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SWEDEN IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WORLD
This page has been left blank intentionally
Sweden in the Eighteenth-
Century World
Provincial Cosmopolitans

Edited by

GÖRAN RYDÉN
Uppsala University, Sweden
First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Göran Rydén 2013

Göran Rydén has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the editor of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Sweden in the eighteenth-century world : provincial
cosmopolitans.
1. Sweden--History--1718-1814. 2. Sweden-Foreign
relations--1718-1814. 3. Sweden--Commerce--History--
18th century.
I. Ryden, Goran.
948.5'036-dc23

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Sweden in the eighteenth-century world : provincial cosmopolitans / edited by Göran
Rydén.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-6588-1 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-6589-8 (ebook)--
ISBN 978-1-4094-6590-4 (ePUB) 1. Sweden--Civilization--18th century. 2. Sweden­
-Social life and customs--18th century. 3. Cosmopolitanism--Sweden--History--18th
century. I. Rydén, Göran.
DL749.S94 2013
948.5'036--dc23
2012045461
ISBN 978-1-409-46588-1 (hbk)
ISBN 978-1-315-61164-8 (ebk)
 Contents

List of Figures   vii

Notes on Contributors   ix
Acknowledgements   xiii

1 Provincial Cosmopolitanism: An Introduction    1

Göran Rydén

2 Where in the World was Sweden? A Brief Guide for Foreigners   33

Chris Evans

Language

3 The Language of Cosmos: The Cosmopolitan Endeavour

of Universal Languages   41
David Dunér

Cultivation

4 Swedish Agriculture in the Cosmopolitan Eighteenth Century   69

Mats Morell

Taste

5 Travelling and the Formation of Taste: The European Journey

of Bengt Ferrner and Jean Lefebure 1758–1763   95
Lars Berglund

Liberty

6 Eskilstuna Fristad: The Beginnings of an Urban Experiment   123

Göran Rydén

Image

7 Prints and Attraction in Eighteenth-Century Stockholm   147

Sonya Petersson
vi Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

Faith

8 In Defence of Freedom: Christianity and the Pursuit of

Human Happiness in Anders Chydenius’ World   177
Carola Nordbäck

Peace

9 Sweden’s Neutrality and the Eighteenth-Century

Inter-State System   203
Leos Müller

Colour

10 Runaway Colours: Recognisability and Categorisation in Sweden

and Early America, 1750–1820   225
Karin Sennefelt

Manners

11 When Sweden Harboured Idlers: Gender and Luxury in

Public Debates, c. 1760–1830   249
Karin Hassan Jansson

Slavery

12 A Divided Space: Subjects and Others in the Swedish

West Indies during the late-Eighteenth Century   275
Holger Weiss

Compassion

13 A World of Fiction: Bengt Lidner and Global Compassion in

Eighteenth-Century Sweden   301
Anna Cullhed

14 Sveaborg and the End of the Swedish Cosmopolitan

Eighteenth Century: An Epilogue   325
Göran Rydén and Holger Weiss

Select Bibliography   335

Index   345
 List of Figures

1.1 Leufsta bruk, 1769   5

1.2 ‘Hela Iordkretzens afritning’, unknown Swedish world map
from the eighteenth century   20

3.1 A Saami with his drum   42

3.2 El, a swinging ball under water or a turning planet in the ether   56
3.3 Table of universal characters   57
3.4 Polhem’s mechanical alphabet   60
3.5 Polhem’s mechanical alphabet   61

4.1 Model drawings of two Northern Swedish Threshing wagons,

a double conic threshing roller and two threshing barns   80
4.2 Detail of map of Uppsala, 1770   89

5.1 Detail from the frontispiece of Leones Méthode raissonée,

depicting a female mandolin player   114
5.2 Title page of Giovanni Battista Gervasio’s sonata in G   115
5.3 The beginning of Gervasio’s sonata   116

6.1 The metal-ware forge at Gustafsfors, 1758   135

6.2 Eskilstuna ‘Fristad’, in 1771   143

7.1 Portrait of Sofia Magdalena, by Jacob Gillberg,

after Lorens Pasch the younger   151
7.2 Portrait of Sofia Magdalena, by Fredrik Akrel   152
7.3 Blueprint and elevation of the nuptials of Adolf Fredrik 1771,
by Per Floding   156
7.4 Emblems and provincial weapons in the Gustavian
chapel during Adolf Fredrik’s nuptials 1771   157
7.5 The chamber of Georg Diedrich Heimberger,
by Carl Wilhelm Swedman, around 1790   162
7.6 Le Jardinier gallant, by Isidore-Stanislas Helman   169
7.7 L’Amour frivole, by Jacques Firmin Beauvarlet,
after François Boucher   170

8.1 Portrait of Anders Chydenius, by the Swedish painter

Per Fjällström, 1770   179
viii Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

9.1 The Benefit of Neutrality, an engraving from 1745   206

9.2 Den Britsen Leopard tot reden gebracht (The British Leopard
Brought to Reason), Dutch engraving from 1780   217

10.1 A peasant woman from the hundred of Bjäre in southern

Sweden wearing a pink scarf and blue jacket, skirt and apron.
Pink was a colour not mentioned in Swedish runaway ads.   242

11.1 A drawing on the theme of the henpecked husband by

Carl August Ehrensvärd in 1795   257
11.2 A drawing on the negative female stereotype not only
spending all her husband’s money, but also cheating on him,
by Carl August Ehrensvärd in 1795   260

12.1 Plan of Gustavia, c. 1799/1800   282

12.2 View over Gustavia, c. 1793   292

13.1 Portrait of Bengt Lidner, coloured engraving

by Anton Ulrik Berndes (1757–1844)   302
13.2 Medea   318
13.3 Yttersta Domen, by Johan Fredrik Martin (1755–1816)   321

14.1 Sveaborg in Finland, tinted drawing by Elias Martin   329

 Notes on Contributors

Lars Berglund is Associate Professor and Chair at the Department of Musicology,

Uppsala University. Specialising in the early-modern period, he has published
studies on music and musical cultures in Northern Europe and on music in
seventeenth-century Rome, with a combined focus on culture history, pre-modern
aesthetics and music analysis. He has also worked on Swedish art music and
aesthetic debates during the 1950s and 1960s.

Anna Cullhed is Associate Professor in Literature at the Department of Culture

and Communication (IKK), Linköping University. Her research interests include
European poetics from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century,
sentimental literature and the history of emotions. Her publications include
a monograph of Bengt Lidner (2011, in Swedish) and studies on the poetics of
Robert Lowth, J.J. Eschenburg and A.W. Schlegel.

David Dunér is Professor of History of Science and Ideas at Lund University,

Sweden and researcher at the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University,
Sweden. His research concerns seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science,
medicine and technology, and the cognitive processes behind scientific and
philosophical reasoning. Recently he published the monograph The Natural
Philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg: A Study in the Conceptual Metaphors of the
Mechanistic World-View (Springer, 2013).

Chris Evans is Professor of History at the University of Glamorgan, Wales. His

research interest lies in the intersection of industrial and colonial history. Among
his most recent publications are Slave Wales. The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery
1660–1850 (2010) and ‘The Plantation Hoe: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic
Commodity, 1650–1850’, William and Mary Quarterly, third ser., 69, no. 1,
January 2012.

Karin Hassan Jansson is Associate Professor of History at Uppsala University.

Her main research interest is gender in early-modern Sweden. She has written
about conceptions of rape, and the relation between notions on violence, sexuality,
gender and state formation. She is currently focusing on the discussions of
marriage, economy and gender in political discourses.

Mats Morell is Professor of Economic History at Stockholm University. His

research focuses on Swedish, Scandinavian and European rural history in the early-
x Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

modern era and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Together with Janken
Myrdal he edited and contributed to The Agrarian History of Sweden 4000 bc to
ad 2000 (2011). His recent publications also include ‘Subsistence crises during
the ancient and nouveau régime in Sweden: An interpretative review’, Histoire &
Mesure, Vol. XXVI (2011).

Leos Müller is Professor of History and the Director of the Centre for Maritime
Studies, Stockholm University. His research interests include Sweden’s seaborne
trade and shipping in the early-modern period, the Swedish East India Company,
neutrality in a maritime context, maritime international order and small states. His
recent books are Consuls, Corsairs and Commerce. The Swedish Consular Service
and Long-Distance Shipping, 1720–1815 (2004), and, together with Göran Rydén
and Holger Weiss, Global historia från periferin. Norden 1600–1850 (2010).

Carola Nordbäck is Associate Professor in Church History at the Department of

Historical, Philosophical and Religious studies at Umeå University. Her research
centres on Lutheran history and theology, historiography, historical consciousness,
philosophy of history and religious use of history. Her publications include two
monographs about the shifting religious conditions in Sweden and Finland during
the eighteenth century.

Sonya Petersson is a PhD student in Art History at the Department of Art History,
Stockholm University. Her research is focused on eighteenth-century processes
of cultural transfer in the popular field of art. She is currently working on her
forthcoming doctoral thesis, Art in Popular Circulation: Knowledge, Media and
Market in Eighteenth-Century Stockholm (2014).

Göran Rydén is Professor in Economic History at the Institute for Housing and
Urban Research, Uppsala University. His research centres on different aspects of
the Swedish eighteenth century from a global perspective. His publications include
Baltic Iron in the Atlantic World (2007), written together with Chris Evans, and
‘Viewing and Walking. Swedish Visitors to Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal
of Urban History, 39 (2), 2013.

Karin Sennefelt is Associate Professor at the Department of History at Stockholm

University. She works on the intersections of political, cultural and social history
in early-modern Sweden. Previous publications have appeared in Social History,
Urban History and Past & Present. She has written on political sociability and
place and is currently researching social practices of identification and social
distinction in the long eighteenth century.

Holger Weiss is Professor of General History at Åbo Akademi University, Finland.

His research focuses on eighteenth- and early twentieth-century global history,
including Danish-African spaces in West Africa and Swedish slavery in the
 Notes on Contributors xi

Caribbean, as well as radical international solidarity movements and actors during

the interwar period and environmental history. His publications include Between
Accommodation and Revivalism: Muslims, the State and Society in Ghana from
the Precolonial to the Postcolonial Era (2008), and Atlantiska religiösa nätverk.
Transoceana kontakter, trossamfund och den enskilda individen i skuggan av
slavhandeln (ed., 2010).
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a project that started in 2010. We were 12 eighteenth-
century scholars who met to discuss the cosmopolitan eighteenth-century
Sweden. It was a group that included historians, economic historians, a religious
historian, historians of science and ideas, an art historian, a historian of literature
and a music historian. We met during three intense workshops, to discuss
preliminary texts. Our first workshop took place at Leufsta bruk in June 2010,
followed by a second meeting in Uppsala in March 2011. The third workshop
was held at Sveaborg, outside Helsinki, in June 2011. These meetings were made
possible by funding from Vetenskapsrådet (The Swedish Research Council), in
Sweden, and Åbo Akademis Jubileumsfond 1968, a fund for research exchange
between Sweden and Åbo Akademi, in Finland. I want to especially thank
Holger Weiss, for both arranging the workshop at Sveaborg and for finding the
necessary funds.
At Sveaborg we had invited three eighteenth-century colleagues to give an
outside perspective on the texts we had been working on since the beginning of
the project. I want to thank Marie-Christine Skuncke, Karel Davids and Chris
Evans for their important contributions. It is fair to say that their input gave us an
incentive to rework our texts, and hopefully they have been improved since. Chris
also volunteered to write a short introduction to the Swedish eighteenth century,
for foreigners, which is included in the book. It is also more than appropriate
to point to the inspiration we all have been given by regularly attending Marie-
Christine Skuncke’s interdisciplinary eighteenth-century seminar organised at
Uppsala University for more than 15 years.
During the publication process the people at Ashgate, and especially Emily
Yates and Aimée Feenan, have been most helpful and generous. They found
two good anonymous referees who read the whole manuscript and gave both
good criticism and valuable advice for the remaining process. We can only hope
that we have lived up to what they wanted us to do. David Jones translated
the chapter by Carola Nordbäck, and corrected the language in another chapter.
The extended quotations from Chydenius’s original manuscripts in Nordbäck’s
chapter were translated by Peter C. Hogg. We have also received generous
funding from Wilhelm Ekmans universitetsfond, at Uppsala University Library,
enabling us to publish more illustrations as well as printing many of them in
colour.
xiv Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

Lastly, I want to thank here all the participants in this project, including Hjalmar
Fors, who took part in all three workshops. Seldom have I had the opportunity to
collaborate with such a nice, generous and gifted group of scholars. It is with
gratitude I remember the workshops we shared.

Göran Rydén
Uppsala, April 2013
 Chapter 1
Provincial Cosmopolitanism:
An Introduction
Göran Rydén

A Cosmopolitan Library – A Point of Departure

In 1739, Charles De Geer arrived at Leufsta bruk, Sweden’s largest ironworks,

some 100 kilometres north of Stockholm, as its new owner. Iron making in
Sweden was organised in bruks, which were a kind of combination of an industrial
community where the iron production took place in furnaces and forges, and a
large landed estate, supplying charcoal and other resources from the land. Access
to mines was sometimes included. Charles De Geer had inherited Leufsta bruk
nine years earlier from an uncle bearing the same name, but at that time the new
heir still lived with his parents on an estate outside Utrecht in the Netherlands;
Charles was just 10 years old when he came into possession of Leufsta, and he
remained in Holland until his father’s death in 1738. Although Charles De Geer
was brought up in Holland he had been born in Sweden, and though he bore a
Dutch name his family had been present in Sweden for about a century. His great
grandfather was Louis De Geer, who had arrived in Sweden as a wealthy merchant
from Amsterdam, although initially from Wallonia, and came to have a large
impact on Swedish economic performance in general, but more specifically on
its iron industry. Louis De Geer soon came into the possession of Leufsta bruk, as
well as other large iron-making estates in the county of Uppland, and it remained
in the family’s hands until very recently. Owning Leufsta also meant control of the
Dannemora mine, one of the richest deposits of iron ore in Europe.1
It was thus a cosmopolitan young man who arrived at Leufsta in 1739; he
belonged to a dynasty of merchants who recognised no borders and he had already,
by 19 years of age, crossed many boundaries, linguistic and others. He made notes
in his personal account book in Dutch, but soon began to write letters in Swedish,
and was to compose scientific books about insects in French. Charles De Geer
brought this cosmopolitanism with him to Leufsta, which developed during his
long reign into a kind of ‘micro’ cosmopolitan society. A century before, Louis

1
For an introduction to the organisation of the Swedish iron industry, see Karl-Gustaf
Hildebrand, Swedish Iron in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Export Industry
before the Industrialization, Stockholm 1992, and Chris Evans and Göran Rydén, Baltic
Iron in the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century, Leiden 2007, pp. 71–92.
2 Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

De Geer had brought skilled workers from his native Wallonia with him, as well
as both Dutch capital and new technologies for both furnaces and forges. The
younger De Geer built on that foundation, establishing the iron from Leufsta as
a top brand on the European iron market, but he also added a European cultural
touch to his community. Charles De Geer was quick to introduce novelties from
Europe, and in the late 1750s he approached the young architect Jean Eric Rehn,
who was to have a leading role in introducing rococo to Sweden, when he returned
from a long journey in Italy and France. He was to refurbish the grand manor
house and other buildings at Leufsta. However, culture was more than architecture
to the new heir at Leufsta.
When Charles De Geer returned to the country of his birth, the bruk was run by
his older brother as guardian, and a Directeur at the site. The latter, Eric Touscher,
had prepared for the arrival of his new superior by penning a very ambitious guide
for a future ironmaster, En liten handbok angående Leufsta Bruk &c. Wälborne
Herren Herr Carl de Geer, wid ankomsten i Orten af En Des Tienare, öfwerlemnat
1739, bound into a small leather-covered book. In this ‘small handbook’, Touscher
touched upon most aspects of being the manager of a large industrial enterprise
operating in a global market; he began by dealing with the personnel, moving to
matters of transport, technology and workshops before treating the more business-
related matters. Touscher ended his manuscript with a small chapter called ‘Some
necessary and well-meant reminders’. Whether De Geer heeded Touscher’s advice
is not clear, but he turned out to be a very successful ironmaster, and died as a very
rich man in 1778.2
However, Touscher’s ‘well-meant reminders’ did not stop with matters related
to being an ironmaster. He had also prepared a second handwritten leather-
covered volume for his master, related to cultural aspects of being a gentleman
of the time: ‘Catalogue over Charles De Geer’s collections at Leufsta’.3 Touscher
had, at his own expense, collected coins and medals for his master; he had also
bought books, as well as scientific instruments, guns and machines. All these items
were catalogued, and they were stored in cupboards, drawers and rooms. The idea
behind all this was to prepare De Geer for a social life as an owner of a large and
well-reputed Swedish bruk; being a collector was an important part of that. If
Touscher wanted to implant the art of collecting in the mind of his new young
master he definitely succeeded, and Charles De Geer can in many ways be seen as
a personification of eighteenth-century collecting. The armoury, the library and the
cupboards that Touscher presented along with his little book really expanded with
the new owner, becoming redecorated wings of his manor house, and in the hands

2
En liten handbok angående Leufsta Bruk &c. Wälborne Herren Herr Carl de Geer,
wid ankomsten i Orten af En Des Tienare, öfwerlemnat 1739, Leufstaarkivet, kartong 152,
Riksarkivet, Stockholm.
3
Touscher, ‘Katalog öfver Carl De Geers samlingar på Leufsta’, 1739, in Top. O.
Hist. Samlingar, Typotius, Vol. 29. ATA: A** Topografiska Arkivet. Vitterhetsakademins
handskriftssamling. Riksantikvarieämbetets arkiv och bibliotek, Stockholm.
 Provincial Cosmopolitanism: An Introduction 3

of Jean Eric Rehn De Geer got a fashionable and purpose-built natural history
cabinet (a room for displaying a collection) as well as a library.
That the natural history cabinet came to include a large collection of minerals
is hardly strange, bearing in mind that De Geer generated his wealth from the
mineral kingdom, and that a knowledge of different kinds of ore ought to have
been within the bounds of his ‘useful knowledge’. However, the new master of
Leufsta bruk has been more remembered by posterity for the other collection in
the same cabinet: the assembly of insects in boxes ordered, more or less, according
to the ‘systema naturae’ established by his fellow countryman, Linnaeus. De Geer
became a naturalist of almost the same prominence as the great professor from
Uppsala, but his Memoires pour server a L’Histoire des Insectes, published in
seven volumes from 1752 to 1778, actually bears the same title as a work by
another famous naturalist, the French René Antoine de Réamur.4
The southern wing of the house, situated alongside the lower works pond, was
mirrored on the northern side of the house with an equally well-designed building,
but this did not include any natural specimens, being filled instead with printed
materials; this was Charles De Geer’s treasured library. On its purpose-built
shelves he stored music sheets purchased from Amsterdam and the most recent
engravings from Paris. De Geer was an accomplished harpsichordist and, with
manuscripts sent to him, he could, together with family and friends, perform the
music in vogue in Europe at the time; his collection included music by Händel
and Vivaldi, but also by less well-known masters such as Schaffrath, Pepusch and
Tartini.5 The master of Leufsta could with equal ease keep abreast of what was
going on in the art scene of the French capital, with engravings sent to him – his
collection included works by masters such as Watteau and Boucher.6 The collection
of books, however, dwarfed the assembled music sheets and engravings, and was
at least as cosmopolitan! There were books in Swedish, especially related to the
iron industry, but De Geer had almost a full collection of works from the French
Enlightenment, with authors like Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau to the fore,
and the shelves were equally filled with books by naturalists such as Réamur and
Buffon. Last but not least, the Leufsta master possessed the most important work
of them all, the Encyclopédie, published under the editorship of d’Alembert and
Diderot.7

4
Thomas Totti, Ädle of Höglärde H. Archiater. Om Charles De Geer och hans
brevväxling med Carl von Linné, Uppsala 2007; also Sten Lindroth, Svensk Lärdomshistoria.
3, Frihetstiden, Stockholm 1978, p. 272.
5
The Drottningholm Baroque Ensemble has recorded two CDs with music from this
collection: The Musical Treasures of Leufsta Bruk, BIS 1526, 2005, and BIS 1975, 2011,
Stockholm.
6
Katalog öfver Leufsta fideikommiss’ gravyrsamling upprättad af Osvald Sirén,
Stockholm 1907.
7
E.G. Liljebjörn, Katalog öfver Leufsta bruks gamla fideikommissbibliotek, Uppsala
1907. See also Tomas Anfält, ‘Bad Books and Barons. French Underground Literature in
4 Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

Leufsta was Sweden’s largest and most prominent bruk, but it was a community
challenging what could be said to be Swedish. For a start, it was a community
largely inhabited by descendants of skilled workers who had migrated from the
Netherlands in the seventeenth century, still working the iron in furnaces and
forges according to technology brought from their native Wallonia. It was also a
community that, from an architectural perspective, bore a significant resemblance
to developments in the rest of Europe, but foremost it was a community totally in
the hands of the De Geer family. The new owner, Charles De Geer, invigorated
the ties to the Dutch economy, as well as establishing iron from Leufsta in the top
tier of the European iron market. The profits from dealings in this market enabled
De Geer to live his cosmopolitan life in his redecorated manor house, with his
natural history cabinet and his library. In a symbolic way, we can imagine the
Leufsta master entering his library and taking a volume of the Encyclopédie from
his shelves. If he had chosen the fourth volume, with plates, from 1765, he could
have viewed the plan and drawings of a French forge which was adopted for the
Walloon method.8 Had he raised his head from the book and looked out of the
window, he could have seen one of his own forges using the same technology.
Leufsta was an iron-making bruk in Sweden, but it was also an unmistakably
cosmopolitan place, crossing all kinds of boundaries. As a bruk, Leufsta was a
‘material’ space, sending out bar iron all over Europe, but it was also a ‘mental’
space, where Charles De Geer in his library could sit and imagine many different
places scattered around the globe. As such it was a truly cosmopolitan place,
situating Sweden within the material world as well as the mental world!
The eighteenth-century library at Leufsta bruk remains more or less intact. Its
yellow plastered walls can still be seen in mirror image in the works pond, and
its purpose-built shelves still contain the books Charles De Geer purchased from
booksellers on the European continent. The building, the manor house, the natural
history cabinet and some other houses are now owned by the Swedish state, while
the books now belong to Uppsala University Library. It is open to the public,
and shelf after shelf of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Buffon and Rousseau can still be
viewed. We are not allowed to take the volumes from the shelves ourselves, but
with help from guides or librarians we can view the drawings of a French forge in
the Encyclopédie. Sadly, we cannot see the Leufsta forges any more, as they have
been demolished, but Leufsta bruk is still one of the primary places to view the
Swedish eighteenth century in all its cosmopolitan flair!

a Swedish 18th Century Private Library’, in ‘Serving the Scholarly Community. Essays on
Tradition and Change in Research Libraries Presented to Thomas Totti on July 3rd, 1995’,
Acta Bibliothecae Universitatis Upsaliensis, Vol. XXXIII, 1995, pp. 271–279.
8
Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers.
Recueil de Planches, sur les Arts Méchaniques, avec Leur Explication. Troisieme Livraison,
Denis Diderot, ed., Paris 1765. The Encyclopédie is accessible in electronic form. See
http://www.lexilogos.com/encyclopedie_diderot_alembert.htm, accessed 27 March 2013.
 Provincial Cosmopolitanism: An Introduction 5

Figure 1.1 Leufsta bruk, 1769

Note: The Library is the small building to the right of the manor house, by the pond, and the
natural history cabinet is the mirror image to the left.
Source: ‘Dagbok öfwer en resa igenom åtskillige av Rikets Landskaper …’ by Adolf Fredrik
Barnekow and Emanuel De Geer. Courtesy of Uppsala University Library and Stora Wäsby
gårdsarkiv.

The aim of this book is to view the Swedish eighteenth century from a
cosmopolitan perspective, and there is hardly a better place to start such a venture
than at Leufsta bruk, with its library. The place can be understood as one local
community reaching out to a much wider global setting, with its bar iron being
sold all around the Atlantic Ocean, as well as a place consuming commodities
and culture from other (global) places, but its library can also be viewed as a
kind of global microcosm; within its yellow plaster walls knowledge about the
world was collected, and stored on shelves designed by Jean Eric Rehn. For
eighteenth-century intellectuals, the Encyplopédie stood as a proxy for the ‘totality
of knowledge’, and in order to fully understand the eighteenth century we must
try to embrace such a way of thinking.9 Our (academic) world of today is far

9
For a critical discussion about the Encyplopédie and its ‘tree of knowledge’,
see Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural
History, New York 1984; Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions. Scientific Dictionaries and
Enlightenment Culture, Cambridge 2001.
6 Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

more divided and structured along different disciplinary, as well as political,

boundaries. These have to be removed. This book began as a workshop held at
the bruk, including a visit to the library, with Swedish eighteenth-century scholars
from different disciplines; we came from history, economic history, the history of
ideas, the history of religion, literature, musicology and art.
Our point of departure was to merge our different disciplinary backgrounds
and in doing so create a more nuanced and elaborated picture of the Swedish
cosmopolitan eighteenth century; the ambition was to strive for a picture more
like the one imagined by the eighteenth-century intellectuals. The disciplinary
differences were not, however, to be abandoned altogether, as each of us was
asked to write a chapter based on prior themes and knowledge; we have remained
attached to features close to our own disciplines. Instead, this more unified picture
was to be found in the angles we adopted while writing our texts. We started from
a spatial understanding of the Swedish eighteenth century, whereby Sweden is
inserted in a wider global and cosmopolitan framework, and how such a setting
might have influenced Sweden’s development. A second point of departure
was found by swapping the spatial aspects for a more common beginning for
historians, that of chronology; the eighteenth century has often been hailed as the
beginning of our modern society, and such a standpoint is also common in Swedish
historiography. Our approach has been to deal with the eighteenth century as a
century of change and transition, but our analysis has also included a discussion of
when this also became clear to people living in that century.
A last point in our common framework stems from our different disciplinary
backgrounds. It is fair to say, picking two extremes, that economic history has
a tradition of analysing the material aspects of economic development, while
literature has dwelled more on the discursive side. However, in keeping with our
ambition of returning to an eighteenth-century understanding of the period, such a
distinction is not feasible, and all participants have been asked to address both these
sides in their chapters. The French eighteenth-century historian, Daniel Roche, has
stated that ‘we must try to understand the possible connections between facts of
intellectual culture and facts of material culture’.10 This is an ambition we share!

The Great Divergence and Global Development

It is now more than half a century since Eric Hobsbawm published his masterpiece,
The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, the first tome of a four-volume treatment of the
modern world. The most enduring aspect of this work has been his way of seeing
the coming of the modern world in terms of a ‘dual revolution’; it was the joint
forces of political events and economic development that set the modern world in
motion. Even though he made it clear that the world had seen change prior to 1789,
he stressed the importance of the ‘period which begins with the construction of the

10
Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA 2000, p. 7.
 Provincial Cosmopolitanism: An Introduction 7

first factory system of the modern world in Lancashire and the French Revolution
of 1789’, and which ended with railways and the Communist Manifesto. What
Hobsbawm did was to indicate that the modern world was created with a ‘Big
Bang’, but also that these ‘explosions’ were first heard in Britain and France.11
Hobsbawm was hardly the first scholar stating that the modern world was born
with a revolutionary upheaval, and he was not the last either. The revolutionary
metaphor was already being used in relation to industrial progress and economic
developments in the first half of the nineteenth century; French observers stunned
by British industrial accomplishments transformed their views from 1789 to
form the concept of an Industrial Revolution. However, it was not until the later
decades of the century before it was adopted into the academic jargon.12 In 1884
appeared, posthumously, Arnold Toynbee’s Lectures on the Industrial Revolution
in England, with its famous phrase that ‘the old society’ was ‘broken to pieces
by the mighty blows of the steam engine and the power loom’, and no one can
doubt his emphasis on a rapid and sweeping process.13 As a centenary celebration,
David Cannadine published an article in 1984 examining how the concept has
evolved over the period; the revolutionary aspect of the industrial development
had been challenged, but the concept had always regained a powerful status
within the academic world, and especially so among economic historians.14 The
1970s and 1980s, for instance, saw the concept being challenged by the concept
of proto-industrialisation and the gradualist approach, both pointing towards more
pronounced economic development in the first two thirds of the century, as well
as a slightly lesser impact after the 1770s; what had been hailed as an Industrial
Revolution became an evolution, stretching over at least the entire eighteenth
century.15
The French Revolution has fared similarly, with scholars disputing whether it
was a rapid rupture with the past or rather the climax of events which gradually
changed French society. A recent textbook began by stating that ‘[t]he French

11
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848, London 1962. The quotation
comes from the last sentence of his Introduction.
12
See Joel Mokyr, The British Industrial Revolution. An Economic Perspective,
Boulder 1993, pp. 4–5.
13
Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, 1884. Quoted
from Pat Hudson, The Industrial Revolution, London 1992, p. 11.
14
David Cannadine, ‘The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution
1880–1980’, Past and Present, 103, 1984. See also Anders Florén and Göran Rydén,
Arbete, hushåll och region. Tankar om industrialiseringsprocesser och den svenska
järnhanteringen, Uppsala 1992; Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial
Revolution’, Economic History Review, XLV, 1 (1992).
15
For an introduction to the debate about proto-industrialisation, see Sheilagh
Ogilvie and Marcus Cerman (eds), European Proto-Industrialization, Cambridge 1996;
for the gradualist interpretation, see N.F.R. Craft, British Economic Growth During the
Industrial Revolution, Oxford 1985.
8 Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

Revolution is one of the great turning-points in history’,16 but at the same time
William Doyle concluded another book by stating that ‘France and the French
underwent profound changes between the 1650s and 1788’.17 All in all, it is
fair to say that the revolutionary aspects of both the Industrial and the French
Revolutions still retain some explanatory power, even if scholars have argued that
the eighteenth century as a whole should be viewed as a long period of change and
transition.
In a similar vein, it is possible to argue that other scholars reduced the
explanatory power of the view of the latter decades of the eighteenth century as
a rapid rupture by discussing the seventeenth century in terms of a military and
a scientific revolution.18 Even so, it is important to remember that Howsbawm
was in the forefront when it came to relating the ‘dual revolutions’ to each other,
as well as pointing to their role in the making of modern society. This way of
connecting revolution to revolution became a template for the next generation of
scholars, along with questions of what brought these rapid ruptures about. Once
economic historians had established the Industrial Revolution as the beginning of
modern society, the aim became to establish what had brought about the industrial
development in the first place. The key question was, was it something in the old
agrarian society? In 1969, David Landes, a stern advocate of the classical view
of the Industrial Revolution, stated that an agricultural revolution had predated
industrial development, with enclosures, crop rotation, new cultivation techniques,
etc.19 Other scholars have added that an agricultural revolution also created a
necessary market for industrial goods, as well as ‘released labour to industry’.20
Agriculture was also important in the discussion about proto-industrialisation,
with its emphasis on division of labour between regions, or between town and
country, as well as establishing manufacturers in the countryside.21
Closely linked to this discussion, scholars began to talk about a consumer
revolution. It was new-found wealth that triggered the demand for new goods

16
Peter McPhee, The French Revolution 1789–1799, Oxford 2002, p. 1.
17
William Doyle, ‘Conclusion’, in William Doyle (ed.), Old Regime France 1648–
1788, Oxford 2001, p. 250.
18
For an introduction, see Clifford J. Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate.
Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, Oxford 1995; Steven
Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, Chicago 1996.
19
David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus. Technological Change and the Industrial
Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, Cambridge 1969, p. 77.
20
For a more modern treatment of the agricultural revolution, see Robert Allen,
‘Agriculture during the industrial revolution’, in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey
(eds), The Economic History of Britain since 1700. Volume I: 1700–1860, Cambridge 1994.
The quotation is from p. 121.
21
Ogilvie and Cerman (eds), European Proto-Industrialization.
 Provincial Cosmopolitanism: An Introduction 9

and commodities, which in turn set the Industrial Revolution in motion,22 but this
approach has also hinted at important non-material aspects. People like Timothy
Breen have argued that the new ‘Empire of Goods’ also shaped the political
developments in late eighteenth-century America, and thus paved the way for its
political revolution.23 The discussion on a consumer revolution soon also included
studies which went beyond the economic sphere, and replaced the analyses of
demand with studies of desire and taste; culture floated to the surface of these
studies.24
Such a discussion also guided Jan de Vries to introduce yet another revolution
to the debate about the roots of modern society, but one that once again shifted
culture towards the edge of the analysis. The underlying argument behind de
Vries’ concept of an Industrious Revolution is that it is difficult to establish what
came first, a rise in demand or in supply, and the basic assumption is that it was the
interaction between supply and demand that triggered the development towards
‘the macrohistorical processes of modern economic growth and state formation’.
The household was given a pivotal importance in a process whereby people
decided to work longer hours in order to satisfy their demands in the market. New
commodities entered into the circuit of everyday life and workers concentrated
their efforts on more specialised tasks; it was the twin processes of division of
labour and market expansion that enhanced output while also gradually lowering
the prices.25
De Vries gives little room to cultural features, but culture has been more
pronounced in recent studies of the material world of economics and politics.
Breen’s ideas about a link between people’s attitudes to consumption and the
American Revolution have parallels in analyses of the political upheaval in France,
linking the Enlightenment to the French Revolution. Ever since the revolutionary
period, a debate has been ongoing about the causes of the revolution; was it
social factors that brought about the upheaval, or had philosophical arguments
an important role? It is fair to say that during the linguistic turn of recent decades
many studies have enhanced the role of the philosophes, and their writings, in
the demise of l’ancien régime. The Enlightenment is seen as the antithesis to the
religious and hierarchical society dominating eighteenth-century Europe prior to
1789, and the intellectual side of the road to modern society. Recent studies of
the Enlightenment have also connected the intellectual movement to economic
development and technological change, two crucial aspects in the discussion about

22
For an introduction, see John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the
World of Goods, London 1993.
23
T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution. How Consumer Politics Shaped
American Independence, Oxford 2004.
24
John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in
Britain and North America, 1700–1830, New Haven 2006.
25
Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution. Consumer Behaviour and the Household
Economy, 1650 to the Present, Cambridge 2008. The quotation is from p. 9.
10 Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

an Industrial Revolution. According to John Robertson, the Enlightenment was all

about ‘understanding … the causes and conditions of human betterment in this
world’,26 and Joel Mokyr saw the Enlightenment as an intermediate intellectual
phase between the scientific revolution and the Industrial Revolution. In his
‘industrial enlightenment’, entrepreneurs and artisans learned to turn scientific
achievements into industrially practical solutions; Mokyr is an advocate of an
industrial revolution as the beginning to our modern society, but it was not born
with a ‘Big Bang’.27
Hobsbawm was thus not the first scholar to use the revolutionary metaphor in
explaining historical change, but he was among the first to link one revolution to
another in order to sketch a beginning to the modern world. According to him, a
watershed could be found between l’ancien régime and the society he lived in, and
the beginning of that divide was the ‘dual revolution’ in Britain and France. Many
scholars have followed this path from ‘multiple revolutions’ towards our present
society, with an agricultural revolution being added to the ‘dual revolution’, and
later also a consumer and an industrious revolution. The problem with such an
intellectual development, of adding penetrating upheaval to upheaval, is that it
drains the concept of its dramatic content; de Vries’ Industrious Revolution was
hardly as revolutionary as the initial meaning of the ‘dual revolution’, and what we
are dealing with is rather a prolonged period of gradual but penetrating change.28
A decade ago the debate was once again re-opened, but from yet another
perspective. In a collection on ‘cultural revolutions’, Colin Jones and Dror
Wahrman assessed the importance of Hobsbawm’s influence, and especially his
‘particular view of the experience of the French and British nations’, but they
stressed that ‘empirical research has been eroding the bases of the dual revolutions
model’. Their verdict is that these two societies did not experience any dramatic
political or economic upheaval. However, they do state this with a twist, as research
based on ‘new theoretical and methodological developments’ have pointed to other
fields where change was dramatic. Scholars inspired by feminist historiography,
the linguistic turn and Michel Foucault have detected radical cultural ruptures in
the period.29
Among the different fields dealt with in The Age of Cultural Revolutions we
find death, war propaganda, theatre, domesticity, feminism, etc.30 However, this

26
John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680–1760,
Cambridge 2005, p. 8.
27
Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy. An Economic History of Britain 1700–
1850, New Haven 2009.
28
For a general treatment, see Roy Porter and Mikulàš Teich (eds), Revolution in
History, Cambridge 1986.
29
Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, ‘Introduction. An Age of Cultural Revolutions?’,
in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (eds), The Age of Cultural Revolutions. Britain and
France, 1750–1820, Berkeley 2002, quotations from pp. 1, 7 and 13.
30
Jones and Wahrman (eds), The Age of Cultural Revolutions.
 Provincial Cosmopolitanism: An Introduction 11

survey only covers a small fraction of the research done in recent decades. Gender
is treated by several authors in the collection, and it is fair to say that gender
studies have challenged our views about the eighteenth century. Margaret Hunt
has insisted that even though European women during the eighteenth century were
subordinated to men, this gradually changed, and women became more present
in public. She points to female agency and thus to a link between gender and the
overall change of the century. Karen O’Brien has also stressed gendered aspects
of the progressive British society.31 Race is another aspect of the century receiving
more interest, and Mary Louise Pratt, for instance, has pointed to the ambiguity of
the Linnaean system in viewing other people and places, and how that came to be
a governing principle in modern society.32 Ideas of a ‘cultural revolution’ have also
been present in discussions within ‘classical’ culture studies, such as art, literature
and music. John Brewer discussed all three of these in his The Pleasures of the
Imagination, a pioneering study of a culturally rapidly changing Britain,33 and Tim
Blanning also gave art an important role in his analysis of Europe in transition.
Antoine Watteau’s L’Enseigne de Gersaint, from 1720, becomes a sign of a
changing continent. In a corner of this picture of an art dealer’s shop, the painter
has depicted a painting of Louis XIV being put into a wooden chest: absolutist
Europe was about to fall.34 Music and literature historians have also thought in
terms of cultural revolutions when describing the transition from the Baroque to
the Galant style in music, or when dealing with the breakthrough of the novel.35
It is beyond doubt that recent achievements within early-modern cultural
studies make it possible for Jones and Wahrman to talk about the eighteenth
century in terms of a ‘cultural revolution’, but they perhaps fall prey to the same
type of criticism they direct to the ‘dual revolution’, about a lack of ‘revolutionary’
content; are we really dealing with rapid transformations of cultural features?
Another problem is whether it is possible to make such a sharp dividing line between
the ‘dual revolution model’ and arguments about ‘cultural revolutionaries’. The
‘cultural turn’ has shifted ‘the grounds in terms of foci of investigation, structures

31
Margaret R. Hunt, Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Harlow 2010; Karen
O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge 2009.
32
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, London
1992.
33
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination. English Culture in the Eighteenth
Century, London 1997.
34
T.C.W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture. Old Regime
Europe 1660–1789, Oxford 2002, pp. 103ff. See Matthew Craske, Art in Europe 1700–
1830, Oxford 1997, for a general overview of this development.
35
Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780, New
York 2003; Robert O. Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style, New York 2007; Ian Watt, The
Rise of the Novel. Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Berkeley 1957; Jane Spencer,
The Rise of the Woman Novelist. From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Oxford 1986; April
London, The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Cambridge 2012.
12 Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

of argument, criteria of relevance, and prioritization of historical causation’,36 but

does that mean that we should abandon earlier interests in political and economic
developments?
Emma Rothschild has, on several occasions, written about what could be
called the ‘indistinctiveness’ of the eighteenth century; the ‘boundaries of
economic, political, and military existence were indistinct’, but so were the
‘frontiers between philosophical and political and popular ideas’.37 She has also
stressed that the eighteenth-century economy must be analysed from a view of the
Enlightenment and with considerations of sentiments as a supporting structure.38
It is, thus, difficult to make a sharp distinction between culture and the material
world for the eighteenth century, as people of the period did not think in the same
categories as we do, and even concepts we share contained a different meaning in
the eighteenth century; when Daniel Defoe dealt with ‘trade’ he included more than
we do today, and his concept was an amalgam between production, commerce and
consumption, and further encapsulated ideas about what certain groups in society,
but also in different parts of the world, should consume. ‘Art’ is another concept
that gradually got a new, and narrower, meaning in the eighteenth century. It is
true that a division between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘mechanical’ arts was already in
place, but it is equally clear that many bonds tied them together for a large part of
the century, such as the guild tradition as well as training and guidelines for what
good art was to be. In Diderot’s treatment it was clear that the ‘liberal’ and the
‘mechanical’ arts belonged together, and should support each other. Trade and art
can also be brought closer together, something that both Defoe and Diderot would
have appreciated, to enhance the connections between ‘the facts of intellectual
culture and facts of material culture’, per Roche. Maxine Berg has approached
the period in a similar way. She began as an intellectual historian, and became an
industrial historian. However, she soon abandoned the world of production for
consumption and luxury, but has recently united all these aspects in analyses of the
trade between Europe and Asia.39
Another scholar in favour of integrated analyses is Christopher Bayly.
In his The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and
Comparisons, from 2004, he stresses that people around the world were not just
toiling in fields and workshops but also consumed goods and desired yet other
commodities, as well as trying to emulate work and consuming patterns from
other groups or countries. Bayly begins with the Industrious Revolution, but the

36
Jones and Wahrman, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.
37
Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires. An Eighteenth-Century History,
Princeton 2011; the quotations are from pp. 4 and 141.
38
Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments. Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the
Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA 2001.
39
For a discussion about Defoe and the concept of trade, see Evans and Rydén, Baltic
Iron, Chapter 1; Denis Diderot, Political Writings, Cambridge 1992, pp. 5f.; Maxine Berg,
Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Oxford 2005.
 Provincial Cosmopolitanism: An Introduction 13

analysis is brought down to the level of the human body and cultural experiences;
he starts with ‘bodily practices’. The attempt is then to ‘translate’ this into a macro
perspective where ‘[t]he movements of economies, ideologies, and states were
not always synchronous. They tended to be interactive’, and there ‘were also
revolutions in “discourse”’. (Rothschild has a similar ambition when she relates
‘the inner life’ of people to the empire.) However, Bayly does more than link
material developments to culture, as he also restates the argument of a ‘Big Bang’
during the latter decades of the eighteenth century. He does so, however, from a
totally different spatial point of view. If Jones and Wahrman agitated for a ‘cultural
turn’, Bayly is an advocate for a ‘spatial turn’, as his analysis is truly global. The
period between 1780 and 1820 saw ‘converging revolutions’, on many continents,
where ‘the old regimes’ were replaced by modernity. These 40 years also witnessed
the beginning of globally converging developments affecting industrialisation,
urbanisation and the modern nation state, as well as religion, literature and art.
However, Bayly also had problems with his chronological demarcations, as he is
aware that the eighteenth century was hardly at a standstill. His analytical solution
to this was the concept of an ‘archaic globalization’.40
Bayly is not the only scholar viewing the turn of the eighteenth century as
both revolutionary and globally ‘connected’. Kenneth Pomeranz had, a few years
before, published his The Great Divergence, a comparative study of China and
Europe. According to him, these two continents shared a similar development until
the later decades of the eighteenth century, but from then on they diverged onto
different trajectories. In Britain, growth and development became the future, while
China faced the Malthusian trap of poverty and stagnation; the title of the book
can be read from both a spatial and a chronological perspective. To Pomeranz, the
dividing features were the abundance of mineral fuel in Europe and the process of
colonisation; the West grew rich due to the extraction of coal and the exploitation
of other parts of the world.41
The significance of Bayly and Pomeranz is not only related to them connecting
a ‘revolution’ around 1800 with the beginning of globalisation, something that
neither Hobsbawm nor Jones and Wahrman had done, but equally important
are the methodological aspects of their writings. Bayly had ‘Connections and
Comparisons’ in his title while Pomeranz did the same with his first chapter, and
since then the writings of global history have been intimately linked with these twin
concepts. Patrick O’Brien has pointed to the ‘two styles of modern global history:

40
Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections
and Comparisons, Oxford 2004; the quotations are from pp. 5, 6 and 12.
41
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. China, Europe, and the Making
of the Modern World Economy, Princeton 2000. See also David Armitage and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam (eds), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, London
2010.
14 Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World

connection and comparison’.42 Pomeranz, Bayly and O’Brien are forerunners in

the development of the latest vogue of history writings, global history, but most
historians would agree that neither comparisons nor connections are new features
in our common toolbox.

Curious Cosmopolitanism

In his promotion of a history spanning the whole globe, using the approach of
connection and comparison, O’Brien stated that global history is not a novel
feature after all, and has been written within Europe ever since the first Greek
historians. Herodotus was its founding father, and he should be embraced ‘for
the scale, scope and empathy of his histories’. However, this tradition has been
dwarfed by the conflicting tradition stemming from Thucydides, and its spatially
more confined approach, ever since. During the eighteenth century, however,
the tradition from Herodotus made a powerful comeback. After centuries with
increasing trade, and an expanding knowledge about lands and people outside
Europe, scholars were well equipped to deal with other civilisations.43 European
historical writing in the Age of Enlightenment was dominated by a spatially more
encompassing tradition in which both connections and comparisons were of crucial
importance. Traditionally, Enlightenment historians have been hailed for their
emphasis on progress and development; Scottish thinkers like Adam Ferguson and
Adam Smith saw the development of human societies in four different stages.44
However, more recently, scholars have been more alerted to a spatial foundation
for such a way of thinking. Karen O’Brien has, for instance, shown how Voltaire
wrote history in a fashion which can very much be characterised as connected.
He abandoned the chronological narratives of his predecessors, structured on
religion and monarchs, to concentrate on synchronic ties within the societies he
dealt with; in his Siècle de Louis XIV he connected ‘[e]conomy, military and legal
reforms [with] improvements in technology and communications’. He also strived
to reach outside the boundaries of solitary countries and instead ‘centred upon the
evolution and existence of a unique, common European civilisation’.45

42
Patrick O’Brien, ‘Historiographical traditions and modern imperatives for the
restoration of global history’, Journal of Global History 1 (2006), p. 4.
43
O’Brien, ‘Historiographical traditions’, pp. 7–11. For a general treatment of global
history since the eighteenth century, see Georg G. Iggers, Q. Edward Wang and Supriya
Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern Historiography, Harlow 2008. For an introduction
to Herodotus, see Sture Linnér, Herodotos. Den förste globalisten, Stockholm 2008.
44
See Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade. International Competition and the Nation-State
in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, MA 2005, pp. 159–184, for the roots in Pufendorf of
the development of these theories.
45
Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment. Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire
to Gibbons, Cambridge 1997. The quotations are from pp. 22 and 35.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 consider anything but his own selfish ease and pleasure
and I suppose he is too old to look for any change now. I
myself am a nervous wreck, so I could not possibly have
you with me.
“As I know that you have but little money and will need
to be very careful, with this letter I am sending you some
things that if you are at all capable you can make over and
use for yourself; the stockings you can cut over, and the
slippers were always too small for me.
“Samuel Jarvis wrote me about the Bible I gave your
mother. I remember it well, and am pleased to know that
you have kept it.
“Your affectionate aunt,
“Sarah Hartly.”
No one made a remark as Mrs. Blossom finished the letter, till
Miss Silence spoke, “Well, let us see what’s in the box.”
The contents were quickly taken out, for even Grandmother Sweet
would have confessed to a curiosity in the matter. These were an old
black velvet dress worn threadbare at the seams and trimmed with
beaded fringe; a soiled black and white check wool wrapper; a black
satin skirt shiny with wear; a purple silk with coffee stains down the
front breadth; some brown brocaded material which had evidently
served as lining to a cloak; a bundle of half-worn stockings; several
yards of black feather trimming, moth-eaten in spots; a pair of fancy
bedroom slippers; and at the bottom of the box a plush cape heavily
braided with a bugle trimming.
Hardly a word had been uttered as one by one the garments had
been unfolded. Rose had knelt among them in silence; now she
drew the cape about her and rose to her feet. For a moment she
looked down at herself, then tearing the cape off she gave it a throw
and sank back in a little heap on the floor. “I know it would be
comfortable,” she wailed, “and I need it, and it would save spending
money, but I can’t wear that cape with those bugles, I can’t.”
 Silence Blossom was laughing. “You needn’t wear it, Rose,” she
said soothingly.
Mrs. Patience had lifted the cape and was examining it, “That was
an expensive garment, when it was new.”
“It might have been, when it was new,” retorted her sister.
“What am I to do with the stuff?” questioned Rose with a tragic
gesture toward the unfolded garments scattered round her. “I’ve a
good mind to pack it in the box again and send it straight back to
Great-Aunt Sarah!”
“No, no, Rose,” reproved Mrs. Blossom; “remember she is your
aunt.”
“I do remember.” Rose’s eyes were sparkling with angry tears. “I
used sometimes to imagine what it would be like if I should ever find
my relatives and have real aunts and uncles and cousins, who cared
for me. Well, I have found them,” and she drew a sobbing breath. “I
have a Great-Uncle Samuel and a Great-Aunt Sarah; and neither
one cares that for me,” and she gave a snap to her fingers, “and
neither one will have me—though I’m glad Great-Aunt Sarah doesn’t
want me. But I shall love Great-Uncle Samuel always, even if I never
see him again, because he did take enough interest to come and
see me, and plan things for me. When I was Posey, I was nobody’s
Posey; and now I’m Rose, I’m nobody’s Rose!”
“You are our Rose,” and Mrs. Patience put her arms about her,
“and the Fifields think you are their Rose. I will tell you what you can
do. You can win the love of people for yourself, and so be
everybody’s Rose.”
Rose suddenly smiled. “I never thought of that before, but I will do
it. And Grandmother Sweet shall tell me how, for everybody loves
her.”
But Grandmother shook her head. “That is something thee will
have to learn for thyself. Only I will tell thee one thing, if thee would
win love thee must first give love; whatever thee would get out of life
thee must first put into life.”
 Miss Silence had been going over the things again with her
practised eye. “See here, Rose, we can wash up this black and white
check and it will make you a good school dress, with a color for
piping to brighten it. And I have been looking at the black velvet and
I’m quite sure I can get you a little coat out of it. We can use the
brocade for lining, and there will be plenty of feather trimming, even
when the bad spots are taken out. That will look nicely with your new
red dress.”
“And I will make you a little black velvet turban, and trim it with red
ribbon to match your dress,” added Mrs. Patience.
“And I will show you how to put new feet in the stockings.”
Grandmother Sweet had drawn one on her hand. “They are a good,
fine quality.”
Rose looked from one to another. “What should I have done if I
hadn’t come here? You know just what to do every time. And when
the world looks all grey, if it isn’t quite black, if I can see it through
your eyes, why it’s pink and rosy again.”
As Rose was saying this she gathered up the articles and put
them back in the box once more. “I suppose you can find a use for
this purple silk. Perhaps when I’m old and wear a cap it will come
useful.”
For answer Miss Silence laughed and nodded, “There will be
some place where it will come in yet.”
“Rose,” said Mrs. Blossom, “I think it is time the chickens were
fed.”
This was something Rose had begged to do. They were a tamer
flock than Mrs. Hagood’s, petted as was every living thing about the
Blossoms, and it was an unfailing pleasure to have them run to meet
her, to feed them out of her hand, and to smooth their white feathers
as they crowded around. As she took the measure of yellow corn
from the back of the stove where it had been warming, the big
Maltese cat rose and purred beside her. “No, Dandy,” and she gave
him a pat, “you can’t go with me this time, the chickens don’t like
you; you jump and make them flutter.”
 As she spoke she looked for something to put around her and her
eye fell on the cape which lay this time on the top of the box. “I have
just thought what I can use it for,” and she laughed merrily. “I can
wear it out to the chicken house; the chickens, I know, will enjoy
pecking at the bugles. That would certainly be making use of it.”
She paused with her hand on the door. “Will I have to write to
Great-Aunt Sarah and thank her?”
“Don’t you think that you ought to?” Mrs. Blossom questioned in
turn.
“I am not sure whether I do or not. But one thing is certain—if I do
write to her you will all have to help me, for I should never know what
to say.”
“I know what I should like to say to her.” Silence Blossom’s tone
was scornful, though she waited till Rose was out of hearing before
she spoke. “I would like to tell her that such a lot of good-for-nothing
old stuff I never saw sent away. I have heard stories of the boxes
sent to some of the home missionaries out West, and I think this
must be like them. Any woman of sense might have known that
those things were not suitable for a girl of Rose’s age.”
“At least the material was good,” urged her mother.
“You mean it had been, but it was past that point. It’s very evident
that Great-Aunt Sarah buys good clothes for herself. Something new
for Rose for a dress would have done her more good than all that
cast-off finery.”
“To my mind the letter was worse than the box,” declared Mrs.
Patience. “I never heard anything more heartless and cold-blooded.
One would have thought the mere facts would have aroused a
sympathy for Rose.”
“She is coming in,” cautioned Miss Silence, “and we would not say
anything before her. But this much is certain, that I know all I want to
of Mrs. Sarah Hartly.”
 CHAPTER XXII
QUIET DAYS

You may have seen a little leaf that has fallen into a stream and
been whirled along by the unresting current, torn and bruised and
helpless, then suddenly drift into a still and quiet pool and lie tranquil,
unvexed, while the stream, unable longer to clutch it, goes hurrying
by. So to Rose, after her troubled, changeful childhood, Farmdale
was the quiet pool, where she was to find a quiet, uneventful period.
Not that Rose ever thought of it as uneventful. To her school life
she brought an enthusiasm that never flagged; the school tests, the
class competitions, the school entertainments, the school games,
and even the school differences, she entered into them all heart and
soul. She studied hard, she took eager advantage of every
opportunity, and was none the less ready for every enjoyment with
the keen zest of her intense nature. Then outside the school was the
village with all its people and all their happenings, a little world of
itself. “Some of the girls call Farmdale dull and poky,” she repeated
wonderingly to Miss Silence. “I’m sure it isn’t dull to me—I don’t see
how they can think it is.”
The Blossom household quickly became home, and home folks to
Rose. But when Mrs. Blossom promised for her the same care she
would have given her own little Rachel, she included also, what she
would have expected of little Rachel had she lived, as she had of her
other daughters, the yielding of a ready, cheerful obedience. Mrs.
Blossom’s law was one Rose had known little of, the law of love, but
none the less was it law. Never in their girlhood, and hardly in their
maturer years, had Silence or Patience Blossom dreamed of acting
in opposition to their mother’s will—that reasonable, mild, but
inflexible will. And though Rose had not hesitated to face Mrs.
Hagood’s fury, yet when those clear, steadfast eyes looked into hers,
and that kindly but firm voice said, with its accent of decision, “Rose,
you cannot!” she instinctively realized that here was a force, the
force of moral strength, that impetuous willfulness would beat
powerless against. Nor was her affection for Mrs. Blossom any the
less sincere because of the obedient respect on which it was
founded.
Great-Uncle Samuel had been rightly informed that the Farmdale
high school was a good one, and the lessons Rose learned within its
walls were to her of value; but no less so was the unconscious
teaching of the pure and unselfish lives that were open before her
every day. Over an ardent young life, full of dreams and plans and
ambitions, all centered in self, a happier influence could not well
have fallen than that of these gentle, kindly women, whose spirit of
helpfulness and sympathy was always as ready and unfailing as the
flow of the fountain itself.
Was any one in distress, in perplexity, in trouble; there was no
counselor so wise, discreet, trustworthy, as Mrs. Blossom, who held
half the village secrets, and had served as a peacemaker times
without number. Was there a bride to be dressed; no one could do it
so well as Miss Silence or Mrs. Patience. Was any one sick; no
nurses were as tender and skillful and tireless as they. Did the
shadow of death rest over a home; no voices could speak words of
sweeter comfort to the dying, no other’s presence was so
unobtrusive, so helpful in the house of bereavement. Indeed, few
were the families in that little community to whom they were not
bound by the cords of a common sympathy in some hour of joy or
grief. And Rose was not the only one who often wondered how with
all the calls upon them they still managed to accomplish so much,
and with a manner so unhurried.
“I don’t see how you ever do it,” Rose exclaimed one day.
“It’s the busy people who find not only the most time but the most
happiness,” was Silence Blossom’s cheery answer.
And realizing, as she well did, how much more of real happiness
there was in the modest Blossom home than in the big Fifield house,
where no one ever thought of going to ask a service, and every life
was wholly self-centered, Rose could not but admit that this was
true.
 “I don’t see what happiness you could find in sitting up all night
with Aunt Polly Brown,” she protested. “I’m sure I never want to go
where there’s sick people. I hope I’ll never be asked to.”
Already in that home where thoughtfulness for others was part of
the daily life, and interest in any who were suffering a matter of
course, it had come about naturally that Rose should be sent with a
handful of flowers, or some dainty for a sick neighbor, or was asked
to call at the door with a message of inquiry. So the next day she
took it as a matter of course when Miss Silence asked her to take a
bowl of chicken broth to Aunt Polly Brown.
“Take it right in to Aunt Polly,” said the young woman who opened
the door. “She’s in the bedroom right off the sitting-room.”
Rose hesitated. She would have refused if she had known exactly
how to do so. As it was, the bowl trembled a little as she walked
through into the bedroom, where on a high four-post bedstead,
under a “blazing star” quilt, Aunt Polly lay, a ruffled night cap
surrounding her shrunken face.
“Well, now,” as Rose told her errand, “it was reel kind of Silence
Blossom to send the broth. I was just thinkin’ that a taste o’ chicken
broth would relish. Sit down, won’t ye,” with a wistful accent, “and tell
me what’s goin’ on? Mary Jane never knows nothin’. Mebby I ain’t
goin’ to get well, but ’tany rate I like to know what folks is doin’.”
“I was standing on one foot wondering how quick I could get out,”
Rose said, relating it all to Miss Silence, on her return. “But when
she spoke that way I just thought that if I were old and sick I’d be
glad to have somebody come in; and I sat down and racked my brain
to tell everything I could think of. She seemed real cheered up when
I came away, and I promised her I’d come again.”
“I thought you never wanted to go where there were sick people,”
and Silence Blossom’s eyes twinkled.
“Well, it wasn’t so bad as I thought it was going to be, though her
hands are kind of skinny. And I don’t think I feel quite as I did about
sick folks now. Besides, it must be dreadful to lie in bed day after
day, and if I can make a little of the time pass, why I’m glad to.”
 “There is where the gladness comes in,” said Mrs. Patience. “It is
making the hours of suffering a little brighter, a little easier. And now
you have learned this I think you will never forget it.”
“And I also remember that I promised to come down to Helen
Green’s to get out my Latin with her,” and gathering an armful of
books Rose hurried away.
“I am glad that Rose went in to see Aunt Polly; she is such a bit of
sunshine that she could not help but do her good. Besides, she has
always had such a morbid dread of a sick room,” Silence remarked
as she watched her away.
“I am glad, too,” agreed Mrs. Blossom, “for Rose can gain as well
as give. Of course I would not want her to go where there was any
danger, but her exuberant young nature will be made the deeper and
richer for being stirred and lifted out of itself.”
So among the threads of interest running from the Blossom home
Rose knit her threads. The people of Farmdale became her friends,
and because they were her friends she loved them, and so it was not
strange that she won love in return. With the Fifields her relations
through the years continued of the friendliest. On her part the
painfulness of being falsely accused had faded away; and on their
part the fact that it had been an unjust charge had not only made
them one and all feel that they owed her something in return, but had
awakened an interest in her that otherwise they might never have
felt. Miss Eudora regarded her in the light of a romance; Miss Jane
Fifield commended the fact that she was neither vain, nor, as she
was pleased to put it, “silly”; while Mr. Nathan, in his pride at Rose’s
persistence, and the quality he called her “grit,” went so far as to
freshen up the languages of his college days, that he might the more
help her.
At their time of life it was not to be expected that the Fifield nature
would greatly change; still their friendship for Rose, inexperienced
young girl though she was, brought a new and wholesome
atmosphere into the old house. Her flitting in and out, bright, breezy,
vivacious, was a welcome break in their old formality. A part of
Rose’s nature was her overflowing enthusiasm on the subject then in
mind; her studies, her school pleasures, whatever part was hers in
the life of the village, was all shared with her friends. So when she
came in beaming with excitement over the prettiness of the newest
Banby baby, Miss Fifield and Miss Eudora became conscious that
Mrs. Banby was a neighbor. Or if it were anxiety how little Mrs.
Mather, whose husband had just died and left her with five children,
was ever going to get through the winter; or rejoicing that Fanny
Barber, who had been so low with inflammatory rheumatism was
really improving, almost before they were aware, they would find
themselves becoming interested, an interest that could easily take
the form of a bundle of warm clothing for the widow, or a glass of
Miss Fifield’s famous quince jelly for the invalid. And so by the slight
touches of Rose’s hands they found themselves drawn gradually
from their cold isolation, and nearer to those about them.
 CHAPTER XXIII
A VISIT FROM AN OLD FRIEND

Through Cousin Allen Gloin’s wife’s sister, who lived in Horsham,

Rose occasionally heard of the Hagoods, and the year after she left
there was surprised by the news of Mrs. Hagood’s death.
“Mr. Hagood takes it real hard,” added her informant, “and says he
don’t know how he’s ever going to get along without Almiry. Some
folks thinks it’s put on, but for my part I don’t.”
“No, indeed,” had been Rose’s answer, “I think he had grown so
used to her ordering him around that now he does feel lost without
it.”
It was not quite two years later when one day, returning from
school, Rose found a horse and buggy standing at the Blossom
gate. This of itself was nothing unusual, for the business of Mrs.
Patience and Miss Silence brought a large share of the Farmdale
people, as well as those outside its limits, to their door. But as Rose
gave a second look in passing at the fat old horse and stout buggy,
she suddenly realized that she had known both before, and
quickening her steps she rushed into the house to find Mr. Hagood,
with Rover sitting upright beside him, waiting her coming. His was
the same familiar figure she remembered so well—thin, grizzled,
slightly stooping; but Rose saw almost in the first glance, that his
motions were brisker than in the days when she had known him, that
his whiskers had been trimmed, that his hat brim had taken an
upward tendency, and his eyes had lost their furtive, timid glance; in
short, that there had been a change in the whole man, slight but still
palpable, in the direction of cheerful, self-assertive manhood.
“Well, now, Posey,” was his greeting, as he held both her hands
and smiled till his face was all a-crinkle, “if it don’t beat natur’ how
you’ve growed! An’ prettier than ever, I declare! I tell you I was reel
tickled when I heerd how well you was fixed, an’ that you’d found out
your reel name, an’ your ma’s relations. You don’t look much like the
little girl Almiry brought home with her from the Refuge.”
“And that you gave the russet apples to?” Rose’s eyes were
twinkling, but the tears were very near them as she recalled that day
of her arrival at the Hagood home.
“So I did, to be sure. Well, Posey—if you hev got another name
you’ll always be Posey to me—we did hev some good times
together, didn’t we?”
Then they talked over the pleasant memories of their
companionship, with a mutual care avoiding those whose
suggestiveness might be the opposite. The only allusion he made to
her leaving was, “Rover an’ me did miss you dreadfully when you
went away, we just did. An’ so to-day, as I had to come over this way,
I said to Rover, ‘We’ll stop an’ see Posey, we will.’ I’m glad we did,
too, an’ I just believe Rover knows you.” And Rover, with his head on
Rose’s knee and her hand smoothing his silky ears, gently thumped
his tail on the floor, as if in affirmative.
Then, after a moment’s hesitation, “I was sorry you an’ Almiry
couldn’t fit together better; she meant well, Almiry did, but you know
she’d never had any little girls of her own.” And as if fearful that he
had cast some reflection on her memory he hastened to add, “Almiry
was a wonderful woman. I tell you I met with a big loss when I lost
her, I just did, an’ for a spell I was about broke up.” He paused with
the query, “I s’pose you’d heard she was dead?”
“Yes, but I never heard the particulars. Was she sick long?”
“No; it come so onexpected it just about floored me, it did. You see
she was taken with a chill, an’ she kep’ a gettin’ colder’n colder, in
spite o’ everythin’ we could giv’ her, an’ do for her. Why, it did seem
that what with the hot things we give her to drink, an’ the hot things
we kep’ around her, that if she’d been a stone image ’twould a
warmed her through; but they didn’t do a mite o’ good, not one mite.
She was took early one morning, an’ late the next night I was
warmin’ a flannel to lay on her. I het it so ’twas all a-smokin’, but she
couldn’t feel nothin’, an’ she give it a fling, an’ riz half up in bed an’
spoke, just as natural as she ever did, ‘Elnathan Hagood, I don’t
believe you’ve hed that nigh the stove; what ails you that you can’t
half do a thing? I’ve a good mind to get up and heat some flannel as
it ought to be done. I won’t hev any till I do.’ An’ with that she fell
right back on her piller, an’ never breathed ag’in. I tell you I was all
broke up.”
Rose did not know what she ought to say, so she said nothing.
Mr. Hagood hesitated, cleared his throat, and remarked in an
inquiring tone, “Mebby you’ve heard that I was married again?”
It was Rose’s turn to be surprised. “No, indeed, I’ve heard nothing
from Horsham since Mrs. Gloin’s sister left there. But I’m glad if you
have.”
“Be you really?” his face brightening. “Well, now, you see,” with the
confidential tone Rose remembered so well, “mebby some folks’ld
think I hadn’t orter done such a thing. But I tell you after a man has
had a home as many years as I had it’s kinder tough to be without
one. I couldn’t live alone; Rover an’ I tried that, an’ everything got
messed up dreadful; keepin’ a hired girl wasn’t much better; an’ to
eat my victuals at somebody else’s table didn’t seem reel natural,
now it didn’t.
“I thought if Almiry knew all the circumstances she wouldn’t blame
me none ef I did marry. An’ there was Mirandy Fraser, Jim Fraser’s
widow—don’t know as you ever knew her, a mighty pretty little
woman—she was havin’ a hard time to get along with her two little
girls, for Jim never was noways forehanded. So I figured it out that
she needed a home, an’ I needed some one to make a home; an’
the long an’ short of it is I married her. An’ the plan’s worked first
rate, well now it has. She ain’t such a manager,” he admitted, “as
Almiry was; but then,” with a touch of pride, “I don’t suppose it would
be easy to find Almiry’s equal there. But I’ll say this, I never did see
Mirandy’s match for bein’ pleasant. I don’t believe anybody ever
heerd her speak cross, I really don’t. She’s so contented, too, with
everything; hasn’t given me the first fault-findin’ word yet, not the first
one.”
 “How nice that is!” Rose rejoined heartily.
“An’ the little girls,” all the lines on Mr. Hagood’s face deepened
into a tender smile as he spoke of them, “Susy an’ Ruth, I just wish
you could see them; there never were two prettier-behaved children,
if I do say it. They like to come out an’ sit in the shop when I’m at
work there, just as you used to, an’, well, they an’ Rover an’ me has
some pretty good times together.”
Rose smiled. “I don’t believe they enjoy it any more than I did.”
“I don’t work so much in the shop, though,” he added, “for I’ve a
good deal to look after. I’m over this way now on business. The fact
of the matter is,” an accent of dejection creeping into his tone, “I’ve
made a bad bargain. Ever since Almiry went I’ve kept everything up
straight as a string, an’ haven’t lost a dollar till now. I s’pose she’d
say it was all my fault, an’ so it is,” growing more and more
depressed; “for I suppose I ought to hev known better than to hev
ever lent Tom Hodges a hundred dollars. When he moved away from
Horsham he couldn’t pay me, but he’d got a good place as foreman
in a mill, an’ promised it all right. That was eight months ago, an’ I’ve
never seen a single cent, so I made up my mind I’d go over there an’
look him up, an’ I found Tom to-day down with the rheumatism, not
able to do a stroke o’ work, an’ they looked in pretty bad shape—
well, now they did. Of course he couldn’t pay me, said he hadn’t but
two dollars in money, but there was a cow, I could take that towards
it ef I wanted to. But bless you, there was four little children who
would hev to go without milk ef I took the cow, an’ I told Tom I’d wait
on him till he could earn the money, which just the same as meant
that I’d give it to him, for crippled up as he is he can’t more’n take
care of his family. An’ when I come away I handed his wife five
dollars; she looked as though she needed it, an’ they’ve both always
done as well as they could. I don’t know what Almiry’d say ef she
could know it. But hang it all!” giving his hat a slap on his knee,
“Mirandy said not to be hard on ’em, an’ it won’t kill me ef I do lose it.
“No, I can’t stay all night,” in answer to Rose’s invitation. “I brought
Mirandy an’ the little girls to my Cousin Em’ly’s, ten mile from here,
an’ they’ll be lookin’ for me back. But I wish you’d come an’ see us,
Posey,” as he rose to go. “I’ve told Mirandy about you, an’ she’d do
everything to make it pleasant. We haven’t changed things any to
speak of since you was there, only we live more in the front part o’
the house. I couldn’t help feelin’ at first that Almiry wouldn’t like it, but
I wanted to make it pleasant for Mirandy an’ the children, an’ you
know it wasn’t what you could call reel cheerful in that back kitchen.”
“And can Rover come in the house now?” asked Rose.
“Yes, Rover comes in, an’ we hev the front blinds open, an’
evenin’s last winter we’d hev apples an’ nuts an’ popcorn, ’most as
though it was a party. You know,” with a broad smile, “I never had
any children o’ my own before, an’ I sort o’ enjoy havin’ some little
girls to call me ‘Pa.’”
Rose had come out along the walk with Mr. Hagood. As they
paused at the gate he glanced around to be sure that no one but her
could hear him, then lowering his voice as though fearing it might
reach the ears of the departed Mrs. Hagood, he added confidentially,
“An’ to tell the truth, Posey, just betwixt you and me, I never was so
happy before in my life as I be now.”
 CHAPTER XXIV
AND COLLEGE NEXT

It was the third May that Rose had been in Farmdale. The turf on
the open green was emerald velvet, the orchards were drifts of pink
and white, the lilacs by Mrs. Blossom’s gate were lifting spikes of
lavender, and shrubs and roses were heavy with the weight of bud or
bloom. In a swift rush Rose came down the walk, the white gate
clashed behind her, and she dashed into the house, rosy and
breathless with haste, waving a long envelope over her head.
“What do you think that is?” she cried.
Miss Silence glanced up from her sewing machine. “It looks to me
like an envelope.”
“And what do you think is inside it?” pursued Rose.
“A letter is usually inside an envelope,” answered Mrs. Patience.
“You won’t guess,” pouted Rose, “so I shall have to tell you, for I
couldn’t possibly keep it. This is my certificate that I have passed the
teachers’ examination I went to last week, and am duly qualified to
teach. Wish me joy!”
“But I thought thee went to the examination simply for the
practice,” said Grandmother Sweet.
“So I did. But all the same I wanted to pass, and was so afraid I
wouldn’t pass. That’s why I didn’t say more about it. And now that I
have a really, truly certificate to teach! I’m sure I’ve grown an inch
since I took it out of the post-office.”
“We are very glad you succeeded,” and Mrs. Patience held off a
hat to see if the bunch of flowers was in the right place.
“And that isn’t all,” Rose went on blithely. “You need sixteen points
to graduate from the high school, I have fourteen already, because
I’ve taken extra studies; to pass the teachers’ examination counts
two points, so now I can graduate this year.”
“But why do you want to graduate this year? I supposed of course
you were going one more,” and Silence looked her surprise.
“I want to get to teaching. I’m just crazy to begin.”
“Rose, Rose,” Mrs. Blossom in the next room had heard the
conversation, and now stepped to the doorway, “you are too young
to think of teaching; even if you are qualified you have not the self-
control a teacher needs.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” groaned Rose, “when I have struggled with
my temper, and prayed over it, and counted a hundred before I
spoke, and bitten my tongue till it bled, and did all the things I ever
heard of to hold on to myself.”
“And you have done very well,” commended Mrs. Blossom. “You
have overcome much, and learned some hard lessons in the bridling
of your quick tongue, and holding in check your temper. But you
have still more to learn, especially if you are going to teach. I know,
for I was a teacher myself, and while text-books and methods
change, boys and girls, as far as I can see, remain about the same.”
“All I ask is the chance to try some boys and girls.”
“Besides,” Mrs. Blossom’s voice was calmly even, “I do not think
you can teach, that any school board would hire a girl of seventeen.”
“But I know people who have taught when no older than that,”
persisted Rose.
“That might have been once but it is not now. Indeed I am quite
sure that a law has been passed in Ohio that a teacher cannot draw
pay unless she is over eighteen.”
“It is a mean old law,” scorned Rose.
“Another thing,” continued Mrs. Blossom, “your Uncle Samuel is
your guardian, and he did not expect, any more than we did, that you
would leave school till next year; and before taking such a step you
must consult him.”
 “Great-Uncle Samuel won’t care,” urged Rose, “and I’ve set my
heart on getting through this year. Besides if I can’t teach I can go to
school another year, and take Latin and German, and review the
common branches.”
“You write to Mr. Jarvis first, and see what he says,” and Rose
knew further argument was useless.
Rose waited and fretted for two weeks before an answer to her
letter came, and when she read it she gave a gasp of surprise.
“What do you think?” she exclaimed. “Great-Uncle Samuel says I
have been a very prudent girl, while from my marks—you know I
have sent them to him every quarter—I seem to have made good
use of my opportunities; so if I will continue to be prudent he thinks
there will be money enough for me to go to college for four years.
This is what he writes: ‘Of course not to a big expensive college, that
would be quite beyond your means, the Fairville Woman’s College is
the one I have chosen for you. I am told that it is an excellent school,
that the location is healthy, and the moral tone excellent. That you
will make good use of its benefits I shall expect. Of course your Aunt
Sarah Hartly ought to have seen to this for you, but as long as she
wouldn’t I have done what seemed to me the best.’”
“Four years in college, will not that be fine?” Silence Blossom’s
own eyes were bright with pleasure.
“Yes, I suppose it will,” Rose spoke slowly. “But, you know, I never
had thought of such a thing as college being possible for me; I did
not think that there was money enough for that. Of course I shall like
it, the only thing is it will make me so old before I get to teaching.”
The older women looked at Rose’s face, that had never lost its
child expression, and laughed at her words.
“It may be though,” she went on, “that I can put in extra studies
and shorten the time.”
“No, no,” protested Mrs. Patience, “to do your best work you do
not want to hurry it.”
Grandmother Sweet stopped her knitting. “Rose, my husband
while a lad served five years as apprentice to a carpenter. His own
work was of the best, and he often said that time spent learning to
use one’s tools was time saved. Now, thee is planning to use books
as tools, and the better thee understands them the better work thee
will do.”
“Oh, of course,” Rose hastened to say, “now the chance has come
to me I wouldn’t miss it for anything. And I will make the best of it,
too. I’m going to send right away and get a prospectus of the college
to see what the entrance requirements are. I’m not going to be
conditioned, and I’d rather be a little ahead. I had planned anyway to
read Virgil this summer with Mr. Fifield, and I can study up whatever
else is needed.”
“I think if you are going to college this fall you will need to do some
sewing as well as studying,” suggested Miss Silence.
“Of course I shall. I know I can’t spend money for a great deal;
what I do have I want neat and in good shape. I’m so glad to know
about it now, for I can plan the dresses I will need when I graduate
from the high school so I can use them then.”
“How many will you need?” asked Silence Blossom.
“The other girls say three; a suit for the Baccalaureate sermon,
another for the senior reception, and the graduating dress.”
“That last will be white, and will answer for your best white dress
all the year, and if you get a pretty grey for your suit that will do for
fall wear.”
“That makes two new dresses,” reflected Rose. “I can’t afford any
more, and one other still to be evolved. I wish the waist wasn’t so
badly worn to the lavender and white striped silk Great-Aunt Sarah
sent in the last box; it would make a pretty dress, and I could mend
up the cream lace to trim it.”
Before Rose had ceased speaking Miss Silence was turning the
leaves of a fashion book. “There is a dress in this last number that I
believe we can copy, and use the purple silk she sent you once to
combine with it. The solid color will give it character, and the lace will
soften and keep it girlish.”
 Rose was looking at the plate. “Yes, that will be pretty. You are the
very Wizard of Old Clothes. And if there are scraps enough of silk
and lace left I will make a little hat with purple violets for trimming to
wear with it.”
She paused and lifted an impressive finger. “But mind this, when I
get to earning for myself I will have some pretty dresses, and never
will I wear any more of Great-Aunt Sarah’s cast-offs!”
Mrs. Patience smiled indulgently. “You are young, Rose, it is only
natural you should feel so. But you know you are denying yourself
now so that day may come.”
“I know it,” Rose nodded. “When I have had to go without things I
wanted and that other girls did have, I’ve said, ‘Never mind, you are
having an education.’ I expect to have to say that pretty often when I
get to college—it’s hard to realize that I am going—but I’m not going
to forget that I’m working for a purpose.”
“And that’s better than fine clothes.”
Rose twisted her face. “I wouldn’t object to the fine clothes if I
could have them. But I suppose I shall need some dresses for
everyday wear; the blue dress I had last year will do for that, won’t
it?”
“Yes, and there is your green and red plaid. You can have some
separate waists, too. I’m sure, Rose, we can have your wardrobe in
shape, that if not fine, it will be neat and tasty.”
“What could I ever have done without you all?” Rose paused and
sighed. “I am glad that I can go to college. I shall be gladder the
longer I realize it. But I feel that it will just break my heart to leave
here. If I could only take you all with me or bring the college to
Farmdale.”
“We are glad that you can go to college, Rose,” Mrs. Blossom’s
voice had not quite its usual firmness, “but you may be sure of one
thing, we shall miss you more than you will us. But it is a long time till
September; we will not begin the parting yet.”
 “And of course I shall come back in vacations; everybody goes
home then, and this is my home.”
“Do you think a college freshman will remember how to gather
eggs?” asked Mrs. Patience.
“This one will, you may be sure,” laughed Rose, “and how to make
omelet, and custard, and cake with them when they are gathered.
It’s a pity Great-Uncle Samuel never comes so I can show him how
you have taught me to cook.”
It was a busy summer for Rose; she went over all the studies in
which she would be examined for entrance to college, she sewed
and gathered and tucked and hemmed, and when the September
days came she packed her modest wardrobe in her new trunk with a
curious mingling of dread and delight; dread at leaving the life she
knew, the friends she had proved; delight in the new and wider world
opening before her.
There had been talk of Mrs. Patience going with Rose, but it had
not proved possible, so when one sunny September day the stage—
the same stage that had brought her to Farmdale, stopped at the
white gate, and her trunk was strapped on, with a mixture of tears
and smiles the good-bys were said, and Rose settled herself in the
same corner of the back seat she had occupied on that day which
now seemed so far, far in the past, no longer a forlorn little figure,
dingy, travel worn and friendless; but a trim young girl in a pretty grey
suit, leaning out and waving her handkerchief in answer to those
waved to her from nearly every house. For Rose’s friends included
almost every one in Farmdale, and all her friends were interested in
her start for college.

THE END
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