollstonecraft has called attention to herself with her somewhat tumultuous personal life. It is, tellingly, her lover Gilbert Imlay, with whom Wollstonecraft had an illicit child, who sends her on the trip to Scandinavia in order for her to undertake business negotiations for him. While Wollstonecraft thinks that the trip can be a way to win Imlay back, on her return to London she realises that the relationship is over and attempts suicide.

<12> Wollstonecraft visits Copenhagen at a very particular point in time: the turn of the period known as the Danish Golden Age (c. 1800-1850). The creative outburst that has come to define the Golden Age had Copenhagen as its centre of gravity. This may seem surprising insofar as the Golden Age developed in a period during which Copenhagen underwent much unfortunate development. The city was devastated by several fires, invaded twice, and bombed by the English army; the following rather unfortunate Danish involvement in the Napoleonic Wars lead to complete economic and political ruin. In contrast to these miserable realities, the cultural products of the period emphasise harmony and order. Worthy of mention is the flourishing tradition of painting with C.W. Eckersberg in the forefront, the physics of H.C. Ørsted (to whom electromagnetism became a theory connecting matter with the spirit of the divine in nature), the fairy tales of H.C. Andersen, and the neoclassical themes in Bertel Thorvaldsen’s sculptures and C.F. Hansen’s architecture. These works continue to arouse great scholarly and popular fascination, a fascination that is most obviously expressed in the term ‘Golden Age’, a phrase going back to Hesiod which is used in many cultural contexts to designate particularly significant cultural periods. (Kondrup 204-206).

<13> The self-confident designation of the Danish Golden Age was first used around 1900 to define a group of writers from the early nineteenth century, and only later applied to the period as a whole (Vedel 7-17). But the meaning of the term in the Danish context is subtle; insofar asand it was also was widely used a fundamental cultural metaphor in the period itself. This was a period in which people were not only longing for a golden age: to a certain extent they saw themselves as standing on the threshold of a new one. This makes it significant that both art and science of the early nineteenth century were characterised by a longing for a bygone historical age situated very concretely in early antiquity (Kondrup 204-206). This understanding is flanked by the concomitant belief that contemporary developments, in particular in philosophy, represented by German idealism and figures such as Winckelmann and Goethe, were about to usher in a new golden age. In the present context, this corresponds to the period’s cultural project to transform Copenhagen into the so-called Athens of the North: a new, neo-classical city that would rise out of the ashes of the devastated and out-dated urban scene (Jørgensen and Wentzel 305).

<14> When Wollstonecraft visited Copenhagen, this grand plan was very difficult to discern and it would be fair to say that Wollstonecraft saw anything but cultural refinement shimmering on Copenhagen’s horizon. In fact, the letters are saturated by a very unfriendly evaluation of the city’s architectural composition, its inhabitants, and its mentality. Wollstonecraft writes her critique of Copenhagen right at the end of her travels in Scandinavia. While she often voices critical opinion during her sojourn, the travel account is not as such a critical document. Even if Wollstonecraft observes a lack of high culture and civilised manners, she describes in great detail experiences of sublime quality with respect to the landscapes of Sweden and Norway and conveys a fairly positive picture of the Scandinavian rural population (Wollstonecraft 90). Once Wollstonecraft gets to Copenhagen, her sympathy quickly withers. Because of the destruction caused by fire, Copenhagen presents itself to her as a somewhat gloomy setting and, on entering the city, she notices:

I passed amongst the dust and rubbish it [the fire] had left, affrighted by viewing the extent of the devastation; for at least a quarter of the city had been destroyed. There was little in the appearance of fallen bricks and stacks of chimneys to allure the imagination into soothing melancholy reveries, nothing to attract the eye of taste, but much to afflict the benevolent heart. (Wollstonecraft 149)

<15> Wollstonecraft’s rejection of Copenhagen may therefore have other underpinnings than merely the depressing impression left behind by a city devastated by fire. On the discursive level, these hark back to a subtle distinction in her prose between the concepts of city and metropolis. Copenhagen is a city and herein lies its provinciality. The counter-image to the city of Copenhagen, with its dubious level of urbane civilisation, is the metropolis, and, as the next section will show, Wollstonecraft sees the metropolitan paradigm embodied in the world city of London. This takes us back to the thematic of the near and the far, the well known, and the foreign. Also, for Wollstonecraft, a potential for knowledge is embodied in the process of encountering a strange urban environment when, from this point of view, she not only assesses the place she is visiting but also looks back at the place from which she has come.

The More I See of the World

<16> Despite the fact that Wollstonecraft is not impressed with Copenhagen, she is even more surprised by the fact that the shortcomings of the place seem to have passed its inhabitants by. As the following quotation shows, Wollstonecraft situates the self-assured attitude of the Copenhageners against Paris and London, the two largest and most important cities in the Western world at the time. She thus, and probably rightly so, brackets any claims to the metropolitan quality of Copenhagen as narrow-minded. But the implicit comparison provides a picture of what she considers a more civilised urban situation to be like:

I had often heard the Danes, even those who had seen Paris and London, speak of Copenhagen with rapture. Certainly I have seen it in a very disadvantageous light, some of the best streets having been burnt and the whole place thrown into confusion. Still the utmost that can, or could ever, I believe, have been said in its praise, might be comprised in a few words. The streets are open, and many of the houses large; but I saw nothing to rouse that idea of elegance or grandeur, if I except the circus where the king and prince royal reside. (Wollstonecraft 149-50)

<17> When Wollstonecraft talks about a metropolis and implicitly refers to London, she both seems to call on the modern understanding of this term and its much older meaning. Being the capital of the British Empire, London also can be seen as a mother city in a colonial or cultural sense. By characterising London as a metropolis, Wollstonecraft evokes an understanding of something culturally superior. London is not merely significant because of its size and scale. It is as if this city is placed as the very navel of civilisation. Wollstonecraft’s antipathies for the city of Copenhagen should therefore not be seen as participating in a general anti-urban discourse. She is concerned with marking out less civilised urban situations than those which she considers the metropolis to offer; metropolitan shortcomings which she finds Copenhagen exemplifies well. We therefore can regard Wollstonecraft’s account of Copenhagen as a kind of negative geography. She depicts the inverse of what she would regard as an ideal city. With this kind of reversal, we find in her writing a formulation of the particular aspirations of the imperial city and metropolis of London. As she writes:

I am, my friend, more and more convinced that a metropolis, or an abode absolutely solitary, is the best calculated for the improvement of the heart, as well as the understanding; whether we desire to become acquainted with man, nature, or ourselves. Mixing with mankind, we are obliged to examine our prejudices, and often imperceptibly lose, as we analyse them. (Wollstonecraft 30-31)

I am delighted with the romantic views I daily contemplate, animated by the purest air; and I am interested by the simplicity of manners which reigns around me. Still nothing so soon wearies out the feelings as unmarked simplicity. I am, therefore, half convinced, that I could not live very comfortably exiled from the countries where mankind are so further advanced in knowledge, imperfect as it is, and unsatisfactory to the thinking mind. Even now I begin to long to hear what you are doing in England and France. My thoughts fly from this wilderness to the polished circles of the world. (Wollstonecraft 90)

The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilization is a blessing, not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations. (Wollstonecraft 90)

The Void in the Picture

<19> In Wollstonecraft’s account of Copenhagen, not only the city itself is tainted: she paints an even gloomier picture of the general moral standards and level of cultural refinement as reflected in the domestic sphere. Individualism and narrowness of mind dominates along with a somewhat ostentatious self-confidence. And, as she sneers, this has an effect on the relations between men and women in the city:

The men of business are domestic tyrants, coldly immersed in their own affairs, and so ignorant of the state of other countries, that they dogmatically assert that Denmark is the happiest country in the world; the prince royal the best of all possible princes; and count Bernstorff the wisest of ministers. As for the women they are simply notable housewives; without accomplishments, or any of the charms that adorn more advanced social life. This total ignorance may enable them to save something in their kitchens; but it is far from rendering them better parents. On the contrary, the children are spoilt; as they usually are, when left to the care of weak, indulgent mothers. (Wollstonecraft 152)

Love here seems to corrupt the morals without polishing the manners, by banishing confidence and truth, the charm as well as [the] cement of domestic life . . . the promiscuous amours of the men of the middling class with their female servants debase both beyond measure, weakening every species of family affection. (Wollstonecraft 155)

<21> A parallel to the anti-urban but pro-domestic strain inherent in Wollstonecraft’s critique of Copenhagen can be found in the work of the Danish female author Thomasine Gyllembourg (1773-1856). Gyllembourg is contemporary with Wollstonecraft but is active at the very end of the Golden Age, a period on which her work is already beginning to look back with nostalgia. Characteristic of both Wollstonecraft and Gyllembourg is that their arguments against the city revolve around two conceptual binaries: a city-nature duality and a city-domesticity duality. In each instance, the city is valued negatively while the themes of nature and domesticity are portrayed in a positive light. Unlike Gyllembourg, Wollstonecraft’s ideas about urban culture are, despite everything, not completely saturated by this representation of the domestic world of the bourgeois home. This constitutes only one strain of her argument against the life and minds of the Copenhageners. The travel account can therefore be seen as a threshold phenomenon which coincides with the turbulent period of its conception between the remains of European baroque culture, of enlightenment discourse, and the burgeoning sentiments of Romanticism.

<22> It is important to note that, except for Copenhagen, Wollstonecraft mainly visits the countryside and small towns of Scandinavia. It is as if her distaste for the Copenhagen lifestyle can be seen as a response to the urban setting—or, rather, the lack of urbanity and metropolitan quality that it represents to her. Wollstonecraft’s account reveals a set of comments about what a civilised culture should look like and the ways in which the city can contribute to enhance or to deaden this ideal situation. In the case of Copenhagen, urban life certainly seems to provoke the latter, negative effect.

Wollstonecraft, Copenhagen, and the Unadvancement of Social Life

<23> Three central lines of argument have been evoked in this reading of fragments from Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. One theme concerns domesticity. For Wollstonecraft, alongside the paradigmatic urbanity of the metropolis, there is also the possibility of the domestic sphere to embody a civilising potential and issues surrounding domestic life are frequently highlighted in the account. It even seems as if the civilising deficit in Copenhagen emanates from the domestic sphere. That the domestic sphere is represented as the guard of decency and fine manners indicates that it has the potential to stand over and against the urban realm. It is not the messy and dirty city full of difference which she is after; her concerns are with an ideal, urbane, and quasi-intellectual togetherness.

<24> The second theme regards culture and civilisation. Wollstonecraft is pitching the miserable realities of the urban life of Copenhagen against a civilising ideal. For Wollstonecraft, this ideal finds its concrete manifestation in a paradigmatic urbanity represented by the kind of metropolitan life which she knows from London. The letters thus enfold a silent representation of London as the embodiment of this paradigm.

<25> The third theme evokes a more general reflection of what kind of account Wollstonecraft’s travel letters may, in fact, be. What is it that makes Wollstonecraft see Copenhagen the way she does, casting such a spiteful glance on this city? While Wollstonecraft’s rejection of Copenhagen not only emphasises her cultural perspective, it also allows us to illustrate central aspects of how urban culture is understood and evaluated around the turn of the nineteenth century. In all their complexity and despite the tendency to contradiction, the letters constitute a key to our modern urbanity.

<26> On a general level, her work points to anti-urban themes that would gain particular weight during the nineteenth century. The letters are thus characterised by a deeply seated tension in the way they evaluate the city: the city both figures as part of the solution and as part of the problem. This means that the letters may be seen as a kind of threshold phenomenon, situated as they are between an enlightenment discourse and cultural tendencies developing in the nineteenth century.

<27>It is significant that Wollstonecraft chooses to publish her travel account as a collection of letters. It is the situation of writing a travel account that allows her to take up a superior position in a moralistic sense. At the time when Wollstonecraft is writing, a letter correspondence may not have had the same kind of ‘private essence’ as may be assumed today. Nevertheless, what is characteristic of a letter is that it takes immediate experience as its starting point. If, in Wollstonecraft’s travel account, Copenhagen comes to embody a thoroughly uncivilised cultural environment, it does so in-the-making. In addition, it is through the process of travelling through Scandinavia that the contours can be drawn of an inverted grand tour. Only in the second instance does her travel teach her about foreign places and expand her horizon as a project of education or Bildung. Instead, the journey provides her with a privileged position from which to glance backwards, and this perspective helps her to formulate her ideas about a civilised and urbane society. Here, her home country comes to form a positive counter-image to what she experiences on her sojourn. In contrast to Copenhagen, the early metropolitan environment of London offers genuine urbane qualities and a level of cultural refinement serving a positive educational and civilising effect. It therefore is possible to suggest that the letters mark an important position in the discourses about the modern city and the paradigm of the modern metropolis.

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To Cite This Article:

Henriette Steiner, “The more I see of the world. . .”: London as Metropolitan Paradigm in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), The Literary London Journal, Volume 9 Number 2 (September 2011). Online at http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2011/steiner.html. .