2 - ‘The dwelling-place of a mighty people’: Travellers beyond Copenhagen

Summary

Murray’s Hand-Book for Travellers in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Russia (1839) reminds the reader early on that the attractions of Denmark are not limited to the capital but extend across the entire country, ‘whose fertile lowlands have ever been the dwelling-place of a mighty people’. However, if Copenhagen received comparatively few British tourists during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then the rest of Denmark – that ‘flat country’ which Sommer’s Description of Denmark portrays, rather less encouragingly than Murray’s Hand-Book, as ‘abounding in bogs and morasses’ – received even fewer. But by no means none at all. Prior to the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–97) Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), for example, at least eight other English-language accounts of travel in Denmark had appeared. These include the brief but informative descriptions of key places on the land route from Hamburg to Copenhagen given in the Grand Tour (1749) of Thomas Nugent (1700–72), and the much more substantial discussion offered by William Coxe (1748–1828) in his Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1784), which Wollstonecraft used, and which had gone to three editions by the time of her visit. And, of course, many other accounts would follow Wollstonecraft’s, written by everyone from wealthy tourists through prisoners of war to the author of the controversial Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

Like Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence, however, most British observations of places outside Copenhagen focus on the surrounding environs of Zealand and were made en passant, as it were, to and from the capital, at the beginning or the end of a larger Nordic tour. And the majority of these describe the east coast of Zealand between Copenhagen and Helsingør (Elsinore), the latter famous in Britain, of course, as the setting for Hamlet, as the prison of Caroline Matilda (1751–75), and as the main crossing point between Denmark and Sweden, ‘the grand turn-pike gate to the Baltic’, as Andrew Swinton (dates unknown) describes it in his Travels (1792). But increasing numbers of British travellers did in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries describe the rest of the Denmark, often as far west as the moors along the Jutland coast, including the likes of William Coxe and Edward Daniel Clarke (1769–1822), both of whom who made the journey from Germany to Copenhagen overland rather than by sea.