On the afternoon of 24 June 1852, the entire city of Christiania gathered on the fortress pier. At 6 o’clock the Swedish steamship Berzelius, named after the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, was due to arrive. On board the ship were 288 Swedish university students from Uppsala. Nine days later, Illustreret Nyhedsblad published a description of the scene:
As soon as ‘Berzelius’ was spotted alongside Steilene, 3 cannon shots from the Revierbryggen proclaimed the arrival of the ship. When it was just off Vippetangen, it was saluted by a battery placed there and flags were hoisted from the church spire. Meanwhile, a countless mass of people flocked down to the fortress and the pier. The craftsmen walked in procession down to Huustangen with their banners and gathered in facilities there to cheer the guests. The Norwegian students walked in procession from [Studenter]
Samfundets building, the old university building, down to the fortress pier, where the hosts had also gathered [the Swedish students were hosted by the citizens of Christiania]. The pier now posed a beautiful sight. Banners had been hung from the fortress walls to the end of the pier. Between them were suspended flower garlands to form a railing. The flags of both realms waved and a beautiful portal stood at the end of the pier. An endless number of ladies formed a picturesque curtain against the green ramparts of the fortress. Boats filled with spectators crossed each other restlessly around the pier. The masts of the ships in the harbor were filled with people. Spectators climbed and hung over each other and the numerus flags waving above their heads provided a festive appearance to the whole scene.1
This description evokes a feeling of anticipation prior to the arrival of the Swedish students. Salutes fired and hundreds of people marching down from all directions, filling up the increasingly crowded pier. Above this description is an engraving of the scene (figure 5.1). We see the Norwegian and Swedish
1 “Studentermødet i Christiania 1852 I,” Illustreret Nyhedsblad no. 40, 3 July 1852, 162.
“Saasnart ‘Berzelius’ kunde øines ved Steilene, fokyndte 3 fra Revierbryggen løsnede Kanonskud Skibets Ankomst. Da det var lige ud for Vippetangen, saluteredes fra et paa samme Sted opstillet Batteri og flaggedes fra Kirketaarnet. Imidlertid strømmede en utallig
Menneskemasse til Fæstningen og Bryggerne. Haandverkerne droge i Proccession med sine Faner til Huustangen og opstillede sig indenfor en der anbragt Indhegning for at oppedie de Fremmede. De norske Studenter gik i Proccession fra sit Samfundslokale, det gamle Universitetet, til Fæstningsbryggen. Her mødte ogsaa Værtene. Bryggen frembød nu et smukt Skue. Lige fra Fæstningsmuren til den yderste Ende af Bryggen var anbragt Vimpler, mellem hvilke Blomsterguirlander slyngede sig og dannede etslags Rækværk. Begge Rigers Flag vaiede og en smuk Æresport bærede sig paa Enden af Bryggen. Uoverskuelige Rækker af Damer dannede en malersk Gardinering til de grønne Fæstningsvolde. Baade, fyldte med Tilskuere, kryssede urolige rundt Bryggen. De i Havnen liggende Skibes Master vare som behængte af Mennesker. Talrige, over de klatrende og hængende Tilskuere viftende Flag gav det Hele et festeligt Udseende.”
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Figure 5.1 “The Uppsala students arriving in Christiania midsummers [St. Hans] day.”
Illustreret Nyhedsblad no. 40, 3 July 1852.
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students greeting each other, flags of both nations hanging above the portal at the pier and, most notably, a vast number of people in boats and on the pier.
The arrival of the Swedish students to Christiania that Midsummer’s day (St. Hans day in Norway) was part of a series of Nordic student meetings that took place from the 1840s to the 1860s. Christiania had, the previous summer, hosted around 350 Swedish and Danish students from the Universities of Lund and Copenhagen. The Uppsala students, who were unable to partake that year, were invited back to Christiania in 1852.2 The visit was part of a longer trip. Their chartered steamship left Stockholm on 17 June, first visiting a number of Swedish towns, then a longer stop in
Copenhagen, before leaving for Christiania on the morning of 23 June.3 In Christiana, the Uppsala students had a packed program, taking in the best art and architecture the capital could show. After being welcomed at the pier, the procession of Swedish and Norwegian students, participants and craftsmen continued up through the city, parading through the central street of the inner-city quarters of Kirkegata to Karl Johans gate (the new central promenade), ending at the square in front of the new university buildings.
The newly finished penitentiary (Bodsfengslet), the royal palace, the collections of the art association as well as the university collections were opened for the Swedish guests during their visit.
A grand welcoming party was held on the following day at Studenterlunden, a park opposite the university buildings.4 On the day after, the two steamships Berzelius and Nordkap took the Swedish and Norwegian students to Bygdøy peninsula or Ladegårdsøen as it was known at the time, where they were greeted at the royal estate by the chief of the court, General Wedel. Back in Christiania that evening, they attended a vaudeville
performance at the Christiania Theater. On Sunday 27 June, an outing to Sandvika and Kolsås was arranged. Steamships transported the party to Sandvika, and then by foot to Kolsås mountain, a ridge to the west of the city which the students climbed. On the final day, a grand farewell party was held at the Masonic lodge. All this was duly presented in the daily papers, and
2 Studentertog til Christiania 1851 fra Lund og Kjøbenhavn: beretning fra et udvalg av deeltagerne (Kjøbenhavn: S. Trier, 1853); For a personal account of the meetings in Christiania in 1851, and Lund in 1856, see: Nils Hertzberg, Fra min barndoms og ungdoms tid: 1827-1856 (Christiania: Aschehoug, 1909), 146–78.
3 The journey is described in the official account, written by some participants and published in 1853: Studenttåg till Christiania 1852 från Upsala: berättelse af utsedde committerade (Upsala:
A. Leffler, 1854), 1–42.
4 Countless speeches were held and songs were sung, the highlight perhaps being a guest appearance by a Christian-conservative workers society, Samfundet paa Enerhaugen, and its choir. See Studenttåg till Christiania 1852 från Upsala, 50–80. Samfundet paa Enerhaugen was initiated by the priest Honoratus Halling in 1850 with the purpose of spreading godliness and true education among the common man. Samfundet på Energhaugen can be seen as a reaction to Marcus Thrane’s worker’s movement and something that was supposed to keep workers away from politics.
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later meticulously described and illustrated in both Illustreret Nyhedsblad and Skilling-Magazin.
The illustration of crowds of people was one of the principal types of images in the illustrated newspapers. As Charles Knight noted on the state of illustrated news in his 1864 autobiography:
The staple materials for the steady-going illustrator to work most
attractively upon are, Court and Fashion; Civic Processions and Banquets;
Political and Religious Demonstrations in crowded halls; Theatrical Novelties; Musical Meetings; Races; Reviews; Ship Launches - every scene, in short, where a crowd of great people and respectable people can be got together.5
One of the favored ways of presenting the city in the illustrated newspapers was as a spectacle. Spectacles have long been an important part of urban life.
The arrivals of kings, funerals, hangings and other events have played a part in building political legitimacy, maintaining social control and constituting different spaces in the city since the beginning of urban civilization.6 Printed media in the form of broadsheets, newspapers and books had been a part of these spectacles long before the mid-nineteenth century. However, the role printed media played in the urban spectacle was intensified by the advent of the illustrated newspapers and the expansion of printed media in the nineteenth century. Illustrated papers such as the Illustrated London News were not only observers of major public events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851 or the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in October 1852, they became participants and producers of the historic events themselves.7
The student meeting in 1852, seen as a media event, arguably represents something new in Norway and Christiania. Royal visits and events like the Nordic natural science meeting in 1846 had been presented in Skilling-Magazin in the 1840s, and the student meeting in 1851 received substantial coverage in the newspapers, but it was not visualized in the same way.8 This was the first time the city was pictured as a spectacle on this scale.
Illustreret Nyhedsblad published a five-part article that ran in eight issues in
5 Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 1864, III, 246.
6 See: Habermas, Structural Transformation, 5ff. On cities and the representative public, see e.g.
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, [1938] (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1996), 64;
88; 267ff. For the city and the representative public (and hangings) in eighteenth century Denmark-Norway, see: Krefting, Nøding, and Ringvej, En pokkers skrivesyge, 88–89.
7 Mari Hvattum, “‘A Triumph in Ink’. Gottfried Semper, The Illustrated London News, and the Duke of Wellington’s Funeral Car”, in M. Gnehm and S. Hildebrand (eds), Architectural History and Globalised Knowledge: Gottfried Semper in London, Zürich: ETH/gta 2018 (forthcoming);
See also: Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 180ff; Peter W. Sinnema, The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852, Electronic edition (Athens, OH.: Ohio University Press, 2006).
8 The Nordic natural science meeting in 1844 was presented with two illustrations in Skilling-Magazin at the end of June 1847, three years after the meeting happened. The meeting did, however, receive a substantial amount of coverage in the newspapers, see: Johan L. Tønnesson,
“Naturvitenskapens kommunikative landskap: Teksthistorisk blikk på det fjerde skandinaviske naturforskermøtet, Christiania 1844,” in Sann opplysning?: naturvitenskap i nordiske offentligheter gjennom fire århundrer, ed. Merethe Roos and Johan L. Tønnesson (Oslo:
Cappelen Damm akademisk, 2017).
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July, August and September of 1852 and Skilling-Magazin devoted 19 pages over four issues from mid-September to late October to the “student parade”
as it was known at the time.9 In total 10 wood engravings were published, 3 in Skilling-Magazin and 7 in Illustreret Nyhedsblad, one was published in both magazines. In addition, several portraits of prominent people involved in the meeting were published in Nyhedsbladet.10 This was, in the context of the Norwegian printing and publishing at the time, a highly-publicized event. If we take the coverage in Skilling-Magazin and Illustreret Nyhedsblad combined, this was the most pictured single event in Christiania in the 1850s and 1860s.
We need, to understand this massive coverage, to see the student meeting in the context of the political situation at the time. The early 1850s, following a period of conflict over the flag in the late 1830s and early 1840s, was a period of relative harmony in the Norwegian-Swedish union.11 The event, furthermore, was part of what was known as the Scandinavianist or the Pan-Scandinavian movement, a pan-nationalistic movement working for increased collaboration and in some instances unification between Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Yet the images of the meeting in the illustrated press point us to other important aspects of this meeting. Christiania, after all, was the youngest capital in the Nordic countries. Much of the visual material focused on the newest sections of the city, Karl Johan, Studenterlunden and Klingenberg. The new royal palace, which was begun in the 1830s, was finished in 1849. The road to the palace, or Karl Johans gate named in 1852 after the previous Swedish-Norwegian King, was the most impressive urban street in the city. The new university buildings, built on the north side of Karl Johans gate, were finished in 1852. The student meeting showcased the new civic city center not only to the Swedish visitors, but also to the readers and viewers of the illustrated press.
Simon Gunn has, in a study of the public culture of the middle classes in the industrial centers in nineteenth-century England, argued for the importance of the renewal of city centers. He argues that refashioning city centers and creating new civic spaces recast “the industrial city as a spectacle in the later Victorian period.”12 In this chapter I will argue that something
9 “Studentertoget” in Norwegian.
10 “Studentermødet i Christiania 1852 I,” Illustreret Nyhedblad no. 40, 3 July 1852, 161-163;
“Studentermødet i Christiania II,” no. 41, 10 July 1852, 165-166; “Studentermødet i Christiania II (forts.),” no. 43, 24 July 1852, 173-174; “Studentermødet i Christiania III,” no. 44, 31 July 1852, 177-178; “Studentermødet i Christiania IV,” no. 45, 7 August 1852, 182-183;
“Studentermødet i Christiania V,” no. 48, 28 August 1852, 193-194; “Upsala-Studenternes Tog til Christiania i Aaret 1852 [I],” Skilling-Magazin, no 38, 18 September 1852, 297-302; Studenternes Tog til Christiania i Aaret 1852 [II],” no 39, 25 September 1852, 306-310; Studenternes Tog til Christiania i Aaret 1852 [III],” no 41, 9 October 1852, 323-326; “Upsala-Studenternes Tog til Christiania i Aaret 1852 [IV],” no 43, 23 October 1852, 338-341.
11 On the Norwegian-Swedish union, see: Bo Stråth, Union og demokrati: dei sameinte rika Noreg-Sverige 1814-1905, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Oslo: Pax, 2005).
12 Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class, 51–53.
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similar can be said about the area around Karl Johans gate. The area around Karl Johan and the new University was the pride of the city. Its successful transformation into a central civic urban space was, however, neither complete nor entirely obvious in the early 1850s. The student meeting presented an opportunity to showcase this new civic urban center to its visitors and, importantly, to reproduce images of its streets and parks filled with people. In this way, the spectacle of the student meeting and its visualization in the illustrated press was a vehicle of urban renewal.
To put this event into context, I will first look briefly at the Scandinavianist movement. the way the Nordic student meetings in the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s were publicized and the way the Pan-Scandinavian meetings used printed media. I will then look closely at the presentation of the meeting in both Illustreret Nyhedsblad and in Skilling-Magazin, focusing particularly on the way these images represented the new area around Karl Johans gate, Studenterlunden and Klingenberg. In the last part I briefly discuss the student meeting as a media event, and in put it in the context of other urban events in the illustrated press.
The Pan-Scandinavian student meetings
As explained in Illustreret Nyhedsblad and later in Skilling-Magazin, the 1852 student meeting should be seen as a part of the Scandinavian student meetings which had been held in Uppsala in 1843, in Copenhagen in 1845 and in Christiania the year before. There were no Danish students in Christiania in 1852, but the meeting still channeled the same
Pan-Scandinavian spirit as those of the years before. For Nyhedsbladet, the spirit of this movement was important to the meeting, as it explained in its first article on the meeting, Scandinavianism
brought an element of association to the Nordic student unions that makes the Jutlander not only a Jutlander but a Dane, the Wermlander not only a Wermlander but a Swede and the Bergener not only a Bergener but a Norwegian student and that in turn makes the Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian students Scandinavian.13
A multitude of local, national and indeed pan-national identities co-existed in this period. As a pan-national movement, the Pan-Scandinavian movement
13 “Studentermødet i Christiania 1852 I,” 161. “Vi sagde overnfor, at dette Studentermøde er fremgaaet af den same Tanke, som de skandinaviske, og vi gjentage at det ellers neppe vilde kommet istand. Vi indrømme at vi også i denne Henseende skylde Skandinavismen meget. Den har bragt det Sammenslutningens Element i Nordens Studenterkoprationer, der gjør Jyden, ikke til jydsk men dansk, Wermlænderend ikke til wermlandsk men svendsk og Bergenseren ikke til bergensk, men norsk Student og som atter gjør danske, svendske og norske Studenter til skandinaviske.”
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could bring together all these identities.14
A many-faceted movement, that brought together people from different sides of the political spectrum, we can distinguish a more politically oriented form of Scandinavianism from a more culturally oriented movement, which is in line with how the movement was understood at the time. The goal of the political Scandinavianists was a political unity between Denmark, Norway and Sweden, while the cultural Pan-Scandinavians focused more on practical Nordic cooperation within the arts and sciences.15 Nordic
cooperation was not entirely uncontroversial, especially in Norway. Norway had been part of a union with Sweden from 1814, and the memory of the 400-year period under Danish rule was still vivid. Only a few decades earlier, the Nordic countries had been on different sides in the Napoleonic wars, and Sweden and Denmark-Norway had been on opposing sides of a number of wars in the eighteenth century.
The Pan-Scandinavian movement was very much a student driven movement between 1843 and 1864. The students were certainly part of an exclusive elite and were seen as symbols of the future of their nations. But, as Fredrik Nilsson argues, the students were also outsiders of sorts, not adherent to the same social conventions as the rest of elite society.16 Scandinavianism had, in the early 1840s, been a form of revolt by young students, particularly in Denmark and Sweden. By the 1851 and 1852 meetings in Christiania, however, Scandinavianism had become more accepted. This was partly due to the new Danish liberal constitution signed in 1849 and partly due to the new King, Oscar I, who was crowned in 1844, being more inclined towards Pan-Scandinavian ideas than his father Karl Johan. King Oscar, during the Christiania meetings in 1851 and 1852, showed his support by hosting the students at his country house on Bygdøy.17
14 The Scandinavianist movement has often been characterized as merely students wanting an excuse for a party, or a movement that had some influence in the mid-decades of the nineteenth century, but essentially died out after the Danish defeat by the Germans in 1864.While the Pan-Scandinavian movement traditionally has been seen as an interim in the history of nation building in the nineteenth century, it has recently been seen more as one of several competing or complementing identity building projects in the nineteenth century. For the former, see e.g. Seip, Utsikt over Norges historie 2, 2:39–44. For the latter interpretation, see e.g. Ruth Hemstad, Fra Indian summer til nordisk vinter: skandinavisk samarbeid, skandinavisme og
unionsoppløsningen (Oslo: Akademisk publisering, 2008); Magdalena Hillström and Hanne Sanders, eds., Skandinavism: en rörelse och en idé under 1800-talet, vol. 32, Centrum för Öresundsstudier (Göteborg: Makadam förlag, 2014).
15 Dag Thorkildsen, “Skandinavismen - En Historisk Oversikt,” in Nasjonal Identitet - et Kunstprodukt?, ed. Øystein Sørensen (Oslo: Norges forskningsråd, 1994), 291–210.
16 Fredrik Nilsson, I rörelse: politisk handling under 1800-talets första hälft (Lund: Nordic Adademic Press, 2000), 87–89.
17 Oskar I’s support for the Pan-Scandinavian movement can at least in part be explained by his more ambitious foreign policy. He supported the Danish against the German-national revolt in Slesvig in 1848 and was more aggressive towards Russia than his father Karl Johan had been.
See: Stråth, Union og demokrati, 1:194–96; Thorkildsen, “Skandinavismen - En Historisk Oversikt.”
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The pomp and pageantry and the countless speeches and songs can easily be seen as a strategy to lead the public into believing that the Pan-Scandinavian movement was more powerful than it really was. Henrik Ullstad has more recently argued that the student meetings can be seen as a series of redressive actions to overcome the borders between Norwegian-ness, Swedish-ness and Danish-ness and thereby create Scandinavians.18 We can add to Ulstad’s argument that pomp, pageantry and parading were important parts of the public culture of the nineteenth century city. Events such as these were not only expressions of an urban community, but its actualization. Urban spectacles offered opportunities for the symbolic display
The pomp and pageantry and the countless speeches and songs can easily be seen as a strategy to lead the public into believing that the Pan-Scandinavian movement was more powerful than it really was. Henrik Ullstad has more recently argued that the student meetings can be seen as a series of redressive actions to overcome the borders between Norwegian-ness, Swedish-ness and Danish-ness and thereby create Scandinavians.18 We can add to Ulstad’s argument that pomp, pageantry and parading were important parts of the public culture of the nineteenth century city. Events such as these were not only expressions of an urban community, but its actualization. Urban spectacles offered opportunities for the symbolic display