Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary

Child of the Enlightenment

Egodocuments and History Series Edited by

Arianne Baggerman Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam

Rudolf Dekker Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam

Michael Mascuch University of California, Berkeley Advisory Board

James Amelang Universidad Autónoma Madrid

Peter Burke Emmanuel College Cambridge

Philippe Lejeune Université de Paris-Nord

Claudia Ulbrich Freie Universität Berlin

VOLUME 1

Child of the Enlightenment Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary

By

Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker Translated by

Diane Webb

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

Cover illustration: The Van Eck family in 1789, pastel by Rienk Jelgerhuis. (See also pp. 37–38.) This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baggerman, Arianne. [ Kind van de toekomst] Child of the Enlightenment : revolutionary Europe reflected in a boyhood diary / by Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker ; translated by Diane Webb. p. cm. — (Egodocuments and history series ; v. 1) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17269-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Eck, Otto van, 1780– 1798—Diaries. 2. Eck, Otto van, 1780–1798—Childhood and youth. 3. Boys—Netherlands—Diaries. 4. Netherlands—Biography. 5. Netherlands— History—1714–1795—Sources. 6. Netherlands—History—1795–1815—Sources. 7. Enlightenment—Europe—History—Sources. 8. Europe—History—1789–1815— Sources. 9. Diaries—History and criticism. I. Dekker, Rudolf. II. Title. III. Series. CT1158.E25B34 2009 949.2’04092—dc22

2008044170

ISSN 1873-653X ISBN 978 90 04 17269 2 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgements .....................................................................

ix

Introduction ................................................................................ Delft 2004 ...............................................................................

1 1

Prologue ...................................................................................... Paris 1788 ............................................................................... Border Crossings ................................................................. Restoration .......................................................................... Kindred Spirits in Exile ...................................................... French Contacts .................................................................. Modern Tourism ................................................................. Delft 1789 ............................................................................... The Family Portrait ............................................................ The Ideal Boy .....................................................................

9 9 9 10 15 20 26 37 37 44

Chapter One An Enlightened Education ............................... The Invention of Educational Theory .................................. The Example of Emile ........................................................... The Philanthropinists ............................................................. Otto’s Upbringing in Practice ................................................ Progress Reports in lieu of Canings ...................................... The Little Man Within ...........................................................

49 49 52 56 65 70 77

Chapter Two Otto’s Diary ...................................................... Self-Knowledge ....................................................................... The Observational Method .................................................... Advice on Keeping a Diary ................................................... Exemplary Diaries: Lavater and Franklin .............................. Writing under Supervision ..................................................... The Will to Knowledge .......................................................... Battlefield ................................................................................ Means of Communication ..................................................... Confessions and Indulgences .................................................. Persuasion ...............................................................................

81 83 85 87 91 95 98 101 105 107 112

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Chapter Three Required Reading .......................................... Reading Advice ....................................................................... Otto’s Reading Regimen ........................................................ Enthusiastic but Fictional Bookworms ................................... Reading in the Company of Fictional Friends ...................... Otto’s Fiction and his Reality ................................................ The Danger of an Overdose ................................................. Reading Habits ....................................................................... Faulty Reception ..................................................................... Required Reading ‘for Pleasure’ ............................................ Identifying with an American Farmer ...................................

119 119 123 127 131 134 145 148 155 163 167

Chapter Four The Garden as a Pedagogical Project .............. Landscape Gardens in the Netherlands ................................. The Phantom of Sion ............................................................ Gardening at De Ruit ............................................................. The Animal Kingdom ............................................................ Gardens and Recreation ......................................................... ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ ..................................................................

171 177 180 190 194 201 209

Chapter Five Social World ...................................................... The Family .............................................................................. Family and Ancestors ............................................................. Servants ................................................................................... Friends of Both Sexes ............................................................. Teachers and Clergymen ........................................................ All in the Family ..................................................................... The New Sociability and Freemasonry ..................................

215 217 228 238 239 243 248 253

Chapter Six Broadening Horizons .......................................... The Map of Delfland ............................................................. Otto Discovers the World ....................................................... Travelling ................................................................................

259 270 273 279

Chapter Seven Changing Concepts of Time ......................... Enlightenment and the Perception of Time .......................... Technology and Punctuality ................................................... Hours, Days, Weeks, Months .................................................

291 293 299 303

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Chapter Eight Reconstructing Man and Society .................... Future Paradises ...................................................................... Frankenstein’s Monster ........................................................... Past Paradises .......................................................................... Lambert’s Encyclopaedia ........................................................ No Happiness without Order ................................................. Improving upon the Human Body ........................................ Inoculation as a Moral Obligation ........................................ A Much Better Fate? ..............................................................

317 317 324 328 331 334 335 337 342

Chapter Nine Revolution in the Netherlands ......................... The Beginning of an Unknown Era ...................................... Rather Decent People ............................................................. . . . or else die at our posts! ...................................................... Stormy Meetings and Time Constraints ............................... The First Constitution ............................................................ Freedom of the Press ..............................................................

345 345 356 358 364 371 387

Chapter Ten Children of the Future ...................................... Political Schooling ................................................................... Young Revolutionaries ............................................................ The Revolutionary Catechism ................................................ Festivities and Rights .............................................................. Child of the Future ................................................................

397 398 401 402 409 413

Chapter Eleven Theophilanthropists and PhysicoTheologians ............................................................................. Enlightened Devotion ............................................................. Physico-Theology ....................................................................

419 419 431

Chapter Twelve The Vulnerable Body ................................... Coping with Death ................................................................. Ter Navolging ......................................................................... Illness .......................................................................................

443 443 453 457

Epilogue ......................................................................................

471

Notes ........................................................................................... List of Illustrations ...................................................................... Index ........................................................................................... Illustration Credits ......................................................................

485 535 547 554

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book first appeared in Dutch in 2005 as part of a project financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) that is being carried out at the Faculty of History and Arts of Erasmus University in Rotterdam under the title ‘Controlling time and shaping the self: Education, introspection and practices of writing in the Netherlands 1750–1914’, directed by Arianne Baggerman. This book is the product of joint research: both authors are responsible for the text, with the exception of the chapters on diary-writing (Chapter 2) and reading habits (Chapter 3), which were written by Arianne Baggerman, who published previous versions of this material in the Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis (1994), Eighteenth-Century Studies (1997) and Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis (2004). We wish to thank the staff members of the libraries and archives we visited, especially the Rijksarchief in Gelderland, where the Van Eck family archives are kept, the municipal archives of Delft and The Hague, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) and the Iconographic Bureau in The Hague, the libraries of the universities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung in Berlin and the Cultural Masonic Centre ‘Prins Hendrik’ of the Order of Freemasons under the Grand Orient of the Netherlands in The Hague. We received, moreover, a great deal of assistance from the descendants of the Van Eck family and related families, in particular from Mrs J. Teding van Berkhout-Fabius, Mrs G.W. van Lennep-Morsink and C.C. van Lidth de Jeude, all of whom were willing to tell us about their family histories and to let us peruse additional sources. M.J. van Lennep kindly permitted us to use his transcription of Lambert van Eck’s travel journal of 1788. Many colleagues have shared their knowledge with us, particularly Edward Arnold, Jeroen Blaak, Jelle Bosma, Syea Dalderup, Xavier Duquenne, Leendert Groenendijk, Wim Huijsmans (Historisch Centrum Overijssel, Zwolle), Florence Koorn, Fred van Lieburg, Willeke Los, Willemijn Ruberg, Anders Schinkel, Gerard Schulte Nordholt, Judith Vega, Sven Veldhuijzen, Thera Weissenbeek, Pieter van Wissing

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and Jori Zijlmans. Leon van der Hoeven carried out the genealogical research into the Van Ecks and related families. We are indebted to Paul Koopman, the secretary of the Huizinga Research Institute and Graduate School of Cultural History, who for years has organised the meetings of the study group ‘Auto/Biography’, which has always proved to be an inspiring interdisciplinary forum. Many thanks, too, to those who read and commented on the manuscript or parts thereof: Marco Berg, Joris van Eynatten, Ellen Grabowsky, André Hanou, Gert-Jan Johannes, Ton Jongenelen, Eveline Koolhaas, Lotte van de Pol, Joost Rosendaal and Wyger Velema. We are particularly indebted to Anna de Haas, who with her characteristic energy and concentration pored over the entire manuscript. Arend Huussen read our book-in-the-making just as critically from start to finish, and allowed us to share in his wide knowledge of eighteenth-century politics. Han van de Zande, a specialist in the history of philosophy, was another careful reader who prompted us to re-examine a number of questions. René Bosch, an expert on Rousseau and other eighteenthcentury thinkers, and Hanco Jürgens, whose specialisms include the German Enlightenment, offered us active and creative support for which we are extremely grateful. We also wish to thank the photographers Anna Johannes and Dan Brinkman, as well as Ab van der Steur, who generously lent us a large number of prints from his phenomenal collection to use as illustrations. We are indebted to Eva Moraal for her help in compiling the index, and to Theresa Oostvogels for her administrative support. We are also grateful to Joos Kat of Wereldbibliotheek for his enthusiasm for this book. Finally, we wish to thank Diane Webb for the skill, creativeness and literary sensitivity with which she produced the English translation. In writing the original book we made use of our edition of Otto’s diary, published in 1998 at Uitgeverij Verloren. Here and there we could fall back on previous publications, the earliest being ‘Lezen tot de laatste snik: Otto van Eck en zijn dagelijkse literatuur (1780–1798)’, published by Arianne Baggerman in the first Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis (1994), an abridged version of which appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies (1997). Other articles appeared in Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis, Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman, Nieuw Letterkundig Magazijn: Mededelingenblad uitgegeven door de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde gevestigd te Leiden,

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Annales historiques de la Révolution française, Roest: Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis en Cultuur, Literatuur zonder leeftijd, as well as the volumes Tot volle waschdom: Nieuwe hoofdstukken voor de geschiedenis van de kinder- en jeugdliteratuur, B. Dongelmans, N. van Rotterdam, J. Salman et al. (eds.) (2000) and Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich: Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500 –1800), Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick, Patrice Veit (eds.) (2001) and Seen and Heard: The Place of the Child in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800, Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore (eds.) (Routledge). We have discussed Otto and his diary at the following conferences and workshops: ‘The History of Emotions’, a conference hosted by The Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ( Jerusalem, June 1998), where Rudolf Dekker participated in a study group of the same name organised by Josef Kaplan and Michael Heyd; ‘The Tenth International Congress on the Enlightenment’ (Dublin, July 1999); the conference ‘Seen and Heard: The Place of the Child in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800’, held at the Cotsen Children’s Library of Princeton University in April 2002; the conference ‘The Book of Nature: Continuity and Change in European and American Attitudes towards the Natural World’, University of Groningen (Groningen, May 2002); the conference ‘Pedagogical Anthropology: Concept, background and interdisciplinary context’, University of the Russian Academy of Education / Institute of the Theory of Education and Pedagogics (Moscow, September 2002); the conference ‘Knowledge and Its Making in Northern Europe’, Pomona College and European Union Centre of California (Claremont / Los Angeles, April 2003); and the workshop ‘Illness Narratives’, Institut für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung (Stuttgart, July 2004). We thank the participants for the useful discussions that took place at these events. We thank the following institutions for their generous financial support of the original Dutch book: Vereniging Trustfonds Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Dr C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute Stichting, M.A.O.C. Gravin van Bylandt Stichting, Dr Hendrik Muller’s Vaderlandsch Fonds, J.E. Jurriaanse Stichting, Stichting Fonds voor de Geld- en Effectenhandel, and the Faculty of History and Arts of Erasmus University Rotterdam. We are also grateful to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for subsidising the English translation. A book such as this, in which a larger history is told from the personal perspective of a boy and his parents, should, in our opinion, end

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in an all-encompassing yet personal way. It is therefore dedicated to our parents and our children: Cor Dekker, Bep Dekker-de Vries, Bas Baggerman, Trijnie Baggerman-Kuiper, Tessel Dekker, Olwen Dekker and Boris Berg.

INTRODUCTION Delft 2004 Shifting one’s perspective to that of an eighteenth-century child is a long and laborious undertaking. We did not realise this at first when we were handed a stack of old notebooks, written initially in a large scrawl that gradually evolved, over the course of several years, into more practised penmanship. Covering the period 1791–1797, they turned out to be a child’s diary, begun at the age of ten by a boy named Otto van Eck.1 The daily entries usually run from one to several paragraphs. They are sometimes rather cryptic, as private notes tend to be, but taken altogether they represent one of the earliest and most extensive children’s diaries found in Europe to date. This unique body of writing allowed us to explore the eighteenth century through the eyes of a child, an experience that required us to become thoroughly acquainted with his world. We decided not to maintain a scholarly distance, nor to approach the manuscript with preconceived notions; instead, we let the diary pose the questions raised by its own world. In other words, we turned things around: Otto’s horizons determined our research agenda, his interests became ours. As our research led us down the highways and byways of his life, we instinctively obeyed a piece of age-old advice to travellers: explore a foreign city on foot before climbing the highest tower to take in the overall view. Thus we resolved – when the plot of Otto’s life had been committed to paper and it was almost time for us to take leave of his world – to follow in his footsteps one last time by climbing the tower of Delft just as he had done two hundred years earlier to the day. Inspired by his reading that morning to write in his diary that it was actually better not to know what the future held in store, he had gone with his music teacher to the New Church to climb to the top of the tower. Otto had counted every step, all the way to 333 – but he was mistaken. In reality there are more: ‘A step for every day of the year’, we heard someone say in the tower above us. Otto’s comments on the tower are characteristically brief: ‘333 steps high, with a far and unobstructed view, since one is above all the houses and woods’. But we were not that high yet: we were still counting the

2

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stairs, and trying not to lose sight of the view, which – though equally spectacular – was a far cry from the prospect Otto had seen. In fact, the higher we climbed, the more obvious it became that our worlds were totally different. We were now gazing down on the future that Otto could not see: advertising masts, industrial estates, office complexes and suburbs, sprinkled randomly over the landscape and allowed to grow wild. Between them ran a watery line – the River Vliet – and the occasional church spire rose up in the distance. By contrast, the scene unfolding before Otto’s eyes must have been relatively empty: flat meadows with a scattering of farmhouses, windmills and duck decoys, all of which provided the setting for a number of imposing country estates and their geometric gardens, nestling comfortably in the landscape. The Vliet, though narrower in those days, would have made a bigger impression, pointing emphatically in the direction of The Hague, whose towers stood out against the horizon. From one of those towers, Prince Maurits – attending an early demonstration of the telescope – had been surprised to see the clock at Delft so clearly that he could tell the time. The exact hour was not recorded, but the date was duly noted: 12 November 1608. Nearly two centuries later, in 1793, Otto gazed from the other side upon a world we can barely imagine, a world that can be reconstructed only with the help of maps, paintings and prints. Those images are static, but Otto saw a world full of movement, some of which could be observed from the tower only with the aid of a telescope. Here and there the flat polder landscape was interrupted by a building site, where workers were busily shifting mounds of sand to transform the geometric gardens into romantic paradises, complete with hills and dales and meandering streams. When Otto gazed down on this scene, the transformation was in full swing, also at De Ruit, Otto’s family estate, which he would have been able to see, looking from the tower in a westerly direction. From this vantage point one could also catch a whiff of the drastic changes in the political landscape that would take place two years later. The year in which Otto climbed to the top of the tower – 1793 – had been ushered in by the execution of King Louis XVI, a logical consequence of the French Revolution that had begun four years earlier. A similar but less bloody revolution would take place in the Netherlands in 1795. The preparations were already well under way, and Otto’s father was to play a prominent role. Even more important was the part played by Otto’s uncle Pieter Paulus, who in 1793 was writing a

delft 2004

3

blueprint for the society he envisioned: a society no longer hierarchical and authoritarian, but based instead on freedom and equality. These twin concepts, which proved to be less compatible than previously thought, could not even be united by the ‘fraternity’ so optimistically linked to them. An endless debate had begun: Where does one draw the line between the freedom of one individual and that of another? What should be done when the freedom of some meant a reign of terror to others? Paulus believed in man’s propensity to goodness, encapsulated in a biblical-sounding motto that later became part of the Dutch constitution: ‘Do not do to others what you would not wish to have done to you.’ Paulus had embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment as defined several years earlier by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant: Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere Aude! Have courage to use your own reason! – that is the motto of enlightenment.2

One was optimistic, to be sure, but not devoid of all sense of reality. Otto’s uncle expressly connected the two basic rights – freedom and equality – with the duties of individuals to one another and to society. Education was of paramount importance: to be capable of handling this new freedom, one had to be educated. Freedom of the press – as Otto’s father, Lambert van Eck, emphasised in his personal notes – was only meaningful if one read everything that was published and was able to discern its value. Fortunately neither he nor Paulus nor their fellow revolutionaries could look into the future, as Otto observed that fine day in 1793. Paulus’s manifesto laid the foundation for the Verklaring van de rechten van de mensch en de burger (Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen), which the revolutionaries proclaimed when Stadholder Willem V and his closest followers fled to England and the Batavian Republic was established. It also became the basis of the first constitution of the Netherlands, ratified in 1798, now all but forgotten yet crucial for the development of the modern Dutch state.3 The Batavian Revolution and the events of the following years heralded the establishment of a new state with new political rules. At the same time, the revolution of 1795 marked the birth of a new individualism and a new self-image. Such far-reaching measures as the

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separation of church and state, the codification of human rights, and the abolition of guilds and feudal rights freed people from the ties that had united them in the Ancien Régime. The right to vote gave people more individual political responsibility, and a number of legal reforms allowed them to take more responsibility for their personal lives as well. The emergence of the modern state and the modern Dutch citizen was one of the most important and most exciting moments in Dutch history, yet it has been given scant attention by historians, for one reason because this Franco-Batavian episode (1795–1813) is an oddity in the context of Dutch history. Another reason is that Stadholder Willem V’s flight to England in 1795 meant that the House of Orange was excluded from the developments that led to the birth of the modern Dutch state. For nearly twenty years the Oranges lived in exile, first in England and then in Germany. In 1813 the Franco-Batavian era came to an end with the restoration that was crowned by the accession of Willem I as King of the Netherlands. Precisely because most of the former revolutionaries had become reconciled to this turnabout, no one – least of all the new royal family – was inclined to dwell on the past. The life of Otto van Eck, the boy at the top of the tower, coincided with this era. He grew up at a time when the ideals of the Enlightenment were becoming concrete enough to be put into practice. In Otto’s day, however, the ideals at the heart of our modern society – freedom of expression, the individual’s right to self-determination, the idea that all people are created equal, democracy, freedom of religion (as well as the freedom not to be religious) – were not yet self-evident. Such dazzling new notions were still radical and inspiring, and their concomitant duties had not yet been forgotten. The belief that man and society can be shaped to meet human needs, that reason is a powerful instrument, that to understand the world is to control it – these beliefs were new and revolutionary. That is not to say, however, that this optimism was innocent or untouched by cynicism. The earthquake that killed 35,000 people in Lisbon in 1755 had inspired Voltaire to write Candide, in which he questioned man’s faith in divine providence. A catastrophe of that magnitude was not compatible with the idea that man lived in the best of all possible worlds, as the philosopher Leibniz had earlier maintained. JeanJacques Rousseau, whom we shall encounter frequently in this book, was not optimistic about the future either. His ideal of returning to a small-scale society in which people lived in harmony with one another and with nature was plainly nostalgic; indeed, he was well aware of the

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impossibility of returning to nature. To be sure, Emile – the protagonist of Rousseau’s book on education – was isolated from society for years and brought up in a rustic idyll, and yet he was thoroughly prepared for life in the modern – and, in Rousseau’s eyes, corrupt – competitive, career-oriented world. Emile was not allowed to join society until his capacity to distinguish good from evil was sufficiently developed. For a long time these ideas were enough to exclude Rousseau from the Enlightenment and to see him as an early Romanticist reacting to the rationality of his age. His philosophy supposedly contained the seeds of such nineteenth-century totalitarian ideologies as communism and, later on, fascism. These views are no longer current. The Enlightenment is now conceived of as a many-headed creature, full of paradoxes and dilemmas and made up of such diverse thinkers as Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant. Casting long shadows into the future, that creature opened the door not only to greater individual freedom, including a critical attitude to life, but also to the dictatorship of the majority, silent or otherwise. The Enlightenment was the beginning of an ongoing process in which the longing for freedom and the necessity of control pose a recurring dilemma.4 Otto’s parents were not philosophers. Their own homespun Enlightenment was based on what they heard and read. This book deals with their Enlightenment and the application of its ideals in their own household. They penned no publications for us to scrutinise, but we can examine the concrete result of one of their projects: Otto’s diary. Otto not only witnessed the revolutionary upheavals of his day, but was himself an object of study: to what extent could man and society be shaped? His diary, which was not his own idea but a task imposed and supervised by his parents, bears witness to human malleability. His diary is a tangible result of the new political ideology that emerged in the 1780s, when citizenship was no longer defined by legal rights but by moral virtues. The family household was thought of as a ‘small republic’, bent on acquiring the virtues needed to transform society. The main virtue to be acquired was self-control, though this ambition did not imply that the intellect was superior to the emotions. On the contrary, at this time the emotions – in the sense of sentiments and passions – were rated more highly than before, provided they were steered in the right direction by reason. Moreover, a clear distinction was made between good and bad emotions. Negative feelings – such as aggression, jealousy and self-pity – had to be kept in check, whereas positive

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feelings, particularly compassion and love of one’s fellow creatures, were to be cultivated. It is no coincidence that this distinction occurs time and again in Otto’s diary. After all, it was meant to be an educational device that would help foster the proper feelings and allow his parents – who read what Otto wrote – to intervene when his emotions seemed to be taking a wrong turn. Otto’s reading was similarly subjected to strict supervision. The tension created by the clash of control and freedom – which also posed a theoretical problem for enlightened thinkers – is reflected in the practical side of Otto’s upbringing, which is epitomised by his parents’ paradoxical instructions to obey them voluntarily. The diary provides information about the conflict between ideal and reality at various levels of consciousness: that of adults as seen through the eyes of a child and that of the child himself, who wrestled with these questions in his own way. It also allows us to view Otto’s development from a shifting perspective: as Otto grows up, reader and diarist alike are presented with a more complex and less naive Enlightenment. The diary evolves along with the boy, becoming an intermediary between Otto and his parents and ultimately a means for Otto to influence his parents. Endeavouring to put together a picture of the Enlightenment – constructed, for a change, from the bottom up – would be sufficient reason for us to write a book about the Van Ecks, but the very fact that Otto’s parents attempted to use the diary to gain insight into his every thought and deed makes it more than just the product of an enlightened education. It actually examines numerous aspects of daily life around 1800: reading habits and the choice of reading matter, man’s perception of nature and his attitude towards animals, outdoor recreation, the advent of a linear concept of time, family life, servants, religion and politics. To the annoyance of his parents, the diarist was a person of few words, but for the careful reader hoping to place Otto’s words in their proper context, half a word is enough. At times we have described Otto’s world from his perspective, and at other times from the perspective of his parents. An important role is played in this book by Otto’s father, Lambert, who – unlike Otto’s mother and sisters – also left us a variety of written records. Lambert’s papers – a family chronicle, an album amicorum, a travel journal, several letters and a commonplace-book that evolved into an encyclopaedia – gave us access to a wider universe in which to situate Otto’s story. This book reconstructs the miniature world of Otto and his parents, putting it into perspective, wherever possible, with the help of existing literature. Otto

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and his father focused on areas hitherto neglected by historians, which prompted new research into numerous contemporary sources, such as the minutes of political meetings, the transactions of learned and literary societies, topographical maps and other visual material, estate inventories, advice books on all manner of subjects, encyclopaedias, pamphlets, periodicals, travel journals, letters, autobiographies, novels, poems and children’s books. The temporal horizon is determined by the length of Otto’s life. His death at the age of only seventeen – a young life nipped in the bud – put a cruel end to the experiment that had begun so auspiciously. It also marks the end of Lambert’s political and social engagement, for he had meanwhile become a victim of the revolution he had so enthusiastically embraced. As a political prisoner, he was permitted to be present at his son’s deathbed only under the guard of two soldiers. That is how it all ended. But no one could have foreseen these events in 1788, on the eve of the French Revolution, when Lambert van Eck and his brother-in-law Pieter Paulus travelled to Paris. Our story begins with their journey.

PROLOGUE Paris 1788 Border Crossings On Thursday, 15 May 1788 at four o’clock in the morning, three travellers waited in a carriage at a Rotterdam toll-house for a ferry across the River Maas. This crossing was the first stage of a long journey that would take them to Antwerp, Brussels and finally Paris. That morning, however, a storm had come up and the ferryman would not risk the crossing until an hour later, when the wind had died down a little. The subsequent voyage to Brabant across a wide body of water, the Hollands Diep, also involved delays, wet feet and a surcharge. Once these obstacles had been overcome and the three travellers had eaten breakfast on the opposite shore and taken their places in the carriage that would bring them to the first stop on their journey, the time had come to heave a sigh of relief, forget the mountain of baggage they had brought along (now safely stowed at the rear of the carriage), gaze at the farmlands that still resembled those around Rotterdam, and look to the future, to the distant prospects on the other side of the border. We know all this from Lambert van Eck’s detailed account, for it was his travel journal that enabled us to piece together the story of this journey.1 At this point, the travellers’ main cause of concern was the silverware one of them had brought along. The tension mounted as they crossed the border and had the misfortune to fall into the hands of three toll-collectors. ‘Before we could give them a tip’, Lambert later wrote, ‘they had taken out our trunks, asked for the keys, and shamelessly rummaged through everything, commenting raucously on our new gloves, under-garments and so on.’ The discovery of the silver before the situation could be explained only heightened the tension. The explanation – namely that the woman to whom it belonged, though Dutch, was a resident of Brussels, so her personal effects were exempt from duty – came too late for them to fob off the douaniers with a few small coins. The travellers were forced to appease them with a substantial tip, and had to wait for the inevitable paperwork to be

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Fig. 1. The Bastille. From J.H. Campe’s Over de staats-omwenteling in Frankrijk in brieven, 1790.

drawn up: lists of imported household effects that would be subjected in Brussels to even closer scrutiny. The owner of the troublesome silverware was Mrs Gevers, the wife of the former Rotterdam bailiff, Paulus Gevers, who had fled to Brussels. She was returning to her temporary home in exile, which – considering the importation of her silverware – was gradually becoming more permanent. Her mission was different from that of her two companions, Pieter Paulus and Lambert van Eck, whose reasons for travelling stemmed from the dramatic events that had shaken the Netherlands the previous year. Restoration Even though the smoke of the battles of 1787 had lifted, to those directly involved – such as our three travellers – what had actually happened in the Dutch Republic was still far from clear. To be sure, the revolution and restoration that had taken place that year were the culmination of the political unrest that had begun in 1779, when the country had become involved in a war against England – a war resulting from the support given by the Republic to the American colonies, which had revolted against the mother country. Many Dutch merchants hoped that America would become an important trading partner once it had won

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its independence, and thus saw the war as a way of gaining ground on England, their biggest competitor. Moreover, the underlying principles of the American War of Independence struck a sympathetic chord in the Netherlands. Newspapers published translations of the modern constitutions drawn up by the newly founded states on the other side of the ocean. The rebel leaders were seen as heroes in the Netherlands. The American naval captain John Paul Jones was greeted with cheers in Amsterdam. The similarities between the American struggle for independence and the Dutch Revolt against Spain two centuries earlier were pointed out on both sides of the Atlantic. John Adams, the first American envoy to the Netherlands, appealed to these feelings of kinship by referring to them explicitly in his address to the States General: ‘The origins of the two republics are so much alike that the history of the one seems but a transcript of the other.’ Pamphleteers put pressure on Stadholder Willem V and the States General, and petitions were submitted throughout the country, which led the Dutch Republic in 1782 to become the first European country to recognise the United States as an independent nation. The American War of Independence was also an inspiring example because of the growing dissatisfaction in the Republic with Stadholder Willem V, who was thought to have become too powerful. Popular feeling called for the Netherlands to free itself yet again, this time not from a foreign monarch but from a native tyrant. In 1781 the nobleman Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol published an incendiary pamphlet called ‘To the people of the Netherlands’, which he concluded with a call to arms.2 In the meantime the war against England was going from bad to worse. Surprisingly, the once renowned but now weakened Dutch fleet had managed to resist the English at the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1781, but after that it collapsed completely. Such military failures brought to light long-standing domestic differences. As the stadholder and highest-ranking military leader, Prince Willem V was responsible for fighting a war he did not support. Those who did back the war, such as many of Holland’s regents, looked upon the prince as an undeclared ally of England. The American example had meanwhile shown that new ideas about freedom, democracy and self-government could actually be put into practice. At first the domestic conflict resembled earlier clashes between Orangists and Republicans, comparable to the confrontations between Prince Maurits and the Grand Pensionary Johan

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van Oldenbarnevelt in 1618 or between Prince Willem III and Johan de Witt in 1672. During those struggles there had also been frequent recourse to medieval privileges, but now the old rhetoric acquired a new dimension. Because they claimed to want the best for the country, the critics of the government adopted the nom de guerre of Patriots. Drawing attention to the problems of their time was, however, much easier than finding solutions to them. It was becoming increasingly clear that the Patriots were a very diverse company. In his pamphlet Van der Capellen argued for a ‘well-organised government’ based on representation – by which he meant the entire population, apart from the ‘rabble’ – and guaranteeing freedom to all. Similar ideas were entertained by the political elites in various provinces, especially the province of Holland. The Republic was a stratified oligarchy, in which power was vested at all levels – local, provincial and national (the States General) – in a select group of well-to-do families. However, the two thousand or so regents, who held important seats on town councils and other governing boards, were not a unified whole. Internal conflicts simmered everywhere and regularly reached the boiling point, particularly when a matter of financial gain was at stake, such as an appointment to a profitable post. Some regents sought to undermine the stadholder’s position only to gain greater freedom for themselves, while others objected on principle to the stadholderate. The middle classes saw Van der Capellen’s platform, and others like it, as an opportunity to regain the political influence they had been deprived of long ago. Although the treaty with England had been signed in 1784, the domestic conflict continued to escalate rapidly. Everywhere people were forced to take sides, and while the Orangists held a scattering of violent demonstrations, the Patriots formed volunteer militias. In 1785 the States General placed so many restrictions on the authority of Stadholder Willem V that he fled The Hague and set up court at Nijmegen in the eastern province of Gelderland. In November of that year, the Republic entered into a defensive alliance with France, a country that had also supported the Americans. In scores of places, particularly Amsterdam and Rotterdam, this pact prompted the Patriots to hold festivities marked by parades, fireworks and lavish banquets, afterwards depicted in popular and widely disseminated prints. All the same, the conflict intensified. In various cities the Orangists were expelled from the town council and replaced by Patriots. There were increasingly violent street brawls involving adherents of both par-

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Fig. 2. The Batavian addresses Willem the Tyrant. Stadholder Willem V tries to rob a citizen of his food. Political cartoon by Rienk Jelgerhuis, 1786. Jelgerhuis later portrayed the Van Eck family.

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ties. Feelings ran especially high in Rotterdam, where in 1783 a volunteer corps of Patriots was formed, as well as a children’s legion called the ‘Batavian Youths’. The Patriot Paulus Gevers, who was appointed bailiff in 1785, managed to bend the city government to his will, but he had more trouble with the Orangist people’s movement, led by the street vendor Kaat Mossel. Gevers had her arrested and sentenced to flogging, branding, ten years in the house of correction, and perpetual banishment from the city. The case dragged on in the Court of Appeal, and sentencing was repeatedly postponed, but while she was in prison Kaat Mossel became a martyr to the Orangist cause. Paulus Gevers’s iron-fisted stance had meanwhile made him a hero of the Patriot movement. A portrait was published of him in a classical pose, pointing to an open folio volume containing the medieval charter of Rotterdam: proof that he defended the traditional rights of the citizens. The more progressive Patriots were thinking ahead, however, and in June 1786 those attending a meeting of volunteer corps from all over the country resolved to advocate a new form of government based on representation. Two Patriots – Pieter Vreede of Leiden and Wybo Fijnje of Delft – drafted a new constitution that clearly echoed the American Declaration of Independence. In The Hague, two Patriot regents fanned the flames by driving their carriage into the Binnenhof – the inner courtyard of the medieval complex that housed the States General – through the large gate traditionally reserved for the Princes of Orange. A short while later, a small army of Patriots instigated a series of civic upheavals – in Delft and The Hague, among other places – in which Orangist regents were driven out of office. The Patriots’ winning streak came to an end in June 1787, when Princess Wilhelmina, the consort of Willem V, was detained at Goejanverwellesluis on her way to The Hague. This was reason enough for her brother, the king of Prussia, to take military action. The Patriots offered resistance, but their defences collapsed. Their hopes were now fixed on the French king, from whom they expected help under the terms of the recently concluded defence pact. His support was not forthcoming, however, and the capitulation of Amsterdam on 10 October decided the matter. The stadholder returned to The Hague and the old regime was restored, which prompted the flight of large numbers of Patriots – possibly as many as 20,000 – many of whom sought refuge in France. Most of these fugitives returned home within a few months, when peace had been restored, or because they had been granted amnesty. Several thousand, however, decided to remain in exile.

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Fig. 3. The Patriot army outside Delft by the River Vliet, 1787.

Things had quieted down in the Republic, but Orangists and Patriots alike wondered why the situation had spun out of control. Kindred Spirits in Exile Large numbers of Dutch Patriots had descended on Brussels, the political centre of the Southern Netherlands, where the regent, Mary of Austria, governed the country on behalf of her brother, Emperor Joseph II. The Patriot refugees were given a warm welcome in Brussels, where they enjoyed the climate of political reform. Laws passed in 1781 had guaranteed freedom of religion and curtailed the power of the Roman Catholic Church. Old government bodies and provincial authorities had been streamlined, and the traditional local fairs had been replaced by a national holiday imposed by ducal decree. Reforming the government and educating the people – also goals of the Dutch Patriots – must have met with the approval of Lambert van Eck.

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En route the three travellers had already encountered a harbinger of things to come: when passing the town of Vilvoorde, they saw ‘a very large building with countless small windows’. The driver told Lambert that it was a ‘workhouse’ for convicted criminals. This modern prison, built a couple of years earlier, aroused Lambert’s interest: ‘We resolved to visit it again from Brussels.’ Like many modern-minded lawyers, Lambert van Eck opposed the death penalty. Imprisonment was considered a more humane alternative, though not – as was customary – in the dungeons of old castles, but in specially designed jails. The prison at Vilvoorde continued throughout the nineteenth century to serve as an example of the new approach to criminal justice.3 On the evening of their arrival in Brussels, the two men were honoured at their hotel with ‘many visits by fugitives from Holland, who were very moved to see us’. The following morning at nine o’clock, more Dutchmen ‘of all classes and kinds’ were waiting to see them. The refugees’ many conversations with Paulus and Van Eck paint a rather sombre picture of internal squabbles, disappointment at the political failures of the previous year, and condemnation of the lack of French support, giving rise, in short, to ‘much ill-advised grumbling’. Van Eck and Paulus did their best to alleviate their countrymen’s misgivings with words of encouragement: We began immediately to clear away the causes of complaint, and were gratified to find that our influence was such that everyone we spoke to – of whatever class or whichever sentiments – resolved to restore the previous cordiality without mistrust, without envy and also without haughtiness on the one hand or impertinence on the other, furthermore not to blame anyone for past mistakes, disasters and rash condemnation of present deeds and actions, and to behave like a people that other powers will continue to think worthy of having their old rights restored to them should the occasion present itself.

By nature Van Eck felt most at home in the ‘aristocratic’ group. He attended the ‘weekly gathering of former regents’, where he met numerous acquaintances, including De Gijselaar and Gevaerts, the two regents who had driven companionably through the Stadholder’s Gate two years before but now quarrelled constantly. Among those Lambert spoke to were Jan Jacob Cau, who had been involved in the detainment of Princess Wilhelmina, and his fellow townsman Wybo Fijnje, one of the ideologues of the Patriot movement. He also visited the Hollandsche Sociëteit, where a more diverse crowd gathered: the innkeeper, for instance, who looked familiar to Van Eck, proved to be the son of his wine merchant in The Hague.

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Fig. 4. Orangists plundering houses in Delft, 1787.

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The Dutch colony was an isolated company consumed by homesickness. Van Eck wrote that when they met for dinner in the evening, they imagined themselves ‘to be in Holland again, as in days of old’, and he recollected visiting an acquaintance with whom he smoked a pipe ‘in the old Hague fashion’. The exiles lived in the past, and spent so much time rehashing the events of the fateful summer of 1787 that they forgot to look around them. They could not stop asking themselves whose fault it was that everything had gone wrong, why the French had failed to intervene, who had made such strategic blunders. Paulus and Van Eck, by contrast, were determined to look to the future. In their view, the modernisation of the Dutch state could not be stopped, but success was more dependent than ever on help from abroad, particularly from France. Paulus and Van Eck visited – as tourists only – Laken Castle, the residence of the regent. They inspected the assembly hall of the Council of State, the highest governmental body, and admired ‘the many splendid pieces of furniture for the storage of papers’. They also toured the armoury with its old suits of armour, shields, spears, swords and guns: all ‘instruments of murder’ which Van Eck abhorred. He was impressed, however, by the sword supposedly used to behead the counts of Egmond and Horne, the two nobles who had rebelled against the Spanish king and were heroes in the eyes of Orangists and Patriots alike. Perhaps Paulus and Van Eck identified with these two luminaries of Dutch history. Finally, they strolled around the gardens, where the fountains sprayed exceptionally high, thanks to a new technical wonder – a steam engine. The gardens also boasted a splendid Chinese tower, which Van Eck hastened to climb, observing that it was 232 steps high. He marvelled at ‘the most enchanting prospects’, including views extending as far as the towers of Mechelen and Antwerp. Lambert was obviously gazing northwards, but his journey continued the following day in a southerly direction, to the most dynamic city on the continent, the political centre of the country from which the Patriots hoped for salvation. Did they expect to encounter in Paris exiled Dutchmen of a more energetic and optimistic nature? In any case, a select company of Patriots had settled there, for the only Netherlanders allowed to stay in the French capital were those wealthy enough to support themselves or prominent enough to be invited by the French authorities. The leader of the Dutch fugitives was Baron Robert Jasper van der Capellen van de Marsch, a nephew of the author of ‘To the People of the Nether-

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lands’. He was surrounded by nobles from Gelderland and Overijssel, as well as many former regents of Holland. It must have been disappointing for Van Eck and Paulus to observe that the exiles who had settled in Paris were, like the refugees in Brussels, fond of dwelling on the events of the previous year. A typical conversation was one they had with Gerard Brantsen, a noble from Gelderland, in which Brantsen voiced his indignation at ‘the imbecility’ of the French, who had failed to intervene in 1787. Lambert’s account reveals that he and Paulus had begun to develop an aversion to such complaints, and were attempting to steer clear of these discussions altogether. Pieter Paulus and Lambert van Eck had not come to Paris to talk to embittered Dutch refugees. The object of their journey, which emerges only gradually from Lambert’s journal, were the talks Paulus was conducting with the French leader Loménie de Brienne, various ministers and other highly placed individuals. There is every indication that the trip had been undertaken at the personal invitation of the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Comte de Montmorin. The French wanted to know what support they could expect from the Patriots in the event of another international conflict. The Patriots, for their part, were intent on finding out if the French were inclined to lend them military support in their efforts to overthrow the regime of Stadholder Willem V. Van Eck wrote little about the subject of these talks, most of which were undertaken by Paulus alone. Paulus’s previous position of authority in the Dutch navy had given him the opportunity to build up an extensive network of French contacts. The French had held him in high esteem, as emerges from a letter written by Joseph-Matthias Gérard de Rayneval, a diplomat who had gone to the Netherlands in 1786 to observe the tense situation at first hand. He had the following to say about Paulus: ‘He is a very enlightened Patriot, who despite his youth has ideas that are both clear and moderate.’ Not surprisingly, Paulus received a warm welcome and was given flattering assurances that the French would have come to the aid of the Dutch Patriots the year before if only they had sent to Paris an ‘homme de tête’ – in other words, someone like Paulus. In the present circumstances, however, it was necessary to rethink the situation to determine how the stadholderly ‘revolution’ of 1787 could be undone. Unlike the Dutch exiles in Antwerp and Brussels, their kindred spirits in Paris were assimilated to some extent in the social life of the capital. Several Dutch women who were married to Frenchmen of consequence

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proved instrumental in achieving this integration. The dinners they hosted provided excellent opportunities for establishing contact with the French elite. Sophia van Neukirchen-Nijvenheim, daughter of the previously mentioned noble from Gelderland and now the Marquise de Champcenetz by marriage, gave parties attended by Dutch exiles and French politicians alike. Margareta Cornelia van de Poll, the Amsterdam-born Comtesse d’Usson, introduced Paulus and Van Eck to Jacques Necker, who held the key post of Minister of Finance. Van Eck described the Dutch countess as ‘a distinguished and intelligent woman’, who received them ‘very kindly in a charming cabinet that housed a very respectable library and gave onto a charming garden’. A third woman who played a large part in cementing Franco-Dutch relations was the Comtesse de Grammont. This French lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie-Antoinette assured Paulus and Van Eck ‘that the king and queen were well disposed towards the Dutch Patriots’. She was ‘very pleased with brother Paulus’; indeed, the feeling was mutual: ‘We were exceedingly pleased with Mrs Grammont, already an older woman but very enlightened in political matters and bent on being of service to a good cause.’ Gatherings, salons, dinners and parties were important venues in French politics. One could also participate in political life, however, by visiting public places, such as the coffee houses near the Palais Royal, where Paulus and Van Eck were frequently to be found. In the evening they often went to the opera, where they ran into all kinds of acquaintances. The boxes at the theatre were meeting places for people from all walks of life: politicians, bankers, journalists and military officers. Van Eck noticed that the officers were not allowed to appear in uniform, but did not know why. In fact there were many things going on in the French capital whose significance eluded him. At first he paid them no heed, intent as he was on the goal of their mission, namely to stimulate French interest in the Dutch situation. French Contacts Diplomacy was the province of Pieter Paulus, who frequently met with high-ranking officials for private talks. During his stay in Paris he thus consulted the Foreign Minister, the Comte de Montmorin, no fewer than twenty-one times, and conferred eight times with the prime minister, Loménie de Brienne. Only occasionally did he tell Lambert

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what they had talked about: on 9 June 1788, for instance, he visited the diplomat Mercy d’Argenteau, who had expressed a ‘most favourable’ view, namely that intervention was necessary because the House of Orange formed a ‘perpetual obstacle to the true interests of the Republic’. Generalities of this kind were all that Paulus would divulge. That Lambert tapped other sources of information is evidenced by an English newspaper cutting preserved in his travel journal. It reports the British government’s concern about secret deliberations going on in Paris. The wording is vague, but evidently Lambert thought that it referred to their mission. The general tenor of Paulus’s talks can nevertheless be discerned through Lambert’s clouded vision. The French government now regretted its failure to intervene when Prussia invaded the Dutch Republic in 1787. This was apparent from the mood of the Marquis de Vérac, a recently ousted diplomat who called on Paulus. Lambert reported that this former ambassador to the Netherlands had been ‘greatly affected by the turn of events, which, he said, had also caused him not a little suffering’. He had even avoided all company for three months. The extent to which developments in the Netherlands exercised French minds also emerges from the fact that one of the opinion leaders of the day, the Comte de Mirabeau, had devoted a whole book to the subject: Aux Bataves, sur le stadhouderat (To the Batavians, concerning the stadholderate). Two months before Paulus and Van Eck’s arrival in Paris, Mirabeau had concluded his manuscript with a concise summary of his aims, a summons to the Dutch people to revolt against the stadholder: ‘To arms, noble Patriots, to arms!’4 Even those who would sacrifice their lives for the cause should be happy, he said, because they were doing it for the sake of their children. Van Eck and Paulus dropped in on the famous writer, but did not find him at home. One celebrity they did meet was Thomas Jefferson, the American ambassador to France, with whom they had a delightful meal. They found the future president in especially high spirits, having just received the news that another state had joined the union. Of all Paulus’s interlocutors, the Marquis de Lafayette made the deepest impression: ‘Lafayette pleased us more than expected. He is young, but supremely modest and composed, in both voice and figure, like the clarity and good sense with which he speaks.’ Lafayette was internationally renowned. After fighting on the side of the Americans to free the new continent, he had returned to his native country a

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hero. Lafayette told, from first-hand experience, exciting stories about the American War of Independence. He praised the American soldiers who had been forced to march barefoot and sleep in the open, and described the massacres of the English, who had even slaughtered pregnant women. Worst of all, they had kidnapped slaves and infected them with smallpox before setting them free, causing an epidemic among the Americans.5 A great friendship based on mutual esteem soon grew between Lafayette and the Dutchmen. They met him no fewer than twenty-six times, together with his wife, who according to Lambert was ‘a cheerful, pleasant and intelligent woman, who loves her husband dearly’. Between the pages of Lambert’s journal lies a letter from Lafayette in which he invites the Dutchmen to visit him at his home. Lafayette was always friendly and courteous to Van Eck and Paulus, but he had meanwhile formed his own opinion of the political strife in the Netherlands: ‘It is strange to see so many people so angry, on so small a spot.’ We know this from his letters to his friend George Washington, to whom he could speak plainly. Lafayette called the stadholder ‘a blockhead’, but also recognised the failings of the Patriots, for they were ‘almost as much opposed to each other as they were to the stadholder’. He thought, moreover, that ‘some Patriots carry their views very far indeed’. In the presence of his two visitors he was less critical, declaring his concern for the Netherlands, which he had visited in 1785, and ‘affirming his desire to be of service to the nation’. When the crisis in the Dutch Republic had come to a head in the summer of 1787, Lafayette and his French army had been standing by, ready to drive the Prussians out of the Netherlands, but at that time the French government had been unwilling to risk the confrontation. While Paulus’s first meetings concentrated on the situation in Holland, later talks centred more and more on the reforms under way in France, which were leading to increasing discord. Shortly before the Dutchmen’s arrival in Paris, Lafayette had written to Washington: ‘We are in a critical situation.’ He added that he had thrown caution to the winds, meaning that he had sided openly with the reformers.6 Lafayette was already a member of the Assemblée des Notables – the council created to advise the king on reforms – where he had proposed, among other things, that Protestants be granted religious freedom. His progressive attitude had even brought him into conflict with his

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Fig. 5. Portrait of Lafayette. From J.H. Campe’s Over de staats-omwenteling in Frankrijk in brieven, 1790.

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immediate family: during dinner one evening he confided to Lambert that his grandmother was no longer speaking to him. The situation in France was just as complex as that in the Dutch Republic. The French king had been pressured by public opinion to implement a number of reforms, the first of which was to abolish the parlements dating back to the Middle Ages. Because it was the task of these provincial councils to give advice in legal matters, those in Lafayette’s circle were opposed to their abolition, which they considered a shrewd attempt on the king’s part to increase his own power. The fiercest protest came from Brittany, where a group of Breton nobles had drawn up a petition which Lafayette, too, had signed. He showed this ‘circular’ to Van Eck, who wrote the following: ‘His answer proved that he openly supported the cause of the parliaments, or rather, the nation. France, he said, was experiencing a perilous crisis, and it would soon be decided whether one would live under absolute despotism or under the well-regulated influence of a fair constitution.’ Lafayette thought the best solution to France’s problems would be another war with England: the ‘general fermentation’ would ‘fizzle out’ and the population would again side with the king. Evidently Lafayette still felt so bound to the monarchy that he expected such Machiavellian measures to have a beneficial effect. Van Eck learned of new developments every time he visited Lafayette. On 2 June his host reported during lunch that the number of protesting Breton nobles had grown to six hundred, and that they had demanded the resignation of two ministers. Lafayette also knew that troops had already been sent to Brittany, ‘and he feared that such zeal would have unfortunate consequences’. A later meal provided ‘a splendid opportunity to discuss the internal affairs of France’. Van Eck had high hopes of Lafayette’s influence on the French ‘friends of freedom’, because they would certainly support the Dutch cause. Shortly before returning to the Netherlands, Paulus and Van Eck ran into their friend in the street, and he immediately invited them to lunch, ‘because he had much to tell about what had happened, quite a bit of which concerned him’. Lafayette told them that he had attended an illegal meeting of Breton noblemen in Paris and had signed a new letter of protest to the king. A couple of Breton nobles had been imprisoned in the Bastille, and he had narrowly escaped ending up there himself. He valiantly stated, however, ‘that one could not prevent such meetings without tyrannical methods’. Lafayette had meanwhile been removed from active military service, but – Van Eck observed with admiration – ‘in the meantime he was working with undiminished zeal

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to promote the national interest and to reinstate the constitution that was the people’s due’. On 2 August they took leave of Lafayette, who had exciting news for them, namely that the États Généraux was to be convened: ‘So much progress had been made within the space of a year, [whereas] he had been taken for a fool’ the year before, when he had first proposed this in the Assemblée des Notables. Thus people again had a say in government, and although the outcome was uncertain, there was no turning back. Paulus and Van Eck had come to France to meet with ministers and other senior officials in hopes of influencing French policy towards the Dutch Republic. In the end it was the king, Louis XVI, who determined policy. Few succeeded in obtaining an audience with His Highness, but Lambert van Eck did not miss the opportunity to observe him from a distance during a visit to Versailles. The king, who was something of a tourist attraction, usually took his meals in public. One day when Paulus had various appointments, Lambert van Eck made his way to La Muette Castle in the Bois de Boulogne to view the king dining. The guests at table included several of his acquaintances, such as the Comte de Montmorin, this time decked out with medals and badges of honour. ‘We duly observed the king from all angles: he was jolly and hospitable, chatted with the lady seated next to him, ate and drank with a hearty appetite, and looked well and happy.’ In short, the overall impression inspired confidence in two Dutchmen who still believed that the liberation of their own country depended on this monarch. It must have been discomfiting for Van Eck and Paulus to discover a month later that more and more of the people they spoke to were turning away from the king. This was true, for example, of the Marquis d’Osmond – supervisor of the Dutch exiles – who spoke ‘very freely’ about the king, revealing sundry details about his ‘impetuous moods’. The greater their domestic problems became, the less interest the French took in the vicissitudes of the Dutch Republic. One of the last pieces of advice Paulus and Van Eck received in Paris came from a Frenchman who could not understand ‘that the Patriots did not harbour a Brutus who could eradicate root and branch the House of Orange as the perpetual cause of the deterioration of the country’. His advice boiled down to assassinating Prince Willem V, just as Brutus had murdered Julius Caesar because of his dictatorial tendencies. The radical means of tyrannicide would in fact be employed a couple of years later, but Prince Willem V would not be the victim.7

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Fig. 6. The Church of Saint-Geneviève under construction. From Lambert’s travel guide, Guide des amateurs et des étrangers voyageurs à Paris, 1787.

Modern Tourism The first thing Lambert did upon arriving in Paris was to acquire a new map of the city. That he intended to savour the sights is apparent from the two bulky travel guides he bought. Armed with the Guide des amateurs et des étrangers voyageurs à Paris and the Voyage pittoresque de Paris, he set out to explore the city.8 Paris aroused mixed feelings in Lambert. He describes the Tuileries, for instance, as ‘a large, magnificent building’ that unfortunately looked ‘old and dirty’ because it was no longer inhabited. Regrettably, the gardens were still laid out according to ‘old-fashioned tastes’, but it was nevertheless pleasant to stroll around them because of the lively atmosphere. The Louvre – ‘untidy and dilapidated’ – did not appeal to Lambert either.9 During his visit to the Châtelet, a gloomy castle in the middle of the city, Van Eck inspected the morgue, where bodies found in the street were kept for several days to allow identification.10 He gave short shrift to the nearby town hall, which in his eyes was an ‘old-fashioned building’, and passed harsh judgement on the Bastille. He thought the medieval prison-fortress

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Fig. 7. The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. From De gruwel der verwoestinge of Vrankryks moord- en treurtoneel, 1794.

a loathsome relic of the past, and found that ‘its grimness surpasses its reputation’. Lambert van Eck did not like bleak old buildings, and he was well aware that Voltaire, Mirabeau and other intellectuals had been locked up in the Bastille by order of the king. When Lambert visited the prison, its inmates included a then unknown writer: behind one of the iron-bolted windows, the Marquis de Sade was adding the finishing touches to his novel Aline et Valcour. A couple of months later, De Sade – screaming loudly from his cell – would call for the release of the prisoners from the Bastille. All was still quiet, however, when Van Eck stood before the imposing edifice. He could not cross the moat, because the draw-bridge had been pulled up, so instead he took a stroll in the adjacent park. From there he could see a toll-gate under construction, and the small building appealed to him very much. Clearly, modern architecture was more to Lambert’s liking, so naturally he enjoyed his visit to the nearly

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finished Church of Sainte-Geneviève. This edifice, wrote Van Eck, was ‘a credit to human ingenuity’. He even mounted the scaffolding to admire the sculpture from close up, and was particularly impressed by the enormous dome.11 Lambert was aware of the importance of this structure, which marked the breakthrough of a new style – neoclassicism – an architectonic revolution in which the ideals of the Enlightenment were made manifest in public buildings. In practice this style usually entailed placing a forest of columns around an interior space of great grandeur. The new architectural theory called for buildings to possess metaphysical qualities capable of evoking a wide range of feelings. The architect of Sainte-Geneviève, Jacques Germain Soufflot, had paved the way for such truly revolutionary architects as Ledoux and Boullée, whose fanciful designs included a Temple of Recollections and a Cenotaph for Isaac Newton.12 Van Eck’s admiration of one of the new toll-gates, even though he was unaware that Ledoux was the architect, proves that he was a dedicated follower of fashion, since he showed particular appreciation for a style that was ahead of its time. In the Netherlands, too, the new classicism was seen as the style of the future and embraced chiefly by the progressive Patriots.13 Lambert was acquainted, for example, with the neoclassicist architect Jan Giudici, whom Pieter Paulus had appointed two years earlier to the Rotterdam Admiralty.14 Giudici, later influenced by Ledoux, was commissioned to design numerous buildings in Rotterdam and nearby areas, such as the Rotterdam Stock Exchange, several private homes in Schiedam and the Reformed Church in Zoeterwoude. The new architectural style had also been seen in the decorations serving as backdrops to the many Patriot celebrations that had taken place in 1787, but after the restoration of the stadholder, those wooden structures disappeared as quickly as they had been erected. The Palais Royal was the very heart of Paris, so it is hardly surprising that Lambert’s first walk around the city led him there. The palace had once housed the royal court, but it was now rented out as apartments and its arcades contained countless shops and restaurants. The square was ‘teeming with carriages and people, so much so that we were scarcely able to dodge them’. It was a place where, according to Lambert, ‘everything is to be had, just as at the annual fair, in shops located beneath long arcades through which one strolls, in little houses built expressly for this purpose, including innumerable coffee houses and other establishments where one can obtain food and all kinds of

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Fig. 8. C.N. Ledoux’s design for a toll-gate near Paris.

refreshments’. It was always ‘chock-full’, and in the evening Van Eck was enchanted by the ‘many small lights’ and the ‘ombres chinoises’, the Chinese shadow plays performed there. The Palais Royal was the place where the latest newspapers and pamphlets were sold, so naturally Lambert returned there time and again.15 The Palais Royal was also the best place to dine, as Van Eck did on 27 May at Au Vallois, sitting at the public table. Usually, however, he ate at Massé’s with his brother-in-law, but at times – as on 11 June – ‘all by himself ’, because Paulus was engaged in political deliberations. Occasionally he dined there in a separate room in the company of other Dutchmen. In such surroundings he could satisfy not only his hunger but also his intellectual appetite, as on 21 June, when Van Eck ate at Massé’s and spent the rest of the evening reading newspapers in the ‘pavillon des gazettes’. Once Van Eck rode out to the Bois de Boulogne, where there were also various coffee houses. Sitting at a table in the open air, he was informed that he should first consult ‘a list with the prices’ of what was available,16 thus becoming acquainted with the precursor of the menu.

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The restaurants Van Eck frequented in Paris were a new phenomenon. In contrast to the inns still customary at the time – where one generally ate whatever there was and sat at a common table – the clientele of these modern restaurants could sit at separate tables and choose from a number of dishes. Dining was becoming individualised, and this was also a sign of the times. Van Eck appreciated French cuisine, but his Dutch sense of cleanliness was sometimes offended by what he called French slovenliness. He was disgusted, for instance, by the milk once given him to put in his tea, ‘because it had a skin and looked distasteful, and gave the tea a dirty blue colour, which made us fear it had been boiled or kept in a dirty pan’.17 The many scientific and philanthropic institutions to be found in Paris – in those days the cultural capital of Europe – also exerted a great attraction. Lambert visited them systematically, beginning on 27 May with the Bibliothèque Royale. The library of the French king, at that time the largest in the world, was open to the public two days a week for three hours each day. ‘We found a multitude of people sitting at tables and busy reading, writing or drawing’, recorded Van Eck. He was impressed by the ‘incredible numbers’ of books, especially when he was told that this was only a fraction of the total and that most of the 300,000 volumes were kept in a separate repository. The walls were lined with busts of such literary luminaries as Voltaire and Rousseau. Another room contained an enormous collection of Bibles – 15,000 altogether – and yet another room housed the theological works. Lambert’s guide said of the latter collection that ‘it was the least requested, whereas a lot of work was done in all other fields’. Van Eck was pleasantly surprised to see the Groot Placaat Boek, a multivolume publication of the most important legislation in the Republic of the United Netherlands. Apparently this and other Dutch books were consulted frequently: ‘One could tell by the bindings that many people from Holland come here. One finds almost everything that was ever written about our history. What surprised me was that one of the librarians showed me the latest issues of Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen [Dutch Literary Review] and Nederlandsche Bibliotheecq [ Dutch Library], which he said were sent over regularly.’ On 25 June, Van Eck visited the Académie des Sciences, where in a room containing models of ‘useful inventions of other nations’ he discovered a Dutch sawmill. On 10 June the agenda included the Jardin du Roy, a botanical garden with a natural history museum boasting,

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among other things, stuffed ostriches. There was also a life-size statue of the former director, Georges Buffon. The new director, Guillaume Daubenton, was in the process of adding volumes to a mammoth reference work begun by his predecessor, the Histoire naturelle, which Lambert had on his bookshelves at home. On 11 June, Van Eck visited the school for the blind, the first of its kind in Europe. Educating the blind was one of the spearheads of the Enlightenment, because it proved that even children with a serious handicap – who had previously been doomed to beggary – could find their rightful place in society. Lambert attended a public demonstration of Braille – a recent invention – at which a little blind boy put together a map puzzle: when Lambert handed him Holland, he promptly inserted it in its proper place. The high point of the demonstration was the recitation by two blind boys of poems they had composed themselves; they went on to say that their education had enabled them to rise ‘from abject misery and unhappiness’ to become ‘useful members of society’. Van Eck was so moved by this performance that he sat through another session, ‘which he witnessed again, gripped by emotion’. Two days later he paid a third visit to the ‘public exercises of the blind’, after which he went to the institute for deaf-mutes, where the technique of lip-reading had been developed. Van Eck also inspected various departments of the University of Paris. At the law faculty he met a member of the Conseil du Roy and asked whether he might be allowed to attend a session of this court, but was told that ‘one could travel all over the kingdom and not meet with anything of the kind’, because the judges and lawyers were on strike, protesting against the king’s proposals for reform. The matter was so complicated that ‘it would require of a foreigner quite some study to understand what it was all about’. A visit to the Palais de Justice on 28 May could not take place either, since the court was ‘occupied by French and Swiss guards, to prevent the assemblies from meeting during the present state of discord and commotion’. In Paris everything was worth seeing, even their hotel room, which was decorated with wallpaper featuring Chinese motifs. The object of greatest interest was the water-closet. Instead of the customary chamber pot that was emptied from time to time by servants, he encountered an ingenious contraption he had never seen before and therefore described in detail. It was a ‘convenience’ that ‘could be flushed repeatedly by opening a tap, the pipe of which supplied water from a reservoir above, while water obtained through another tap squirted from a copper pipe,

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Fig. 9. The construction of modern sewers in Paris. From Description des arts et métiers by Duhamel de Monceau et al.

to cleanse those who wished to make use of it. A lead stopper with a copper knob on the other side of the seat served to prevent the stench from rising upwards.’ The contrivance was a symbol of individualisation – since one operated the water-closet oneself – privatisation and greater sensitivity to bodily functions, but for Lambert it was primarily a sign of technological progress, something for which he had a keen eye.18 The most impressive invention of the times was the steam engine, which Van Eck invariably called a ‘fire engine’, the first of its kind in the Netherlands having been installed in Rotterdam a couple of years earlier. Lambert examined the steam engine that drove the pumps for Paris’s newly installed water pipes, and observed that the fire, while not large, was indeed constant, since ‘three workers stoke the oven at all times’. The construction of the waterworks was an important advancement in itself in an age when most people still depended on pumps, which provided water that was far from pure. In Lambert’s own country, the laying of water pipes would not begin until well into the nineteenth century. Van Eck saw the most impressive display of modern technological prowess during an excursion from Paris to the harbour works in Normandy. Just off Cherbourg a great barrier dike was being built in the sea to make the harbour deep enough for large warships. Huge wooden cones were towed into place and submerged by filling them

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with rock. Their truncated tops stuck out of the water, and the gaps in between were filled in. It is the first example of hydraulic engineering using caissons. Owing to his expertise in maritime matters, Paulus had been invited by the French Naval Minister to inspect the harbour works. Lambert went along, and the two were taken in a sloop to view the project from atop one of the cones. Van Eck saw . . . how these mammoth [cones], the upper part of which rise up from the sea, are wrenched and ravaged by the force of the waves; several had already been smashed to pieces, but in spite of this it was thought that the barrier would eventually be completed, since the gaps on the other side had already been filled in and now rose above the water like a stone dike. We climbed one of these cones on the side of Fort Royal – where they have remained intact – the same one from which the king witnessed the submersion of a nearby cone in 1786, the top of which is paved with hard plaster, so that one seems to be walking on large tombstones. We were in the middle of the sea as though on an isolated tower and had a view of the entire circle of batteries and forts which, at a certain signal, fired their canon in succession.19

The sight of water and dikes made them homesick, and this feeling became more acute as they gazed at the landscape on their way back to Paris: ‘One could imagine oneself in Holland, with flat land everywhere, on either side of the dike, vast meadows and wheat fields.’ In Tours, Lambert amused himself by climbing the tower ‘of the cathedral, around three hundred steps high’.20 En route he became acquainted with another, less exemplary side of France. He was shocked by the poverty of the peasants and their miserable little cottages, and disgruntled at the drab and dirty inns in which he was forced to stay. The beauty of the French countryside was, by contrast, one of the attractions of travel: ‘one imagines oneself to be in another world, transported to a place where nature is more beautiful’.21 Van Eck enjoyed the ‘continuous paintings seen against hills and dales, everything fertile and cultivated as far as the eye can see’. The countryside is ‘so gentle and lovely that one’s soul is filled with nothing but tender feelings’. On the journey from Holland to Paris, Van Eck and Paulus had visited the palace and gardens of Chantilly, a country estate held to be ‘the most beautiful in France’,22 where a guide had taken them under his wing: ‘We were given a guard in livery, who handed us over in every building or section to someone else who supervised that part.’ The garden of Chantilly ‘was very large’ and had ‘an endless variety of parks, promenades, copses, hermitages, salons, ponds, cascades, grottoes

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and so on.’ The high point was the rustic hamlet that had been built several years earlier. ‘The hamlet’, Lambert wrote, ‘consists outwardly of barns on a grassy field with numerous paths and randomly planted flowers and shrubs. These barns are furnished as rustic salons, each serving a special purpose, one for dancing, another for billiards, the third a peasant kitchen, the fourth a dining room, as well as sheds for cattle, rooms for innkeeping and suchlike. For feasts and fairs, this part of the English garden is illuminated, as is the wide, meandering brook, the source of which is a large pond on which people sail in little boats.’ During his stay in Paris, Lambert had all the time in the world to stroll around the gardens of Versailles while Paulus was engaged in deliberations. He described the palace as a ‘maze of rooms’. The gardens were vast, and parts of them were still laid out as they had been a century earlier, namely as geometric gardens intended to draw attention – from every possible angle – to the imposing palace and thus to the power of the king, the centre of this universe. The traditional geometric layout could still be seen around the office occupied by the diplomat Gérard de Rayneval; there Van Eck stumbled across an ‘old-fashioned Dutch garden with fruit trees, flowers and vegetables in straight beds . . . Here everything was in well-ordered lanes with timber trees and trimmed hedges.’ More to his taste was the Petit Trianon of Queen MarieAntoinette. It was ‘small, but charmingly appointed’, and the two men ‘were enchanted by the English garden laid out there’ and the ‘endless variety of shrubbery, lawns, streams and ponds, in the latest fashion’. As in Chantilly, the exterior of the buildings betrayed ‘peasant tastes’, but their interiors were ‘furnished in a costly and comfortable’ manner. In these surroundings there was also a ‘rock hanging menacingly over the water and a dark hermitage’. In short, Lambert concluded, the whole afforded ‘no small diversion’. If indeed Lambert had been unduly charmed by this display of regal splendour, Rayneval’s remark that ‘half the national debt lay buried in Versailles’ would have brought him to his senses.23 By the end of his stay in Paris, Lambert van Eck had explored thoroughly and systematically the principal buildings and gardens in both the city centre and the surrounding areas. As befits a traveller, he had also taken the opportunity to gaze upon the city from a panoramic viewpoint. He did this while visiting a royal palace in SaintCloud, outside Paris. From this castle, situated on top of a mountain, he used a telescope to enjoy the ‘most wonderful views’ of the city.24 When Lambert visited Versailles with all its pomp and splendour, it was inconceivable that less than two years later all French titles of

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nobility would be abolished and the king would be forced to live out his life as ‘Mr Capet’. But anyone reading Van Eck’s journal with knowledge of later events discovers on every page signs of the gathering storm. Lambert van Eck tells of illegal meetings, soldiers guarding government buildings, troop movements in the provinces, families quarrelling about politics, the dismantling of the judicial system and the detention of dissidents, all of which would come to a head on 14 July 1789 with the storming of the Bastille, which marked the beginning of the French Revolution. By the time Paulus and Van Eck were preparing to leave – Paulus had gone to his last round of talks while Lambert packed their trunks – it was abundantly clear that the French were no longer interested in Holland’s problems, preoccupied as they were with their own ‘impending troubles’. Van Eck could understand this to some extent, since the Comte de Montmorin, the minister who had invited them to come to Paris in the first place, now had his hands full with the ‘messy situation’ in his own country.25 They were disappointed, to be sure, but they understood they would have to wait until peace had returned to France. It seemed only a matter of time. Surely the largest, most modern and most powerful country in the world would be able to overcome this crisis. All the same, their mood as they travelled homeward differed noticeably from that of their outward journey. Even the landscape seemed to have changed: it had been raining for weeks on end, but Lambert saw peasants making hay despite the bad weather. The wheat fields he had praised so poetically on their way to Paris had turned into huge pools of water, and they saw peasants fishing with nets in the flooded fields. There were fears for the harvest, and the first signs of unrest had appeared. On his last day in Paris, Lambert had seen a placard reporting the conviction of a grain merchant for hoarding.26 In these sad circumstances they travelled home quickly, making only one small detour to visit the country estate of Ermenonville, where ‘JeanJacques Rousseau died and was buried on an island beneath a group of poplars’. Rousseau had spent his last years here at the invitation of the Marquis de Girardin. The estate, laid out in the English style of garden design, had been inspired by Rousseau’s novel Julie ou la nouvelle Heloïse.27 The Marquis himself had championed the ‘natural’ English garden in his book De la composition des paysages of 1777.28 Rousseau was buried in 1778 on a small artificial island in an ornamental pond. His tombstone bears the inscription: ‘for a friend of nature and truth’.

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Fig. 10. Rousseau’s grave on the island at Ermenonville, c. 1785.

Lambert van Eck was enthusiastic about the park: ‘Everywhere we found nature so simply imitated by art as though no art had been involved – no adornment at all by human hands – all the buildings and temples serenely tasteful: in a word, the beauties of Italy and Switzerland delightfully imitated.’29 According to the Marquis, a park should be laid out in such a way that a variety of pleasant sensations are aroused in those strolling around it. To this end, inscriptions and lines of verse had been applied in appropriate places – on trees, fences, rocks – to guide visitors’ thoughts and shape their experience of the park. Lambert thought it a brilliant idea: ‘The inscriptions and sayings one encounters in this wilderness on rough pieces of rock heighten the soul’s sensitivity, filling it with useful and agreeable thoughts one might not otherwise have had.’ And he concluded: ‘Here man learns to savour nature and is compelled, as it were, to notice the strength and goodness of the hand that created both him and his surroundings.’ Lambert’s tour nevertheless ended in disappointment, for heavy rain had transformed the pond into a swamp, so that he could not be rowed to the ‘isle of the dead’. As his journal reveals, Lambert deeply regretted being forced to view only from a distance the grave of the philosopher he so much admired. This muddy ending to the travel journal is in fact symbolic of Van Eck and Paulus’s entire undertaking. When they had embarked on their

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journey, the circumstances seemed favourable for eliciting French support for a revolution in the Dutch Republic. However, no sooner was the harbour in sight than their plans foundered on developments neither they nor their French contacts had foreseen – stormy weather in France. Once he was at home, Van Eck resigned himself to the idea that the reorganisation of the Dutch state would be some time in coming. Delft 1789 The Family Portrait A year after Lambert’s return from Paris, the Van Eck family was immortalised in a pastel drawing made by the popular portraitist Rienk Jelgerhuis. It shows the couple and their four children – nicely divided into two boys and two girls – looking the viewer straight in the eye. Their nonchalant poses are indeed remarkable. The lady of the house sits with the baby perched casually on her knee, at the same time gripping the hand of the daughter at her side, who seems about to step out of the picture. The master of the house is seated, his legs wide apart and a dog at his feet, with one elbow resting carelessly on a pile of papers and his eldest son at his side. The open book on the table is decidedly not the stately Bible generally appearing in the portraits of earlier generations. It lies at a slight angle, presumably on top of another book, and – like the figures – seems to be dynamic, or in this case unstable. If it should fall to the floor, its owners – far from being alarmed – would no doubt pick it up in silence, wait for the portraitist to leave, open it to the right page, and happily resume their reading. The eldest daughter (in the centre) also seems to have been disturbed in the midst of some activity. Poised with pen in hand, she stands behind a reading-desk containing sheets of paper, possibly a letter. This frozen image of the Van Eck family in the winter of 1789 comes to life again only in the spring of 1791, when one of the sitters – plagued by a guilty conscience, but inspired by the determination to take better care of his papers from now on – dips his pen in ink to write the following: The diaries from 17 February 1791 (when I began to keep a diary) up to now have been lost through carelessness.

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Fig. 11. The Van Eck family in 1789, pastel by Rienk Jelgerhuis.

Written in a firm hand below this confession is the year 1791, followed by the first of a long series of descriptions of events in the author’s life: At present I’m rather slow at getting up, because it’s still rather cold early in the morning. All the same, we’re having a completely green May. If only I weren’t so hard of hearing, I’d get up early to listen to the nightingale sing.

This diary eventually grew into a document of 1,560 pages, written initially in the large letters of a child but later in a smaller, more mature handwriting until the last page ends abruptly on 17 November 1797 with the words: ‘Bad weather and snow yesterday. Better today, with frost, easterly wind.’ One year later the adolescent author would die of tuberculosis. These jottings enable us to explore the world of the 1790s through the eyes of a child. Lambert van Eck and his travel journal guided us through Paris on the eve of the French Revolution, but his eldest son, Otto, who was ten years old when he began this diary, will be the one

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Fig. 12. Waking up. ‘I hear the birds singing / If only I could sing along!’ From J. Hazeu’s Kinderpligt en zinnebeelden, 1789.

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to familiarise us with the Netherlands at the close of the eighteenth century. The change of perspective is more fundamental than a mere shift in time and place. When the family had its portrait drawn in 1789, the political map of Europe was undergoing radical changes brought about by the French Revolution, followed six years later by the Batavian Revolution, which in 1795 put an end to the Republic of the United Netherlands. But in the diary entries of this boy – who led an active life despite his frequent colds and consequent loss of hearing – these important political developments often shrink to household proportions. At first Otto inhabited a small world, bounded in the summer by the ditches and fences enclosing the garden of De Ruit, the Van Ecks’ country estate near Delft, and in the winter by the walls of their large house in the centre of The Hague. The hierarchy, laws and conventions that Otto had to obey were those of a small republic, governed by his parents – occasionally assisted by uncles, aunts and grandparents – with his siblings as competitive and sometimes warring parties, and the domestic staff as foot-soldiers at the bottom of the social ladder. Though they do not appear in the portrait, the servants who usually figure anonymously in Otto’s diary were a constant presence in the house. Some are referred to as ‘the coachman’ or ‘the nursery maid’, while others, such as the maids Eva and Leentje, are not mentioned by their Christian names – or even mentioned at all – until they quit their positions. The only exception is the old gardener, Gijs Kersseboom, whose age and expertise in the field closest to Otto’s heart allowed him to rise above anonymity. Otto learned a lot about nature from his mentor, and sometimes even adopted his mode of speech, as evidenced by the entry of 4 September 1795: Mama was dissatisfied with me both yesterday and today, partly because of my bad manners, especially at table, and partly because of all my words and deeds in general, as I demonstrated this afternoon, and it was only a piffling matter (as Gijs says).

While Lambert van Eck’s travel journal introduced us to a number of eighteenth-century luminaries, so well known that they could be referred to by their surnames only – the revolutionary Lafayette, the diplomat Jefferson, the philosopher Mirabeau – Otto’s diary is peopled mainly by local celebrities. At the heart of Otto’s small republic were not only his parents, brother, sisters and household servants, but also the animals he

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bought with Gijs at the market in Delft: his goat, a horse, turtledoves, rabbits, larks, goldfinches and naturally the dog lying at Lambert’s feet in the family portrait. The less intimate circles included Otto’s friends (boys and girls alike), the masters who taught him dancing, music, drawing, languages and arithmetic, as well as neighbours, family acquaintances and a number of clergymen. The outermost ring consisted of the estate’s tenant farmers and a floating population of hired labourers. And the world beyond? Just how far away this could seem to a child emerges from an observation made by Otto’s contemporary Maurits VerHuell, who grew up in comparable circumstances. Maurits imagined that, behind the country estate where he lived, there was a gaping abyss, where the world simply ceased to exist: ‘For a long time we had that strange feeling, and it did not disappear until we grew older, and our mother showed us on the map the land stretching out on the other side.’30 Otto did not live long enough to view his youthful experiences with hindsight, as did VerHuell, who in middle age came across the diary he had kept as a fifteen-year-old in the summer of 1802 and supplied it with wistful commentary. Reading his youthful notes enabled him to relive his boyhood adventures: capturing a pretty bird to the accompaniment of croaking frogs, climbing into a pine tree and finding an ants’ nest, getting his trousers wet while leaping over ditches, catching twelve fish including a pike, and falling asleep on the lawn in front of the house after snaring no fewer than four birds. Continuing this reminiscent ramble through the past, he went on to read about the long walks he had taken with his father and the games he had played with friends – ‘we played there with frogs, tying a string to one leg, letting them swim, and then setting them free’ – and about the magic lantern show he held and the tenant farmer in the audience who, ‘not knowing what it was, said “it looks like the work of the devil” ’. Such activities were interrupted only by a sudden shower or the bell calling them in at mealtimes. In the afternoon there was always a cup of tea, but even then, they went on playing as usual: ‘during tea I fired Papa’s gun’. Otto’s diary contains similar descriptions of wondrous catches of fish and fowl, walks and ramblings, meetings with tenant farmers, adventurous games involving climbing and jumping, and dreamy afternoons spent lying in the grass. If he had had the chance to outgrow this land of milk and honey, he would probably have been overcome by the same melancholy that seized Maurits, who picked up his 1802 diary nearly

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Fig. 13. Rural life. ‘The land I praise / Planted in ways / to give the greatest pleasure.’ From Pieter ’t Hoen, Nieuwe proeve van klijne gedichten voor kinderen, 1779.

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twenty years later and added a few poetic lines about those ‘blissful days in the morning of life’.31 Otto’s descriptions of outdoor life resemble those of Maurits, and the nature of their activities also corresponded closely. The only difference is that Otto’s diary goes much further in mentioning other, less happy aspects of his life. Thus he also describes, in contrast to Maurits, the bickering that went on between him and his sisters, such as when he ‘unobligingly’ refused to lend his shovel to his sister Cootje, and the clashes with his parents about his rudeness, bad moods, rowdiness, negligence, naughtiness, laziness, anger, teasing and envy, or even a combination of the above: Although on the whole I spent today contentedly, still it was not brought to a happy conclusion, and I have myself to blame for being angry and envious, and for teasing my sisters. Three faults, one worse than the other.32

While Maurits apparently fired his father’s gun at tea-time without mishap, Otto’s shooting practice backfired dramatically: During dessert I committed an act of great rashness by picking up a pistol and, not knowing that it had been loaded since I’d seen Papa shooting at the sparrows shortly before, I waved it around and had already cocked it in order to shoot, which would have broken the glasses and frightened Papa and Mama to death; but Providence saw fit to forestall this by making me want to show it to my sister first. In the meantime Papa noticed it and luckily prevented me from shooting.

Otto’s diary shows that he enjoyed life to the full: his new goat, for instance, to whom he instantly developed such an attachment that he could not leave it alone for a minute; two birds purchased inexpensively at the market in Delft; a visit to the theatre; a tight-rope walker performing at the 1797 Delft fair. Often, however, his laughter was followed by tears. Sometimes these were tears of sorrow, as when he waved goodbye to his beloved Uncle and Aunt Paulus, who were heading home after a long stay at the Van Eck estate. At other times he cried tears of frustration, such as when an excursion was cancelled at the last moment – ‘and even though I understood that now I wouldn’t have so much fun, I simply couldn’t help crying’. Or else tears of remorse, such as on 7 August 1791 when he overslept: Began the day crying, because, not being called early enough, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to catch up with yesterday’s diary.

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Adults cannot fathom the depth of children’s grief, which is intense but quickly forgotten. Having been expelled from paradise and finding themselves at the mercy of a much larger and more complex world, they are usually left with a strange sensation of vaguely recollected pain, forgotten joy, and nostalgia for what is no longer theirs. When Otto was growing up, the first experiments in arousing this feeling of nostalgia were being carried out, and it is no coincidence that attempts were being made to evoke a childhood idyll for adults by means of subtly composed gardens containing reflecting ponds, meandering brooks, hidden huts, Chinese pagodas, poplar-fringed isles of the dead, picturesque farmhouses, Swiss bridges and waterfalls. The De Ruit accounts reveal that when Otto’s father returned from France – where he had marvelled at such gardens – he decided to turn his country estate into just such a romantic paradise. His account book records payments for trees, sowing seed, and barges filled with sand, with which the workers were expected to transform a bit of polder into a hilly landscape. But was Otto’s little world actually as idyllic as it seemed? Otto lived in a carefully constructed environment in which all naturalness and spontaneity had in fact been shaped by human hands. As will soon become apparent, this held true not only for his physical surroundings but also for his inner landscape, which his parents mapped out meticulously in order to steer him in the right direction, at the same time taking full advantage of his natural inclinations. De Ruit’s charming landscape, with its artificial hills and winding streams, can be construed as an experimental garden of the Enlightenment, since this transformation of Holland’s polder landscape must also have been seen as an example of mankind’s victory over nature, as proof that man himself can shape his world. But what this entailed and to what extent the world could be shaped had yet to be discovered. The Ideal Boy Was De Ruit truly a safe haven? The family portrait of 1789 betrays no sign of the dramatic events that had only recently taken place. Four years earlier, one of Otto’s sisters had died of smallpox, and her death had taken its toll on her parents. Moreover, just the year before, Otto’s baby brother Adriaan had died of a severe cold only a few days after birth. Death remained a regular visitor to De Ruit. The baby in the portrait is Otto’s little brother Franc, who would die of a cold several

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months later. Before Otto was born in 1780, his mother had had three miscarriages and two babies who died shortly after birth. The birth of Otto, ‘a healthy son’, was therefore experienced as a miracle, the more so because he came into the world ‘too early but nevertheless very felicitously’, as his father noted in the family book he kept.33 We may catch a glimpse of the proud parents and their cheerful and inquisitive child in a letter of 1813, addressed to Otto’s mother, of which only a cut-out passage about Otto has been preserved. After an enthusiastic description – still partially legible in the margins of the cutting – of the development of her own grandchildren, this relative recalls Otto (‘Uncle Ot’) when he was the same age: He still doesn’t talk so clearly as Uncle Ot. Do you remember when he was eighteen months old, and Mama and I came to stay with you? You opened the door for us with him in your arms, and he exclaimed clearly and unhesitatingly, ‘Dina Grandmama’. It seems to me that I can still hear him saying it, for a sweeter and more beautiful boy has yet to be born.34

From papers in the family archives and from Otto’s own scribblings, in particular his diary, the picture emerges of a youngster who was expected to be the ideal boy, to compensate for everything – not only the death of his siblings but also Lambert’s feelings of helplessness after the unsuccessful Patriot revolution of 1787. After returning from France in 1788, Lambert had to accept the fact that the reconstruction of Dutch society would not take place for years, so he confined himself to two projects closer to home: the transformation of the classicist garden of his country estate into a romantic, landscaped garden, and the education of his son Otto as a model citizen. The two projects may seem unconnected at first, but anyone who delves into both the reforms in garden architecture and the new educational ideals will soon realise that they ran parallel. The conversion of the estate will be discussed later; first Otto’s horizons will be reconstructed by analysing his education, focusing on his writing exercises, literary regimen and reading habits. The pile of papers in the family portrait could no doubt tell us something about the intellectual climate in which Otto grew up. Perhaps we have even seen some of them, since so much has been preserved in the family archives, including the account book of De Ruit, an encyclopaedia written by Lambert that contains detailed notes on all kinds of subjects, Lambert’s album amicorum, and letters to and from his wife, Charlotte Amélie Vockestaert. The picture that emerges is a

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consistent one: the Van Ecks were modern, enlightened people, Christian yet tolerant, idealistic but also pragmatic. This attitude to life is confirmed in Otto’s diary: his parents, who had made a close study of enlightened treatises on education, attempted to instil as consistently as possible in their own children the virtues they propagated – generosity, charity, compassion, leniency and self-control. Otto’s diary reveals that he was frequently reprimanded for such misdemeanours as not putting his precious time to good use, refusing to share his toys with his sisters, showing a lamentable lack of compassion for a poor peasant, neglecting his animals or his homework, not obeying his parents with grace and goodwill, neglecting to fulfil his social duties, and failing to control his temper. As his mother often observed, an improvement in his overall behaviour would make life easier for everyone – including Otto. Thus Otto’s diary not only reveals the standards he was expected to live up to, but also paints a picture of his daily activities. Indoors he occupied himself with reading, writing letters, playing the piano, dancing, drawing, making fishing nets, gluing together boxes, cutting out paper figures, playing board games, and even operating a toy printing press. Outdoor activities, which were an equally important part of Otto’s education, included spinning tops, swinging, seesawing and fishing, as well as pruning trees in the spring and ice-sailing in the winter. We also see him leaping over ditches, boating, setting off fireworks, driving his goat-drawn wagon, riding his pony, catching birds on the finch run, drumming, playing badminton, and zealously working on various carpentry projects, including a model windmill, a hutch for his rabbits, and bird-houses of various sizes. His passion for carpentry must have been prompted by his responsibility for the care of his animals. Otto was also required to tend his own vegetable garden, and visited a number of farmsteads to observe the work at first hand. Educational visits to workshops and factories were also part of his upbringing. This wide range of pursuits gives the impression that Otto spontaneously chose them, showing himself to be a healthy Dutch boy suffering only from too much to do. A closer look reveals, however, that this overfull agenda was actually dictated by his parents. Otto’s daily routine consisted of an interesting mixture of traditional Dutch children’s amusements and completely new elements inspired by the enlightened educational theories of the times. Fresh educational insights occasionally placed new constraints on Otto’s activities. When, for example, his parents forbade him to go ice-skating, it is quite possible that their decision was prompted by an article condemning it, which Lambert

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could have read in the progressive weekly De Denker (The Thinker), known to have been in his library.35 In Otto’s day, educational manuals and children’s books were new genres. A couple of years before Otto was born, the successful author Betje Wolff observed: ‘Nowadays one takes great pains over the upbringing of children, inasmuch as it can be advanced through plans and precepts.’ She also wrote enthusiastically about the growing popularity of children’s books.36 In both genres Otto’s parents found children who could serve as role models for their young son: a host of examples were to be found, for instance, in Hiëronymus van Alphen’s verses for children, first published a couple of years before Otto was born. The illustrations to those poems seem like snapshots of Otto’s daily life. Indeed, with his goat, hammer, chisel and shovel, he must have looked as though he had stepped out of – or perhaps fled from – the book that was a source of inspiration for nearly every author writing for or about children: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile ou de l’éducation.

CHAPTER ONE

AN ENLIGHTENED EDUCATION The Invention of Educational Theory ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.’1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau was good at writing opening lines, and this one from Emile ou de l’éducation (Emile, or On Education) is one of his best. This single sentence encapsulates the message of the book: less is more. It was a book that readers found confusing, beginning with Rousseau’s publisher, who immediately realised that the work would meet with censure. Although it was in fact banned as soon as it left the printing presses in Paris and Amsterdam in 1762, subsequent editions followed in rapid succession.2 Was this book a novel or a treatise, many wondered. Rousseau stressed the fictitious and theoretical nature of his book: Emile’s upbringing should be viewed as an unattainable ideal, and the book could best be read as a fanciful vision of the future. Rousseau stated this explicitly at the beginning of Emile, where he explained the grounds on which his brainchild had been conceived. He cast Emile as an orphan, so that he, the writer, would not have any parents to worry about. Because he thought it senseless to educate sickly children, his pupil had to be in perfect health. He also considered it pointless to lavish a good education on the children of labourers, so he endowed his protégé with a substantial inheritance from wealthy parents.3 From this ideal starting point, Rousseau recommended that one become acquainted with children before commencing on their education. His advice to educators was to begin by ‘studying your pupils better’.4 He had only one predecessor of whom he approved to some extent: the English philosopher John Locke, a pioneer of the Enlightenment, who in 1693 had published the pedagogical treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Locke had distanced himself from earlier pedagogues, who considered children bad and sinful by nature. He argued that a child came into the world as a blank slate, or to use the Latin term, a tabula rasa. Children learned by experience, through confrontation with their environment – in short, empirically. Rousseau adopted the idea of empirical learning, though

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Fig. 14. Parents attempting to keep their children out of harm’s way. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774.

he saw the child not as a blank slate but as a reservoir filled with innate talents and potential, as a seed that only had to bud. Just as Rousseau’s Emile completely changed people’s attitudes towards children, so had his previously published Discours sur l’inégalité overturned the traditional view of society. Civilisation and culture were, in his view, a threat to both the individual and society, and the development of humankind from wild to civilised signified degeneration rather than progress. Rousseau’s ideal was a state of nature: for society this was an era long past; for the adult individual it was the time of childhood. Rousseau thought that the innately good nature of the child should be spoiled as little as possible by culture, but he was also aware that a certain measure of adjustment was needed to take part in society. For Emile this phase began only when he had come of age, for he spent the first twenty-five years of his life in the countryside, far away from cities, which Rousseau called ‘the abyss of the human species’.5 In his view a child must learn by experience. This process began by learning to walk without a walking frame, leading strings or the padded

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hats customary at the time – in other words, by trial and error – but ‘the well-being of freedom makes up for many wounds’.6 Knowledge and skills should be acquired at first hand, and for this method of learning by doing, nature was the best possible school. A walk in the countryside was instructive, especially in the early morning, when the ‘birds in chorus join together in concert to greet the father of life. . . . The conjunction of these objects brings to the senses an impression of freshness which seems to penetrate to the soul.’7 Rousseau thought that technical know-how should be gained in a practical way, by observing craftsmen in their workshops. Spiritual development, too, was a question of trial and error. Rousseau saw amour propre, self-love, as the mainspring of all human action. Without this ‘passion’, social intercourse would come to a standstill, just as a watch does not run unless the spring is wound. Although self-love can also have negative effects, it should be given free rein to develop. In Rousseau’s view, the only passions that should be curbed by pedagogues are those aroused by cultural – and thus man-made – stimuli, such as reading inappropriate literature, which could fire the imagination prematurely.8 Other, faulty passions, such as vanity and self-interest, needed to be corrected. To this end, Emile’s tutor secretly staged a series of edifying situations that would allow the boy to learn from experience. To restrain Emile’s vanity, for example, he had someone flatter the boy, and then – when he proved susceptible – ridicule him.9 Culture, according to Rousseau, was a child’s greatest enemy, particularly when it took the form of books: ‘reading is the plague of childhood’.10 Rousseau made an exception for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. This novel, which had appeared in 1719 and was soon translated into many languages, was based on a true story. Defoe recounts the vicissitudes of a shipwrecked sailor stranded on a desert island who survives by learning from nature. Robinson even manages to lead a pleasant life – cultivating grain, domesticating goats, building a little house – and records this learning process in a journal, made possible by the miraculous recovery of paper, pen and ink from the wreckage of his ship. The account of this castaway must have been a source of inspiration for Emile, who, like Robinson Crusoe, had to tend his own goat and grow his own vegetables. Rousseau links the individual stories of Robinson and Emile to those of humanity as a whole; indeed, his praise of Robinson Crusoe follows naturally from a remark made some twenty pages earlier: ‘the island of humankind is the earth’.11

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chapter one The Example of Emile

The immediate reaction to Emile was either approval or condemnation. A more considered opinion was formed only by a handful of readers, one of whom was the Dutch author Belle van Zuylen (after her marriage Madame de Charrière). She spoke of ‘chimerical plans’ for an ‘impossible education’, and thought the book a fanciful tale about ‘a nature that exists nowhere and of which no one knows if it ever existed’. But even though she was realistic enough to know that such an existence could never be carved out, she applauded the act of fantasising in itself, and viewed Rousseau as a poetic visionary: ‘Ah, it is better to dream, it is better to leave people the excuse of an insurmountable problem . . . Can we not observe that every realisable idea collides with one interest or another? And then everything is rejected, everything is lost. All rhetoric is powerless in the face of passion or cold self-interest. A starving kite devouring a nightingale does not listen to its song. By contrast, dreams, grandiose plans, sublime images, even if they are not accepted, at least leave the seeds of change in the soul they have touched.’12 Some historians think that Emile made an instant impact, whereas others see the book as a time bomb that did not explode until many years later. The sudden popularity of the name Emile argues in favour of the first point of view. Rousseau’s Amsterdam publisher even asked him to act as godfather to his daughter, Emilie, who was born shortly after Emile appeared. In the first years after its publication, various parents actually raised their children according to Rousseau’s principles. A few such cases are well documented, such as that of Richard Edgeworth, who was born two years after the appearance of Emile. Richard’s father, an English engineer, resolved to make of his son ‘a fair trial of Rousseau’s system’. The little boy was allowed to go about freely and do anything he liked. At first this was a success, for according to his father he was ‘bold, free, fearless, generous’ and ‘ready and keen to use all his senses’. When little Dick was seven years old, his father took him to Paris, where they visited Rousseau, who admittedly found the boy clever, but also stubborn and self-satisfied. At first Dick was educated at boarding schools, but when he proved impossible to discipline, he was sent to sea at the age of fifteen. He deserted and left for America, to the relief of his father, whose memoirs include a candid account of his failure as a pedagogue.

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In France, Manon Roland – who tried to give her daughter Eudora a similar upbringing – described her educational experiment in letters and memoirs. In her case, too, everything went as planned for the first few years, but in the end she could no longer refrain from punishing the girl. ‘How can I master this dull-witted, apathetic child?’ she wrote in despair. In this case, the blame was laid on the child: supposedly cold and stupid, she was finally sent off to a convent.13 Rousseau’s opinion of such experiments is known from several surviving letters, which he wrote in reply to his admirers. A man from Strasbourg wrote to him, expressing a certain pride in having raised his son entirely in accordance with the principles of Emile, upon which he received a rather discouraging reply: ‘so much the worse for you, sir, for you and your child, so much the worse’. Rousseau was more enthusiastic about the initiative of the Princess of Württemberg. She and other parents were warned, however, that his system was a question of all or nothing. A critical reader wrote to Rousseau to say that his method was unworkable in practice. Rousseau’s answer supported this conclusion: ‘You are absolutely right in claiming that it is impossible to create an Emile, but did you really think that that was my intention, and that the book of that name is actually a treatise on education? It is a philosophical work based on the same principle as that advanced by the author in his other writings, namely that man is good by nature.’14 Rousseau’s plea for a natural upbringing coincided with a growing fascination for ‘wild children’. In France and elsewhere in Europe, children were occasionally found who had been living alone in fields and forests; in those days they were thought to have been fed and protected by wolves, bears or other wild animals. Wild children were found even in the Netherlands; one such girl was caught by peasants in the woods near Zwolle.15 Wild children were a sight worth seeing: in 1788 Otto had the opportunity to view several ‘savage children’ at the fair in Delft.16 They were also ideal as case studies to test Rousseau’s ideas. The ultimate experiment was carried out by Jean Itard, director of the Paris institute for deaf-mutes, which Lambert van Eck visited during his Paris sojourn in 1788. Itard had taken into his care a boy caught in the mountains of Aveyron, and was bringing him up according to a specially devised plan. His efforts were not very successful, but Itard’s account of the boy’s upbringing nevertheless became a classic in the field of educational theory.17

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Emile arrived at just the right time, when traditional methods of education were being called into question everywhere. Nor did the Dutch lag behind in this respect, for more pedagogical treatises were published in the Netherlands in the 1760s than in the whole of the previous century. Learned societies such as the Dutch Society of Sciences stimulated this interest in education by holding essay contests and publishing the best of the entries that came flooding in. In his Confessions, Rousseau even accused one such essayist of plagiarism,18 but his accusation was unjust, because the competition was held – and the entry in question submitted – before and not after the publication of Emile. The coincidence does confirm, however, that the subject was in the air. The theme of education also cropped up regularly in periodicals, and well-known Dutch authors such as Betje Wolff began to publish books on education and child-rearing. Among the first writers to subscribe to Rousseau’s beliefs was Willem Emmery de Perponcher. In 1774 he published his Instructions d’un père à son fils (Instructions from a father to his son), in which the son bore the revealing name of Emile. When the writer became a father five years later, his acquaintances expected his son to be raised as a ‘model and masterpiece of education’.19 Sure enough, De Perponcher threw himself energetically into his child’s education, and was forced to conclude that there was no satisfactory manual for home tuition as he envisioned it. Thus he once again took pen in hand and wrote – this time in Dutch – the more pragmatic Onderwijs voor kinderen (Lessons for children). In his preface, De Perponcher stresses the basis of his work: a step-by-step method of education, closely connected with children’s perception of their environment, which takes into account their individual learning needs. Instruction was supposed to be playful and illustrative. De Perponcher’s three-volume handbook, numbering more than 1,500 pages, teaches children about a wide variety of subjects, ranging from abstract character traits, such as ‘benevolence’ and ‘orderliness’, to such concrete objects as ‘bread’ and ‘buttermilk’.20 De Perponcher wrote simple lessons containing occasional echoes of Rousseau, such as the idea that evil inevitably punishes itself. In the very first story, a little boy ignores a warning not to pick up a hot teapot and consequently burns his fingers. Other stories, such as ‘Rain makes plants grow’, show that man can learn from nature. Subsequent lessons contain such warnings as ‘Children ought not to play with weapons’, which begins with a father exclaiming: ‘What have you got

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there, Jacob? What are you playing with?’ The child replies: ‘A pair of pistols that I took from the table.’ As a deterrent, the father then tells the story of the little boy who lost his nose playing such a dangerous game. De Perponcher’s handbook was a huge success, perhaps because his stories were written so that children could read them at a young age. The well-known author Jacob van Lennep, who wrote the introduction to a new edition of the book nearly a century later, wrote that he had read it avidly as a mere four-year-old.21 By the time Otto van Eck began his diary at the age of ten, he had long grown out of De Perponcher’s Onderwijs voor kinderen. Yet we know from a number of casual remarks that he, too, was raised with this book. In his diary he writes more than once – in May 1791, for example – about the beautiful song of the nightingale. Love of these birds could have been instilled in him by De Perponcher’s Onderwijs, in which a ‘May song’ associates the month of May with the song of the nightingale: ‘Hear the leaves rustle! Listen in yonder wood. The nightingale is singing!’22 Several months later Otto refers explicitly to De Perponcher’s Onderwijs when he recognises a story from a French children’s book written for a somewhat older readership – Madame De la Fites’s Entretiens, drames et contes moraux (Conversations, plays and moral tales) – as a ‘little story that Perponcher borrowed from her for his Onderwijs’.23 This proves that Otto had read De Perponcher’s work attentively. Even as a sixteen-year-old, Otto took Onderwijs voor kinderen from the bookcase to read during breakfast: ‘While eating, I read a bit in Mr Perponcher’s book for children.’ This note is also interesting for another reason. De Perponcher is the only author Otto sometimes calls ‘Mister’, invariably referring to other authors only by their surnames. The latter are paper acquaintances, not people of flesh and blood. The use of this courteous form of address suggests that Otto actually knew De Perponcher, which may well have been the case, for he was a distant relative of the Van Ecks. Lambert, too, referred to him in his handwritten encyclopaedia as ‘Mr Perponcher’. The De Perponcher and Van Eck families belonged to the same cultural milieu: Otto’s uncle Pieter Paulus, for example, was – like De Perponcher – a member of the select literary society ‘Dulces Ante Omnia Musae’. In short, Otto was a perfect example of the kind of reader for whom De Perponcher had intended his Onderwijs voor kinderen.

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chapter one The Philanthropinists

In his first book, published in 1777, De Perponcher frequently acknowledged his indebtedness to Rousseau, but in Onderwijs voor kinderen, published five years later, the Frenchman’s name is no longer mentioned. Instead, several German pedagogues make an appearance. They were representatives of a new school of thought that had arisen in German education. The ‘friends of mankind’, as these pedagogues called themselves, were determined to put Rousseau’s ideas into practice. To this end they wrote educational manuals, published periodicals, founded schools that experimented with his ideas, and set up publishing houses and bookshops with their own list of philanthropinist schoolbooks, advice manuals and children’s books, which they distributed to a seemingly insatiable market.24 Johann Bernard Basedow, who stood at the cradle of the movement, published in 1768 his Vorstellung an Menschenfreunde und vermögende Männer über Schulen und Studien (Proposal to philanthropists and men of means regarding schools and studies). This plea to bring up and instruct children in an enlightened way was addressed to the ‘friends of mankind’, or philanthropists, which explains how this educational movement came to be called philanthropinism. The word Pädagogik had been introduced into the German language in 1771, and not long afterward the first chair in this discipline was established at the University of Halle. In addition to Basedow, two other leaders of the movement became widely known in the Netherlands: Joachim Heinrich Campe and Christian Gotthilf Salzmann. Although the philanthropinists developed educational systems that were enlightened and progressive, their approaches differed widely. Their reformatory zeal went beyond the education of children: adults, too, were taken in hand. In addition to his children’s books and pedagogical writings, for example, Salzmann published works on the ‘sensible education of educators’.25 Campe’s edition of Emile illustrates the transformation undergone by Rousseau’s body of thought under the influence of Campe’s new philanthropinist mentors.26 The German translation was loaded with footnotes and commentary, which overwhelmed the original ideas with warnings and criticism, drawn from the works of various German pedagogues, of whom Campe himself was the most charitable. The very first footnote, written to accompany Rousseau’s famous opening sentence, already undermines the basis of his teachings, namely that nature goes before culture: ‘One might just as well argue, however, that

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Fig. 15. J.H. Campe’s translation of Robinson Crusoe, 1791.

many things degenerate when they are left to nature alone and are not helped along by human diligence.’27 This footnote also sums up the revisionists’ programme: nature is all very well, but human intervention remains indispensable. A Dutch translation of this German Emile was published in 1790, the year before Otto began his diary. As will become apparent, Otto was not raised according to the letter of Emile, but rather according to the footnotes of the revised philanthropinist translation. The German pedagogues remained influential in Holland until well into the nineteenth century. Almost the complete works of Campe, Basedow and several other authors were translated into Dutch. Philanthropinist notions of sober rationalism and tolerant Christianity were closely connected to ideas current among the enlightened elite of the Republic. Periodicals appeared in the Netherlands with a philanthropinist slant, such as Bijdragen tot het Menschelijk Geluk (Contributions to Human Happiness) of 1789–1793 and De Menschenvriend (The Friend of Mankind) of 1788–1797, the titles of which already express the philanthropinists’ agenda.

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Fig. 16. Reason. From Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798–1800.

The popularity of the philanthropinists in the Netherlands was in keeping with the orientation – which grew markedly stronger in the late eighteenth century – towards German culture, as evidenced by the growing number of translations of German books in all fields.28 Nowhere was the connection between the Enlightenment and education so close as in Germany. In 1784 Immanuel Kant had succinctly defined the Enlightenment as ‘man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage’.29 Enlightenment, emancipation and education were all of a piece, and Kant was also active in the field of education, giving lectures on the subject which were later compiled in his book Über Pädagogik (On Pedagogy).30 Rousseau remained, in spite of it all, the most important beacon for all these pedagogues. It was no coincidence that Basedow named his daughter Emilie and resolved to use her as a guinea pig to test his own system, which he had outlined in his book on education.31 The proud father reported the results of this experiment in the new educational

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Fig. 17. The Philanthropinum with pupils working in their own gardens. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774.

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journals. In his view, Emilie’s mental and physical development proved him right, for his daughter could read by the age of three and her body had been toughened by going about naked much of the time. Little Emilie was a walking advertisement for the girls’ school that her father planned to establish alongside his school for boys. Basedow’s boarding school for boys, the Philanthropinum, had been founded a few years earlier in the town of Dessau, where the reigning sovereign, the enlightened Prince Leopold III Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, had given him the opportunity to put his ideas into practice. While Rousseau had his brainchild Emile grow up outside society as much as possible, the philanthropinists chose to bring up their pupils in less extreme isolation. To be sure, their institutions were deliberately located outside the cities, but education took place within the social context of the school. Basedow’s Philanthropinum became an example to other schools founded throughout Germany as well as abroad. To attract pupils, they published prospectuses describing their educational systems and lavishing them with praise. Campe, a former teacher at Dessau, set up his own school, where the pupils had their own gardens and rooms equipped with tools and turning-lathes. Physical training was also included in the curriculum. The philanthropinists were responsible for devising the vaulting horse, the buck and other pieces of gymnastic equipment later found at every school. Dutch translations of their prospectuses were distributed in the Netherlands in order to recruit pupils. It is difficult to tell how many Dutch children attended philanthropinist schools in Germany, but the modern education on offer there was certainly an attractive option.32 We know a lot about the ideological basis of Salzmann’s school, because he outlined it in a detailed prospectus published in 1785.33 He began by stating that for the last fifteen years people had been waking up to the fact that much of the ‘wretchedness and misery’ in the world had been caused by a misspent education. Like the other philanthropinists, he was keenly aware of being an innovator. He chose the village of Schnepfenthal because, he said, it was ‘not situated so close to the city that it could be badly influenced by it, yet it was close enough to allow the pupils to associate with upright, enlightened and cultivated people’. In his prospectus Salzmann promised to base the curriculum at Schnepfenthal on what was practical and useful. The rote learning of vocabulary lists, rules of grammar and the catechism would make way for visits to workshops to become acquainted with artisans and their world. Pupils would be encouraged to question craftsmen about their

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Fig. 18. Brochure describing Salzmann’s school in Schnepfenthal, 1808.

trade and earnings. Geography and history would be made tangible by starting close to home. Salzmann planned to make frequent trips with his pupils to a nearby monastery to look at the tombstones. The sight of old graves and bones would prompt them to ask interesting questions, thus inspiring the teacher to impart historical knowledge. Salzmann did not believe in burdening his pupils with Latin, a language he considered to be of limited use. He sought to turn his pupils into ‘practical, active individuals’. It was more important for them ‘to learn how to transform the wilderness, which the world now was, into a paradise’. His educational system was intended for boys between the ages of ten and sixteen: Otto’s age in the years he kept a diary. The philanthropinists were convinced that offering a better education to youngsters would, in just a few generations, lead to a better world. The philanthropinists were realistic enough to recognise that eradicating all evil, even in the microcosm of a boarding school, would not be an easy task. One evil in particular had attracted their attention: they were the first to raise the subject of masturbation, an issue ignored by earlier educationalists. Salzmann swore to the parents of prospective pupils that he would protect his school from what he considered a grave wrong: ‘I am convinced that our whole country is tainted by

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it, and that millions are either struck down in the prime of life or else lead a joyless existence.’ In other writings, too, he warned against the vice that turned young men into ‘dried-up lemons’.34 The pedagogues joined ranks with the physicians, who likewise churned out one treatise after another, the most influential of which was written by the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot. His treatise on the dreadful ‘diseases caused by self-corruption’ appeared in 1777 in a Dutch translation that was reprinted in 1792. Salzmann, who had done some research on the subject, knew what he was talking about: ‘I asked the public to write to me on this subject, not only to compile material for a book, but also to discover the sad secrets that I suspected, to enable me to safeguard against them at the school I intend to establish. I was successful. I received the most remarkable information from all sides. Youths who had for many years harboured such sorrow in their breasts opened their hearts to me and divulged their secrets, which had never been made known to anyone but the Almighty. As a result of these secret stories (which I preserve very carefully in my writing desk, having cut off the names and stipulated that, if I die suddenly, they are to be burned), I saw two main causes: seduction (by servant boys and girls, bed fellows, schoolmates, the occasional steward) and boredom (from inactivity, want of diversion, too much instruction).’ Indeed, not long after writing this, Salzmann published a separate work: Ueber die heimlichen Sünden der Jugend (On the Secret Sins of Youth). The book contains over three hundred pages of stories about young people who bring ruin upon themselves by surrendering to this temptation. The tidal wave of books on masturbation started with Rousseau, who – in Emile – had been the first to call for vigilance. The collective fear of the consequences of masturbation haunted enlightened circles in particular, to the extent that the subject was given its own entry in Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Campe, too, was in the vanguard of those bent on rooting out this evil. In 1786 he became chairman of a committee appointed to judge the essays submitted to a contest held by the Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly) to determine how best to combat this evil habit. The best of the twenty-seven entries were published in his Allgemeine Revision des Erziehungswesens (General Revision of the Educational System). The radical remedy recommended by this pedagogue was infibulation, in which a metal ring was inserted in a boy’s foreskin, rendering an erection so painful that it was virtually impossible, so that the evil punished itself. It seems strange for a friendly

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educator to advocate such draconian measures, but in the end it was the ultimate test of self-control, the crux of philanthropinist education. The root of the evil lay, after all, in an unbridled imagination, which supposedly allowed the sexual urges to run wild.35 Masturbation was seen as a prime example of irrational, uncontrolled and fruitless behaviour, even worse than suicide, because those who masturbated harmed not only themselves but society as a whole. It was the antisocial conduct of self-sufficient individuals who ignored their fellow human beings. The philosopher Kant argued that masturbation was the opposite of Enlightenment.36 Otto does not mention the subject in his diary, but on 20 February 1792 he was warned by his parents to ‘withstand temptations to evil (which, as I grow older, will often come over me), perhaps surrendering myself to a bunch of lawless lads, possibly causing me to lose my health and, above all, leading to my own undoing’. The offensive launched against masturbation was in keeping with the great emphasis on the formation of ‘passions’ and emotions by modern educationalists. Classical authors such as Aristotle and Cicero had written about the necessity of guiding the emotions, but the various methods developed by the philanthropinists were completely new. On this point they agreed with Rousseau, who – despite his reluctance to interfere – thought intervention vital in this case. An example of their methods is to be found in Campe’s Kleine zielkunde voor kinderen (Concise handbook of psychology for children), the title of the Dutch translation that appeared in 1782. In the introduction Campe explains that there are different ways of steering children’s emotions, namely by giving ‘verbal explanations’, by working with ‘sensory representations’, such as paintings and prints, and by offering ‘true or invented examples’. But the best way to learn, in his opinion, was by experience. Campe goes on to describe a dozen conversations between a father and his children, which begin with such declarations as: ‘Rejoice, my children! Today we shall again become acquainted with something very remarkable about our souls.’ In one of these conversations, the father manipulates his children’s emotions by reading aloud a letter from their elder brother, who has been away on a journey for some time. First he tells them that their dear brother announces his homecoming, then that his arrival will be postponed for a month, and finally that the delay has been caused by illness. He then points out to his children that they have meanwhile experienced three ‘interesting emotions’: joy, hope and sorrow. In the last chapters the father talks in detail about the unhappiness

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Fig. 19. A dying father and a careless girl. The portrayal of various emotions. From J.H. Campe’s Kleine zielkunde, 1782.

of people who cannot control their emotions: the mentally ill. The children find this the most fascinating session. The last conversation is the only one that opens with a question put by the children: ‘Father, will we hear more today of such horrible lunatics?’37 That a child’s education should pivot on the control – rather than the suppression – of desires was a notion subscribed to by many Dutch pedagogues: ‘While it is the passions that can bring about our happiness or unhappiness, and they are innate, the passions are the first thing to which a supervisor must pay attention in educating children.’ From this perspective, they turn against older schoolbooks that make much of the horrors of war. Such impressions only stimulate cruelty and callousness in the child: ‘One should conceal from them all that is cruel. Teach them to shudder at the sight of blood. No birds or animals should be killed in their proximity.’ On the other hand, tenderness and compassion ought to be fostered from a young age. This can be achieved by taking children along to visit hospitals or the poor, so that they develop a ‘tender heart’.38 This new approach was based on the assumption that

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Fig. 20. The Passions. From Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798–1800.

a child was endowed from birth with individual feelings and faculties, which reflected the more general emphasis on individuality and identity that was emerging in those years.39 Otto’s Upbringing in Practice Otto’s diary reveals that his parents also saw self-control as the basis of child-rearing. Otto himself was well aware of this, as emerges from a passage he wrote in 1791: ‘[I] did my very best to be sensible and prevent the effects of anger and rashness.’ That day he tried ‘to be tractable, just, gentle, charitable, modest, peaceable, grateful and friendly’. He did not always succeed, however. Over a year later, after noting that he had quarrelled with his sisters, he added, ‘I intend to cure myself of the shortcoming of irritability, because of its bad consequences.’ On 5 July 1795 he admitted: ‘How little I master my impulses and how often I let them get the better of me, especially the haste and carelessness that give rise to most of my mistakes.’ On another occasion, in February

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1796, his mother again summed up his shortcomings: ‘disobedient, inclined to talk back, quick-tempered, vengeful and immodest’. To guide their son’s feelings and emotions, Otto’s parents arranged for him to have edifying experiences. They adopted this approach when Otto succumbed to self-pity while suffering from a long illness. His father ordered him to accompany the gardener on an errand: they were to take some money to one of his tenant farmers. Otto’s reaction reveals that this meeting had the desired effect, which was to shock him into recognising that his own situation was not so bad after all: ‘I knew that this man had been ailing for the past two years, but I never thought I would find him so poorly. I found him in bed (which he never left the whole day long), emaciated, as pale as death, and suffering from a nose-bleed that had lasted for four hours and still hadn’t stopped. It was then that I thought for the first time about how many things I had to thank God for, and how badly I had acted recently by complaining about my misfortune.’ In his diary Otto laid it on thickly, noting how preoccupied he had been with the ‘discomforts’ of his illness, without considering ‘the good that my illness had brought me as regards morals’ and without stopping to think ‘that there are so many people who suffer a great deal more than I do’. Otto’s upbringing, which took place largely in the seclusion of the country estate of De Ruit, had been inspired by philanthropinist thought. The source of a piece of wisdom Otto offers – that one should ‘adapt’ children’s education to ‘suit their nature’ – is significant in this context. It is not Rousseau’s work that he refers to, but that of Basedow. No matter how tempting it is to imagine Otto – with his own vegetable garden, carpenter’s workshop and goats – as Robinson Crusoe in the flesh, washed up on the island of De Ruit, where he could experiment with human existence, living a completely self-sufficient life unhindered by book-learning and civilisation, Otto’s diary does not permit us to paint that Rousseauesque picture. This little boy – whose mother frequently rapped his knuckles for coming inside with muddy shoes, who was forbidden to go ice-skating and grounded because he climbed over a fence, who was often ordered to stay indoors so as not to catch a cold – actually bears little resemblance to blithe, barefooted Emile, wandering about godlessly out of doors with nature as his most important guide, and withdrawing in the evenings to a room so sparsely furnished that even a blind horse could do little damage to it: Your ill-tempered child ruins everything he touches. Do not get angry; put what he can damage out of his reach. He breaks the furniture he

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uses. Do not hurry to replace it for him. Let him feel the disadvantage of being deprived of it. He breaks the windows of his room; let the wind blow on him night and day without worrying about colds, for it is better that he have a cold than that he be crazy.40

Otto’s activities corresponded much more closely to those of the pupils at Salzmann’s Philanthropinum, where life followed a strict daily regimen, and civilisation and nature were both part of a well-balanced educational diet. Here nature had been reduced to a park next to the school, with individual gardens for the pupils, who, in imitation of smallholders, were allowed to sell their produce. Like Otto, the pupils at this Philanthropinum were given the opportunity to rear and tend animals, and the reading of books – those of sound content – was encouraged and even required as part of the daily regime. The toughening and development of the body was stimulated by gymnastics, dancing lessons and long hikes. Objectivity, workmanship and patience were acquired by means of handicrafts: making fishing nets, fashioning paper toys, basket-weaving, painting, cabinet-making and carpentry, to which end the boys’ rooms were equipped with workbenches. While the philanthropinists themselves say little in their prospectuses about how things worked out in actual practice, Otto’s diary provides a lively account of the struggle between man and matter. In his diary Otto weaves, paints and hammers to his heart’s content, and such activities served a utilitarian purpose, as they did at the philanthropinist schools: Otto glues boxes together for his mother, repairs book-bindings for his father, makes nets to use in fishing, and builds cages for his animals. It is not known how the pupils at the Philanthropinum reacted to this enforced functionality. Otto usually did his chores with pleasure, but sometimes he felt the need to make something just for fun. On his own initiative he made a miniature windmill, which he proudly displayed to his father: ‘He asked me what purpose it served, and recited this Latin saying: “nisi utile est quod facimus, stulta est gloria” (if what we do is not useful, it is foolish to take pride in it), but I replied that I hadn’t done it to reap glory, but for my own amusement.’ Painting a goat-cart gave Otto much less satisfaction: ‘After eating and reading as usual, I spent the whole afternoon painting a cart; truly not a pleasant activity, but it had to be done.’ The industrious hammering that resounds repeatedly in the diary, right up to the last entry, is frequently interrupted by expressions of satisfaction at having done the job in question: ‘After eating I did my Latin theme and then took up my old carpentry project and happily finished the work today.’

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It is the higher purpose behind the task that Otto dislikes most about his dancing lessons. On 24 January 1794 he writes that, under the guidance of the dancing master, he and his sisters danced ‘or rather practised steps, because the dancing master says that good posture is more effective than dancing, and Papa agrees with him, although we perhaps don’t think it so much fun’. The dancing lesson Otto had attended the previous year at the house of his friend Ceesje Reepmaker was much more jolly: ‘And so it happened that we arrived safe and sound at the house of Mr Reepmaker, where we passed the evening, and again I had a lot of fun, especially joining in with Ceesje’s dancing lesson and prancing about with them.’ Otto actually liked to dance, but only in an atmosphere of ‘dancing and jumping and joking around’, preferably in the absence of the dancing master. The attempts made by a succession of dancing masters to improve Otto’s posture and dance steps frequently led to explosive conflicts: ‘Mama says that, even though I danced well, I didn’t do my best after all, because I behaved improperly towards Master Demny, who wanted to cure me of a bad habit.’ Several weeks later Otto’s recalcitrance again prompted his mother to give him a good scolding: ‘Arriving home at one o’clock, we once more found the dancing master, to whom I again behaved badly (according to Mama), having been unwilling to follow his good advice and unaware that everything he told me was for my own good.’ The fact that Otto afterwards describes a number of dancing lessons at which he obediently danced a ‘contredanse’ suggests that he had taken his mother’s admonitions to heart. When one of his dancing masters quit his position, Otto even managed to express regret: ‘We are all very sorry that he is going away, because he took such pains to teach us well.’ Sometimes the roles were reversed, such as the time Otto made an effort to teach one of the servants how to make fishing nets: ‘In addition to my own affairs, I’ve now acted as a master for a change, by teaching one of our servants how to make fishing nets, so that he can make them too, and needn’t spend the winter evenings in idleness.’41 All the same, the hands-on approach to Otto’s physical activities was not supposed to tip the scales in the other direction and encourage him to become a craftsman. As at the Philanthropinum, which was attended by privileged children destined to work with their heads rather than their hands, it was not the Van Ecks’ intention that Otto should seriously consider earning a living as a carpenter. Otto was very much aware of the necessity of maintaining this delicate balance when, at the age of sixteen, he cautiously requested that his studies be expanded

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to include lessons from a professional carpenter, choosing to express this wish with the following words: ‘I should very much like, if Papa consents to it, to learn a little carpentry, just as a pastime.’42 Otto’s visits to workshops and factories were also inspired by Rousseau and the philanthropinists. Otto was once taken to a glassworks, and on another occasion to a bullet factory. During a journey to Gelderland in the summer of 1793, he observed the workings of a paper mill: ‘After our meal we went to see the paper mill, which I liked very much.’ Another kind of walk that Otto took with his father was recommended by De Perponcher in his Onderwijs voor kinderen. Following Rousseau and the philanthropinists, De Perponcher urged parents and teachers to take walks as often as possible ‘with their children and pupils out of doors, in the fields, and to draw their attention to what goes on there, taking those things as the basis of teaching. This will be the best instruction of all, for it is the Book of Nature.’ The children’s books Otto read were also teeming with strict yet just fathers who, during long walks with their children, solemnly held forth on questions regarding religion, people and society, drawing inspiration from the flora and fauna they saw along the way. These fictional excursions come to life in Otto’s diary, in which frequent mention is made of walks undertaken with his father for both education and enjoyment. His description of just such an outing that took place on 28 September 1791 encapsulates the most important eighteenth-century educational ideals: This morning I walked with Papa to The Hague and had a lot of fun observing nature, which (it seems to me) I can do much better walking than riding. Moreover, one sometimes has a chance encounter that one might otherwise have missed. For example, we saw a woman riding with two children. She struck one of them – the one who wouldn’t sit still (and might even have been less than a year old) – and this upset the child, so that it cried the whole way, whereas if the woman had been kind to it, it would have been quiet and obedient. This incident prompted us to talk about the good fortune of children who have sensible parents who guide them, just as God guides all people.

The theme of this walk had not been fixed beforehand, but the accidental meeting had indeed been very edifying, providing his father with an opportunity to point out to Otto the mildness of his own upbringing. This is not to say, however, that he was never punished. His diary reveals that his parents took a great interest in methods of reward and punishment, then a topic of lively and sometimes heated debate among educators. Campe even went so far as to publish an entire book on the

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Fig. 21. Country Life. From Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798–1800.

subject. That the question also generated interest in Holland is apparent from an essay contest held in 1792, in which the applicants set forth their theories on reward and punishment in the schools.43 Progress Reports in lieu of Canings For centuries educators had stressed the importance of breaking a child’s will. Actual education could not begin until a child had learned to obey. Seventeenth-century Dutch portraits often show children with a tame bird perched on their arms or a dog at their feet – creatures just as well trained as themselves. The older pedagogues found it only natural that a child’s education should include the infliction of corporal punishment. The father traditionally had the right to subject his children to discipline, including canings if necessary. Even the progressive John Locke thought that beatings were an indispensable means of correction.

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Fig. 22. ‘Merit table’, or school report. From Verhandelingen uitgegeeven door de Nederlandsche Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen, 1798.

Rousseau, who took a completely different view of the matter, thought any form of punishment wrong. In his eyes, punishment was unnecessary because of the self-correcting effect of nature. It was a piece of advice that worked beautifully in the case of his fictional Emile. As we have seen, however, parents who tried to raise their children according to this principle soon came to a different conclusion, while the pragmatic philanthropinists sought a happy medium: if needed, the self-punishment of evil could be lent a helping hand. Basedow was the first to adopt a systematic approach to the subject of reward and punishment. By introducing a ‘merit table’ to keep track of the behaviour and progress of each pupil, he actually invented the school report. These reports, which have been preserved since the opening of the school in 1777, contained two tables: one recorded a pupil’s

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virtues and merits, the other his censurable conduct, or demerits. For the merits in the first table, the children were rewarded with coupons, which they were forced to surrender for the demerits in the second table. The names of all the pupils were listed on a bulletin board, and a yellow nail was hammered next to the name of anyone who had earned more than fifty coupons. Those who had earned a certain number of nails were admitted to the Order of Diligence. As regards punishment, Basedow was the most old-fashioned of all the philanthropinists, since his school still practised corporal punishment. Campe rejected the system of merit tables, because he thought it wrong to encourage competitiveness in this way. Salzmann, on the other hand, adopted merit tables and the Order of Diligence at his school, and even introduced rewards and punishments in real money. At the end of each week there was a ‘cash box audit’, when each pupil calculated how much he had lost or earned. According to Salzmann, this system fostered the development of economic insight in children.44 Some traces of Salzmann’s system are to be found in Otto’s diary. Now and then his efforts were rewarded with money, such as his weekly task of helping his father with some copy work: ‘received twelve pennies from Papa for three articles’, as noted on 8 May 1791. A week later he wrote: ‘The payment from Papa came to almost nothing last week.’ And a week after that: ‘I shall take stock. Did not earn as much with writing as Mama would have wished; with sums I’ve made it to fractions and have gained some understanding of them. As far as my homework, my manners and my conduct are concerned, I shall take stock of that tomorrow.’ Otto also refers – on 28 May 1795, for instance – to a list kept by his mother, a kind of merit table: ‘I behaved badly at table and especially towards the nursemaid, so today, too, my name was put on the list frequently.’ Six months later he wrote: ‘Nevertheless I have something else to confess, even though it shames me, namely a list on which Mama has written all the mistakes I made today.’ Misbehaviour had its price, and Otto had to pay it out of his pocket money. Sometimes, however, the mere threat of punishment was enough to make him toe the line, as revealed by his diary entry of 12 November 1794. His mother’s ‘list of punishments’ has not survived, but Otto’s diary can be seen as a shadow ledger. Once, for example, he had to pay two stuivers for his ‘carelessness and disobedience’, and a day full of ‘mischief and teasing’ resulted in a fine of 5½ stuivers, ‘which penalty will, I hope, make me

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see the error of my ways and lead to improvement’. Several weeks after writing this, he appears to have made amends – he got up early and enthusiastically did his homework with his mother – but afterwards he erred yet again by answering his mother in a ‘rude manner, for which I again had to forfeit one stuiver as a fine’. Three years later the system was still in full force: he stood staring out the window for so long that he ‘could not read in Hermes [a religious handbook], which meant I had to pay a fine’.45 The system of merit tables was also propagated in the Netherlands. The Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen (Society for the Promotion of the Public Good) held an essay contest for the most efficacious solution to the challenge posed by the following question: ‘What are the best means of turning children into sociable people while they are still at school?’ One of the answers contained a ‘behaviour table’.46 Variants of these were in use at Dutch boarding schools, as evidenced by the memoirs of Christoffel Baerken, Otto’s senior by ten years, who attended a boarding school in Boxmeer in the 1780s and gave a detailed description of the state of affairs there. At his school, where the system had taken on a life of its own, the schoolboys carried on a brisk trade in merit coupons.47 A variation on this system was developed by J.F. Martinet in his Huisboek voor vaderlandsche gezinnen (Household book for Dutch families) of 1793, in which he advocates keeping lists of virtues and vices. The Van Ecks owned this book, and Otto himself consulted it occasionally. Martinet was bent on helping children ‘to establish order in their souls’, to which end they should be encouraged to draw up two lists, one in which the virtues and vices are mixed up together, and another in which the virtues and vices are recorded separately. These lists must be displayed on your table every day, and you must ask them why the first is called the list of disorder and the other the list of order, which vices destroy order and which virtues create order, which they should follow or avoid, and why. This will become a very useful and entertaining exercise for you [the parents] and for them [the children].48

Reward and punishment could also be given by either allowing or denying small pleasures. On 21 October 1791, for example, Lambert van Eck rewarded his son’s behaviour by permitting him to buy a bird at the market. In August of that same year, when Otto wished to buy a couple of rabbits, his father imposed a probationary period: ‘I should

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Fig. 23. ‘Dearest child, your father loves you, he is surely your best friend / But, alas, he must deny you things that harm you in the end.’ A father steps in to prevent disaster. From J.H. Swildens, Vaderlandsch A–B-boek, 1781.

have liked to visit the market to buy a couple of rabbits, but Papa said that lately he had not been as satisfied with me as he ought to have been, so I must postpone this pleasure for a week.’ The punishments suggested by other Dutch pedagogues ranged from putting on an angry face to withholding sweets, toys or even food – although the last possibility was condemned by the more enlightened among them. Now and then Otto was punished by being sent to bed early, which was humiliating because it meant that he was temporarily subject to the same rules as his younger sisters: . . . when Wim Beerestein and a lot of other people were here, I spoiled things again (as usual); first, says Papa, I was, among the guests, wild and impolite and rude, and second (which is the worst thing and what I

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regret the most), I shamefully misled Papa about taking a biscuit, which made Papa very angry, and he said that he never would have thought that of me and feared that I would eventually go from bad to worse if I didn’t remain under his watchful eye and beneath his roof, and he also ordered me straightaway (and every evening from now on) to go to bed at half past nine like my sisters.

Such punishment – those who acted childishly were treated as small children – could only be effective in an educational climate in which distinguishing between the various stages of childhood and adopting educational strategies appropriate to each age group had become matter of course. Martinet’s Huisboek includes a new option that advises parents temporarily to withhold affection from naughty children by ignoring them or isolating them from the rest of the family: ‘As soon as your child is naughty or disobedient, you must tell it that it is no longer worthy of being in your presence.’49 Rewarding and punishing with affection was a modern idea also to be found in Otto’s diary. When his mother recovered from an illness, he was rewarded with ‘kisses from father and mother’ for the ‘prayer of thanks’ he had written for the occasion. On 28 May 1791, Otto reflected on the past week and wrote: Today I spent the whole day at home and resolved this week to examine my behaviour during this period. I recall many mistakes and many punishments, particularly for my reckless behaviour and my moods, which often give rise to useless discontent. Also many good intentions, but bad performance, so that Papa reproached me, saying that not one day had passed in which he had not been displeased with me, even today, though I’d tried my hardest. Still, I hope that I won’t lose my parents’ love, for that would make me unhappy.

Two weeks later Otto made so many mistakes while reciting his lessons to his father that he was threatened with being sent to boarding school. His father already had one in mind: the boarding school run by Michaël van Kuik in Delft. Otto knew that this was no idle threat. In those days it was not unusual for children to be sent to boarding school; some parents even parked their children at a boarding school in their own home town. Fortunately for Otto, Lambert discussed the matter again with his wife, after which he decided to give his son another chance, though he could not refrain from threatening, as Otto noted, ‘that if it happens again, he would definitely send me away and have nothing more to do with me’.

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Even so, Otto continued to disappoint his parents. On 26 June 1791, at the age of ten, he gave an account of one of his parents’ tirades: Papa also showed his displeasure at my incorrigibility in talking back and the sour faces I make at everything that is said to me. There were also many complaints about me, namely that I usually rush through things with my head full of fun and games and shun all effort in everything I must do. That’s why Papa is afraid that I’ll become an unbearable, obstinate, short-tempered know-nothing as well as an unmannered street urchin. Oh, how little I deserve the constant care my parents take of me, and how much more pleasant it is for me to remain in their hands than to be given over completely to strangers.

Threatening one’s children with boarding school was not among the pieces of advice given in Martinet’s Huisboek, published two years later, but it was in keeping with his suggestion to threaten children with emotional isolation. The author worked out this principle in somewhat more depth in a chapter addressed directly ‘To Children’, intended to make them aware of their great indebtedness to their parents: Oh, says many an orphan, if only I had the unmitigated pleasure of seeing my parents here on earth. I should give everything I possess to have that back again. But they are gone – alas, gone for ever! Here is a child with no supervision, who doesn’t know what to do, who is deprived of comfort among strangers who lack a parental heart; there is another child who drifts, without knowing where he will end up. . . . Without your parents’ care you would have starved long ago, been lost long ago, been resting in your grave long ago, yea, already forgotten in the world!

No words can describe the willingness of parents to sacrifice everything for their children, nor can their efforts be expressed in monetary terms: It is fortunate for you that this account is not drawn up nor payment demanded! The former would be too long for you to take in at a glance, and for the latter you would not find sufficient riches in all the gold and silver mines of the world.

What is expected in return is merely ‘gratitude, love and obedience’, and support and compassion when one’s parents become old and infirm. ‘A child, negligent at such times, is a monster by nature.’50 The moral of the story is a variation on the memento mori theme, an exhortation to ‘remember the death of your parents’: ‘therefore live in such a way that afterwards you will have no cause to reproach yourself for neglecting your duties’. That Otto took this message to heart is apparent from

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various passages in his diary, in which he asks himself in desperation how he will ever be able to repay his parents’ love and concern. He does this, for instance, on 5 July 1796, his sixteenth birthday, when he thanks God for giving him parents who care for my body and soul, thus helping me and enabling me to work towards my own happiness, and so I harm myself when I am reluctant to follow their orders or take their good advice and am ungrateful to them by not wanting to obey them, thus leading to my unhappiness. I hope this thought will occur to me more often, for then I shall be confident that with God’s help my improvement will follow naturally, and I should be able to live much more cheerfully, and undoubtedly bring Papa and Mama much pleasure on earth and let them die more peacefully, if they could have more faith in my behaviour, or, if I were already dead, could be assured of finding me reunited with God.

The death of an aunt several years before had made him feel very sorry for his nieces and nephews, who had already lost their mother, and he had resolved in future to be more obedient to his own mother: ‘I seldom give it a thought, but Uncle said that we could learn much from this, and should be obedient to Papa and Mama while they are in good health, so that when they die we need feel no remorse on that score.’ The Little Man Within The primary objective of Otto’s upbringing was the formation of his conscience. This is not to be found in very explicit terms in his diary, nor did pedagogues dwell on the subject. In Otto’s day, in fact, the ‘conscience’ had just been invented; even the word itself was new to the Dutch language. To be sure, the authorised version of the Dutch Bible did mention the word ‘consciëntie’, but it was used in a more religious sense. In the late eighteenth century, the conscience came to be associated with civic virtue rather than religious norms. It became an anthropomorphic image of internalised values. Otto’s mother spoke of ‘the little man within’, while others imagined the conscience as an inner voice. Among the first authors to use the word in this way were Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken, who wrote the following in their novel Willem Leevend of 1784–1785: ‘Can we have a clear conscience if we do not acquit ourselves properly of the great duty of education?’51 The modern conscience was a product of the Enlightenment, and it is no

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Fig. 24. The Conscience. ‘Nothing gives me greater pleasure than cheerfully performing my duty.’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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coincidence that the same authors speak elsewhere of an ‘enlightened’ conscience. A children’s poem published in 1782 by Hiëronymus van Alphen titled ‘The conscience’ ends with the moral: ‘Nothing gives me greater pleasure than cheerfully performing my duty.’ The accompanying illustration shows a little boy in front of a desk with an inkstand, a goose-quill, and sheets of paper on which he has presumably done his homework.52 Whereas in earlier times children were intimidated by the punishing hand of God, Otto was threatened with ‘the little man within’. This expression was not invented by Otto’s mother. It had been introduced by the English writer Adam Smith, as ‘the man within the breast’, whom he described as ‘the abstract and ideal spectator of our sentiments and conduct’.53 This inner man, however, often needed to be jolted awake by the ‘real spectator’ – in this case Otto. Sometimes he heard his inner voice, but did not heed it. On 23 February 1793 he had stared out the window for a long time, ‘though I must confess that my conscience insisted that I was doing wrong, but I found the view so pleasant that I ignored that voice’. The dangers of a guilty conscience could not be underestimated. Otto’s mother pointed out to him that a bad conscience could even lead to suicide, which she illustrated with an example from the Bible. In two entries, worded nearly identically, Otto says that he hopes to die with a ‘good’ or ‘clear’ conscience.54 Although Otto was occasionally worried, he was certainly on the right path. As an adult he would have to live his life according to his own moral standards – a modern idea. The first detailed philosophical study of the conscience to be published in Dutch appeared in the first year of the new century. In this treatise, titled ’s Menschen geluk op deeze waereld (Human happiness in this world), the author, Hylke Hanekuyk, argues that a good conscience is the greatest human happiness.55 That was the ultimate goal of Otto’s upbringing: he was destined to become the perfect nineteenth-century citizen and, as such, equipped with a modern conscience.

CHAPTER TWO

OTTO’S DIARY Mother: Look at yourself in the mirror. Child: I am such a being as I see there. Mother: Indeed! You are still small, and yet you are a complete human being.

This piece of wisdom appeared in a popular little book published in 1792 under the title ‘For a child, to acquire self-knowledge’, intended to teach children the first principles of good conduct.1 In the simple woodcut gracing the title page of this oft-reprinted publication, a mother stands her child on a table in front of a mirror to let it look at itself. But the mirror naturally reflects the mother as well: together they personify the combination of self-examination and control pervading Otto’s diary. When Otto van Eck penned the first page of his diary at the age of ten, he was not beginning a journal intime on his own initiative. The diary was part of a comprehensive didactic regime to which he submitted – at times willingly, but more often with reluctance. In writing his very first entry – expressing, not without a tinge of melancholy, his desire to hear the nightingale sing on an early morning in May – he was following the advice to commit his innermost feelings to paper: advice given with great insistence by his parents, who later read his jottings and supplied them with commentary. The friction thus caused and the results – fruitful or otherwise – of this approach will be dealt with in detail. First, however, we must ask what prompted Otto’s parents to require him to write a diary subject to their supervision. Was it their own idea, or had they been inspired in this endeavour by contemporary pedagogical advice? If the latter was the case, where did the advice come from? This form of diary-writing by children – previously unstudied, since historians were unaware of it – necessitates an extensive search for the moral-philosophical and pedagogical works in circulation around 1800.

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Fig. 25. To gain self-knowledge ‘Look at yourself in the mirror. / I am such a being as I see there. / Indeed! You are still small: / and yet you are a complete human being.’ From J.H. Nieuwold’s Voor een kind, 1792.

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Self-Knowledge The introspective element evident in Otto’s diary (and demanded by his parents) abounds in advice literature. An appeal to parents to encourage their children to develop at an early age the ability to examine their own thoughts and actions can be found in religious writings published around 1800, such as the 1798 ‘Handbook of theophilanthropists or worshippers of God and friends of mankind’: At the end of the day he asks himself: which failings have you overcome today? Which evil inclinations have you struggled against? In what respect are you better? The outcome of this soul-searching is the resolution to behave better the next day.2

This advice is frequently found in children’s poetry as well, as in the verse ‘Self-knowledge’, written by Pieter ’t Hoen in 1803: My father says I must not fail To learn to know myself, So that here in this earthly vale Towards virtue I progress.3

Self-knowledge is also a central theme of Campe’s Kleine zielkunde voor kinderen (Concise handbook of psychology for children) of 1782. This book begins with a conversation between a father and his children about the importance of learning to plumb the depths of one’s soul. In accordance with the philanthropinist approach, the problem is introduced to the children as graphically as possible: Children: How should we begin, then, to become acquainted with the soul hidden inside this body? Father: How? If one of you would be so good as to let his body be cut open from head to toe, so that the rest of us can look inside and see what kind of thing this Soul actually is. Children: Oh, no thank you! That would hurt too much!4

The father explains that it is the soul that distinguishes man from other creatures or inanimate objects: Children: ‘And the mirror?’ Johannes (one of the children): ‘It knows nothing of such things.’ Father. ‘It rejoices in nothing and is saddened by nothing. This is because it knows nothing, neither of itself nor of what is reflected in it. It is therefore dead, but our soul is a living mirror. The mirror has no consciousness, whereas our soul is a mirror that can look into itself.’5

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Fig. 26. ‘Our soul is a mirror that can look into itself.’ From J.H. Campe’s Kleine zielkunde, 1782.

To acquaint his children with their own souls, the father subjects them to a number of experiments by telling them stories that stir the emotions and are afterwards analysed, or by letting them listen to the song of the nightingale: Father: ‘Thus our soul has suppressed all other thoughts to think only of the sweet song of the nightingale. Is that not so?’ ‘Yes!’, the children cry out with one voice.6

In the encyclopaedia compiled by Lambert van Eck, he refers to Cicero rather than Campe to underscore the importance of knowledge of the soul: ‘If you wish to become more beautiful, begin with your soul.’ Advising the cultivation of self-knowledge in children – by urging them to keep diaries, for instance (though the above-mentioned authors do not refer to this) – does not automatically mean that parents should read their children’s diaries. The idea behind this must be sought in another pedagogical insight which emerged in the eighteenth century and for which Rousseau also laid the basis.

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The Observational Method The crux of Rousseau’s educational theory – the need to fathom a child’s nature before devising a tailor-made educational regime – was endorsed in full by the philanthropinists and their Dutch followers. Rousseau had championed an observational method in which the only intervention was the banishment of negative influences. Later pedagogues adopted the basic principle – the importance of observation – but not Rousseau’s roughly sketched and impracticable method of ‘éducation négative’. In their eyes, parents should keep a close watch on their children’s emotions, and actively intervene when they sense that their children are in danger of being overpowered by their impulses. Close ties between parents and children are imperative: after all, only children who place great faith in their educators will ‘boldly dare to reveal all their innermost thoughts and foolish doings, for it is of great importance that these impulses be exposed first to the parents, who can thus look at all times inside their children’s souls’.7 The pedagogues left parents in the dark, however, as to how they should learn to fathom their children’s souls. Most educators stressed the importance of mutual trust and how to further it – by taking edifying walks together, for example, or by playing like a child with one’s children: ‘Teaching children while playing with them like a child kindles open-heartedness, trust and affection. And how much good can come of it! Becoming thoroughly acquainted, through uninhibited association, with the child’s innate character and natural inclinations makes it all the easier to attack the weeds that spring up here and there, and to train the crooked tree to grow straight, or otherwise to sow in due course good seed in the field, carefully cultivating a lovely little plant.’8 Some pedagogues go a step further by telling parents how to sharpen their powers of observation. Martinet, for example, accompanies his exhortation to concentrate on fathoming a child’s ‘particular propensities and disposition’ with a discussion of temperaments and character traits. Parents must take note of a child’s temperament, ‘since it cannot completely be changed’, in order that ‘it be steered towards good as much as possible’.9 The German pedagogue August Hermann Niemeyer provides a firmer footing: his four-part Grondbeginselen van de opvoeding (Principles of education) of 1796 not only distinguishes more character types but also furnishes this framework with a didactic method most suited to each type. Educators – Niemeyer’s handbook was intended mainly for

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teachers – must leave no stone unturned in discovering ‘the true character’ of their ‘pupils’: ‘With the purest of intentions and the utmost faith in his office, the educator, without sufficient knowledge of children and youthful feelings, can only fail to lay the groundwork, nip the most delightful shoots in the bud, and pervert in the most unfortunate way the best of inclinations.’ To avert disaster, it is essential that educators compare their assessments with those of others from the child’s environment, never losing sight of the subjectivity of their evaluations. For these reasons alone, the capacity for self-reflection and introspection belongs, in Niemeyer’s view, to the essential baggage of every good educator. Furthermore, he emphasises the necessity of self-knowledge in empathising with children and passing this skill on to them: ‘He who can read children’s souls to any extent – and nothing is more conducive to this than frequent reflection on one’s own childhood – will be able to describe and clarify their internal condition and inner feelings so accurately that they will think he has looked inside their souls. But precisely this will teach them to examine themselves.’ Niemeyer goes on to give other directions for the observation of pupils by their educators, invoking Lavater’s physiognomy and discussing in detail the best time for observation.10 Unlike the usual situation in families and educational institutions – where attention focuses on the children mainly when they exhibit out-of-the-ordinary behaviour (whether bad or good) – ‘the true observer’ should ‘note in silence the overall behaviour of his pupils’. ‘Precisely when the emotions are not excited, when there is no conflict between the pupil and his environment, when he follows his own inclinations and least suspects that he is being observed, then his true nature will reveal itself.’11 In Niemeyer we find the same elements that play a vital role in other enlightened pedagogical works of around 1800: the necessity of having children engage in self-reflection and the importance of continuous observation on the part of their educators. His elaboration of the correct perspective from which to observe pupils – through the prism of the educators’ own self-knowledge – constitutes the addition of a wall of mirrors to the already brightly lit, enlightened pedagogical observatory. We find the same thing in the ideas of the philanthropinist Salzmann, who sees the self-knowledge of educators as the be-all and end-all of good education, that is to say, an education that responds to the pupils’ individual character traits. Salzmann’s ‘formula of unity’ required for admission to the guild of educators therefore contains but one line: ‘My formula is short and reads thus: The educator must search

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in himself for the basis or cause of all the shortcomings and faults of his foster children.’12 This formula was intended not only for aspiring teachers but also for parents: ‘Instead of blaming your children’s faults on the educator, seek their cause in yourself. Let the educator seek them in himself, seek them in yourselves, and may each rectify the errors of judgement he finds there. Then all will be well.’13 In the course of the nineteenth century, this view came to be translated by the authors of prescriptive pedagogical handbooks into the urgent advice to teachers to keep a diary.14 Advice on Keeping a Diary The decision of Otto’s parents to have him keep a diary under their supervision is the logical result of new pedagogical insights in which children’s self-reflection and the observation of children’s behaviour were considered of great importance. Eighteenth-century pedagogical literature, however, contains little trace of the advice to parents to urge their children to keep a diary. One of the earliest instances of such advice is to be found in a book published in 1749, which had been translated from the English: Lettergeschenk voor de jongelingschap (Literary gift to youngsters). The chapter titled ‘Self-examination’ contains the advice to girls and boys ‘to record this self-examination every day, and, for this purpose, to start keeping a diary’.15 In contrast to what the chapter’s title suggests, this is not meant to be an introspective journal but an extremely efficient overview, laid out in columns, of ‘your daily activities, your studies, reading, recreation, expenses, social intercourse, correspondence, etc.’ Such an account, though taking only a few minutes a day, would ‘suffice to recall the day’s events and to draw your attention to the good and bad of the same. The uncomfortable feeling you notice every time you waste a day will gradually teach you to attend with more seriousness to making good use of your life.’ The diary recommended here served as an aide-mémoire, and was intended only to confront a certain aspect of the ‘self ’, namely time management. Such diaries, moreover, were strictly private; they were not intended as observation posts for parents. Nor would such a double function have been in keeping with the reasoning of this anonymous English author, who in the chapter on letter-writing insists on taking precautionary measures against possible readers: ‘Letters are generally saved, and are therefore always on hand

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Fig. 27. Memory. From Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798–1800.

as a kind of evidence against you. For this reason you cannot be too careful in your writing. . . . In short, write in such a way that you threaten no one and do not endanger yourself: that is, with all the cunning of the serpent but, at the same time, all the artlessness of the devil.’16 In several prize-winning essays written by Dutch pedagogues in 1765, one finds a more pointed variant of this type of bookkeeping: the advice to urge children to write about what they read. Allard Hulshoff suggests having children write long letters in which they discuss what they have been reading. H.A. Chatelain, too, emphasises the importance of reporting on one’s reading regimen,17 although he does not specify the form this should take. A detailed, practical guide to keeping a journal of one’s reading dates from the late seventeenth century, but it is not addressed specifically to children or young people. It is John Locke’s 1687 Methode nouvelle de dresser des recueils (translated into English as A new method of making common-place-books and into Dutch as Eene nieuwe manier om verzamelingen of aanteekeningen te maaken). The number of eighteenth-

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century reprints of the Dutch translation shows that, a century later, the book had lost none of its topicality.18 It was certainly known to Otto’s father, who compiled his handwritten encyclopaedia according to Locke’s system. This reading list tells us that Lambert was also acquainted with Gellert’s Zedekundige lessen (Moral lessons) of 1775, which not only suggests that children keep a ‘day-book’ listing and commenting upon what they have read, but also urges parents to read these day-books: ‘Every three months I should like to see your notebook of what and how you are reading.’19 Gellert says nothing about children’s diaries as a means of stimulating self-reflection, but he does devote a chapter to the benefits of self-reflection in general, in which he refers to a very popular eighteenth-century treatise on self-knowledge by the English dissenter John Mason.20 If we consult Mason, we find the following advice: ‘Recur to the help of a common place-book, according to Mr Locke’s method. And review it once a year. But take care that by confiding to your minutes or memorial aids, you do not excuse the labour of the memory; which is one disadvantage attending this method.’21 Mason therefore discourages frequent consultation, placing priority on the orderly keeping of a notebook in the memory itself: Think it not enough to furnish this store-house of the mind with good thoughts, but lay them up there in order, digested or ranged under proper subjects or classes. That whatever subject you have occasion to think or talk upon you may have recourse immediately to a good thought, which you heretofore laid up there under that subject. So that the very mention of the subject may bring the thought to hand; by which means you will carry a regular common place-book in your memory. And it may not be amiss sometimes to take an inventory of this mental furniture, and recollect how many good thoughts you have there treasured up under such particular subjects, and whence you had them.22

Unlike Locke and Gellert, Mason also gives advice on keeping an introspective diary: And it may not be improper, in order to make us sensible of and attentive to some of the more secret faults and foibles of our tempers, to pen them down at night, according as they appeared during the transactions of the day. By which means, we shall not only have a more distinct view of that part of our character to which we are generally most blind; but shall be able to discover some defects and blemishes in it, which perhaps we never apprehended before. For the wiles and doublings of the heart are sometimes so hidden and intricate, that it requires the nicest care and most steady attention to detect and unfold them.23

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Admittedly, Mason did not use the terms ‘diary’ and ‘notebook’ in this context, but he betrays the method with the verb ‘to pen’ and by giving examples,24 borrowed in part from Benjamin Bennet’s The Christian Oratory: or, the Devotion of the Closet Display’d, a work with pietistic leanings, in which keeping a ‘diary’ is explicitly recommended.25 It is left up to the reader to fill in the blanks with his specific weaknesses: ‘This day, saith the Christian (upon his review of things at night) I lost so much time, particularly at ______. I took too great a liberty, particularly in ______. I omitted such an opportunity that might have been improv’d to better purpose. I mismanaged such a duty ______. I find such a corruption often working; my old infirmity ______ still cleaves to me; how easily doth this sin beset me.’26 Diaries such as those recommended by Mason and Bennet were, however, intended to be kept by adults. These handbooks were addressed, after all, to adult readers such as the Rotterdam clergyman’s daughter Jacoba van Thiel,27 who from the age of twenty-five kept a diary in which we learn, for example, that on 28 October 1768 she and her sister read aloud from Bennet’s Godsdienstige Christen.28 The year before, when the later novelist Aagje Deken left the orphanage at the age of twenty-five, she was presented not only with a few items of clothing and a small sum of money but also with ‘a new book called “De zelfkennis”’ – in fact, Mason’s treatise.29 The target group addressed by Johann Caspar Lavater in his Brieven aan jongelingen (Letters to young men) of 1783 is older than Otto was when he took up the pen, but still somewhat closer to him in age. These letters were written expressly to young men of student age, who are urged to keep a diary as a means of daily practice in the observation of other people, events and one’s own feelings: Accustom yourselves to formulating your observations in clear and apposite language and to writing down the most important of these concisely and on the spot! Certainly you would often regret afterwards any carelessness on this score. I strongly advise you to keep a diary. You will reread it with pleasure for as long as you live. A great deal is lost if one is insufficiently swift and skilful at writing things down.30

In these letters Lavater does not – in contrast to Mason – give examples of the way in which one should set about keeping a diary. Interested readers did not have to look far, however. They could consult Lavater’s Geheimes Tagebuch (The Secret Diary of an Observer of his Self ), which had been published with the author’s permission for the first time in 1771.31

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This diary contains a detailed description of Lavater’s daily life, his weaknesses of character, outbursts of anger, doubts and religious views – in short, his innermost feelings from day to day and moment to moment. The candour typical of this diary – which, for that matter, had undergone literary treatment – is exemplified by Lavater’s elaborate description of the panic he felt when his maidservant set to work cleaning his study – ‘if only she doesn’t throw everything around up there’ – and his anger when his abrupt entrance gave her such a fright that she upset an ink pot: ‘I ran to the table, complaining and moaning, as though the most important papers had been stained and ruined, but the ink had touched only blank pages and a blotter.’ After his wife had succeeded in calming him down, his anger subsided into shame: ‘I fell silent, and finally burst into tears. “What a slave I am to my own temper! I no longer dare to lift my head! I cannot wrest myself from the power of this sin.”’32 Exemplary Diaries: Lavater and Franklin The publication of Lavater’s diary marked a breakthrough in diarywriting in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Many diarists of this period (and long afterwards) name his diary as a source of inspiration. The youthful Jacobus Bellamy, for instance, began his diary with these words: ‘Deep-thinking and sensitive Lavater . . . your daily observations have awakened me from my slumber.’ The poet Hiëronymus van Alphen kept his diary along the same lines and published it under the pseudonym E.V.C. – Een Vroom Christen (A Devout Christian). As in the case of Lavater’s diary, Van Alphen’s was a literary adaptation of the material.33 The Dordrecht publisher Abraham Blussé also felt compelled to follow in Lavater’s footsteps. In a letter to his son he offers a running commentary of his innermost feelings over the course of an entire day: I was slow to rise in the morning. Then I suddenly remembered that this day is dedicated to God, and I am bound to serve him; I arose, quit my oppressive sleeping place, and pulled on my clothes. I woke my spouse with the exhortation that we must hasten to church.34

These opening lines turn into a detailed account of a single day of his life, a Sunday, which Blussé concludes as follows: ‘I ate moderately, and read some of Lavater’s diary – but it did not give me pleasure.’ The

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Fig. 28. Frontispiece of Geheim dagboek by J.C. Lavater, 1780.

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Fig. 29. ‘What a slave I am to my own temperament!’ From J.C. Lavater’s Geheim dagboek, 1780.

letter was therefore intended to discourage his son – a publisher like himself – from unquestioningly joining the ranks of Lavater’s admirers. The need for this fatherly intervention confirms Lavater’s popularity in the Netherlands, but Abraham’s objections to the diary are also interesting. Although he respects Lavater’s religiosity and in no way disapproves of keeping a diary, he finds it difficult to accept Lavater’s use of his diary as a tool in his pursuit of perfection. By publicising in his diary such self-examination undertaken with a view to self-improvement, Lavater calls suspicion on himself as someone who thinks that good works will bring about his salvation. In the eyes of the Calvinist Abraham Blussé, this went against the doctrine of divine grace. Such protests had little effect. The diary of Alexander van Goltstein, a contemporary of Otto, illustrates how influential Lavater was in the Netherlands.35 Van Goltstein, who began his diary in 1801 at the age of seventeen, took Lavater as his example. This is apparent from his manner of description – ‘My prayer was filled with vacillation. Remorse for my negligence and depravation. Did not read the Bible, owing to

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lack of time’ – and by the resolution, uttered later on, ‘to make a diary of my heart’, a desire expressed by Lavater in exactly the same words. Van Goltstein also takes a critical look at his sometimes unfriendly attitude towards his father and mother, his addiction to novels and his other shortcomings. In 1806 he concludes that he can no longer consider himself a believer: ‘The Bible itself says somewhere that what does not derive from faith is sinful, and so it is completely wrong to profess something of which one is not convinced.’ This may signal the end of his religious beliefs but not of his diary. Van Goltstein continued for two years – without God, yet by no means godlessly – to commit his self-examination to paper. His soul-searching, now confined to his actions and state of mind, was aimed at moral improvement. To this end he consulted the writings of the pietistic theologian Franz Volkmar Reinhardt and the ethical doctrine of the German moral philosopher Christian Garve, as yet unpublished when Otto began keeping his diary. Van Goltstein took as his most important example, however, the autobiography of the self-made man Benjamin Franklin. The life story of this man who embodied the American dream – a typographer who became a founding father of the United States – was frequently consulted by Alexander van Goltstein as a guide to diary-writing. The book was suited to this purpose because it was both an autobiography and a do-it-yourself workbook. Franklin’s description of his struggle to attain moral perfection contains not only thirteen rules of life but also tables of the virtues one should strive for: a kind of daily checklist by means of which readers could see whether or not their efforts had been successful. The central message of the book is that man is the architect of his own happiness. Franklin’s autobiography appeared – in Paris in French translation – precisely in 1791, the year in which Otto was urged by his parents to draw up a daily account of his activities (including his reading), transgressions, good intentions and lessons in life.36 Franklin began to keep a diary at a much older age than Otto. His ideas on the benefits of diarywriting did not become known in the Netherlands until 1798, the year his autobiography appeared in Dutch translation. Later on, Franklin’s passages on diary-writing were added as an appendix to a translation of Carl Nicolai’s Über Selbstkunde, Menschenkenntniß und den Umgang mit Menschen (On Self-Knowledge, Knowledge of Human Nature and Social Intercourse) of 1816, which treats in detail the benefits of diary-writing for young people. The appendix with Franklin’s advice serves to underline Nicolai’s ‘recommendation to keep a moral diary’.37

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Writing under Supervision Our tour d’horizon – or rather that of Otto’s parents – clearly shows how popular diary-writing was in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was recommended and tested by all sorts of authors, from pietists to rationalists, all of whom had self-understanding as their goal. Over the course of the century, adolescent diaries appeared with increasing frequency, but there was still scant evidence of pedagogical children’s diaries being subjected to parental scrutiny. Advice to this effect – though scarce – is to be found chiefly in the work of the philanthropinists. The philanthropinist journal De Menschenvriend (The Friend of Mankind) of 1788 conjures up for its readers a utopian city, the ‘city of virtues’, in which all previously discussed philanthropinist educational ideals are applied: edifying walks, rewards in the form of badges, working at lathes, and tailor-made pedagogical regimes devised by loving and observant parents and teachers. These practices are supplemented by a new element: the fathers in this community are given the special task of keeping a detailed diary of the behaviour of each of their children.38 Such diaries are also recommended in the fifth volume of a work compiled by Campe, the Allgemeine Revision des gesammten Schul- und Erziehungswesen (General revision of the entire schooling and educational system), published in 1786. Peter Villaume, the author of this part, sees such diaries as an excellent means of confronting children at a quiet moment – when they are open to criticism – with the mistakes they have made during the day.39 According to this author, it would however be a perilous undertaking to have children keep diaries themselves: ‘Children either feel too strongly or not at all. For this reason, and in order to justify their behaviour, and because they cannot handle language and writing, the resulting picture might be incomplete or distorted.’40 The pedagogue Salzmann saw things differently. The previously discussed 1785 prospectus for his educational institution in Schnepfenthal announces his intention of having pupils start at the age of ten – Otto’s age when he began – to keep a diary: Finally, I teach my pupils that it is good for everyone to keep a diary, in which he records the words and things he learns every day, and the memorabilia and experiences he has acquired. Not only is this task a new exercise, but these diaries also enable parents and teachers to determine how much or how little their children and pupils have learned.41

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The only element of Otto’s diary lacking here is the necessary depth, the introspection that other publications encourage adults and adolescents to indulge in. Otto’s parents could have found an example of this – applied to Otto’s age group, but without parental supervision – in the biography of the Englishman Philip Doddridge. This progressive theologian was exceptionally popular in the Republic, particularly in the more enlightened circles. Doddridge, born in 1702, began to keep a diary at the age of fourteen, which – according to Job Orton, who compiled extracts from Doddridge’s diary in a volume titled Memoirs of the Life, Character and Writings of the Late Reverend Philip Doddridge – gives ‘a just idea of his inward sentiments, and the grand motives on which he acted thro’ life’. Otto’s parents evidently read right over the objection that had been made to Orton’s efforts (of which he was well aware), namely that ‘what was principally written for a person’s own use ought not to be made public’.42 Or perhaps they preferred to remember a subsequent phrase, which suggested that disclosing a personal diary was forgivable if it benefited others. In any case, Otto’s parents were familiar with Doddridge’s work and continually held him up to Otto as an example.43 As a youthful diarist, Doddridge was following a tradition that had long existed among English puritans and had been known since the seventeenth century in Dutch Protestant circles. In 1679 the clergyman Jacobus Koelman published a religious-pedagogical work, De pligten der ouders in kinderen voor Godt op te voeden (The duty of parents to bring up their children before God).44 It includes a ‘catechism on the practice of godliness’, in which the author recommends ‘ending every day by reflecting on how we have conducted ourselves and what God has done to us and for us, and reading God’s word and concluding everything with prayers and thanksgiving’. This advice is followed by a number of examples of English children who engaged in self-examination and kept a ‘little journal’, but there is nothing to indicate that Koelman’s advice was put into practice in the Netherlands of his day. Orthodox authors such as Koelman were not read in Otto’s home, unlike the more modern theologian Doddridge, who was even a direct source of inspiration. There is a fundamental difference, however, between Doddridge’s diary and the one Otto’s parents envisaged for Otto. Pietistic diaries were kept for religious reasons: the self-knowledge they contained had been sought in the hope of true conversion. Enlightened diaries were likewise kept with a view to acquiring self-knowledge,

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but that knowledge served other purposes, namely to control one’s emotions and to improve social intercourse. The advice that most nearly accords with the purpose of Otto’s diary was found not in the contemporary pedagogical or moral-theological literature, but in the first encyclopaedia tailored to Dutch needs, Chalmot’s Algemeen huishoudkundig-, natuur-, zedekundig-, en konst-woordenboek (General dictionary of domestic economy, physical science, ethics and art). If Otto’s parents did not have this standard reference work in their own library, they could always consult it at the homes of friends or relations, many of whose names – including that of Otto’s grandfather, the Delft burgomaster Adriaan Mouchon – appear on the subscription list. In the second volume of this encyclopaedia, published in 1787, one finds – not where one would expect it, under opvoeding (education) or kind (child), but under dagregister (day-book) – advice that unites all the elements mentioned above: a reading list, self-examination, parental monitoring and the aide-mémoire. When the child finally reaches the age at which it has the ability to record its thoughts, it should become accustomed to keep an orderly day-book, subject to daily perusal and assessment. Then, based on one’s opinion of the circumstances, one can reprimand, shame and punish, or praise and reward. . . . In addition to training children from their tenderest years to acquire self-knowledge and to indulge in self-examination, it would be more effective than a Latin exercise in promoting learning ability.45

The pedagogical impetus of the late eighteenth century – an important but as yet unrecognised phase in the development of the diary as a genre – led to a great blossoming in diary-writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After Otto there were many children whose parents required them to keep diaries, such as Maurits VerHuell, whose diary of 1802, written when he was fifteen years old, has been preserved. We cannot infer from the contents that VerHuell’s diary was instigated and monitored by his parents, but we know it from his autobiography, written in 1839, in which he has the following to say about his upbringing: I also had to keep a diary, and if I proved lucky enough now and then to describe something I had observed in a rather romantic way or in a good style, I was assured of gaining the approval of my mother, who in that case generally made me note apt portrayals of such scenes in one or other book, without ever pointing out how inferior I was to those writers. She did not want to stifle my ambition.46

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Only one year of VerHuell’s diary has survived, but that is more than what remains of the youthful diaries of Johan Rudolf Thorbecke. It is certain that Thorbecke kept a diary as a boy, at least if we take his word for it. At the age of fourteen he wrote the following in a letter to his parents: ‘In answer to your question as to whether I am continuing my diary and saying my daily prayers and adhering to the established regime, I can reply with a clear conscience: yes.’47 The rest of this passage – ‘I shall apply myself to being friendly and polite in this house’ – more or less tells us what to expect from his diary, as do excerpts from other letters: Dear, beloved father. I have already promised you so often not to disobey you another time, and yet it always happens again. Now I promise you, dear father, that this promise will not be broken again. You cannot be certain of this at once, I know, because I’ve promised it so often and yet haven’t done it, but now I shall and will do it.48

The above-mentioned pieces of pedagogical advice dating from around 1800, as well as the surviving fragments of children’s diaries, suggest that Otto was not exceptional in keeping a diary. His is unique, however, in that it has been preserved from cover to cover and therefore provides an opportunity for a thorough examination of this new form of diary-writing. The Will to Knowledge In Otto’s diary, the pressure put on him by his parents soon becomes obvious. After only a couple of pages we are confronted with a passage in which the author solemnly swears to complete his homework on time, followed by biting commentary in another hand: ‘Remember this now and live up to it, for it is better not to promise than not to keep your promise. Better not promise so often, but do it instead.’49 Otto’s diary sometimes tellingly addresses ‘the honourable reader’, by which he naturally means his mother.50 His diary appears to have been public domain, available for perusal not only by his parents but also by friends of the family. Thus Otto writes contritely on 13 July 1793 about his reluctance to show his diary to acquaintances of his parents. He maintains that he did not dare to, ‘out of misplaced shame’, ‘which Papa did not like, saying this gave people a worse picture of me than the frank admission of a few faults’. Several weeks later Otto seems

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to have overcome his diffidence: ‘Various people ate here and Mama says that I behaved reasonably well. Among them was the Reverend Scheidius, to whom I once showed my diary from last year (when I was ill), and he thought it very good.’ Because Otto’s diary was also read by outsiders, one would not expect him to reveal his innermost feelings. Moreover, it was influenced by his parents’ demands: instead of confining himself to descriptions of his daily affairs, Otto was supposed to pay particular attention to the higher things in life. When inspiration was lacking, he was advised to draw it from literature, by reading, for example, a passage in the children’s book Carel Grandisson, ‘which was extremely useful, because it taught me that it’s easy enough to obey one’s parents when forced to, but children should actually take pleasure in doing everything their parents command’.51 Sometimes Otto seems uninterested in forming an opinion of what he has read. Thus he writes on 26 September 1791, after giving an account of all his activities: ‘This journal is not worth much, but here are a couple of sayings: 1. An honest man must always keep his word. 2. One must associate with the devout and avoid bad company.’ Now and then Otto failed utterly to come up with any profundities. The reader is then subjected, page after page, to the pedestrian rhythm of a life completely saturated with knowledge and culture: Otto goes to school, returns home to find the dancing master who is swiftly followed by the piano teacher, whose early departure gives Otto the opportunity to rush through his homework for the next day, after which he does some reading with his mother, potters about for a while, writes a letter to his aunt, and finally concludes the day’s activities with a conscientious entry in his diary. Sometimes – and these seem to have been the more spontaneous moments – Otto was inspired to write about such things as ‘very distant and beautiful views’, which he had seen on a trip to Gelderland.52 However, if such effusive descriptions of nature (often combined with a weather report) went on for too long, they were abruptly cut short by his parents. When Otto read a story about the diary Philip Doddridge kept as a boy, this sparked a moment of recognition: This morning during breakfast I read in Feddersen about Doddridge’s devoutness, especially how, in his youth, he wrote in his diary every day, recording in the evenings how much good he had received from God that day, which dangers he had been rescued from, and what progress he had made in goodness. I found all of this very fine and asked Papa if I didn’t do the same.53

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Fig. 30. A page from Otto’s diary.

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Otto’s illusions were immediately shattered, however, by his father’s rather discouraging remark that his diary could not compare with Doddridge’s. Following the latter’s example would require Otto to display more depth in his writing: Yes! But my diary was defined too much by what had happened during the day – I included, for example, the fact that I had gone to Delft and had come home so late, etc. This seemed to him of no great importance, the more so because nowadays it is always the same.

In his father’s opinion, Otto would do better to summarise the substance of his reading ‘with some useful comments about it’. The only thing Otto could say to this was that he ‘hoped in future to do so’.54 Battlefield The Van Ecks set high standards for Otto. Perhaps that is why he was such a reluctant diarist. Admittedly, during the first years he committed his experiences to paper nearly every day, but this was due not so much to his own efforts as to those of his parents, who usually reminded him of this task in the evening. Their insistence resulted in a regular stream of mundane jottings, as well as a wide range of excuses – some convincing, others less so. Sometimes Otto could think of no excuse for failing to write in his diary other than ‘negligence’ or being ‘rather sleepy in the evenings’. At other times he pleaded lack of time or circumstances beyond his control: ‘In the evening I had to write a letter, so I had no time to write in my diary.’ Writing was sometimes impossible because he was away on a visit: ‘I haven’t written in my diary since Sunday. When one is away from home, everything is less well organised.’ Occasionally he was too ill to hold a pen. Illness combined with moving house provided him with an especially plausible excuse: ‘The reasons I haven’t kept my diary all this time are these: first of all, because I am somewhat listless (since I still have the tertian fever) and secondly, this little book was still in the country.’ Apparently the diary had been held up in the baggage sent from their country house to their winter residence in The Hague. A less convincing excuse was lack of time compounded by negligence: ‘I haven’t written in my diary these last few days for two reasons: first of all, because I’ve been occupied the whole week in writing something

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out of the ordinary for myself, and secondly, through negligence.’ It is not inconceivable that the latter reason had been suggested by his mother. A year earlier, when he had blamed his writer’s block on ‘nothing remarkable happening’ – another frequently proffered excuse – he added the following: ‘but Mama says it was also due a little to negligence’. The sheer bad luck of being both ill and bereft of noteworthy events occasionally led to the granting of dispensation, but only on the condition that he ‘continue with it as soon as something happens’. Generally Otto was shown no mercy as regards his diary-writing. If he made up his mind to skip a day, he met with resistance from his mother: ‘She doesn’t want me to leave off writing in my diary again.’ When he succeeded in avoiding the task for several days running, it was again his mother who put her foot down: ‘Mama says this isn’t good, and wants me to do it every day from now on.’ The hand with which Otto’s mother restrains his younger sister in the 1788 portrait makes itself felt time and again in his diary.55 As Otto grew older and more obstinate, the war over the diary escalated, with ever more frantic attempts on his part to escape this requisite recording of daily life: ‘The reason I haven’t written in my diary for so long is that I neglected it on purpose, in the hope that it would be completely forgotten and that I could leave off writing it altogether.’ Otto was forced to go in search of other expedients. On 6 January 1796 he wrote: ‘As these four days have been spent in the usual way, so that there’s not much to write in my diary in the evening, I’ve made one entry of everything.’56 And two months later: ‘Because I complained continually of lack of material for my diary, Mama has permitted me to write in the diary only on Saturday, but for the whole week at once.’ On the following 30 April, however, Otto had to confess: ‘I only took advantage of Mama’s kindness, when she allowed me to write but once a week in my diary, because now I haven’t done it for so long. Unfortunately, when there is no one at home to remind me constantly of my duty, I forget it far too often.’ On 9 July 1796, Otto decided to change tack: ‘Mama has reminded me of my duty to write in my diary today, so I cannot avoid it, even though I don’t have much to write. To make up for the lack of material and to make things easier for myself, from now on I shall record what happens to me every day and how I’ve behaved, etc., and then it will be easier for me to put it all together on Saturday evening and write an account of the whole week.’ This plan also failed, because four months later we read: ‘This week I neglected to write the day’s events on the slate in the evening, so

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now I can’t write in my diary as I should, which is why Mama is going to start punishing this daily omission by making me pay a fine.’ Otto makes frequent mention of punishments imposed for neglecting to keep his diary. These punishments could consist of a fine, but sometimes he was allowed to make amends by doing extra work, such as an additional translation from the German – a punishment he soon came to prefer to writing in his diary: ‘The day before yesterday I did double German instead of writing in my diary, because I didn’t know what to write.’ Once he even ventured to compose an ending: ‘Furthermore, today I can’t remember anything worth writing down, which is why I shall simply put an end to this diary, only taking the liberty to draw a line under it with the help of a ruler.’ This last-ditch effort was obviously in vain, since the diary continues for two more years.57 As we saw earlier, the pressure from above was not confined to writing alone. Thematic demands were also placed on the diary, and greater depth was requested. Thanks to Otto’s recalcitrance and the ensuing reprimands, we know that his parents insisted that the diary be more than just an account of his profound meditations. Indeed, they demanded nothing less than a total confession: ‘This morning, when Mama saw my diary for the whole week, she said that the way I wrote it did not please her, and that instead of filling it with learning and playing, which was practically the same every day, I ought to give an account of my moral conduct and my temper, which gets the better of me, and the faults I’m guilty of. This, I must admit, is also useful.’58 Otto was as good as his word: ‘To begin, then. I did not control my temper today, but I did persevere in completing my lessons, with Mama and otherwise. I did not quarrel with my brothers and sisters, and I performed the duties of sociability and politeness; on the other hand, I did not bend my will so completely to Mama’s that I was satisfied with what she did, so tomorrow I must improve.’ Accordingly, the entries for the following days focus on Otto’s rebelliousness. Time and again, Otto was ‘not completely in control of his temper’, and even when he did curb his anger for a whole day, his parents still had something negative to say. One day Otto wrote that his mother had been satisfied with his behaviour in as far as it went, ‘but there had been no reason for me to lose my temper, and so there had been no occasion to exercise my will power to overcome anything’. Nor was his mother’s approval forthcoming when Otto did everything as he should, but had no witnesses to that effect: ‘Even though I did everything as I should today, Mama is not – or rather cannot be – happy with me, because she did

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Fig. 31. Children – such as Gerard Johannes Beeldsnijder, born in 1791 – were often portrayed writing. Painting, oil on canvas, c. 1800.

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not see me doing it.’ When Otto rashly concluded that he could end his day on a positive note because his behaviour had been exemplary, he was immediately forced to rectify this mistaken notion: ‘Finally I can say today that Mama was satisfied with me. I finished everything as I should and there was nothing to criticise about my behaviour; even so, Mama says that she didn’t see me very much.’59 Such passages cannot help but call to mind another invention of Otto’s day, the panopticon. In 1791, the year Otto began his diary, the enlightened English reformer Jeremy Bentham published his Panopticon or the inspection-house. Bentham advocated dome-shaped buildings as ideal for prisons, schools, hospitals and factories. This form, after all, enabled constant supervision from a central point. In Bentham’s prison the system was further refined by the installation of a system of tubes through which the guards could listen in on the prisoners. In the author’s view, such total control would help to transform criminals into civilised human beings. Bentham’s ‘simple idea of architecture’ did not remain theory alone; it was eventually put into practice.60 We do not know whether Otto’s father was familiar with the ideas of Bentham, but as a judge he did have a professional interest in the subject. As we have seen, on the way to Paris he was eager to inspect a recently built prison near Brussels. It is tempting to see Otto as a prisoner in a paper panopticon, as the object – or rather victim – of discipline imposed from above. The diary he was forced to write invites comparison with the tubes through which the prison warden monitored the prisoners, but it had another dimension as well. Close reading reveals that Otto was certainly no spineless victim of his parents’ disciplinary strategies. Indeed, he made creative use of his diary to achieve his own ends. Means of Communication Otto’s diary contains, sometimes in combination with a humble confession of alleged misconduct, many an argument for his side of the case. For example, when promising his mother that he would never again climb over the fence surrounding De Ruit, Otto begins with the excuse that he had been ‘frightfully bored’ and goes on to say that in his opinion it was not at all dangerous.61 Otto also frequently used his diary as a means of making his wishes known to his parents, sometimes in a very subtle way. Immediately

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after the French invasion in January 1795, his father became a member of the revolutionary committee of The Hague, and this meant that both he and his wife were absent from home for long periods. Upon their return they read in Otto’s diary that he had felt lonely and had ‘not had any fun’. In September 1796, Otto even claimed that he had never had ‘such a horrid and unpleasant summer. Perhaps the reason is because Papa has so much to do and can never spend any time with me, or go anywhere with me.’ Even less subtle were Otto’s attempts to use his diary to inform his parents of his choice of profession. Against the wishes of his father, who hoped he would become a clergyman, Otto wanted to manage a farm. This emerges explicitly from the report of a talk he had with his mother, and implicitly from repeated allusions to this most fervent wish. After visiting the vast rural estate of a family friend, Otto’s parents read in his diary that ‘such a farmer’s life would also please me’. A year later, when Otto laid eyes on a simple farmstead, he thought he would even be satisfied with a more modest cottage. A farmhouse like that, he said, ‘is all that I desire’.62 Otto underlined the last two words to make his point more forcefully. Some of Otto’s wishes – more immediate and more easily attainable – were fulfilled. When one of his birds escaped from its cage, his father said he could buy a new one, a promise that Otto evidently felt should be put in writing, since he recorded it in his diary.63 Otto’s tendency to point out behaviour that pleased his parents and to gloss over his errors is often evident in his diary. These attempts to distort the truth were most successful when his parents were away from home or when he was staying at someone else’s house. At such times, the sporadic recording of suspiciously innocent offences seems intended to lend credibility to his account. Even when Otto was at home and within sight of his parents, however, he still made an effort to camouflage his misbehaviour. That he sometimes went too far is apparent from the following passage – ‘Today I did everything I was supposed to do, so Mama is satisfied with me’ – which is followed by a deflating remark in another hand: ‘This is but very mediocre and could have been much better.’64 Otto appears not to be the only one who overplayed his hand occasionally. When his parents tightened the reins, continually raising the fines they imposed, the result was far from satisfactory: ‘All these days I neglected to write in my diary, and although I could have done it, I no longer have to reproach myself on this score because Mama put

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my name down for it four times.’65 And when the obligatory list of daily misdemeanours threatened to become too long, Otto treated his parents to the following laconic statement: ‘I shan’t begin the sermon on my behaviour because it’s the same as usual, Mama being satisfied with my work but not with my conduct.’66 When Otto wrote this he was sixteen and had evidently reached an age at which he dared more openly to oppose his parents. On closer inspection Otto’s diary proves to be the opposite of a journal intime, in which feelings, events and conduct are recorded spontaneously, unfiltered by censure from outside. Instead, Otto’s diary conjures up the image of a public arena in which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the persecutors from the persecuted, and it is important to realise this when reconstructing Otto’s physical and mental world. The supervisory and disciplinary function of his diary, however, enables us to paint a rather faithful picture of the way Otto’s parents raised him and the difficulties that arose. Confessions and Indulgences The battles described in the diary make it clear that Otto’s parents carefully coordinated his education, drawing inspiration from the newest pedagogical insights. In obliging Otto to keep a diary they hoped to combine two key elements of enlightened pedagogics: the learning of self-reflection and the close observation of children. Having Otto keep a diary was supposed to teach him to render an account of his emotions and behaviour, and reading over his shoulder was meant to help his parents to plumb the depths of his soul – an undertaking warmly recommended by pedagogues – and enable them to guide him whenever necessary. This also explains why they continued to urge the little fellow not to confine his entries to daily events but to concentrate on his impulsive and unacceptable behaviour. It should be clear by now that the dual function of Otto’s diary inevitably produced friction – to the point of causing this vital source of information to dry up periodically. The fuss caused by the diary also prompted us to examine the problems involved in the implementation of some other pieces of contemporary pedagogical advice. The philanthropinists’ system of imposing fines, for example, proved to overshoot the mark when it was enforced too rigidly. Otto seized upon the accumulation of fines as a secularised form of indulgences, which enabled him to buy off his feelings of guilt. One

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may well wonder whether the excess of transgressions and misconduct requiring confession contributed to forming the conscience or whether it was actually counterproductive in that it allowed Otto to shake off feelings of guilt. In a number of excerpts from the diary we see a boy who does exactly as he pleases, only to turn into a repentant sinner. On Wednesday, 16 October 1793, for instance, he repeatedly ignored his mother’s wishes. To begin with, when his confirmation class was called off, he decided on the spur of the moment to pay a visit to his grandmother, although he should have gone home straightaway to do his homework. Upon his return his mother demanded that he devote the remaining time to his tasks: ‘Instead of this I spent some time spinning a top, so that when I sat down to eat I still hadn’t done a thing.’ At the end of the day, Otto gave a blow-by-blow account of his recidivism, adding that unfortunately his piano practice and geography lesson had also fallen by the wayside. A couple of years later he no longer took the trouble to specify his offences: ‘Otherwise nothing special happened today; Mama is dissatisfied with me for many reasons.’67 The tiredness that sometimes set in could have been the result of overalertness on the part of Otto’s parents to his bad behaviour. Chalmot’s advice to ‘shame and punish’ on the basis of the diary evidently made more of an impression on them than his other recommendation to ‘praise and reward’. Otto’s parents would have done well to consult not only Chalmot but other literature as well, such as an issue of the children’s magazine De Vriend der Kinderen (The Children’s Friend) of 1791, which stresses the desirability of labelling behaviour in a positive way. The fictional protagonist in this magazine, Mentor, describes his experiment with his own children’s diary-writing as a positive experience for all concerned: ‘It so happens that I’ve got them into the habit of keeping a day-book of all their actions and deeds, in which they must report all their failings without keeping back anything.’ His children supposedly took great pleasure in keeping their day-books. The immediate confession of their errors and the subsequent ‘gentle, friendly and loving’ admonitions prevented ‘more emphatic reproof ’ later on. These children were also required to read their diaries aloud to one another, a practice that was thought to reinforce their good behaviour. Everyone delights in the praise prompted by his good behaviour: for I can say, without indulging in parental vainglory, that normally the good deeds far exceed the bad. . . . Each pays the utmost attention to the others’ daily stories, in order to work out how much better he has spent his time than his siblings.68

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To draw his young readers into this competition, or simply to show what such diaries might look like, Mentor proceeds to publish a random page from the diary of one of his pupils, a girl called Charlotte. A comparison of her diary with Otto’s reveals the close correspondence of their structure and subject matter: daily routine, reading matter, topics of conversation and personal viewpoints. Like Otto, Charlotte describes the day’s events, her mistakes and shortcomings, and her parents’ subsequent admonitions: I dressed, but had not put my gown away properly the night before – once again, a gentle admonition!69

Unlike Otto, however, Charlotte is accustomed to dwelling on her good deeds and the praise she receives: I spent the time between eleven and twelve, which is my free hour, diligently at work, lettering a shirt, and was praised by my good mother.

The compliment had barely left her mother’s lips when Charlotte reported to her piano teacher and received another pat on the back: From one to two I played some of my piano pieces and was duly praised by Mr N.70

Otto’s parents were much more sparing in their praise: his diary, at any rate, records very few compliments. It is possible that this reticence was the result of some educational principle or other, because – according to Campe and like-minded pedagogues – too much praise could spoil a child. This attitude suited Lambert van Eck, who approvingly recorded in his encyclopaedia the following piece of wisdom from Cicero: ‘You will seldom damage your enemy by unjust reproof, but always harm your friend by undeserved praise.’71 The diaries of Otto and Charlotte also differ in the amount of detail. While Otto usually confines his entries to a single paragraph, Charlotte goes on for pages about her daily experiences, a habit that would have met with the approval of Otto’s parents. But wasn’t her diary pure fiction? To be sure, Charlotte herself was a fictional character, but Charlotte’s readers were real enough, and in all likelihood they included Otto and his parents. The Dutch translation of this issue appeared in 1791, the year Otto began his diary. In one entry from that year, Otto reports having complained to his father about his lack of things to write about. His father advised him to read something for inspiration, which he did ‘at once,

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and was surprised at the wisdom, tolerance and wariness of elephants, virtues not found in any other beast as perfectly as in this one’.72 This conclusion corresponds almost literally to that of ‘The elephant and its virtues’, the article immediately following Charlotte’s diary in De Vriend der Kinderen.73 Perhaps Otto opened the book to the wrong page by mistake. Then again, it is possible that he preferred to emulate elephants than to follow the example of Charlotte, who was not only a more gifted writer, but also a more talented musician. It is no coincidence that Otto and Charlotte both played the piano. This instrument was recommended in pedagogical literature as preeminently suited to furthering children’s musicality, ‘inasmuch as music entertains us and also uplifts the heart’.74 Yet again it proved easier to bring up a fictional child than a child of flesh and blood. Unlike Charlotte, Otto usually dragged himself reluctantly to his piano lessons, admitting that he went ‘only out of dutifulness and to give Papa pleasure’.75 There was no love lost between Otto and his piano. Once, when his mother made him repeat his exercises for what seemed an eternity, it was more than Otto could bear. He told her he ‘wished that there were no pianos in the world’, but his apology followed immediately, at least in his diary: ‘Still, I didn’t really mean it, and only said it out of frustration.’76 This last comment comes across as far less spontaneous than the aversion to piano-playing Otto habitually displayed. The sincerity or otherwise of Otto’s utterances – of vital importance in determining the success of certain educational strategies – is not always obvious. If we are to take Otto at his word, it was usually a question of submission, but submission accompanied by varying degrees of reluctance. The diary contains frequent confessions of a perfunctory nature – ‘I regret this very much, but que faire, that’s simply how it is’ – possibly the unintended result of the sparse praise Otto’s parents gave him.77 Counterbalancing such throw-away lines, however, are just as many tormented confessions of his failure to live up to his parents’ expectations: How little I live up to the manifold care my parents give me, not only to ensure me of bodily health, good posture, cleanliness and strength, but also to teach my soul Christian virtue, to love God above all else, and always to treat my fellow human beings as I should wish to be treated by others, and thus to smother all evil impressions both by their example and by their admonitions and punishments. How little I control my temper and how much I let it get the better of me, the haste and carelessness which give rise to most of my faults. Please let all the blessings I have

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Fig. 32. Mietje at the harpsichord. ‘If only I could learn [to play] / I’d do my best like you.’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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chapter two enjoyed until now spur me on to overcome my vices and shortcomings, and Thou, dear God, give me Thy help, in order that it remain not only an intention, as has happened so often, but may at last be realised, so that here on earth I may be part of my parents’ happiness and may further my own temporal and future well-being.78

This tormented passage is not a daily reckoning, but the retrospective review of an entire year, written on Otto’s fifteenth birthday. Similarly, New Year’s Eve was always an occasion to reread his diary and take stock. This procedure, probably initiated by Otto’s parents, was also recommended – with or without the help of a diary – by pedagogues and further developed in children’s literature. In the Van Eck family, this required rereading of the diary encompassed the low points as well as the highlights. Time and again Otto’s incorrigibility led to the advice to reread his diary: I regret having to admit that I have already made up my mind so often to improve all of this, but have never followed through. Perhaps the reason for this is that I don’t reread often enough what I’ve written in my diary . . . Papa told me to put all of this in my diary and to reread it frequently, so that it would make a deeper impression on me and spur me on to reform.79

As we have seen, Otto’s diary was intended as an incentive to improve his behaviour, but above all to develop his conscience, or, as Otto’s mother called it, ‘the little man within’.80 In the long run Otto was expected to internalise his parents’ critical gaze, ultimately making their supervision unnecessary. The success of this undertaking is apparent from the subtle changes that take place in Otto’s diary as he grows older, starting in 1793. Persuasion In the years preceding this, Otto let the judgement – for the most part censure – of his conduct depend completely on the views of either his father (‘Papa was very displeased at this, and will not readily take me along again until I’m wiser’), his mother (‘Mama tells me that things did not go so well today, because I took her advice unwillingly’) or both parents (‘Unfortunately I must add that three times in these last couple of days I’ve given Papa and Mama reason to be displeased with my behaviour, because of my moodiness and intractability’).81 Here the rectification of his behaviour was still exacted by others. In 1793, when

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Otto was thirteen, persuasion began to play a role. Though rebuked by his parents, he was becoming receptive to their arguments. During his mother’s lessons he said ‘something very rude, and she convinced me that it was very bad of me’. By behaving ‘civilly’ at table, he tried to make up for ‘the previous mistake’.82 From 1794 on, persuasion was even reinforced at times by his own convictions. Otto began to take an active part in the process of evaluation: ‘And so the day was spent more cheerfully and peacefully than yesterday, when Mama and I myself were not happy with me.’ His parents’ reprimands continue to loom large in the diary, but now and then they are accompanied by a new element – self-reproach: ‘Still, today did not go by without any errors on my part, and I had much to blame myself for as regards my behaviour.’ Sometimes Otto judged himself more severely than his parents did. Even when his mother was much more satisfied with his behaviour than she had been the previous week, Otto says, ‘but all the same my heart tells me that it could have been better’.83 With increasing frequency, however, Otto voices a more charitable opinion of himself than he did in his younger years. After careful consideration he decided that he had no reason ‘to blame himself for anything’, or he flattered himself that ‘this week Mama will be rather satisfied (on the whole) with my behaviour’. Otto’s personal contribution to the evaluation of his behaviour gave him an opportunity to stay one step ahead of his parents, as well as to plead mitigating circumstances for his misconduct: ‘because even though I often forget my duty to my parents, my teachers and myself, it is always mere thoughtlessness’. Several days later we find the same argument, but more elaborately worked out. Otto admits that there was much to find fault with in his behaviour, but at bottom he had a good heart, ‘because, without wishing to praise myself, I nevertheless feel that it is not so much ill will as my pleasure-seeking nature and thoughtlessness’. At the same time he provided his parents with a justification for their strictness, which – as Otto now frequently emphasised – was for his own good: ‘I thus harm myself when I am unwilling to follow their orders or good advice, and am then ungrateful to them by refusing to obey, thus leading to my unhappiness.’84 That Otto gradually internalised the voice of his parents is also evidenced by his tendency to pre-empt their criticism and simply to assume beforehand that the usual consequences will ensue: ‘I shan’t fall into the rut of saying that I shall turn over a new leaf; instead, I prefer to see next Saturday how I’ve actually managed to do it.’85 Otto also

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Fig. 33. The kindly father. From Economische liedjes (1791) by B. Wolff and A. Deken.

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Fig. 34. The fate of a disobedient child. By Otto’s drawing teacher Isaac van Haastert. From Aangenaam kinder-school, 1781.

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Fig. 35. The Emants children (Otto’s cousins): Christina (1786–1849), Marcellus (1778–1854), and Jacoba (1779–1820). Silhouette, c. 1795.

began to gain more and more insight into – and to anticipate – the chain of reactions set off by his behaviour: For the time being I can report in this diary that, even though my behaviour this week was far from what it should have been, and I often erred by being rude, careless, angry, lazy and suchlike, Mama was for the most part much more satisfied with me than she was a week ago. Although she did not tell me so, I can see it nonetheless and must admit that it’s much more agreeable when she’s friendly to me than otherwise.86

Otto’s ability to anticipate his parents’ reaction – bad behaviour results in rejection and this in turn causes distress – must in the long run make punishment unnecessary. Evil is self-punishing – which brings us back to one of the basic principles of Rousseau’s Emile, but via a philanthropinist detour in which evil, even when it is not engineered, is at least given a helping hand. It sometimes happened that Otto’s parents refrained from intervening and simply let nature do its salutary work, although this was only in straightforward cases. When Otto got a stomach ache from eating too many sweets, his father pointed out that ‘this little illness has done, and continues to do, more good than the best admonitions and warnings’.87 A year later nature took its toll in the guise of a ‘little fruit man’: ‘In the evening I was slightly sick to my stomach; the little fruit man probably came to collect his money.’88

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The ‘little fruit man’ – supplied by nature free of charge – was a much more biddable ally of Otto’s parents than ‘the little man within’, the voice of his conscience. After all, that ‘little man’ had first to be cultivated, so it is no wonder that he leaps into action only at the end of the diary. In this sense Otto’s diary fulfilled the function of intermediary: a paper conscience that could be called upon to remind him of his good intentions. After the diarist had given proof of increasing insight into the pattern of action and reaction – good behaviour meant pleased parents and increased happiness – he invoked not only God but also ‘the little man within’ to continue to persuade himself of this: ‘May all of this, added to the little man within (as Mama says), incite me to pray for God’s help and stimulate my vigorous cooperation in continuing on His path.’89 Here the ‘little man within’ and Otto ‘himself ’ were still two separate beings. Several months later, when Otto’s own heart told him that his behaviour had been unacceptable, they appear to have merged.90 Now that Otto’s prayer had been heard, it seems that the diary was no longer necessary. After this entry, Otto’s jottings gradually become shorter and more erratic until they finally come to a halt on 20 November 1797.

CHAPTER THREE

REQUIRED READING Reading Advice The choice of books one gives to children is an all-important detail of education. All parents and educators should give the utmost consideration to this important matter, since the souls of children are susceptible to both evil and good impressions, and reading books, no less than listening to conversation, makes a very deep impression on children. . . . Friends of mankind, allow me to ask you: do all of you know the writings that your children so assiduously peruse? Are you confident that no poison of any kind is disseminated therein, that they contain nothing evil or excessive that could spoil the imagination or hearts of your children?1

This warning was issued in 1789 in the philanthropinist journal Bijdragen tot het Menschelijk Geluk (Contributions to Human Happiness). Never before had books been considered so important and yet so dangerous to the child’s soul.2 Children’s reading meant careful navigation between Scylla and Charybdis. Although reading was necessarily praised by parents as a beneficial and, above all, agreeable activity, it was also essential to subject it to strict supervision. In nearly all the pedagogical writings of this period, therefore, parents were advised to serve their children a balanced diet of carefully selected reading matter. Chatelain, for instance, advised parents to assemble for their children ‘a good library containing the best books in all branches of learning’.3 Betje Wolff went even further by advocating the introduction of age groups within such libraries. When children are presented with books beyond their comprehension, they are in danger of becoming ‘priggish’.4 Chatelain, too, was afraid of creating a ‘dry, stale school wit’. Reading should be a ‘pleasure’, because books ‘can be enjoyed through both the eyes and the ears’. A boy of fourteen or fifteen who freely chooses to ‘read nothing but slender classics is certainly on the wrong track’. At the same time, however, the author warns against ‘corrupting the taste with those trashy, contemptible novels often concocted here by hungry hirelings’.5 The pedagogue Jean Trembley subsequently enjoined parents not to let children read everything all at once: ‘This will cause their reading

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exercises for an entire year to be pieced together as ridiculously as a harlequin’s costume.’6 There is an interesting discussion of this problem in a ‘Conversation about exaggerated feelings’ in De Nieuwe Nederlandsche Spectator.7 A father tells a friend that he encouraged his children – aged eighteen and twenty-three – to read Werther and other novels. In his opinion it did them good: ‘My friend, I gave my children these edifying books to read, and since then they are totally different people; they have changed from wooden blocks into sensitive hearts.’8 His friend, however, warns him against the dire consequences of a morbid sensitivity. He suggests removing all sentimental books from the children’s rooms: ‘for the best novels are now poisonous to both of them’.9 The novels should be temporarily replaced by ‘simple moral writings’. Only when the children have read these should they return to Rhijnvis Feith and similar sentimental authors. More parents should consult such advisers, in the opinion of the philanthropinist Johann Ludwig Ewald, who saw it as the sacred duty of parents to protect their children from harmful reading matter. If they are incapable of making suitable choices, they should at least take the trouble to ‘ask a sensible friend for advice and let him select the books’.10 Martinet, on the other hand, urges parents to consult advisers but to maintain a healthy distrust of them: ‘Then, when someone recommends a book to you or your children, do not rely too readily on his opinion. They should be given no books that you have not first read yourself.’11 This advice also figures – much more emphatically – at the top of the list of recommendations made by the anonymous author in Bijdragen tot het Menschelijk Geluk, in which one of the rules regarding book-reading runs as follows: ‘Let your children read nothing – absolutely nothing – that you have not first read yourself.’12 Naturally the pedagogues’ warning to be wary of bad advice did not apply to their own counsel or to the children’s books they had written themselves. The situation lamented by Allard Hulshoff in 1765 – the distressing shortage of ‘good narratives’ for children, which forced them to make do with stories whose excess of ‘passion and love affairs’ made them unsuitable for children – was soon set to rights.13 After 1780 there was a boom in ‘sound and sensible’ children’s books, many of them written by the same educators who had turned children’s reading into a pedagogical problem.14 This invalidated one of the reasons put forward in Rousseau’s Emile for safeguarding children from book-learning, namely the inadequacy of the books on offer. By around 1790, when Otto began his diary, the supply had even become so plentiful that pedagogues

required reading

Fig. 36. The first stirrings of the intellect. From Economische liedjes (1791) by B. Wolff and A. Deken.

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could permit themselves the luxury of a certain fastidiousness in singling out the best of the ‘good’ children’s books. Thus Martinet immediately toned down the enthusiastic observation made in his Huisboek (Household book) of 1793 – that children ‘need no longer amuse themselves with the story of Ourson and Valentine and The Four Sons of Aymon and such rubbish’ – with a critical comment: ‘We now have much, perhaps already too much, of a better sort; well then, since they are not all of equal value, choose the best.’15 In 1786 the philanthropinist Peter Villaume even warned against the surplus of exemplary and grateful children populating the recent children’s literature: One now finds in books numerous examples of children who are grateful to their parents, remember their parents’ birthdays and suchlike. This may be beneficial, but at the same time I fear either exaggerated feelings or even affectation. Children seek to imitate their models, and yet they do not have the same feelings – perhaps their parents are not the kind who deserve to engender these feelings – and then everything becomes compulsion, affectation, inordinate display, and nothing but appearances. . . . These children are like girls who read novels and glean from them the notion of love; they seek a beloved, but cannot find one anywhere.16

Villaume therefore exhorts the authors of children’s books to write with more subtlety and to beware of exaggeration: ‘Every exorbitant representation wrenches the heart.’ The previously quoted author writing in the 1789 Bijdragen tot het Menschelijk Geluk seems to share this sentiment when he insists that children should read mainly non-fiction in which people and the world are portrayed as faithfully as possible. This is also why Salzmann attaches so much importance to the reading and telling of true stories taken from history. Parents should not only choose the right books with care, but also take into account the children’s ages. As we have seen, Betje Wolff advocated a library in which books were categorised according to age, the Nieuwe Nederlandsche Spectator advised against giving children sentimental books to read before their minds had been cultivated by reading simple moral writings, and the Bijdragen tot het Menschelijk Geluk pointed out the danger of tainting children’s minds by confronting them too early with books inappropriate to their age group.17 The author of this last article went a step further by insisting that the choice of books be based on the specific character of the children in question and their state of mind: Match the books you let your children read to their characters. Therefore, good parents, seek to acquaint yourselves thoroughly with the particular

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temperament of your children, and choose their reading matter accordingly. If you perceive signs of vindictiveness in your children, let them read the most apposite examples of generous forgiveness; fuel in this way their ambition from this angle, and impress upon them that herein lies the highest honour and praise. If you sense a miserly streak in them, let them read shining examples of largesse. In short, give them examples of all such virtues of which you have discovered more or less the opposite in them.18

This recommendation to read the right thing at the right time brings us back to the crux of the approach championed by eighteenth-century pedagogues: the importance of observing children in order to intervene effectively – in this case with the help of reading matter – when their emotions and impulses threaten to take a wrong turn. The solution, once again, is to have them keep a diary under parental supervision. We have already seen that the advice literature urged parents to have their children keep a written record of what they read and to monitor this ‘reading diary’. This was the advice Christian Fürchtegott Gellert gave to his fictional son: ‘Every three months I should like to see your notebook of what and how you are reading.’19 The fact that Otto’s diary contains so much information on his reading suggests that his parents had not only taken Gellert’s advice to heart but had done him one better: they perused Otto’s diary not every three months but almost every day. Otto’s Reading Regimen Otto’s diary gives us an impression of the selection his parents made from the children’s literature of the day. In his early youth he grew up with De Perponcher’s Onderwijs voor kinderen (Lessons for children), but as he grew older, from the age of ten in any case, he read almost daily from a four-volume work that served as a sequel to De Perponcher: J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire.20 This work, compiled entirely in accordance with philanthropinist principles, was intended to make all other school books redundant.21 Evidently Mr and Mrs van Eck were not convinced, because, in addition to this basic book of encyclopaedic proportions, Otto read at least thirty-five other pedagogically sound works of an enlightened nature. In 1791–1792, for example, he usually divided his attention between four titles a day, reading an average of five pages in each book. These titles, each belonging to a different

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genre, reveal that Otto’s reading regimen had been put together with the greatest of care. In the morning he read a number of pages of a religious work, followed in the afternoon and evening by several pages of a history book, a novel or a collection of stories, as well as some of Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire. It is more difficult to determine the make-up of Otto’s reading portfolio for the years after 1792, since in this period he was less inclined than before to pad out his diary with a methodical run-down of his reading. His notes of titles or authors’ names became rather arbitrary and did not always include descriptions of content. Moreover, he often recorded isolated passages without giving their source. In reality, therefore, Otto must have read more than the thirty-five titles cited in his diary. He acquired his knowledge of natural and general history from, among others, Buffon’s Algemeene en bijzondere natuurlijke historie (Natural History: General and Particular), Millot’s Oude en hedendaagsche algemeene waereldlijke geschiedenis (Elements of General History: Ancient and Modern), Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur (The Catechism of Nature; for the Use of Children) and his Kort begrip der waereldhistorie voor de jeugd (Concise history of the world for young people), Pluche’s Schouwtoneel der natuur (The Spectacle of Nature, or Conversations about the Particularities of Natural History That Have Appeared Most Apt to Make Young People Curious and Form Their Minds), Rollin’s Histoire romaine (The Roman History from the Foundation of Rome to the Battle of Actium), Stuart’s Romeinsche geschiedenissen (Roman Histories) and Wagenaar’s Vaderlandsche historie (History of the Dutch nation).22 It is no coincidence that the above list contains titles expressly recommended in a number of pedagogical treatises. For instance, both Betje Wolff and Pieter Paulus (Otto’s uncle) recommended Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, which – if accompanied by parents’ verbal explanations – was thought suitable for young children.23 Pluche’s work was highly esteemed as a pedagogical tool by both De Perponcher and Hulshoff.24 Children who were not in a position to read such works supposedly ran the risk of developing minds that were ‘not alert’. Wagenaar’s Vaderlandsche historie was indirectly recommended by Betje Wolff to ‘Dutch mothers’ who take their educational task seriously: ‘Is the history of our country, as well as that of other regions, completely foreign to you? . . . But we lack so much – possibly this is true! Yet this does not allow you to be excused – read!’25 Rollin’s Histoire romaine, which Otto read, was considered by Basedow suitable for acquiring in-depth information on the subjects previously studied in his Manuel élémentaire. This book was likewise recommended in 1767 in the jour-

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Fig. 37. Frontispiece of Algemeene en byzondere natuurlyke historie by G.L. Leclerc de Buffon, 1798.

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nal De Philosooph, as were the works of Pluche, Buffon and Wagenaar. Basedow’s work was propagated in turn by Cramer in his Aanleiding ter bevordering der huisselijke gelukzaligheid (Occasion for furthering domestic bliss) of 1786.26 In the field of religious literature, Otto’s parents also followed the advice of philanthropinist authors to acquaint children – albeit with the ‘necessary circumspection’ – with the Bible. These writers thought that biblical stories were not always interesting or comprehensible to children, and were consequently a potential source of mistaken ideas and fears: ‘because of this unclarified obscurity, and partly because of the objectionable element some of them appear to have’. Moreover, the language of the Bible had not been adapted to the child’s powers of comprehension: ‘Young people rightly demand that they be spoken to in a language they can understand.’27 Otto’s religious reading therefore consisted of the Bible, accompanied by Feddersen’s Voorbeelden van wijsheid en deugd (Examples of wisdom and virtue) and other works on such subjects written by philanthropinists: Hermes’s Godsdienstig handboek (Religious handbook), Hess’s Geschiedverhalen des O. en N. Testaments . . . voor den jeugd (Biblical stories of the Old and New Testament . . . for young people), Seiler’s Kleiner und historischer Katechismus (Concise historical catechism) and Salzmann’s Gottesverehrungen gehalten im Betsale des Dessauischen Philantropins (Worship held in the prayer room of the Dessau Philanthropinum).28 For edification and enjoyment, Otto read moral tales written especially for children and novels by such enlightened authors as Madame de Genlis, M.G. Cambon-van der Werken, M.E. Bouée de la Fite, Madame d’Epinay, F.T.M. de Baculard d’Arnaud and the philanthropinist C.G. Salzmann.29 He also read children’s journals such as the philanthropinist periodical De Vriend der Kinderen (The Children’s Friend). Even though the advice books said that fiction was the most delicate part of a child’s reading regimen, they gave little indication as to which titles were sound and which were not. Pronouncements on this subject can be found only with regard to the works of Madame de Beaumont: K. van der Palm recommended them and Hulshoff advised against them. Remarkably, Madame de Beaumont is missing entirely from Otto’s list of literature. The children’s books Otto read provided additional information to help parents choose their offspring’s reading matter. The lists of recommended reading they contain reveal a network that largely corresponds to the regime Otto’s parents devised for him. Thus De Perponcher

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refers to the poems of Hiëronymus van Alphen and Pieter ’t Hoen – which Otto presumably read before he began to keep a diary – and to Madame de la Fite’s Entretiens, drames et contes moraux (Conversations, plays and moral tales), also part of Otto’s reading, as well as to Madame d’Epinay’s Les conversations d’Emilie (Conversations of Emily), Pluche’s Schouwtoneel der natuur, Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire, the journal De Vriend der Kinderen and Madame de Genlis’ Adèle et Théodore.30 The fictional children in the last-mentioned book supposedly read the work of De Perponcher at a young age – a claim no doubt added by the Dutch translator, Betje Wolff – after which their literature list comprises, once more, the conversations of Emily, the relevant books by Rollin, Pluche and Madame de la Fite, as well as two other works that Otto read: De kleine Grandisson (published in 1790 as Young Grandison in a translation by Mary Wollstonecraft) and Madame de Genlis’ own Avondtijdkortingen van het kasteel (Tales of the Castle).31 The children in these tales read, among other things, Les conversations d’Emilie and the Schouwtoneel der natuur.32 The work of De la Fite is administered to Piet, a little boy in a poem by Van Alphen, as an antidote to vindictive snitching: Piet grew sad, sank down, dejected; Sulking, sighing, as expected, Then took up La Fite. An inclination to complain Was never seen in Piet again.33

The diligent readers of Weekblad voor Neerlands Jongelingschap (Weekly for Dutch Youth) grew up, as did Otto, with the verses of Van Alphen and ’t Hoen, De Perponcher’s Onderwijs voor kinderen and De kleine Grandisson.34 The reading and diary-writing children in De Vriend der Kinderen are slightly older and are given Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire as basic reading – as was Otto after his tenth birthday – just as they all read Buffon’s Natuurlijke historie.35 Enthusiastic but Fictional Bookworms The endorsement of ‘the good book’ in the works of children’s fiction written around 1800 is invariably accompanied by stirring passages aimed at encouraging youngsters to read. Thus Karel in De Vriend der Jeugd (The Friend of Youth) receives, to his great disappointment, the book De kindervriend (The children’s friend) as a St Nicholas present.36

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Hoping to get a tin soldier, he bursts into tears when he opens his package. As could be seen in the accompanying illustration, Karel’s father explained so convincingly the benefits to be had from good books that Karel dried his tears and would no longer exchange his present for anything in the world, not even for the tin soldier he had so fervently desired. The argument advanced by Karel’s father – the importance of putting one’s time to good use – accords with the message of a poem written by Hiëronymus van Alphen for the sister of another Karel: Never working, never reading, Always in the garden, dreaming, Is this why we live at all? Dearest Clara, aren’t you weary? You must find it very dreary, Always playing with your doll!

Karel himself comes to realise this when, in a different poem, he catches a cold: Sitting there, so indolent, I was really in the doldrums, Sulking, all my patience spent. At last I said – such idle living, Cannot be for good or gain. I took a book, began my reading, And indeed felt far less pain.37

Some fictional children, such as Willem in De kleine Grandisson, do not need to be persuaded by speeches or nasty experiences of the benefits of reading. But of course Willem has an example worthy of imitation in Karel, about whom he writes to his mother that he will do everything in his power ‘to become his equal’. He still has a year in which to achieve this, since he is ‘but twelve years old’ – the same age Otto was when he read this book – ‘and he [Karel] is thirteen’. This letter is followed by the remark that tomorrow they will travel to the family’s country house, where Willem expects to have a lot of fun: ‘Karel has packed many books to take along, because we like to read.’ In the second part of the book, Willem’s sister Annette relies just as much on the support of Karel’s sister Emilia, blessed as she is with a great passion for reading: ‘She loves to read, and she is right, for this is the proper way to learn.’ The two children can judge their own behaviour by comparing themselves not only with good examples but also with one remarkably bad one: Eduard, the black sheep of the Grandisson family, who – as befits a bad character – abhors books, just as he detests country life:

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‘All three of us are glad to go to the country; only Eduard regrets it. It’s a bad sign, it seems to me, if one hates life in the country.’38 Naturally children with a passion for reading are extremely upset if they accidentally damage a book. This happens to Hendrik in the story ‘De kleine losbol’ (The little rascal) of 1792, when he knocks over an ink pot, spilling ink over Buffon’s Natuurlijke historie, of all things: ‘But you see, continued his father, your rowdiness causes sorrow not only to me but to yourself as well. The beautiful Buffon has now been lost to us for ever. What a joy it would have been for your brothers and sisters if I could have shown them the glory of nature in its creatures, and what will they say when they have to forgo this pleasure, a pleasure that would have taught them so much? Now they must be content with a lesser book.’39 The fact that Buffon’s Natuurlijke historie was remaindered on a large scale in the very year this story was published means that it may well have been more than just impartial publicity for a ‘good book’.40 In any case, this mingling of self-interest and the common good occurs more often. The children in G.C. Raff’s Gesprekken voor kinderen (Talks for children) rack their brains trying to remember where they read a certain story.41 It was about a monstrous animal even larger than a whale, which was ‘a half league in length and breadth, and which resembled an island when it appeared at the surface of the water’.42 ‘Oh, if only I knew where. Do tell me where I can find this story!’ At last they realise that they read it in their Natuurlijke historie voor kinderen (A System of Natural History, adapted for the Instruction of Youth, in the Form of a Dialogue), likewise by Raff. ‘Exactly, that’s right, now I remember. Oh, if only I had that book now!’ ‘George: I have it – here it is.’ There is no greater joy in children’s-book-land than a fresh supply of books. Not surprisingly, the family friend Philoteknus in De Vriend der Kinderen would not dream of showing up empty-handed when visiting the children. As soon as he arrives, he tells them that he has been to the fair, where he searched the book stalls for ‘the latest novelties’, from which he selected a book for each of them: ‘“Well? Did you get something nice for me? – and for me? – and me too?” they cried out, each trying to make himself heard above the others while feeling the man’s pockets. Philoteknus then turned out his pockets and said to them, “Yes, of course, for all of you. Something for everyone, and very beautiful things they are, too”’43 The gifts are presented on the condition that each child ‘will be so good as to tell the others the contents of his or her particular book’. Frederik is naturally overjoyed to receive Raff’s Geographie voor kinderen (Geography for children), Lotje is equally ecstatic

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Fig. 38. Children hungry for books. From J. Hazeu’s Leerzaame gesprekjens, 1790.

about Trembley’s Onderwijs van een vader aan zijne kinderen (A father’s lessons to his children), Karel gratefully accepts Ebert’s Onderwijs in de natuurlijke historie voor de jeugd (Instruction in natural history for the young), likewise Lijsje De Kindervriend (The Children’s Friend) by the philanthropinist Frederick Eberhard von Rochow: ‘The Children’s Friend! The Children’s Friend!’ she cried. ‘Oh, I’ve already got it!’ ‘You’ve already got it, you say? No, Lijsje, not this one. The Children’s Friend you have in your hand is possibly a brother of the one you already own: at least they are completely equal in your affections.’44 In De Genlis’ Tales of the Castle, one of the children is presented with the other Kindervriend, that of the French philanthropinist Arnaud Berquin: ‘Delphine listened, attentively and with astonishment, to Henriëtte. “How much you know!” said Delphine. “I,” resumed Henriëtte, “I know nothing. I have only a very shallow and muddled knowledge

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of everything, but I have the most fervent desire to learn, and I love to read. Shall I lend you some books?” “Gladly,” said Delphine, “since my doll has not yet arrived from Paris.” “Well then, I’ll lend you the Conversations of Emily and The Children’s Friend.” ’45 The most extreme form of pre-programmed reading is to be found in De Genlis’ Adèle et Théodore. Adèle’s mother leaves nothing to chance, and even succeeds in making it seem as though her daughter is free to choose what she reads. She writes Adèle’s books herself, has them printed in a very limited edition, and then arranges for them to be brought to the door by a peddler. To stimulate her daughter’s desire to read alone and to choose alone, she waits as long as possible to have the books brought round: ‘Her impatience was increased by delaying the pleasure.’ When the peddler finally appears, Adèle does not disappoint her mother. She chooses the right book – coincidentally the only one properly bound, with Morocco leather and gilt edges to boot – and reads it as though her life depends on it: ‘A week later, another peddler, another lesson.’46 Reading in the Company of Fictional Friends Otto’s books provide him with fictional friends his own age – all of whom possess an infectious enthusiasm for reading – and fictional parents who supervise their little readers along with their story-book children. Otto’s reading included many stories-within-a-story, in which fictional children and their educators form the outermost narrative frame. The children in these books have all kinds of experiences themselves, but at the same time they read books together or have stories told to them. These stories are the heart of such books, but in a way they become interactive, because the fictional children continually interrupt the inner narrative to comment or express feelings of horror, grief, pity or enthusiasm. These feelings are taken up in turn by the fictional educators and commented upon, encouraged or steered in another direction if they are considered inappropriate. The children in De Vriend der Kinderen read on their own a book of which we are told little at first, except that it has moved the children to tears.47 Their father therefore decides to have his daughter Lotje read aloud the most poignant passages. The story is about the profound love between a father and his son, both seriously wounded in battle and each more worried about the welfare of the other than about his

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own injuries. The narrative is regularly interrupted by the children’s tears or fits of weeping that last so long the father has to take over the task of reading aloud: ‘I simply cannot go on reading, dear Papa,’ Lotje stammered. ‘Then give it here,’ I said, ‘and I shall do it – but should I read it to myself, or out loud? How do you feel about it? Do you really want to hear this mournful story a second time?’ ‘No, Papa, no!’ cried the children, ‘don’t read it to yourself ! Read it out loud if you will, out loud!’ So I continued reading.48

The son in the story is getting better, but suffers a setback when he hears that his father has died. Only when he is told that there was a misunderstanding, and that his father is indeed recovering, is the son able to accept his own death: ‘“Thank God! Why on earth did they tell me that? Now I’m at ease. Now I’m ready to die!” Whereupon speech became difficult for him, and his throat ever more constricted, and he grew short of breath.’49 The listeners are so choked with emotion that they also have lumps in their throats, and a hush falls over the narrative. After a moment of suitable silence, the father takes the floor to point out the lessons to be learned from the story. That children should take such lessons very seriously indeed is made clear to them in another story, in which youngsters who ignore the moral of a story told by their father pay for this mistake with their lives. Their father has just finished telling them that cruel acts will bring earthly retribution upon the perpetrator, when the eldest boy steals all the young birds from a nest and divides them up among his younger brothers and sisters. Unlike the two sisters, who take loving care of their birds, the boys indulge in all kinds of animal abuse: ‘The lad who had found the nest tied a rope to the leg of his bird and dragged it along behind him. The second boy stuck a needle into his bird’s eye, and took pleasure in watching the creature bleed.’ These brothers were first punished by their father, who treated them to the same cruelties they had inflicted on their victims, and then they were dealt with by God: ‘It pleased God that six or seven months later the eldest son, who had actually masterminded the evil deed, fell ill and died.’ Nature then sent vengeful birds to complete the punishment: ‘Many people say that, when he was buried, they saw ravens, magpies, vultures and other birds of prey fall screeching upon his grave . . . and that after a great deal of effort, when they had finally got him under the ground, the birds dug him up again and devoured him.’ The girls came to a good end, at least in the

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author’s opinion. The youngest died a year after her brother, but was buried in a well-tended grave, ‘for the birds pulled out the weeds, and God let all kinds of beautifully coloured wildflowers grow on it’. The moral of the story was so convincing in itself that the father decided to make an exception and keep his conclusions to himself: ‘We understood his meaning very well, and it had a wonderful effect.’50 The same structure is seen in another book Otto read, Avondtijdkortingen van het kasteel (Tales of the Castle). The main characters find themselves in a draughty old castle far from Paris, where they gradually learn to appreciate country life, despite their initial aversion to it. This transformation is the result not only of their pleasant experiences in the countryside but also of the stories their mother tells to liven up the evenings. It is no coincidence that the mother – Madame de Genlis alias Mrs de Clemire – chooses the story ‘Delphine or the Fortunate Recovery’ as the first in a long series of stories told in the tradition of Tales from a Thousand and One Nights. Delphine, a city girl, is rich and conceited, though she has a good heart. She has been ruined by unhealthy city life, and her ‘vehement emotions’ and ‘unbridled passions’ have made her ‘the unhappiest child in all of Paris’. After various physicians have examined her and pronounced her incurable, her desperate mother consults ‘a renowned German doctor named Steinhausse’. His methodical observation of the child leads him to diagnose a potentially fatal condition and to prescribe a remedy that he will administer personally, if the mother agrees to entrust her child to him for eight months. Delphine is to be taken to the countryside, where she will live in a cowshed, in the dung, which – according to De Genlis’ footnote – is an effective remedy for chest complaints. The girl, still ignorant of her fate, suffers such fits of despair and rage that she has to be led away by force. This prompts one of the listeners – Pulcherie – to remark, with tears in her eyes, that she can understand the girl’s reaction. She is immediately reprimanded, however, by her story-telling mother: Delphine’s reaction to what happened was exaggerated: ‘Religion and reason must always keep us from despair.’ Moreover, the girl ought to be condemned, not pitied, because of her arrogant behaviour towards Mrs Steinhausse, whom she considers beneath her. The smell of cow-dung combined with the fresh country air, the salutary contact with simple peasant folk, and above all her friendship with Henriëtte, the doctor’s daughter, leads to Delphine’s metamorphosis: ‘She subsequently becomes the most

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amiable of women, acquiring a refined intellect and agreeable talents – good-natured, capable, charitable.’ Pulcherie’s conclusion that a faulty upbringing was to blame for Delphine’s complaints requires, for once, no contradiction from her mother.51 Otto’s commentary to this story is of an entirely different nature. He seems to be focusing more on the medical remedy – the smell of cow-dung as a cure for chest complaints – when he claims to have been struck by the realisation that one ‘can grow accustomed to anything, as I often noticed during my illness’.52 Otto’s reaction was clearly based on his own experience, for in this period he was suffering from a serious skin complaint that required treatment with evil-smelling ointments composed of tar and sheep’s fat, which he had to rub on his whole body, including his face.53 The way in which both fictional and real-life readers are manipulated in children’s literature is completely in keeping with the approach suggested by Campe in his Beknopte zielkunde voor kinderen (Concise handbook of psychology for children). The self-contained world in which Rousseau experiments with his protégé Emile is here replaced by an artificial universe, safer than the natural surroundings in which Emile was expected to rough it, but also safer than the real world. Martinet is very explicit about this compromise in his Huisboek. Children, he maintains, should be allowed to gain ‘knowledge of the world’ not in the world itself but in books: ‘We, and they, must never become similar to the world! . . . Oh, that we may hand them over to society, and to the nation, as pure and uncontaminated by the world as possible!’54 Otto’s Fiction and his Reality If we compare the events in the fiction Otto read with those in his own small universe, we must acknowledge that the fictitious outside world – intended as preparation for real life – fits Otto like a glove. The lives of his fictional friends display a frightening similarity to his own life: not only do they read the same books he does, but they lead the same sort of lives. Like Otto, they divide their time between the city and sizeable country estates. They take walks with their goats, cultivate little plots of their own, visit factories and workshops, care for their pet birds, go on long, edifying walks with their parents or teachers, play the piano, write poems for their parents’ birthdays, keep diaries, rise early to hear the nightingale sing, and occasionally eat too many peaches:

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My father gave this peach to me For learning with such fervour, And now I eat quite happily. The peach has yet more flavour.55

That, at least, is how a boy in a poem by Van Alphen put it. The logical sequel to this incident is to be found in Otto’s diary. In 1791 he wrote that in future he would be allowed to pick peaches only under supervision: ‘I’m still haunted by the devouring of twelve peaches in 1787.’56 During a real-life educational walk of the kind Otto also read about, he again discussed his reading: ‘Walked back with Papa while talking about the new book by Mrs Cambon, De klijne Clarissa (Little Clarissa), which we received as a gift. Like Karel in Grandisson, Clarissa is the heroine in whom all virtues are combined, and this book has been given to us in order to imitate them.’57 During one of these walks, Otto was advised not to fraternise with the household servants.58 This notion is almost identical to the advice given in Adèle et Théodore by a baroness who counsels a friend to stop encouraging her daughter to consider her servants ‘as unfortunate friends’. No matter how well intended, such an attitude will lead down a slippery slope: ‘We can never view people without the slightest education as our friends. I know of nothing more dangerous than a young person being intimate with servants. . . . He or she will learn nothing but ridiculous expressions.’59 The scene with the slate in Salzmann’s Stichtend en vermaeklijk handboekje (Edifying and diverting handbook) of 1792 must also have seemed familiar to Otto. Maria is not allowed to go with the rest of the family for a walk in the woods, because she has misbehaved the whole week long. When she objects to this disciplinary measure, her mother brings out the slate on which she records instances of the children’s behaviour, and asks one of them to read it out loud. Maria’s brothers chalk up overwhelmingly positive scores, but Maria’s conduct shows a marked downward spiral: ‘Maria: Monday morning: diligent and peaceful; afternoon: stubborn. Tuesday morning: peevish; afternoon: peevish and quarrelsome. Wednesday: very badly at fault.’60 We have already seen that Otto’s behaviour was tallied up in the same way, presumably also on a slate. The list was likewise read out by his mother, and sometimes Otto was condemned to copying the whole of it – on his own slate. In the week of 27 February 1796, Otto even surpassed Maria by being ‘disobedient, contrary, short-tempered, vindictive and impudent. Truly

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Fig. 39. The peach. ‘My father gave this peach to me / For learning with such fervour.’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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fine virtues which in future, when I have grown older, will make me quite an amiable character.’61 Otto was not unique in keeping a diary. His fictional peers do the same, and are similarly monitored in this endeavour by their elders. This is true not only of the children in De Vriend der Kinderen and those in the little book Otto read by Feddersen, in which the youthful diary of Doddridge is held up as an example, but also of the main characters in Adèle et Théodore. Adèle and her mother write in their diaries at the same time every day: ‘every evening she gives me her written thoughts and comments, which I then correct with mine’.62 Adèle is allowed to read her mother’s diary only after she has submitted her own for inspection. Adèle’s attempt to destroy a few pages of her diary is thwarted by her mother, who encloses them without compunction in a letter to a friend: ‘You will receive it just as she wrote it.’63 In the journal De Vriend der Jeugd (The Youngsters’ Friend) – not to be confused with De Vriend der Kinderen – Lodewijk is urged by Hermanus, his former teacher, to keep a diary as a means of perfecting his character: ‘In it you must write down in the evening all the feelings that have arisen in you that day, as well as all of your activities’.64 Hermanus does not ask to see the diary, but Lodewijk sends it to him anyway, so that both his teacher and the journal’s readers are given an idea of a suitable form, appropriate content and the desired effect of such diaries: 6 June Have I fulfilled all my duties today? Have I spent this day in such a way that I can say to myself: ‘Lodewijk! You have added to your understanding, bettered your heart? Let’s see, let’s review the day: today I studied geography very diligently – with very little joy, to be sure, but is it my fault that I’m not in good spirits today? I wish to clear myself, and yet I’m not free of guilt.’65

Not only Otto’s activities but also a number of incidents in his life strongly resemble those described in his reading. Thus we see Otto’s experiment with his father’s firearm, which ended before he could hurt anyone, occurring countless times in the literature he read, in which the outcome was usually much worse. For instance, in the journal Geschenk voor de Jeugd (Gift to Youth) of 1784, the bosom friends Jantje and Keesje were far less fortunate. After several stanzas enlarging upon the lads’ utter devotion to one another, they hit upon the idea of playing at soldiers with real rifles:

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chapter three Like a sergeant Kees taught Jan, On arms he did expound. ‘Take aim and fire,’ he yelled, ‘Come on!’ Bang! – Jan lay on the ground! Kees threw himself on his dear friend, And tried to stop the bleeding. ‘Oh Jan,’ he cried out in the end, ‘Would God could hear my pleading!’ The dying Jan gave him a look Of fondness and forgiving; Gripped his hand – that’s all it took! He was no longer living! Kees screamed as though a bayonet Had slashed his chest apart, And falling next to Jan he met Death from a broken heart.66

In similar fashion one of the main characters in Entretiens, drames et contes moraux accidentally shoots her younger sister.67 Moreover, a print in Otto’s copy of the Manuel élémentaire shows a man pointing to a gun on the wall with a boy standing at his side, listening attentively. According to the caption, it is a father instructing his son. We are not told what words he uses, but it is easy to imagine the gist of the lesson. Adèle and Théodore pay their respects to the body of the gardener’s daughter in order to alleviate their fear of death: ‘I took Adèle by the hand and said, “Look, my child, this soul-stirring thing can do nothing but fill us with a tender sorrow.”’68 Otto missed this opportunity when the daughter of their gardener died, presumably because at the time he was himself feeling poorly. He did, however, visit a gravely ill farmer to learn another of life’s lessons. A year later, when the clergyman died, he again missed the opportunity to become reconciled with death, which he very much regretted: ‘Mama told me that he died very peacefully and even thought of me in his last hour. I should have liked to be with him once more, to see for myself how fortunate it is to die so peacefully.’69 Otto’s difficulties in caring for his birds and the resulting discussions with his parents are sometimes paralleled in the books he read. In Adèle et Théodore, Adèle catches a little bird and puts it in a cage. Even though she smothers it with affection, the bird becomes more and more miserable. Her mother tries to persuade her to let the little creature go by suggesting that Adèle put herself in the bird’s place: ‘ “If I were to

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Fig. 40. Kees threw himself on his dear friend / And tried to stop the bleeding. From Geschenk voor de jeugd (1784) by J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg.

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lock you up in a small room and never let you out, wouldn’t you be unhappy?” Adèle answered (very sadly), “Oh, my poor little bird!”’ Here follows a blow-by-blow account of a long inner struggle, in the course of which Adèle’s mother does everything she can to change her daughter’s mind: ‘Well then, child, keep it. This little creature has no more sense than other animals. It does not reason about the wrong you do it, about your cruelty in robbing it of its happiness just to give yourself a mere pastime. It doesn’t hate you; it is simply unhappy.’ The upshot of this is that the girl decides to grant her beloved pet its freedom.70 One of the discussions in De kleine Grandisson revolves around the same theme. The exemplary Karel, however, disagrees with Adèle’s mother on this score, perhaps because the birds in question are accustomed to captivity and also because of the wonderful care Karel gives them. Karel does not think it cruel to keep birds in a cage, because they cannot think ‘as we do’. Adèle’s mother subscribes to this opinion, but she distinguishes between thinking and feeling: she considers birds capable of the latter and therefore capable of experiencing emotions. Karel approaches the question in a rational way: ‘If we were locked up, we would say to ourselves, how diverting it is to go out and how painful it is to be imprisoned. Birds have no understanding of that difference: when they are given food and drink, they are satisfied, and they content themselves with what they have, without yearning for what they don’t have.’71 It emerges from a discussion Otto had with his parents on this subject that both opinions found support in the Van Eck household: In the afternoon one of my best-singing birds flew away, owing to carelessness on the part of the servant, and when I complained to Mama about it, the only answer I got was: ‘the creature is now much better off than before’. I think so too, in fact, but still I should have preferred to keep him in my cage. Papa says that I can buy another one, since a caged bird has already been robbed of its freedom anyway, and I hope to do so tomorrow morning at the market in Delft.72

The opinion of Otto’s mother actually goes further than the children’s literature of those days. After all, keeping house pets was not condemned, but there was less agreement about catching wild birds. Cruel methods were not condoned, but Otto’s books contain quite a few children who catch birds in a knip – a trap that snaps shut when the creature hops into it. Van Alphen, who has no moral objections to this hobby, nevertheless wrote a poem warning children not to entertain high hopes of success:

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Fig. 41. Pietjen and his pet bird. ‘Dearest Siskin, pretty creature, / Don’t you miss your liberty? / Certainly you must regard, / Imprisonment with misery. God gave every creature freedom, / He rejects all slavery, / His example I shall follow, / Choosing now to set you free.’ From Stukken het schoolwezen betreffende, uitgegeven door de Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen, 1785.

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chapter three No more than half an hour had my trap hung in the tree, When this titmouse flew inside. How many birds I shall soon catch! I told myself with glee. In this good start I take great pride.73

After spending seven days waiting for another bird to happen into his trap, the child becomes dejected and is now ripe for the moral of Van Alphen’s poem: Those who venture great things, those who dare, Because their first attempts are so successful, Are just as foolish as those who despair Because they have been weighed down by reversal.

Otto ran the same risk with his optimistic fantasies at the beginning of the season: Furthermore, it was a very fine day, and I amused myself greatly by hanging out the thrush snares and the traps. The first day I already caught something and saw a great many thrushes, so there’s hope.74

Later on Otto accidentally caught a blackbird in one of his thrush snares. Admittedly, he ‘granted’ the bird its life, but ‘not its freedom’, because – according to his own irrefutable logic – ‘otherwise I needn’t have hung any traps’.75 When a bird in his aviary had the nerve to peck at his finger, the creature was, on the contrary, set free as punishment for its audacity. Otto chased the reluctant bird, which was ‘not worth much anyway’, out of its cage.76 The tension between freedom and restraint in Otto’s life and reading matter was actually stylised in a contemporary children’s game, in which wild finches were tamed. In the first stage they were forced to become accustomed to a cage and a certain bright colour; next they were clad in little trousers that were fastened by a thread to a stool of the same colour. Finally, they were allowed to fly around, and each time they landed (of necessity) on the stool, they were rewarded with a tasty titbit. When the time was ripe, the finch was set free and was expected to return to the stool of its own free will. Children held competitions with their tamed birds: the finches were all released at the same time, and the owner of the first bird to fly to the stool was declared the winner.77 This practice is to be found both in Van Alphen’s poems and in Otto’s life. As a reward for his good behaviour during school and dancing lessons, Otto’s father permitted him to buy ‘a bird for the stool’. This led

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to disappointment, for the bird proved untameable, and Otto claimed that he had been deceived by the trader: ‘Still, the bird should have been able to do it, since it cost eight stuivers, even though it was only a finch.’78 The little protagonist in Van Alphen’s ‘Bird on the stool’ made a better purchase: It was but six or seven days ago, I bought this siskin from a market vendor; Although at first the effort I bemoaned, I now claim there are none who can fly better. How much progress I should reap, If I were so inclined to learn! But surely it would make me weep. My bird reproaches me in turn.79

Fortunately, the finch that Otto bought two years later was indeed eager to learn, and prompted musings in him that were shared by his fictional counterpart: At twelve o’clock I rode home on the pony and (after reading a bit for Mama) I amused myself for a while with my bird on the stool. I must admit that if I were to progress as much as the finch does in everything I must learn, I should already be much more advanced.80

By contrast, the journal De Vriend der Kinderen of 1791, which Otto also read, discussed the undesirability of caging wild birds. Nightingales in captivity were said to lose interest in singing: ‘It is as though their desire and courage are suppressed by their lack of freedom, as often happens to people.’81 This notion is in keeping with a trend noted at the end of the eighteenth century in England, where moralists and aestheticians seemed to agree that ‘the singing of caged birds can give no joy’.82 Otto’s reading concurs even more strongly with the condemnation of children who let their house pets – and not just once-free birds – die of neglect. Naturally it is Eduard, the bad example in De kleine Grandisson, who forgets to feed his siskin, whereupon the little bird gives up the ghost. His sister is surprised at his heartlessness: ‘If that happened to me, I should never forget it.’83 If children feel no remorse for an act of negligence, their fictional parents, at least, make sure they never forget the experience. In the story ‘The Neglected Lark’, a little boy whose bird dies attempts to pin the blame on the servant – the same strategy Otto employed when his bird escaped – but he and not his servant got a scolding:

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Fig. 42. Jacob opened up the cage. Jacob opened up the cage. / And the birds flew out forthwith, / Pleased at last to leave their prison. From Geschenk voor de jeugd (1784) by J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg.

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By rising early from your bed, You could have come to your lark’s aid. But now for want of care it’s dead, And laziness is thus repaid.84

With Otto we even find two avian skeletons in the closet. This time it is not the servant he hides behind but Kluge the farmer, one of the principal characters in a children’s book by the philanthropinist Christian Gotthilf Salzmann: Here I must add that I let my two birds die of neglect. The care I have to give my rabbits was the cause, and it has taught me not to bite off more than I can chew. This was also one of Kluge’s maxims. He started with a little bit of land and became a rich farmer.85

On the whole, however, Otto took fairly good care of his animals. With few exceptions, he fed his birds daily. It seems that in the long run this care took on a deeper meaning. When Otto was older, he no longer wrote that he had ‘fed’ his birds, but that he had ‘helped’ them.86 His beloved goat was not driven mercilessly or whipped, such as the billygoat in Lettergeschenk voor de Nederlandsche jeugd (Literary gift to Dutch children), which collapsed and died after such abuse.87 When Otto was older he was given a pony. He was so devoted to it that his father decided to have it brought in the winter to The Hague, where he had a stable built for it. Otto noted this with satisfaction in December 1795: ‘Today my best friend, namely the pony, has moved into its house here.’88 In this case Otto had every reason to be grateful to his parents. The Danger of an Overdose No matter how useful the new children’s books were, the dosage had to be carefully regulated. The philanthropinist Peter Villaume warned against the excessive number of grateful youngsters in the edifying children’s literature available around 1800, since real-life readers with less exemplary parents might become disheartened by the discrepancy between fiction and reality. He also cautioned authors not to arouse unduly strong emotions: ‘every inordinate proposal wrenches the heart’.89 How did Otto react to the eternally grateful role models and their demoralising opposites in the books he read?

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Fig. 43. The Dying Goat. Pieter had the sweetest goat / A billy-goat with great big horns / With shiny fur and pretty markings / He rode out often with his goat / And beat it ruthlessly / Drove it till it was out of breath. / Once, driving it pitilessly . . . From Lettergeschenk voor de Nederlandsche jeugd, 1790.

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The stories about ‘the lovable character of a child much-loved by its parents . . . and the hateful existence of a different sort, who possesses many talents but has little interest in his parents’ made a big impression on him.90 That particular remark was prompted by Madame de La Fite’s Entretiens, drames et contes moraux. We have already seen how Martinet, in his Huisboek, played on the child’s mind, going on at length about the sorrow of naughty children whose parents die prematurely. In De kleine Grandisson this theme is incorporated in a frightening story: just as Eduard begins to realise his shortcomings (but has not yet begun to show any improvement in his behaviour), his father unexpectedly falls seriously ill. While his father lies dying, Grandisson, ‘beside himself with heartache’, experiences unbearable sorrow: ‘I cannot go on living if my father dies. The memory of my inconstancies will probably drive me to my grave. I never thought that remorse would cause the heart to ache so much. Oh, if only thoughtless and recalcitrant children would feel for a moment what I feel, they would be shocked by it, and no longer give their parents any cause for sorrow.’91 Otto, already shocked to the bone when his father came down with a cold, wrote: ‘Oh, how I should miss him in my circumstances if he were prevented by illness from helping me. Then I might still benefit from his advice and comfort, but how I should miss it if I were lacking that as well.’92 Five years later the shock had not yet subsided. After a long and elaborate listing of his sins, he closes his account with the resolution to improve his life, so that he will be ‘able to live much more happily and undoubtedly also give Papa and Mama much pleasure on earth and also allow them to die more peacefully’.93 It is hardly surprising that children in this frame of mind saw dying fathers where there were none. One of the pictures in the textbook Manuel élémentaire shows, according to Otto’s description, a ‘dying father taking leave of his son. The thought of my father dying satisfied with me will, I hope, prevent me in future from doing anything to grieve my parents.’94 For the time being, however, this image only deepened his sorrow, because that day he had supposedly been ‘sulky and unbiddable on several occasions’. The picture book in question contains two illustrations of dying men being lent succour by young gentlemen. However, as the accompanying text makes clear, these helpers are not related to the dying men. One of them is a physician and the other is a family friend. The contented expression on the face of one of the dying corresponds to Otto’s description, with one important difference: his smile was not prompted by a son’s good behaviour.95 With a radiant

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Fig. 44. A dying man. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774.

expression, the dying man points to the skull on his bedside table. The words appearing behind it – ‘Lord, I await thy salvation’ – serve to underline his faith in God. Otto’s misinterpretation, however, could have been suggested by an intermediary not previously taken into account: his parents. Because the illustrations to the Manuel are bound separately from the text and the accompanying captions, it would certainly have been possible for his parents to supply these pictures with their own explanations. They had not only the means but also the opportunity to do so, for Otto seldom read anything alone – in complete accordance with the advice given by eighteenth-century pedagogues and with the role models in Otto’s books. Reading Habits At breakfast in the morning Otto nearly always read religious works with his father.96 If Lambert happened to be called away just then, their reading was put on hold: ‘This morning I was once again prevented

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from reading to Papa at breakfast by a farmer who came to talk to him, and I could do nothing about it.’97 At the end of the midday meal, during dessert, Otto often read from the Manuel élémentaire. Even when he had not been present at the meal, he was called back ‘to come and read from the Manuel during dessert’.98 Otto’s reading of Rollin’s Histoire romaine often coincided with the evening supper. In the Van Eck family, food for thought and food for the body appeared to be closely connected. Otto’s other reading was also reserved for fixed times of the day and was frequently enjoyed together with other members of the family. In May 1794, when his sister Doortje reached the age of thirteen, she was also admitted to the ‘programme’. The plan was that Otto and Doortje, together with their father, would delve ‘every afternoon’ into history or natural science, but in June this programme already appears to have been postponed to the early hours of the evening.99 As Otto wrote, not without a touch of irony, reading with Doortje and his father was ‘by rights supposed to take place immediately after eating’.100 If reading some of Wagenaar’s Vaderlandsche historie was made impossible by a long walk, it was compensated for the following morning – not during breakfast, but before it, since breakfast time was reserved for a story from the Bible,101 or from Hermes’s religious handbook, which was invariably part of the breakfast reading. This explains Otto’s remark that he had ‘read aloud’ from Hermes during breakfast. He did not mean that he was reading out loud to himself, but that he was reading aloud to his father. The works of fiction Otto read were also part of his required reading. One may therefore assume that these books, too, were read jointly. In the early years of his diary, he does not say when he did his reading, so we have no idea how this genre fit into his daily routine. When he was older, it became part of a different category – ‘reading for pleasure’ – which was done at fixed times, both daytime and evening. However, one should not be deluded into thinking that this leisure reading was undertaken voluntarily. The diary contains numerous passages in which Otto mentions his father’s complaints about his failure to devote enough time to this form of relaxation: ‘Papa also complains that I don’t do things with the proper diligence, and merely seek to finish them so that I can go riding or fishing, do a bit of carpentry or go for a stroll, whereas there is little thought of reading for pleasure.’ Otto prefers to read such books on rainy days, when he cannot go outdoors anyway: ‘for this reason I didn’t do any walking or go outside the whole day, but amused myself until dinner by reading Tales of the Castle by

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Mrs de Genlis’.102 This could have been one of the times when Otto had the chance to withdraw and read a book of his own choosing, but he makes no mention of being allowed to do this. He also read De Genlis’ Adèle et Théodore on a similarly dull day, but reports that he read the book together with his father.103 Although Otto occasionally writes in his diary that he has read his required ‘reading for pleasure’ out loud to his parents, he must have done this quite often, considering the communal nature of his reading. This suspicion is confirmed by something Otto says in passing, namely that he has ‘read aloud much longer than usual’ to his mother, who was lying in bed with a bad back. He tried to ease her boredom with a story from the Schouwtoneel der natuur ‘about the cleverness of spiders’.104 In addition to several explicit remarks about reading aloud from books, Otto’s diary also mentions reading aloud from newspapers. Only once, according to his diary, did Otto’s father read out loud to him.105 Otherwise it was always Otto who read to his parents. Despite his very brief accounts of these gatherings, Otto sometimes gives an impression of the atmosphere. Once, for example, instead of going to church, the family listened to Otto reading a sermon: ‘Today the bad weather prevented us from going to church, but at home I read a sermon out loud. I must admit that – as I had not expected it and had only just read it in Hermes – at first I did not begin very willingly.’106 But sometimes things turned out better than expected. When Otto was reading a sermon ‘on original sin’ to his parents, he was interrupted by a visit from Mrs Berkhout, ‘which I was glad of, because I didn’t understand much of what I was reading’.107 Thus the picture emerges of a little boy reading rather reluctantly a text he barely understands. On another occasion the atmosphere at one of the evening gatherings was more agreeable: Otto, being favoured with ‘a cup of cocoa’, then ‘read for Papa and Mama from Rollin’s Histoire romaine’.108 He rounds off his entry on a note of contentment with the remark that the day thus ‘ended cheerfully’. Occasionally Otto’s reading aloud must have served a practical purpose, such as the time his mother was ill and he entertained her by reading from Pluche. It is also possible that his father’s eye complaint, which sometimes prevented him from ‘seeing or writing’, was a reason to have Otto read aloud regularly.109 It could also have been an exercise in perfecting Otto’s pronunciation of foreign languages. Otto also read Dutch texts out loud to his parents, not because it was fun or because of their backaches or poor eyesight, but because it

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Fig. 45. Spiders. From N.A. Pluche’s Schouwtoneel der natuur, 1737–88.

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Fig. 46. The cosy winter evening. Beautiful prints attract their merry eyes. By Otto’s drawing teacher Isaac van Haastert. From Almanak voor de beschaafde jeugd, 1799.

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enabled them to influence their son’s reception of this literature. The political treatise written by his uncle Pieter Paulus – which Otto took to the garden house to study on his own in the spring of 1794 – was taken up several months later, to be ‘read again with Papa, so that I may acquire sound ideas regarding both religious truth and political affairs’.110 The lessons in life expounded in Otto’s books, in which fictional parents influence their children’s impressions – leave little room for misunderstanding. Moreover, Otto’s responses were guided by his real parents, who subscribed to the morality preached in these books and added their own commentary, supplying examples from daily life by way of corroboration and illustration. Thus Lambert van Eck reminded his son of the lesson he should have learned from De kleine Grandisson earlier that day, when Otto said that he would rather play with his friend Ceesje than walk with his father and sisters to Delft. Nevertheless I ought to have done it gladly, because it would have given Papa the most pleasure, but I forgot what I had read that morning, and not only was I sulky, but I let my sulkiness get the better of me, so much so that Papa called me an insolent brat. Alas, was this the example of Carel Grandisson or did I resemble Eduard?

Six weeks later he was reminded of another story from this book when he reacted defiantly to his father’s attempt to correct his pronunciation: ‘On that occasion Papa said that he was now beginning to think admonitions were no longer of any use, because Carel Grandisson’s good example of yesterday evening ought to have been fresh in my mind.’111 This refers to a passage Otto’s father had made him read the previous evening, which had prompted Otto to write that ‘there’s nothing clever about being forced to obey one’s parents; rather, children must take great pleasure in doing everything their parents expect of them’.112 The moral of a story about Demosthenes, who through continual practice ‘conquered all his faults of ineloquence’, was underscored by Otto’s mother when she remarked that ‘those who persevere in their efforts and apply themselves will eventually succeed in doing even the most difficult things’.113 It was the non-fiction read by Otto – in which the reader’s reception was not pre-programmed – that particularly lent itself to interpretation: Otto’s parents could easily bend the moral of the story to suit their own purposes. Thus the biblical story of Samson and Delilah prompted Otto’s mother to say that ‘things never go well for children

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who marry against their parents’ wishes’.114 Nor was there any lack of parental commentary when Otto read a fable from the Manuel, ‘which proved that one must follow the advice of older people or else one will come to regret it too late’: ‘Mama says that I shall also realise this one day, because I walked through the mud with my shoes on, instead of putting on my clogs (as Mama has often advised me to do)’.115 Every time we try to reconstruct Otto’s response to his reading matter, we run up against intermediaries: Otto’s educators and their own reception of the literature. To guide Otto as intensively as they did, they must have known the literature he read inside out, which also indicates that his reading was a joint activity. The way Otto’s parents supervised him likewise suggests that they dutifully followed not only the advice offered by educationalists but also the example given by the fictional model parents who read along with their offspring. This brings us to a last piece of advice that resounds throughout the pedagogical literature: the recommendation to present the right passage at the right time. Reading over Otto’s shoulder, we see that some of his books were deliberately read out of the proper order. Even with regard to the books that were studied systematically, the rules were broken when current events called for it or because Otto had requested it. Thus Otto dutifully read Martinet’s Kort begrip der waereldhistorie (Concise history of the world) from the beginning up to the Romans. The chapters on a host of other peoples – Arabs, Turks, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, Swedes, Prussians and Portuguese – were skipped in order to move on, full steam ahead, to ‘the history of the fatherland’. This was presumably a concession to Otto, who had patiently sat through the history of the Greeks and Romans, but was now at the end of his tether. He writes with relief about having started the history of ‘our fatherland’ in Martinet, ‘which interests me more than that of the Romans or Greeks, because it concerns me more’.116 In his Manuel élémentaire, Basedow started with psychology, and then moved on to logic, religion, ethics, handicrafts, the Three Estates and history. History, which was treated first chronologically and then thematically, also encompassed geography and mythology. This was followed by natural science, which included the study of the human body. The author concluded his textbook with grammar and rhetoric. The Van Eck family, however, cleared its own, idiosyncratic path through this jungle of material. In October 1791, for instance, Otto read in the Manuel about such diverse subjects as a boy who went to the city to seek his fortune, the location of Canaan, the discovery of America, Oriental

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plants, the engraver and the engineer, the resemblance of human existence to the erratic course of a river, people with supernatural powers, the preparation of wax, Hercules, Samuel, the Spartans, the proper way to raise children, pelicans and poultry, and finally child-rearing. To find the corresponding passages one must criss-cross both volumes. Nor was the order determined by the arrangement of the illustrated atlas, even though a remarkably large number of the passages Otto quotes have accompanying illustrations. Perhaps Otto and his parents took a look at the atlas, chose an appealing illustration, and then turned to the corresponding story. There is no discernible logic to the order in which Otto consulted Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur other than the events unfolding in his life.117 For example, he read about the structure of grains of sand when the improvements being made to the garden of their country estate were in full swing. Its transformation from a classicist garden into a romantic, English landscape garden, complete with meandering streams, was accompanied by the construction of artificial hills. Otto observed the work closely and was sometimes allowed to help. The Katechismus gave these already interesting piles of sand a deeper dimension: This evening I read in Martinet about sand, which seems very ordinary to us (viewed with the naked eye), but when we look at it through a magnifying glass, every grain proves to be a cleverly wrought triangular or round globule.118

That Otto chose to read about the structure of snowflakes on 17 December 1792 naturally leads one to suspect a recent snowfall.119 It is no coincidence that Martinet’s discussion of the fact that people tend to cling strongly to life, despite the promise of perfect bliss in the hereafter, was read after a period of illness. Faulty Reception Otto read about the fear of death in both Martinet’s Katechismus and Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire, using the two treatises to draw his own conclusions. Martinet’s attempt to dispel children’s fear of death – first by taking their fear seriously, since it is only natural to cling to life, and then by consoling them with the prospect of a heaven for all pious and virtuous people – was only partly successful in Otto’s case. In his diary he takes up the first part of Martinet’s argument – man’s

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instinctive attachment to the here and now – and then, with the help of the Manuel, adds his own line of reasoning: It seems obvious to me that a person, even if he believes that he will be eternally happy in the hereafter, clings to life; death suddenly separates him from his best friends and destroys all his plans, and the prospect of eternity is nevertheless dark, so I shall readily confess to wanting to live a while longer, even though I have not the slightest doubt in the promise made by Jesus Christ.120

Otto borrowed his argumentation from Basedow’s explanation of various mainsprings of human action, including the will to survive.121 Basedow’s discussion several pages earlier about death not being frightening, because the soul will pass into something else, apparently made less of an impression on Otto: ‘Just imagine, children, how blissful such a new life will be. Our souls are immortal!’ Otto’s last comment, that he has ‘not the slightest doubt in the promise made by Jesus Christ’, is his own addition. It is probably a reaction to Basedow’s explanation that the survival instinct can take on pathological forms if children harbour a fear of death because they do not believe in the immortality of the soul. Martinet’s faith in a heavenly future for all pious and virtuous people does not surface in the diary until eleven days later, after Otto has read about the great efficacy of sunlight, a gift – and proof – of God: ‘It gives fertility and food to the world; no one is lost through want. This brings honour to God, and is proof of the work wrought by His hand.’122 Otto interprets this very freely when he concludes that God lets the sun rise ‘on good and bad people alike, even though the latter do not deserve it, but God sometimes permits the bad people in this world to flourish, even though he is fair, and after their death they will receive their just deserts, and not escape His judgement’.123 This moral, based on the assumption that the injustice of dividing sunlight equally between good and bad people will be put right in the hereafter, is not to be found in Martinet’s work. Nor could Otto have read such a thing in the Bible. That God lets the sun rise on both the good and the bad is given a much more charitable moral in Matthew 5:44–45: ‘But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’ Otto’s faulty reception can

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Fig. 47. ‘Sand, disdainfully thought simple, is to my mind a miracle.’ From J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, 1782–89.

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probably be blamed on the children’s fiction he read, in which good is always rewarded and evil necessarily punished. Apparently Otto was inclined to add ‘the moral of the story’ – so familiar to him from his reading – to works lacking one.124 Otto’s highly developed – or perhaps still child-like – sense of justice also emerges from his response to historical and mythological events. He invariably sympathises with children whose unjust parents expose them to cruelty. The children of Sparta, whose upbringing ‘seems rather cruel’ to Otto, could count on his unequivocal support.125 And despite Otto’s admiration of ‘the fine impartiality of the Roman Brutus towards his sons’, he ‘still pitied them’. 126 Otto’s involvement in this story was such that he recorded his irritation with the author in his diary. Martinet supposedly ‘glossed over the events so hastily’ that Otto derived little benefit from it. He therefore consulted the Manuel for its version of the same event.127 A couple of years later Otto recalled the story when reading about the Roman consul Manlius Torquatus, who condemned his son to death for disobedience. Otto thought this ‘very cruel’, even worse than the cruelty displayed by Brutus. Manlius Torquatus had hereby incurred the wrath not only of ‘all good youths and young men’ of Rome but also of an eighteenth-century boy in the Dutch Republic. The mockery and scorn that Manlius Torquatus met with was, to Otto’s mind, ‘his doubly deserved reward’, and it surprised him ‘that they had not conspired to kill him’.128 Especially after quarrelling with his sisters, Otto revealed his great talent for the legal profession by using his diary as a strategic weapon to argue his side of the case. Both his sense of justice and his rhetorical talents are evident in his response to one of Martinet’s explanations of nature as the reflection of a superior, divine order. His account of what he read is, at least in the beginning, entirely in accordance with the actual text: This evening I read in Martinet about the greatness of God’s works. I must in fact confess that the making of the smallest things in nature (the leaf of a tree, for example) far surpasses in artistry and neatness that of the most superb things wrought by human hands.129

In his conclusion, however, Otto shifts his perspective and seems less fascinated by nature’s proof of the existence of God than by the opportunity it offers to use mankind’s insignificance to justify human failure. In his view, the work of the Creator is inevitably superior to the work of His creatures:

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Fig. 48. The sun. ‘How great God must be!’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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chapter three It is also (in my opinion) very natural that God, who is the Creator of all people, achieves more order in his work than do those who owe their existence to Him.130

We have already seen some examples of Otto’s idiosyncratic interpretation of his reading matter, his fixation on elements of secondary importance to the story – dung as a remedy for chest complaints, for instance – and his tendency to lift a story from its context and exploit it for his own purposes, as he did with Kluge the farmer, whom he dragged into his account to give a moralistic twist to his confession that he had let his birds starve to death. In his diary, however, there are quite a few passages that seem to indicate that he is either indiscriminately adopting ideas from his reading or obediently following the authors’ advice and possibly that of his read-along parents. Otto’s periodic progress reports comply with the advice given in one of his books, Feddersen’s Voorbeelden van wijsheid en deugd (Examples of wisdom and virtue).131 This author frequently enjoins his readers to ‘examine’ their ‘youthful behaviour’ at set times – weekly, monthly and yearly – according to a standardised formula.132 It is curious that Otto, in drawing up his balance sheets, even retained the expressions recommended by Feddersen. The message of the moralistic poet Jacob Cats – ‘children are a burden’ – certainly found fertile ground in Otto’s imagination, as evidenced by a poem he composed at the age of twelve for the marriage of ‘Miss Hartman’: To you dearest Miss I wish wedded bliss, And a very long life As your husband’s good wife. And if you have children, May they not be a burden. Short lines these remain, But they come from my brain.

There must have been some discussion about the last four lines, because the following alternative was written in the margin by a different hand: May they learn their lesson Like good children from Hesse This wish is the feeling Of a small human being.133

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These lines were then roughly crossed out, so that Otto’s version again concludes the poem. His added explanation of the efficacy of sunlight deviated from Martinet’s, to be sure, but it was completely in keeping with the morality that had been crammed into him by his other reading. Indeed, it stems more from a desire to toe the party line than from rebelliousness.134 A tendency to exaggerate, already warned against by Villaume, was also apparent when Otto began to respond intelligently and to bombard his parents with the results of his book-learning. The roles were reversed, for instance, when Otto’s mother burst into tears at the death of a friend and he tried to comfort her by saying that ‘perhaps now the deceased is much happier than we who mourn her loss’.135 That the result of Otto’s reading was occasionally in conflict with his parents’ intentions is demonstrated by the fact that Otto, inspired by the glorification of country life that permeated his reading, conceived a passionate desire to become a farmer. His parents would rather have seen him in a clerical robe than a farmer’s smock, but Otto much preferred outdoor play to reading, and this remained a thorn in his parents’ side. In this case Otto’s reception of the literature he read was both exaggerated and one-sided. His children’s books attempted to cultivate a love of nature and a love of reading in equal measure, but Otto seems to have taken a liking to the former only. This could easily have been triggered by the compulsory nature of Otto’s reading regimen, his parents’ strict supervision, and his lack of freedom to choose his own books. The authors of eighteenth-century children’s books struggled, quite rightly, with the problem of turning such restricted reading into a veritable passion for the written word. Most authors simply sidestepped the issue by endowing their fictional paragons with an almost inhuman enthusiasm for books. Madame de Genlis – who secretly writes her pupil’s books and then gives her the illusion of being free to choose them – appears to have given this question serious consideration. She describes several rather subtle methods of stimulating Adèle’s reading, such as keeping books which she hopes Adèle will read avidly – once she gets her hands on them – under lock and key for a long time, conspicuously displayed in a strategically positioned glass case.136 When she reaches the age at which she is allowed to read without supervision – Adèle is then fourteen – she is carefully trained to acquire a taste for appropriate reading matter. Her mother allows her to collaborate on an epistolary novel in which a woman must convince her brother that the

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Fig. 49. The obedient boy. From Economische liedjes (1791) by B. Wolff and A. Deken.

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unsuitable books he reads will lead to his ruin. Not surprisingly, Adèle is given the task of writing the woman’s letters, while her mother happily pens the villainous letters of the brother.137 This training is supposed to make Adèle permanently immune to bad literature. Clearly, Otto’s parents were not given to such subtle schemes; their more down-to-earth style of child-rearing meant that they simply ordered Otto to go – at once – and ‘read for his own pleasure’. Required Reading ‘for Pleasure’ Otto’s reading regimen was extremely varied, composed as it was of a wide variety of titles from a well-stocked bookcase. Indeed, Otto’s knowledge of subjects ranging from the structure of snowflakes to the wars waged by the Romans was gleaned from the work of various authors. In the Manuel he read about ‘the strict upbringing of Spartan children’, for example, whereupon his father had him study the same subject in Rollin’s Histoire romaine, ‘which presents the same in much more detail’.138 Otto’s religious reading was also subject to this comparative approach. In his diary we see him reading aloud from Seiler’s Katechismus, while his sisters diligently ‘check the Bible’ for what he is reading.139 Reading the Bible with his uncle Paulus seems to have been more a philological exercise than a religious lesson: ‘[We] read the Bible and saw that in all likelihood John the Evangelist was also the author of the three Epistles, as the words and exhortations in those books are nearly the same and written in the same style.’140 The Van Eck family library contained a wide range of reading matter, but Otto’s freedom of choice was very limited indeed. To be sure, the titles recorded in his diary are very diverse, but they belong, almost without exception, to a closed corpus of texts recommended by the high priests of enlightened pedagogics. That Otto’s opinion counted for little emerges, for example, from a conflict with his parents on the reading of Gellert’s Blijspelen (Comedies). Otto maintained that even though he had completed both his homework and his lessons for his mother ‘satisfactorily’, she was unhappy with him ‘because I lost my temper when she wouldn’t allow me to continue reading Gellert’s comedies, which I picked up this evening’.141 By means of his diary, Otto then attempted to convince his mother with the following enthusiastic review: ‘I think it’s a very good book, because it’s very suitable for correcting the mistakes of the human heart and also because it’s written in

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an amusingly humorous style, suitable for reading in spare moments.’ However, Otto’s attempt to win his parents’ approval by copying the style of argumentation found in pedagogical literature seems to have carried no weight with them, for Gellert’s ‘humorous’ book never makes a return appearance in his diary. Presumably Otto’s parents thought him too young for the work of this popular German playwright. Otto’s educators held fast to the list of titles they had selected, as evidenced by another diary entry written while the Van Ecks were staying with Uncle and Aunt Paulus. Unlike their longer change of venue, when the family set off from The Hague with bookcases in tow to spend the summer at their country estate, their shorter stays in Rotterdam were undertaken with far less luggage.142 At such times the usual evening reading from Rollin’s Histoire romaine was replaced, probably out of necessity, by Stuart’s Romeinsche geschiedenissen, ‘which I find much more agreeable than Rollin, perhaps because the book is written in Dutch’.143 Despite Otto’s outspoken preference for Stuart’s ‘Romans’, the reading of Rollin continued as usual back home, even though the Van Ecks must also have had a copy of Stuart, since their name appears on the subscription list.144 Presumably Mr and Mrs van Eck favoured the Histoire romaine for the same reason Otto was partial to the work by Stuart: the language in which it was written. The reader of the diary cannot help feeling that Otto would have preferred to grow up without books. Considering his love of nature and his frequent dislike of the books he was required to read, Otto would probably have been happy with the kind of instruction the fictional Emile received from Rousseau: ‘In thus taking away all duties from children, I take away the instruments of their greatest misery – that is, books.’145 Otto’s exuberant descriptions of real-life experiences of nature – rippling streams, journeys on horseback or in his goat-drawn wagon, successful fishing expeditions, and summer afternoons lying in the grass, staring at the clouds floating past – are in stark contrast to his perfunctory jottings about literary landscapes. His aversion to reading is also obvious from the way he expresses himself. Otto took up the Manuel élémentaire, for example, with the rather unenthusiastic adage ‘uitstel is afstel’ (one of these days is none of these days),146 and even though he tried ‘as well as [he] could’ to amuse himself with books, in the end it gave him ‘little pleasure’.147 His father’s complaint – that Otto did not do things ‘with the proper diligence’, and merely tried to finish them so that he could indulge in activities he enjoyed – does in fact seem well-founded.148

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Fig. 50. ‘Am I now yours?’ Illustration from the book that Otto was not allowed to read: C.F. Gellert’s Blijspelen, 1778.

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Fig. 51. Portrait of Ceesje Reepmaker, c. 1795, attributed to J. Parker.

Even so, Otto’s parents did not always have cause for despair. At times, especially during rainy periods, Otto amused himself ‘with some reading’,149 or even ‘cheerfully spent an evening in the company of [ his] books’.150 This sudden enthusiasm had its downside, however. When a ‘nice book fell into [his] hands unexpectedly’, he forgot the time and his homework fell by the wayside.151 Otto was so enthralled by a book he borrowed from his friend Ceesje Reepmaker that he neglected his tasks for the rest of the day. He pleaded extenuating circumstances, saying

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that he had to ‘return the book that evening’, but failed to record its title.152 It was precisely those books that were not part of his required reading ‘for pleasure’ which Otto describes simply as ‘nice’, a terseness no doubt connected with the diary’s function. After all, Otto’s primary reason for copying out excerpts and linking them to titles and authors’ names was to convince his parents that he had studied and understood his daily dose of required reading. Identifying with an American Farmer The book Otto mentions on 25 July 1794 and the following days – Brieven van een Amerikaensche landman (Letters from an American Farmer) by the writer St John de Crèvecoeur of 1784 – is, in more than one respect, the odd man out among the sound and enlightened children’s books Otto normally read,153 yet he clearly took great pleasure in it and could easily identify with the protagonist: Some people came to dine with us today, so I was deprived of my lessons with Papa and I spent most of my time out of doors, both because of the fine weather and because I had this morning to myself. Miss Philip and Tietje having spent the night here, we have postponed reading in Rollin for the time being and have exchanged it for the American Farmer, whose life and activities appear to be very much in agreement with my taste.

This title does not appear in either the advice literature or the books and children’s journals read by Otto and his parents. This is hardly surprising, for it was by no means intended for children.154 In fact, the book was recommended by George Washington to anyone thinking about moving to his country.155 That Rollin was forced to make way for this book would not have caused Otto any anguish, for as he wrote on another occasion, ‘what I’m reading now contains little of interest’. The ancient Romans were a matter of indifference to him – an opinion he shared with the American Farmer, who expressed his dislike of the ‘musty books’ he had inherited from his father. This farmer insists it is pointless to travel to Italy to visit the Roman ruins, since no benefit could possibly be derived from ‘viewing the ruins of temples and other buildings which have very little in common with those of the present age’. It would be much better to set out for America, where a new future was being shaped and one could study ‘the rough rudiments of societies’ and ‘the new foundations of our cities’, as well as travel through ‘recently settled territories’. In America

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everything was ‘modern, peaceful, and benign. . . . Here nature opens her broad lap to receive the perpetual stream of newcomers, and to supply them with food.’156 This change of perspective must have seemed like a breath of fresh air to Otto. One does not have to dig very deeply to discover in this book a brand of optimism typical of the eighteenth century, a faith in progress and the firm conviction that man possesses the ability to shape his environment. By taking the positive elements of European civilisation – culture and mentality – and implanting them in uncultivated America, the immigrants had succeeded in establishing in less than a century a society superior to the one Europe had taken millennia to develop.157 They did this, to be sure, by leaving behind the negative elements of European civilisation: The same [i.e. society] does not consist, as it does in Europe, of worthy gentlemen who own everything and a multitude of common people who have nothing. Here there are no distinguished families, no courts, no kings, no bishops; here is no ecclesiastical power . . . no excessive appearance of affluence. . . . We have no princes for whom we work, famish and die, and we are bringing into being the most perfect society in the world.158

The book, which was written in French, appeared in 1782 in England as Letters from an American Farmer. Seen as the first manifestation of the ‘American dream’, it is in fact a complicated work, written by an author with more than one identity. Hiding behind the simple farmer was Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur, a descendant of a noble Norman family, who had actually emigrated to America. After living there for a time as a gentleman farmer, he left during the War of Independence and returned to France to secure his inheritance, leaving behind his wife and children. Crèvecoeur’s farm was burned to the ground by Indians and his wife murdered, but he went to London, where he managed to get his book published. The 1782 edition was followed two years later by a French translation, which he dedicated to Lafayette. Crèvecoeur was soon admitted to the world of the literary salons, where he was launched as a victim of the English reign of terror and a noble savage, the latter identity being favoured by Rousseau’s former lover, the Comtesse d’Houdetot, who was to become Crèvecoeur’s patroness in the Parisian beau-monde. Now that his star had risen, he returned to America as a diplomat. After being stationed for several years in New York, Crèvecoeur returned in 1792 to his mother country, where he narrowly escaped the rampant revolutionary terror and, after extensive wanderings, finally died in Paris in 1813.

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Like its author, this famous book can take on various guises, and this seems to have been the writer’s intention. The first chapters are primarily an ode to the new world, but in the second part it becomes increasingly clear that a true utopia is still a long way off. The issue of slavery is given a wide berth, but in the last chapter Crèvecoeur expresses doubts about where his loyalties lie – should he side with the English or the insurgents? – and he voices his fear of warfare: I am a lover of peace, what must I do? I am divided between respect for the old and fear of the new – the consequences of which are not clear to me – as embraced by my own countrymen.159

Such complexity, however, did not accord with the Patriots’ world view as it was then expounded in the Netherlands. The Patriots viewed the American freedom fighters as heroes, struggling for a good cause against the rogue state of England. Furthermore, Crèvecoeur’s readers did not know that he had written a sequel that was never published. When it surfaced more than a century later, it appeared to consist largely of accounts of the atrocities committed during the War of Independence, horror stories in which little remains of the American dream. There was not only selective reading, therefore, but equally selective writing and publishing. To be sure, the world of books followed the fashions of the day, and for the time being it was fashionable to have faith in progress and the beauty of the world. Otto’s plain-living American farmer, ‘whose life and activities appear to be very much in agreement’ with his taste, was by no means unlettered. Though a farmer, he was a gentleman farmer, even something of an illusionist, who – by the time Otto read his account – had already fled from his paradise.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE GARDEN AS A PEDAGOGICAL PROJECT Yesterday at twelve o’clock we drove in our carriage to Ypenburg to have dinner with our relatives, the Van den Burgs, and then return home before dark, but we stayed so long that it was already very dark by the time we left, causing us to run up against a mound of sand in the lane, which one of our horses stumbled over.1

Was this an incident of no consequence? Or was it a sign of the times? That mound of sand had no doubt been dumped there for a purpose, namely to transform the estate of Ypenburg into an Arcadian idyll, just as the garden of De Ruit and those surrounding the country houses of many of Otto’s friends and relations were thoroughly uprooted and replanted in these years to conform to the ideal of a romantic English landscape garden. When he returned from Paris in 1789, Lambert van Eck undertook the makeover of De Ruit with just as much idealism and fervour as the education of his son. The two projects had much in common, if only because children were often compared to young trees. Like children, trees had to be guided and trimmed into shape when necessary, as pedagogues had been advising since antiquity.2 As one is wont to trim and prune young trees, To grow to best advantage, bear good fruit, So one must do to youth (though it displease): Constrain and prune, all evil thus uproot.

Child-rearing was also frequently likened to the training of animals. Dutch portraits of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries often depict children with a bird on their arm or a dog at their feet, the message being that both civilised children and domesticated animals are the product of careful training. In the 1757 portrait of Lambert van Eck, painted when he was six, he poses – not coincidentally – with a tame bird perched on his arm. Rousseau objected strongly to such rigorous trimming and training. In Emile he had written: ‘[Man] forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another. He mixes and confuses

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Fig. 52. Lambert van Eck, portrait by A. Bauer, 1757.

the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; man must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy like a tree in his garden.’3 In Rousseau’s eyes, nature – humans, animals and plants alike – should be given free rein. A child’s naturalness must be preserved, and so Emile was raised in freedom in rural surroundings. The philanthropinists, in their assimilation of Rousseau’s pedagogical ideas, adopted the comparison of children to plants, but interpreted this metaphor in a slightly different way. The ‘natural upbringing’ they

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Fig. 53. A father gives one of his children something to read. The painting on the wall shows a tree being bound to a pole. From the first issue of the Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798.

propagated was characterised by ‘freedom in restraint’, a naturalness that need not be imposed but must certainly be guided. The pedagogue C.G. Salzmann compared child-rearing to the cultivation of plants: ‘Growing good cabbages requires good seed and careful tending. . . . And it is the same with the education of children.’4 The young readers of De Vriend der Kinderen (The Children’s Friend) of 1791 are addressed thus: ‘I look upon you as plants, which, shooting up into trees before long, will bear the finest and most wholesome fruits in the forecourts of the Lord.’5 In his School van wijsheid en deugd (School of wisdom and virtue), the philanthropinist J.L. Ewald developed the comparison in a conversation between father and son: One fine spring morning Damon went out into the garden with his little son. With renewed attentiveness they looked at the trees, flowers and plants on which the dew still glistened. ‘Why is this tree so very straight, and that one over there isn’t?’ little George asked his father. ‘Because, my child,’ the father replied, ‘this one was cultivated, bound up tightly and properly pruned when it was young, whereas this one was left to grow up in freedom but without care. . . . You are the young tree: if I don’t let you do everything just as you like, but tell you what you should and shouldn’t

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chapter four do, if I punish your wrongdoings, insist that you learn something useful, and find you obedient in everything, you will grow up in a good manner and become a good, fruit-bearing tree. And you are this flower: I have tended it with care, and cultivated the best soil, and protected it from the night frost. How much care your mother and I have lavished on you up to now, my son! I hope that you, too, will in future flourish to our great joy, and earn your place in society.’6

A new aspect of the connection between education and nature was the search for ‘natural’ principles of education among simple peasants. The best-known example was the Swiss peasant Jakob Guyer, whose lessons in life were published in book form by a physician. Excerpts first appeared in the Netherlands in De Denker (The Thinker), followed by a complete translation titled De wijsgeerige landman (The philosophical peasant).7 This peasant, who had not been spoiled by formal education and culture, owed everything he was ‘to Nature and to his own observation, nothing to art’. This enabled him to give his children a simple and honest upbringing superior to the education received by most of his readership. It is no coincidence that the first philanthropinist school, founded by Basedow, was situated in Wörlitz, the first landscape park laid out in Germany. Both the school and the park were an initiative of the enlightened Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, who thought that educational reform should go hand in hand with the makeover of the landscape. Nearly the whole of Europe’s intellectual elite came to see this park, their interest having been sparked by enthusiastic descriptions in letters and travel journals, such as that of Charles-Joseph de Ligne, a true man of the Enlightenment, who issued the summons: ‘Gardeners, painters, poets, philosophers, go to Wörlitz.’8 The Prince of AnhaltDessau had been inspired by a journey to England undertaken with his landscape architect. His Gartenreich, or garden kingdom, completed around 1784, was a succession of gardens offering a romantic tour of a variety of landscapes, groves, ponds and decorative buildings. Visitors walked across a Swiss suspension bridge, strolled passed a hermitage, espied a Chinese pagoda, and all in a well-considered sequence aimed at evoking various emotions. One could, in other words, read the park of Wörlitz like a novel, hence – to enhance one’s reading pleasure – a visitor’s guide appeared soon after the park was opened.9 The arts of gardening, pedagogy and literature were inextricably bound up with one another in these grounds.

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Fig. 54. Children are taught how to bind a tree to a pole. From Geschenk voor de jeugd (1784) by J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg.

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The new landscape style broke with a tradition that had prevailed in Europe since the Renaissance, namely that of laying out gardens in fixed symmetrical patterns.10 These French gardens – so called because the park of Versailles was the apex of this geometric style – were also prevalent in the Netherlands, certainly on the country estates built by well-to-do townspeople on a large scale from the mid-seventeenth century onwards.11 In these perfectly manicured gardens, nature was cultivated and disciplined. The geometric garden was a microcosm with a timeless and universal character, and this effect was heightened by planting evergreen yews, which banished the seasons from the garden.12 Furthermore, these hedges were regularly trimmed to ensure they always looked the same, thus emphasising their timelessness. These impenetrable hedges served, moreover, to close off the garden from the outside world. The English landscape garden came into fashion around 1770 and quickly spread throughout Europe. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, born in 1788, explained this shift from French to English as follows: a French garden reflects only the will of the owner, who has subdued nature, so that it displays, instead of its own ideas, forms of his devising, which have been forced upon it as a badge of its slavery: trimmed hedges, trees clipped into all sorts of shapes, straight avenues, arcades and so on’. In the English garden, on the other hand, ‘the will of nature – as objectified in tree, shrub, mountain and water – is brought to the purest possible expression of its ideas, that is to say, its innate being’.13 This yearning for unspoiled nature can also be seen as a reaction to the progressive reclamation of wasteland and the rationalisation of agriculture, which received a new impulse during the Enlightenment. This was evident from the foundation in 1778 of the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture.14 Many sought to make the Netherlands a country organised entirely in accordance with scientific principles. When the Delft Patriot Gerrit Paape sketched his futuristic picture of the Netherlands in the year 1998, he recorded with satisfaction that all sandy areas, heaths and dunes – in short, all ‘useless land’ – had meanwhile been developed and cultivated. The same enthusiastic tone resounds in the writings of J.F. Martinet when he states in his Katechismus der natuur that much has already been achieved: ‘In olden times [our country] consisted of wild forests, salt marshes and flooded lands; now you see it transformed into a paradise.’ At the same time he proved to be a champion of the natural style of garden landscaping:

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‘Stroll through your flowerbeds, which the French taught us to make in the last century, and if their formality gives you little satisfaction, lay out English gardens which are also now in vogue in our country.’15 In Martinet we see a paradox typical of the view taken of nature in Otto’s day: a great appreciation of cultivated, useful nature, coupled with an equally great admiration of wild, unrestrained nature. That wildness, however, had to be rendered manageable in gardens that had been converted into nature preserves. The new notions of garden design first made their way to the Netherlands through articles in journals. As early as 1770, the Nieuwe Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (New Dutch Literary Review) published a plea for the English garden style titled ‘The beauty and picturesqueness of pleasure gardens’.16 Gardening became a craze that spread to the bookshops, where one could buy a Zakwoordenboek voor het buitenleven (Pocket dictionary of country life) or a Tuincatechismus voor liefhebbers van tuinen (Garden catechism for garden lovers).17 Gardens were a favourite topic of conversation, as emerges from diaries such as that kept by Jacoba van Thiel, a clergyman’s daughter, who lived with her sister’s family in the village of Overschie near Rotterdam. Jacoba wrote frequently about her own garden and her visits to other people’s gardens. Some enthusiasts – such as Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, a scion of a Rotterdam regents’ family with whom the Van Ecks were acquainted – even kept a special ‘garden diary’. It was a widespread practice: Thomas Jefferson, whom Lambert van Eck had met in Paris, also kept a garden diary.18 Even though English gardens were designed to counterbalance the cultivated landscape of which they were part, the aim was to effect smooth transitions by creating views of fields and meadows with waving corn or grazing cows. Farmhouses were also included in the garden landscape, and so gardens became an expression of an economic utopia, of the yearning for a simple, rural economy. Landscape Gardens in the Netherlands When Lambert van Eck decided to take a shovel to his garden, the English style had already been adopted here and there. One of the first country estates to be laid out along modern lines was Biljoen in the province of Gelderland. Its owner, J.F.W. baron van Spaen, had gained inspiration during his grand tour of Europe in 1769, when – thinking

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ahead – he had plane trees, poplars and weeping willows shipped home from Venice.19 After a journey to England, he embarked in 1774 on a large-scale transformation of his rural estate. Starting in that year, his account books record payments for considerable amounts of pine seed, intended to make the poor sandy soil of the surrounding hills more fertile. In 1783 we find the first payments for ‘English plants’. In the meantime the well-known landscape architect Johann Georg Michael had designed a new layout with a large pond (complete with artificial islands), winding paths with grass borders, trees and flowerbeds. One of the small islands was planted with poplars, just like Rousseau’s burial island, and supplied with a wooden cross: Van Spaen presumably intended it as his last resting place.20 Beekhuizen, another part of the estate, was converted into an English landscape park. Elsewhere on the estate the baron had created views of farmhouses, and where the recommended usefulness was lacking, he had had buildings erected from which one could enjoy the surroundings from various points of view. The salon, where his guestbook lay, was not only the most comfortable spot but also the room with the most impressive view. In imitation of the approach taken by the Marquis de Girardin in his garden at Ermenonville, the baron had more than seventy ‘text boards’ installed in his park. In this way visitors could ponder sayings and poems intended to heighten the feelings evoked by the landscape. Solitary spots were thought perfect for this purpose. In the stream valley, visitors were reminded of their mortality – if it had not already occurred to them – by the following poem: ‘Stream, we seem to possess the same strength. We both follow a hasty course: you to the sea, we to death.’21 It was a popular comparison, and one Otto had come across in Basedow’s Manuel: ‘After dinner I read in the Manuel a beautiful comparison between human existence and the course of a river, which, running alternately through lovely fields and rocky valleys, finally loses itself in the ocean.’ The baron took his texts from numerous literary sources of a pastoral nature, including Virgil, Horace, Petrarch, Boileau and Racine. The scores of quotations encountered by visitors to the park also included passages from Jacques de Lille’s recently published Les jardins ou l’art d’embeller les paysages (The Gardens, A Poem): Have you not heard, when fields and woods rejoice, Their silent eloquence, their secret voice? Give the effect. Mark too, from grave to gay,

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From grand to simple, how we love to stray: To please each taste, combine each varying style, Spread gloom around, or bid the landscape smile; There let the painter’s touch new charms acquire, Let Inspiration’s breath the poet fire; The sage in shades a calm retirement find, And faithful Memory bless the happy mind; There Love’s pale votaries their vigils keep, And there the wretched unmolested weep.22

These lines of verse suggest that it was left to visitors to decide which feelings should be given free rein. The baron saw various possibilities: one could ‘either withdraw in complete solitude and surrender to philosophical reflections, or savour the pleasures of country life in the midst of a large company’.23 The wide variety of reactions recorded in the estate’s guestbook proves that the baron was successful in this endeavour. The author Elisabeth Maria Post, who stayed there several times, wrote that the grounds were an earthly paradise.24 The clergyman-poet Dirk van de Loo described his stroll as a journey through ‘the Eden of glorious Gelderland’. According to C.J. ter Bosch, it was ‘beyond comparison’.25 A.M. van Grasveld emphasised the sober simplicity he saw in the park: Here there reigns no splendid art or grandeur, Here sore hearts are touched by godlike nature, Which indeed despises all constraint. Surely in this place of sheer delight, Where pure simplicity beguiles the sight, There is no sorrow, terror or complaint.

In Grasveld’s perception, art had been subordinated to nature at Biljoen. Another, anonymous poet agreed with him: ‘Here one sees that nature can surpass art.’ The issue of culture versus nature exercised the minds of many visitors. The Reverend J.H. van der Palm, later the Minister of Education, stressed a different aspect when he spoke of ‘Nature, enhanced by art’. The Reverend J. Mensinga’s remark (‘nature guided by art’) and that of J.C. Clement (‘nature aided by art’) show that they endorsed the views of De Lille and C.C.L. Hirschfeld, who emphasised the importance of nature and art alike. Antje van Hogendorp, the sister of Gijsbert Karel, visited the baron’s park in 1787.26 Her travel journal contains an enthusiastic description of the layout, especially the landscaping of Beekhuizen, ‘which is

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[done] entirely in the grand English taste’.27 That the wonders of this country estate defied description – ‘one has to see this to understand it’ – did not stop her from giving a detailed account of the cascade, rocks, hermitage, grottoes and so on. More interesting in this context, however, is her mention of De Lille: it was a great pleasure, she said, to see with her own eyes scenes that she had previously pictured in her mind, thanks to De Lille. This foreknowledge says a lot about the degree to which the new notions of garden design were spreading among the Dutch elite at the end of the eighteenth century. Antje’s criticism of the classicist gardens of nearby Rederoord, the property of one of Otto’s relatives, contrasted sharply with her enthusiasm for Biljoen and Beekhuizen. The sight of Rederoord Castle, splendid and solidly built, appealed to her, but the garden was ‘ghastly’, a monument to bad taste.28 The lovely, rugged hills, magnificent trees and vistas with which this country estate was blessed only fuelled her indignation all the more. Although it had all it needed to make it truly beautiful, the owner had evidently been able to think of nothing better than to plant the hills with straight rows of trees, ‘creating sad, uniform lanes. What a picnic this natural richness would have been for an English artist with good taste!’ The gardener had confided to her that the pruning of the trees alone kept nine men busy day in and day out. Antje could certainly understand that, for she lived on one of the largest classicist country estates – Sion, near Delft – famous for its formal gardens with clipped hedges more than seven metres tall. Sion’s flat meadowland, however, lent itself more to demonstrations of pruning prowess than to displays of English landscape gardening. This might explain her outrage at the lost opportunities at Rederoord. One should count one’s blessings, she wrote, for the flat clay region around Delft simplified the deployment of a gigantic pruning implement known as the ‘phantom of Sion’, whereas it was difficult to use this device on hilly terrain like Rederoord. The Phantom of Sion Antje’s commentary on Rederoord was far from mild, but it was generous compared with Otto’s opinion of Antje’s estate. In his eyes the flat polder landscape around Delft was no excuse for the failure to make more of the gardens surrounding Sion:

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Fig. 55. The landscape around Rederoord. From J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, 1782–89.

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Fig. 56. View of the house and gardens of the Sion estate. Now something else from yesterday, when I finally went to see the famous country estate of Sion, and my expectations were disappointed. I found nothing but towering clipped hedges and ponds all of two morgens long and proportionately wide, and, by contrast, very beautiful timber trees, elms and beeches, but no oaks. At the rear of the place there was, however, a small piece of land newly converted into a wood with winding paths, at the end of which one came to a terrace, where one looked out over a completely square pond, into which a cascade fell that came from a very long and straight ditch. All of this would have been very nice if only there had been grassy areas or groups of exotic plants and pines or something similar, and if the pond had been round and the ditch transformed into a meandering stream. And it was laid out in such a way that all of this could easily have been done. But now my diary is getting too long and I shall close with this.29

Otto would have none of Sion’s classical French style, featuring ‘towering’ hedges neatly clipped by the ‘phantom’ and ruler-straight bodies of water. He was not even impressed by the miniature warship in the pond, which boasted a real cannon that was fired at banquets and par-

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ties.30 Only that part of the garden containing the wood with winding paths – laid out anew in the modern style – met with his approval. His list of what the garden lacked – exotic plants, pines, grassy areas and meandering streams – shows that at the age of fifteen he was just as familiar with ‘the grand English taste’ as the eighteen-year-old Antje van Hogendorp. Nor did Otto think much of the house and grounds of Ypenburg, which he visited before it had been remodelled by his cousin Franco van den Burch, who – according to Otto’s commentary – had many improvements to make to his property: ‘I find it a large, low-lying, hill-less place, but something very nice could be made of it, if it were taken in hand by an enthusiast.’31 It is clear that Otto was the perfect person for this job, and equally clear what he would do with such a garden: transform it into a romantic, English landscape garden. Franco van den Burch apparently took up his young cousin’s challenge. We have already seen what happened after a later visit: in the road leading to the house, the Van Ecks’ carriage ran up against a mound of sand, which had undoubtedly been imported to remedy the estate’s lack of hills.32 Like Antje, Otto travelled to Gelderland. In the summer of 1793, for example, when he was thirteen, the whole family stayed in Gelderland at the Mariëndaal estate, which belonged to the Arnhem burgomaster Jacob Nicolaas van Eck – Otto’s uncle – and his wife, Hester Henriëtte Engelen. Aunt Hester had recently inherited the estate, so the couple had barely had a chance to modernise it.33 Otto refrained from comment, at least in his diary, in which he does not even speculate on the property’s possibilities. Perhaps he was so daunted by the sheer magnitude of the endeavour that he did not know where to begin. The former grounds of an Augustinian monastery dating from the end of the fourteenth century were situated on high land that offered stunning views of the lower-lying Betuwe and the twisting Rhine. From time immemorial there had been meandering streams and centuries-old beeches and oaks on this site, and it also accommodated a paper mill and numerous farmhouses. A description written by a distant cousin of Otto reveals that Mariëndaal also had a great many graves and skeletal remains. She reported that it was forbidden to dig holes behind the stables, because it was said that ‘you might come across a skeleton’. To be honest, this threat did nothing to stop me; on the contrary, I felt a burning interest. ‘Skeletons? Why

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Fig. 57. The Mariëndaal estate. Drawing by Jacoba (Cootje) van Eck. skeletons? What do you mean?’ ‘Oh, that is the old burial place of the monks, who used to live at Mariëndaal and were put into the ground just as they were, without coffins.’

There were yet more graves elsewhere on the estate: In my youthful years I liked to walk past the old, beautifully wrought gravestones. There were three in a row, blue-grey in colour, covered with a sort of moss growing in their cracks and crevices. One fine day – I must have been about ten – I attempted, with much toil, to scrape those stones clean with a sturdy kitchen knife. But I couldn’t read what was inscribed on them, and there was no one who could explain it to me. A date – was it 1494? – coats of arms in all four corners, Gothic letters.

Years later the estate would be drastically modernised by Otto’s cousin and contemporary Gerard van Eck.34 But there was still no sign of these improvements in 1793, when Otto stayed there at the age of thirteen. Otto’s trip two days later to the nearby manor of Doorwerth is better documented. The castle did not appeal to Otto. He dismissed this medieval edifice with its towers, gates, metres-thick walls and moat as ‘an old castle which has existed for three hundred years and was not to

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my liking because of its lifeless appearance’.35 To reach the waterfall, which did impress Otto, one had to drive a bit longer or take a long walk, as the Gelderland historian Isaac Anne Nijhoff did thirty years later, ‘past wide, well-laid-out winding paths, over hills and dales, in the shade of pines and beeches and oaks and all kinds of trees, both high and low, following for a good long way the Dorenweerd hills along the Rhine’.36 The hiker was rewarded with the sight of a natural waterfall known as ‘the fountain’, ‘where, at the foot of a precipice, an amazing amount of water emerged from the ground and fell from a considerable height from one pond into the next – within a very short distance and all of four times – and then rushed on into the Rhine’. Otto’s description is shorter but no less enthusiastic: ‘Afterwards we went to a beautiful waterfall, such as I’d never seen before, which we thought very fine.’ That he was referring to the same waterfall as the one Nijhoff described is apparent from his report that he returned two days later with a cousin to the same spot, which he then refers to as ‘the fountain (which we had already seen the day before yesterday and my cousin also thought it very beautiful)’. This cousin was also coaxed into visiting the other highlight of the previous trip: the country estate of Eijerhaag. Otto’s description of this country house, written two days earlier, is one of the high points of his diary: Furthermore, we saw very distant and beautiful prospects, including the view of Eijerhaag, a beautiful house on a high hill situated on the Rhine and having a view of Cleves, Nijmegen, Driel, etc. Down below ran a sweet gurgling brook. One descended the hill in 232 steps and then came to a lovely little meadow, where various beasts were grazing, which made the most enchanting picture.37

The Eijerhaag estate no longer exists. It was next to the Duunoog estate, which has survived only as Duno, a lookout point with a panoramic view of the Rhine.38 The family took it easier the following day. Otto went with his uncle to visit the paper mill at Mariëndaal and a ‘newly built farm cottage’; he thought the former ‘very nice’ and the latter ‘particularly appealing’. The most memorable was the ploughing peasant whom Otto was permitted to lend a helping hand: ‘As we were returning home, I saw the peasant ploughing, which I’ve now seen and done myself, and so I had a great time today.’ The last day was spent visiting a number of ‘neighbouring country houses’, which probably left him no time to write at length in his diary. He summed up the excursion of 22 August 1793 as follows:

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Fig. 58. Martinet takes a pupil to visit the waterfall in the Imbos on the Hoge Veluwe. From J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, 1782–89.

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Fig. 59. Peasant ploughing. From J. van Westhoven’s Den Schepper verheerlijkt, 1771. I liked the first [country house] very much because of its well-laid-out park and lovely fountains and waterfalls. The second had nothing much to offer apart from a fine house and some nice big trees. At the third I saw nothing worth mentioning except a very nice hermitage with [the hermit’s] moss house, grave, etc. And the hermit himself – standing in his little house reading the Bible – was a very good likeness made of wood.39

There were quite a few country estates around Arnhem that had fountains and waterfalls, and nice big trees were even more common. Only the hermitage offers a point of reference, and that brings us back to Baron van Spaen, whose improvements at Biljoen and Beekhuizen included a number of hermitages. One of them was occupied for a time by the poet Elisabeth Maria Post, whose verses profited from the peace and quiet. Another hermitage housed two Swiss cheesemakers, who were evidently supposed to represent both ‘solitude’ and ‘productivity’. Visitors could in fact watch them making cheese. Such living, breathing hermits were rare in the Netherlands, in contrast to England, where owners of country houses recruited paupers

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Fig. 60. Hermit and other garden accessories. From G. van Laar’s Magazijn van tuinsieraden, 1802.

to inhabit their hermitages in return for free board and lodging. The proprietors imposed such stringent conditions, however – prohibiting grooming, bodily hygiene and strong drink – that the hermits seldom stayed for long or else were peremptorily dismissed for alcohol abuse.40 Elisabeth Maria Post’s working conditions were decidedly more pleasant, and the cheesemakers were apparently granted some freedom of movement. In December 1791, at any rate, the ‘Swiss or cheesemaker Christiaan Hannij’ of Velp was seen in the inn De Rode Leeuw. We know this because of the incident that took place after this visit, when unknown assailants fired at him three times on his way home.41

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Fig. 61. Design for a hermitage to be built on the Rederoord estate, 1797.

Otto did not see a live hermit on his trip to Gelderland; instead, he saw a life-size wooden statue reading the Bible in a house a stone’s throw from the hermit’s self-prepared grave. This hermit could have stepped right out of Van Laar’s Magazijn van tuinsieraden (Catalogue of garden decorations), which illustrates – as a source of inspiration to construction-crazed garden owners – an effigy of a hermit, holding a book in one hand and pointing to his coffin with the other. One could also make him ‘sit, lie or kneel, as desired, and in the case of good weather, one can also put him in a restful pose’. The wooden effigy installed by Baron van Spaen was different from the one Otto saw. Van Spaen’s hermit was clad in a brown habit and could nod his head and point to an open coffin with the inscription ‘Memento mori’.42 So it was probably not Biljoen that Otto visited, because he could not possibly have written of that rural estate – with its poems, amusements, and highs and lows of English garden design – that he had seen ‘nothing much worth mentioning’ apart from the said hermit. Moreover, Otto’s name does not appear in Biljoen’s guestbook. He probably visited the Lichtenberg estate near Arnhem, which also boasted a hermit, according to an 1813 report. Otto’s observation thus indicates that this

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Fig. 62. Map of De Ruit, detail of the map of Delfland, 1712.

selfsame hermit had already been there for twenty years, which adds one more to the list of solitary wooden Dutchmen. This effigy, which also had movable parts, resided in a hermit’s cell and was surrounded with the usual symbols of death: an altar and a small churchyard complete with a skeleton. Lichtenberg belonged to Otto’s relative H. Brantsen, burgomaster of Arnhem, who was reported by the 1813 visitor to have transformed the estate – previously ‘laid out in accordance with oldfashioned tastes’ – into a veritable ‘paradise’.43 Gardening at De Ruit De Ruit, the country house where Otto grew up, was situated on the River Vliet, the waterway connecting Delft and The Hague. On the 1712 map of Delfland, the garden of the country estate is portrayed to a high degree of accuracy.44 This very detailed map, which even depicts the individual trees, clearly shows a classical French garden. A short avenue leading from the road gave access to the house, behind which lay a square garden – with yew hedges and trees in a simple geometric pattern formed by circles, rectangles and intersecting avenues – surrounded by hedges and a fence. In 1787, when Otto’s mother

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inherited this rural estate, almost no changes had been made to what had meanwhile become an old-fashioned garden. In 1790 Lambert embarked energetically on a plan of modernisation. Unfortunately there are no visual records, but the changes made can be reconstructed on the basis of De Ruit’s account book. To begin with, a pond was dug, and two ‘meandering streams’ were added in the following years. According to the new philosophy of gardening, the genius loci – the spirit of the place – was supposed to leave its mark on the new design, but this was not of much importance to Lambert. The flat pasture land was thoroughly taken in hand, and some of the surrounding meadows were transformed into a wood. Because a landscape garden was supposed to be hilly, whole shiploads of sand were brought in. Parts of the garden – the orchard, for example, and the kitchen garden and greenhouses – were meant to be productive rather than picturesque. The transition to the adjacent pasture land was flowing and natural, as the new philosophy prescribed. After all, a garden was no longer allowed to be a microcosm screened off by hedges from the outside world; instead, it was meant to be integrated into its surroundings. The neighbouring pasture land was leased to a farmer. Otto’s diary clearly indicates that the garden was closely connected with the farming activities. The Van Ecks also owned a farm in Maasland, and this property was likewise leased.45 On 8 November 1793, Lambert – prompted by a passage he and Otto had read together – explained to his son why the family owned a country estate. Today, reading in Rollin about Roman history during the reign of the wise Numa Pompilius, I found agriculture and rural life praised as the sister of wisdom and as a school of simplicity, moderation, justice and all moral virtues. Papa took this opportunity to tell me that one of the main reasons we live in the country both summer and winter is to teach us from an early age that simplicity, moderation and industry are inextricably bound to our basic happiness.46

These arguments can be found almost verbatim in Chomel’s dictionary, in which country life is presented as ‘useful and essential, honest and diverting’, but above all as a life that makes one happy because it educates one ‘to virtue, frugality, justice and religion’.47 Otto did not have to be persuaded of this, for his diary gives ample proof of his love of country life.48 The new garden improvements described in his diary not only met with his complete approval but found in him a passionate observer, who usually watched the building

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activities at close quarters. During the digging of one of the meandering streams, he wrote: ‘After the midday meal I spent some time with the labourers. They’re already more than half finished with digging the stream. The weather is also very favourable (since it still hasn’t frozen very much).’49 In the meantime, trees had been planted to create a wood: ‘This afternoon many more trees were planted, and so a lot of work has been accomplished before the coming of spring.’ Otto’s parents saw to it that his personal observations were enhanced by appropriate passages from his reading. At this time he thus read in Martinet ‘of the various types of soil in our country, such as clay, earth, sand and so on’. Otto was thrilled when he was allowed to help, and wrote proudly that he had participated in the digging by hauling sand in a wheelbarrow. He preferred hands-on work experience, but merely observing the men at work was apparently so enthralling that being forbidden to watch was an effective punishment. When Otto complained that he would ‘rather be in the field helping the workers to drive the cart’ than doing his homework, his parents forbade him to watch the next day.50 In September 1792 he reports having taken great ‘pleasure in walking a bit and playing near the carpenters and bricklayers, who are now busy making a new shed in which to store the winter provisions as well as the hay for the cows, since we’ll be spending the winter here’. That same year the workers demolished the ‘summer house at the back’, a remnant of the old French garden.51 On 10 April 1795 he went out to have a look, ‘because the gardener laid out the parterre today’. When Otto was older, he became more involved in the management of the garden. On 3 April 1797, for example, he rode his pony on ‘an errand to a nurseryman’. Part of the garden was reserved for useful purposes. The kitchen garden, which provided vegetables for the table, is mentioned now and then in Otto’s diary. The family ate the fruit from their own orchard or from the greenhouses in which peaches and grapes were cultivated. The estate also boasted a field of tobacco. Their supply of meat included rabbits and other animals, for which Otto made hutches and pens. Such a large garden naturally required a lot of maintenance, but that was another source of amusement for the youthful observer. At the end of the summer Otto recorded: ‘This afternoon I had a grand time because our hay was brought in today, which was a right bit of fun.’ In the spring all kinds of other things had to be seen to: ‘The garden has been duly dug up and had seed scattered on it, and the

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Fig. 63. Garden maintenance. From Geschenk voor de jeugd (1784) by J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg.

peas and beans for the legume bed are already rather big.’ Summer was a quiet time in the garden, but after that new activities appeared on the agenda: ‘There is now a great deal of work chopping up and planting trees, a work which was nearly forgotten during the summer and is now being taken in hand again. By contrast, the sowing and planting in the kitchen garden has now come to an end. The earth must rest to collect new nourishment for the coming year.’52 Otto’s role was not confined to that of spectator. To his great delight, he was allowed to do some of the chores: ‘After the midday meal, I drove the buckwheat hay to the stables with my goat-cart.’ Once he was even excused from school to haul wood in his cart. In the spring he was permitted to help his father: ‘In the afternoon, since the weather improved so much, I spent the time with Papa, pruning trees with hammer and chisel, which is good work for getting warm.’ Sometimes Otto’s sisters also helped with the pruning: ‘Afterwards I went with Papa and my sisters to prune some trees for fun.’53 In the autumn the whole family helped in the orchard: ‘It was very good weather, and I arrived home to find Papa and Mama and my

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sisters busy picking apples and pears. I joined in the fun, so at dinner I was very hungry and ate with relish. I forgot to say that the apple and pear harvest is not half so plentiful as it was last year.’ The medlar harvest, on the other hand, was abundant. The whole day Otto and his father picked medlars which were so ‘plentiful’ that darkness fell before they had finished.54 Though we hear little about it, Otto naturally had his own garden, in accordance with philanthropinist principles. This responsibility is apparent from casual remarks – ‘and then I went to work for a little while in my garden until it was time to eat’ – and when it comes in handy as an excuse: ‘Uncle and Aunt left without my seeing them again, the reason being that I was working the whole afternoon in my little garden.’55 Presumably his younger brother and sisters had their own plots to cultivate. This would explain the quarrel recorded on 3 August 1791: ‘Then I was so unobliging as to refuse to lend my shovel to Cootje, but I reconsidered in time.’ In the winter, gardening came to a halt, but an alternative was practised in the sitting room, as emerges from the entry of 17 January 1795: ‘After supper I spent the time – until the candle was brought – in the corner of the hearth, and when there was light, I sowed a bit of garden cress on pieces of cloth on saucers.’ Sowing garden cress was a typical philanthropinist example of learning by doing. The Animal Kingdom The animals bred at De Ruit also offered educational opportunities. In August 1791, Otto was permitted to help Gijs the gardener make a pen for the pig, ‘which must now be erected in haste, in order to fatten it up’. Autumn was the slaughtering season, and it was eagerly awaited. On 26 October 1791 the time had come at last: Otto writes that he was allowed to stay at home to ‘see our pig being slaughtered’. He refrains from describing the scene, accompanied by much blood and squealing, but adds that he enjoyed himself tremendously. On another occasion a sick calf had to be slaughtered on the spot, which Otto portrays in his diary as ‘a jolly affair, but damaging to Papa’s purse’. He also tells in detail of a cow that stumbled into a ditch, which he describes as ‘a long story’. Otto was not guilty of sentimentality; on the contrary, he seemed to have a penchant for the sensational. ‘After the midday meal I went to Delft to see an ox being slaughtered. I had

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Fig. 64. Livestock for slaughter. ‘A child should learn not to be cruel.’ Children watching a pig being slaughtered, by Otto’s drawing teacher Isaac van Haastert. From the Almanak voor de beschaafde jeugd voor het jaar 1799.

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never seen that before, and wanted to see how it was done.’ Two years earlier Otto had watched one of the Van Ecks’ cows being boned. He had not been present at the slaughtering, but his mother had accepted ‘all this commotion’ as a valid reason for neglecting his homework: ‘Because slaughtering is done only once a year, Mama says she won’t hold it against me for not studying so much today, provided I do my work satisfactorily tomorrow.’56 That Otto’s parents allowed him to watch and take part in such bloody activities does not seem to accord with the new pedagogical notion that children should be spared such scenes, which were thought to stimulate cruelty and bloodthirstiness: A child should learn not to be cruel, To hate all semblance, as a rule, Of conduct lacking in compassion. ‘God’s kingdom’, so the child must see, ‘Includes the beasts as well as me. Let nobler passions guide my actions’.57

These lines of verse were published in the Almanak voor de beschaafde jeugd voor het jaar 1799 (Almanac for cultured youth for the year 1799). It is apparent from the opening lines that slaughtering was not associated with cruelty to animals: ‘To be slaughtered is the animals’ lot, to give us the delightful pleasure of wholesome nourishment.’ This was accompanied by an engraving of a freshly slaughtered pig by the hand of Isaac van Haastert, Otto’s drawing teacher, who also worked as a book illustrator. In Salzmann’s Leerrijke en aangenaame onderhoudingen voor de jeugd (Instructive and pleasant talks for young people) of 1794, a mother explains to her child that God created the animals without intellect or reason because otherwise it would be impossible for man to slaughter them: Child: Why didn’t God give them the power of reason? Mother: Don’t the animals live to serve us? Child: Yes! Mother: If they could reason, we should not dare to slaughter them and eat them. Would it be right if a robber were to take you away, slaughter you and eat you? Child: Oh no! Anyone who did that would be a horrible person. Mother: Then why is it not horrible for a person to slaughter and eat a lamb? Child: Well, because it’s an animal! Mother: If the animals could reason, wouldn’t they think: Oh, you horrible people who slaughter and eat us! And wouldn’t they ponder

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the matter and decide to band together in great numbers and devour people in turn? Child: Oh, how good it is that animals cannot think!58

Otto’s enthusiasm for scenes of slaughter does not imply that he had no compassion for farm animals. When winter weather suddenly set in on 18 November 1794, his primary concern was for the welfare of the animals: This morning when I got up, it had frozen so hard (without anyone having suspected it last night) that all the ditches had half a thumb of ice on them and the animals, shivering with cold in the meadow, were promptly put in the shed. Poor creatures, how they suffered from the cold.

During his walks around the grounds, Otto frequently went to have a look at the cows. Given what he said on 11 March 1794, this was a daily ritual, for he speaks of his ‘daily visit to the cows and calves’. These visits were prompted by curiosity as well as more pragmatic reasons: on 8 April 1794, for instance, he went ‘to the cowshed to drink some warm milk’. Sometimes there was such exciting news that the gardener came in person to report it, as on 24 February 1793: ‘We heard from the gardener that the cow had calved. Truly good news, ha, ha, ha, ha.’ Such events were recorded with great glee: ‘I almost forgot to mention that this morning at nine o’clock Mrs Cow was delivered in her stall of a healthy daughter. White and black in colour, the new mother and the child are doing very well under the circumstances and (most importantly) the former has an udder full of fresh milk.’ A couple of weeks later we read that Otto got up early to visit the new-born calf, from which he was forced to take leave ten days later: ‘Got up with very good weather this morning at six o’clock and strolled over to the cowshed, where I said goodbye to the little calf, which was sold this morning at the market in Delft.’59 Otto was delighted to be directly involved in the farming: ‘After supper (at five o’clock) I walked with Papa to Van der Spek to see a cow that had calved this morning, which Papa is supposed to buy.’ When Otto was older, his father took him along when he went to settle accounts with his tenant farmers.60 Otto was most fond of his own animals, his daily companions who often feature in the diary. His dog was considered a member of the family, and so was duly included in the family portrait of 1789. This little dog is never mentioned in the diary, unlike its successor: ‘Nowadays I amuse myself a lot with a new dog we were given, who is trying to get

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used to me.’ This dog is mentioned chiefly when Otto goes outdoors with it: ‘I spent the time playing in the garden with my dog.’61 Otto’s goat figures much more prominently in his diary, from the moment that he received it as a present. On 9 June 1791 he wrote: ‘Papa has favoured me with a lovely white goat, with which I had so much fun this afternoon that I thought of almost nothing else and neglected my tasks.’ The following day he wrote: ‘My heart is already so attached to my goat that I got up at five o’clock this morning to take it for a walk before going to school, but Papa wants no more of this, because he says it disturbs the tranquillity so beneficial in the morning.’ Four weeks later Otto said that he would rather play with his goat than attend the baptism of his baby sister: ‘I took more delight in the goat.’ The birth of little goats prompted him to write enthusiastically in his diary on 21 May 1793: ‘Then I had breakfast and tended my goat (who – mark well! – became the mother of two daughters last night).’ The goat was frequently harnessed to the goat-cart, and when there was snow its task was to pull a sledge: ‘After the midday meal I harnessed my goat to the sledge and hung a few bells around its neck, and drove around with my sister in our goat-drawn sleigh.’ In 1795, however, when Otto was old enough to ride a horse, he was given his own pony and the goat was relegated to the sidelines. Without the slightest trace of sentimentality, Otto wrote, ‘Today I sold my goat, cart, etc.’, and from that moment it was the pony who was Otto’s ‘best friend’.62 Horses had fascinated Otto for a long time. On 1 June 1791 he persuaded his father to take him to the horse market: ‘There is a fine horse market at Delft, and I asked Papa if we could go there some time, so we did.’ Otto enjoyed riding in the sleigh, particularly because ‘it involves a horse, and I am a great horse-lover’.63 Otto was given the pony when he was eleven, but later on his father gave him a horse. Driving a horse-drawn vehicle was quite a feat for such a young boy: during a jaunt on 25 March 1794 the pony was ‘very jolly en route, and leapt about gaily, prancing along the way, and yet I didn’t get hurt’. Of the other animals, the rabbits seem to have been much less important to Otto, though he did write with satisfaction: ‘This morning Gijs (the gardener) went to Delft and brought me two rabbits, because I’d earned them, and the first thing I did was to give them some food.’64 Otto was much more interested in the birds that he bought at the market, received as presents, or caught himself with snares, traps and nets. On 2 November 1793 he says how much fun he had ‘teaching a bird on the stool’. A couple of months later, he saw at the bird market

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Fig. 65. The animal market at Delft. From Hollandsche Arkadia in zeshonderd en meer afbeeldingen, 1807.

‘a great many goldfinches, which could perform the trick of drawing water [from a tiny cup]. I should have liked to buy one with a little platform and all, but I didn’t know if Papa would approve and wasn’t sure where I would put it.’ He did not hesitate a second time. A couple of weeks later, while walking through the bird market on his way to Master Spil, he again noticed goldfinches ‘with little houses and all the accessories’. He immediately bought one with his pocket money, skipped his lesson, and placed the creature temporarily in his grandmother’s care. Fortunately, when he arrived home with his finch, the whole family was enthusiastic: ‘When I came home with my purchase, everyone found it very nice, especially Mama, so that I don’t regret buying it, the more so because it’s already given proof of its skill.’ The subject of birds was also brought up in his correspondence with Aunt Paulus, who once wrote that she would bring him a canary as a present the next time she came to visit. In the meantime, she could tell him that the creature sang ‘as though it had an organ in its throat’.65

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Meanwhile Otto also had turtledoves to care for: ‘After the midday meal I was given a new chore, namely to let the doves, who are very docile, eat a piece of bread out of my hand, which they were already accustomed to doing before they were mine.’ A while later Otto discovered to his ‘great joy’ that the dove was sitting on eggs, ‘so that I now have hopes of having almost an entire population’. A few weeks later, however, when little doves failed to appear, Otto broke open the eggs: ‘they were thoroughly rotten, so that the creature could have sat there brooding for ages with no result’.66 Otto knew that autumn was a good time to catch birds: ‘It is now almost time to start catching birds with the trap. Autumn has its own amusements, as do summer and the other seasons.’ One recurring autumnal diversion was setting out ingenious traps to catch birds, hares and other small animals. Autumn was also the time to bring the bird cages indoors: ‘I had enough to do hanging my [cages of ] turtledoves, birds, etc. in the house, which was just in time, because this evening there’s a sharp frost, so it will be much colder tonight.’67 Otto took good care of the birds he caught, being remiss in this duty only when he was ill: ‘When I got up this morning I found that I was scarcely any better and still had a stomach ache and no appetite and not even any desire to feed my animals, though I knew very well that the poor creatures were extremely hungry.’ When necessary, though, he was merciless to troublesome, uninvited guests, such as the sparrows that feasted on the fruit in the orchard: ‘Afterwards I went for a walk and then studied from seven o’clock until now. Now that it’s dark, I’m going out to chase the sparrows away with my handgun.’ And when he and a friend, rowing in a boat on a lake, saw ‘a flight of wild ducks’ (as many as two hundred), he sighed: ‘When they took flight, if I’d had a flint-lock musket, I’d certainly have shot them, even though I’m not very good at it.’68 Trapping finches was especially popular in Holland. Every country house had a finchery, or finch decoy, to which the birds were lured and subsequently caught in a large net that suddenly snapped shut. The dunes were particularly good hunting grounds. In the autumn of 1792, Otto stayed at the country house of Deunisveld, in the dunes near The Hague. There he took part in the finch hunt, but with mixed results: ‘Today, too, the finch catch was not so good as yesterday, when the total amounted to fifty-three and today only twenty-seven, but on the whole it’s going very badly this year. The autumn is much too windy.’ There were no really good catches during Otto’s stay. After he left, the

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Van Ecks received a letter with the news ‘that more than four hundred were caught the day before yesterday’. The finches were an ingredient of the pasties served at supper.69 Fishing was perhaps Otto’s greatest love; dozens of diary entries testify to his enthusiasm. We have already seen that in the winter he taught the servant to make fishing nets. In the spring the time was ripe for fishing, an activity that recurs in the diary throughout the summer months. The following description of Otto’s lucky catch on 7 June 1794 is typical: Then, until we went in to eat, I saw to a few things I needed for fishing, because after eating I wanted to try and catch a mess of fish. . . . When I was about to begin, my friend Vreedenburch came for a visit and we went fishing together until eight o’clock. With great success, for we caught a mess of carp and red-eye and tench.

Otto fished with hook and line and used bag nets, including a square bag net that was a gift from his grandmother. Trammel nets were also part of his fishing tackle: ‘After eating I went fishing for a change with the trammel net and caught a lot of red-eye, which I helped to clean.’ It will come as no surprise to hear that the Van Ecks regularly ate the fish they caught themselves. Only in the spring, when fishing was forbidden by the authorities for several weeks, one had to make do without and wait patiently for the fishing season to start up again. ‘I put out my two trammel nets last night and had such a good catch that we all ate of it at the midday meal. Now, though, I won’t be fishing any more until June, and I shouldn’t even have gone fishing today, since the fish are about to spawn or already are spawning, so that it would harm fishing too much.’ On 1 June 1795 Otto could start fishing again: ‘The ban having ended, I started fishing again today.’ During the fishing season, too, Otto’s parents searched for suitable reading. After a couple of days of good catches, Otto was allowed to read from the Bible about Peter’s ‘miraculous draught of fishes’.70 Gardens and Recreation Lambert had had a see-saw and a swing made for the garden, and they were enjoyed by children and adults alike: ‘Before mealtime I was amusing myself on the see-saw with Mama and the nursemaid, but because the nursemaid jumped off, Mama (whom I couldn’t hold up

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Fig. 66. Donkey / Child reading / Writer / Farmer / Dog / Fisherman. From K.Ph. Moritz, Proeve eener korte beoeffenende redeneerkunde voor de jeugd, 1789.

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Fig. 67. ‘And he read an amusing story from a book he had brought along.’ The inquisitive Karel reading aloud. From J.H. Campe’s Beknopte zedeleer voor kinderen van beschaafde lieden, 1806.

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by myself ) went down and I went up in the air and fell off. Luckily I didn’t hurt myself, but the shock gave me a headache and then I felt sick.’71 Apart from such mishaps, the see-saw and swing were a source of diversion, and typical of one modern aspect of country life: using the garden as a place of recreation. In the autumn of 1796, the newly dug stream served as a swimming pool, where Otto went to cool off.72 It was the beginning of modern, recreational outdoor living, but still without sunbathing or picnicking. For adults in those days, gardens were mainly a place in which to stroll, especially in company, since in the open air one was less bound by the formalities that applied indoors. Not surprisingly, contemporary novels often used the garden as a device for bringing various characters closer together. In Otto’s day, gardens were frequently supplied with a garden house, since people preferred not to sit in the sun. The garden house at De Ruit was the ideal place to read or do one’s homework in peace: ‘After eating, I went with Papa to the garden house to do my work.’ Earlier Otto had sat there reading with Aunt van Lidth.73 The happy combination of reading and country air had already been pointed out by J.H. Campe in his Zedeleer voor kinderen (Ethics for children).74 ‘Inquisitive Karel’ was wont to ‘sit beneath a shady tree’ and read ‘an amusing story from a book that he had brought along.’ That Otto also took great pleasure in reading out of doors is apparent from his entry of 23 May 1795: This morning I got up before five o’clock, and so had time not only to write a bit more, but also to take a walk and to sit for an hour in the garden house, reading in Uncle Paulus’s book about equality and in Rollin’s Histoire romaine. These are two very edifying and entertaining texts, and they are all the more pleasurable when one reads them in the open air on a beautiful summer morning.

One could even combine reading and walking, as evidenced by Otto’s entry of 24 April 1794: ‘While walking, I read a bit of Rollin.’ We have already seen that Otto’s enthusiasm for reading cooled considerably when nature was not involved; his love of nature, however, was undiminished by a lack of appropriate reading matter. Nature was a permanent source of pleasure, with or without a book, in all kinds of weather and at all times of the day. In the early morning Otto enjoyed ‘the summer pleasure of the early morning hour, when everything is fresh and just right for noticing the sweetness of nature’. Even on a rainy afternoon there was still plenty to enjoy, ‘and at five o’clock it started to rain and when it stopped, how delicious it smelled in the

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Fig. 68. Diligent Jantje. Jantje prefers reading to catching butterflies. From Geschenk voor de jeugd by J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg.

garden’. The scent of autumn had its own charms, described a couple of years later by Otto’s more skilful pen as follows: ‘I was struck by how the whole of nature had already taken on an air d’automne in my eight-day absence.’ Otto’s diary also reveals that nature moved him to think deeply, and this was entirely in accordance with the new norms set by Rousseau and his kindred spirits. In his very first entry, Otto mentioned his desire to hear the nightingale sing – followed by the doleful remark that he was too hard of hearing to perceive it. His deafness was a temporary but recurrent condition. In any case, on 15 May 1795 he was able to write that he had gone fishing and had not come home on time, though for good reason: ‘I’d have stopped fishing more promptly, but I stayed to hear the nightingale, which was singing divinely.’ On a Sunday in

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October 1792, he wrote, during a spell of illness, that ‘being alone’ and tormented by ‘dark thoughts’, he went to sit on a bench outdoors, ‘where I could observe nature in all its beauty’. In November 1792 the closing in of winter prompted the following musings: Today I experienced keenly that winter is coming. When I went for a walk this morning, having done my lessons, it was as cold as it is in February, and the water in the pond was quite frozen. All the trees that have to be replanted had their tops chopped off, and this makes the woods very wintry as well. The hooded crows also do their part. Oh, how quickly the lovely summer has again flown by.

Conversely, the beginning of spring was always a time of joy: ‘Despite the rain this afternoon, it was very mild weather, and on the whole we’re having gentle spring days. Most of the trees are already in blossom. Oh, sweet, delightful spring!’75 The advent of spring was all the more joyful when the family had spent the winter in The Hague. In those years springtime signalled the bustle and excitement of their removal to De Ruit, followed in the autumn by the move back to town. Otto was always sad when their things were being packed up at De Ruit: ‘Now, while we’re still here, I must benefit from the outdoor life, because this winter we’ll go to The Hague, which I regret very much.’76 On 5 November 1796 he noted: ‘Yesterday afternoon we arrived here in The Hague to move into our winter quarters, which is not wholly pleasing to me.’ In the city Otto tried to compensate for the lack of a large garden: The weather turned very nice after the midday meal, so I took a beautiful walk in the woods. If I could take pleasure in beautiful walks, I should not miss De Ruit, even if we did not go there the whole summer, because here [such walks] are like nowhere else (in Holland). But this is not enough for me. I must be able to run and jump: in a word, to be able to do everything one cannot do in public places.77

Otto’s other more or less rural walks in The Hague included the Princessetuin (Princess’s garden), which in Otto’s day was laid out in an early landscape style with winding paths. Moreover, the Van Ecks’ house near the Buitenhof had a garden where Otto kept chickens and doves.78 Even so, he preferred to spend the winter at De Ruit, as they actually did in 1792: ‘In a way the days are not half so pleasant now as in the summer, even though one can discover God’s goodness and wisdom in nature just as easily in the winter as in the summer.’79 Two years later, when the family again spent the winter at De Ruit, he drew the following conclusion: ‘It’s now well and truly winter, and yet very

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pleasant outdoors and much more diverting than in the cities.’ In the 1790s the winters were sometimes very severe, which Otto – with his weak constitution – did not like at all.80 On 28 January 1795 he wrote that it was hailing and snowing, but that God certainly knows better than I what is useful and necessary, and therefore I and everyone else must resign ourselves to it, but I can say that I bitterly regret it. If only we were now at least rid of the snow and only had ice, but that, too, has returned. Oh sweet spring, when will you ever come? It’s ridiculous, [it is] only January and I am already longing for spring, but what can I say? It is so nevertheless.

Years before this, Otto’s father had told him that people must never complain about the weather: This whole summer has not been as good as the previous one, but nevertheless I have every reason to thank God, because He knows better than we do what’s best for us, and therefore Papa doesn’t want me ever to say that the weather is bad.

Otto then obediently added: ‘On rainy days we are also happy to stay indoors. May God be thanked for this.’81 In the years following the Batavian Revolution of 1795, the pressure of Lambert’s work forced the family to stay in The Hague all year round. By this time Otto was old enough to visit De Ruit on his own, which led to the following lament: ‘Yesterday at De Ruit I saw that the animals have already been put out to pasture. If the weather is the same tomorrow, I shall ride out there again, because I’m bored stiff here in The Hague. What will it be like if we cannot spend the summer there!’82 A month later – when the annual fair was in full swing in The Hague – he had ‘again been briefly to De Ruit’, where it was ‘truly delightful. I’d trade the fair and all its amusements for it, even if it were ten times more amusing.’83 Such outpourings were undoubtedly heartfelt, but at the same time inspired by his reading, which, as we have seen, largely determined his world view. Children’s books constantly stressed how useful and agreeable nature was. Pieter ’t Hoen sang nature’s praises in, for example, his verse ‘The country life’: The land I praise Planted in ways To give the greatest pleasure. Glad to live there So free from care The country life I treasure.84

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Fig. 69. The water is dangerous. From Pieter ’t Hoen, Nieuwe proeve van klijne gedichten voor kinderen, 1779.

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Otto’s teachers, too, presumably encouraged his love of nature. His drawing teacher, Isaac van Haastert, likewise sang the praises of the country life in his volume of Mengelpoëzij (Miscellaneous poetry): How much enjoyment people find When, town and turmoil left behind, They settle in the countryside! There peace and blissfulness awaits The cities’ lustre dissipates Like chaff and sand blown far and wide.85

Otto’s preference for country life is in keeping with the spirit of the times and the prevailing ideas about education. Even so, his parents were not entirely happy with their son’s enthusiasm. On 2 September 1794 he noted: ‘Papa and Mama have often been dissatisfied with me, and think that our life in the country is too distracting to expect me, in the long run, to be diligent and industrious in all branches of my education.’ De Ruit simply offered a boy like Otto too many diversions, and so things sometimes happened that angered his parents, as on 2 July 1794: ‘I have squandered all my time and much, much more, by falling in the water through sheer clumsiness, as a result of which all my clothes were wet and muddied, and I had to be cleaned from head to foot. Papa and Mama were very displeased, particularly because I tried to make a joke of it.’ ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ On 29 April 1797, Otto wrote in his diary that in the spring De Ruit became ‘an earthly paradise’. It was common to compare country estates to Arcadia, the region of Greece in which Virgil situated his famous Bucolics. Since the seventeenth century, European literature had favoured Arcadia as a setting for pastoral poems and bucolic romances. Otto’s time, moreover, saw the blossoming of a new genre of books, in which country estates were described, depicted and praised as Dutch Arcadias. An early example is the Kleefsche en Zuid-Hollandsche Arkadia (Arcadia of Cleves and South Holland), in which the author, Claas Bruin, sang the praises of such country houses as Clingendaal near The Hague. Other works featured a wealth of illustration, such as H. Numan’s book of 1797 and, slightly later, Hollands Arkadia (Dutch Arcadia) by Adriaan Loosjes. The high point of the genre was Hollandsche

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Arkadia, a folio volume published in 1807 that contained more than six hundred prints with depictions of country houses. The book was permeated with the nostalgia associated with classical Arcadia, for the title page states that the publication served ‘to commemorate the country’s traditional greatness and picturesque beauty, as well as the prosperity and rustic life of its inhabitants’.86 In Otto’s day the words ‘paradise’ and ‘Arcadia’ were also used metaphorically to refer to youth as the first stage of life, a theme popular among the poets and autobiographers of Otto’s generation. Earlier autobiographers had usually either skipped their youthful years or discussed them briefly as a period of no importance. Here, too, Jean-Jacques Rousseau pioneered a new view, which he set forth in his Confessions, the autobiography published shortly after his death. As an adult, Rousseau felt as uprooted as Adam after the Fall, and while writing his memoirs he became homesick for the lost paradise of his youth. Later on, autobiographers often used the image of the garden as a metaphor for a paradisiacal place they were forced to leave in order to discover themselves and the world.87 In 1845 Jean Deel, Otto’s junior by four years, looked back on his childhood: ‘Everything I heard and saw was tender, beautiful, charming and harmonious, everything that could be perceived by my senses breathed nothing but love and happiness . . . I still had no idea of sorrow and grief.’88 Willem Warnsinck, born two years after Otto, described the image that was most deeply engraved on his memory: the lime tree in the courtyard of his infant school in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district. ‘I can still see myself, seated on the edge of the water trough beneath the lime, my gaze directed upward and sunk in thought, when suddenly the play of sunlight on the leaves created a mixture of light and shade. Then the sighs welled up in the breast of the six-year-old philosopher!’ In his youth Warnsinck had imagined heaven as ‘a wood of blossoming limes’.89 Nature occupies a prominent place in many youthful recollections, a genre that became popular around the mid-nineteenth century. In his Levensschets (Biographical sketch), the Utrecht professor Gerrit Jan Mulder – born in 1802 and thus a member of the following generation – debated whether nature or culture had a greater impact on the formation of his personality; even though he was a much more avid reader than Otto, he allowed nature to tip the scales:

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It must have been at my father’s discretion that I was so often permitted such fishing expeditions. These he actually never refused me, for I had learned to read very early on, and once I understood that art, there was no end to the books I devoured, which certainly did not please my father. In truth: looking back on things, I owe more to fishing and walking in the open air than to most of the books of my youth, more to the unrestricted view all around, more to quiet musing at the waterside, more to wild cavorting than to what I read, most of which I did not understand anyway.90

His earliest memories had been shaped by a garden and a book – to be precise, a dilapidated classicist country estate and Robinson Crusoe. The first seems very simple but in fact was not so. In the vicinity of my parental home there was a country house from earlier times, with clipped palms, lanes, statues and marble monsters, some spouting water like a fountain or waterfall, with ponds, secret passageways, artificial grottoes, and other caverns (some with water gushing forth), decorated with shells and other objects; in short, a country estate, called Zijdebalen, similar to the many that existed elsewhere in our country a century ago. My imagination, which was sparked very easily, found plenty of nourishment there; [at Zijdebalen], where I was allowed to go every day, I was in a kind of theatrical setting. I took all that artificiality to be the product of nature, and, because it was the only place of its kind that I knew, I found Zijdebalen extremely alluring. There my unpractised mind was urged to dream, to cultivate a feeling that rises above the earth and builds castles, far from being as transitory as a fata morgana. The peculiarities of Zijdebalen aroused higher spheres in me and gave me a fairyland, in which I felt I became better, just as Plato says of the two friends who sit beneath a plane tree in striking surroundings, listening to lovely sounds, who are also made better. . . . Zijdebalen! You are ruined, because even then you were long outmoded, and of incomparable tastelessness; but I am indebted to you for my first enchanted world, the first glow of the worldly elevation of my soul, my transcendence of reality: I am still grateful to you for it. What would have become of me, if I had spent my early youth simply studying anatomy and learning reading, writing and arithmetic?91

Times change. The classicist Zijdebalen estate, with its neatly trimmed, evergreen hedges, was once a monument to constancy, but in its state of decay it had become a monument to transience and the fierceness of nature. In its decline it was finally accessible to the lower circles, including a nineteenth-century boy named Gerrit Jan Mulder, the son of a simple surgeon. In Gerrit Jan’s eyes, Zijdebalen was a Tale from a Thousand and One Nights, a mirage, a hallucination, an apparition from times past, who awakened his historical understanding:

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When nineteenth-century autobiographers compared their younger years to the biblical paradise or the pagan Arcadia, they were referring to an ideal state of nature that had been lost to them as adults. Similarly, gardens in the English landscape style evoked in adult visitors the feelings of their youth. Visitors to the Gartenreich in Wörlitz described this sensation in travel journals and memoirs, in which they claimed to have relived their youth – now set in a true paradise – during their ramblings in this garden. Ottilie von Pogwisch, who grew up in Dessau and later belonged to Goethe’s circle, wrote that not only did she experience her childhood anew in the Gartenreich, but her travelling companions also had the feeling that they had spent their youth in that paradise.93 Baron van Spaen supplied the guestbook of his country estate of Biljoen and Beekhuizen with the motto ‘Et in Arcadia ego, et moi aussi j’habite l’Arcadie!’ Below this he signed his name, thus declaring to visitors that he had succeeded in creating his own Arcadia here on earth. The same maxim is inscribed on the baron’s portrait, in which he is depicted sitting in the moonlight on a bench by the large pond at Biljoen.94 ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ was the slogan of the new perception of nature, one of whose instigators – the seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin – was a source of inspiration to De Lille and other apostles of the new garden philosophy. In the eighteenth century, a painting by Poussin – Et in Arcadia ego – acquired a nearly mythical reputation. It depicts an idyllic landscape in which Arcadian shepherds are arranged in contemplative poses around the tombstone of Daphnis, a fellow shepherd whose death they mourn. The phrase ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ is chiselled into the stone. This painting in turn inspired a poem which the Swiss poet Salomon Gessner included in his popular volume Idylls of 1756. Rousseau’s grave on the poplar-covered island at Ermenonville was modelled after Poussin’s painting, with the philosopher assuming

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the role of Daphnis and visitors playing the part of the mourning shepherds. Baron van Spaen’s sepulchral monument at Biljoen followed this new trend in garden design. In 1782 a poplar-covered island with a tombstone was added as the finishing touch to the Gartenreich at Wörlitz. Even posthumously, Rousseau managed to introduce a new fashion. The pedagogue Campe followed Rousseau’s example and also had himself buried on a poplar-covered island. The Amsterdam regent J.A. van Lennep had an imitation of Rousseau’s tomb built on his country estate in Heemstede.95 Tombs and sepulchral monuments became very popular at this time as garden decoration; examples were published in books on garden design, such as Hirschfeld’s Aanmerkingen over de landhuizen en tuinkunst (Remarks on country houses and garden design) and Van Laar’s Magazijn van tuinsieraden (Catalogue of garden decorations).96 There was a romantic Poussin revival: in Rome, a monument erected to the painter had been inspired by Rousseau’s tomb and thus indirectly by his own painting.97 ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ was read in Otto’s day as the shepherd Daphnis’ melancholy farewell to his friends: I, too, once lived in Arcadia. Viewers identified with the mourning shepherds. The picture was thought to evoke melancholy and nostalgia for youth and nature, but this interpretation was new, and differed radically from the image’s original meaning. Ten years before Poussin painted the canvas on which this new interpretation was based, he had made another version of the same theme, in which the shepherds seem dismayed and the atmosphere is dramatic. The painting that served as his example, painted yet another decade earlier by the Italian artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri – better known as Il Guercino – is even clearer: on the tomb, right above the inscription ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, lies a macabre skull. This is not a picture of a shepherd longing for his lost Arcadia, but rather of death itself exclaiming: ‘Even in Arcadia I am omnipresent!’ In other words, the painting is not a reflection on a longed-for past, but a terrifying memento mori and a warning for the future.98 The eighteenth-century reading of ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ was more in keeping with Lambert van Eck’s world view, but the old meaning – lying dormant beneath the surface – could awaken at any time.

CHAPTER FIVE

SOCIAL WORLD During the first years in which Otto kept his diary, his world was still small and sparsely populated. In May 1791, when he was eleven, he wrote in his diary nearly every day, but his entries involved mostly his parents and sisters, and he mentions only three other people by name: his Uncle and Aunt Paulus and a clergyman. The entries for May 1793 include thirteen names, and in the course of the year he mentions, in addition to family members, the Berkhouts (their neighbours), various clergymen, a teacher, and a Miss Mortier, the last-mentioned being the only one from outside Otto’s immediate circle. By 1794 the people populating Otto’s diary have risen in number to twenty-eight, and they include distant cousins, acquaintances of his father, and a number of other people outside the family circle. As Otto grows up, we see in his diary an accurate reflection of his widening social world. No diary kept by Otto’s father has survived, but we do have his album amicorum, to which friends and acquaintances contributed sayings, poems, drawings and short declarations of affection. Such albums were useful in keeping track of one’s personal relations and social contacts. Lambert van Eck began his album amicorum during his student days in Leiden, the perfect time to make new friends. The contributors include various members of families who also figure in Otto’s diary, such as the Brantsens, the Van den Burchs and the Teding van Berkhouts. On 12 January 1778, Pieter Paulus – later to become Lambert’s brother-in-law and, later still, Otto’s uncle – described the nature of his friendship with Lambert in the latter’s album amicorum: ‘I consider it completely impossible and unnecessary to describe true friendship; moreover, much has already been written about it. It is such as exists between us. We experience it, but cannot express it.’ Later on, Ysbrand van Hamelsveld and other politicians also appear in Lambert’s album. Contributions were often reciprocated: thus we find an inscription by Lambert in Van Hamelsveld’s album amicorum, as well as in those of his fellow students Anthonie van der Heim, C.H.W. Anthing, J.A. van der Spijk and Jacobus Kantelaar.1

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Fig. 70. Anthonie van der Heim’s contribution to Lambert van Eck’s album amicorum.

From 1797 onwards, Otto’s sister Doortje kept a poetry album, a handsome, leather-bound book, in which we again encounter various acquaintances from Otto’s diary: P. Teding van Berkhout, for example, who made a lovely drawing of a sailing boat; her ‘friend and cousin’ J.A. van Olivier; Mrs J.E. Hartman and Tietje Philip, who enriched the album with verse; and Cornelia Vockestaert and Aunt van Doeveren, whose presence in Doortje’s life is evident from their drawings in this album.2 The family book – in essence an elaborate birthday calendar used to jot down information about one’s family – was sometimes extended to include distant relatives and acquaintances. A good example is the volume belonging to Lambert’s friend Jacob van Vredenburch: his family book, started in 1775, contains the names of many people known to Otto. In 1781 Van Vredenburch recorded the marriage of Uncle and Aunt Paulus, for example, and in 1793 the marriage of Otto’s cousin Franco van den Burch to Maria Jacoba van der Steen at Wadestein Castle.3 Like this notebook and his father’s album amicorum, Otto’s diary also served as a ledger in which to keep an account of his social capital.4

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Fig. 71. ‘Mother loves you too, you know. Oh, she is so good, feeding her child tenderly, as a mother should.’ A mother nursing her child. From J.H. Swildens, Vaderlandsch A-B-boek, 1781.

The Family At first Otto’s social world consisted of the family as portrayed in the pastel drawing made in 1789. The situation recorded at that time changed a few months later upon the death of Otto’s brother Franc, the baby portrayed in the lap of Otto’s mother. Another sister (Anna Maria) and brother (Adriaan) had already died prematurely, one of smallpox, the other of convulsions. Infant mortality was high in those days, also in the Van Eck family. The sisters appearing in the portrait, Cootje and Doortje, survived their childhood years without much difficulty. After the artist Rienk Jelgerhuis had immortalised their family, Mr and Mrs van Eck were not only confronted with the loss of Franc, but – fortunately – blessed with three more births.

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Fig. 72. The lament of little Willem. ‘Oh! My sister is dead.’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten 1787.

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On 8 July 1791, Otto wrote: ‘Arose today in high spirits, hearing the surprising news that Mama had been safely delivered of a sister. Although I should have preferred a brother, I’m pleased, and hope to live with her in peace and contentment.’ This younger sister, Dientje, grew up in good health. The following addition to the family took place on 25 November 1793: ‘Otherwise this day is very remarkable, for this evening my dear Mama, by the grace of God, was safely delivered of a son. Yet again we have every reason to thank God for the goodness He has shown us. First by keeping Mama from danger and second by letting our family grow in size.’ So Otto finally had a little brother, Jantje, who survived infancy. On 5 April 1797 there was another late arrival, Pauline: ‘This morning at half past five I was awakened by Papa, who came to tell me that in the night Mama had been safely delivered of a sister (who had been expected for two or three weeks already), even though Mama stayed downstairs last night until eleven o’clock. So I, and all of us, again have many reasons to be thankful to God.’5 Occasionally the atmosphere in the Van Eck family was less harmonious, and often it was Otto’s fault. In one of his very first entries, he wrote that he had made such a racket the whole day long that ‘it gave Mama a headache’. Sometimes the day began with an argument: ‘This morning the day started with discontent, because Papa told me I had to do something that was not to my liking, whereby I robbed him of all his pleasure.’ Otto quarrelled frequently with his sisters as well, especially in the summer of 1793, when he confessed nearly every day to having ‘squabbled’ with Cootje, Doortje or both of them, to the dismay of Otto’s parents, who told him they were fed up with having to scold him all the time – to no avail. Otto naturally showed remorse, but remained incorrigible, and the reprimands continued to rain down on him. A couple of days later Otto was again guilty of ‘all kinds of mischief and teasing’. His parents, who regularly chastised him for ‘bickering’ with his sisters or ‘squabbling’ with Cootje in particular, decided to change their tactics: instead of receiving a simple scolding, Otto was now separated from his sisters. Relations with Cootje were especially tense, as emerges from Otto’s confession that ‘once again I have shown that I think of no one but myself and grumble at everyone, especially my sister Cootje’.6 Perhaps he had reason to do so, since Cootje never hesitated to tease her brother in turn or to give him a rap on the knuckles: ‘Today I was again angry at my sister for no reason, because when I was playing the piano she said that I’d forgotten part of the tune.’ Otto had stalked off without

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saying a word, but later regretted it: ‘How can this be reconciled with the best resolutions I made this morning?’ Sometimes Otto did not even have the time to make any good resolutions: ‘Began the day quarrelling with my sister.’ He then pointed the finger at himself – ‘The reason is because I’m impetuous’ – only to blame the other party because he ‘cannot tolerate a lot of provocation, but Mama says that I must remember that she’s only a child and that I should keep silent to prevent an argument, but unfortunately I’m not in the mood for this’.7 As Otto grew older, the quarrels, though less frequent, occasionally flared up again: ‘Although on the whole I spent today contentedly, still it was not brought to a happy conclusion, and I have myself to blame for being angry and envious, and for teasing my sisters. Three faults, one worse than the other.’ Jealousy raised its ugly head chiefly when one of his sisters was allowed to play at a friend’s house, while he had to stay at home. Sometimes, but only when it suited him, he isolated himself from the company: ‘I’m better off alone. Then I can’t argue with anyone.’8 By contrast, Otto always mentions with tenderness his sister Dientje, eleven years his junior. Seeing her again after returning from a holiday, he wrote: ‘Dientje was thriving. She had made great progress in walking and talking, and above all I thought her very sweet.’ He gave a detailed account of this sister’s inoculation and also partook of the ‘inoculation biscuits’ that were part of her diet. Her new front teeth did not escape his attention either. When a little brother was born in 1793, Otto began each day by paying a visit to little Jantje. In later years the contact with the older children became more harmonious as well, as evidenced by his rides in the goat-cart with his sisters, who were not allowed to drive the cart themselves. Between Otto’s admissions of guilt and his parents’ reprimands, we frequently see a side of him that is kind and loving. When his mother was ill, he sympathised with her, and when her condition improved, it prompted him to write that she was ‘noticeably better’ and that if she continued to recover, she would ‘again be almost completely well. I believe that the days now seem long to her, and she is certainly bored, for she hasn’t been allowed to see my little sister Dientje (who is now being weaned) for a whole week.’ When his mother recovered from another illness, Otto composed ‘a prayer of thanksgiving’, saying that he had written it to the best of his ability.9 The Van Ecks occasionally resembled the ideal family – harmonious and affectionate – as evidenced by a number of domestic scenes

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Fig. 73. Evening at home. An evening in the family circle. From De vier stonden, 1798.

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Fig. 74. ‘One usually finds her at her embroidery frame, surrounded by her children.’ Domestic scene from C.C. Claudius, Zestig kleine verhalen, 1804.

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Fig. 75. The Magic Lantern. From R. Arends’s, Vaderlandsche kermisvreugd, 1782.

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described in Otto’s diary. On Mrs van Eck’s birthday, for example, the family played the ‘lottery game’, one of the board games that was all the rage in this period. On other occasions they gathered together to view their print collection. The diary also contains frequent descriptions of pleasant evenings, enlivened by the presence of such guests as Mr van Goens, who obliged the company by playing the piano like a ‘true master’, Otto’s German teacher Lou, who played the flute, his cousin Franco van den Burch, who demonstrated his ‘illuminated optics’ (a magic lantern), and Mr La Regnère, who regaled them with his conjuring tricks.10 Otto positively disliked being at home alone, that is to say, without his parents. On 24 September 1792 he wrote: ‘Nowadays my lot is sadly disappointing in some respects. Bad weather and having to be home alone so often without Papa and Mama (who dined elsewhere again today) is no fun.’ Later he heightens the sorrowful effect: ‘How boring it is when Papa and Mama are not at home; then I feel only half alive.’ The picture of a close-knit family is confirmed by the lively correspondence that took place when family members were away from home. Both the travellers and the stay-at-homes constantly kept one another informed of what they were doing. Unfortunately, very few of these letters and notes have survived. To get an impression of their contents we must turn to the countless entries in Otto’s diary mentioning the letters he wrote – as well as those he received from his parents and sisters – while he was away. These jottings are often short and to the point, but always reassuring: ‘Today I received a letter from my sister Doortje and was glad to hear that she and my other sisters are thriving and that everything is all right at home.’ How did Otto’s siblings fare in life? Doortje and Dientje never married; the former died in 1831, the latter in 1875. Cootje, who married Otto’s boyhood friend Ceesje van Lidth de Jeude, died in 1871 at the age of nearly ninety. Otto’s brother Jantje studied law in Leiden, received his doctorate, became burgomaster of Arnhem, and died in 1867. His wife was the daughter of a town councillor in Tiel. Their daughter married her cousin Otto van Lidth de Jeude, a son of Otto’s sister Cootje. Otto’s youngest sister, Pauline, married the lawyer Bernard Rasch in 1820 at De Ruit; widowed at a young age, she died in 1860. Otto’s brother and sisters were true people of the nineteenth century, whose memories of the Ancien Régime of their youth were probably very vague. Cootje, immortalised as an old woman with the aid of the

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Fig. 76. A letter from Carel to his sister Caatje. ‘So that’s why I speak to you on paper.’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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Fig. 77. Jacoba (Cootje) van Eck (1786–1875), portrait by Berend Kunst, 1836.

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Fig. 78. Jacoba (Cootje) van Eck (1786–1875), photograph, c. 1860.

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new technique of photography, definitely belonged to the modern age. Her descendants remembered her as an old fuss-pot, and illustrated their point with the anecdote that she used to keep tabs on her maidservant by putting little pieces of paper under the chair-legs. If they were still there after the maid had cleaned, there was hell to pay.11 We know about her temper as a child only from Otto’s account, which is equally unflattering. Family and Ancestors In the Van Eck family archives we find a number of handwritten genealogies drawn up by Otto’s father. Indeed, it is apparent from other family archives that in the second half of the eighteenth century people of rank began to delve more deeply into their family histories.12 Affirmation of one’s status was sought in the past, and this familial interest was fuelled by a growing historical awareness. The further back a family’s lineage could be traced, the greater its prestige. This was also true of the Van Ecks, even though their origins were relatively straightforward. The family came from the city of Tiel in Gelderland; the baker Jan Stevensz van Eck became a citizen of Tiel in 1542. His children and grandchildren were shopkeepers, the most successful of whom was Lambert Stevensz van Eck (1581–1624). This cloth merchant became a member of Tiel’s town council. His son Johan (1601–1650), likewise a cloth merchant, became not only a magistrate and councillor but also a church warden, steward and toll collector. The following generation continued to climb the social ladder. Two sons studied law: one set up as a lawyer in Zaltbommel; the other, Lambert van Eck (1627–1667), became a member of the Tiel town council and public prosecutor at the Provincial Court of Gelderland. He married a well-to-do orphan. Four of their children completed their studies in law. One of them, Cornelis, rose to be a professor in Utrecht and another, Johan (1652–1705), became burgomaster of Arnhem, an office later held by his son Lambert (1682–1736). One of the children of this Lambert was Otto van Eck (1719–1781), who, after studying law, returned to Tiel, where he became secretary of the town council. In 1750 he married Cornelia Maria van den Steen, a daughter of the burgomaster Jacob Nicolaas van den Steen, the most powerful man in the city. Their second son, Lambert Engelbert van Eck, was the father of ‘our’ Otto, who was born in 1780.

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In the two centuries that had passed since Jan Stevensz van Eck had been a baker in Tiel, the Van Eck family had risen to become part of the ruling elite of the Dutch Republic. Financially, too, they had made great strides. Otto’s father, one of the wealthiest residents of The Hague, owned a magnificent house near the Buitenhof (the area just outside the medieval castle complex), a country house near Delft, farmlands scattered throughout Holland and Gelderland, and a wellfilled portfolio of shares. Otto’s ancestors were a constant presence, not only in family portraits but also on the book shelves, as the authors of various legal dissertations. Otto once bound eight dissertations written by relatives, a fact he recorded on the covers of the books. Perhaps he did this on 14 March 1794, the day he wrote the following in his diary: ‘In the afternoon I wanted to go for a walk, but the cold wind eventually drove me indoors, where, until darkness fell, I spent the time covering some books for myself.’ The dissertations Otto bound are preserved in the family archives. Indeed, Otto seemed destined to produce such a dissertation himself one day. In only a few generations the Van Eck family had evolved from tradesmen into regents. Their good fortune had been furthered by a succession of strategic marriages. The marriage in 1750 of Otto’s grandfather, Otto van Eck, to a daughter of the Van den Steen family was truly a master-stroke. The Van den Steens – a family of consequence – were nobles who had originally come from the Southern Netherlands. At the beginning of the Eighty Years’ War, one of their ancestors had fled in the retinue of William of Orange to the North, where the family had bought the medieval castle of Wadestein, including the accompanying feudal rights. This castle was situated in the Betuwe, not far from Tiel; by Otto’s time it had fallen into disrepair, but it was still an imposing edifice. Many of the Van den Steens, faithful to their military tradition, served in the higher ranks of the States army. Others, such as Otto’s great-grandfather, studied law and then pursued a career in government. The members of the Van den Steen family figure prominently in Otto’s diary. Grandfather van Eck died in Otto’s infancy, but Otto continued to visit his grandmother during summer excursions to Tiel. The Van Ecks also stayed in touch with her brothers and sisters and their children, and paid frequent visits to Uncle Bernard van den Steen, an artillery captain in the States army, who lived in The Hague. Jacob Bertram van den Steen, a burgomaster of Leiden, was mentioned in Otto’s diary only upon his death. During Otto’s trips to Gelderland, he

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stayed at Wadestein Castle, the home of his Uncle Jacob Diederik van den Steen, whose son Diederik was Otto’s particular friend, though he played with his other cousins as well. Here Otto also met the son of Aunt Petronella van den Steen, and visited his cousins in Zaltbommel. His much older cousin Maria Jacoba van der Steen (born in 1750) lived closer to Otto. She was married to the Delft regent Franco van den Burch, and – given the frequent mention in Otto’s diary of visits back and forth – the couple maintained close contact with the Van Ecks. The Van den Steen family, who also pursued a tactical course of advantageous marriages, sought to marry into well-to-do regents’ and merchants’ families of Holland. The Van den Steens had been able to buy Wadestein Castle thanks to their alliance with the wealthy Amsterdam family of Bicker. From generation to generation, the relations between this noble family of Gelderland and the ruling elite of Holland were confirmed and strengthened. Another way to marry strategically was to choose one’s spouse from within the family. For example, Otto’s Uncle Jacob Diederik van den Steen (1751–1823), who lived at Wadestein Castle, had married his cousin Gertrude Françoise van den Steen (1755–1812). Such marriages ensured that the property stayed in the family. The regents’ families of Holland mirrored this behaviour. They sought their spouses in the distinguished families from the eastern provinces, but also frequently chose marriage partners from their own circle. Otto was the product of the first kind of union. As typical as his father was of the province of Gelderland, his mother was equally typical of the province of Holland. Charlotte Amélie Vockestaert was the daughter of Hendrick Vockestaert, secretary of the town council of Delft, and Theodora Catharina Mouchon. She was a granddaughter of the Delft regent Adriaan Mouchon (1701–1772), who – it can be no coincidence – was married to a member of an earlier generation of the Van Eck family, Charlotte Amelia van Eck (1696–1744), daughter of Johan van Eck (1652–1705), the great-grandfather of our Otto. The marriage of Otto’s parents thus followed in the tradition established by these two families, who constantly sought to strengthen existing ties. The Vockestaert family had been supplying town councillors to the city of Delft since the mid-seventeenth century. Generation after generation of Vockestaert males studied law at Leiden, and for more than a century members of this family had married into other Delft regents’ families. This regent-patriciate had left an indelible mark on

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Fig. 79. Otto’s Uncle and Aunt Emants at tea. Silhouette by J.A. Schmetterling, 1794.

the city. For example, three of Otto’s forefathers – Adriaan van der Goes, Adriaan Mouchon and Hendrick Vockestaert – had been involved in the establishment of the Foundation of Renswoude, set up in 1754 to educate poor orphans to be navigators, architects, surgeons, mill builders, watchmakers and instrument-makers. The stately house on the Oude Delft canal still boasts a marble bench in which their coats of arms are engraved.13 The maternal side of Otto’s family tree also displays a complicated pattern of intertwined branches. Through various lines, Otto was related to a great many regents’ families of Holland and Gelderland. His diary contains the names of cousins from the Cau, Gevers, Van Haeften, Toulon and Emants families. The Vockestaerts were related, moreover, to the families of De Perponcher and Graswinckel, the latter being the Delft regents’ family from whom the Van Ecks inherited the country estate of De Ruit.

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Various generations of Mouchons had married into prominent families of Delft, such as the Van der Goes family. Otto’s maternal grandfather, Adriaan Mouchon, had married Agatha Maria van der Goes (1722–1803), whom Otto refers to in his diary as Grandmother Mouchon. Otto’s fondness for this woman could only have been increased by her habit of taking him to the fair now and then. Even without this excuse, he was happy to pay her regular visits. On 21 May 1794, Otto noted enthusiastically in his diary that his grandmother ‘had the goodness to say that if I didn’t know what to do with myself, I could always come and see her’. Otto’s cousin Franco van den Burch was married to Anna Maria van der Goes, who died in 1792. Otto’s mention of this in his diary shows how shaken he was by her death. A year later his uncle remarried, this time a member of the Van den Steen family. Otto’s diary also contains a couple of references to his Van der Goes grandparents. This relationship had been brought about by the third marriage of his grandfather Hendrick Vockestaert, after whose death in 1786 his widow, Aemalia Catharina van Eyck (1747–1818), married the elderly Adriaan van der Goes (1724–1803). In addition to an otherwise unspecified ‘Aunt van der Goes’, Otto mentions his uncle Willem Hoyer, who managed the property of Anna Maria van der Goes at Voorne, and his ‘Cousin Scholten’, Catharina Elizabeth van der Goes.14 The Van Ecks maintained close ties with the family of Van Lidth de Jeude, a regents’ family of Gelderland. Otto’s aunt Margaretha Lamberta van Eck (1751–1811), his father’s eldest sister, married Jan Richard van Lidth de Jeude (1754–1803), who soon turned out to be the black sheep of the family. The couple divorced in 1782, after which their young son Ceesje went to live with Otto’s uncle Jacob Nicolaas van Eck on the Mariëndaal estate near Arnhem. Ceesje got along well with Otto, and evidently with Otto’s sister Cootje too, since he later married her. Their union continued the tradition, already well established by this Gelderland-Holland clan, of marrying within the family. In her autobiography Cootje reminisces about her controversial father-in-law, who was ‘endowed with extraordinary mental powers, as witnessed by all who knew him’. But, she continues, ‘unfortunately he did not succeed in putting them to good use; instead, they turned him more and more from the straight and narrow’.15 Family ties could be strengthened by asking relatives to witness a baptism. Otto’s baptism was witnessed by his grandfather and namesake,

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Fig. 80. Kinship. From F.L. Kersteman’s Secretarij der Hollandsche voogdijen ontslooten, 1790.

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Otto van Eck, and his grandmother Cornelia Maria van den Steen. The witnesses to the baptisms of his younger brothers and sisters included their maternal grandparents, Uncle Bernard van den Steen (who was asked no less than three times to appear at the baptismal font), Cornelis Aenaeus van den Steen (a colonel in Amsterdam), Grandmother Mouchon (Agatha Maria van der Goes, twice a witness), Franco Willemsz van den Burch, Françoise Henriëtte Vockestaert (Aunt Paulus), Arend Hendrik van Eck (an uncle from Tiel) and Margaretha Lamberta van Eck, Lambert’s eldest sister. The above-mentioned torrent of names gives some impression of one of Otto’s most important activities during the years he kept a diary, namely to become acquainted with his extensive family. The first circle beyond Otto’s immediate family consisted of both his father’s and mother’s families. Otto’s forefathers, uncles, aunts and cousins formed a complicated network. Indeed, Otto was not so much part of a family tree as of a genealogical forest. Family was important, certainly in the upper crust of Dutch society. Blood relations were expected to provide one another with moral and financial support, employment, marriage partners and accommodation. Just how extensive family networks were is apparent from the customary forms of address. Very distant relatives continued to address one another as ‘cousin’, ‘niece’ or ‘nephew’. Over the years Otto referred in his diary to more than forty family members with whom he was in contact. The diary thus fulfilled the function of an aide-mémoire. From a young age Otto became acquainted with his maternal relatives, who lived in Delft and its vicinity. He saw those on his father’s side, most of whom lived in Gelderland, far less frequently. Some of them he saw for the first time on his journey through Gelderland in the summer of 1793, when he met his cousin Gerrit van Eck, ‘whom I had never seen before’, but with whom he instantly had ‘lots of fun’. Their acquaintance resulted in a lively correspondence about a passion they shared, namely making rabbit hutches. Otto’s diary contains various references to distant relatives whose kinship remains unclear. Often these were casual encounters, but the people in question were pointedly referred to as blood relations. During a meal at his Uncle van den Steen’s in The Hague, for example, Otto met his Renesse cousins. He became acquainted with the Toulon cousins – whom he mentions only once – when his Uncle Vockestaert brought them along on a visit to De Ruit. The Van Hasselt cousins

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Fig. 81. A portrayal of friendship. W.R. Brantsen’s entry in Lambert van Eck’s album amicorum.

also occur only once in his diary, when they visit De Ruit to proceed from there, along with Otto and the rest of the family, on a day trip to Scheveningen: ‘I rode on ahead on my pony. We dutifully walked and leapt about on the dunes, and ate prawns.’ These were the children of Aunt Adriana van den Steen, who was married to the lawyer Gerard van Hasselt, a well-known historian employed by the province of Gelderland. Furthermore, a certain Balleur, Otto’s cousin, stopped by just once, during a holiday with the ‘Van den Steen cousins’. Otto saw his relatives in Delft and The Hague more frequently. These included his Van den Burch ‘friends’, including Franco van den Burch, who lived in the country house of Ypenburg, not far from De Ruit, and his grandmothers Aemalia van der Goes-van Eyck and Agatha Mouchon-van der Goes, both of whom lived in Delft. When he was old enough, Otto often went to see them on his own. He visited his Grandmother van Eck less frequently, since she lived in Tiel, but he saw a lot of her on his trips to Gelderland. He also enjoyed very warm relations with Uncle and Aunt Vockestaert in Delft. Otto was much less enthusiastic about visiting the retired army officer Bernard van den Steen, who lived in The Hague and was not very jolly company. On 25 October 1792, Otto wrote in his diary: ‘Tomorrow I’m going again with Papa and Mama to eat at Uncle Bernard van

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den Steen’s in The Hague. I hate it, I’d much rather stay at home, but Papa says I can’t get out of it.’ Otto’s entry the following day confirms that he ‘didn’t have much fun’. The next time his parents went to visit this uncle, Otto was allowed to decide whether or not to accompany them. He chose to stay at home. That this Van den Steen relative was important to the Van Ecks is apparent from the fact that he witnessed no fewer than three baptisms. Although it was kind of them to ask, perhaps they also wished to stay in the good graces of this elderly, sickly and – more to the point – unmarried uncle, so that he would not forget them in his will. Uncle Pieter Paulus and Aunt Françoise Vockestaert played a very important part in Otto’s life. They were the first to be mentioned in the diary outside his immediate family. Whenever this aunt and uncle visited De Ruit, Otto could not wait to greet them: ‘I joyfully welcomed them.’ After his parents and siblings, these two are the people most frequently mentioned in Otto’s diary. He visited them regularly in Rotterdam, and they often stayed at De Ruit. Otto once complained that it had been all of six weeks since he had seen them, which is a good indication of the frequency of these visits, which Otto eagerly looked forward to for weeks in advance: ‘I was glad to hear that they are coming to stay with us three weeks from now.’ Taking leave of them, however, was always difficult: ‘This afternoon Uncle and Aunt Paulus left for Rotterdam. We are all very sorry. When the time came for them to leave, I was so sad I couldn’t hold back the tears. But Mama said it was good that I value Uncle and Aunt’s presence so much that I was sad to see them go, and that of all the pleasures in the world there is not one that is lasting and that it would be foolish of me to torment myself with the thought of their departure to the extent that I was now unable to carry out my tasks. I then took Mama’s advice and tried to shift my attention to my work, but I must admit that I did not find this evening at all pleasant.’ Tears also accompanied the end of a three-week stay at their house in Rotterdam. Otto missed them so much that it completely overshadowed his joy at returning home: ‘At first I was very sad because I had to leave Uncle and Aunt Paulus.’16 Uncle Paulus is the only adult figuring in Otto’s diary who can be caught ‘romping’ or ‘fooling around’ with the lad, though he also took the time to make sure that Otto’s studies were progressing satisfactorily. During one of Otto’s visits, for example, Paulus took his nephew aside to test his knowledge of Latin. As a result, Otto was subjected the

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Fig. 82. Some of the passions or emotions, including the maidservant’s unguarded laughter. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774.

following evening ‘to a more comprehensive examination. Uncle said it went reasonably well, but told me to pay more attention.’ A month later, Otto’s lack of concentration evidently prompted his uncle to repeat his advice, this time more sharply: ‘My carelessness in Latin provoked several rebukes from Uncle; still, I hope to improve tomorrow.’17 It was also Uncle Paulus who surprised his nephew with a unique present: a ‘hand-operated printing press’, the only toy Otto ever mentions in his diary. With seeming prescience, Paulus presented this gift in June 1794, on the eve of the Batavian Revolution, thus giving Otto the opportunity, even before his uncle called for freedom of the press in 1795, to gain some practical experience in this field. His aunt gave him a watch, an heirloom from his grandfather, as proof of their particular attachment to this child, the son they themselves never had. Shortly before Otto was born, the couple had lost an infant son, after which they remained childless. This may well explain their strong attachment to their nephew.

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A household the size of the Van Ecks’ could not exist without domestic staff. The servants attending to the family’s needs were at once very close and extremely far away. The physical distance between them was minimal: they lived in the house, and were constantly seen scrubbing floors, cooking meals, washing clothes and waiting at table. The social divide was immense, however, and Otto was warned by his parents not to become too familiar with them. This warning was issued with good reason, for Otto got along well with the servants. He was upset by the departure of two maidservants in 1793: ‘Today nothing special happened except that Eva (the kitchen maid) and Leentje (the housemaid) have moved away, which is not at all agreeable.’ He wrote this on 3 May, two days after the day on which domestics were traditionally dismissed or themselves resigned. It is striking that Otto refers to the servants by their Christian names only, and sometimes not even that. The nursemaid and the coachman are never mentioned by name, only by their function. Many activities undoubtedly took place in the presence of the servants, but Otto did not usually take the trouble to mention them. Occasionally he mentions going to Delft with Dirk, or picking peaches and pears with the maid. An exception was Gijs Kersseboom, the gardener, who encouraged Otto’s love of nature. When Otto was allowed to buy rabbits, he went with Gijs to the animal market, and he noted with pride that he had helped Gijs to make a pen for the pig. Otto did not always get along so well with the other servants. ‘Moreover, I again spoke without thinking, unnecessarily bringing upon myself the wrath of Thomas, so that I can best learn from experience that one cannot reform people by scolding them.’ Shortly after this, Thomas was dismissed. His successor was called Antonie. Otto’s first impression of this new servant was positive, but on 20 February 1792 he wrote: ‘This morning I went to school as usual. At twelve o’clock Antonie (our servant) drove me around in the sleigh, because there was a lot of snow and Mama had given me permission, provided I didn’t go on the ice. When we came to a canal, he strongly urged me to go on it, but despite all his exhortations I didn’t want to do it, because I had promised Mama.’ That was the end of Antonie. The new servant, Dirk, managed to keep his position longer. Dirk was a willing pupil: Otto taught him to make nets and took him fishing. Otto’s behaviour towards Thomas, Antonie and Dirk clearly expresses the social gap

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between them: the upper-class boy and the humble servant. Despite the difference in age, it was always clear who the boss was. Outside De Ruit, Otto had almost no contact with people from the lower classes. He lived in an isolated world, where simple folk were encountered mostly in books, and even then they were the sort who managed to work their way up in the course of the story to a higher social position, such as Salzmann’s Farmer Kluge. The servants live a shadowy existence in Otto’s diary, coming and going without leaving much trace, except for Gijs the gardener, whose departure is described in detail: ‘This morning our gardener, Gijs, left. We are all very sorry, especially me, but I console myself with the knowledge that his departure is for his best, since he has been granted a position as gardener in Hellevoetsluis, and I hear that it is a very advantageous post. Even when he can no longer work owing to old age, he will be cared for there anyway.’ Lambert van Eck had managed to find his old servant a sinecure at a large naval dockyard. Regents traditionally rewarded their personal servants with such positions at government expense. Later on, Otto paid Gijs a visit in Hellevoetsluis: ‘I also saw our old gardener, G. Kersseboom, who was thriving, as were his wife and children.’ Friendship between older, faithful servants and the children of the house was common in Otto’s day, as evidenced by the autobiographies of contemporaries, such as that of Maurits VerHuell, whose mentor was the family’s coachman. Friends of Both Sexes Otto built up a circle of friends his own age early on, beginning at school in The Hague, when he occasionally invited classmates – such as his friend Helman – to come to De Ruit. These friendships petered out when Otto began to receive tuition at home. Six months after leaving school, Otto described a chance meeting with an ‘old mate from school’, which gave him an opportunity to ‘ask how everything was going’. From the age of eleven, Otto received lessons at De Ruit or at the homes of his teachers. There he sometimes met other children, such as Bruin, a boy who became his friend. Otto even called this otherwise untraceable boy a ‘great friend’, which suggests that his parents were less well disposed towards Bruin. It sounds like an attempt to pre-empt his parents’ criticism – something Otto did frequently. Mr and Mrs van Eck were convinced that their son would do better to choose his friends

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Fig. 83. The Master and the Gardener. By Otto’s drawing teacher, Isaac van Haastert. From Aangenaam kinderschool, 1781.

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from his own circle. Both Helman and Bruin disappear from view soon after their enthusiastic introductions in the diary. After that, all of Otto’s friends were peers from regents’ families of the Van Ecks’ acquaintance: Iman Teding van Berkhout, Wim van Beerestein, Mattheus Gouverneur, Johan Willem van Vredenburch and Ceesje Reepmaker all came frequently to De Ruit to play with Otto. He always enjoyed the company of his Rotterdam friend Ceesje Reepmaker. Whenever he went to stay with Uncle and Aunt Paulus, he invariably paid Ceesje a visit. Otto’s playmates also included girls, such as Tietje Philip, his cousins Jacoba and Christina Emants, and Saartje Gouverneur, with whom Otto frequently performed a ‘contredanse’. Naturally Otto would later be expected to choose a wife from this circle of acquaintances. Tietje Philips’s birthday celebration was described on 27 July 1794 as a party which Otto attended ‘with a great deal of pleasure’. He even ended up having a ‘conversation with Tietje’.18 This is almost the only time Otto admits to speaking, rather than playing, with someone his own age. It is also the only time that he goes into any detail about contact with the opposite sex. This party and that of his cousin Ceesje van Lidth are the only friends’ birthdays Otto ever mentions, perhaps because children’s parties were not yet in vogue. At first Otto depended on his parents for contact with his friends, but when he was older he visited his friends on his own or invited them to come to De Ruit. His earlier ‘mates’ evolved into ‘gentlemen’ when the Messrs van Beerestein and van Vredenburch honoured him with a visit. Was Otto being ironical when he wrote this, or was he attempting to polish his manners? In any case, he spent the afternoon ‘agreeably’, walking and riding in their company: ‘Mama says that I should view them as models of propriety.’ In the spring of 1797 it became more difficult for him to see these friends when the Van Ecks decided to stay in The Hague, unlike their acquaintances, who had gone to the country for the summer. His mother tried to reconcile Otto to the situation by suggesting that he take his horse and ride out to see his friends, but her attempts to appease him were only partly successful: ‘I’m never there in the mornings or evenings, and so can never visit any of my friends, and then I always have to ride for a full hour, and one also grows weary of that after a while.’ It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Otto’s visit to Willem van Vredenburch was rather stressful: ‘At three o’clock I went on horseback to the Overvoorde estate, to see my friend Willem van Vredenburch, whom I found at home and with whom I amused myself until darkness drove me home again.’

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This devotion to his friends does not imply that they never quarrelled: ‘And then Gouverneur came here, and we spent an enjoyable afternoon driving around in the goat-cart. Mama says, though, that she heard us arguing, and that I became quite angry, but even though this is so, it won’t (I hope) harm our friendship in the slightest, at least not as far as I’m concerned.’ Despite the occasional row, these friends formed the basis of the old-boys network to which Otto was destined to belong, a group of regents’ sons who had known each other from boyhood. From birth it was clear what kind of lives Otto’s friends would lead: a high position in government awaited the boys, while a good marriage was in store for the girls. In most cases this is exactly what happened. Although the Batavian Revolution of 1795 had upset social relations, the elite had managed extremely well to hold their own. Otto’s friend Willem van Vredenburch went to study law in Leiden and obtained his doctorate in 1805. In old age he wrote his autobiography, in which he goes on at length about his ‘honourable father, who spared no pains’ in giving him ‘a decent education’, but unfortunately he fails to mention his childhood friend Otto. In the family archives, his career is documented by his doctoral degree, the certificate testifying to his being called to the Bar in The Hague, and his appointment as burgomaster of Rijswijk in 1825. Among the archival documents we also found a silver medal commemorating his death.19 Another friend, Mattheus Gouverneur, studied theology, became a clergyman in Groningen, and married a daughter of the Delft regents’ family of Graswinckel. He played a prominent role in church life.20 Ceesje Reepmaker, who studied law in Leiden and obtained his doctorate in 1808, died a bachelor.21 Ceesje van Lidth, who also studied law, became burgomaster of Tiel. In 1806 he married Otto’s sister Cootje at De Ruit. He ended his career as a member of the Upper House and died at the age of eighty-one. Wim van Beerestein likewise studied law, took up the post of secretary of the Provincial Court of Holland, and married a daughter of the Amsterdam regents’ family of Bicker.22 Otto’s neighbour Iman Willem Teding van Berkhout was sickly; he died in 1812. Otto’s cousins Jacoba and Christina Emants both married clergymen: Jacoba moved to IJsselstein, where she died young; Christina ended up in Middelburg. Sara Gouverneur never married, and died in Delft in 1849. Finally, Tietje Philip married a lieutenant in the Dutch army, who died a couple of months after the wedding. Two years later she married another military officer, with whom she

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led a nomadic existence. The couple had no children. Tietje died in 1829 in the garrison town of Namur. Teachers and Clergymen From the age of eleven, Otto received tuition at home from numerous teachers who were charged with preparing him for university. His parents did not choose just anyone to carry out this task.23 Otto received lessons in mathematics and physics from none other than Abraham van Bemmelen, a lecturer at the Foundation of Renswoude. Van Bemmelen published books on hydraulic engineering, algebra and physics. Another of Otto’s teachers, G.C.C. Vatebender, was formerly headmaster of the Latin school in Gouda. Since 1795 he had been living in The Hague as a member of the National Assembly, where he championed educational reform – a subject on which he penned a number of publications.24 Later Otto was instructed by the mathematician and physicist Jacob Florijn, an authority in these fields and the author of a number of handbooks on hydraulics and navigation. Otto’s description of his first lesson with Florijn shows how determined this teacher was to take his pupil firmly in hand: ‘I’ve been given another new teacher for mathematics, by the name of Florijn, from whom I shall have an hour-long lesson four times a week, and whom I like very much indeed, inasmuch as I can judge from these first lessons. But he is very strict about everything done under him or for him, so it will be necessary to take care and pay close attention.’ Frequently Otto also describes the content of his lessons, such as this one that took place on 26 November 1795: ‘At one o’clock I went to Mr Welding and spent between an hour and 5/4 hours in an agreeable fashion. We dealt with the principles of grammar and astronomy, which, I find, he teaches very clearly. He gave me some grammar exercises to do at home.’ Mr Welding also taught Otto English: ‘I spent the lesson with Welding examining the most important seas, lakes, rivers and capes, streets, mountains, etc. in Europe, and then we did some astronomy, which I study in English, first of all because outstanding works have been written on the subject in English and secondly in order to gain more practice in that language.’ In those days English was part of the curriculum only among the cultural vanguard.25 Otto’s English lessons testify to his parents’ modernity. Mr and Mrs van Eck may have preferred to have Otto tutored at home because he

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was often ill, but home tuition also gave them the opportunity to let him study subjects not yet taught at most schools, such as German, English and geography. Otto usually went to Welding’s house for his lessons, but when he was ill, Welding came to him, which Otto found less agreeable. On 14 December 1795 he wrote in his diary: ‘Today, because the weather was rather good and my health is improving, I again went to Welding’s, which I much prefer to his coming to my house to teach.’ Otto’s friend Ceesje Reepmaker had been placed in the care of a tutor, a Mr Pahud. We know this from an entry in Otto’s diary, in which he tells of a book auction, which Mr Pahud attended with him and Ceesje in tow. Ever since Rousseau had condemned the practice of having live-in tutors, such instruction had become less customary. Otto therefore had no tutor, but his diary sometimes affords us a glimpse of the nameless nursemaid who took charge of his sisters. Later on he mentions Anna Maria Evans, an Englishwoman who kept a boarding school in Delft, where Otto’s sisters attended day-school when they were old enough.26 This boarding school is also known to have offered lessons in the English language. Otto’s diary provides us with some information about the knowledge his sisters acquired, either at this school or at home. They listened when someone read aloud from the books of Pluche and Martinet, for example, and Otto tells us that his father urged him to help his sisters with their French. We know that pedagogical treatises of the time paid increasing attention to the education of girls, and that Otto’s parents tended to heed such advice, so we may assume that the education of Otto’s sisters was also mapped out with care.27 We have more information about the cultural skills and social graces they were taught, because Otto was required to learn them as well. They all received lessons from old Nicolaas Gauthier, the former dancing master at the stadholder’s court. Gauthier was a man of the old school. According to Antje van Hogendorp, whose criticism of a classicist garden was quoted earlier, the people dancing at court balls under his guidance ‘cut poor figures’, performing steps that were frightfully old-fashioned.28 Otto refrained from criticism, at least in his diary, though he was not exactly enthusiastic: ‘Mama says that she is not very satisfied with my dancing, and that if it doesn’t improve, I shall have to pay for it myself.’29 When Gauthier left, his place was taken by a Delft innkeeper. His lessons were ‘not so enjoyable’ either, mainly because the emphasis lay more on acquiring ‘good posture’ than on dancing.

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As related earlier, Otto and this teacher had a falling-out: ‘Mama says that, even though I danced well, I didn’t do my best after all, because I behaved improperly towards Master Demny, who wanted to cure me of a bad habit.’ Demny – Pierre Demmerrie – quit his position a month later, after which a new master arrived, whose name we do not know because Otto does not mention it. The perseverance of Otto’s parents in their recruitment of new dancing instructors clearly shows the value they placed on acquiring this skill – and rightly so, for dancing fulfilled an important social function, one being the opportunity it provided to associate with the sons and daughters of families from one’s own circle. On 29 January 1793, Otto received his first piano lesson from Master Harris: ‘I didn’t like it at all. I went only out of dutifulness and to give Papa pleasure.’ In any case, these lessons enabled Otto to play the occasional psalm on the piano: ‘After eating I played some psalms on the piano and sang with Mama.’ Because Master Harris and Otto did not get along, his father quickly found another teacher: father and son Berghuis, the bell-ringers of the famous carillon of the city of Delft. In the account of his study trip through Europe, the English music historian Charles Burney, himself an organist and composer of some distinction, praised old Johannes Berghuis as ‘the best performer I met with in Holland, particularly on the carillons, which he plays with astonishing dexterity’.30 His son Frederik was also a virtuoso. We know what they played, because their books of music – in which they recorded the melodies that rang out from the tower of the New Church – have been preserved.31 It emerges from the diary that Berghuis also taught Otto’s sisters: ‘This afternoon Master Berghuis was here for the first time to teach my sisters as well.’ From 16 September 1793, Otto’s cultural programme was supplemented with drawing lessons from Isaac van Haastert, whose thriceweekly lessons demanded a great deal of preparation. According to Otto, this was such a time-consuming business that the rest of his homework frequently suffered as a result: ‘However, because I had rather a lot to draw, I couldn’t finish everything.’ These pieces of work have not survived, though we do have a nice drawing by Otto’s sister Cootje of the Mariëndaal estate in Gelderland; presumably she, too, received drawing lessons from Van Haastert. This teacher produced paintings, drawings, etchings and book illustrations. He supplied several children’s books and almanacs with prints depicting everyday situations, a number of which are reproduced in this book.32 Moreover, he made a series of

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Fig. 84. The Education of Girls. Frontispiece of De opvoedinge der meisjes by F. de Fénelon, 1770.

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Fig. 85. Silhouette portraits en famille were popular around 1790, such as this one of Joan Muijsken and his family.

optical prints of Delft townscapes (see Chapter 6, Fig. 89). This versatile artist was also active as a writer. His publications include poems, essays on religion, politics and science, and translations of Lavater’s writings on physiognomy.33 Otto’s diary contains the names of twenty-four Reformed and Walloon clergymen. This may seem like a lot, but most of these entries concern sermons he heard in Delft, The Hague or the surrounding villages. The Van Ecks maintained closer ties with three clergymen.34 Otto was particularly fond of Samuel Geraud, minister of the Walloon congregation in Rotterdam. On 6 September 1792 he wrote: ‘This morning the Reverend Geraud, who has been staying with us for a week, left, which I deeply regret, because, being a man who loves children, he often encouraged me with his talks, and cheered me up a lot by telling me so much.’ Otto was closest to the clergymen who led his confirmation classes. The first was Pierre l’Ange, whose death in September 1793, ‘which we all, and I in particular, deeply regret’, occasioned great sorrow, because it meant the loss of ‘a good teacher’. Otto’s parents gave an account of their visit of condolence to l’Ange’s widow, and not long afterwards, Otto went to visit the widow as well, after receiving his first confirmation lesson from l’Ange’s successor, Jacob Scheidius – the clergyman who read Otto’s diary on 3 August 1793 and complimented him on it.

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At a young age Otto was already conscious of belonging to a large network of ‘friends and relations’, as he once called them, who formed a thick protective skin around the Van Eck family. In those days kinship and friendship coincided much more than they do now. The word friend was synonymous with family member, as was the word maag, meaning kinsman or kinswoman. Kinship and friendship formed an indispensable bulwark against the dangers of the outside world at a time when the authorities did not yet provide a safety net and most people were not insured against illness, fire and other misfortunes. Blood relationship and friendship compelled mutual support. Seen in this light, it is all the more remarkable that, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, many families were less united, politically speaking, than one would expect. The political persuasions in Otto’s family ranged from his radical-revolutionary uncle, Jan Richard van Lidth de Jeude, to fiercely loyal Orangists, such as Grandfather van der Goes. After the Batavian Revolution, the latter was even denounced by his fellow townsmen at the National Assembly for his stubborn allegiance to the stadholder, who had meanwhile fled the country.35 We see similar rifts in the families the Van Ecks counted among their friends. The Teding van Berkhout family, for instance, had split into a Patriot branch (led by their neighbour Hendrik Willem Teding van Berkhout) and an Orangist branch in Leiden. Otto’s revolutionary uncle, Van Lidth de Jeude, had a private life that was every bit as unorthodox as his political career. Shortly after marrying, he divorced his wife and went to live with his mistress, then fled as a Patriot to Saint Omer, where he remarried and fathered several children, who, to everyone’s dismay, took the name of Van Lidth.36 We know this from the autobiography of his daughter-in-law, Otto’s sister Cootje, who admitted that she had heard ‘something’, though by no means everything, of this ‘affair that was so painful to her husband’. Cootje’s father-in-law ended up in Germany, where he committed suicide. His last wish was to be buried with a portrait of his first wife, Otto’s aunt. Dominicus Namna le Balleur, burgomaster of Zaltbommel and a distant relative of Otto, was at the other end of the political spectrum. The last time Otto saw him as a free man was when he visited the Van Ecks on 13 April 1794, at which time he and his nephew had ‘dutifully

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walked themselves into a sweat’. Le Balleur was arrested in April 1795 for crossing out the rallying cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ on an official form. He was taken to The Hague and locked up in the Gevangenpoort, a medieval tower that served as a state prison. Thanks to Le Balleur’s memoirs of this dramatic period in his life, we know how his relatives reacted to his imprisonment.37 The Van Ecks stood by him. Le Balleur was visited in his cell by Lambert van Eck, Pieter Paulus and Otto’s cousin Franco van den Burch, who prevailed upon him to relent. When Le Balleur fell ill, the Van Ecks sent their family physician, Abraham van Stipriaan, who not only examined the prisoner but also, in the words of Le Balleur, ‘used every ounce of his eloquence to persuade me to sign a petition of submission’. To no avail, for ‘although he said that the entire family was urging it’, Le Balleur remained true to his principles. In the end he was banished and fled to Emmerich, just over the German border, where he remained until the end of the Franco-Batavian period. The next protective layer consisted of the friends and acquaintances of Otto’s parents. The diary names twenty families, among them Teding van Berkhout, Van Vredenburch, Van Beerestein, Gouverneur, Hartman and Reepmaker. These were all families from their own circle of regents. Another name recorded in Otto’s diary is that of the Leiden professor Johan Luzac, publisher of the Patriot-minded Gazette de Leyde and a friend of Lambert. The physician Floris Voltelen, professor at the University of Leiden, also visited the Van Ecks. Both of these men had been dismissed from their positions after the Patriot revolution because of their political principles and solidarity with a colleague who had refused to swear allegiance to the restored Orangist government. The letters exchanged at this time between Otto’s father and Luzac have been preserved.38 Otto’s diary tells us quite a bit about the social life of the adults he knew, even though as a child he was excluded from it. When staying with Uncle Paulus, Otto wrote about the ‘Sunday supper’, a weekly occasion. This form of social interaction was highly developed. Otto’s father, for instance, held a ‘Monday salon’. Such get-togethers were informal, but another facet of social life was institutionalised in the form of societies. From the age of fifteen, Otto accompanied his father every week to the meeting of a physics society in The Hague, where they attended lectures that sometimes included the added excitement of chemical experiments. Otto was particularly enthusiastic about the

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pyrotechnics: ‘Yesterday evening I attended the Physics Society and heard Mr Alsche, who ended his lesson with some jolly good fireworks, produced by means of inflammable air, sealed into bladders and then ignited with a candle, and nicely pressed through various copper pipes into the shape of stars and similar figures.’39 The older Otto grew, the more frequently he recorded the names of people – around thirty altogether – who inhabited the periphery of his social world. When Otto was allowed to accompany his father on a visit to Mr Martens in Amsterdam, he could not follow the conversation at all. Presumably they discussed the Dutch East India Company, since they also visited Gulielmus Titsingh, the company’s senior bookkeeper. Otto also went with his father to see Jan Washington, a high-ranking public servant, and he met the renowned architect Jan Giudici when staying with his Uncle and Aunt Paulus. Sometimes Otto had the opportunity to speak with such outsiders alone, especially when his parents were not at home and he had to do the honours. When Mr Toulon dropped by to see his father, who was away, Otto wrote that ‘courtesy required me to keep him company’. On 22 April 1794 a Monsieur Dumas came to visit, ‘and because [Papa] was not at home, I had to keep him company’. The diary shows Otto gradually developing the social skills of an adult. Otto’s diary reflects a social horizon that broadened as he grew older and more often found himself outside the family network. Otto’s social world was that of the regent class that had ruled the Netherlands for the past two centuries. The Batavian Revolution had done little or nothing to change this. Domestic servants were still invisible after 1795. Otto could not write in his diary until ‘the light was brought’, a very impersonal reference to the servant charged with bringing the candles, which also shed their light on the book by Uncle Paulus that Otto so frequently read, about the equality of all people. The farmers Otto visited with his father are generally given somewhat more personal treatment. At least they are referred to more specifically by their initial, ‘farmer E.’ or by the addition of a possessive pronoun: ‘our farmer’. We should not forget, however, that analytical thinking about social relations was a recent development. Some authors of books on this subject exchanged the legal-philosophical approach for a new, sociological-anthropological perspective. The Leiden lecturer J. le Francq van Berkhey wrote a nine-volume Natuurlijke historie van Holland (Natural History of Holland), the first part of which had been published in 1769. He defended his decision to study ordinary people as follows:

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‘Many a time – in their cowsheds and at their spacious hearths, while I conversed with them – I have had ample opportunity to observe their customs, and the genuine fishermen’s neighbourhood often showed me their generosity. In this way I have witnessed their wakes and funerals, as well as (I am not ashamed to say) their fairs, carnival festivities, weddings and baptismal merriment.’40 Ysbrand van Hamelsveld’s study of 1791 also testifies to a certain tentativeness.41 In De zedelijke toestand der Nederlandsche natie op het einde der achttiende eeuw (The moral condition of the Dutch nation at the end of the eighteenth century), Van Hamelsveld examines the morals of Netherlanders ‘in various professions and walks of life’, a sociological analysis avant la lettre. It contains a short essay on the ownership of country estates, which made it possible to distinguish between respectable people and common folk: ‘Those who kept no carriages and did not own country houses’ could not ‘be counted among respectable people’. However, as a result of ‘recent catastrophes’ (the war with England, the unsuccessful Patriot revolution of 1787), many carriages had been dispensed with – this writer claimed – and many country estates demolished. Van Hamelsveld subjected various segments of society to critical scrutiny, but was sometimes forced to admit defeat – ‘And if we now descend to the lower class, to the rabble in our cities, we go in search of them in the back streets and alleyways’ – upon which the author wonders whether one can even speak of people in this context.42 In Van Hamelsveld’s view, such simple folk display a paradoxical blend of servility and rebellion: ‘Truly, it is disgraceful that in a country like the Netherlands so large a proportion of its inhabitants are so neglected and corrupted.’ Van Hamelsveld’s book was in keeping with a long tradition of moralising, but his approach was new, more detached, and occasionally founded on empirical investigation. That sociological and anthropological interest was growing in this period is also apparent from Ontwerp tot eene algemeen characterkunde (Plan for a general study of character) by W.A. Ockerse, especially from the third volume, ‘comprehending the national character of the Netherlands’. This book, too, exudes a new, critical spirit. The same holds true for the Tafreel van de zeden, opvoeding, geleerdheid, smaak en verlichting in het voormalige gewest Holland (A picture of the customs, education, learning, taste and enlightenment in the former province of Holland), written by a person who called himself Cosmopolite. Bernardus Bosch wrote De weelde in Nederland (Affluence in the Netherlands), ironical in tone but certainly meant as a critical analysis of contemporary society. Cornelis Rogge’s pamphlet De armen, kinderen van den staat (The poor: children

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of the state) of 1796 was written in the same vein. Rogge no longer looked at poverty in a religious and moral light, but saw it instead as a social problem.43 Another Patriot-minded author, J.H. Swildens, wrote an essay ‘On the current state of society in our Republic’ by way of introduction to his translation of Knigge’s Over de verkeering met menschen (On social intercourse), intended as a ‘guide through the contemporary world’. This new approach to society was coupled with a growing interest in such issues as poverty, mass education, public health and housing – themes that would play a pivotal role in what later became the field of sociology. Jeronimo de Bosch Kemper – who is considered the founder of Dutch sociology because of his study on poverty, which appeared fifty years later – was in fact only building on insights developed in Otto’s day.44 Turning the study of society into a science was linked to the advances in the natural sciences. In the eighteenth century, people began to apply to society the physical laws that had been discovered by Isaac Newton. Human behaviour was the result of two forces: self-love on the one hand and the attraction between people on the other. These were the mainsprings of social physics. Man was no longer seen as an unresisting and unpredictable victim of his passions, but as stable, logical and orderly. On this foundation a mechanical view of society was developed, one expression of which occurs in the entry on ‘société’ in Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Here Rousseau’s idea to study society through men and men through society exerted a great influence. The later eighteenth century saw the evolution of the ‘social sciences’, and their practitioners set about organising themselves. In France this took place in the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme, for example, whose members paid a great deal of attention to education. The society actually adopted the wild child of Aveyron as a highly interesting case study for this new science.45 Several of the above-mentioned authors – Van Hamelsveld, Bosch and Rogge – were elected to the National Assembly. It can therefore be no coincidence that the authorities planned at this time to acquire more knowledge of the country and its inhabitants through empirical study. To this end, a census was taken for the first time in 1795, followed by various surveys, the results of which were compiled as statistics: new methods of obtaining and presenting information on society and the economy.46 In some fields, private initiatives had led the way. For two

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decades the members of the Physical and Medical Correspondence Society had been collecting medical data,47 thus being the first to gain an understanding of the nature of epidemics such as smallpox. Looking at the country and its population in a new light also affected the way people kept travel journals, which now contained more social and economic information. This trend is reflected in Otto’s diary: when describing a number of journeys, he jotted down what the crops looked like, and gave his opinion of the fertility of the land. In more general terms, the new view of society affected Otto through his parents and his reading, but his education contained a paradox, because modern theories of education were incompatible with the way of life of Holland’s regents. The traditional aim of education had been to prepare princes and nobles for positions in government, and it was to this readership that many early pedagogues, from Erasmus to Locke, had addressed their writings. The philanthropinists had initially applied themselves, as had Rousseau, to educating children of the upper and middle classes. Pedagogues of the late eighteenth century, such as Salzmann and Campe, pointedly focused for the first time on educating the children of peasants and workers. Otto’s upbringing was based on their more egalitarian ideas, but he himself still inhabited a very elitist world. The New Sociability and Freemasonry People could shape society themselves: that was a logical implication of the new view of man and society. Great value was attached to the proper mode of contact with one’s fellow human beings. Otto therefore speaks in his diary of the ‘duties of sociability’ he was required to perform. The Weekblad voor Kinderen (Children’s Weekly) devoted an issue to ‘Society’, which began with the sentence: ‘My dear pupils, people are sociable creatures!’48 Children were expected to learn early on to consider how society could best be organised and how people should treat one another. This all-important ‘sociability’ could be institutionalised by joining together in societies to take concerted action. A new sociableness blossomed: especially after 1770, societies were founded at local, provincial and even national levels, such as the Society for the Promotion of the Public Good. Its name reflected a general aim of most of these societies: to promote the progress of the Dutch people. Many societies focused on a clear-cut objective, such as writing poems

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collectively, or carrying out scientific experiments. Numerous societies held contests for the best essay on a certain subject and then published the winning entries. They also organised lectures and concerts. Otto’s relatives and acquaintances participated enthusiastically in these social events and gatherings. Pieter Paulus was a prominent member of numerous societies, including the Society of Arts and Sciences of the Province of Utrecht, the Utrecht literary society Dulces ante Omnia, the Dutch Society of Sciences, the Rotterdam literary society Studium Scientiarum Genetrix, the Batavian Society of Experimental Philosophy, the Society of Sciences of the Province of Zeeland and the Drawing Academy of Middelburg. Paulus was proud of his memberships; indeed, he recorded the most important ones on the title page of his treatise on the equality of man. Otto’s father joined such societies on a more modest scale: he was a member of Studium Scientiarum Genetrix and of the Hague chapter of the Society for the Promotion of the Public Good, which was one of the most progressive, as evidenced by the petition it submitted to the national board to allow Jewish members.49 Otto’s diary reveals that his father also belonged to the Physics Society of The Hague. Most of his relatives were likewise members of one or more of these societies. Even the black sheep of the family, Jan Richard van Lidth de Jeude, could boast one membership, namely that of the Society for the Promotion of the Public Good. Several of these societies were teeming with people Otto knew. The members of Studium Scientiarum Genetrix included Otto’s father, his Uncle Paulus, his Uncle Emants and his drawing teacher, Isaac van Haastert. At the Dutch Society of Sciences, Uncle Paulus could meet Otto’s teachers Van Bemmelen and Florijn, as well as Dr Abraham van Stipriaan, an especially zealous member of a wide range of societies. Isaac van Haastert was just as obsessed with society membership: in Delft in 1797 he founded a literary society devoted ‘To learning sublime, more complete over time’, as expressed by its motto. The clergymen with whom the family associated were usually members of one or more societies, as were such friends as Jacob van Vredenburch and Jacob Reepmaker. The former was a member and later director of the Dutch Society of Sciences; the latter was a member and patron of Studium Scientiarum Genetrix. In the 1780s the Van Ecks’ neighbour Teding van Berkhout belonged, as did Van Vredenburch, to the Delft Patriot volunteer militia, another example of the new societism. He later became chairman of the Delft division of the Economic Branch of the Dutch Society of Sciences, which was devoted to furthering

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Fig. 86. Meeting of the Society for the Promotion of the Public Good in 1790. From Arend Fokke, Vaderlandsche geschiedenis in themata, 1796.

the economy. He was a member of the Society for the Promotion of the Public Good and attended, as did Lambert and Otto, lectures on experimental physics. Naturally it was thought that Otto, too, would eventually become an active member of such societies. While still a young man, Otto’s friend Ceesje Reepmaker became a mainstay of the library set up by the Society for the Promotion of the Public Good in Dordrecht, and as early as 1789, Wim van Beerestein became a member of the select literary society that called itself Fabricando Fabri Fimus: practice makes perfect. This motto encapsulates the core ideas of these new societies. In the mosaic of eighteenth-century sociability, Freemasonry occupied a special place. In many respects this society was, despite its secret symbols and rituals, a product of the Enlightenment. Its members strove to improve themselves, and did this by organising pleasant gatherings in local lodges.50 In 1756 there were only twelve lodges in the Dutch

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Republic, but by Otto’s day their number had risen to more than a hundred. It is possible that Lambert van Eck came into contact during his student days in Leiden with the lodge La Vertu, founded in 1757, to which many of the people in his circle belonged. One P. Paulus was enrolled in 1779 as an Entered Apprentice and later as a Fellow Craft of the lodge in Middelburg, but it is not certain if this person was Otto’s uncle, Pieter Paulus. Various members of the Van Lidth de Jeude family, who were related to the Van Ecks, were certainly Freemasons. Otto’s cousin Franco van der Goes was admitted in 1780 to the lodge in The Hague, and another member of this family joined the lodge in Leiden. Jan Jacob Cau was a member of the Hague lodge. Jacob van Vredenburch, a close friend of Lambert, belonged to the lodge in Delft, as did Otto’s drawing teacher Isaac van Haastert, the family physician Abraham van Stipriaan, his cousin Lodewijk van Toulon and two members of the Vatebender family. Abraham and Hugo Gevers, also family friends of the Van Ecks, were likewise members.51 Lambert van Eck is not registered as a Freemason anywhere, but this does not mean much, since the archives have survived only in part. It is clear, however, that in his circle Freemasonry was both popular and influential. In the beginning Freemasonry had no political leanings, but after 1770, progressive lodges sprang up all over Europe. The Order of the Enlightened was founded in Germany in 1776; this order sought to form a new, enlightened elite and to bring about political reforms inspired by the American War of Independence.52 Until the Patriot Era there had been no clear connection in the Netherlands between one’s political persuasion and membership of certain lodges. This changed in the 1780s, when some lodges became distinctly anti-Orangist. The abortive Patriot revolution of 1787 further highlighted the differences. Exiled Patriots founded in Dunkirk the lodge Les vraies Bataves. Otto’s uncle Jan Richard van Lidth de Jeude joined this lodge during his exile and rose to the position of master of ceremonies. In France the Freemasons played a clear role in the run-up to the French Revolution. After 1789 the Freemasons comprised a notable twenty per cent of the Assemblée nationale. The Marquis de Lafayette was a prominent Freemason. At the 1796 Dutch National Assembly, Freemasons were even better represented: more than one-quarter of the representatives belonged to a lodge or would soon join one.53 We must bear in mind, however, that surviving membership records are

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incomplete, so the percentage might have been higher. Moreover, the Freemasons appear not to have formed a unified block during their terms in the Assembly. Their voting behaviour was widely divergent. Among the identifiable Freemasons in the National Assembly, we again encounter many men with whom Lambert van Eck had close ties, such as Ysbrand van Hamelsveld, Jacobus Scheltema and others who wrote in his album amicorum. The Masonic ideal of personal betterment must have appealed to Lambert van Eck, who certainly adhered to the idea – observed by such pedagogues as Salzmann and Niemeyer – that child-rearing and selfeducation went hand in hand. Enlightened educators and Freemasons alike envisaged a utopian society in which all men were brothers. The many philanthropinists who were also Freemasons included Basedow, Salzmann and Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, the first director of a philanthropinist school and later a lecturer at the University of Halle. They were members of the Order of the Enlightened, where they joined the ranks of the politicised and progressive faction of Freemasonry. Lavater – author of the Secret Diary of an Observer of his Self – belonged to the Freemasons in Germany. The self-examination he practised was a key concept in the movement, and keeping a diary was recommended for this very reason. In his Kinderfreund (Children’s Friend), C.F. Weisse, also a member of the Order of the Enlightened, praised the diary ‘as an educational tool’ for adults and children alike.54 Amalia von Gallitzin, the wife of the Russian envoy to The Hague, applied Weisse’s advice to her own children, each of whom was required to keep a ‘moral diary’, which she monitored. Through their diaries, the children also monitored themselves and each other.55 Otto read Weisse in a Dutch translation (De kindervriend), and so Freemasonry has brought us back full circle to the reason for Otto’s diary.

CHAPTER SIX

BROADENING HORIZONS Otto was ten years old when his parents first sent him on his own to do an errand in The Hague: he was told to go after school to a tailor to have his coat altered. His diary contains a description of his adventure: ‘I was slightly fearful, coming out of school . . . because I was afraid I’d get lost.’ A month earlier his father had asked him to go on his own to the house of an acquaintance; Otto wrote about this on 12 July 1791: ‘Early this morning I rode with Papa to The Hague and stayed there to eat at Mr Kogel’s, where I enjoyed myself, even though I had wandered around looking for his house for half an hour.’ Otto’s father had apparently begun to urge him to explore his surroundings independently in a way reminiscent of the advice given in Rousseau’s Emile. According to Rousseau, a child should begin to explore the world by branching out from its parental home. Practical knowledge of one’s surroundings was best gained from first-hand experience. Lessons based on maps and globes were to be replaced by personal observations – of sunsets, for example, or the position of the moon – from which children were to draw their own conclusions. Rousseau also strongly recommended educational walks, during which children were deliberately made to lose their way, since finding their way home by noting the position of the sun or the stars could not fail to convince them of the benefits to be derived from studying geography.1 Children have an irrepressible urge to explore the world. Three years later, Otto described the following adventure in his diary: ‘I was very glad when it was four o’clock and I could get up (before that I didn’t dare), because I was dreadfully bored in bed. I therefore had a long morning in front of me, but Mama says that I didn’t accomplish much of anything, and even put my life in danger by climbing over the gate, which was still locked (because it was so early). Mama thinks this dangerous, but I don’t, because I was careful not to fall into the ditch.’2 When he was twelve, Otto became acquainted with his surroundings in an entirely different way. On 14 November 1793, his piano teacher, Mr Berghuis, surprised him by announcing that the two of them

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Fig. 87. A demonstration of the usefulness of astronomy. From Rousseau’s Emile, 1780.

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Fig. 88. Children using a map to find their way home. From Gallerij van beroemde kinderen, 1822.

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Fig. 89. The Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) of Delft. Optical print by Isaac van Haastert, c. 1780.

were going to climb the tower of the New Church. As municipal bellringer, Berghuis had access to the church tower at all times. Otto was enthusiastic about this expedition: ‘Having arrived in Delft, I accompanied Mr Berghuis to the tower of the New Church, 333 steps high, with a far and unobstructed view, since one is above all the houses and woods’. Climbing to the top of the tower was a unique experience, partly because the tower of Delft was the third tallest in the country. Few people ever had the opportunity to view such a vast panorama. Only in a hot-air balloon could one go somewhat higher. This had been achieved a decade earlier in France, but the Netherlands had still to witness a successful hot-air balloon flight with a human passenger.3 Climbing the tower was presumably part of Otto’s educational programme. Viewing the surrounding area from a tower – an excellent way to acquaint oneself with a region – was considered an important part of all educational travel. Every guidebook encouraged travellers to explore a city on foot before climbing the highest tower to take in the overall view.4 On his journey to France, Lambert had climbed many towers and, like Otto, had invariably counted the number of steps.

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The view from the Delft tower of the flat landscape of Holland was panoramic and impressive, but for Otto it held one particular point of reference: De Ruit, his parents’ country estate. De Ruit was the point from which Otto set out to explore the world. In his Huisboek voor vaderlandsche gezinnen (Household book for Dutch families), the pedagogue Martinet advised parents – as had Rousseau – to begin their children’s education close to home, to start by gathering knowledge, ‘for example, of the sitting room, then of the other rooms, and finally of the whole house; further, of the grounds around your house, your village, the city in which you live’.5 Salzmann addressed his ‘dear little readers’ in the same manner: ‘I do not know where you live, but wherever you live, you certainly inhabit a particular place; examine that place carefully.’6 In Otto’s eyes De Ruit was the centre of the universe. The country estate bordered on the River Vliet, a waterway whose idyllic beauty was praised by Dutch and foreign travellers alike. The Englishman Samuel Ireland wrote in his travel journal, published in 1789, that ‘nothing can surpass the beauty of the scene’.7 When De Ruit was sold at auction in 1858, it was described as ‘most pleasantly situated’. By this time the house had a history stretching back two hundred years.8 Built in the mid-seventeenth century, it had become the property of Lucy Walter, the mistress of the English king Charles II, who was living in exile in the Netherlands. When Charles returned to England in 1660, the estate was sold to the Graswinckel family of Delft. De Ruit remained in the hands of this regents’ family until 1767, when it was inherited by Hendrick Vockestaert, secretary of the Delft town council. Upon his death nineteen years later, De Ruit came into the possession of his daughter Charlotte, Otto’s mother. At that time the estate comprised a manor house, a coach house, stables, cowsheds, and a gardener’s cottage. Several parcels of pasture land belonged to the property, which covered just over three hectares. After Lambert van Eck died, Charlotte Amélie continued to live there until her death in 1825, after which the estate was sold. The house was demolished in 1864, and the last trace of the estate disappeared in 1954, when the pond was filled in. There are no known depictions of De Ruit. To visualise its appearance, we must turn to a written document, an inventory drawn up in 1786 – when Otto was six years old – by a notary who went through the entire house with pen and paper in hand, recording every last item. By referring to this thick document, we can take an imaginary tour of the house, picturing it as it must have looked just before the Van Eck family moved in.9

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Fig. 90. The River Vliet near Delft. From S. Ireland’s A Picturesque Tour, 1790.

De Ruit had a classical symmetrical façade with a flight of steps and a large door in the middle leading into the entrance hall. Here stood a clock and a bench, and the walls were decorated with maps of Delfland and The Hague. The hall also contained a small copper basin and a lantern. Through a door on the right one entered a large room – the drawing room – where visitors were received. One could take a seat on one of the twelve chairs upholstered in green moquette, placed around a mahogany table covered with a tablecloth. Otto no doubt sat here when his father’s absence required him to do the honours and entertain unexpected visitors. The furnishings of this room indicate that on such occasions he or one of the domestics served tea. A gate-leg table contained a chafing-dish, a tea kettle and a tea caddy. A mahogany bureau with a reading-desk stood against the wall. On the other side of the entrance hall was another large room – the ‘dining room’ – where Otto read aloud after dinner. Here, too, the notary recorded a table and twelve chairs, these upholstered in red moquette. This room had a mahogany ‘tobacco table’, on which stood another tea caddy; glasses and porcelain were displayed on a sideboard in the corner.

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Going by the order in which the notary recorded the contents of the rooms, the ground floor also had a mangle-room, which naturally contained a mangle: a machine with two cylinders through which linen was rolled to press out the creases. This room must have served other purposes as well, since it also had a reading-stand with a wooden base. To rest from these activities, one could sit on the furniture provided: four chairs with three cushions, two stools and a garden chair. The floor of this room was covered with reed mats, as were those in the rest of the house. The windows, here and in the other rooms, had linen curtains. Also located on the ground floor was the ironing room, where the washing was dried and ironed; it contained an airing cupboard, a ‘fire basket’, or metal container designed to hold hot coals, and a foot-stove. Below the ground floor was a large basement, which housed the servants’ hall and the kitchen. The servants’ hall – a room for the domestic staff’s daytime use – was below the drawing room. Whenever the servants were not needed to serve tea, bring candles, or do odd jobs, they could sit on one of the eight chairs in this room, which also had a bedstead. The kitchen was situated, very practically, below the dining room. Here, too, one could sit down, for the notary counted seven kitchen chairs and eight foot-stoves. Of course the room was intended to be put to more practical use, for it also contained cooking utensils, an iron ash-pot, a copper extinguisher, a heavy copper kettle, an iron brazier, two iron frying pans, tongs, an ash shovel and a mustard mill. Below the kitchen was a cellar with beer racks and a wine crate. The first-floor landing provided access to three rooms: a ‘large upstairs room’, a ‘cabinet’ and a ‘small front room’. The ‘large upstairs room’ must have been very large indeed. It contained a bedstead, eight chairs with cushions, an armchair, and a mirror in a black frame. Presumably this was one of the parents’ bedrooms. Next to it was a ‘cabinet’, a private room to which one could withdraw to use a ‘convenience’ (chamber pot), wash oneself at a dressing table with a mirror, or devote oneself to loftier activities. The room also contained a lacquer table – on which stood a ‘writing box’ with two ink-wells – and a buffet: a cupboard containing a collection of porcelain sufficient for an entire orphanage. Next to the ‘cabinet’ was the ‘small front room’, though the inventory reveals that ‘small’ must not be taken to mean ‘cramped’. It had enough room for six chairs with cushions, a lacquer table made of walnut, a bedstead complete with a bolster and four pillows, two bedside tables and a chest of drawers.

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The notary then climbed another flight of stairs to reach the children’s floor. Here there was a ‘small room for the young gentlemen’ – possibly the room later allotted to Otto – the contents of which included twelve chairs, two beds and a ‘games table’. The other two rooms were similarly furnished. Somewhere on the second floor or in the attic were the rooms where the servants slept: a manservant’s room with a simple settee and a maidservant’s room containing a box bed with two straw mattresses. The ‘old clothes attic’ and the ‘peat attic’ were at the very top of the house, just below the roof tiles. The peat attic was obviously used to store peat, and the clothes attic also housed a number of unsurprising items, including two clothing presses, a clothes closet, six boxes of clothes, a folding plank and thirty-six clothes hangers. Otto would have found the rest of the inventory more appealing, especially the fish tin, a wooden wagon, a large crate of iron fittings, and ‘some hen-coops and other sundries’. The house also contained numerous built-in cupboards, in which the Van Ecks stored not only porcelain, pots and pans, foot-stoves, glasses, cutlery, skimmers, cooking pots, meat cleavers, Delftware, baskets, and ‘odds and ends’, but also such surplus furnishings as mattresses, tables and chairs. After the notary had carefully specified and assessed everything – how many of each item, and whether there were missing pieces (such as lids) – he went to have a look outside. At the back of the house he noted a spacious, tiled area with nine garden benches, two cisterns and a rain barrel. A bit further away he saw a barn, a shed, a coach house and a chicken coop. The barn was not very interesting, though it did contain a few useful tools that no doubt delighted Otto and his father: two double pruning ladders and a single ladder for working closer to the ground. The pruning shears were presumably kept with the other gardening tools in the coach house or in the shed with the wheelbarrows. In the kitchen garden the notary saw six ‘cold frames’. In the chicken coop he noticed a wine rack, probably damaged and demoted to a perch for the chickens. Some place in the garden, probably by the River Vliet, there was a tea-house with net curtains at the windows, a table, eight chairs and six foot-stoves. These were the highlights of the inventory drawn up at De Ruit in 1786. Except for a few items, Mr and Mrs van Eck bought all the furniture and household effects, estimated to be worth 783 guilders. The most expensive items were two bedsteads, one valued at twenty and the other at thirty guilders, and the clock in the entrance hall, estimated to be worth fifteen guilders. As emerges from Otto’s diary, Lambert and

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Charlotte van Eck subsequently upgraded their furnishings by adding a fashionable sofa and a piano. They must also have bought new wall decorations, since a note in the margin of the inventory explicitly states that the paintings were not part of the furnishings purchased. What is more, there were no fewer than forty of them, a large number of which – seventeen, to be exact – were stored in the room with the mangle. These were probably old paintings, possibly family portraits. By this time the art of the past century was no longer held in high regard. In many other eighteenth-century Delft households, such old canvases had also been relegated to the attic.10 The inventory gives the impression that there was quite a bit, in and around the house, which needed clearing out. In 1790, when the garden was given a radical makeover, the house was also thoroughly remodelled. We know about these projects from De Ruit’s account book, begun at the outset in 1786,11 even though it does not record the costs of the ‘large-scale renovation work’ (grote timmeragie) undertaken in 1790. In all likelihood, separate books were kept for such expensive projects. Considering that the annual costs of maintenance and improvements were normally between 500 and 1,000 guilders, the renovations must have been very expensive indeed. The following years brought more novelties: in 1791, for example, the drawing room was wallpapered. Wallpaper was something modern; in Paris, Lambert had been impressed by the Chinese wallpaper in his hotel room. In that same year the mats on the floors were replaced by comfortable carpets. In 1792 a nursery was furnished and wallpapered – this was new, and suggests that the children had been given their own room. A ‘communication door’ was also made, presumably between the parents’ rooms, since we know from Otto’s diary that his father and mother had separate bedrooms. One of the rooms in the house was turned into a library, the ‘book room’, where Otto often did his homework in the presence of his father. After all these costly investments, the leak in the dining room in the winter of 1795 was a serious setback, causing heavy damage to the new carpets and pretty wallpaper. Otto, at any rate, wrote the following: ‘Our room was swimming, and all the books, furniture, and so on, as well as the carpet, were soaking wet.’12 The 1786 inventory gives a rather unclassicist picture of the layout of the country house; the collection of rooms, antechambers, attics, walk-in closets and smaller cupboards built into recesses all give a labyrinthine impression. It was a paradise for children playing hide-and-seek, one of Otto’s favourite pastimes when friends came to visit. There was also

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Fig. 91. Children’s pastimes. From Pieter ’t Hoen, Nieuwe proeve van klijne gedichten voor kinderen, 1779.

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plenty of room to test the house’s acoustics without immediately being taken to task: ‘Having come home and eaten, I played the drum for a while in the entrance hall (truly a great din).’13 Compared with many other country houses of the time, De Ruit was a relatively unpretentious property, but its modesty was more than compensated for by the house in The Hague, where the family spent the winter. That residence had been purchased on 20 July 1781, when Otto was one year old. We know nothing of its furnishings, except for some of the wall decorations. When Lambert van Eck bought the house, he paid the previous owner 2,000 guilders for the mirrors and paintings, nearly three times the amount paid in 1786 for the entire contents of De Ruit. We know more about the house itself, although there are no pictures of this house either, and it, too, was eventually demolished. The house had cost 13,000 guilders, a huge amount, equivalent to fifty-two times the annual salary of Gijs the gardener. The house was situated on the south side of the Buitenhof (the area just outside the medieval government complex), diagonally opposite the Gevangenpoort (the tower that housed the state prison). An advertisement from 1836 praises it as a capital double residence equipped with all conveniences. On the first floor there were four large rooms, the grandest of which was connected to the rooms on either side. The stuccoed ceilings featured representations of Wisdom and Prudence. The splendid winding staircase to the second floor was a sight to behold, with sixty-one steps, oak panelling and a magnificently carved wooden railing featuring a sculptured head. The walls of the landing were plastered with decorative motifs, and a glance upward while climbing the stairs afforded a view of the domed roof. On the second floor there were ten rooms with various large attic rooms above them, while the basement contained several spacious cellars.14 The administration of the income and expenditure of this house and De Ruit was no small task. When he turned sixteen, Otto was allowed to help his father with the bookkeeping: ‘Otherwise spent all my time making a list for Papa of all the income and expenditure in his notebook pertaining to De Ruit and the farmlands and so on, and then determining the balance.’ He would have preferred to take over the entire management of this country estate, but apparently he was thought too young to assume this responsibility: ‘I wish I were already able to take care of it all for Papa.’15 By this time neither the Hague house nor the country estate held any secrets for Otto, but there was still plenty left to explore in the outside world.

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Otto could start exploring the area around the country estate without ever leaving the house, for the furnishings the Van Ecks had acquired with the house included a map that depicted the entire area between Delft and The Hague. There was only one large map of Delfland in print at that time, and it is one of the highlights of Dutch cartography. The two-metre-square map gives a detailed view of Otto’s world. The country estate of De Ruit is clearly indicated, and if we look at it closely, we can even make out individual trees, shrubs and garden paths. This map was not only an aid in finding one’s bearings, but also an important cultural symbol to the Van Eck family. In 1697 the governors of Delfland’s dike board had decided that a new map was needed of the polders between Schiedam and The Hague. The commission was given to two Delft surveyors, the brothers Nicolaas and Jacob Kruikius, who proposed to make a multi-functional map with a detailed depiction of all the dikes, quays, roads, ditches, locks, bridges and windmills that would be of use in polder management. The landowners could henceforth find their own parcels ‘at all times and at a glance’. For the board of governors, the map would be useful in determining the tax due on each parcel of land. Finally – and this was considered of overriding importance – a fine map could be used for ‘pleasant contemplation by the discerning eye’. The Kruikius brothers spent years taking extremely precise measurements to ensure the success of their project. They hiked tirelessly through the polders with their instruments in hand, and spent several days in the tower of the New Church, the highest point in Delft. The result, printed in 1712, was an exceptional example of cartographic craftsmanship. Most of the map consists of white areas and black lines: meadows transected by waterways. We see the countryside of Holland surrounded by the cities of Delft, Schiedam and The Hague. Here and there is a lonely windmill, sluice or duck decoy, but there are scarcely any rural roads. Along the coast lie the dunes – desolate and deserted. The map cost twelve guilders and could be purchased from the dike board and at bookshops. A second, updated edition appeared in 1750. Maps of one’s own territory were a status symbol for local authorities; cities and district water boards tried to outdo one another in producing them. The Delfland map was a reaction to a similar project launched by the city of Delft, where in 1675 the town council had decided to commission a ‘figurative map’ showing a bird’s-eye view of the city.

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Dozens of people had collaborated on this map, which had taken three years to complete. A second edition of this cartographic masterpiece appeared in 1703. Meanwhile The Hague, not wanting to lag behind, had also commissioned a similar figurative map. This map, too – on which the Van Eck’s house in The Hague could be found – hung on the wall at De Ruit.16 The cultural significance of the map can be gleaned from the rich decorations in its margins: the waving grain and fat cows for which Delfland was famous, along with putti holding a cornucopia to emphasise the paradisiacal nature of this corner of Holland. The members of the dike board trumpeted their personal power by having their names and family arms incorporated into the border decorations. One such board member was the dike-grave Jacob van Vredenburch, an ancestor of one of Otto’s friends. When the map was reprinted in 1750, it was supplied with the arms and names of a new generation of governors, one of whom was Otto’s grandfather Adriaan van der Goes. By means of this personal touch, he and his fellow regents literally staked their claim to the territory depicted. The prestige attached to this map explains why it was given pride of place in the Van Ecks’ entrance hall. On this map, De Ruit is located exactly in the middle, at the very centre of this world. The map revealed to visitors not only their physical location but also the demeanour they should adopt towards the family in residence. In the midst of the cows and ears of corn in the border decoration, we see a depiction of a country house like De Ruit and, in front of it, a simple man, bowing deeply and removing his hat for a gentleman, evidently the proud owner of the house. The makers of the Delfland map claimed that their map was not merely useful, but also intended for ‘pleasant contemplation by the discerning eye’. This was in keeping with a long tradition in the Northern Netherlands, whose culture was permeated by a ‘mapping impulse’.17 The ‘discerning eye’ was a very Dutch way of looking at one’s immediate surroundings; indeed, that attitude lay at the heart of the realistic painting of the seventeenth century. This realism was in turn closely connected with the appreciation of the natural sciences, including the science of surveying. Maps were a product of the new spatial awareness and modern cartography, which came into being after the Renaissance. The earlymodern era saw the introduction of degrees of latitude and longitude, the grid system that captured physical space, as it were, in a latticework. Since the sixteenth century, the Netherlands had been in the

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Fig. 92. Country house near Delft. Detail of the border decoration of the map of Delfland, 1712.

forefront of these cartographical innovations. The importance of geography was obvious, for the economic success of the Golden Age had depended in no small measure on a thorough knowledge of trading routes. Indeed, geography was the most useful of sciences. Unlike the French, English and Portuguese, Dutch explorers did not lay claim to newly discovered territories by issuing proclamations or performing other rituals, but rather by mapping them.18 Dutch painters were fond of portraying geographers and astronomers with a compass in hand and a globe nearby. The rise of geography as a modern science is often placed at the beginning of the Enlightenment, which was characterised by a determination to describe and catalogue the universe mathematically. A better understanding of the world was sought through exploration and by undertaking cartographic exercises. It was with good reason that Diderot called his Encyclopédie ‘the great map of mankind’. The objective was to amass knowledge of oneself – one’s own city and country – and of

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all the peoples of the world. Clearly, great importance was attached to geography in Otto’s circle. Otto’s father and his Uncle Paulus, who both held high administrative positions in the navy, did their best to promote education in the art of navigation. Geography naturally occupied an important place in Otto’s educational programme. His father even employed Jacob Florijn, one of the most prominent experts of his day, to accompany Otto on his exploratory excursions. Otto Discovers the World In the eighteenth century, distances were still measured in terms of the hours it took to walk them, and space seemed larger than it does now. The trips Otto took never led him further afield than the city of Kampen, at that time a journey of several days by passenger barge or coach. He found this expedition exceptional enough to produce a separate account of it, which unfortunately has not survived. For other, more distant destinations, Otto could make use of a much faster means of travel: the study of books and maps. At first geography was thought important only for prospective merchants and navigators. In the mid-eighteenth century, this subject became part of the private tuition of the elite, but it was not incorporated in the curriculum of schools for some time. In this respect a pioneering role was played by Basedow’s Philanthropinum, where – completely in keeping with philanthropinist principles – geographical knowledge was acquired step by step. During the first lesson, pupils were asked to take careful measurements of their rooms and to draw maps of them. In the same way they went on to explore the school building and its immediate environs. Basedow also invented the ‘blind map’, which is still in use. An observatory had even been installed in the tower of the Philanthropinum, but more spectacular still were the two huge half-globes in the garden, which represented the Northern and Southern hemispheres: ‘Sometimes instruction is interrupted momentarily to have a bite to eat. Every day the pupils eat in the country we wish to focus on, but the ingredients of the meal have been gathered together by world travellers of all countries. Tea is drunk in Japan, then in China, then in Tonkin, then again in Siam, for which sugar is brought from Brazil and cinnamon from Ceylon. Volcanoes are made unforgettable by putting on an evening display of fireworks, and Lisbon by an imitation earthquake.’ A former pupil later wrote in his memoirs:

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Fig. 93. ‘First I shall put these books back on the shelf.’ A girl in a library with maps on the wall and a musket in the corner. From J. Hazeu’s Het beloofde geschenk, 1800.

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Fig. 94. ‘The Netherlands is your fatherland, where you live in utmost security. When you grow up, you, too, will surely dwell here with your family.’ From J.H. Swildens, Vaderlandsch A-B-boek, 1781.

‘The first time I heard that the earth was a big globe was when I laid eyes on the huge hemisphere in our garden.’19 Basedow gave geography an equally important place in his Manuel. His colleague Campe published a series of travel accounts for children, which began to appear in Dutch in 1786.20 He also introduced the school trip: an exploration of the surrounding area by horse and cart in groups of approximately forty pupils. The account he published of one of these school trips – a report of a visit to an iron mine – was at once instructive and entertaining. Above all, it served to recruit new pupils. In the Netherlands, Betje Wolff emphasised the usefulness of the subject and especially of a work she herself had translated: Aardrijkskunde voor kinderen (Geography for children) by the German geographer G.C. Raff.21 Otto’s exploration of the world can be reconstructed from his reading list. Geography featured prominently as part of his lessons, and is

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often mentioned in his diary. On 28 August 1793, Otto wrote: ‘This morning I did all of my assignments with Mama, except geography, and spent the entire morning on all of it.’ Later he was instructed in this subject by Master Welding. On 22 February 1796, he wrote that he had ‘gone to Welding, where I travelled through Spain (geography) and then to the moon (astronomy)’. Otto obtained most of his geographical knowledge from Basedow’s Manuel and Martinet’s Natuurlijke historie (Natural history). In addition to these more general works, geography books written especially for children began to appear for the first time. In 1784, Martinet published such a work, later reprinted as Kort onderwijs in de geografij (Concise instruction in geography).22 In his view, becoming acquainted with the world was tantamount to becoming acquainted with God, and his book can therefore be seen as a late variant of the traditional, more religiously oriented geography, in which determining the exact location of the Garden of Eden was a geographer’s most important motive in mapping the world.23 This also held true for the three-volume Nieuwe aardryks-beschryving voor de Nederlandsche jeugd (New geographical description for Dutch youth) by W.E. de Perponcher,24 which was originally intended for his own children, as was his Onderwijs voor kinderen (Lessons for children). Because geography was not yet part of the school curriculum, the first books on the subject were written by parents or private tutors. The anonymously published Geographisch hand-boekje voor de jeugd (Geographical handbook for young people) was intended for a ten-year-old pupil and, according to the foreword, also written initially for personal use.25 De Perponcher attached a great deal of importance to social geography, societal structures and forms of government. He was fascinated by the United States, the ‘first free state in the new world’. In America, after all, ‘a new theatre had opened, in which society would be able to raise itself to the apex of prosperity, worldly happiness and glory’. Making use of the findings of James Cook and other explorers, he also devoted much attention to ‘as yet uncivilised lands and parts of the world’. In his foreword he stated that it was useful ‘to know man in all the various modes to which his nature is prone’ and ‘in all the various states, conditions and circumstances in which it pleased Providence to place him on this earth’. The pupil had first to develop a ‘philosophical eye’, as ‘the ultimate objective of all education’. In their geography books, Martinet and De Perponcher did not neglect to mention a point they stressed repeatedly: study must start

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close to home. Thus Martinet puts the following words in his pupil’s mouth: ‘My master says that it is not right to live in a house with twelve rooms and not to know more than two or three of them.’ For his part, De Perponcher advises the educator to start by making ‘a detailed map of the city and region he lives in, but not until he has acquainted his pupil – by walking around the place itself – with the surrounding cities, villages, countryside, roads, canals, rivers and – if near enough – the sea and the mountains, thus helping him to understand more easily what is actually shown on maps and how they are made’. Incidentally, in this book he described Delft as ‘a large but not very lively city’. De Perponcher sought new ways to teach geography, using such methods as a large box containing clay, sand, pebbles and moss, which enabled one to assemble a ‘nearly perfect picture’ of the surrounding area. For those with limited space, a bowl of water sufficed, with floating pieces of cardboard to represent the continents. Lambert van Eck had seen a similar teaching method at the school for the blind in Paris. The physical and mathematical aspects were important ingredients of the geography taught in the Atlas des enfans (Children’s atlas), which first appeared in 1760 and was reprinted nearly every year for the next fifty years. The foreword stresses that man’s knowledge of the world is constantly increasing: ‘This science has now reached the point where the earth has essentially become one big city, where people are becoming acquainted with one another and will in time form one large family.’ It was up to the younger generation to realise this ideal. The frontispiece shows a boy shouldering a celestial globe like an infant Atlas. The text takes the form of a catechism, the first question being: What is geography? The answer reads: ‘It is the mathematical, physical and political description of the earth.’ This French book, which was printed in Amsterdam, was no doubt much used in the Netherlands. A Dutch translation was published in Brussels only in 1787. Another popular textbook was the Geografische oeffening (Geographical exercise) of 1758.26 A book aimed more at the practical applications of geography, written by an Amsterdam surveyor employed by the Dutch East India Company (voc), was Geopende deur der geographie (The opened door of geography). Intended for young people, it had been written, as the author claimed, ‘in a way never done before, to my knowledge’. The physical approach gradually supplanted the more religiously oriented one, in which the world was seen as the product of divine creation. In enlightened children’s books, a new aspect of geography now emerged: national consciousness. In Vaderlandsch a-b-boek voor de

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Fig. 95. Frontispiece of Nouvel Atlas des Enfans, 1799.

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Nederlandsche jeugd (Fatherlandish abc for Dutch youth), Jan Hendrik Swildens assigned a print to every letter of the alphabet. The letter n features a depiction of a sitting room with a large map of the Netherlands on the wall. In front of it stands a father, who says to his son: ‘The Netherlands is your fatherland.’27 In this very successful lesson-book, Swildens popularised the new notion of fatherland and Enlightenment as an indissoluble entity. Otto very likely learned to read from this little book. Certainly his father was a friend of Swildens, a leading Patriot whose publications helped to politicise the concept of ‘fatherland’, thus laying the foundation for the modern feeling of nationalism that began to coalesce in the Netherlands around 1800.28 The same tone is struck in a 1791 atlas, possibly written by Martinet, titled Het Vaderland (The Fatherland). ‘Fatherland’, a new concept in the Dutch language, reflected the new political dimension of geography.29 From now on, the wall maps of one’s native town or polder would have to make way for a map of a new nation, the Netherlands.30 Travelling Otto was fond of travel accounts, which were important sources of geographical knowledge. During a visit to his Uncle Paulus in November 1793, he buried himself in a ‘description of a journey’, and on a later visit he read Vaillants reizen door Africa (Vaillant’s travels through Africa). That book – in addition to the stories of Cook, Bougainville and Carteret – was one of the many travel accounts quoted by Pieter Paulus in his treatise on the equality of mankind, in support of his theory that the Verklaring van de rechten van de mens (Declaration of the rights of man) was the intellectual expression of the practices of peoples ‘living in a state of nature’.31 As mentioned earlier, Otto also read Brieven van een Amerikaensche landman (Letters from an American Farmer), which taught him about the New World. Otto’s own journeys began closer to home with visits to other country houses, at first in the company of his parents, but later on alone. Most of these were day-trips, but occasionally they turned into overnight or even extended stays. In the autumn of 1791, Otto wrote that his father and sister Doortje would be leaving the next day for the Deunisveld estate, which belonged to his cousin Franco van den Burch. Otto added: ‘Still, I hope to arrange things so that we can both go along, because the invitation was for two.’ He was denied this outing, however, owing to several instances of misbehaviour.

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Fig. 96. The road along the River Vliet. Drawing from a travel account by R. Bransby Cooper.

It was nearly a year before they were invited again, and for a while it seemed that Otto would miss out on this trip too, owing to a spell of illness. On 8 October 1792, however, he had good news: ‘I am regaining my strength to the extent that the doctor has given me permission to accompany Papa and Mama the day after tomorrow to visit Cousin van den Burch at Deunisveld, and to spend a week there, provided I guard against the cold.’32 Deunisveld was located in the dunes south of The Hague. Otto took his diary along, but neglected to write in it. Only a week later did he explain why: ‘I haven’t written in my diary since Sunday. When one is away from home, everything is less well organised.’ He thus enjoyed himself all the more: ‘I’m having a very pleasant stay, so the days here seem to fly by.’ Three days later it was time to head home: ‘Today it was again very bad weather (as usual), but in the afternoon I revisited all the places at Deunisveld, because tomorrow morning we’ll be going home.’ Many of the Van Ecks’ friends and relatives owned country houses, in accordance with the lifestyle prevailing among the elite. Pieter Paulus – a town-dweller without a country estate – was an exception, but he compensated for this deprivation by countless visits to other people’s

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Fig. 97. Pasgeld House on the River Vliet. Engraving after a painting by J. van der Heijden.

country houses, including De Ruit, where every year he and his wife spent several weeks in succession. Moreover, nearly every month they came for a shorter stay of one or two days. In this way, they kept pace with the other Dutch regents on the travel circuit. The many diary entries describing Otto’s visits to other country estates give an impression of their owners’ lively comings and goings. He tells of visits to some twenty country houses, most of them in the vicinity of De Ruit and all appearing on the large map of Delfland. The country estate nearest to De Ruit was Pasgeld, on the other side of the River Vliet. Depictions and a detailed inventory have been preserved of this country house, owned by the Teding van Berkhout family. The layout was similar to that of De Ruit, but the house was larger and more lavishly furnished. Otto visited Pasgeld frequently, but he was also a regular visitor to Ypenburg House near Delft, owned by his cousin Franco van den Burch. In the vicinity of The Hague, Otto occasionally visited Oud-Clingendaal, the property of the naval officer Johan Arnold Bloys van Treslong. Otto also mentions the houses of

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Ter Horst (belonging to the Cau family), Oostduin (owned by C.E. van Doeveren) and Welgelegen (the property of N.W. Hartman). Near Voorburg – between Delft and The Hague – there was a high concentration of country houses, including Hoekenburg (owned by George Frederik Alsche) and Vreugd & Rust (purchased in 1784 by Adriaan Caan and after 1795 in the possession of P.J. Groen van Prinsterer, the Van Ecks’ family physician in The Hague). Near Voorschoten, Otto visited Vredenhoef, owned by P.J. Marcus, a former burgomaster of Leiden, who was part of the circle of friends to which Lambert van Eck and the professors Luzac and Voltelen also belonged. In Rijswijk, Otto visited Overvoorde House, the property of the Van Vredenburch family. In the direction of Rotterdam, near Overschie, lay Rodenrijs House, which belonged to Willem van Hogendorp. We have already heard about Otto’s visit to the gardens of Sion, this family’s country estate. Otto’s trip to Brielle to visit Duinzicht House, belonging to his Uncle Hoogendijk, lasted from seven in the morning until ten at night, which was longer than most day-trips. After such time-consuming and exhausting excursions, Otto sometimes forgot to write in his diary, though after such journeys he often had more to relate than usual. In the summer of 1793, therefore, he left for Brielle full of good intentions: ‘Tomorrow morning at seven o’clock we shall be travelling to Duinzicht to visit Uncle and Aunt Hoogendijk, where I hope I shall behave well.’ The next day he recorded, late in the evening, how much he had enjoyed the outing: ‘This morning at seven o’clock we left for Uncle and Aunt’s, and now we’ve just come home and it’s long after ten, so today nothing came of my lessons. We had a very pleasant time with Cousin van Lidth, and we all went with Uncle and Aunt to see the rabbit hunt, which we enjoyed very much, and because Duinzicht is near Brielle, we had to cross the river twice, which was also very pleasant, especially because I’d never seen this region, for when my sisters came along last year, I was ill. As far as the grain is concerned, I think they take more pains over it than they do here. We mostly saw fine wheat and rye, but the hay and the pasture lands did not look nearly so good as they do here.’ To be sure, country estates looked like respectably inherited family property, but in fact they changed hands often. In 1793, Nicolaas Hartman, a colleague of Lambert at the Court of Brabant, bought the country house of Welgelegen. On 23 May 1794, the Van Ecks went to have a look at it, after which Otto wrote: ‘At one o’clock I rode

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with Mama and Papa to Mr Hartman’s, to his new country house, Welgelegen. Although it is not especially big, I nevertheless had a very pleasant time, sailing with Mr van Doeveren in the boat.’ Later Otto also went on his own to call on friends, as he did, for example, one Sunday in May 1797: ‘At half past nine I rode on horseback to Oud-Clingendaal, the house belonging to the widow Mrs Bloys, where I dined, arriving home only half an hour ago. It is a handsome house with a vast farm and arable fields and so on, where I would be in my element, as I would be at Mr van Vredenburch’s, even though the pasture land is not nearly so good. There is fine hunting during the season, both in the surrounding dunes and on the grounds themselves.’ Such visits were not terribly exciting. One Sunday in September 1793, the Van Ecks paid a visit to Mrs Caan on the country estate of Vreugd & Rust: ‘After eating and taking a walk and drinking tea in the garden house, we drove home again.’ Two weeks later the visit was repeated, at which time Otto merely recorded that he had ‘behaved well’. In later years he occasionally wrote longer accounts of such excursions. His diary then takes on the tone of a grown-up’s travel journal, as evidenced by this entry of 16 July 1796: This morning we left at half past seven in a wagon pulled by four horses, to take Aunt Paulus to visit Mr and Mrs Reepmaker at Noord-Waddinxveen, where she will stay for a while, and we spent the whole day there, having just come home at half past nine. We had good weather on the way there, passing through the villages of Pijnakker, Zoetermeer and Moercappelle, riding past wide pools of water, on some of which – those that had been pumped dry – grew good wheat, rye, barley, oats, trees, flax, linseed and so on. It all seemed to want a good fertilising, though, to be able to bear fruit. When we were close to our destination, it poured on us and the rest of the day was rainy until we left at seven o’clock, when a fresh south-westerly wind was blowing, which has now died down considerably. There is good fishing in the ponds and lakes near Mr Reepmaker’s, and, being a lover of fishing, he even keeps a fisherman, who is just like a grand falconer of a well-stocked menagerie with all kinds of exotic birds, which, however, could never hold as much attraction for me as fishing.

Otto often wrote in his diary how much he loved country life. In this he echoed popular sentiments as expressed, for example, by Martinet in his Katechismus der natuur (Catechism of nature), where the teacher tries to instil in his pupil the proper attitude: ‘What we hold dear in nature is freedom, and we despise everything that shuts us in. The poor city-

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dwellers enclosed by walls, embankments and canals, who live in dark, cramped houses and breathe dirty, contaminated air, are denied this dear freedom. The monotonousness of the stones, windows and rooftiles of the houses is a sight that never changes and therefore becomes boring.’ Even so, Otto liked to stay with his Uncle and Aunt Paulus in Rotterdam, where his aversion to city life quickly evaporated. They lived near the harbour, in one of the busiest places in the city, and it was here that a whole new world opened up for Otto: ‘It is so lively and pleasant in Rotterdam that this morning, while breakfasting, I went and stood for a while at the window, intending, after I had eaten, to devote myself to my lessons, but it remained an intention only, for I could not find the resolve to take my eyes off all those ships and carts, though I must confess that my conscience insisted that I was doing wrong, but I found the view so pleasant that I ignored that voice’. On 7 September 1793 he was forced to admit that although he had done his lessons, it was not before he had spent some time ‘lounging about, looking out the window’. During a later visit he wrote: ‘This morning I again did my assignments as usual, but there is always so much to see in Rotterdam that I couldn’t help standing at the window from time to time, even though I repeatedly resolved to finish all my lessons first.’ Otto paid his first visit to Amsterdam in 1793. His account of this trip consists of only four words: ‘Saw everything of interest.’ Later that year he visited the city briefly, travelling by carriage via The Hague, Leiden and Haarlem. Otto and his father arrived in Amsterdam at five in the afternoon and took lodgings at the Oudezijds Heerenlogement, a boarding-house for gentlemen. They attended a concert at the Felix Meritis Society, ‘where we were pleasantly entertained the whole evening by very beautiful music’. After supper Otto wrote the following: ‘We have returned to our lodgings, where we hope to spend the night sleeping peacefully.’ The efficiency of public transport in Holland made it possible to travel relatively long distances in a single day. In Otto’s time, after all, Dutch passenger barges were known throughout the world for their speed and comfort, and it would be another fifty years before the train put an end to this mode of transport. On 8 December 1793, Otto travelled to Haarlem and back, and, after returning to De Ruit, wrote that same evening: ‘This morning Papa and I took the nine o’clock barge to Haarlem, where we arrived in time to get the twelve o’clock barge to Leiden. After arriving there at four o’clock, Papa and I drank a cup of tea at Mr Voltelen’s, after which we took the five o’clock barge to Delft

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Fig. 98. The hall of columns at the Felix Meritis Society in 1793, the year in which Otto visited this ‘Temple of Enlightenment’, opened in 1787.

to be home before eight o’clock. Here we found the whole household, especially Mama and little brother, to be reasonably well. So today Papa and I spent ten out of twelve hours on the barge.’ An excursion on the Admiralty’s yacht in September 1796 was also worthy of mention. Otto and his father were accorded this honour because of Lambert van Eck’s high position as secretary of the Committee for Naval Affairs, an appointment he had received after the Batavian Revolution. Otto writes about an exciting sailing trip in the ‘Admiralty’s yacht’, plying against the wind, sailing past Zaltbommel, Loevestein and Gorinchem to Dordrecht. There they moored and spent the night, and the next morning they sailed on to Rotterdam, where the trip was concluded with dinner on board the yacht. Otto had missed another trip in July 1795 to Friesland, Texel and the cities on the Zuiderzee, ‘to inspect the warships anchored there’. That trip must have been exciting for his father and Uncle Paulus in particular, who again had to contend with strong head winds, this time figuratively speaking. After the Batavian takeover, the navy appeared to be in sad shape, but it was decided nevertheless to fit out a squadron capable of stopping the English, who had left for the Cape of Good Hope to conquer the Dutch colony there. The inspection trip made by Otto’s father and uncle was therefore all business and little pleasure.

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Fig. 99. Drawing of ships from Lambert van Eck’s album amicorum.

The only vessels available for the voyage to the Cape were two ships of the line and four frigates, ‘but que faire, there is nothing to be done’. These words were not uttered by Pieter Paulus or Lambert van Eck, but by Otto, who very much regretted that there was no room for him on the inspection ship: ‘I should have liked to go along, because I’ve never been to any of those places, but I ought to have asked earlier, because there is no longer any room for me on the yacht (according to Uncle Paulus).’ In January 1796, Paulus was doing everything in his power to get the fleet ready to sail. He hoped to form a joint Franco-Batavian squad-

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ron, which was the subject of difficult, ongoing negotiations. Several weeks later he made the decision – which subsequently proved fatal – to let the ships set sail. The negotiations in Paris fizzled out, and the funds made available to the French government by The Hague were used not to lend military assistance at the Cape but to invade Ireland. The commander of the Dutch squadron was unaware of this, however. Expecting the arrival of the French fleet, he sailed into a bay, where his unresisting ships were overpowered by the English.33 Paulus did not live to see this. Otto was still alive at the time, but made no mention of this debacle in his diary. It is time for us to return to Otto’s more immediate world. When Otto’s parents and aunt and uncle went on the above-mentioned inspection trip in July 1795, Otto was sent to stay with Uncle and Aunt Hoogendijk in Brielle. Either the time he spent there was too uneventful to prompt much diary-writing, or his aunt and uncle failed to do the necessary prompting; in any case, Otto mentions only the places of interest he visited. He thus describes his walk to the village of Oostvoorne, where he inspected the ruins of the castle of Jacoba of Bavaria and was impressed by two iron rods, ‘which, far from being corroded, are not even rusted, although they have been lying there for more than four hundred years’.34 Another trip took him to Hellevoetsluis, where he saw ‘a warship with sixty-four guns, ready to set sail’, which was something he had never seen before, at least not as far as he could remember: ‘It was De Revolutie, under the command of Rear Admiral J.A. Bloys van Treslong.’ His visit to the rock of Rockanje, which grew bigger every year, was so noteworthy that he devoted several paragraphs to it. This rock, which consisted of ‘large petrified lumps of mud’, was to be found in the middle of a small lake, where it protruded five feet above the water. ‘The reeds surrounding it and the ground itself become more petrified with time, and the rock itself grows bigger every year.’ Otto gives no explanation for this phenomenon – the deposit of carbonate of lime caused by the composition of the water – but relates with relish the bizarre anecdote told by their guide.35 Six years previously, a visitor had lost his hat and wig, which he fished out of the lake two years later – completely petrified – and took home as a trophy, ‘a great conversation piece’. In the summer of 1793, Otto had taken a longer trip to Gelderland to visit relatives. Having arrived at Zeist, the first stop on his itinerary, Otto noticed how different the vegetation and the landscape were: ‘The next day we walked through the splendid Zeist woods and nearby

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Fig. 100. Oostvoorne Castle with the well-known scene of a man either pointing at something or giving pointers to a child. Watercolour, 18th century.

places, all of which are planted with exceptionally beautiful oak and beech trees, such as one seldom finds in Holland.’ The family went on a walk and then attended a church service of the Hernhutter brotherhood – a tourist attraction. An excursion to the Betuwe region in the province of Gelderland in April 1795, which entailed taking the night barge to Utrecht and then continuing by horse and carriage to Tiel, was also one of Otto’s longer journeys. Here he saw the other side of the Batavian Revolution, the devastation it had caused to farms and rural estates. His commentary, however, is remarkably apolitical. Wars are wicked, and are fought over futilities: ‘During the journey I noticed that most of the land here is still untilled, because the farmers have no horses. . . . Here and there we also saw a number of ruined houses and farm cottages, which had been burned. Wretched war! Those who start them, often because of pathetic trifles, will have to answer to the world’s highest judge.’ We know less about Otto’s longest journey – in 1797 to Kampen – because, as he said in his diary, he described it in a separate journal, which unfortunately has not survived. Keeping a travel journal – an integral part of eighteenth-century education – was a useful pursuit, an aid in acquiring practical geographical skills. Otto’s younger brother Jantje wrote a similar travel

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account, still in the family archives, which describes his journey with the Teding van Berkhout family through Brabant and the Southern Netherlands, returning via Cleves.36 At the age of sixteen, Otto’s cousin Ceesje van Lidth de Jeude wrote an account of a trip he made in the spring of 1793 with the above-mentioned Uncle and Aunt Hoogendijk van Domselaar. He wrote a lot about the forts and ships they saw along the way, and about the damage done by the French troops during the clash that year.37 Another cousin, Marcellus Emants, Otto’s senior by two years, wrote an account – which has in fact been preserved – of a trip made in 1793 with family members who departed from The Hague and travelled through Zuid-Holland, Gelderland and Brabant.38 A rough draft of that account has also survived, as has a letter Marcellus wrote to his parents, which reveals that he wrote the account at their behest. In a certain sense these travel journals served the same purpose as Otto’s diary: keeping a diary helped children to develop an awareness of time, while writing a travel account deepened their understanding of the world.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF TIME On 26 January 1793, twelve-year-old Otto discovered to his dismay that his watch was no longer in his pocket: First I went and had a look in all the places where it could and should have been, but it was nowhere to be found. Now I fear it will have to surface with time, though I still haven’t lost heart completely. I shall search for it again tomorrow morning at first light, if possible until I’ve found it. Papa has been good enough not to say anything about it, but even so, I’ve lost my watch. Oh!

Otto continued for days to write in his diary about the loss of this watch and his inability to find it. By 30 January he had given up hope: ‘I still haven’t found my watch, and I’m afraid I’ll never see it again. I’m very sorry, the more so because my Great-grandfather Mouchon always kept it in his pocket, so it is a keepsake to remind me of that good man, and Aunt Paulus gave it to me as a present. I almost don’t dare tell her I’ve lost it.’ But a week later fortune smiled on him: ‘I’ve found my watch. It was hanging in the orchard on a pear tree, and now I remember that last Saturday, the day I lost it, I climbed into a tree for fun, and there, I imagine, the chain stuck on a branch and was pulled out of my pocket, without my feeling it (while climbing). The (steel) chain was slightly rusted, but when I wound up the watch, it worked again very well, despite having hung there for nine days in the wind, rain, hail and snow. Oh, I’m so happy.’ Juvenile sorrow and happiness alternate in these diary entries, but they also make clear how important time was to Otto, or rather how important it was in his parents’ eyes. In this respect both his watch and his diary fulfilled key functions. Keeping a daily record of his thoughts and actions was supposed to make Otto more aware of the passing of time. Tellingly, the first passage Otto copied out of a book he read was the following: ‘le temps perdu ne se retrouve plus’ (lost time can never be regained). Wasting time was something Otto’s parents warned him against over and over again.

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Fig. 101. Pocket watch and pendulum with a weight: the mechanism of the watch. From N.A. Pluche’s Schouwtoneel der natuur, 1737–88.

Otto’s panic at the loss of such a symbolically charged object as a watch – an heirloom of the past, a beacon of the present, and a key to the future – was not exaggerated. The importance of this object is apparent from the way in which watches – often bearing inscriptions from previous owners – were carefully passed down from one generation to the next. Eloquent testimony of this is provided by the many bills and notes in family archives, regarding the costly repairs made to broken timepieces.1 When the Dordrecht publisher Pieter Blussé, a contemporary of Otto, gave his beloved a present as a pledge of their engagement, he deliberately chose a watch, and encouraged her to wear it in as obvious a place as possible: ‘Wear your watch, too, at your side, and you will honour and delight the giver.’ The gift was intended chiefly to put pressure on the girl’s rather unobliging guardians.2 Several decades earlier, the gesture of a Genevan watchmaker’s son – who nonchalantly threw his timepiece away – was just as meaningful, but intended to send a somewhat different message, for it was in this way that Jean-Jacques

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Rousseau expressed his dislike of modern technology, preferring the rhythm of nature to that of a mechanical device.3 Enlightenment and the Perception of Time Otto’s parents had an unshakeable faith in a future utopia, based on the achievements of science. In their view, a watch was not only the high point of technical ingenuity but also a regimen: modern life ought to be regulated by the hands of the clock. They never failed to remind Otto to put his time to good use. As a ten-year-old, his life was already subject to a schedule specifying appropriate times for getting up in the morning, doing his lessons, reading his books, and eating his meals. Even his ‘free time’ – the few hours he preferred to spend out of doors in the garden, with all its potential dangers – was impinged upon by a large bell that could be heard a long way off, inexorably calling him to come in. It was in this very period – when Otto was growing up – that the boundaries between work and free time were becoming more distinct. The sixth volume of Chalmot’s Algemeen woordenboek (General dictionary), published in 1793, contains the following definition of uitspanningen (recreation, relaxation): ‘everything that one undertakes, after doing some work of whatever kind, in order to amuse oneself, with a view to restoring and reviving the physical or mental strength expended through work’. The notion that even ‘free time’, once it had been earned, could not be enjoyed without constraints emerges from an elaborate warning against excesses: ‘wild gaiety’ would only lead to ‘painful remorse’.4 This view was endorsed by Otto’s parents, since even Otto’s free time was subject to regulation from above: ‘This morning I got up so early that, after reading about Moses’ remarkable education, I still had time to go for a walk with Papa’s permission’, he wrote on 7 June 1791. And a month later: ‘One must give one’s time sparingly to people, says Papa, for one easily wastes it.’ Otto was well aware of the importance of keeping schoolwork and relaxation separate. On 6 May 1791, he resolved to work virtuously on the homework given him during his school holiday ‘without thinking of any recreation before it is all done’. Among the rational standards and values that children had to be taught – as emerges from enlightened pedagogical writings of the day – managing one’s time was of key

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Fig. 102. ‘The hours fly by, one by one.’ From J.H. Swildens, Vaderlandsch A-B-boek, 1781.

importance. In Swildens’s Vaderlandsch A-B-boek (Fatherlandish abc) of 1781, the reader is taught the following in connection with the letter u: The hours fly by, one by one. Remember this and learn. Do your best to spend them well, for they will ne’er return.

In the accompanying engraving, a father teaches his son to tell time. The same message resounds in the previously quoted passage about le temps perdu copied out by Otto. In the books he read, Otto was confronted repeatedly with the theme of wasted time. On 25 September 1791, he noted: ‘I also read that spending one’s time well is the best way to progress in the world. In

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this we have the example of Kluge.’ In this story, Farmer Kluge owed his increased prosperity to his ability to make the most of his time. By spending every minute of the day in a useful manner, he succeeded in working his way up from farmhand to wealthy gentleman farmer. Kluge’s creator, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, thereby illustrated a novel idea: the notion – nowadays a truism – that ‘time is money’. A while later Otto read a passage in Madame de la Fite about a boy ‘who, while his parents were out, wasted all his time, even though he had been warned by his younger sister not to lounge about idly. But because he did not follow her advice, it was not very pleasant when his parents returned, for they refused to embrace him when they heard how little progress he had made.’ This is the message of a poem by Hiëronymus van Alphen: Never must I take to idling, But do things with zeal sublime; Praying, learning, reading, writing, Play and work – all have their time. Mother thinks it is a crime To waste our time, our learning thwart; ‘Laziness is stealing time,’ She says, ‘for life is all too short!’5

The exhortation to put time to good use was not new; it can, in fact, be found in moralistic treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It acquired another dimension, however, when the concept of time underwent a change between 1750 and 1850.6 Around 1800 the static world view based on the Bible disappeared – at least among the enlightened elite to which Otto’s parents belonged – and made way for a dynamic, scientifically grounded picture of a world in continual development. In other words, the future was now seen to be wide open, and humanity capable of shaping it. What is more, the Dutch word for future (toekomst) first made its appearance in the Dutch language around 1800.7 The change in the perception of time has also been characterised as the transition from a cyclical to a linear notion of time. Pre-industrial societies related time to such things as the rising and setting of the sun, the ebb and flow of the tides, the changing of the seasons, and the coming and going of migratory birds. The rise of a linear concept of time was linked to a number of technological innovations introduced since the seventeenth century, which made it possible to measure time with increasing precision. This mathematical concept of time led to the

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awareness of a future that is not just a repetition of certain acts, but a series of unique events. This also shifted the meaning of the term ‘revolution’ from a simple change in power to a fundamental remodelling of political structures: a new beginning. Accordingly, a new calendar was introduced during the French revolution. By the same token, the Batavian revolutionaries christened the year 1795 ‘the first year of our freedom’. The 1790s were marked by a new feeling that grew stronger every year: a sense of looking forward to the new century. With the approach of the year 1800, confusion arose as to the precise dating of the new century, something that had never been seen as a problem before. Did the nineteenth century actually begin in 1800, or was the year 1801 more correct?8 Apart from this detail, many saw the turn of the century as an important milestone. One such person was the poet Johannes Kinker, who closed his Eeuwfeest bij den aanvang der negentiende eeuw (Centenary at the beginning of the nineteenth century) with a scene – expressing the hope that peace and prosperity will lead to the blossoming of the arts and sciences – in which ‘humanity’ exclaims: ‘This new era is the century of beauty and virtue.’9 The transition from a cyclical to a linear concept of time did not take place overnight. Nor should these concepts be seen as mutually exclusive opposites. A linear concept of time is naturally associated with technological progress and the future, but it also implies finiteness, death and decline, as opposed to the cyclical idea of repetition and rebirth. The new linear concept of time is usually linked to an optimistic belief in progress, but it also has a pessimistic variant: the passing of time as a process of degeneration and decline. This theme dominated public debate in the Dutch Republic, where the present era was compared with the Golden Age. The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw the publication of numerous books and pamphlets treating the decline of the Republic. Gulielmus Titsingh, for example, published a pamphlet on ‘the decline of our national sea trade’.10 In his encyclopaedia, Lambert van Eck made notes about ‘the decline of our factories’, with reference to various publications on the subject. Eighteenth-century scientists increasingly viewed time as a serious problem. In the early-modern era, scholars such as Descartes had mainly pondered the question of how time should be measured. Time was seen as a mathematical variable based on recurring movements, such as the orbital motion of the earth around the sun and the moon around the earth. The recurring movement of a clock was used as a more exact unit of measure. A fundamentally different approach was proposed

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Fig. 103. Sometimes up and sometimes down. Cyclical time portrayed: Father Time turns the wheel of war, 1780.

by Isaac Newton, who assumed the existence of ‘absolute time’: time has a character of its own and is independent of the physical world; it is, therefore, ‘real time’ and not a human construct. In Newton’s view, time flows constantly, irreversibly, as a succession of indivisible moments. A moving object can slow down or accelerate, but time keeps on flowing at the same speed. John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, added another dimension to the discussion by asking himself how people perceive time. Locke saw time as the flow of ideas, in which sequence and duration can be distinguished. In his view, a sleeping person had no notion of time.11 He therefore argued for a more subjective definition of time. These two views were at the heart of the eighteenth-century debate on time.12 Could the two exist side by side, or was only one kind of time possible? This last view was adhered to by Leibniz, among others. After all, why would God have created two sorts of time? Put to the choice, he rejected Newton’s notion of time. This led to a counter question to which he had no answer: why had God not created the

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world six thousand years earlier or later? For centuries, theologians had believed that God had created time along with Creation – according to biblical reckoning, six millennia ago. In the enlightened theology of the eighteenth century, however, God had been reduced by some thinkers to the Great Clockmaker, the power that had set the cosmic clockwork in motion – a metaphor that is very revealing. According to this modern view, God did not intervene actively in the lives of people, but was present on earth only as the passing of time. The biblically based calculations that placed creation six thousand years ago also came under fire. Fossil studies indicated that the world was older; the question was only how much older. In other words, in the eighteenth century the idea of the ‘great chain of being’ – God’s Creation in which everything has its place – was put in the context of time. The earth on which man lived had not been created in six days, but was the result of a continual process of change and development. The Frenchman Buffon, whose work Otto studied, devised a new history of the world, divided into a number of phases, with the motto: ‘Le grand ouvrier de la nature est le temps’ (The great worker of nature is time). Another eighteenth-century development was the growing doubt – among a small circle of people – in the hereafter. For centuries it had been taken for granted that life on earth would be followed by eternity, a timeless hereafter. Those who doubted this considered the time spent on earth all the more precious. The mere fact that this point was being discussed no doubt had implications for the way people looked at the world. When Otto was growing up, the philosophical discussion about time entered a new phase. Immanuel Kant, in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), attempted to go one step further by reconciling Newton’s absolute time and Locke’s relative time. Kant’s theory was expounded by the Dutch philosopher Paulus van Hemert in his Beginzels der Kantiaansche wijsgeerte (Principles of Kantian Philosophy), which appeared in 1796. A critic writing in the Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (Dutch Literary Review), a journal read in the Van Eck home, explained the issue even more concisely.13 In Chalmot’s Algemeen woordenboek, the debate on time, including the difference between ‘independent time’ and ‘relative time’, was also succinctly summarised for a broad public. 14 In the modern view, time was an intangible division between past and future.

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Technology and Punctuality The development and improvement of clockworks – even though prompted more by an interest in mechanical ingenuity than by a need for a more precise measurement of time – was an important factor in the changing perception of time, which in turn formed the basis for a mechanisation of the world view. In this sense it may even be correct to proclaim the clock, instead of the steam engine, ‘the key machine of the modern industrial age’.15 According to this view, it was the up-andcoming middle classes in particular who strove for the rationalisation and control of time. In fact, it was in the urban, bourgeois Dutch Republic that great efforts were made to create better timepieces. The most noteworthy advancement was achieved by an inhabitant of Hofwijk, a country house near De Ruit, for it was there that Christiaan Huygens invented, around the mid-seventeenth century, the pendulum clock, in which the turning of the hands was regulated by the constant motion of a pendulum that ensured uniform movement. For the first time, it was possible to provide clocks with second-hands.16 Later Huygens invented the spring, making the watch a reliable instrument that could even be equipped with a second-hand. In the course of the eighteenth century, clocks appeared in more and more households, and began to be displayed more prominently, usually taking pride of place on the drawing-room mantelpiece. And now that the correct time was a permanent and pointed presence in the house, it increasingly began to regulate domestic life. That the interest in timepieces gained ground more quickly in the countryside – where many farmers owned simple clocks with an alarm, to wake them before dawn so they could milk the cows – is only natural: town-dwellers, after all, could always rely on the church clock. This rural demand led to the production of great numbers of inexpensive clocks in Limburg, Friesland and the Zaan region.17 The technical improvements in clock-making paralleled the changing notion of time. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the decorative function of timepieces – usually made of silver and gold and skilfully embellished – was more important than their practicality. Before this time, clocks had served mainly to verify an estimate of the time, but in the course of the eighteenth century, they were used increasingly to discover the precise time. This development marked a fundamental change in the way people handled clocks and watches, for such timepieces had begun to regulate life. Punctuality was a great virtue in

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Fig. 104. The sensible young lady. Interior with a pendulum clock on the mantelpiece. From Economische liedjes (1791) by B. Wolff and A. Deken.

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Fig. 105. ‘At five o’clock we take our places.’ Illustration from De man naar de klok by Th.G. Hippel, 1792.

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the eighteenth century. In De man van bedrijf (The man of business), a handbook translated from the English for entrepreneurs and businessmen, this point is stressed repeatedly: ‘The well-regulated apportionment of time is one of the main activities of a man of business.’18 At the same time, others had already perceived the danger posed by obsessive punctuality, which threatened to degenerate into a reign of terror. De man naar de klok (The man ruled by the clock) is the title of a comedy of 1780.19 The protagonist, who finds himself in a room ‘furnished with various clocks’, constantly counts the hours, minutes and seconds. Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken’s novel Willem Leevend has a character called Mrs Rijzig, who swears by ‘strict order’ and thinks that ‘everything must be governed by the clock’.20 In 1799 the writer Arent Fokke summed up enlightenment, virtue and time as an ‘indivisible trio of rationalities’.21 Herein lay the impetus for the typically eighteenth-century aim of reducing the number of hours spent every night in sleep. Sleep was increasingly considered a waste of time. That, at any rate, is the tenor of the entry on ‘sleep’ in the Algemeen woordenboek. The author was drawing upon his own experience when he wrote the following: ‘In my youth I tested whether one could make do with five hours of sleep, but after three months, in which I grew lean and listless, I was practically sleeping on my feet.’ He rues his inability to curtail his nights, and concludes that people spend only one-third of their lives ‘actually working’. The even greater need of children to get sufficient sleep was a result of their ‘weaker brains’. After this observation, the author can do little but recommend tea as an ‘antidote’ to sleepiness. The same dictionary defines ‘coffee’ as a ‘useful drink that suppresses sleep, and can thus help to combat somnolence or be of use when one intends to stay awake for a long time at night’. This effect of coffee had not been mentioned in earlier descriptions.22 The growing popularity in the eighteenth century of coffee and tea could therefore indicate an increasing desire to limit the amount of time devoted to sleep. Even the time children spent sleeping, nowadays thought a blessing, was increasingly criticised. In his Fabelen en kleine gedichten voor kinderen (Fables and short poems for children), Pieter ’t Hoen sang the praises of the early morning hour: Always try to rise and shine, Don’t be a sleepyhead. Morning is the perfect time To learn and forge ahead.23

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Although clocks had come to have reliable mechanisms, sundials were still indispensable in determining the correct time. Clocks and watches were set according to sundials: when the sun reached its zenith, the clock was set at twelve o’clock noon. Because the perception of the earth’s orbit around the sun varies at each degree of latitude, every place in the Netherlands – as indeed in the rest of the world – kept to its own ‘local time’. The Netherlands is so small that the difference between clocks in various places was never more than fifteen minutes; even so, this slight difference proved a great inconvenience when the first railway timetables were drawn up. Time was not standardised in the Netherlands until 1909, when the rest of the country began to set its clocks by Amsterdam time, thus putting an end to a long-standing problem. In Otto’s day, the departure times of stage-coaches and ferries were nevertheless recorded with greater accuracy than a century earlier, and included more often in almanacs.24 At the same time, there was an ever-swelling torrent of complaints from passengers about the late arrivals and departures of coaches and barges. In Delft, people grumbled that the passenger barges to Leiden did not leave on time, and blamed this on the clock of the Old Church. Otto’s piano teacher, Berghuis, was called to account: as the municipal bell-ringer, he was responsible for the tower’s bells. He was able to prove, however, that there was nothing wrong with the clock’s mechanism. 25 In regents’ circles there was a tendency at this time to impose stricter sanctions on those who came late to meetings. The tickets for the concerts at the Felix Meritis Society, one of which Otto attended, plainly stated that concerts began ‘in the evening at six o’clock on the dot’.26 Not surprisingly, Otto’s upbringing aimed at preparing him for these increasingly strict schedules. Hours, Days, Weeks, Months A boy of twelve with a pocket-watch was no longer an exception in Otto’s day. Inventories show that such timepieces had become widespread among the Delft elite. Men often owned a number of them.27 In the course of the eighteenth century, watches also became common among the middle classes. This wide distribution of timepieces was connected, indirectly, to the growing popularity of the diary,28 since keeping a diary – like observing the clock – was a way of getting a grip on time. The entire family of Christiaan Huygens, the inventor

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Fig. 106. An uncommonly fine standing and walking human clock. From A. Fokke’s Verhandeling over de algemeene gelaatkunde, 1801.

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of the pendulum clock, were passionate diary-writers. The example had been set by the pater familias, the statesman and poet Constantijn Huygens, who not only kept a diary, but sang the praises of timepieces in a poem titled ‘Clocks’.29 Only fragments of Christiaan’s diary have survived, but we do have a diary covering many years written by his brother Constantijn Jr, who was one of the first Dutchmen to write in his diary with the regularity of a clock.30 Indeed, the words ‘diary’ and ‘journal’ (Otto actually used the latter term) both refer to records kept on a daily basis. One of the functions of Otto’s diary was to allow him to look back at the end of the day and reflect on how he had spent his time. Sometimes the judgement was positive; at such times Otto wrote, for example: ‘I managed to put my time to good use’ or ‘I didn’t try to kill time by loafing, as I did yesterday.’31 Otto describes his days chronologically, often recording the exact time his activities took place. Even so, by now it is clear that Otto was hardly an expert at managing his time. One of the first entries in his diary illustrates this, but also shows that he would not give up without a fight: Didn’t go to church today, and got up so late that I couldn’t finish my tasks before eating, having begun some of them only at six o’clock, and not before Mama told me to, even though I’d had the whole afternoon to do them. Also didn’t keep my promise to be quiet while trying to fall asleep, which is why Mama has imposed a bedtime of eight o’clock.

The connection between the exercise of power and the control of time is likewise visible in the disciplining of labourers that began around 1800. Clocks were installed in workshops and factories to subject workers to a new and stricter working regimen. It had taken several generations for the traditional, irregular working hours to disappear. Factories were now run by the clock. Recent anthropological research has shed more light on the connection between time and power. The lower down one was in the hierarchy, the less freedom one had to manage one’s own time – the most extreme cases being slavery or imprisonment.32 Regulating others’ time is tantamount to exercising power over them. Conversely, deliberately ignoring time constraints is a subversive act. Time as a tool of power is a strong presence in Otto’s diary. By means of his pocketwatch, the clock in the hall and the outside bell, his parents controlled his behaviour and imposed a certain rhythm on his life – and instead of inflicting corporal punishment, they sent him to bed an hour earlier. To get even, Otto occasionally ignored this temporal straitjacket by staying

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Fig. 107. The early riser. From Leerzame spiegel . . . voor kinderen, 1795.

in bed longer in the morning or by coming home late. Moreover, the diary itself was a strategic weapon. Otto’s parents had instructed him to write in his diary every day, and they regularly read his entries. As we have seen, Otto occasionally retaliated by shirking this duty entirely, pleading mitigating circumstances, or negotiating milder conditions (such as weekly, rather than daily, entries). The demands Otto’s parents placed on his diary-writing caused him to record events with such precision that we can readily picture the world he inhabited. The changing of the seasons is apparent from his comments about trees budding in the spring and even ‘growing by the hour, so to speak’. Otto himself was subject to this process, as emerges from his observation of 5 November 1792. Long bedridden as a result of illness, he rose for the first time in weeks and started to dress. He really had to squeeze himself into his clothes, which caused him to remark that he had ‘grown noticeably’. His awareness of growing towards adulthood, mentally as well as physically, is expressed in an observation prompted by his first horse, a pony. His great joy on 12

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Fig. 108. Diligence. ‘I want to learn my lessons.’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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Fig. 109. Time. The hours fly, and every second. / Races past, ne’er to return; Wasting time is such a loss, / Remember this – and learn. From Stukken het schoolwezen betreffende, uitgegeven door de Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen, 1785.

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June 1793 led him to the following insight: ‘How much people always desire something else. First I was very glad to have a goat, and now it no longer matters to me, and I’d rather ride a pony, and who knows how soon this, too, will bore me and I shall want a big horse.’ Apart from such observations, Otto’s diary has its own rhythm, owing to his precise entries and the times at which the events in his life took place. Because his daily schedule changed little over the years, his diary betrays a certain monotony. He usually got up around seven o’clock. We know this because he occasionally says that he got up earlier than usual, and then it is around six, or that he overslept, and then it is eight or nine o’clock or even later. Apparently no one woke Otto up; he was supposed to keep track of the time himself. When Otto got up early, it was to tend his birds and rabbits. He was, in any case, expected to rise around seven. Upon rising he read an edifying piece, if there was time, and said his morning prayers. This was followed by breakfast with the other members of the family, eating usually being combined with reading aloud. In 1791, when his diary begins, Otto was attending a school in The Hague that started at nine o’clock. He travelled there by barge from Delft, or rode in the carriage with his father, who – like a modern-day commuter – travelled to the court in The Hague. School lasted until twelve o’clock. Back at De Ruit, the family ate their main meal of the day, finishing with dessert, during which there was more reading aloud. Otto was ill for a long time in 1792, and did not return to school after his recovery. From then on he was taught at home by tutors, or had individual lessons in Delft, and continued to study under his parents’ supervision. At home he had to keep to the normal school timetable, which meant three hours of lessons every morning from nine to twelve. This was followed by the midday meal, after which lessons continued until five. Otto talks about his ‘morning tasks’ and his ‘afternoon tasks’, but after completing these, his day was by no means at an end. From five to seven he could do what he liked. If he went outdoors to play, he was summoned inside by the bell. This signalled the commencement of his ‘evening tasks’, which consisted mainly in reading edifying books with his parents. In the winter Otto could not begin his evening tasks until the candles were lit. He loved the twilight hour, when he drank a cup of cocoa or tea, or – when he was older – a glass of wine or punch, or a cup of coffee.33 This sequence reflects Otto’s stage of maturity, for coffee was undoubtedly the most

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adult drink in the list. At eight o’clock the family had a light supper. When Otto was ten, his bedtime was presumably around nine o’clock, because when he was sent to bed early as a punishment, it was eight o’clock. Two years later he was punished by being sent to bed at half past nine, so evidently by then he was usually allowed to stay up until ten or later.34 There was one daily activity that Otto was never allowed to skip, at least in theory: the evening entry in his diary. Otto lived by the clock, and if he forgot the time, his parents reminded him of it. To nearly all of his activities – rising in the morning, eating breakfast, learning his lessons, doing his homework, going to bed – his parents had assigned an appropriate time. The weeks, months and years also followed a set rhythm. Otto’s weekly routine did not change much over the years. Weekdays were reserved for study at school or home. His teachers came to his house on fixed days, although once in a while this regularity was disturbed by bad weather, illness or misunderstanding. On occasion Otto went to Delft for his lessons; this was true of his confirmation classes, which took place every Wednesday from twelve to one. There were other fixed appointments in the weekly schedule: on Thursdays, for example, the animal market was held in Delft. This was an event Otto rarely missed, going nearly every week just to have a look round, and sometimes to buy a rabbit or some birds. On Saturday, Otto invariably wrote his obligatory weekly letter to Uncle and Aunt Paulus. This letter had to be finished by ten o’clock in the morning, no doubt because that was when it had to be posted – postal collection and delivery being very punctual in those days. Starting in 1795, Otto and his father spent their Friday evenings at the Physics Society, where they hoped to increase their scientific knowledge. Sunday morning was reserved for church, but when bad weather or illness made it impossible to attend, a sermon was read from one of the many collections in the Van Ecks’ library. After this, there was seldom any sign of Sunday rest. For the adults, Sunday was the perfect day to receive visitors, and – for Otto and the other children – to play in and around the house. This did not mean, however, that Otto was excused from his ‘tasks’. He was expected to perform these even on the birthday of the Prince of Orange, a national holiday on which school pupils – and therefore Otto as well – were given the day off. This must have been the subject of a disagreement between Otto and his parents, although the only trace of it in the diary is the mention of Otto’s pouting and the clever arguments put forward by his

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mother, whose Patriot sympathies led her to disapprove of the holiday. She maintained that the Prince’s birthday was no excuse for Otto to neglect his ‘tasks’: No school this morning, because it was the Prince’s birthday, and so as not to do too much honour to the Prince by neglecting one’s duties, I have properly performed all my tasks with Mama, even though I sometimes pouted again, because to my mind I didn’t finish studying soon enough.

Many passages in Otto’s diary testify to his growing understanding of time. The beginning or end of a month often prompted reflection, as evidenced by the entry written on 2 February 1792: ‘Yet again, one month of 1792 has flown by like a shadow, and so the others will probably roll by too. Therefore I shall make the most of my time, so that I won’t have to reproach myself at the end of the year.’ And on 1 October 1792: ‘Once more a month has passed, how quickly time goes by.’ On 31 March 1794: ‘It seems to me that the older I get, the faster time seems to pass.’ He spoke to his mother about this: ‘It seems to me that the month of June has gone by so fast. It seems but a couple of hours ago that we said farewell to the month of May. Mama has said this sometimes, and now I think so too, even more as time goes on: that the older I get, the faster time seems to go, in my eyes.’35 Otto had learned that the perception of time is subjective and age-related, as we all perceive it to be. Otto’s remark is, as far as we know, the earliest recorded instance of a child uttering such sentiments. As children grow up, the time span they can comprehend becomes longer. A year is so long that a child of ten can scarcely imagine it. Nevertheless, the rhythm of the year resonates in Otto’s diary, though at first he is unaware of it. One of his earliest entries tells of a visit to the annual fair in The Hague, in May 1791. Traditionally, a city or village fair was one of the principal landmarks in the year; for Otto, as a child, such events were particularly pleasurable because there was no school that week. Each year Otto visited the Delft or Hague fair, and sometimes both. In Otto’s diary the Christian holidays barely stand out from ordinary, run-of-the-mill days. A typical description of one occurs in the entry for Thursday, 2 June 1791: ‘Didn’t go to school because it’s Ascension, but talked with Papa about it this morning. Otherwise I spent the day playing without thinking any more about it, which did not please Mama at all.’ On Christmas 1794, Otto wrote that something appropriate was

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read aloud in the morning, but the rest of the day was simply spent ‘merrily’. On various occasions Otto mentions the annual days of prayer instituted by the States General, on which a prayer written by the authorities was read in all the Reformed churches. The subdued nature of Christian holidays was a conscious choice, as became clear to Otto after reading Zollikofer’s collection of sermons about ‘the useful custom of Christian holidays’.36 Otto carefully recorded the beginning and end of school holidays, and in this respect he was a thoroughly modern child. These free days were observed even when he was taught at home; remarkably, however, he was expected to continue doing homework throughout the holidays. To Otto’s delight, his father also had regular holidays – a privilege enjoyed only by high-ranking officials. For Otto, the course of the year was mostly determined by the changing seasons. In the spring he recorded the budding of shrubs and trees, the sowing and planting that was done, the time for pruning trees and making hay, the day grass-butter was first served, and the appearance of pods on the cold ground. At the beginning of spring, Otto went in search of lapwing eggs, a traditional pastime. In the autumn he wanted to be present when a cow or pig was slaughtered. His parents permitted this, since such things happened only once a year.37 The change of seasons sometimes prompted more profound thoughts, as on 26 November 1792: ‘Today I experienced keenly that winter is coming. . . . Oh, how quickly the lovely summer has again flown by, and so it will probably be with the course of our lives; may we spend the time the good Lord has given us in such a way that we can give Him an adequate account of it when our everlasting spring begins.’ Three days later, Lambert van Eck had the ‘first fire’ laid in the house. There were also special days, such as birthdays, observed in the family circle. When his parents or sisters had a birthday, Otto was of course expected to wish them many happy returns of the day. For his father and mother, he normally composed a poem, but otherwise the family was not much given to celebration. On 19 February 1793, Otto recorded that he and the rest of the family had forgotten his mother’s birthday. When he remembered it – the next day – he wished her a happy birthday and apologised: ‘I assured her that my wishes were no less sincere, even though they came several hours too late.’ The following year, on 12 November 1794, Otto forgot to write a poem for his father’s birthday, something his sister had remembered to do: ‘Anyway, I hope he realised that my wishes, which I conveyed to him

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verbally, were well meant nonetheless.’ Otto had learned his lesson. On his mother’s next birthday he wrote: ‘I got up early this morning and the first thing I did was to wish Mama a happy birthday and give her a poem I had written for the occasion.’ In the Van Eck household, there were no grand birthday celebrations, nor were presents given. It was business as usual: the family went on an outing, or the customary visitors came round, but no more than on any other day. Otto had a greater need of merrymaking, however. If necessary, he organised it himself, as emerges from the description of his mother’s birthday in 1795: ‘When it was dark, I surprised Mama by shooting one of my firearms and setting off some fireworks, but it gave her a fright, because she didn’t know what was happening.’ Occasionally Otto mentions the birthdays of other family members: Uncle Paulus turned thirty-nine on 10 April 1793, his sister Doortje eleven on 26 April 1793, Grandmother van der Goes forty-six on 18 November of that year, his friend Tietje Philip sixteen on 27 July 1794 – all duly recorded without further ado. Otto’s own birthdays went by just as quietly. He wrote nothing about presents, streamers or children’s parties – these did not become customary until the nineteenth century. Otto’s birthdays were, at most, an occasion for moral reflection, expressing thanks to God for having spared him thus far and voicing the hope that he would continue to enjoy God’s grace. When Otto turned fifteen, Uncle Vockestaert paid him a visit and brought along two distant cousins, and even though Otto called this ‘quite a party’, the gathering was probably not all that jolly. The greatest diversion on that birthday, he writes, was a moonlit walk. Birthdays were simply not so important in those days, nor were they considered of major significance as milestones in time.38 The turn of the year, nowadays an important marker of time, was not cause for large-scale celebrations either. Otto never mentions being allowed to stay up until midnight, nowadays a memorable event in the life of a child. Twice, however, he stayed with his Uncle and Aunt Paulus over New Year, and went along with Paulus in the carriage to ‘deliver cards’. Such visiting cards – a sign of one’s inclination to pay the recipient a visit – were, in fact, the precursors of our Christmas or New Year’s cards. Sometimes the turn of the year induced in Otto profound contemplation, as in 1795: Just look (but for a few hours, which will also fly by quickly), this year gone, gone for ever. The big question we should all, each of us, ask

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In Otto’s perception of the coming year, cyclical and linear concepts of time have merged – a mixture that often comes to the fore in his diary. The awareness of time that his parents sought to instil in him was modern and enlightened; at the same time, however, traditional markers remained important, such as the annual fair and the changing of the seasons. The beginning of the new year was a time for looking back as well as forward. The compulsion to live by the clock, the emphasis on putting one’s time to good use, the severe limitations imposed on free time – all of this, on the other hand, exudes the spirit of modernity. Both the past and the future took on new meanings in Otto’s day. His contemporary Jean Deel later related in his autobiography how, as a child, he had become aware of this dimension of time: ‘For children, the present tense is the most important part of all grammar. They still have no thought of the past or future, they do not bother themselves about how things were or will be one day; at that happy age, one seems receptive only to the enjoyment of the moment.’39 Otto’s consciousness of both the past (a land once familiar but now alien) and the future (a new world lacking clear contours) did in fact evolve as he grew older. When he was fourteen, he attempted to give some thought to the future, by now a concept with a name, but no less dark for all that: ‘This morning I read in Sturm that it is very beneficial to everyone’s earthly peace and happiness that one cannot see into the future.’

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Fig. 110. The Future. Beware! The future according to the Orangist draughtsman David Hess (who fled to England) in Hollandia regenerata, 1796.

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RECONSTRUCTING MAN AND SOCIETY Future Paradises ‘Heaven on earth’ is the title of a book published by the pedagogue C.G. Salzmann in 1797 and translated into Dutch the following year. The title seems paradoxical, for Salzmann defined his heaven not in religious terms but as ‘that condition of moral beings, in which they need fear no obstacles in following their morally good intentions’. He thought that people were able to shape their lives themselves, and that it was even their duty to pursue happiness on earth.1 Salzmann was not alone in holding this optimistic view of life, since it can also be found in the pedagogical writings of contemporaries and in political manifestos, as well as in a completely new literary genre: novels set in the future. Fantasising about other, better societies was not new. For centuries, writers had given free rein to their imaginations in visualising a society totally different from their own. Their stories did not take place in the future, however, but in territories that had yet to be discovered. At the same time, geographers were pondering the actual location of the earthly paradise.2 After the mid-eighteenth century, writers no longer situated their imaginary worlds in another country, but in another time – the future. The blossoming of utopian thought in the second half of the eighteenth century is directly related to the development of a linear concept of time.3 The past and the future came to be seen as fundamentally different from the present. This new view of the past was based on an idea that had recently taken hold, namely that people of previous eras had acted, lived and thought differently from those alive now. The past had become another world, the study of which demanded a scientific approach of its own. The future, too, took on much more concrete forms in the popular imagination. Bolstered by a growing faith in scientific, economic and moral progress, people came to see the future as a world that they themselves could shape. It was thought that mankind, guided by reason, would take control, enabling an ideal world to be established on earth within only a few generations.

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Fig. 111. Device of the Utopiaansche Courant in the year 5569, 1819.

Another impetus to the rise of the utopian genre was the successful struggle of the Americans for their independence.4 Having gained their freedom from the mother country, the American colonists were building a new society, organised according to the most modern principles. Moreover, the discovery by James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville of unknown peoples (such as the inhabitants of Tahiti) still living in a state of nature had led to the conclusion that societies were time-bound: Europe had already entered the Steam Age, whereas some peoples were obviously still living in the Stone Age. The conceptualisation of space and society thus took on a historical dimension.5 In the Netherlands, imaginary travel stories experienced their heyday around 1700, as evidenced by both domestic production and the translation of foreign works.6 One hugely successful work was a peculiar book by the ship’s surgeon Hendrik Smeeks, whose Beschryving van het magtig koningryk Krinke Kesmes (The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes) of 1708 was translated into a number of languages. The exotic island of Krinke Kesmes was inhabited by people who lived in a society based on progressive ideas that had not yet been put into practice in the Netherlands, such as the equality of men and women. These islanders placed great importance on child-rearing: ‘Nature urges us towards freedom, but education holds us to our duty; education can carry the gifts of nature to their highest perfection.’ Krinke Kesmes was ruled by a king, who was assisted by a council of philosophers. A form of deism had also been introduced. Various Protestant ministers detected the ideas of Descartes and Spinoza among the author’s sources of inspiration – reason enough for the authorities to ban the book.7

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Later imaginary travel stories took place against less exotic backdrops which more closely resembled the authors’ own world. The 1775 novel Rhapsodiën of het leeven van Altamont (Rhapsodies, or the life of Altamont) is considered the first Dutch utopian novel. Written by W.E. de Perponcher – whom we met earlier as the author of philosophical works, novels, children’s books and textbooks – this novel combines many genres. Its preface – a ‘Warning from the publisher’ – announces that the book is neither a novel nor true history, but should be viewed instead as ‘fantasy’. It tells the story of a shipwrecked sailor, stranded on a faroff island, where he and a native woman establish their own society, inspired by Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’. The couple bring up their children according to the principles expounded in Rousseau’s Emile. It is no coincidence that the chapters bear such titles as ‘On Equality and Freedom’. On this island there is complete equality, slavery is unknown, and everyone is happy.8 North America was a shining example in this respect. It fascinated De Perponcher, as evidenced by another of his books, Nieuwe aardryksbeschryving voor de Nederlandsche jeugd (New geographical description for Dutch youth). He wrote in detail about the United States of America, the ‘first free state in the new world’, where ‘a new theatre had opened, in which society would be able to raise itself to the apex of prosperity, worldly happiness and glory’.9 The most popular utopian novel of this period was L’An 2440 (The Year 2440), written in 1771 by the Frenchman Louis-Sebastien Mercier. It tells the story of a Parisian who sleeps for seven hundred years and wakes up to discover a city with broad boulevards and street lighting. France appears to have been transformed into a constitutional monarchy, where the gulf between rich and poor has disappeared, and everyone has a right to social security and can make use of such institutions as the ‘inoculation house’, where one can be inoculated against all kinds of diseases. Criminal justice has become more humane, torture has been abolished, and the streets are finally clean. L’An 2440 was not translated into Dutch until 1792.10 In his preface, the translator observed that much had changed in the twenty years since the French edition had appeared. When it was first published, the book had been read as the ‘dream of a philanthropic philosopher’ full of ‘well-thought-out ideas’, whose realisation was not expected – mistakenly, as had now been proved – until some time in the distant future. During the French Revolution, several of Mercier’s visions had already become reality. It was therefore important, the translator went

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on to say, that his work should also appear in Dutch, for ‘there could never be a more opportune time to share it with our fellow countrymen’. The intended readership apparently consisted of a group who hoped to be given another chance after the unsuccessful Patriot revolution of 1787. Next to Mercier’s name on the title page, it pointedly says that he is ‘now a member of the National Convention’. After the French Revolution, he had in fact been elected a representative of the people and could actually participate in the realisation of his ideals. The utopias of this time reflect a growing optimism, a belief in progress that was most aptly expressed by the Marquis de Condorcet, an aristocratic revolutionary. He had dedicated himself to the revolutionary cause, but – like many members of the nobility – had been arrested during the Reign of Terror. While awaiting judgement, he wrote his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Sketch of a historical picture of the progress of the human mind). The book appeared in 1794, and was followed eight years later by a Dutch translation.11 Condorcet was not the only writer to commit his brave new world to paper while in prison, for the Marquis de Sade had done the same while locked up in the Bastille. In the Netherlands, the utopian novel underwent a change around 1780. Smeeks and De Perponcher had placed their ideal societies in contemporary settings. By contrast, Holland in ’t jaar 2440 (Holland in the year 2440) – published anonymously in 1777 but presumably written by Betje Wolff – was a futuristic story in imitation of Mercier. Dutch authors were fantasising more and more about the explosive growth in scientific knowledge they hoped to see in their own country. In 1792, Arend Fokke – in his book Het toekomend jaar 3000 (The future year 3000) – looked through his ‘telescope of the imagination’ and saw his fellow countrymen flying in motorised balloons. Somewhat later, Willem de Goede situated in the Rotterdam of the future an ‘international air-balloon port’, from which airships would depart for China, Australia and Africa.12 The most prolific writer of utopian novels was Gerrit Paape, a militant Patriot from Delft, who had fled to France after the restoration of the stadholder but returned to the Netherlands to take an active part in the Batavian Revolution. After publishing several imaginary travel stories under a pseudonym, in early 1798 he described a ‘revolutionary dream’ about the Netherlands in the year 1998. The book appeared just when the Batavian Revolution had entered its most radical phase, at a time – according to Paape – when the foundation was being laid to make his

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country the happiest in the world. In the year 1998, the Netherlands would be populated by teetotallers and ruled by an infallible government in which partisanship no longer played a role.13 A remarkable number of authors wrote both utopian novels and pedagogical works: the previously discussed De Perponcher and Betje Wolff, for example, as well as Petronella Moens, one of the editors of the periodical De Menschenvriend. De Perponcher was a distant relative of the Van Ecks, and Moens, too, could conceivably have been a personal acquaintance. If we compare Lambert’s album amicorum with that of Moens, we notice how many friends they had in common. Moreover, both were members of the Rotterdam society Studium Scientiarum Genetrix. In 1817, Moens published a utopian novel set in South America, where a settlement called Aardenburg was ruled with a firm hand by the hero of the story, a man named Adolf. The walled enclave was permanently guarded from ‘a kind of watchtower’, manned day and night by ‘armed guards’. Adolf is the only one who lives in an ‘impressive house’. The other inhabitants dwell in workshops, where they invariably begin the day by participating in a rite of thanksgiving for the ‘great almighty spirit’ that governs the community, to the musical accompaniment of an orchestra made up of ‘Negro musicians’. In the evening a similar ceremony is held to close the day, and the overseers are asked to give Adolf a ‘faithful report’ of the workers’ conduct.14 Such totalitarian rule is typical of many utopias, whose inhabitants are generally too happy to give any thought to freedom.15 Another characteristic is the great importance attached to child-rearing and education. Utopian society is a school, albeit often a reform school. The reverse could also be said: it is no coincidence that the Englishman Jeremy Bentham developed at this very time his ideas on the panopticon, in which prisoners were re-educated and transformed into respectable citizens. The constitutions drawn up in the 1770s and 1780s by the new American states and revolutionary France can also be viewed as utopian, especially the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789. After all, these declarations of rights did not so much reflect reality as describe a sought-after ideal, with a typically utopian notion – ‘the pursuit of happiness’ – at its core.16 Not surprisingly, the debates triggered by these texts occasionally recall the conversations among the seamen marooned on De Perponcher’s far-off island. The same discussions also took place

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Fig. 112. Have a pleasant journey. Illustration to an article on the hot-air-balloon flights of the Montgolfier brothers and De Jonge in Paris in 1783. From Aanhangsel tot den Nederlandschen Courant, 1783.

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Fig. 113. The constitutional draft is still being debated. From De Lantaarn voor 1796 by P. van Woensel.

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in the Dutch National Assembly, convened after the Batavian Revolution of 1795. Typical of these are the fervent words with which the educationalist G.C.C. Vatebender argued in favour of a revolutionary upbringing: ‘In every nation the youth and their education are not private goods to be handled by all and sundry according to their own whims and squandered through ignorance or malice: the youth of every country are the public property of the state, and as such entitled not only to the paternal protection, care and guidance of the sovereign power, but also to remain uncorrupted by those who would lay their unwashed hands on them or otherwise try to claim them.’17 Vatebender’s words – the youth are state property – betray a totalitarian view. The aversion to ‘unwashed hands’ is in keeping with the utopian obsession with purity. Mercier’s Paris of the future boasted clean streets, while other utopias were populated by vegetarians and teetotallers. Vatebender was well aware that his ideal was far removed from reality and perhaps even unrealisable. In the National Assembly he voiced the fear that his ideas on educational reform would be seen as a ‘chimera’. In this respect, too, he showed great foresight, since his plan for national education never progressed past the planning stage. Frankenstein’s Monster The ever-widening gap between the present and the future made it possible to look ahead with greater awareness. At first this resulted in mostly optimistic scenarios. Many writers had high expectations of the recent technological advancements. Condorcet, for example, thought that improved methods of farming would end famine within the foreseeable future. A few years after the French and Batavian Revolutions, however, a growing stream of publications began to paint a much more sombre picture of times to come. In his influential Essay on the Principle of Population of 1798, Thomas R. Malthus attacked the utopian vision of the future expressed by Condorcet, whose Esquisse of 1794 had been published that same year in English. Malthus was also critical of the Englishman William Godwin, a progressive philosopher whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice had sketched a world free of war and crime, in which government had become unnecessary. In Malthus’s view, mankind was racing towards ruin, for unchecked procreation would lead to overpopulation, recurring famine and devastating epidemics.

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These gloomy visions of the future were soon followed by literary variants. The best-known is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley – the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft – who became the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.18 Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818 contained elements of the gothic novel, then extremely popular in England. It also incorporated the ongoing scientific debate in which materialists and vitalists disputed the origin of life. Mary Shelley sided with the materialists, who saw man as an instrument or a machine, an idea stemming from the French thinker Julien Offroy de La Mettrie. As in earlier utopias, electricity, magnetism, vivisection, polar expeditions and other topical phenomena are woven into this book. Mary Shelley also fell back on the much-discussed attempt by the French doctor Jean Itard to civilise a wild child. The scientist Frankenstein went a step further, however, by creating with his own hands the creature whose development he wished to control. Rousseau’s Emile exerted a great influence on utopian thinkers. William Godwin claimed that no book had ever made a deeper impression on him. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary’s husband, was also a fan of Emile, and often read it aloud to Mary during their honeymoon in the Swiss Alps. Before their marriage, however, Mary and Percy had spent the summer of 1816 in a rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. One evening they went to visit Lord Byron in a neighbouring villa, and were prevented from returning home by a storm. The assembled company spent the night reading aloud to one another from a collection of ghost stories, which led Byron to challenge his guests to write a ghost story of their own. In Mary’s case, the result was Frankenstein, published in May of the following year. Although she admired Emile, Frankenstein was a critical commentary on the experiments of parents who had actually raised their children according to Rousseau’s instructions – generally with disastrous consequences. Frankenstein can be read as a disquieting variation of not only Rousseau’s Emile but also his Confessions. In his autobiography, Rousseau admitted that he had abandoned his own children after their birth. That is exactly what Frankenstein does to his own creation when it turns into a monster. Mary Shelley’s novel is a literary portrayal of the paradoxes in Rousseau’s own life and his educational advice. However, the book can also be interpreted as an allegory of the French Revolution, and this was no doubt the author’s intention. Frankenstein’s scientific experiment spun out of control in much the same way as the social experiment of the French revolutionaries. On closer inspection, the

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Fig. 114. The ‘new man’ comes into the world like a bolt of lightning. From J.L. Perée’s L’homme régénerée, 1795.

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book appears to take place not in the future, but in the late eighteenth century. It is in two respects a utopia gone wrong, portraying a world where technology brings disaster rather than happiness. After 1800, the optimistic thought that it was possible to create a heaven on earth began to lose its appeal. Frankenstein was not translated into Dutch, but another dark book was published in the Netherlands in 1830: De hel op aarde (Hell on earth), in which the author, the German J.G. Gruber, contests the ideas of Salzmann. In his introduction, the Dutch translator remarks ‘What a strange title!’, and goes on to explain Salzmann’s ideal, observing that thirty years later there was still no trace of his heaven, for life on earth was still ‘much effort and few rewards, much sowing and little reaping’.19 The later vicissitudes of W.E. de Perponcher, author of the first futuristic novel in Dutch, are illustrative of the conflict between utopia and reality. In 1813 he became a victim of the events unfolding after the Batavian Revolution, when numerous coups were followed by the country’s transformation into a kingdom – ruled by Napoleon’s brother Louis Napoleon – and its eventual annexation by France. When the Napoleonic armies withdrew, they took along several hostages, one of whom was De Perponcher. After an emotional parting from his eightyyear-old sister, he was conveyed to Paris ‘in the dead of winter’ in a carriage that moved with exasperating slowness. The ‘seven-day winter journey’ left him exhausted: ‘I awoke in the dungeon; a nine-foot-square stone cell – beneath a sloping ceiling, with a small, latticed cross-window and a heavily bolted door – supplied with an open cot and a woodburning stove, which did not have a fire in it that evening or the entire night . . . also a chair, a small table, a large earthenware jug of water, a stable broom for cleaning and an open tub; in short, it was too disgusting, especially when the door was closed.’ This description was written months later, when De Perponcher returned to the Netherlands, safe and sound, and committed his bizarre adventure to paper. It almost seems as though every idealist ends up in hell instead of heaven. De Perponcher was undaunted, however, and clung to his enlightened Christian optimism: through the bars of his dungeon he saw in the early morning ‘a lovely, glowing aureole’, and when he opened the small window he breathed ‘the fresh morning air’: ‘Accordingly, even in this dungeon, I thought, I may behold the Creator’s works.’20

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In Otto’s day, views of the past were shifting in the same way as visions of the future. For centuries, history had served as a continuous reservoir of stories from which moral lessons could be drawn, but the past now became a discrete era and an object of study. Historians began to wonder what past societies had been like, what changes they had undergone and what had prompted those changes. Some time after the heyday of the utopian novel, the Netherlands witnessed the appearance of historical novels and stories, starting with Feith’s Alrik en Aspasia of 1782. Later on, the writer Petrus de Wacker van Zon introduced in his novel Willem Hups a time machine in the shape of a nightcap, which could convey the protagonist to any era.21 In Patriot circles, it was common to look back on the Batavians and other Germanic tribes, who had lived in a virtual ‘state of nature’. In these historical novels, the same ideals that featured in futuristic stories could be projected onto the past, to the extent that the past and the future sometimes came to resemble one another. Betje Wolff, for example, sketched the Netherlands in the year 2440 as a country whose inhabitants had returned to the simplicity of the good old days of the Batavians, to whom political writings of the late eighteenth century referred with increasing frequency. It is only natural that the new state formed in 1795 was named the Batavian Republic. Both the collective past and one’s personal past were viewed from a new perspective. In particular, there was a change in the way people recalled their own youth. In the late eighteenth century, childhood came to be seen as a paradise, as an object of nostalgic yearning. More and more autobiographers described their own past – their childhood world – as a garden of delight. One such writer was Willem Hendrik Warnsinck, Otto’s senior by two years and a bosom friend of Petronella Moens. He refreshed his memory by thinking back on his beloved domain: the inner courtyard – dominated by the shade of a large lime tree – of his infant school. The same technique was tested by Gerrit Jan Mulder, whose meditations on the paradisiacal country estate of Zijdebalen were quoted earlier. Jacob Haafner, too, remembered only the ‘happy days of my childhood, days of innocence and joy’, seemingly referring to the innocence of Adam and Eve in the earthly paradise, before the Fall. Otto’s contemporary Maurits VerHuell likewise looked back on his youth as a ‘laughing vision heightened by the most vivid colours’.22

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Fig. 115. Willem Hups. Time machine in the shape of a nightcap on the title page of the novel Willem Hups, 1805.

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Fig. 116. Infancy / Childhood. From De nuttelyke en aangenaame staatsalmanak, 1787.

Later on, the idea of a definite break between childhood and adult life was clearly formulated by Nicolaas Beets, whose Camera obscura opens with several youthful recollections and the observation that anyone over thirty is already so far removed from his youth ‘that he no longer knows anything about what he had or had not thought, felt, understood and enjoyed as a child’. In this book Beets introduces the term ‘child’s world’ (kinderwereld) to indicate that children live in a cocoon of their own.23 One of the first to express this essentially utopian idea was the poet Friedrich Schiller, who wrote: ‘[Children] are what we were; they are what we again must become. We were nature, as they are, and our culture must bring us, on the way to reason and freedom, back to nature.’24 The idealisation of one’s own youth is a personalised variation of the new genre of a utopia projected into the past.

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Lambert’s Encyclopaedia The pièce de résistance of the Enlightenment was the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts en des métiers (Encyclopaedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades). This multivolume work, published between 1752 and 1780, attempted to summarise the entire body of human knowledge. Numerous enlightened authors contributed articles, and despite sabotage and censure, the undertaking was brought to a successful conclusion under Diderot’s leadership. This project stemmed not only from the pedagogical conviction that the dissemination of knowledge is beneficial, but also from fear of the catastrophes that could befall mankind – in which case the Encyclopédie would function like Noah’s ark. The Encyclopédie was not the first attempt to compile knowledge in a systematic way. Earlier reference works were, however, both less comprehensive and less ideologically charged than the Encyclopédie, which had a large number of articles propounding radically liberal standpoints on such matters as religion, tolerance and freedom of the press. The French authorities banned the book, and prosecuted the editors, writers and publisher – for good reason. The ambition to spread knowledge by means of the printing press was an essential part of Enlightenment philosophy. The enormous significance of this work inspired imitations, also in the Netherlands.25 A person’s attitude to the Encyclopédie was the litmus test of progressiveness, a way of determining who was enlightened and who was not. Lambert van Eck would have passed this test with flying colours. Starting in 1774, he himself began to compile a kind of encyclopaedia, or ‘adversaria miscellanea’. Lambert’s handwritten encyclopaedia, organised along the lines prescribed by John Locke, fills 147 folios and discusses hundreds of subjects, from the pyramids to megalithic tombs and from Johan de Witt to Voltaire. Because Lambert referred systematically to the literature he relied upon, including many pamphlets and periodicals, his encyclopaedia gives a good picture of the wide range of his reading, which naturally included the Encyclopédie, to which he refers in his entry on Confucius. His interest in ‘pagan philosophers’ also emerges from his entry on Socrates, with reference to the debate then raging on Marmontel’s Belisarius. His interest in history is betrayed by his entries on such people as the Frisian king Radboud and the Duke of Alva. The entry on factories reveals his interest in economics. His literary preferences are

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evident from an entry on the Delft poet Hubertus Poot. The majority of Lambert’s entries are related to law, which is not surprising for a lawyer. The most interesting are those in which he discusses questions that were at the forefront of public debate, such as tolerance, freedom, the printing press, the arts and sciences, zealotry, luxury, race, civil society and republican government. His progressive views emerge from all these entries. Only in religious matters does he seem somewhat more conservative: his regard for pagan philosophers notwithstanding, he considered the ‘torch of the gospel’ indispensable. We no longer see the Enlightenment as a monolithic movement; on the contrary, we now think of diversity as one of its most salient features. To begin with, historians have become aware of the differences between developments in France, England, America and other countries. The Dutch variant of the Enlightenment was thought to be characterised in particular by moderation and an enduring regard for the Christian faith. Moreover, we have come to realise that the rational optimism characterising the Enlightenment also had a more pessimistic, sometimes even cynical, undercurrent. Until recently, such developments as the Romantic style in literature and painting, the growing preference for landscape gardens, and especially the popularity of irrational ‘sciences’ (such as mesmerism) were seen merely as reactions to the Enlightenment. Now, however, it is assumed that they were actually part of it. In this respect the so-called ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ has been given more attention,26 as have the darker sides of the rationalempirical, optimistic Enlightenment. Should the roots of modern totalitarianism be sought in the late eighteenth century, as some historians suggest? Did that era actually bring ‘unfreedom’ rather than freedom, as Michel Foucault argues? The paradoxical everyday practices of the Enlightenment as reflected in Otto’s diary – the passion for Romantic gardens, the blending of cyclical and linear perceptions of time, the electrotherapy undergone by Otto’s sister (which will be discussed later), and particularly the total control to which Otto was subjected, with his diary being used as a means to this end – makes it clear in any case how shadowy and hybrid the Enlightenment must have been. The study of Lambert van Eck’s encyclopaedia and his other personal papers leads to another point: every intellectual of this era constructed, as Lambert van Eck did, his own Enlightenment, pieced together as he saw fit from the vast reservoir of opinions expressed in newspapers, pamphlets, treatises and, of course, Diderot’s Encyclopédie. We shall soon see how much Lambert’s personal brand of enlightenment changed over the years.

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Fig. 117. Enlightenment. Allegorical representation of the Enlightenment, 1795.

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chapter eight No Happiness without Order

The new meaning given to the word revolution in 1789 reflects the changing political thought of the time.27 Only then did the word take on the meaning of ‘radical political change’. It was not the only word to undergo a shift in connotation, for this period saw the rise of a whole new political vocabulary. The Bataafsche volks-almanak of 1796 therefore contains a ‘Concise explanation of some political words currently in use’, including anarchy, amnesty, aristocracy, despotism, patriot, republican, revolution, sovereignty and freedom.28 The weekly De Democraten wrote that it was of great importance to know ‘the power and true meaning of words’, and began to publish a political dictionary in instalments. In France, a new section added in 1797 to the large dictionary of the Académie Française contained ‘new words and their usage since the Revolution’.29 The revolutionaries were aware that their vocabulary was also undergoing a revolution. Condorcet, for example, wrote an essay in 1793 on the meaning of the word ‘revolutionary’.30 The word ‘revolution’ acquired a certain mystique. When the Batavian Revolution was proclaimed on 19 January 1795 in Amsterdam, Dam Square was renamed Revolution Square. A Dutch warship was baptised De Revolutie. But the cultural change went much further than shifts in the meaning of words. Such fundamental concepts as ‘time’ and ‘space’ were redefined during the French and Batavian Revolutions. To indicate that a new era had dawned, the French began to count the years anew – Year i was 1792, the first year of the French Republic – and a new calendar was introduced with months divided into three ten-day weeks. As previously mentioned, the Batavian revolutionaries called the year 1795 ‘the first year of our freedom’. In France, the provinces, domains and seigniories of the old feudal system were replaced by departments. After the Batavian Revolution of 1795, the same thing happened in the Netherlands. One of the first resolutions passed by the National Assembly was the introduction of departments as administrative units, thus breaking with the traditional division into provinces. Later on, the former province of Holland was further broken up into three smaller divisions, in order to banish all traces of the old provincial identity. The metric system was intended to replace the jumble of pounds, sacks, ells and other units of measure. In 1787 the Economic Branch of the Dutch Society of Sciences signalled the start of this initiative by publishing a booklet in which local units of linear measure were converted into standard units.31 In the 1797 plan for a new constitution, article

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834 reads: ‘All weights and measures shall be determined and drawn up according to a constant unit that is the same throughout the Republic.’32 The metre and the kilogram were introduced after an international meeting that took place in Paris in 1798, which was attended by the Dutchman Jan Hendrik van Swindon, a natural scientist and enlightened publicist.33 The need for these reforms arose from the desire for a rationally ordered world. The idea that order was just as important as freedom, equality or fraternity was voiced in 1796 by Arent van Soelen in his ‘Lecture arguing that there can be no happiness without order’.34 Order was also at the heart of the new attitude to nature. The Dutch Society of Sciences held contests for the best solution to the problem of classifying and describing Dutch flora.35 Gerrit van Olivier, the later husband of Otto’s Aunt Paulus, won at an advanced age a contest to systematise the classification of animals in Dutch. The result was published as the Fauna Belgica, a standard reference work in the tradition of Linnaeus.36 The yearning for order was also reflected in the new interest in agriculture. In 1778 the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture was founded with the objective of furthering the knowledge of agriculture through ‘work and experimentation’. As stated in the preface to the first volume of the yearbook, this interest had been stimulated by ‘the custom of spending summers in the country’. The owners of country houses therefore saw agriculture ‘as both a most pleasant and humane recreation and a useful exercise’. The members of this society were expected to immerse themselves in chemistry, botany, meteorology and other sciences that were beyond the understanding of the ordinary farmer but formed the ‘true foundations of agricultural knowledge’.37 The urge to create order was evidenced by the new practice of planting crops in long, straight rows. The human mind could be shaped and was therefore susceptible to improvement, just as governmental bodies could be perfected by human intervention. Was this also true of the human body? This was the question plaguing the medical profession. Improving upon the Human Body In April 1793 twelve-year-old Otto noted in his diary: ‘Papa and Mama have resolved to have Dr Stipriaan, with God’s help, inoculate my sister Dientje against the children’s pox, to prevent the natural children’s disease, which has already manifested itself outside The Hague. Because we were fortunately saved by this remedy, I hope that, with God’s grace,

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it will also help Dientje.’ Inoculation against smallpox, also known as ‘the children’s disease’, was indeed an important occasion, which is why Lambert van Eck documented it in a separate journal, as he had done nine years before when Otto and his younger sister Cootje had been inoculated. His opening words reveal what a momentous decision this was: ‘After long deliberation we have resolved to have Dr Stipriaan inoculate Dientje, since the disease has already manifested itself in nearby Haagweg and we no longer dare postpone it, which I should otherwise have preferred to do, however, because she does not yet have her eye-teeth and is only twenty-one months old.’38 The anxiety felt by Lambert and his wife was not unfounded. Smallpox was a dreaded disease, its most serious form proving fatal in one out of three cases. The mortality rate was even higher among children, and the younger the child, the smaller its chances of survival. In the worst cases, three days of high fever and headache are followed by the outbreak of a rash: red spots – appearing first on the face, hands and forearms, and then the chest – which turn into small blisters and later pustules that cover the entire body and emit a penetrating, sickly smell. The virus also attacks the internal organs, resulting in shock, coma and death. There are also lighter cases of the disease. Patients with strong immune systems show signs of improvement after ten days. Those who survive are immune from the disease for the rest of their lives, but are often marked for life by deep, pitted scars. The Netherlands experienced periodic smallpox epidemics. The mortality rate in Rotterdam, for example, shows nine peaks in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.39 The disease could be contracted only through direct contact with infected individuals, so epidemics were slow to spread. After cases of the illness were reported in Amsterdam, it could take more than a year for the disease to reach Rotterdam. In 1793, the year in which Dientje was inoculated, there was in fact an epidemic. Lambert’s notes show that he kept a close watch on the spread of the disease, which had begun to advance from The Hague. It was not until cases were reported close by, however, that the Van Ecks decided to have Dientje inoculated. Lambert’s hesitation was understandable. Inoculation was risky: a child could become seriously ill and even die, though the chance was smaller (1 in 200) than in cases of ‘natural’ infection. The decision to inoculate was a question of rationally calculating the probability of death with or without the inoculation. Inoculation against smallpox had been introduced to the Netherlands thirty years earlier. The technique, developed in Turkey, had been

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employed in England since 1721. The principle was simple. It was known that healthy people had a better chance than weak people of surviving the illness, and that those who had had a light case of the disease were immune from future contagion. Inoculation consisted in introducing a mild form of the infectant into the body through a small incision, thus inducing a light case of the disease in children who were considered old enough and strong enough to survive it. In London inoculation was first practised at the royal court. In the Netherlands, too, it was the stadholder and his courtiers who first had their children inoculated, initially by English doctors. The elite soon followed suit: the children in Otto’s milieu were generally inoculated, and their parents – including Lambert van Eck – often kept a journal of the procedure. An inoculation journal kept by Teding van Berkhout, the Van Ecks’ neighbour, has likewise been preserved.40 At first adolescents were also inoculated, as evidenced by a 1767 diary in which a girl from The Hague kept an account of her inoculation by Dr Sutherland, an Englishman.41 Sutherland led a public discussion of his method, thus sparking a heated debate between the advocates and opponents of inoculation.42 Strict precautionary measures were taken before and during inoculation. A special diet had to be followed, purgatives were administered regularly, and after inoculation, children were kept in quarantine for weeks, during which time both children and adults – including the parents – who had never had the disease were kept well away from them. These risks became much smaller after 1798, when the English doctor Edward Jenner discovered a safer method: inoculation with cowpox. A virus related to smallpox that occurred in cows proved to give the same protection, while producing only minor symptoms in humans. From 1800 onward this method was also employed in the Netherlands, and Dr van Stipriaan was again in the vanguard of its practitioners. In old age he wrote a treatise propagating this practice.43 Inoculation as a Moral Obligation As a form of preventive medicine, inoculation was soon accepted by the elite, who in general were increasingly inclined to avoid all possible risks. Those who had their children inoculated thereby demonstrated how progressive they were. Voltaire zealously championed the practice, for the decision whether or not to inoculate also revealed who was

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modern-minded. In Beaumarchais’s famous play Le Barbier de Seville – which appeared in Dutch translation in 1781 – Figaro, disparaging old Bartholo’s era (the late eighteenth century), exclaims: ‘What a barbarous age! What has it produced that we should praise it? Nonsense of every kind! Liberty of thought, the force of gravity, electricity and magnetism, universal toleration, inoculation, quinine, the Encyclopaedia.’ (Bearing in mind his readership, the Dutch translator added to this list the Economic Branch, an enlightened society whose members included many from the Van Ecks’ circle.) Thus inoculation was put in the same category as a host of new-fangled ‘inventions’, and those who wanted none of it were old-fashioned obscurants.44 Not everyone was convinced of the necessity – or indeed the moral rectitude – of inoculation. To begin with, Rousseau raised doubts in the progressive camp by asking in Emile if his brainchild should be inoculated. It would have big advantages, he writes, but it is better to let nature take its course and wait until the disease strikes, in hopes that the child will survive and henceforth be immune.45 Rousseau’s followers were left to agonise over the desirability of adhering to this principle. Acceptance of inoculation had nothing to do with Patriot or Orangist political preferences. Nevertheless, in the Netherlands more than elsewhere, there arose a religious debate between the supporters and opponents of inoculation. Was it right to take preventive measures against an illness traditionally viewed as a punishment sent by God? Inoculation also posed an ethical problem. Was it right to make children ill on purpose, even for their own good? Champions of the practice wielded rational arguments, but defended their viewpoint most forcibly on moral grounds. Benjamin Sowden, director of the Amsterdam Felix Meritis Society, spoke in 1792 of the ‘moral obligation’ of parents.46 The advocates of inoculation included Martinet – whose writings Otto read so intensively – who had written in his Katechismus that man was capable of eradicating sickness and pestilence ‘with God’s blessing’, giving as an example Europe’s success in ridding itself of the plague by means of the quarantine system.47 Experiments were also carried out on cattle, which were inoculated against animal diseases.48 In orthodox-Reformed circles, meanwhile, there was growing resistance to inoculation, which led some local authorities to prohibit the practice. Distrust also emerges from a satirical poem, posted in the streets of Rotterdam, which railed against a clergyman who had preached inoculation from the pulpit. The poem casts suspicion on inoculation, calling it ‘a work of darkness’.49 As early as 1768, it had been remarked

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Fig. 118. Frontispiece of De inënting, kluchtspel (Inoculation, A Farce) of 1768.

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that people reacted to the practice either with ‘hand-clapping cheers’ or ‘footlight jeers’.50 Dr Abraham van Stipriaan, the Van Ecks’ family physician, belonged to the former group, also as regards other medical innovations. On 5 March 1790, he delivered an address – to mark his acceptance of the lectureship in Delft – titled ‘Oration concerning the use of chemistry in general and its influence on medicine in particular’. There were, he thought, still many misunderstandings surrounding the new science of chemistry. Some saw its practitioners as gold-seekers, others as people who performed only ‘pointless tricks or illusions from a conjuror’s bag’. Van Stipriaan pointed out to his audience that in chemistry ‘a surprising number of discoveries’ were made daily, which in neighbouring countries had promoted many industries and made their citizens ‘happier in all respects’. Another, equally important argument was the role of chemistry in providing ‘cheaper and more powerful remedies’. In short: ‘Who would not feel a stab of joy in his heart when he grasps the full value of this science, viewed in its entirety? Who would not exalt it above many others?’ The modern physician, armed with chemistry, ‘let fly at the common enemy’. The fight against disease, concluded Van Stipriaan, had already been so successful that the doctor ‘often contested death’s prey’.51 Somewhat later the physician Assuerus Doijer supplied his ‘Sermon in praise of cowpox inoculation’ with a depiction of arrows, symbolising smallpox, bouncing off the shield of medical science.52 Medicine advanced not only through scientific discoveries but also through better and more systematic observations. In 1769 the versatile Martinet suggested that every province compile its medical observations on various illnesses.53 Seven years later, a Physical and Medical Correspondence Society was established in The Hague with a view to realising this goal. This Society did in fact succeed in discovering fixed patterns in smallpox epidemics. After the Batavian Revolution, the ideas prevailing in Lambert van Eck’s circle were adopted by the authorities. The Constitution of 1798 stated that the government was to ‘extend its care, through salutary laws, to everything which, in general, can promote the health of the population, removing as much as possible all impediments’. And the brief of the Education Minister came to include the following: ‘He shall extend his care to everything conducive to the promotion of the health and physical well-being of the Batavian People.’54 Health care thus became the responsibility of the state.

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Fig. 119. Treatise advocating inoculation with cowpox, by Assuerus Doijer; written in 1808, published in 1823.

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Medical science had taken a step forward, but Otto’s parents had yet another problem. The decision as to whether or not to inoculate was fraught with consequences either way. That Lambert and Charlotte van Eck wrestled with the dilemma is apparent from the letter of condolence sent by Otto’s aunt after the death of their daughter Annemietje, whom they had decided not to have inoculated: ‘Imagine you had had her inoculated and she had died, you would never stop blaming yourselves; now you might say, if only I had had her inoculated, but everyone advised you against it. If, however, you had decided for it and she had died, you would have reproached yourselves; but you did not do it, and thought you were doing the best for her – you could not have done more.’55 Both the rational and the moral arguments in favour of inoculation found a sympathetic listener in Otto, as emerges from the second entry written after the inoculation of his sister Dientje: ‘In the afternoon we had a visit from Dr Groen of The Hague, who said (as Dr Stipriaan did this morning), that my sister’s poxes are healing well. Oh, how she is thriving, and how much better it is to inoculate than [to risk] the dreadful natural children’s disease (to which we lost a sister).’ That last comment refers to the premature death of Otto’s little sister Annemietje, which Lambert recorded in detail in his inoculation journal. While Otto and Cootje were undergoing inoculation by Dr Muilman at the Van Ecks’ house in The Hague, their younger sister Annemietje was staying with her grandparents (the Vockestaerts) in Delft, because she was thought too young to be inoculated. While the two older children were recovering nicely – even Floris Voltelen, a professor from Leiden, came to see them and ‘gave assurances that everything was going well’ – Annemietje contracted the ‘natural children’s disease’. From Leiden, Voltelen gave medical advice and reassured his friend that he had made the right decision.56 He told Lambert not to ‘blame or castigate’ himself. In the meantime, Voltelen could only agree that the youngest girl was in grave danger: ‘But alas! All remedies apart from inoculation are, not infrequently, ineffective against this disease when one has a bad case of it.’ The little girl was given medicines, by means of which ‘nature wanted at first to be helped’ but which in the end were of no avail. As Lambert wrote, his daughter was taken back by God, where ‘to be sure, she enjoys a much better fate than the best upbringing we could ever

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have given her in this world of grief and misery, where our temporal happiness is so uncertain and our eternal concerns are exposed to so many dangers’. In closing Lambert wrote: Once, when we were speaking to one another of our sorrow, the full conviction of this caused the following lines to flow from my heart: ‘Dearest Annemietje, beloved child, favourite of God, who has thus taken you away from your lamentable, worldly fate. If our children were to lay eyes on this story, I do not doubt that it would serve to soften their hearts and make them prefer inoculation to the danger of the dreaded natural smallpox, which we so much wanted to spare this child, too, through inoculation, but were advised against it, owing to her young age and the danger of teething and seizures, deciding – not without having consulted the doctor – that we had to leave her fate to Providence, who saw fit to ordain this unhappy outcome.

Lambert van Eck was wrestling with a modern problem: because he had made the decision not to have his daughter inoculated, was he now responsible for her death? Stoic-Christian resignation, traditionally the appropriate attitude, had now become impossible. His solution to this problem of conscience was likewise modern: he held the doctor responsible. The general optimism that prevailed in the Van Ecks’ circle was not fundamentally shaken by this death. Cousin Mackay closed her letter of condolence with the comforting wish that the other two children, Otto and Doortje, ‘be preserved and spared, so that they may still become useful members of society’.57

CHAPTER NINE

REVOLUTION IN THE NETHERLANDS The Beginning of an Unknown Era By the time you receive this, you will have heard that the former king of France has already forsaken this world. How little one can depend on earthly glory, since it saves us from nothing, and how much more preferable it is to be born to a lesser station and to live within it in such a way that one can give an adequate account of one’s doings, and in his circle serve and promote as much as possible the health and welfare of his loved ones and himself. The tidings of this execution move us, and cause us much pain, because we imagined he would be shown mercy, but no, he was beheaded on Monday evening at seven o’clock.

This reaction to the execution of King Louis XVI dates from 26 January 1793; it was written by Françoise Vockestaert, the wife of Pieter Paulus, in a letter to her nephew Otto van Eck.1 Both her letter and Otto’s reply have been preserved, for the day after this shocking news reached De Ruit, he noted the following in his diary: ‘This morning I completed none of my lessons, because I had to write a letter to Uncle and Aunt Paulus, which had to be finished before ten o’clock.’ Subsequent entries show that Otto was also upset, but not so much by the French king’s dramatic demise as by the disruption his aunt’s letter caused to his schedule, for answering it took so much time that he fell behind with his homework: ‘Then I started my Latin lesson in a vexed state of mind, because it was too much, it seemed to me, and it cost me more effort than usual, because Papa couldn’t help me.’ Otto had more important things to worry about than the tragic fate of Louis Capet or the tense political situation. The day his aunt’s letter arrived, Otto had lost his watch and, to add to his troubles, his mother had reprimanded him several times for behaving badly: ‘Mama tells me, to my regret, that afterwards she saw me twice in a foul mood and also that it was indiscreet of me to read a letter that could be of no interest to me.’ The letter that Otto had so indiscreetly perused was probably also from his aunt and possibly contained more news about the execution – news thought unsuitable for children.

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Fig. 120. The beheading of Louis XVI. From De gruwel der verwoestinge of Vrankryks moord- en treurtoneel, 1794.

The terrible end of the former king of France troubled the hearts of many Dutchmen – Orangists and Patriots alike. This execution no doubt made a deep impression on Lambert van Eck, who only five years before had walked around the palace at Versailles and had seen the king several times at close quarters. Lambert must have felt even more compassion for his French friends and acquaintances guillotined during the Reign of Terror, the radical phase of the Revolution. Of the many politicians Lambert van Eck and Pieter Paulus had met in 1788 in Paris and Versailles in their attempt to seek support for a Patriot uprising in the Netherlands, many had initially embraced the revolution. The Comte de Montmorin – the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Pieter Paulus’s most important contact – had even joined the Jacobins, the most radical political society. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to death in 1792 merely because he was an aristocrat and had held government office during the Ancien Régime. Loménie de

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Fig. 121. Mirabeau ascending to heaven. From Hommage à Mirabeau, 1792.

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Fig. 122. Mirabeau’s books, including Aux Bataves. Detail of Hommage à Mirabeau, 1792.

Fig. 123. Rousseau’s grave on the island at Ermenonville. Detail of Hommage à Mirabeau, 1792.

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Brienne, a former government leader, suffered a fatal stroke shortly after his arrest and was thus spared the guillotine. The death of the Comte de Mirabeau was shrouded in so much mystery that many suspected that this troublesome revolutionary had been poisoned. The most dramatic execution was that of Beatrice Choiseuil, Comtesse de Grammont, whom Lambert had found most charming. It was her hospitality that had enabled Lambert and his brother-in-law to meet so many Dutch exiles and French politicians during their stay in Paris. She was conducted to the scaffold on 22 April 1794, a year after Louis’s beheading. Other of Lambert’s friends and acquaintances had fled in the nick of time, such as the Marquise de Champcenetz and Charles, Duc de Castries, the former Naval Minister. In the end, even Lambert’s great hero Lafayette was forced to pack his bags, despite the key role he had played in the revolution as commander of the Paris National Guard. Dutch newspapers kept a close watch on the course taken by the French Revolution. Essays and illustrated chronicles also appeared in book form, such as that of Martinus Stuart, known to Otto as the author of a history of Rome (Romeinsche geschiedenis). Once the genie had been let out of the bottle, the violence that erupted in France had a mitigating influence on the course taken by the Batavian Revolution in the Republic of the United Netherlands in 1795. Pamphlets, pointing disapprovingly at the French example, warned against bloodthirsty excesses. Thus the anonymous author of the ‘Fatherlandish memorandum or well-intended recollections of this interim era’ warned of the dangers, saying that while the ‘so multiform French revolution’ had indeed striven towards good, the accompanying violence had meanwhile plunged the country into mourning’.2 In a treatise published in 1793, Pieter Paulus also emphatically distanced himself from those events, ‘which have indisputably tainted the revolution in France and filled the sensitive hearts of all with woe’.3 In his opinion, this state of affairs underscored how important it was to agree before taking action on the ‘fundamental principles’ on which the new society was to be grounded. As will become apparent, Pieter Paulus was as good as his word: immediately after the revolution in the Netherlands, it took him but a week to produce his Verklaring van de rechten van de mensch en van de burger (Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen). The fact that the Batavian Revolution was much less violent than its French predecessor is due to the lessons learned by both Dutch and French revolutionaries.

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Fig. 124. The news. From Economische liedjes (1791) by B. Wolff and A. Deken.

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Fig. 125. Paradise Lost. Willem V and his family being driven out of Holland, 1795.

The Batavian Revolution of 1795 succeeded thanks to French intervention, which Pieter Paulus had requested in vain seven years earlier in Paris. At that time he could not have imagined the course the revolution was to take, for the French did not come to save their Dutch comrades, but rather to occupy the country. All the same, they were welcomed as liberators by the former Patriots. Orangist regents had to step aside, of course, but the local changes of government mostly passed off without incident. Several heavyweights of the old regime were temporarily imprisoned. Van de Spiegel, the former Grand Pensionary, was kept in solitary confinement in Huis ten Bosch, the Hague palace that had been empty since Stadholder Willem V had fled to England. A number of Orangists had followed the Prince’s example and gone into exile in England or Germany. Lambert van Eck himself led the velvet revolution in The Hague, after French troops had marched in on 21 January 1795.4 He formed a committee of citizens, with himself as chairman, and as soon as the incumbent administration had stepped down, he called a meeting in the Kloosterkerk. Van Eck, emphasising that he was merely a ‘citizen’ like everyone else, mounted the pulpit to suggest the formation of a government ‘founded on the rights of freedom and equality’. He then

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Fig. 126. The arrest of the Grand Pensionary Van den Spiegel. From C. Rogge’s Tafereel van de geschiedenis der jongste omwenteling, 1796.

read out a list of candidates for the town council and the magistrates’ court, after which the audience began to clap and shout. Among the new town councillors were several old regents, including Adriaan van der Goes, a former burgomaster, and several wealthy individuals – such as Jan Jacob Cau, a man of independent means – but joining their ranks were a plumber, a groats-seller, a glazier, a surveyor and a watchmaker. To be sure, the observation made by the Orangist diarist Magdalena van Schinne was grossly exaggerated – ‘in our cities, there are among those who replaced the regents bankrupted individuals, sons of executioners, many who had narrowly escaped the noose’ – but her assessment was correct inasmuch as the social relations of the Ancien Régime had been ruptured. She was certainly not the only one confused by the change of power: ‘the total revolution that is taking place on both a large and a small scale offers rather strange perspectives; it is the upside-down world map, usually so amusing to children, which aptly captures the situation’.5 The revolution did not proceed so smoothly everywhere. In Utrecht and Woensel, for example, there was some vandalism to houses, churches and graves.6

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Fig. 127. Desecration of the tomb of the Countess of Solms at Utrecht, 1795.

After new town councils were elected in the province of Holland, their members sent representatives to The Hague; as the Assembly of the Provisional Representatives of the People of Holland, they formed the interim provincial government that replaced the old States of Holland. Many of those who had disappeared from the arena in 1787 now returned to politics.7 Lambert van Eck was chosen to represent The Hague in the new government of the province of Holland, as were Jacob van Vredenburch and Jacob Reepmaker. On 1 May 1795 an executive committee was formed: the Committee of General Vigilance. One of its members was Gerrit van Olivier, another of Lambert’s old acquaintances. A Committee for Naval Affairs was also established; Pieter Paulus became its chairman and Lambert van Eck its secretary, a salaried position he no doubt owed to his influential brother-in-law. Pieter Paulus was also elected president of the provincial assembly of Holland, a post comparable to that of the former Grand Pensionary.

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Fig. 128. The Removal Committee. Graves desecrated by the Removal Committee. Satirical print from David Hess’s Hollandia regenerata, 1796.

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One of the first achievements of the Provisional Representatives of Holland was to create a committee charged with drafting a declaration of human rights, which was to form the basis of the new political order. Pieter Paulus, its chairman, energetically set to work. Within a week he had put the desired declaration in writing, and it was ratified on 31 January 1795. The ‘Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen’ applied only to the province of Holland, but the other provinces soon produced nearly identical declarations. The birth of this document – in essence the basis of the present Dutch constitution – was astoundingly quick, but its incubation period had been rather longer. Indeed, Paulus had been working for years on a blueprint in the form of his ‘Treatise on equality’, which had been published in 1793.8 This treatise – which, as we have seen, Otto studied intensively – numbers no fewer than 216 pages and discusses the most important political theorists of the day, including Rousseau, Paine, Sieyes, Mackintosh and Burke. Paulus considered Rousseau the most important of these thinkers, as emerges from the motto prefixed to his work – a long quotation from Rousseau’s treatise on human inequality – and from the many passages devoted to his thinking. Even so, Paulus did not agree with Rousseau on a number of essential points. Rousseau’s state of nature, in which evil is supposedly nonexistent, was considered unrealistic by Paulus, who had discovered – when he consulted the literature and numerous travel accounts in his library – that such societies cannot be found anywhere. Rousseau, he said, had invented a ‘wild man’ to underpin his own ideas. In Rousseau’s view, moreover, humans were no different from animals, but Paulus considered this notion completely inconsistent with the philosopher’s later ‘excellent work’, Du contrat social (The Social Contract), his blueprint for the ideal society. In this work, too, Paulus detected numerous contradictions. On the one hand, Rousseau stresses that, in this new society, man ‘may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before’. On the other hand, he emphasises the importance of popular sovereignty: the subordination of the individual to the ‘supreme direction of the general will’. Rousseau’s solution to this dilemma – the return to a state of nature, in which individual interests and the common good coincide – is dismissed by Paulus as unrealistic. Such societies have never existed and are, in any case, unfeasible. Paulus proposed a compromise: in social matters, individuals must bow to the general will, and in this sense people have a number of obligations towards the society in which they live. Yet he also underlined the importance of defending the rights of the indi-

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vidual, and in this respect the Dutch declaration of human rights – as adopted under Paulus’s chairmanship two years after the publication of his ‘Treatise on equality’ – differs from its French and American predecessors. The importance attached to this concept, namely that society must uphold the rights of the individual where these conflict with the claims of the collective, also emerges from the order in which the articles are presented.9 The first two articles largely correspond to the wording in the American Declaration of Independence: ‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. In the Dutch declaration, however, the articles immediately following this define a number of civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and religion, and even the right not to hold religious beliefs. These liberties come much later in the French declaration, and are accompanied by all sorts of legal restrictions. In France, freedom of religion is permitted only up to a point: one is allowed to entertain ‘notions, even if of a religious nature . . . provided that their expression does not disturb the peace as laid down by law’.10 The ‘general will’ ideally underlying all legislation and to which everyone must submit is not mentioned in the Dutch declaration until after a number of stipulations limiting the collective’s power over the individual. Furthermore, the Dutch system of justice – unlike its French and American models – is founded on Christian principles. The equality of all people was the logical result of the biblical command to ‘love thy neighbour’: the Golden Rule of ‘Do not do to others what you would not wish to have done to you’, which Paulus presented in his 1793 Treatise, is included in the third article of the Dutch declaration of human rights.11 Rather Decent People At first the Batavian Revolution took place locally: town councils were replaced by revolutionary committees; later on the provincial States were replaced by assemblies of representatives of these new local governments. The States General initially underwent only a change of personnel: Orangists were forced to make way for Batavian revolutionaries. With its new complement of staff, the States General planned to continue functioning for another year under the chairmanship of Pieter Paulus.

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Fig. 129. The National Assembly. From C. Rogge’s Tafereel van de geschiedenis der jongste omwenteling, 1796.

Naturally the stadholderate was immediately abolished, as was the Council of State, which was replaced by a committee whose first task was to draw up a plan for convening a democratically elected National Assembly. The country was divided into electoral districts, from which delegates were chosen. All Dutchmen over the age of twenty were allowed to vote; only domestic servants and recipients of public charity were excluded. Voters were required, however, to declare their disapproval of hereditary office, which was meant to keep Orangists away from the polls. After nation-wide elections, the National Assembly met for the first time on 1 March 1796 in the former ballroom of the Princes of Orange in the Binnenhof. The delegates had deliberately avoided the traditional meeting place of the States General, but the new location was not ideal. To break more pointedly with the past, they would have preferred to erect a new building with a modern, classicist façade, but there were insufficient funds for this project. Pieter Paulus was unanimously elected chairman. This was mainly a symbolic gesture, since the chairmanship rotated every two weeks.

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In the circles of the previously quoted Magdalena van Schinne, one could breathe a sigh of relief: ‘The election of the National Assembly has been more successful than expected, for two-thirds of its members are rather decent people.’12 Most of the members of this house of representatives – the first in history to be elected according to the principle of universal male suffrage – came from the upper middle classes. Otherwise it was a fairly mixed group. The Assembly included not only ordinary citizens who had won their spurs in the Patriot movement – such as Pieter Vreede, Bernardus Bosch and Ysbrand van Hamelsveld – but also descendants of the old regents’ families (provided they had embraced the revolutionary ideal), such as the Frisian representative Coert Lambert van Beyma, who wore a red sash to meetings as a sign of his radicalism. Lambert van Eck had known Van Beyma since their time at university. Other friends and acquaintances of the Van Ecks also took their places on the benches that day, including W.H. Teding van Berkhout, the two sons of the Rotterdam bailiff Paulus Gevers and even G.C.C. Vatebender, Otto’s teacher. These chosen representatives of the people went to The Hague with great expectations as well as feelings of uncertainty. Lambert’s friend Teding van Berkhout began a political diary, which he opened by saying that he would have preferred to remain at his country estate of Pasgeld, but did not want to shirk his public duty. Indeed, he declared his determination ‘to contribute to the best of my ability and as an honest man to the welfare of my fatherland’.13 It was with some reluctance that Lambert van Eck joined the assembly on 12 October 1796 to replace a deceased member. His attempt to decline the honour – protesting that his work for the Committee for Naval Affairs would suffer as a result – was politely brushed aside.14 From this time on, the minutes of the meetings sketch a picture of Lambert as a practising politician. In this capacity he had to do without the support of his brother-in-law Paulus, who had been his adviser since their student days, for shortly after chairing the first meeting of the National Assembly, Paulus became seriously ill. . . . or else die at our posts! The Dordrecht clergyman Paulus Bosveld, a member of the National Assembly, wrote to his friend Cornelis de Gijselaar on 13 March 1796, giving him a detailed account of Paulus’s condition and the

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Fig. 130. Lambert van Eck, silhouette as a representative of the people. From C. Rogge’s Geschiedenis der Staatsregeling voor het Bataafsche volk, 1799.

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apparent cause of his illness: the newly instituted ritual – demanded by the principle of equality – that followed upon Paulus’s installation as chairman: Paulus is still severely ill, and has been dangerously close to death with a wasting fever. On 1 March, the day of the installation of the National Assembly, the wind was blowing hard from the north-east. As president he was escorted home in style by most of the members. Neatly dressed and decorated with the tri-coloured sash (but wearing no hat), and flanked by two rows of soldiers, he descended the large staircase of the former Stadholder’s Quarters . . . Walking beside him, we put our hats on, but he continued – bare-headed and greeting people – down the Vijverberg, Korte Vijverberg and on to the Rotterdam boarding-house. I had little fear for myself, being used to the cold as I am, but it was only to be expected that he would suffer from it, since he had not been looking well lately. He held out until Friday, however, when he fell ill, started to run a fever, and eventually lost consciousness. It seems that emetics, bloodlettings, Spanish flies and such interventions have arrested the disease, but he is said to be very weak.15

Bosveld’s assessment of the situation was overly optimistic, because four days later Pieter Paulus died of his ‘wasting fever’, which proved to be pneumonia. The news of his death stunned the members of the National Assembly. The new chairman opened the session with the official statement that ‘until the time of his death, Citizen Pieter Paulus never ceased to serve the fatherland and freedom’. At this point all the members cried out ‘sadly, with one voice: “this we declare”’. The lawyer and former exile Bernardus Blok then proposed to honour the deceased by having all 144 members of the National Assembly, as well as the members of the recently founded committees, walk in the funeral procession. His fellow lawyer Jacob Hahn objected to this proposal, arguing that ‘the ideas Paulus professed in his lifetime [were] completely at odds with such ceremony’. Moreover, that morning he had spoken to one of Paulus’s next of kin, presumably Lambert van Eck, who had told him that the funeral would be kept simple. It was their intention ‘to commit the body to the earth in the greatest possible silence and simplicity’. After much discussion, the assembly appointed a committee of twelve to offer the widow their condolences and to inform her of the statement made in the Assembly, namely that Paulus had served his country until the end. Hahn’s arguments had evidently decided the matter: ‘The sorrowful silence that prevailed in the Assembly pays greater tribute to the man’s services than outward ceremonies, of which Paulus had such an abhorrence in his lifetime.’16

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The shock caused by Paulus’s death also resounds in a number of diary entries from that time. Teding van Berkhout recorded a conversation he had the day before Paulus’s death with Lambert van Eck, who had held out hope that Paulus would recover. However, the next day, noticing that the Van Ecks’ shutters were closed, he began to fear the worst and soon received word of Paulus’s death. Two days later he heard that Paulus had been buried ‘without ceremony’ in Scheveningen at the new cemetery Ter Navolging, ‘and so remained true to his conviction that it is unhealthy to inter bodies in churches’.17 Paulus’s death was mentioned both in the diary of his nephew Otto and in that of his attending physician, Dr Groen. On 13 March, Groen wrote of his dismay at the tragic course taken by the illness of this particular patient. His feelings of compassion were so strong that he described Paulus’s death a few days later as an ‘accident that befell me’. His consternation appears to have arisen, however, not so much from sympathy with the patient as from concern for his own reputation. In those days the worst thing that could happen to a physician was to lose a patient like Paulus, a man in the prime of his life and at the centre of public attention. Indeed, on 13 March, Groen wrote that the outcome of Paulus’s illness could damage his ‘worldly interests’. As he later confessed with remorse to a certain Reverend J., he had been unable to resist the temptation to exonerate himself: ‘I could not rest before telling him that I had only ever lost two patients to the wasting fever then widely prevalent, and had had a mere five deaths in my practice this year.’ After confessing to this act of vanity, Groen treated future readers of his diary to some comic relief: Over five weeks ago Miss Voet, the daughter of the famous Eusebius Voet, paid a friendly visit to Miss Mol. They were discussing current affairs, and the subject of P. Paulus came up. Miss Voet remarked that she couldn’t stand the sight of the man, much less be in the same house with him. She went home, contracted a wasting fever the very next day, died, and was buried in the cemetery at Scheveningen. A few days later Paulus, felled by a similar fever, also died, and – lo and behold – was buried next to Miss Voet.18

This anecdote about the pietistic Miss Voet shows that not everyone worshipped Paulus. Despite the deluge of elegies, such as the Lijkcypressen ter nagedachtenis van P. Paulus (Memorial cypresses in honour of P. Paulus),19 his death unleashed other reactions as well. Clearly, the grief felt by many was not shared by all, certainly not by his old Orangist enemies. It is in those circles that we must seek the authors of such verses on the demise of Pieter Paulus as the following epitaph:

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chapter nine In this ground he lies and rots, The head of the new Patriots! The urge to rule doth dissipate! Thus Pieter Paulus met his fate!20

In Paris the news of Paulus’s death came like a bolt from the blue. It was to France’s advantage to have a stable sister republic. Losing Paulus – in French eyes the only Dutch politician capable of preserving unity – was a cause of great concern. This fact, combined with the time of his death – just after his installation as chairman of the National Assembly – led in France to rumours that he had been poisoned by his political opponents. In fact there is no evidence anywhere to suggest this, not even in the diary of his attending physician.21 The true circumstances of Pieter Paulus’s illness are to be found in Otto’s diary, in a short entry written on 17 March 1796. Otto sought the cause of his uncle’s sad fate in the burden of political responsibility. Because Mama spent a lot of time with Aunt Paulus this week and so could not follow my lessons all the time, I neglected my diary and might possibly have skipped today as well, were I not compelled to record a remarkable event. This morning at nine o’clock we received the sad news that Uncle Paulus, who had been labouring under a wasting fever for the past few days, died because his strength failed him. This is a great loss, for Aunt and the rest of the family as well as for the country, but it was the will of God, who surely does nothing but good and will now reward him for his active life, which he literally sacrificed for his fatherland.

Françoise Vockestaert, Paulus’s widow, shared her nephew’s opinion; she believed that her husband had sacrificed his health on the altar of national interest. The twelve members of the National Assembly delegated to commiserate with Paulus’s widow were sent away with the excuse that she was too distraught to receive such a weighty committee.22 One year later, when the First National Assembly was commemorated to the roar of cannon, her emotions were rekindled, and she gave vent to her feelings in a letter to Otto: ‘Oh, dear Ot, how I, you, the country and all those concerned with Uncle must miss the man, of whom I can say with complete conviction that he sacrificed himself for his fellow human beings, judging nothing too onerous, if only he saw the country happy – ah, take that good man as your example, follow in his footsteps.’ Perhaps Françoise Vockestaert was also thinking back to that bleak day when her husband – true to his egalitarian principles – had walked home bare-headed from the inauguration ceremony, greeting all and

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Fig. 131. Monument to Pieter Paulus, 1797.

sundry. Paulus Bosveld was convinced, after all, that it was this courtesy that had cost Pieter Paulus his life, and it was this very eye-witness who had paid her a visit the previous evening to reminisce with her. Indeed, Pieter Paulus himself had declared in his opening speech to the First National Assembly that his exertions the previous year had left him physically drained.23 Thanks to his premature passing, Pieter Paulus went down in history as the politician who rose above party loyalties and would have been able, had he lived, to preserve unity. Both his opening address and his earlier writings reveal how much importance he attached to concord among the members of the national government and what high hopes he had for solidarity. The members of this national government were expected to put aside their personal interests (and those of their native cities and provinces) and to base their decisions exclusively on a common goal: the promotion of the nation’s well-being and the prosperity of all its inhabitants. Paulus was convinced that, after a long history

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of conflict and discord, the ‘dawn of unity and indivisibility of the national government’ had come at last. One important precondition to such harmony – a non-violent revolution – had already been fulfilled: ‘Fortunate, yea thrice fortunate are we to have attained this’ without ‘being defiled by the horrific turn of events caused by those scenes of massacre which – alas! – have tarnished [the revolutions] of other countries.’ He had also hoped to put an end to the endless deliberations, stalemates and legislative powerlessness that had characterised the old governing bodies. This new decisiveness was apparent from the rapid pace at which work had been accomplished in the months preceding the convening of the National Assembly: ‘Then, in little over a year, we were able to accomplish more in this regard than in the previous two centuries.’ He gave as an example the administrative reforms implemented throughout the country, the activities of the Committee for Naval Affairs – which had managed in a mere nine months to equip all seventy-seven ships for the purpose of mounting a defence against England – and the swiftness with which the National Assembly had been formed. Paulus had closed his address by urging the members to do their utmost ‘to save the fatherland or die at our posts!’24 Paulus, as we know, died almost at once, but how did Lambert van Eck and the other members of the National Assembly fare? The minutes of the sessions reveal that they lacked neither passion nor energy. Stormy Meetings and Time Constraints In 1795 Dutch politics changed drastically in both content and style. Even though this period is one of the most dynamic in the history of the Netherlands, up to now only a handful of historians have shown more than a passing interest in it. Those wishing to delve into the Batavian era must thread their way through masses of archival material, newspapers and other printed matter, of which an unprecedented volume was generated at precisely this time. Starting in 1795, moreover, a new and remarkable source appeared: the minutes of the sessions of the National Assembly. Unlike the meetings of the States General, those of the National Assembly were open to the public, who jumped at this opportunity to witness their government in action. The minutes regularly mention a balcony packed with spectators, from whom cries of approval or shouts

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Fig. 132. The committee of public information. From David Hess’s Hollandia regenerata, 1796.

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of dismay were frequently heard. The publication of the minutes in the weekly ‘Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Assembly’ was also new in Dutch politics. The literate who could afford to buy these newssheets – or those with an opportunity to peruse them or hear them read aloud in bookshops, libraries or societies – could keep tabs on the new representatives and even visualise their body language: ‘Here the speaker raised his eyes and hands towards heaven.’25 Some of the representatives were long-winded, to be sure, and their jargon was not always easy to comprehend, but they generally spoke clearly and without wasting words. Time – especially the shortage thereof – was a recurring topic of discussion. The magnitude of the operation – a complete administrative revamping of the Republic – and its scheduled completion were reason enough to make the most of every minute: additional evening sessions were the rule rather than the exception and sometimes lasted throughout the night; meetings were held all day Saturday and even on the occasional Sunday. At the instigation of Otto’s teacher Vatebender, a committee was appointed to draft a plan ‘to ration the National Time with regard to the activities of this Assembly’.26 Even the discussion as to whether all the members, or only a small delegation, should attend Pieter Paulus’s funeral was cut short for reasons of efficiency: four representatives declared themselves ‘to be against further deliberation on the subject, as futile and a waste of time’.27 Even so, such phrases as ‘I shall refrain from needless repetition’, with which Lambert van Eck once began a speech, soon became clichés. In the ‘New political dictionary’, the expression ‘to save the national time’ was explained as follows: ‘This is a polite way of saying “much talk and no action”.’28 Such time constraints also had repercussions on Otto, who often wrote in his diary about his father’s prolonged absence: ‘We just received a note from Papa saying that he cannot come home, as he must remain the whole night at the Assembly, so tonight we’re alone again.’ Otto was not supposed to complain, however, for he, too, was expected to contribute in his own way to a better future: ‘Papa didn’t come home last night and perhaps won’t come home tonight either. How horrid it is that he has his hands so full, but no, I mustn’t say that, since he’s working for the fatherland, and what is more, for freedom – at least in the history of Rome that I’m reading, I can find nothing to make me think otherwise.’29 The odd moments Otto spent with his father became rare bright spots: ‘Because it gets dark so early, Papa spends most nights in The Hague; nevertheless, I’m now at his side, writing

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in my diary. I find that I deal with my tasks much more pleasantly and easily in his presence than otherwise, even though (I may say freely) I have no need of his exhortations to diligence.’30 It was at this time that Otto began to worry about his father’s health. Lambert’s forty-first birthday on 11 November 1796 prompted Otto to ponder the risks his father was taking by not sparing himself: When I got up, I went to his room and was happy to find him alone there. I could pour my heart out to him so much better and express my thankfulness to God, who has again spared him for us for a long time. By working too much he might easily have exhausted his strength and succumbed, as Uncle Paulus did this year. How much we are indebted to God. At last I promised him that I would do my best, at least so as not to shorten his life even more by giving him reason for displeasure or anger.

Otto was silent on the nature of Lambert’s activities in The Hague. His diary reveals nothing about the debates his father took part in, the views he held, the conflicts he was involved in, the concessions he made, the cliques he formed, or the frustrations he inevitably encountered as he attempted to put his ideals into practice. A few of Lambert’s political ideals are in fact mentioned in Otto’s diary, but only in passing, worked out at a micro level. Several years earlier, for instance, when Otto had asked for a humming top, his wish had not been granted because the toy in question was manufactured in England: ‘What a pity it is that the thing is completely foreign and so does not provide our craftsmen with a livelihood.’31 Such were the views – inspired by the ideals of the Economic Branch – which Lambert brought to the National Assembly. He was convinced that buying more products manufactured domestically would boost Dutch industry. Imported goods were to be discouraged, in his view, and it should be forbidden for shopkeepers to pass off foreign merchandise as Dutch. This proposal received broad support, but Lambert’s later plan to oblige soldiers and civil servants to wear clothing made of Dutch fabric met with resistance, because it was considered an infringement of personal freedom. Later on, he argued in vain for an embargo on chicory.32 Lambert’s ideas on reforming the criminal justice system are echoed in a sympathetic passage in Otto’s diary, written on 5 April 1794, when his father was still a councillor at the Court of Brabant. That day, Otto wrote, his father had come home shattered and depressed, having been compelled to interrogate people who were certain to be condemned

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to death. Otto’s assessment of the situation was childishly simple: if there were no murderers, society would be a lot more humane, for ‘then one would not hear so much about punishing people in public, and even executing them, which is a disgrace to humanity’. That last comment reveals the Van Ecks’ aversion to such common punishments as flogging and hanging, and their disapproval of torture as a means of extracting confessions. The same spirit emanates from Lambert’s article on ‘criminal justice’, written for his encyclopaedia years earlier: ‘Now, more than ever before, efforts are being made to bring [ justice] to a higher level of perfection’, in particular by imposing the ‘mildest possible punishments’.33 During a debate in the National Assembly on 24 February 1797, Lambert championed the controversial proposal to include the constitutional abolition of the rack. He was the first to take the floor, saying quite simply that the implementation of this reform ought to be a matter of course. He was followed by others, however – among them Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck – who opposed torture but thought that the justice system had not yet reached the point at which it could do without this means of coercion. Schimmelpenninck reproached Van Eck for arguing in ‘a philosophical vein’.34 Unfortunately, Otto’s diary does not provide us with any more background to Lambert’s political views. While it is true that Otto read the newspaper every day and undoubtedly heard more than enough about the vicissitudes of Dutch politics from his parents and the visitors to their house, his diary was clearly not intended to convey such information. Instead, as we have seen, it served other purposes, being a day-book of his heart, an aid in becoming a better person, and a means of instilling in him standards and values which would ensure that his actions were always guided, as he once noted, by the following precept: ‘To love God above all else and always to treat my fellow human beings as I should wish to be treated by them.’35 Since Paulus’s ‘Declaration of the rights of man’ of January 1795, this precept had been established as the principal virtue to which all Dutch people should aspire. Indeed, such was its importance in Lambert’s view that, during his chairmanship, he proposed its inclusion in the new constitution. On 6 January 1797, Lambert van Eck was elected chairman of the National Assembly. In his acceptance speech he begged his listeners to bear with his inexperience and ‘poor suitability as a leader’, since he was ‘accustomed only to follow’. Nevertheless, he was delighted as chairman to do his part to further ‘the happiness of present and future generations’. He closed his speech by expressing the hope that the

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coming debates on the new constitution would be harmonious, ‘that the spirit of wisdom and order prevail, that no suspicion or dissension destroy our so urgently needed concord and disappoint the expectation of good in the country, that we remain ever mindful of the divine love which will, I hope, safeguard, also in our forthcoming constitution, our Christian feelings to treat and love one another and our fellow human beings as we would ourselves!’36 If an atmosphere of solidarity had in fact prevailed in the National Assembly, all sign of it vanished as soon as the new constitution came up for discussion. In the long debates on which provisions should or should not be included, the federalists, who hoped to preserve provincial sovereignty, clashed with the unitarists, who favoured a strong central government. This conflict would lead in 1798 to a coup d’état carried out by the unitarists, in the wake of which Lambert van Eck and a number of other former revolutionaries were imprisoned. But things had not yet come to this pass when Lambert van Eck sparked a debate on the spirit in which the country should be governed.37 He began his speech with a plea for the need to formulate basic rights – in this sense he was the intellectual heir of his late brother-in-law Pieter Paulus: ‘Surely it cannot but do honour to an enlightened government openly to confirm the fundamental principles that constitute the basis of the government to which the implementation of those principles has been entrusted. Therefore, founding the government of the Netherlands on the eternal, immutable principles of universal civil rights, as taught in the school of true enlightenment, must be ascribed to the noble aim of ensuring the well-being of society and perpetuating the enjoyment and practice of the irrefutable rights and duties of every citizen.’ Van Eck endorsed the principles formulated in the ‘Declaration of the rights of man’, namely ‘the chief features of our system of social well-being’. He felt, however, that something was missing: ‘Yet among the principles that will secure the well-being of our new state, religion – which I take to mean the acknowledgement of our connection to, and dependence upon, the Supreme Being – is, in my opinion, worth mentioning for more than one reason. I view such a religious consciousness as the source and mainstay of all social virtues and as one of the strongest bulwarks against both tyranny and lawlessness.’ A number of the representatives reacted enthusiastically. Lambert’s Delft neighbour, Willem Teding van Berkhout, wrote in his diary that Lambert had delivered an outstanding speech.38 Bernard Hoffman was more critical, however: ‘What is religion? A word that is very ambigu-

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ous in our language, and construed by many as an idea based on their own narrow-minded notions.’39 Jacob Hahn returned to the subject during the final discussion, saying that it was a ‘moral lesson’ that did not ‘belong to the principles that should head a social contract, which help us to formulate the criteria by which the constitution – that is, the constitution of society – shall be tested’. He added: ‘I cannot think that Citizen Van Eck would wish to open the door again to the most unpleasant of discussions, that is to say, what one takes to be “the true religion”: discussions that are certainly wholly inappropriate to this political assembly.’ Indeed, the National Assembly had already adopted a far-reaching resolution agreeing to the separation of church and state, and the speaker was suggesting that Van Eck sought to reverse that decision. Van Eck proposed yet another amendment, wishing to add to the closing article of the constitution that ‘no one lacking in domestic virtues can be a good citizen’. He did not specify which domestic virtues, but presumably they were the ones he was instilling in his children. There was little enthusiasm for this proposal either, and again it was Hahn who sneered: ‘I have nothing against this nicety, but I must explain yet again that it does not belong here. I apply the principle – in religion as in ethics – that a bad man or a bad father or an evil son cannot be a good patriot, but I cannot imagine that this is the right place to assert it.’40 Lambert delivered his last important speech at the session held on February 1797, during the debate on whether the executive power should rest with ministers or committees. He argued for the creation of ministries, because in his view committees would spend too much time deliberating and often lack the necessary expertise. This argument was based on his own experience as secretary of the Committee for Naval Affairs.41 The minutes show Lambert to have been a pragmatic politician, who remained calm and conciliatory in the midst of bickering and backbiting. He preferred to steer the representatives towards compromise or, if need be, respite – until feelings cooled down enough ‘to weigh more carefully the pros and cons’ of important matters. He once said on such an occasion that ‘in politics, principles cannot be established a priori’ and that ‘principles are not always self-explanatory and are often open to various modifications’.42 Here he was referring to the draft of the new constitution, the National Assembly’s most important task but from

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the beginning also its greatest bone of contention – and ultimately the fatally divisive element in this new political era. The First Constitution The biggest stumbling block in the debate was whether the Republic should be patterned after the federal, American model, with shared sovereignty, or be remodelled into a unitary state following the French example, with supreme power vested in a central government. The complexity of the matter, of which Lambert had warned, also stumps historians attempting to clarify the matter by lumping the participants into two groups, federalists and unitarists, and further subdividing these two into radical democrats, moderates and aristocrats, according to their standpoint on popular sovereignty. The split between federalists and unitarists was not a split between conservatism and modernity. Dutch federalists never tired of pointing out that federalism and progressiveness went well together, as evidenced by the modern American example. After all, the United States had quickly grown into a stable democratic republic, whereas the French unitary republic had been ravaged by terror.43 Other authors appealed to the political ideals of Rousseau, which they believed most closely resembled federalist thought. The 150 members of the National Assembly were divided along other lines as well. The aristocrats, moderates and radical democrats split according to the prevailing ideas about the right to vote. Operating at one end of the spectrum were the imperious aristocrats, who sought to keep burgher participation to a minimum; at the other end were the radical democrats, for whom the principle of popular sovereignty was the be-all and end-all of the new society and who placed the permanent and active involvement of all citizens at the heart of the political process. The middle ground was occupied by the moderates, who proposed an indirect electoral system in which representatives chosen by ‘the people’ operated independently during their term of office, without a binding mandate from their voters – those voters consisting only of citizens whose income met a certain criterion. The first draft of the new constitution was finished in November 1796 and submitted to the National Assembly by Schimmelpenninck, who had made a number of concessions to the moderate unitarists. Earlier

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drafts had not even been put to the vote because of the overwhelming opposition to their strongly federal character. The seventy-eight speakers who took the floor in the National Assembly to offer their opinion as to whether Schimmelpenninck’s draft should be considered the basis for debate and further elaboration included Lambert van Eck, who seconded the views of Schimmelpenninck.44 Lambert did not belong to the group of twenty-five stubborn federalists who opposed the draft. Instead he joined the ranks of a wide-ranging group of representatives that included adherents of all the other factions, even extremely radical democrats such as Pieter Vreede. An attempt had been made in this first draft to deal with the objections of both federalists and unitarists. The Netherlands’ nine provinces were thus renamed ‘departments’ and increased in number to eleven and later to fifteen, and their boundaries were re-assigned to create units more or less equal in terms of population. The power of these departments was barely affected, but a compromise was reached on Article 11, which stipulated that it was up to the central government to determine which matters were to be considered national concerns and which were to be dealt with by regional authorities.45 The committee did not begin anew, but set about rewriting and amending, until the text grew to no fewer than 918 articles and was referred to as the ‘Fat Book’.46 This derisive nickname ignores the fact that the draft was an impressive achievement, for it presented the country with a completely new governmental structure, for the first time codified in a written constitution. On 10 May 1797 the draft of the constitution was approved by the National Assembly, the votes being counted by head during a clamorous meeting in which Van Eck again gave his sanction. It was now the turn of the country’s voters, ‘the Dutch people’ – excluding women, children, domestic servants and recipients of charity – who on 8 August of that year would be allowed to declare themselves for or against the draft in a referendum. In the intervening three months, supporters and opponents alike did everything in their power to inform the public of the advantages and disadvantages of the new constitution. The battle to influence public opinion that took place in these months was without precedent in the history of the Dutch Republic, for it was, in fact, the very first time that ‘the people’ were given an opportunity to express their opinion at the polls. Defenders of the constitution mounted an extensive campaign to acquaint the public with the contents of the draft. The text was con-

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densed and 20,000 copies of this abridged version were printed and distributed throughout the country. Numerous educational pamphlets were published with a view to explaining the advantages of the constitution in plain language; these were often cast – following an old Dutch tradition – in the form of a pleasant conversation between, for example, two pipe-smoking gentlemen known as Pieter and Klaas.47 Clergymen who opposed the constitutional separation of church and state mounted the pulpit to exhort their parishioners to reject this work of the devil. Radical adversaries, for their part, pursued the same goal, but for completely different reasons and by other means. They made use of their own newspapers – including De Democraten (The Democrats), De Politieke Opmerker (The Political Observer) and De Domkop (The Dunce) – as well as clubs, such as the Hague society ‘Doet Recht en Ontziet Niemand’ (Do what is right and spare no one), founded at an earlier stage but now deployed as a vehicle to make their objections known to as many people as possible. The supporters of the constitution had fewer papers and periodicals at their disposal. The first weekly paper to voice moderate convictions was Heraclijt en Democrijt (Heraclitus and Democritus), first published on 3 December 1796, which, according to De Democraten, was ‘a cunning weapon of the federalists, produced under the pretence of moderation and heartfelt compassion for the suffering of the fatherland in order to fill the people with fear of unity and indivisibility, thereby furthering their own subtle scheme’.48 In February 1797 there appeared Den Nationaalen Schildwagt (The National Guard) and by May of that year, when the campaign for and against the constitutional draft was launched, the advocates also had a daily paper: De Republikeinsche Courant (The Republican Daily). This newspaper was an initiative of the Gemeenebestgezinde Burgersociëteit – the Republican Society of The Hague – founded less than six weeks earlier to offset the radical democratic clubs. The founding of such a society was essential, as one of its members writes, because it was high time that the voices of all honest burghers unite in order to silence the fierce clamouring of those hundreds of office-seekers who desire nothing but the same good fortune – God help us! – which has already been conferred on so many of their brethren and to push their way into good offices and even into the highest assemblies, this being sufficient reason to break into wild expressions of love of fatherland and freedom, even though their moral character, their actions and their destitute circumstances make them look more like the rabble that accompanied Catalina than true patriots.49

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Those words were written by Jacobus Kantelaar, a friend of Lambert van Eck. Since November 1796, Kantelaar had been Lambert’s deputy secretary of the Committee for Naval Affairs (Lambert having put in a good word for him), but had been released from that office when he became a deputy member of the National Assembly.50 The Republican Society of The Hague had quite a few members who also held seats in the National Assembly, including Lambert van Eck, his friend and neighbour Teding van Berkhout, his friend from university days Coert Lambert van Beyma, as well as Jacobus Scheltema and Cornelis van der Hoop. Van Eck, a member from the very beginning, had co-authored a newspaper advertisement appearing on 1 April 1797 in which the Society introduced itself to the public. Jacobus Kantelaar, another of the four co-authors, had formulated the aims of the club in rather diplomatic terms. The Society, he said, had been founded to promote harmony among Patriots who deplored the present discord, caused ‘by people who only sought their advantage in the face of confusion and partisanship’. This division, he maintained, would persist until all right-minded citizens had joined their ranks.51 The readers of the democratic paper De Weerlicht (The Lightning Bolt) had been warned against this Hague movement. The moderates were thought to be setting up a central organisation with branches throughout the country with the aim of influencing the outcome of the constitutional referendum. This report deliberately gave the impression of a fifth column. In reality the Hague Society had only two sister organisations, one in Amsterdam and one in Rotterdam. The radical democrats themselves were better equipped. They appealed to the National Assembly, asking for a one-month postponement of the final verdict on the constitution, in order to give the people time to raise objections, which they were requested to do as soon as possible. Numerous societies broadcast this appeal for ‘unity and indivisibility’ with lightning speed, but the National Assembly denied the request for postponement. In reply the three Republican Societies published a statement in the daily papers, in which they denounced the intrigues of the radical democrats and accused them of using reprehensible methods to advance reprehensible arguments. Reacting to this, the Rotterdam branch of ‘Voor Eén- en Ondeelbaarheid’ (For Unity and Indivisibility) let it be known that, while they did not oppose a constitution, they rejected the present draft because it would clear the path to federalism, oligarchy and suppression of the vox populi. The Republican Society of Rotterdam in turn published a newspaper report accusing its opponents of

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entering into a monstrous alliance with England, in order to throw the country into such disarray that the English would be able to restore the stadholderate.52 On 24 June the moderate Heraclijt en Democrijt launched a campaign stressing the advantages of the constitution and insulting its adversaries. In July the radical democrats countered with a brilliant publicity move by publishing a manifesto signed by twelve members of the National Assembly who called themselves the ‘twelve apostles’. They appealed to voters to reject the constitutional draft, which in their view would usher in a pre-revolutionary government that would reduce the people to little more than slaves, groaning under an ‘aristocratic, velvet-padded yoke’.53 The manifesto was printed in newspapers and published separately as a pamphlet, and its well-timed appearance undoubtedly influenced the referendum held on 8 August 1797. With only 27,955 votes in favour and no fewer than 108,761 against, the draft was roundly rejected. It was a crushing defeat for Lambert and his political sympathisers. The National Assembly was back at square one, but in the eyes of the radical democrat Pieter Vreede, having no constitution was preferable to accepting a bad one. Other radical democrats, such as Jacob Hahn, regretted the situation, agreeing that the constitution was a ‘harlequin’s coat’ but admitting that in the circumstances ‘it would be better to put on the harlequin’s costume than go about bare-arsed’. Even Vreede’s kindred spirit Johan Valckenaer wrote on the eve of the voting that he hardly knew which outcome to hope for: ‘As a minister and public official I must desire that it be accepted, understanding well enough the need that we have for some form of definitive organisation. But as a citizen having to live under such a constitution, I disapprove of it and reject it. I even look upon it as likely to revive the old aristocracy and the stadholder. As a patriot and calculator of events, knowing the mood of the French . . . I would counsel acceptance. I know not if there is some contradiction in all this, but this in truth is how I feel.’54 After new elections the National Assembly, in a new constellation, once more tackled the question of the constitution. Van Eck again had a seat in the Assembly, this time as a deputy for the Arnhem representative J.S. Wentholt, who had joined the new constitutional commission.55 This commission had been founded on 15 September 1797, but it was denied the opportunity to propose a new plan to the National Assembly, for while its members were attempting to cook up a new compromise, a coup was brewing behind the scenes.

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Valckenaer was not very wide of the mark when he conjectured in the summer of 1797 that after a year of fruitless debate the French would be at the end of their tether. France wanted a full-fledged sister republic with a fully developed constitution.56 The attempts of the French ambassador, François Noël, to force the matter shortly before the referendum by appealing to the Dutch people to vote in favour of the constitution were presumably counterproductive.57 In France a more bellicose government had meanwhile come to power. Noël – an ally of the moderate faction through his marriage to a woman from The Hague – was replaced by his superior, Charles Delacroix, who appeared on the diplomatic battlefield with a new official ‘Instruction’. He was ordered to use ‘the ways of persuasion, so as not to alarm a people very jealous of their independence’.58 If that were to fail, however, he was instructed to warn the Dutch that the French government might still exercise its rights as the conqueror of the Republic of the United Netherlands.59 Delacroix was allowed to decide for himself whether he would put a constitutional draft to the popular vote or, to be on the safe side, simply skip this stage. The radical democrats, for their part, saw this change of power as a fresh opportunity for a constitution without far-reaching compromises. To this end, negotiators were secretly sent to Paris – Paulus and Van Eck had fulfilled this role eight years earlier – to sound out the leaders and obtain the promise of French support for a coup. The talks proved satisfactory in every way, owing in no small measure to the pledge of a one-million-guilder bribe. The French government agreed to support a coup d’etat in the Dutch Republic, provided it took place without bloodshed. These secret deliberations had been instigated by a group of Amsterdam radicals called the Jacobijnen ( Jacobins). Only a few radical democrats who held seats in the National Assembly, among them Pieter Vreede, were informed of the details. Their sympathisers were told about the plans but only their tacit support was expected. Not all of the radical democrats were enthusiastic about the idea. A number of them, including Vreede, preferred a last-ditch attempt to reach an agreement within the National Assembly. Accordingly, they drew up a manifesto that included a summary of the new constitution and set about trying to win over majority support for it. In the end, fortythree representatives (Lambert van Eck was not among them) signed the manifesto (later known as the Manifesto of Forty-Three); this was less than one-third of the Assembly, just enough to create a stir. The Manifesto was published not only in newspapers in the Netherlands

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but also, in translation, in France and Italy.60 In the National Assembly this publication led to a week-long debate which focused more on the procedure than on the content of the Manifesto. At this point Lambert van Eck, silent up to now, again took the floor. Did he know anything about the impending coup d’état? Was he aware of the risk he was taking by refusing to sign the Manifesto – the last attempt of the ‘opposition’ to reach a compromise before they resorted to other means? It is likely he had not been told, though rumours of a possible coup had been afloat since December.61 On 4 January 1798, eighteen days before the change of power, Lambert voiced his opinion, thereby sealing his fate. For a better understanding of Lambert’s viewpoint and of this stillunwritten piece of Dutch political history, it is necessary to go back and pick up the thread earlier, in December 1797, when the Assembly was not only confronted with the Manifesto but also inundated with petitions from concerned citizens voicing their demands and making proposals on a wide range of thorny issues, including the tax system, the abolition of the guilds, the separation of church and state, and the preservation of church property. These petitions were passed on to the constitutional commission.62 The discussion of the Manifesto, however, became bogged down by the formal requests submitted by a number of burghers in Leiden and Amsterdam, who demanded not only a political structure in which representatives could be recalled at all times, but also a government characterised by permanent popular sovereignty, universal suffrage irrespective of income, central authority, general taxation based on income, and the amalgamation of the departmental (i.e. provincial) debts into one national debt. Unlike the Amsterdam petition, the Leiden petition contained a number of threats, the first being that unless the constitutional draft contained every one of these points it would not be accepted. It then demanded that all representatives sign the Manifesto to prove their democratic-republican mettle to the people. A passage that was deleted before the petition was submitted clearly reflects the prevailing mood: members who refused to sign would expose themselves as enemies of the people. A more positive tone resounded in the final version: representatives who did sign the Manifesto would demonstrate their willingness to work seriously to achieve those ‘great objectives’ necessary to secure the happiness of the people.63 It was left to the reader to draw the conclusion that those who refused to sign were thereby betraying their evil intentions – a message that must have been obvious to everyone in the Assembly.

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Jan Bernd Bicker, a federalist and scion of an aristocratic family, therefore felt compelled to lay his credentials on the table. He declared himself to be a patriot in heart and soul, and even though his views on a number of matters differed from those of others in the assembly, one thing was perfectly clear: his ‘firm resolution to uphold our revolution with his life and property’. He considered the actions of the forty-three signatories ‘unlawful’. It was against all the rules for members of a ‘government’ (the National Assembly) to make resolutions – while awaiting the conclusions of a commission established by that same government – which could not be overturned. He thus thought, ‘with a sincere revolutionary heart’, that the requests should be ignored.64 The federalist and radical Van Beyma tried a different approach. In a detailed response he attempted to demonstrate point by point that the proposals were ambiguous and too vague to be endorsed with confidence: ‘The second article of the constitutional draft mentions equal rights, and prohibits inequality arising from birth, rank, property or religious beliefs – but are there no others? Many, to be sure. Should they not be prohibited as well? I believe so.’65 By this he must have been referring to racial inequality. Van Beyma was, after all, one of the few champions of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade.66 It is also possible that he was alluding to the inequality of the sexes. To point out the ambiguities in the first article of the constitutional draft, he compared its contents with his own ideas. The first article spoke of a ‘genuine popular government based on representation’, but Van Beyma pointed out that democratically chosen representatives were free to act at their own discretion and were not merely spokesmen for their electorate. In support of this notion he turned to Rousseau, whose ideas had been instilled in him since his earliest youth: ‘The great Rousseau taught me as a child that it is not in the nature of things, and therefore contrary to principles, to think that in a well-ordered society I could direct or empower someone to desire something on my behalf. Our will – citizen representatives! – cannot be represented.’ The wording of these requests – demanding that the people be able to exert influence on the government – betrays a lack of freedom. After all, seeking the possibility to ‘influence’ implies not being in a position to ‘control’. The people, says Van Beyma, may not be placed under restraint like children. Van Beyma was also critical of the principle of ‘unity and indivisibility’, which in his view was no more than a practical necessity. ‘He who believes Rousseau when he says that one is most free

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in the smallest of republics will lament the necessity, now irrevocably dictated by circumstances, of having to make states so large.’ Jan van Hooff’s reasoning is similar to that of Bicker. The fortythree signatories to the Manifesto published in the Haagsche Courant had exceeded their authority, he claimed, because it was against the rules for government representatives to voice a minority opinion in this way: ‘There are such things in that Manifesto that I consider fatal to freedom and suited to nothing other than allowing demagogy to reign supreme, always at the expense of the people’s peace and well-being.’ To Van Hooff, the demagogy was also the least palatable aspect of the radical democrats’ petitions and publications, such as the thirty-second issue of De Weerlicht, which dared to appeal ‘openly and with impunity’ for donations in support of the radical democrats, in order to offer more effective resistance to an adversary receiving financial assistance from England. ‘Is this not to be scorned?’ He called the radical democrats to account, because if they were receiving financial support from the popular societies, they could no longer be considered independent and would have to withdraw from the Assembly. This caused a great stir: Various members then jumped angrily to their feet, demanding satisfaction. The confusion became more vehement and more widespread; the visitors in the gallery disrupted the deliberations by clapping their hands and otherwise making their opinions heard. The president called them to order by pounding his gavel continuously, but Van der Hoeven, Van Roseveldt Cateau and others persisted, and the Assembly grew more and more unruly, while Van Hooff continued to oppose these summations, crying that ‘he will not be deterred, since he has sworn and is prepared to sacrifice himself for the people, but that he will never flatter those people’. The hubbub and chaos kept up, and various members even betook themselves to Van Hooff to show him in the clearest possible way, in both words and gestures, the extent of their displeasure.

After peace had been restored and it had been agreed that Van Hooff would repeat his declaration and thereafter give the floor to the other party, the discussion was resumed. Representative Lemon found it inappropriate to call the members of the National Assembly to account because of newspaper reports: One might just as well cite the Heraclijt en Democrijt, which had possibly received the support of some and in which various members of this Assembly had been derided in the most scandalous manner without it ever being disavowed by those very same supporters, but this was irrelevant here. He had long heard certain words being bandied about: freedom,

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Lambert van Eck was among the last to offer his opinion on this question, saying that he was determined to resist the temptation to lapse into emotional digressions, mutual recriminations perpetuated by old wounds, or the kind of ideologically inspired speeches given by a number of his predecessors. That would only lead to even greater confusion and a breach of harmony. ‘For my part, therefore, I shall come to the point without beating about the bush.’ Speaking candidly, he said that he belonged to the group within the Assembly who thought that the proposal ran counter to the rules. He said this bluntly, disregarding the risk of ‘being taken for tares among the wheat’. He did, however, wish to say something about the underlying motives of these requests. Their authors appeared to be interested primarily in restoring the people’s confidence in their representatives and furthering peace, tranquillity and harmony in the Assembly. Assuming this was their true intention, Lambert could not understand why they did not try to arrive at a compromise before issuing their publicity-seeking Manifesto. This state of affairs smacked of ‘force and coercion’, damaged public confidence even further, and increased the representatives’ distrust of one another. Lambert argued for ‘a return to true fraternity’ and the subordination of party interests to the general good. Harmony was particularly vital, he said, because of the growing threat from abroad. Here Lambert was presumably referring to the threat of war from England, particularly because several months earlier the Dutch fleet had been largely destroyed at the Battle of Camperdown (Kamperduin). Perhaps he was also alluding to the possibility of French intervention in Dutch affairs – also a very real danger, as we shall see. At the end of his speech he pointed out that every action gives rise to an equal and opposite reaction – not always the desired one – ‘and recent events have lent sufficient proof of the proverb that “he who grasps all loses all”’.68 With such appeals to common sense Lambert may well have persuaded his son Otto to act reasonably, but his words had little effect on his fellow politicians. Neither did the ritual – performed at Hugo

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Gevers’s suggestion – of repeating in unison the closing words of Paulus’s opening speech: The president answered that he consented with all his heart and that no true Batavian could possibly hesitate. He then rose from his seat, as did all the other members of the Assembly, and raising their right hands towards heaven, they swore to save the fatherland or die at their posts.69

A proposal put forward by Van Beyma at the same meeting of 15 January was voted down. He had wanted to promote solidarity by having all the members take an oath ‘of hatred against the stadholderate and all oppression’ on Sunday, 21 January, the fifth anniversary of the beheading of Louis XVI. Hatred of tyranny and oppression was thought to be so self-evident that an express declaration of it was considered unnecessary. Hahn voiced the suspicion that this proposal had been prompted by rumours of ‘a violent enterprise, which some miscreants are supposedly hatching against the Assembly that represents the free people of the Netherlands’.70 Van Beyma evidently saw the approaching storm, but was probably unaware that these plans were about to be put into action. On 21 January the French ambassador Delacroix hosted a dinner to celebrate the execution of Louis XVI. More than fifty guests were invited, including Van Hooff, the politician whose accusations of demagogy had caused such a stir among the radical democrats in the National Assembly a few weeks earlier. The host’s proposal to toast the success of the revolution touched a nerve in Van Hooff, who reacted by declaring loudly, before leaving the table in protest, that Delacroix was apparently determined to throw the fatherland into turmoil, in which case he would rather be the first victim than be forced to witness a repetition in his own country of the events of 31 May.71 The reference to 31 May would have been immediately clear to all present. Van Hooff was alluding to the fall of the Girondists on 31 May 1793 in Paris. On that day twenty-seven députés had been removed by force from the French National Convention, marking the beginning of the Reign of Terror under Robespierre. For Van Hooff and many others, that moment would come in their own country sooner than expected. The day after the dinner, a number of radical democrats staged – with French assistance – a coup d’état that had been in the making for months. The coup was set in motion by the election of a radical democrat to the post of chairman of the National Assembly, the highest office

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in the land. This took place on 20 January, when the radical Johannes Midderigh was elected chairman by a narrow margin. Before daybreak on 22 January 1798 – at five o’clock to be precise – ‘fifty confidants’, all members of the National Assembly, gathered to discuss the coup. The other members were summoned at eight o’clock that same morning to a special session, where the sheep were separated from the goats. Long before this, a blacklist had been drawn up of twenty-two representatives suspected of opposing republican principles. They were ushered into another room by four grenadiers.72 Lambert van Eck was among them. In his family book he wrote: On 22 January 1798 I was among the twenty-two members of the assembly – all but myself, however, original representatives – whose presence in the assembly that day during the projected turn of events was considered too dangerous, and who were therefore arrested in the president’s chambers and actually removed from the Assembly.

They were then placed under house arrest, but on 3 February, Lambert was seized from his bed in the early morning hours and taken under military escort to Huis ten Bosch by soldiers ‘giving no reason whatsoever, or even feigning some new pretext’.73 The same thing happened to the other twenty-one representatives, not only the imperious aristocrats Jan Bernd Bicker and C. de Vos van Steenwijk, both fervent federalists, but also the aristocratic federalist-anarchist Coert Lambert van Beyma – the man with the red sash, who shortly before had been so keen to celebrate the beheading of Louis XVI – and the democratically and unitarist-minded Brabant merchant Jan van Hooff, the politician who had left Delacroix’s dinner in protest on the eve of the coup d’état. His exclamation that he would rather be the first victim of a coup than have to witness its aftermath appears not to have fallen on deaf ears. Among the prisoners were well-known publicists, such as the prolific writer and translator Jan David Pasteur, the magazine editor Jacobus Kantelaar and the enlightened theologian Ysbrand van Hamelsveld. It was a colourful group of people with little in common. Only a few of the twenty-two were radical federalists, and Lambert van Eck was not among them; he had voted, in fact, for the amalgamation of the provincial debt and preferred national ministries to committees.74 Van Eck was not the only one who was baffled by his appearance on the blacklist. At the time of his arrest he had been given no explanation, and the remark he made in his family book suggests that the reason for his detention was never made clear to him. The fact that he was merely a temporary member of the National Assembly, deputising for

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a member of the constitutional commission that had nearly completed its task, made his arrest especially puzzling. Lambert apparently thought so too, as evidenced by his revealing statement that, of the twentytwo representatives removed from the Assembly, all but himself were ‘original representatives’. Perhaps he was blacklisted because of his wealth. The French had initially planned to seize the property of those arrested, according to French custom.75 That would also make the detention of Van Beyma more understandable, but it does not explain the arrest of such men as Pasteur, Van Hamelsveld and Kantelaar. It is possible that Van Eck was more powerful behind the scenes than the minutes of the sessions suggest. Perhaps, too, it was his resistance to the Manifesto or his membership in the publicity-seeking Republican Society of The Hague, in which he played a prominent role, as is apparent from the advertisement he co-authored, in which Kantelaar, Van Hamelsveld, Van Beyma, Jacobus Scheltema (likewise arrested) and Cornelis van der Hoop also had a hand. This club, with its branches and publicity networks, had proved to be an important factor in the battle to sway public opinion. For example, the vociferous weekly Heraclijt en Democrijt, the moderate bi-weekly Nationaalen Schildwagt and the like-minded daily Republikeinsche Courant were all edited by Jacobus Scheltema, Lambert’s fellow club member and detainee at Huis ten Bosch.76 It is possible, too, that those who drew up the blacklist had based it on another anonymous publication that had appeared in the summer of 1797, on the eve of the referendum: ‘Monument for the next generation’, which included a character sketch of every member of the National Assembly.77 The author of this pamphlet drew a clear line between good and bad representatives. With one or two exceptions, all those arrested with Lambert van Eck belonged to the latter group. The profiles of a number of radical democrats – ‘deserves the esteem of the nation’ or ‘a good man with an honest heart and almost wholly a patriot’ – are in stark contrast to those of the opposing party. J.B. Bicker, for instance, is characterised as ‘the head of the aristocratic cabal in Holland, a crafty schemer, who stops at nothing to achieve his egoistical aims’. G.H. van Marle, also later imprisoned in Huis ten Bosch, was – according to the pamphlet – ‘after Bicker the most dangerous person in the National Assembly’. His later fellow prisoner J.A. de Mist ‘is not a slippery character but an outspoken supporter of the House of Orange’. His opinions were thought to have had a disastrous influence on the National Assembly.

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Fig. 133. The draft of the constitution is carried to the grave on 8 August 1797.

Van Hooff was not raked over the coals to this extent, but as early as July 1797 there was apparently a suspicion that he might become difficult, as indeed he later proved to be: ‘an honest man who means well but cannot control his temper, a blind follower of the French and thus a marionette of intriguers; he is a friend of the people and yet his abhorrence of terrorism leads him to hate all popular assemblies . . . an advocate of the newly drafted constitution’. Ysbrand van Hamelsveld was said to have had a good name in the past, but now he was known mainly for ‘his foolish fanaticism, ridiculous opinions, and ludicrous way of presiding over the National Assembly’. During meetings, he wrote weeklies, ‘a curious waste of time for a representative’. At first Van Beyma was also promising, ‘a man who undoubtedly deserved to be counted among the first patriots if he had remained constant, but then his odd behaviour, as regards both the amalgamation [of the provincial debt] and other questions, in which he deserted the good men, makes one doubt his steadfastness, and many even regard him

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as an intriguer, because no one who knows Van Beyma would claim that he is lacking in intelligence’. The evaluation of H. van Castrop was much shorter: ‘a fat aristocrat, endowed with a gruff voice, great conceit, little intelligence and a black heart’. If Lambert’s neighbour and friend W.H. Teding van Berkhout had had the misfortune to be elected for a second term, he would certainly have been among the company at Huis ten Bosch, considering his character sketch: ‘very bad, in the Assembly he often raises his hoarse voice like a brazen fishwife, and his eloquence consists only in ranting and raving; a difficult but inconsequential being whom the people of Delft would have done better to put in a house of correction’. Lambert van Eck came off relatively well: ‘a man who formerly stood out among the revolutionaries, but in looking out for his own interests has shown himself in all his actions to be an aristocrat’. This obviously refers to Lambert’s post as secretary of the Committee for Naval Affairs, to which he was appointed immediately after the Batavian Revolution in 1795. In an earlier pamphlet, probably published in late 1796, Van Eck was portrayed in more detail.78 Here his pragmatism and ability to put political conflicts in perspective were used as a preamble to accusations of both practising and reaping the benefits of nepotism: ‘[Van Eck is] of the opinion that in politics principles cannot be established a priori, therefore not the principle of indivisibility either, which sounds well enough coming from a councillor at the Court of Brabant but not from a man who receives such a sizeable salary from an indivisible Republic and so many emoluments from private individuals. On the occasion of the last revolution, he gave many speeches in the Doelen and in the Walloon Church in The Hague, and was always the first to encourage revolutionary deeds and conversations, but after obtaining – through the good offices of his brother-in-law – a secretarial post worth 29,000 guilders, he instantly fell silent and became as indulgent towards Orange as all his patrons, just like his friend Kantelaar, who now, according to Representative Evers, also has “a lucrative post with the Navy”, and will obtain even more as a reward for his flattering report.’ There seems to be some truth to this accusation. Pieter Paulus undoubtedly had a hand in Van Eck’s appointment, and Kantelaar had in fact become, thanks to Van Eck’s recommendation, his deputy in the well-paid post of secretary of the Committee for Naval Affairs. The other character traits attributed to Van Eck correspond to some degree with the picture that emerges from the minutes of the meetings of the National Assembly – his pragmatism, his inclination to weigh matters,

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and his tendency to keep a low profile during meetings – though here these characteristics seem evil and calculating, as though he were a careerist whose main motives in accepting a seat in the Assembly had been to consolidate his network and enjoy the ample salary. In reality, however, he had joined the National Assembly with great reluctance. His reason for declining membership at first – insisting that the Navy was more in need of his services – was a valid one, considering the disastrous outcome of the Battle of Camperdown in October 1797, more than a year after Lambert had been forced to give up this key position. Neither pamphlet sheds much light on the reasons for Lambert’s arrest, other than to confirm that – like the other twenty-one detainees – he had fallen from grace. Otherwise it was a strange assortment of individuals in Huis ten Bosch. Their backgrounds provided them with more than enough topics of conversation as well as heated political discussions. Historians attempting to explain the criteria behind the selection of these twenty-two men have always pointed to their alleged federalist tendencies, but a letter written by Lambert to his wife reveals that federalism was one of the topics deliberately avoided at Huis ten Bosch so as not to spoil the convivial atmosphere. Not without irony, he wrote: ‘Our shared misfortune gives rise to a feeling of general unity among us. Incidentally, federalism has no currency, and we ensure that it does not raise its head among us.’79 Despite their diverse backgrounds, the detainees formed friendships that were attested to by many an album amicorum. Several have been preserved, including that of F.W. Anthing, in which Lambert recorded the motto: ‘The middle path is the point closest to wisdom.’80 In Ysbrand van Hamelsveld’s album he wrote a similar motto: ‘The golden mean, where virtue lies, is always the goal of the wise.’ This motto expresses his ideal of political progress without the revolutionary excesses to which he had fallen victim. After the purge of the National Assembly, the representative body – now renamed the Constituent Assembly – quickly drew up a new constitution, in which the country was transformed into a unitary state. This proposal so closely resembled the compromise that had taken shape in the Second National Assembly that the coup of January has sometimes been described as the ‘unnecessary revolution’.81 It was ratified by primary assemblies of voters, from which the federalists had – as a precaution – been excluded. The leaders of the new national govern-

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ment put off introducing the new constitution, however, perhaps because it would undermine their recently acquired position of power. An end was put to this deliberate dithering on 12 June 1798 by a new coup – staged by a more moderate group, again supported by the French – which was carried out by the Batavian army under the leadership of General Daendels, a Patriot who had left the country in 1787 and carved out a successful military career for himself. After a struggle lasting more than two years and involving two coups, the new ‘governing regulation’ (Staatsregeling) went into effect in July, at which time Representative Van de Kasteele declared that the revolution had come to an end. Freedom of the Press The definitive Staatsregeling contained a number of ideals Lambert is known to have endorsed: the stimulation of Dutch industry, the abolition of the rack, freedom of religion, and even a couple of the amendments he personally proposed. Lambert’s ‘nicety’ – domestic virtue as an obligatory morality, which Hahn had derided in 1797 to the general amusement of the Assembly – had finally been adopted in May 1798. Article 7 states that people can only be good burghers if they ‘conscientiously perform the domestic duties in the various stations in which they find themselves, and otherwise fulfil in every respect their social obligations’. Lambert, an ardent advocate of religion, must have been gratified to see the adoption of Article 8, in which religious faith is ‘most solemnly recommended’. During the meetings he did not voice an opinion on freedom of the press as laid down in Article 16, but we know that he was a fervent supporter of it. The encyclopaedia Lambert wrote for his own use contains a long entry on freedom of the press that makes his own viewpoint perfectly clear: The press should be infinitely free; since its invention, people have been enlightened as to their interests. . . . Writings about the government, if they contain the truth, ought not to be forbidden, because preventing the dissemination of the truth obstructs all advancement; if they contain lies, they refute themselves, or quickly find an advocate of the truth who better instructs the public.

His brother-in-law Pieter Paulus felt very strongly about this subject. Freedom of the press figures prominently in both his 1793 ‘Treatise on

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Fig. 134. Freedom of the Press. Frontispiece of a pamphlet by Batavus, 1785.

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equality’ and his ‘Declaration of the rights of man’ of 1795. Paulus held that without this right, all other rights would prove worthless, and that in a democratic society adhering to the Christian principle of equality, freedom of the press was of paramount importance. Van Eck formulated this connection as follows: ‘In a free state one should be able to express freely one’s ideas about religion and the government – the interests of both demand this – for without this freedom the Christian faith would not have spread so far, and the Reformation would not have occurred.’ This entry is a good example of typical Patriot thinking on this point. Van Eck appears to have read nearly everything there was on the subject; he refers to such authors as Voltaire, Price and Priestley, who were at the forefront of the debate on freedom. The Dutch writings to which he refers include Joan Derk van der Capellen’s famous appeal Aan het volk van Nederland (To the people of the Netherlands) and pamphlets such as Twee gesprekken tusschen Waermond en Vrijhart (Two conversations between True-Mouth and Free-Heart), published anonymously by Pieter Vreede. He also mentions various articles on the concept of freedom that appeared in such journals as De Burger (The Citizen) and De Opmerker (The Observer).82 One of their arguments in favour of freedom of the press was written, remarkably enough, by a renowned Orangist publicist, Elie Luzac.83 The enormous increase in such writings in the 1780s had to do with the Patriots’ use of the printing press as a political weapon in their fight against the stadholder’s regime. There were countless attacks on the stadholder and the Orangists in pamphlets and political cartoons, a genre that had suddenly blossomed. Many of these publications, such as Van der Capellen’s pamphlet, fell victim to censorship. The controversial prohibition of the Patriot newspaper Post van den Neder-Rhijn (Post from the Lower Rhine) was criticised at length by Van Eck, who focused on the legal aspects of its ban. Even the contributions of two Frenchmen to the political debate in the Netherlands were banned: Mirabeau’s Aux Bataves of 1788 (also outlawed in Dutch translation) and Condorcet’s Adresse aux Bataves of 1792.84 There are no known publications by Lambert van Eck, though a letter written in an official capacity by him and three fellow councillors at the Court of Brabant did appear in 1786 in the Post van den NederRhijn. In this long letter, the councillors urged the States General to put an end to the discrimination against Brabant, which was not an independent province, but a territory governed directly by The Hague.

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Fig. 135. The burning of the POST VAN DEN NEDER-RHIJN at Arnhem. The executioner burns the periodical Post van den Neder-Rhijn on the scaffold at Arnhem, 1784.

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The Patriots wanted to rectify this situation, and Lambert took a firm stand by signing this letter requesting that the ‘people of Brabant be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their long-standing and faithful association with the Republic’.85 The authors in Lambert’s circle who were victims of censorship included Jean Luzac, Ysbrand van Hamelsveld and Lambert’s brotherin-law Pieter Paulus, whose ‘Treatise on equality’ was banned in The Hague in 1794. The edition in question was probably the one published in Amsterdam by D.M. Langeveld. In Amsterdam itself the book was not banned, but a close watch was kept on it, and in May 1794 the Amsterdam bailiff observed with alarm that this book was being read avidly in revolutionary circles.86 The importance the Patriots attached to freedom of the press was prompted by more than their own negative experiences of censorship.87 Freedom of the press was considered a prerequisite of the ideal society to which the Patriots aspired: a republican state based on popular sovereignty. Corruption and government abuse of power could be prevented only if opinions were freely expressed and disseminated. This reasoning was apparent in the actions and writings of both Pieter Paulus and Lambert van Eck. In his self-compiled encyclopaedia, Lambert van Eck showed his awareness of the other side of the coin. Complete abolition of censorship, he wrote, might open the door to writings intended to undermine the state. If, however, one made an exception for such publications, the cure would be worse than the disease: such a ban was incompatible with true freedom and ‘a dangerous step towards slowly encroaching slavery’. Moreover, wrote Van Eck, the influence of ‘libellous writings and anonymous provocations’ should not be overestimated. In this context he approvingly quotes Van der Capellen: Books do not rebel; to rouse the common folk to action, one must stir them up with impassioned voices. A good government has nothing to fear from the people, because it shares the people’s interests. To enlighten the people is to keep them from believing wrongful incitements. . . . One does not have the right to keep people stupid and ignorant under the pretext of preventing chaos and revolt.

In the margin of this entry, Van Eck gave a concrete example, namely how the king of Prussia had dealt with the Histoire philosophique des Indes (Philosophical history of the Indies), in which G.Th.F. Raynal denounced slavery and other evil consequences of European expansion.88

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Fig. 136. Writings of exiled Patriots are burned in Amsterdam by the executioner on the scaffold. From Atlas van vaderlandsche gebeurtenissen, 1789.

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Frederick the Great did not ban the book; instead, he ordered someone to publish counter-arguments. From this example Van Eck derived the following moral: ‘The advisers of our Prince should have done the same with the booklet Aan ’t volk van Nederland.’ Van Eck even supported freedom of the press when it meant the publication of anti-religious writings. Such works fulfilled a useful function, because they provoked a reaction. To discourage people from entertaining erroneous ideas, one should not ban books, but rather use counter-arguments to keep them from ‘believing mistaken incitements’. This was the theory at least, committed to paper at a time when the Patriots still had no political power and their writings were regularly condemned. In practice, things proved more complicated, starting in 1795, when this group itself was in control and able to experiment with this longed-for freedom of the press. The aim of the new rulers to make government as transparent as possible by publishing the minutes of the National Assembly was heartily approved by Lambert van Eck, who felt that providing clear and complete information would prevent ‘the people’ from believing ideas on any topic whatsoever propagated in the ‘wrong’ publications. In his view the interests of good government and those of the people coincided, so it was important to present the truth in order to pre-empt – or, if necessary, counteract – potentially subversive publications. The possibility of heated conflicts among the representatives of the people had not been taken into account. There were still no rules of play for a situation in which minorities within the National Assembly might mobilise public opinion against majority decisions. The current political system with a government formed by a coalition of political parties with a parliament divided into ruling parties and opposition parties had yet to take shape. The only familiar structure was the old States General with its secret meetings and decision-making by consensus. In the situation obtaining after 1795, the inconceivable happened on a regular basis: ever more clearly defined groups fought an open battle to persuade the public to veto a constitutional draft that had been accepted by a majority of the representatives. This went against all the old norms of political decorum. By the same token, the attempts of the moderates, organised in the Republican Societies, publicly to discredit the other party were just as reprehensible; in any case, the governing bodies in existence before the Batavian Revolution would never have let things come to such a pass. At the most, dissident regents let their opinions be known in anonymous pamphlets, but these were published without

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the aura of authority that surrounded the people’s representatives when they influenced public opinion through political manifestos. Had those been the good old days? Lambert probably yearned for them when he saw the Monument in which his very own words, quoted from the published minutes of the National Assembly, were used to portray him as an opportunist of the first order. Readers who took the trouble to peruse the minutes in their entirety would have seen that the passages had been quoted out of context. There were sources in abundance, but consulting them required great perseverance. Moreover, a vicious, colourfully written pamphlet was infinitely more amusing. The ideal democracy presupposes an intellectually schooled and discerning reading public seeking detailed information on all aspects of any argument. This was not yet the case in Lambert’s day, nor is it ever likely to be. To overcome this problem, the Republican Societies ventured down the path of demagogy with their equally malicious publications in newspapers and journals, in which they exposed the ‘true’ intentions of their opponents, the radical democrats, whose alleged alliance with England was threatening to plunge the country into chaos. The vitriol in which Lambert’s cohorts, and perhaps Lambert himself, dipped their pens was, in their eyes, the necessary antidote to such venom. In this sense their actions were indeed consonant with the principles set out by Lambert in his encyclopaedia. But what of the people? Is A A A

freedom but a ruse, to tell the people lies? net in which deceit may catch the innocent? noose in which to hang themselves, folk ignorant? trap for power-hungry men? a spider web for flies?

This was written by Ysbrand van Hamelsveld – ‘your companion in misfortune’ – in Lambert’s album amicorum in the spring of 1798. Denounced in the same pamphlet as Lambert van Eck as a hack writer and politician lacking in firm principles, he had been locked up in the same prison after the coup. But what was to be done about that dangerous freedom of others? ‘O God, who is all-knowing and all-seeing, wilt Thou wrest from brute violence the true freedom, too long unknowingly detested by unlimited power!’ Their fellow prisoner Van Castrop – who, as we have seen, was characterised in the pamphlet as a man of ‘great conceit, little intelligence and a black heart’ – did not raise his eyes to heaven but clung instead to his talisman: ‘true friends of the people use no sword other than that of reason and persuasion to slay prejudice’.89 Reason and persuasion would, in his view, bring

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about ‘true freedom’, and even if he and Lambert were not to profit from it, future generations – who by virtue of their enlightened educations would be deserving of, and equal to, that true freedom – would reap its benefits.

CHAPTER TEN

CHILDREN OF THE FUTURE ‘It is time that we seek to turn this world into a heaven.’1 With these words Lambert van Eck summarised the main objective of the National Assembly, at the same time describing the very essence of utopianrevolutionary thinking. Heaven on earth was within reach, if only people would actively intervene to combine enlightenment and Christianity. It might take some time to bring this about, and Lambert doubted that he would live to see this man-made paradise, but he was certain that subsequent generations would reap the benefits of the Batavian Revolution. In the address delivered upon his election as president of the National Assembly, Lambert van Eck therefore stressed the importance of furthering ‘the happiness of present and future generations’.2 His fellow representatives in the Assembly no doubt agreed with him. After all, the pursuit of happiness, which all enlightened spirits considered a goal of life, had been included by Thomas Jefferson – an acquaintance of Lambert – in the American Declaration of Independence. For centuries humankind had placed its hopes of happiness in the hereafter, but now the time had come to achieve happiness on earth. A proposal was made in the National Assembly to include a similar passage in the Dutch ‘Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen’, but unfortunately the representatives could not decide whether happiness should accrue to the individual or to the nation as a whole, with the result that the concept did not find its way into Dutch legislation.3 The members of the National Assembly were inclined to compare their meetings to a school, as Lambert van Eck had done in his address by referring to the ‘School of the Enlightenment’. The realisation of a heaven on earth involved a learning curve in which mistakes would inevitably be made, as the French Revolution had shown. There, too, the revolutionaries had been inspired by the conviction that their efforts would benefit future generations. Mirabeau had closed Aux Bataves, his appeal to the Dutch people, with the exhortation: ‘Fortunate are those who will spill their last drops of blood for the fatherland! They will take with them to their graves the comforting thought of having brought

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people nearer to happiness, and will leave to their children the legacy of their virtues.’4 The progressive French philosopher Condorcet was convinced that the happiness achieved for future generations would have a cumulative effect: each generation would be happier than the previous one. These revolutions, both French and Batavian, were therefore seen as a rebirth, a rejuvenation of society, or as Swildens described it, ‘momentous now, memorable hereafter’.5 Political Schooling The Dutch people were still in need of a great deal of education, according to one of the articles in Lambert’s handwritten encyclopaedia. He divided people into three ‘classes’. The first class comprised those governing the country, the people ‘who wielded a share of the supreme power’. The second group was formed by ‘all burghers, that is, decent citizens, tradespeople or otherwise, craftsmen, and so on’. The third ‘class’ was the ‘rabble’, characterised by Van Eck as ‘the dregs of the nation’, a ‘bastard branch, which one must put up with but keep carefully cropped, to prevent it from darkening the whole body of the

Fig. 137. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is explained to a child. From Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798–1800.

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tree’. He did not think the situation hopeless, however, because in his article on ‘freedom of the press’ he wrote that education was the key to progress, and that people had to be ‘enlightened’ with the aid of a free press. It was no coincidence that pamphlets often spoke of ‘the education of humanity’.6 Education and revolution went hand in hand, and for this reason it was the Batavian revolutionaries who first made education the responsibility of the state. Conversely, many teachers considered themselves missionaries of the Batavian Revolution, as illustrated by the address – delivered by the teacher Arent van Soelen on 25 August 1795 to the ‘school institute’ in Bodegraven – published in Amsterdam under the title ‘Address regarding the serious promotion of the education of youngsters and the universal education of the people, considered in connection with the blossoming of bourgeois society and adapted to the current circumstances of our fatherland as a stimulus to all true Patriots’.7 The address began by heaping praise on the modern German pedagogues Campe, Salzmann and Basedow, who had considered education a prerequisite to ‘individual and societal happiness. . . . Just think what the Enlightenment already budding here and there means for your future!’ After all, France had seen great progress since departing from the ‘demonic deceit of priests and monks’. In the Netherlands, too, there was a glimmer of hope: modern pedagogy had certainly flowered in Germany, but the Dutch were by no means lagging behind, and to prove his point Van Soelen cited the work of Martinet, Van den Berg, ’t Hoen and Van Alphen. The ‘national somnolence’ of yesteryear seemed to have made way for a dynamic mentality intent on bringing about a ‘formidable metamorphosis in the Netherlands’. Not only had a new future opened up, but the past was to be rewritten. From now on, children would be told about the ‘haughty princes and power-hungry kings and queens’ who had been driven out of the country, and about the ‘blindness, slavery and destitution’ they had caused. ‘Behold, roughly outlined, these first images, which – in accordance with the needs of our time – parents, teachers and other enlighteners of the Dutch people cannot emphasise enough in the instruction of youngsters, in the education of the people!’ Even before the Batavian Revolution there had been concrete plans to reform the educational system if a coup were to take place. One of the most radical proposals came from Otto’s teacher Vatebender, who submitted his treatise on the subject to a contest held by the Provincial Society of Arts and Sciences of Utrecht.8 Vatebender hoped

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to put an end to class-bound schooling. In his view, both rich and poor had equal rights to a good education, which in his view should be organised and financed not by the church and the local authorities but by the national government. A ‘national education’ would provide better guarantees for good schooling for everyone, as well as enabling talented lower-class children to climb the social ladder. He also believed that a national body of school inspectors would safeguard the quality of teaching. These ideas put Vatebender far ahead of his time, not only by Dutch standards.9 To some extent his plans did, however, resemble the reforms then being implemented in France. The French constitution of 1791 had declared the right to public and general education to be the responsibility of the central government – a law that had been worked out by Condorcet. Two years later a more radical Plan d’éducation nationale was drafted by Michel Lepeletier, at the request of Robespierre, and submitted in July 1793. It is doubtful whether Vatebender knew of Condorcet’s plan. In any case, Lepeletier’s plan did not appear until after the publication of Vatebender’s treatise. It is likely that all these authors drew their inspiration from the same source: the work of Rousseau. Vatebender based his treatise in part on Emile and on Rousseau’s plan for a Polish constitution which argued for ‘national education’. Unlike Rousseau, however, Vatebender had pondered the practicalities of school organisation. In 1792 he published a separate treatise on the subject that included lesson timetables, an exemplary budget and a blueprint of the school building. Compared with Rousseau, Vatebender was a pragmatic thinker whose plans even took into account the time needed to implement them, which he estimated at thirty years. Thus future generations, not the present one, would profit from them. After the Batavian Revolution he traded his position as headmaster of the Latin School at Gouda for the uncertain life of a representative to the National Assembly. In April 1796 he gave his treatise to the Assembly’s committee for educational reform and was promptly invited to become a member. In the meantime, Vatebender had become better acquainted with political practice, and had pointed out in his accompanying letter that his proposal would probably be considered ‘chimerical’. His fears were confirmed, for the committee, promising only ‘calm reflection’, was determined to avoid the pursuit of ‘idle dreams of an unattainable and fanciful state of perfection’.

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Even though the radical representative Pieter Vreede urged the education committee to act quickly, it failed to come up with a recommendation.10 Progress was made in the long run, however, because the Staatsregeling (governing regulation) of 1798 finally set up an Agency for National Education (in other words, a Ministry of Education). The ‘agent’, or minister, was given the task of promoting ‘enlightenment and civilisation’. Two years later, the agent J.H. van der Palm drafted a detailed memorandum that constituted the blueprint for education in the nineteenth century. The proposals in this memorandum were not as thoroughgoing as the reforms Vatebender had in mind. Van der Palm, too, strongly opposed ‘the ideals of a fanciful state of perfection’ that would only prove counterproductive. Choosing the books to be used in the schools was one of the spearheads of the new policy. The agent ‘will keep a watchful eye on the writings that come to light or are announced in the public newspapers, and notify the government of those that are harmful to decent morals’. Young Revolutionaries For the French revolutionaries, renewal was more than just a catchword. Many of the post-revolutionary leaders were remarkably young, certainly in comparison with the generation in power before 1789. Marc-Antoine Jullien Jr, only five years older than Otto, was the personification of the new youthful élan.11 At the age of sixteen he was already visiting the Jacobin club, the meeting place of Paris’s radical revolutionaries. At the age of seventeen he was sent to England to sound out the opposition. A year later, in 1793, he was again given an important assignment by the Committee of Public Health to act as Robespierre’s special envoy in Brittany and Normandy. It has never been proved that, as the ‘agent of the committee’, he was responsible for the many executions that took place there, but considering his position of power at the time, it is not unlikely. Young leaders were apparently at an advantage when carrying out such purges, for as Jullien himself said: ‘I’m young, and therefore less corrupt.’ The young French revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just – a driving force behind the Reign of Terror – maintained that his youth brought him closer to nature. This notion provided him with the basis for his moral authority until, at the age of just twenty-seven, his life was cut short by the guillotine.

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Young Jullien, by contrast, survived the period unscathed and went on to pursue a career as a journalist, writer and educationalist. He developed a method of time management, which he recommended as ‘the easiest means of finding happiness’.12 His book was also read in the Netherlands; in fact, Otto’s contemporary Alexander van Goltstein attempted, on the basis of its principles, to reorganise his life.13 Jullien’s revolutionary upbringing can be reconstructed with the help of his personal archives, which include sixty-two letters from his mother. Written to her son and her husband, these epistles contain numerous details of Jullien’s youth. He was given a typical enlightened education, inspired by Rousseau’s Emile. Sensitivity and conscience were key concepts, and reading and writing the principal means of developing them. Jullien’s parents subscribed on their son’s behalf to the first French children’s magazine, L’Ami des enfants, which shows that his reading regimen must have resembled Otto’s, as did his strict schedule of lessons and homework, drawn up with the idea that time is scarce and must be put to good use. Marc-Antoine Jullien was encouraged at a very young age to commit his thoughts to paper. The first sample of his writing skills appears at the bottom of a letter from his mother to his father, where he scribbled a couple of lines, reporting that the roses in the garden were already in bloom and expressing the hope that Papa would stay at home instead of travelling to Paris. The letters reveal that Jullien’s mother corrected both the style and the content of her son’s scribblings, regularly making such comments as ‘Cela n’est pas bien, dis d’une autre manière’ (This is not good, say it another way). Marc-Antoine was urged by his mother to keep a diary that was no more private than Otto’s. When her son was staying in Paris, she wrote to say that she was amusing herself by re-reading his diary of 1784. The Revolutionary Catechism The central issues of the French Revolution were embodied in 1789 in the ‘Declaration of the rights of man’. Armed with this concise formulation, the new leaders were confident that they could deal effectively with the political education of the young. For the transmission of revolutionary ideals, however, use was made of a tried-and-true method, namely the catechism, a book of instruction by question and answer.14 In France the genre of the revolutionary catechism became so popular

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Fig. 138. Love of the Fatherland. ‘And when I become a man, I’ll be as useful to my country as I possibly can.’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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that Condorcet found it necessary to warn against the tendency to have children rattle off the rights of man from memory. In his view the constitution should not become ‘a kind of catechism’.15 The first Dutch versions appeared even before the Batavian Revolution. A popular booklet was the translation of a French example, the Fransche republikeinsche catechismus voor de jeugd (French republican catechism for the young) of 1793. A catechism adapted to the Dutch situation, the Catechismus der egaliteit en der rechten van den mensch (Catechism of the equality and the rights of man) was published the following year. To be on the safe side, the title page merely states ‘printed in the Netherlands’, revealing neither printer nor publisher. In the ‘first year of the Batavian Freedom’, as recorded on the cover, the progressive Amsterdam publisher W. Holtrop issued the Republykynsche katechismus en eerste grondregelen van republykynsche zedenkunde voor de opvoeding der jeugd van beiderlei geslacht in de huisgezinnen en in de schoolen (Republican catechism and first principles of republican ethics for the education of youngsters of both sexes in the family and at school). The motto at the top of the title page – ‘freedom, equality and fraternity’ – was accompanied by a portrait of Pieter Paulus as the ‘wise helmsman’ of the Dutch ship of state, ‘great in both name and deed’. The following page featured a virtual battle cry: ‘Children! It is you who will hand down the legacy of freedom to future generations!’ The preface promised ‘Dutch parents and teachers’ an upsurge in the ‘national virtues’ and ‘old Dutch-Republican morals’, provided their pupils were instructed ‘with this book only’. A mere forty-four pages sufficed for a thorough political indoctrination, with such questions and answers as: Q. A. Q. A.

‘What is the best form of government?’ ‘The one in which the people find their place: the Republican.’ ‘What should happen when the burghers are oppressed?’ ‘Then it is the sacred right and unavoidable duty of every person and all segments of society to rise up in revolt.’

On the subject of religion, this catechism is briefer still. Only six questions were considered necessary, and the answers are strongly secular in character. The question as to what religion should be taken to mean is followed by the answer ‘the lofty idea man has of his existence’ and the ‘recognition that he is indebted to the Supreme Being’. The most important religious duty is to be ‘an honest man’. Public worship consists in ‘working, because idleness is, of all the vices, that which most

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displeases the Supreme Being’. The request for proof of the existence of God is answered thus: the doubter must ‘turn his eyes to the heavens, to the earth, to the sea, to everything that surrounds him’. The catechism concludes with the observation that all religions are equal, provided they are in accordance with the laws of the state. The publication of many similar booklets attests to the popularity of this genre, also in the Netherlands.16 The related genre of the dialogue was popular among enlightened philosophers, especially those seeking to expound their ideas to a wide audience or targeting children as their readership. Diderot used this form in his Entretien d’un père avec ses enfants (Conversation between a father and his children). De Perponcher’s Onderwijs voor kinderen (Lessons for children) and Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur (Catechism of nature), both of which Otto read avidly, were also written in the form of a dialogue. Otto’s diary does not refer to any catechisms. His political education consisted of heavier fare, such as the treatise by his Uncle Paulus, which he read with regularity. He first mentioned doing this on Saturday, 7 September 1793: ‘Having come home, I spent the rest of the evening reading a book by Uncle Paulus on the equality of people.’ Earlier

Fig. 139. Portrait of Pieter Paulus in the Republykynsche katechismus, 1795.

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that evening he had returned from a stay at his uncle’s, so perhaps Paulus had given Otto his newly published book. It long remained compulsory reading, intended – as Otto wrote on 4 August 1794 – to teach him ‘sound ideas in religious truth and political affairs’. In the first year of the ‘Batavian freedom’, the book was again put on Otto’s reading list, a revision exercise initiated by his father. For the rest, Otto’s political education was based on history books, which his parents used to acquaint him with current political issues. Indeed, the authors of these books seem to have anticipated this function. Thus Martinus Stuart, the author of Romeinsche geschiedenissen (Roman histories) of 1793, established in his preface a direct connection between antiquity and current affairs.17 Otto’s reading of Stuart had the desired effect. On 1 February 1794 he noted: ‘In the Romeinsche historie I read about the discord in Rome after it became a republic. This made it clear that civil wars can sometimes do more harm than the most powerful tyrants, but that when a republic is fortunate enough to escape this fate and continues to reap the benefits, one can be happier than in a monarchy.’ Millot’s Wereldgeschiedenis (World history), which Otto read with his mother, also encouraged him to ignore differences in time and place when pondering political questions. Thus he showed great enthusiasm for a law enacted by one of the pharaohs that required courtiers to be chosen on the basis of merit: ‘It seems to me that these laws should also be introduced in Europe, where princes and kings so often abuse their power.’ Hereditary nobility and monarchy lay at the wrong end of the political spectrum. Otto preferred to read about history that had taken place closer to home – the history of the fatherland. On 21 October 1791 he wrote: ‘Spent the evening writing and reading in Martinet and others about the history of our fatherland, which interests me more than that of the Romans or Greeks, because it concerns me more.’ Numerous episodes in Dutch history were hotly debated in the eighteenth century, such as the murder of Johan de Witt, the Grand Pensionary who had abolished the stadholderate more than a century before. This Patriot hero was referred to repeatedly in the National Assembly, and Lambert van Eck devoted an article to him in his encyclopaedia. The historical works of such writers as Wagenaar and Martinet gave Otto the same Patriot version of the past: ‘I Read in Martinet about the De Witt brothers, who were treated abominably by the rabble in The Hague, who afterwards dragged their dead bodies through the streets, even though these men had been of great service to the country.’18

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Fig. 140. The murder of the De Witt brothers. From J. Wagenaar’s Vaderlandsche historie, 1794.

The old Batavians, Patriots avant la lettre, were another important point of reference. On 28 May 1794, Otto reported having read with his father and his eldest sister ‘about our first forefathers, the Batavians, how they were brave in war and fought for freedom’. The same picture emerges from other children’s literature of the time, such as the Lettergeschenk voor de Nederlandsche jeugd (Literary gift to Dutch children) of 1790, in which the Batavians are praised as a ‘loyal, courageous, virtuous and honest’ people with only one vice: the immoderate consumption of alcohol. The Batavians were a home-grown, freedom-loving people: ‘Such valiant people inhabited our country – take care, children, to learn their history, for then you will cherish a nation of fearless people whose virtues and love of freedom you must imitate.’19 Otto read extensively about current affairs. On 16 January 1795 he noted that he and his father had read a ‘booklet in which a corrupted republic (like ours) is very nicely portrayed’. This theme was so common in pamphlets of the period that it is unclear which one Otto is referring to. It is possible that he was reading De mislukte bedoeling der heerschzucht; of de verkorte geschiedenis van een Gemeenebest op de maan (The

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Fig. 141. The Batavians. From Lettergeschenk voor de Nederlandsche jeugd, 1790.

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ill-fated objective of the lust for power; or the concise history of a republic on the moon),20 a parallel narrative about a people on the moon that fight for and gain their liberty only to have it taken away again by a ruler acting under the influence of an evil guardian: ‘There a republic, a small but pleasant province, suffered the same fate.’ Otto also read the newspaper regularly, such as on 15 April 1794: ‘During dessert I read to Papa from the newspapers about how things now stand in France.’ Festivities and Rights The numerous festivities held to celebrate the French and Batavian Revolutions frequently included rituals referring to renewal and rebirth. The best-known example of this was the planting of liberty trees. It is no coincidence that children were assigned the leading roles in these rituals. The above-mentioned pedagogical connection between children and trees now took on new, revolutionary connotations. During the festivities held in 1797 to commemorate the French Revolution, a sixteen-year-old boy solemnly pronounced the following words: ‘Trees, my friends, are the symbol of our youth: together we grow.’ On that occasion four hundred children each planted a tree.21 Starting in 1795, great numbers of liberty trees were planted in the Netherlands as well, and the ritual was accompanied by similar festivities. The first such ceremony was held on 6 February 1795 in The Hague. Each of the twelve citizens selected to plant the tree was paired with ‘a Batavian maiden under the age of fourteen’.22 Otto, too, was present at this festive event: ‘Yesterday we were all there to see the planting of the liberty tree, and the ceremony was accompanied by very beautiful music.’ Various prints of such ceremonies have survived. On a depiction of the liberty tree in Zaandijk we see a mother standing to one side, explaining its significance to her small son.23 During the ‘citizens’ celebration’ on 3 March 1796, two days after the opening of the National Assembly – where Pieter Paulus caught his fatal cold – there was a parade in The Hague in which twenty boys sang ‘songs of the fatherland’ and twenty girls and twelve mothers with young children carried a banner which read: ‘We will never stop praising this day to our offspring, so that they can pass it down to their descendants.’ They were followed by several poor orphans carrying a banner proclaiming ‘equality’.24

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Fig. 142. The liberty tree in the Hague Buitenhof and the parade of 3 March 1796. Detail from Monument voor Pieter Paulus, 1797.

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Even though children were spoon-fed revolutionary ideology from birth and were expected to take part in all kinds of revolutionary celebrations, they were ignored in the Dutch ‘Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen’. We may well ask if these children of the revolution actually had any rights. Children – like slaves, women, Jews, non-whites, domestic servants, the poor, deaf-mutes and the disabled – were among those for whom equal rights did not automatically apply. The general terms in which these rights had been formulated, however, prompted renewed discussion of the neglect of these segments of society. In his answer to the question What is Enlightenment?, Kant defined this modern intellectual movement as ‘man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage’. Enlightenment meant emancipation, but the writers who asked themselves to whom these human rights applied – other than male citizens, of course – were more concerned with slaves and women than with children. In his ‘Treatise on Equality’, Pieter Paulus took a clear stand against slavery, which he considered particularly inappropriate in a country as traditionally liberal as the Netherlands. This decidedly modern standpoint was not adopted by the National Assembly, even though it was the subject of great discussion. The majority thought that the slaves in the Dutch West Indies were not yet ready to benefit from the freedom to exercise their human rights. Otto was acquainted with this opinion from the work of Martinet, who believed that Surinamese slavery was in any case better than ‘idolatrous African freedom’.25 The discussion of the rights of women parallels that of slavery. Interest in this subject had been increasing in the Netherlands since the Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (Dutch Literary Review) had printed parts of William Alexander’s History of Women – the Dutch translation appeared in 1796 – in which this question was first raised. That same year saw the publication of a translation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, the most comprehensive defence of women’s rights.26 This book was translated by Lambert’s friend Ysbrand van Hamelsveld, who supplemented it with the commentary from C.G. Salzmann’s German version. The lawyer F.A. van der Marck – a man Lambert van Eck admired greatly – wrote a treatise advocating female suffrage, the equality of men and women within marriage, and the right of women to obtain doctoral degrees.27 He argued that, according to natural law, marriage is a union of equals, in which ‘one [partner] does not have the privilege of commanding the other’. He speaks explicitly of ‘parental’ – not ‘paternal’ – authority. As early as 1795, the first year of the Batavian

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Revolution, a person concealing his or her identity behind the initials P.B. v. W. penned a pamphlet championing equal rights for women: ‘Demonstrating that women deserve to participate in the governance of the country’.28 The author, demanding the right of women to vote and to hold public office, closed with an appeal to take the lead, so that the French could salute the Dutch by saying, ‘We broke the chains, but you, Holland, have placed freedom completely on its throne!’ In his Revolutionaire droom (Revolutionary dream) of 1798, Gerrit Paape sketched the ideal family in the year 1998, by which time there would, he assumed, be complete equality between men and women.29 In a play called Het revolutionaire huishouden (The revolutionary household), Lieve van Ollefen likewise described a utopian marriage. The protagonist, a father who prepares all six of his daughters for male professions, prides himself on being a revolutionary not only in affairs of state but also in family matters.30 Jacobus Kantelaar, a friend of Lambert, wrote an ‘Address on the influence of true enlightenment on the lot of women’, in which he establishes a direct link between enlightenment and the position of women.31 Kantelaar adopted Rousseau’s notion that a desire for affluence was the root of all evil, for civilisation had overshot the mark and distanced man from nature. He concluded that ‘moral refinement had become the primary cause of inequality among people’, which in his view included the inequality of the sexes. Affluence, he said, led to the repression of both women and slaves. Indeed, civilised societies were not so very different from barbarian societies, since both were in need of enlightenment – ideas very much in keeping with those of Lambert van Eck. The boom in pedagogical works in the last decade of the eighteenth century indicates that children were beginning to be taken more seriously. The journal Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen regularly featured educational subjects. It reviewed not only advice books but also children’s literature, such as Adèle et Theodore – part of Otto’s reading regimen – which was praised as ‘a series of outstanding lessons on education’. Feddersen’s Voorbeelden van wijsheid en deugd (Examples of wisdom and virtue), also part of Otto’s programme, was approvingly described as the work of a ‘serious writer, bent on impressing upon young people the proper rules of life [with] superior examples of sensible behaviour’.32 Nevertheless, a theoretical discussion of the rights of children, comparable to the ongoing debate on the rights of women and slaves, failed to occur. In general, the pleas to put children and adults on a more equal footing continued to come from the pedagogues, not from the politicians.

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From a legal standpoint, too, there were few changes in the position of children but some in the status of young people. For example, the age of majority was redefined: in 1792 the voting age was lowered in France from twenty-five to eighteen, and five years later, the voting age in the Netherlands was lowered from twenty-five to twenty-two, and to twenty for those who had served in the military.33 Moreover, the farreaching rights that parents exercised over their children were curtailed. Thus adult offspring no longer needed parental consent to marry. Inheritance rights became more favourable in the sense that it was no longer possible to disinherit one’s children completely, which had in the past been an effective means of coercion. Some of these reforms were reversed after 1814, but the symbolic link between youth and progress remained. In 1856 the first stone of the national monument in Amster-dam’s Dam Square was laid by an orphan, whose participation was rewarded with a watch. The message that the future of the fatherland was in the hands of the young had meanwhile become commonplace.34 Child of the Future Otto, who had been brought up on revolutionary ideals, knew what a revolution was in theory, but after 1795 he was able to find out what it was like in practice: ‘rough days’. His first notes on the subject describe the French troops passing Delft on their way to The Hague. On 19 January 1795 he reported having encountered ‘many army wagons’ in the vicinity of Delft. That day he arrived home to hear from his father that ‘altogether more than a hundred had come past, I don’t know where they are going. This evening all their horses were again ridden to The Hague, so that it has been a rough day.’ The French troops, marching to The Hague on the road alongside the River Vliet, inevitably passed De Ruit. Otto’s drawing teacher Van Haastert must have had a good view of them from the house. He drew some of these scruffy French soldiers, drifting past in small groups for days on end. On 24 January 1795, Otto wrote in his diary: I’m very glad that today is over, because I haven’t had any fun. First of all, Papa and Mama were in The Hague the whole day, so that I was alone with my sisters and the governess. Secondly, the weather was cold and snowy, so I couldn’t go outdoors, and thirdly, we were repeatedly disturbed by the French volunteers marching past, who came by without officers in groups of four to six. Some of them came across the ice and right up to the house, and we could only get rid of them by giving them

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Otto was away from home the next day, but their servant Dirk told him ‘that it had been much quieter than yesterday and there had been only a couple [of soldiers] who had left in an orderly manner after drinking a glass of gin’. Soon afterward the stream of soldiers swelled again, and Otto wrote: ‘For the rest, we’ve been inconvenienced again by French hussars. We thought we were rid of them, because for a long time nothing happened, but now there’s been trouble.’ Once things had calmed down, the billeting of the French troops stationed in the vicinity of Delft began. De Ruit also had two lodgers: the French officers Danton and Gérard. Otto was ‘very pleased’ that he could speak enough French to converse with them. He described Danton as ‘a very good man’, who came to sit with him in the evening: ‘Then he talks and sings a bit, so I listen and neglect my own tasks.’ As mentioned earlier, Otto was indirectly affected by the revolution because his father was continually obliged to go to meetings. Lambert’s neglect of his son was a regular cause of complaint: ‘I’m especially glad to be getting on with Latin again. I wasn’t getting anywhere, working on it only with Papa, because ever since his appointment to that political post he hardly has any time.’ Compared with France, the revolution that took place in the Netherlands in 1795 was rather peaceful. There was no terror and no guillotine in The Hague’s Binnenhof. Just how much the Netherlands differed from France, even though its Reign of Terror had ended, emerges from events taking place in France at the same time. The revolutionary storm had subsided by 1795, but its aftermath could still be felt, as illustrated by the fate of Otto’s contemporary, Louis Capet, the orphaned son of the French king. Raised as the heir to the throne, the boy died in a Paris prison on 8 June 1795. The new leaders had resolved to re-educate him according to revolutionary principles, and had therefore placed him in the care of a cobbler, who – in line with Rousseau’s precepts – raised him harshly and taught him a trade. Like Emile and Otto, he had been given chickens and rabbits to tend – in this case not as a pedagogical aid but as an indispensable contribution to the family income. His re-education was successful inasmuch as the boy cursed his parents when prompted to do so and even appeared as a witness in

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Fig. 143. Fusilier. Itinerant French soldier, depicted by Otto’s drawing teacher Isaac van Haastert, 1795.

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the trial against his mother. After Queen Marie-Antoinette had been executed and the cobbler had relinquished his educational role, the lad languished in prison and eventually died of tuberculosis.35 The death of ten-year-old Louis attracted little attention, certainly in comparison with his father’s execution, but the Patriot writer Johannes Hazeu saw fit to mention it in his history of the French Revolution written for children. His Historie der omwenteling in vaderlandsche gesprekken voor kinderen (History of the revolution in fatherlandish talks for children) was cast in the familiar form of a conversation between a father and his children, in this case Jantje and Mietje. After a discussion of the execution of Louis XVI, in which the author avoids taking a firm stand – writing that the king had answered ‘more or less’ adequately, but not ‘satisfactorily for those who sentenced him to death’ – the children come forward with difficult questions and insist on knowing the fate of the crown prince. Mietje – presumably brought up, like Otto, on children’s literature intended to instil empathy – pities the unfortunate boy and wants to know what happened to him. Her father cannot bring himself to prevaricate and thus answers: ‘The king’s son died in prison of an illness.’ Then he quickly changes the subject and winds up with the moral of the story, which is to urge his children to become ‘good citizens’ of a country that has turned ‘a muddy swamp’ into ‘the most beautiful place on earth’.36

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Fig. 144. Mocking him. The young son of Louis XVI and his guard. From Gallerij van beroemde kinderen, 1822.

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THEOPHILANTHROPISTS AND PHYSICO-THEOLOGIANS Enlightened Devotion Otto was baptised in 1780 in the Great Church in The Hague and thus belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church. But what did religion mean to a little boy growing up at that time? It is difficult to say, especially because the first years of his diary tell us mainly about the outward, ceremonial side of religion. On Sundays Otto usually went with his parents to church, often the Walloon Reformed Church, where worship services were held in French. Afterwards, at home, the family discussed the sermon, which gave Otto’s parents an opportunity to find out if he had been paying attention. Sometimes he disappointed them, either because he had not understood the French or because the sermon was beyond his comprehension. Occasionally the Van Ecks did not attend church; instead, they stayed at home and read a sermon together or discussed religious matters. This was naturally the case when one of them was ill or the weather was bad, but sometimes they made a conscious decision to worship at home in the family circle. Private devotion of this kind was popular among the Van Ecks’ acquaintances. Doddridge advocated it, as did handbooks by the modern theologians much read by the Van Ecks, such as C.C. Sturm’s Dagelijksche verkeeringen met God (Daily communication with God) and G.J. Zollikofer’s Christelijk huisboek (Christian household book). Their Walloon minister, Jacob Scheidius, later published his own Bijbelsch huisboek (Biblical household book). Such gatherings combined modern faith and modern family life.1 As an aid to Otto’s religious upbringing, the Van Ecks chose books written especially for children. Otto’s diary mentions Johann Jacob Hess’s Geschiedverhalen des O. en N. Testaments, inzonderheid geschikt voor de jeugd (Stories from the Old and New Testament, especially suited to the young), a forerunner of the children’s Bible. Otto also attended confirmation classes once a week. His religious ideas gradually took shape, and the end of the year (or month or week) often prompted him to conclude his diary entry with a religious observation. Even so, Otto did not seem deeply moved by the Christian faith. He was a reluctant

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churchgoer, sometimes pleading a cold in order to stay at home. A typical remark dates from Sunday, 31 January 1796: ‘Since I didn’t go to church today (being hard of hearing again), Mama wished to speak to me this morning about similar things. And although in the beginning I was not in the mood, we nevertheless got into the spirit of it and came to talk about the death of Jesus Christ.’ Otto was fascinated, however, by the outward trappings of religion, such as the Lord’s Supper, which was observed every three months. He was first allowed to attend a celebration of it in July 1791: ‘Today I went to the service at Voorburg, but because it was the Lord’s Supper and I had never seen an observance of it, I was so curious about what would happen that I paid little attention to the minister’s sermon, so that when we got home I could not comment on it.’ After such inattentiveness Otto was not allowed to attend the Lord’s Supper for the time being. One Sunday in April 1794 Otto wrote: ‘Did not go to church this morning, because it was the Lord’s Supper.’ Otto presumably asked why he was not allowed to attend, because he went on to say: ‘On this occasion Papa explained why children were not allowed to take part in this rite, which was started by Jesus.’ This entry resulted in a promise on the part of Otto’s mother to take him along again some time when the Lord’s Supper was being observed, but it was nearly a year before he actually attended such a service: ‘This month I started going to the Walloon Church in Delft, where today they celebrated the Lord’s Supper, a rite that moved me deeply.’ Otto’s day began with reading devotional literature and generally ended on the same note. On 21 May 1793 he described his breakfast: ‘I read the newspaper and the Bible to Papa.’ Otherwise he seldom mentioned reading the Bible. Evidently it was not one of his favourite books, because on 27 September 1793, when he specifically mentioned having read the Bible, he added ‘which nowadays I fail to do nearly every day, which does not please Mama at all’. Altogether there are no more than eleven references to the Bible in Otto’s entire diary. That number pales into insignificance compared with the countless references to Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur (Catechism of nature) or Basedow’s Manuel. Over the years religious matters further decline in importance in Otto’s diary.2 On Sunday, 11 January 1795 Otto noted: ‘This morning Papa and Mama and Aunt went to church, but Uncle Paulus and Doortje and I stayed at home and read the Bible and saw that in all likelihood John the Evangelist was also the author of the three Epistles, as the words

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Fig. 145. Moderation in outward appearance and wealth. Print from the category ‘The effects of religion’. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774.

and exhortations in those books are nearly the same and written in the same style.’ Otto was raised with the most modern interpretation of the Bible, in which it was no longer viewed as God’s word, but as the work of various mortals. Increased interest in the Bible’s historical context had focused attention on the Apocrypha. Martinet was Otto’s source of information on this subject. In October 1791 he read ‘about the books of the Maccabees, which serve to fill the gap between the Old and New Testament’. One Sunday in December 1794, Otto and his father happened to discuss the hereafter: ‘And I had a useful conversation with Papa about mankind, which proves that, even if there were no eternity, one would be happier in this world accomplishing God’s will.’ The revealing phrase ‘even if there were no eternity’ indicates that it was in fact possible to doubt the existence of an afterlife, though the values represented by Christianity had a wider legitimacy in the eyes of Otto’s father, who went on to tell his son that human happiness consisted in ‘perfecting one’s mind and promoting the good of one’s fellow men’.

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On 18 November 1793 Otto wrote: ‘This morning I read the story of Joseph in Hess’s stories from the Bible, from which we see that God is always with us when we are virtuous.’ Piousness and virtuousness had traditionally gone hand in hand, but Otto’s father linked faith directly to the values he had drawn from enlightened authors. One Sunday in June 1791 Otto wrote: ‘This morning Papa and I read a sermon about the love of God, which consists in the yearning to love one’s neighbour and also in a rational self-love.’ ‘Rational self-love’ was not a biblical term, but rather the mainspring of human action, according to Enlightenment philosophy. Otto’s religious beliefs were based on the notion that God always wanted the best for people, even when this was not immediately apparent. All kinds of setbacks, illnesses and accidents were construed by Otto as blessings in disguise. On a summer day in 1794, for example, Otto was strolling around the grounds of De Ruit with Willem van Vredenburch, his junior by two years, when Willem suddenly fainted. Otto ran home to get help, and Willem regained consciousness after his tie was loosened. Afterwards Otto reflected that it was fortunate that Willem had not fainted while fishing, ‘because then he would have fallen into the water and drowned. Thus we see the wondrous effects of God’s providence.’ A setback or illness was never interpreted as divine punishment for one’s sins; ideas of that kind had long been abandoned in the Van Ecks’ circle. Similarly, it was bad form to complain about misfortune. In 1791 Otto noted: ‘This morning I made a huge mistake by asking Papa in a grumpy voice why God had made me so hard of hearing, but I didn’t know and won’t do it again.’ It was also wrong to complain about the weather, ‘because [God] knows better then we do what’s best for us, and therefore Papa doesn’t want me ever to say that the weather is bad. On rainy days we are also happy to stay indoors. May God be thanked for this.’3 These ideas were also expressed in the books Otto read, in such pieces as a devotional ‘thought for the day’: ‘The chapter was about cold weather. It included a comment which proved that people are very wrong if (seeing only the disadvantages and not the advantages of cold weather) they complain to the Good Lord, being unaware that God does everything for their own good.’4 All of this testifies to a rational understanding of religion, but there were also signs of a more emotional brand of piety. One Sunday in July 1791, for example, Otto had a talk with his father: ‘Today I didn’t go to church but read a sermon with Papa about the opening of the

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Fig. 146. God’s goodness. ‘God is good, for rain is falling / On this dried-out, thirsty land.’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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Lord’s Prayer. What I liked about it most was that if we pray to God, our heart must be inclined like that of a child towards its father, but before one can pray like that, one must become a child of God.’ What it meant to be ‘a child of God’ accorded with the virtues that were praised in the pedagogical literature: ‘Therefore to be a child of God is the same as doing what is right and being useful, finding happiness in being industrious, righteous and benevolent, as well as earnestly avoiding hate, persecution, avarice, debauchery.’ This passage reveals a two-pronged notion of religion. On the one hand, Christian belief is presented as rational: industriousness, righteousness and benevolence were virtues propagated in the children’s books Otto read. On the other hand, faith was a personal relationship between God and man, like that between father and child. The pious must become children and give themselves over to faith. This question vexed Lambert, as emerges from his encyclopaedia, for which he copied out a passage from Zollikofer about children’s prayer.5 Appreciation of a more spontaneous spirituality grew in the late eighteenth century. It is to be found in a new and rather enlightened form of pietism, which appealed strongly to the emotions and, through authors such as Lavater, gradually gained ground in the Netherlands. The image of the faithful as children was in keeping with a growing appreciation of the first phase of life. A biblical passage that became popular in those years is Matthew 18:3: ‘Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ Pieter Paulus quoted this passage in his opening address to the National Assembly. The same idea can be found in the painting and literature of the time, in which children were increasingly portrayed as innocent and angelic creatures.6 The eighteenth century saw the Reformed faith split into three movements: orthodox-confessional, enlightened and strict pietistic. The strict pietistic Calvinists (the ‘Fijnen’), attached great importance to self-examination, which was to be undertaken by keeping a religious diary, for instance, or relating the story of one’s conversion. Otto was certainly familiar with the ideas of these strict pietists, because they were part of his immediate circle. His diary contains an account of a visit to the farmer Paulus van der Spek, a devout pietist of the strictest sort. Van der Spek’s religious world is well known, because he kept a diary. He also wrote an autobiography, likewise preserved, whose title resounds with strict pietistic language: ‘Several ways in which the Lord has guided me.’ Van der Spek’s writings are marked by grave doubts about his holy calling and a desire to do penance for his sins.7

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There was no longer any place in the Van Ecks’ modern faith for the concept of original sin or predestination.8 Lambert’s self-compiled encyclopaedia contains a number of articles that provide insight into his religious ideas. His article on ‘Tolerance’ clearly shows that he viewed it more as a trait that could benefit society than as a Christian virtue. In the article on the ‘Arts and Sciences’, he wrote of the ‘state of perfection in which our forefathers were created, with respect to their intellectual capacity as well as the regulated trades’. In writing this article he had consulted the ‘outstanding treatise’ by the German theologian Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jerusalem, Verhandeling over de voornaamste waarheden van den godsdienst (Treatise on the most important religious truths), in which modern faith was defended against radical notions, such as the deism or atheism of thinkers like Hume, Bolingbroke and others.9 Lambert also made extensive use of the Dutch edition of the new translation of the Bible by the German biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis, whose version was intended – and this was completely new – for people of all denominations. This new translation presented the books of the Bible in the order in which they were originally written. In his article on ‘Genesis’, Lambert subscribes to the modern notion that the Bible need not be interpreted literally. ‘Moses wanted primarily to give the Israelites a true picture of the origin of mankind and the world, in particular to arm them against the idolatrous beliefs of other peoples. In this respect one should not think of him as a natural scientist seeking to convey to the Israelites a perfect understanding of the entire world system, but only as much of it as served his aims.’ Typical of Lambert’s religious stance is his regard for Confucius, to whom he devoted an article as ‘one of the most venerable philosophers in China’, with reference to the article on Confucius in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which was possibly in the Van Ecks’ library. Despite his enthusiasm for Confucius, Lambert disliked zealotry, on which he also wrote an article, defining it as ‘believing too strongly in certain principles or duties, or practising such principles or duties without allowing any place for reason’. Zealotry, he thought, ‘does not confine itself to religion but occurs in almost all the sciences, ethics, politics, philosophy, scholarship, etc.’. Lambert expressed himself in similar fashion in the National Assembly, where he emphasised that enlightenment and Christianity could in fact profit from one another. In his capacity as representative of the people, Lambert van Eck had accepted the far-reaching resolution to separate church and state, which made religion a matter for the individual. The transition to a more private spirituality had begun earlier, but devotional practices now

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began to flourish in the intimacy of the family circle. Otto’s parents never troubled him about the formal side of religion; they discussed it with him, but respected his ideas and attitudes, despite his tender age. Otto made notes of a religious nature and even wrote a couple of poems and prayers that were strictly personal: he was not required to show them to anyone; even his parents were unaware of their existence. Perhaps Otto was following a piece of advice given by Martinet in his Huisboek (Household book): ‘Do not fail to attend public worship; make notes in a special book of everything that is new to you or strikes you as strange.’10 We may well ask ourselves which path Otto would have taken as an adult, but it is certain that his modern religious upbringing had sown the seeds of a fundamental crisis of faith. In those days such developments were by no means inconceivable. A good example of growing doubt is that of the previously mentioned Alexander van Goltstein, Otto’s junior by three years.11 While a student, Alexander began to keep a diary inspired by Lavater’s Geheim dagboek (Secret diary) and Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which appeared in Dutch in 1798.12 At the age of nineteen he wrote: ‘For about a year I’ve been less scrupulous in my religious practice.’ Two years later he noticed himself ‘standing still or falling behind in the observance of religious practices’. Later that year he wrote: ‘For how long have I not been aware of the darkness in my understanding of divine holiness?’ On 15 October 1806 he took the last step: ‘I am more in doubt than ever about religion; the unstable edifice of religion, which has been mine for a number of years, has slowly begun to totter and now comes crashing down.’13 The privatisation and liberalisation of religion involved dangers of which a person like Lambert van Eck was only too well aware. During his visit to the Bibliothèque Royale in Paris, the guide had given him proof of the waning interest in religion by informing him that the theological department was ‘the least requested, whereas a lot of work was done in all other fields’.14 In recent years historians have come to the conclusion that enlightenment and Christianity complemented, rather than opposed, one another. That picture, however, is based mainly on the public debate, because what went on in people’s minds is known only from the private diaries kept by the few individuals who recorded their interior monologues for their own use only. Religious doubts were likely to be kept hidden from the outside world, as we saw in the case of Alexander van Goltstein, who did not even reveal his feelings to his parents.

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In Otto’s day the place of religion in society was so fiercely debated that in Reformed circles the idea took root that religion was badly in need of defence. This led in 1785 to the founding of the Hague Society for the Defence of the Christian Faith. Its establishment had been precipitated by the publication in Dutch of Joseph Priestley’s An History of the Corruptions of Christianity.15 Though it did not mention the translator’s name, the Dutch version was presumably the work of Ysbrand van Hamelsveld. Priestley championed what he viewed as the original form of Christianity, and rejected such doctrines as the Trinity and original sin, arguing that the Bible was silent on these subjects. His book, which ran up against opposition mainly because of its Unitarian ideas, was banned and publicly burned. Lambert van Eck’s notes reveal that, far from condemning the work, he actually admired it. Lambert’s other preferences also betray the Van Ecks’ latitudinarian leanings. The books in their library were precisely those inveighed against by the orthodox minister Jan Scharp in his book on the ‘current so-called Enlightenment’. This Rotterdam clergyman warned against authors such as Basedow, whose writings were at the core of Otto’s upbringing, and dismissed Goodricke and Priestley, whom Lambert quoted with approval. In Scharp’s view they were all ‘enlighteners’, who sought to purge Christianity of what they considered ‘errors’, though in fact they were undermining the faith. They are mentioned by Scharp in the same breath as the ‘unfortunate’ Rousseau, the ‘falsely mocking’ Voltaire and the ‘lunatic’ La Mettrie. Among the Dutchmen Scharp criticised was Lambert’s friend Ysbrand van Hamelsveld, whom he saw as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, because ‘our adversaries, expertly erudite, play upon feelings and talk about love of mankind’.16 Scharp lumped together all notions deviating from orthodoxy. In reality, liberal Christianity came in a sea of varieties, through which Lambert charted his own course. He rejected Voltaire’s religious ideas, for example: even though he admired him as a philosopher and man of letters, he nevertheless viewed this thinker as ‘the Goliath of unbelief, who sought to measure the mysteries with the short ell of his finite understanding’. Elsewhere in his encyclopaedia, where he advocates unlimited freedom of the press, Lambert commends Voltaire because his attacks on religion supposedly inspired the writings of authors such as Jerusalem, ‘which bring the highest honour to religion’.17 Lambert’s initial partiality for the optimistic Jerusalem – whom he preferred to the more cynical Voltaire – emerges from his expressions of approval at every mention of this ‘outstanding’ German

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theologian. Jerusalem is thought of as the optimistic theologian par excellence, who even managed to hold on to his optimism after an unhappy love affair caused his son to commit suicide. This dramatic event provided Goethe with the material for his bestselling novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther), which made the case a cause célèbre in the Netherlands as well.18 The whole of intellectual Europe was astonished that Wilhelm Jerusalem still believed he lived in the best of all possible worlds, as Baron van Spaen remarked in 1783, after a visit to the philosopher.19 The separation of church and state in 1796 shook the ecclesiastical structure to its foundations. Lutherans, Mennonites, Roman Catholics and Jews were no longer discriminated against in law, and the Dutch Reformed Church lost its privileged position. For Jews in particular the decision had far-reaching consequences, since up to then they had been forbidden to settle in many Dutch cities, including Delft. This is confirmed by a 1783 travel journal kept by a German, who noted about Delft that the ‘city has no Jews’.20 Churches of all denominations were henceforth viewed as societies, in which the faithful came together to profess their beliefs. The new religious organisations were given complete freedom, but had to be self-supporting. This also held true for the Dutch Reformed Church, which until then had been financed by the authorities. Now that this support had been withdrawn, there were growing fears that the country would fall into a religious and social vacuum. Lambert van Eck shared this concern, according to a letter written to him by a like-minded acquaintance, the Leiden professor Floris Jacobus Voltelen, who was alarmed by the withdrawal of stipends for clergymen and teachers: But what grieves me the most, my friend, is the indifference with which religion is handled and the woeful fate awaiting us. . . . Anyone who chooses to do so and possesses an adequate fortune can find the means to support ministers himself, and woe betide those who cannot do such a thing! Thousands will be forced to see themselves robbed of the means of education, of intercession, of the comfort of the salutary practices of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Behold the disappearance of the good Christian stock in the Netherlands and with it all blessings! Oh, my friend, my heart weeps.21

Lambert’s correspondent actually supported equal treatment for the various religious persuasions, but with the retention of financial support, not only for the Dutch Reformed Church but for all denominations.

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Lambert van Eck wanted to go further, in fact, for it was his goal to break down the barriers between the various denominations within the Christian faith. That he was an ecumenicist avant la lettre is apparent from his preference for Michaelis’s translation of the Bible, which was also recommended by Martinet in his Huisboek.22 It is telling indeed that Lambert van Eck became a member of Delft’s Walloon Church, which many young, enlightened intellectuals joined around 1790. The Walloon Church was much more progressive than the Dutch Reformed Church. It was also elitist – the Delft congregation numbered fewer than two hundred – and so had always exerted an attraction on people like the Van Ecks. Around this time a new fellowship was founded within the Walloon congregation. Calling itself La Confraternité (The Brotherhood), it consisted of deacons and former deacons, whose actual task was to care for the poor. Since poor people were conspicuously lacking in the Delft congregation, the brotherhood decided at one of its bi-weekly meetings to set itself a new goal: to defend the Christian faith against ‘underminers’ of whatever kind. La Confraternité called itself a ‘secret society’ – a strong reminder of Freemasonry. That is no coincidence, since the brotherhood’s members included various Freemasons of the Delft lodge Silentium. Several members of La Confraternité wanted to hold religious services that would be open to members of all denominations. With a flair for symbolism, they founded a society called Christo Sacrum on Christmas Day 1797. Its members met secretly for the first five years, after which the society went public, holding services with its own liturgy (including baptism), its own hymns and its own ecclesiastical vestments. The members of Christo Sacrum saw themselves as embodying ‘the new man’ – a New Testament term that took on a new meaning during the Enlightenment.23 Following the example of early Christendom, the society strove to be an ecumenical model of modern ethicalreligious citizenship. Its members propagated these ideas in other ways as well. One of them, Willem Goede, wrote a utopian novel sketching Rotterdam’s evolution into an ideal city, whose amenities included a highly efficient method of disposing of the dead, as evidenced by the smoke rising from the huge chimneys of the municipal crematorium on the outskirts of the city. The good citizens of Delft thought that the members of Christo Sacrum were oddballs and scornfully called their society ‘Criss-Cross’.

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Their numbers remained small, for ordinary people were not interested, and the elite would not venture to join. The driving force behind the brotherhood was Isaac van Haastert, Otto’s drawing teacher. That his ideas were close to those of the Van Ecks can be gleaned from his many publications on a wide range of topics. The ecumenical ideal can also be found in the work of authors whose ideas were at the heart of Otto’s upbringing: C.G. Salzmann, for example, who not only taught at the Philanthropinum but also gave lectures – Gottesverehrungen (Worshippings of God) – in which he promulgated a faith free of all dogma and ritual and not connected to any church. In 1794 Lambert had instructed Otto to translate daily into Dutch a passage from Salzmann’s Gottesverehrungen. Lambert no doubt welcomed the foundation of Christo Sacrum, though he remained a member of the Walloon Church. It is possible that he occasionally attended a service of Christo Sacrum, for it was not uncommon to see parked outside their church the coaches of sympathisers reluctant to associate openly with the movement.24 Other cities also witnessed the initiatives of interconfessional movements, including those of the theophilanthropists, a very loosely organised religious group that had arisen in 1796 in France as a mixture of deism and Freemasonry.25 The theophilanthropists had no desire to found a new church; instead, they strove for a universal faith based on the love of God. They made their ideas known in publications such as Recueil de cantiques . . . (Collection of canticles, hymns and odes for religious holidays and the ethic of the theophilanthropists or worshippers of God and friends of man),26 in which God is referred to as the ‘father’ or ‘soul’ of nature and the hymns glorify a ‘beautiful butterfly’ or a ‘lovely stream’. The volume opens with an ‘examination of conscience’ to determine whether readers have fulfilled their duties to themselves, their families and society – in that order. The unadulterated deism of the theophilanthropists seems to have been the last step towards conscientious agnosticism. From a casual remark Lambert van Eck made in a letter he wrote in 1798, we know that the Recueil was actually his favourite volume of religious literature. Though he did not publicise the fact, Lambert was among the most liberal Christians of his day. The last decade of the eighteenth century was turbulent in every respect, even with regard to religion, which – with the modern additions of civic pride and love of the fatherland – was more important than ever. Lambert van Eck stressed this point in the National Assembly, but – as we have seen – he did not manage to persuade the other representatives.

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Lambert’s stance shows that in the late eighteenth century enlightened ideas and liberal Christianity could be perfectly compatible. Some of his contemporaries thought that the two were irreconcilable, but they were the extremists of both the left and the right, who vociferously advocated views that few people shared. In the Netherlands, in fact, the Enlightenment was hand-in-glove with Christianity.27 Obviously religion was important to the Van Eck family. As we have seen, clergymen were regular visitors to their house and religion was a recurring topic of conversation. Otto would have liked to become a farmer, but his parents had another vocation in mind: they wanted him to become a minister of the church. It seems a strange choice, because for generations it had been the custom in both their families for the sons to study law in preparation for careers in government. If Otto’s parents saw the clergy as the profession of the future, they would have been proved right, for men of the cloth were gaining in prestige and becoming true opinion leaders. In Arend Fokke’s guide to occupational choice – De wegen des levens (The paths of life) – the first chapter is devoted to a discussion of clergymen, followed by lawyers and several other ‘intellectual professions’. Last in line and worthy of but the briefest mention are four ‘manual occupations’: farmer, sailor, soldier and artisan.28 In the Van Ecks’ circle, where children had long been seen as future regents, there were quite a few parents who broke with tradition. Otto’s friend Mattheus Gouverneur studied theology and became a successful minister. It is also telling that Otto’s cousins Jacoba and Christina Emants both married clergymen – an unprecedented choice in their family. Physico-Theology Besides the transition from public worship to a more individual faith, there was another development that came to a head at the end of the eighteenth century, making religion the subject of fierce debate, namely the dichotomy between science and religion. Ever since Newton and other scientists had shown in the seventeenth century that the universe was governed by immutable natural laws, doubts had grown about the role played by God. To keep religion and science from drifting apart, an emergency measure was called for: a stopgap called physico-theology, or what in English was often referred to as natural philosophy. This body of thought lay at the heart of Otto’s upbringing.

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‘The word “nature” is by no means ungodlike.’ This is the opening sentence of Chomel’s article on ‘Nature’ in his Algemeen woordenboek (General dictionary). It might seem strange nowadays, but in 1778, when this publication first appeared, ‘nature’ was a concept much in dispute. The process had been a slow one, but it had begun to dawn on people that, just as the sun did not revolve around the earth, Creation did not revolve around mankind. Many people feared that the explosive growth in scientific knowledge would result in a decline in the belief in God, leading to deism and even to atheism. These fears were not unfounded. The idea that dead and living nature formed a selfgoverning whole had in fact led to alienation from traditional religion. The gap between nature and culture had widened; some thought that in this mechanical world view a distinction could no longer be made between body and soul, and there was no longer any place for morality and ethics. Chomel apparently sought to pre-empt accusations that he was propagating such notions. Chomel stressed that nature should be understood ‘in the correct sense’. It should not be ‘used improperly’, which was difficult, because it had ‘various meanings’. The first was ‘the Creator’ or ‘God’, and the second was ‘the created’ or ‘Creation’, comprising nature both living and dead, which was bound to ‘laws or rules’. For all other meanings of the word, he referred the reader to Robert Boyle’s treatise on nature. This Englishman, a natural scientist and philosopher, saw in natural laws the reflection of God’s wisdom and omnipotence. He disputed the opinion of Spinoza, who had concluded that no proof of God’s existence could be found in the physical world. The following entry in Chomel’s dictionary – ‘Natural Science’ – contains the same message. It explains that a deeper knowledge of nature inevitably leads to a better understanding of God: ‘thus natural science schools us in supreme nature or the Supreme Being [of ] God; unlike the atheists, it teaches us to know it better; it inspires us to become aware of and constantly to ponder that great Maker and Ruler of all created beings – which we perceive all around us in everything, from the incomprehensibly small to the unbelievably large – and above all to praise, honour, thank and glorify [ Him]!’29 In this construct, nature was a perfectly designed mechanism whose individual parts had each been fine-tuned by the ‘Overseer’, as God was sometimes called. Within this system, a practical or moral reason was found for the existence of every animal, plant and natural phenomenon. A popular image was the ‘ladder of natural beings, of which not a single rung is missing’: ‘It appears to have pleased the Almighty

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Creator to connect all living beings, and even all lifeless ones, in such a way that there is nowhere a gap, nowhere a crack to be found.’30 This Scala Naturae – whose gradations start with rocks and ascend through ever-higher forms of life before finally reaching God – was known as the Great Chain of Being. It was understood that nature did not exist for the sake of humankind; instead, each organism, no matter how small, fulfilled a specific function in a larger whole. Human beings were no longer seen as separate from nature, but as the highest rung on the ‘ladder of natural beings’. Man’s faculty of reason allowed him to govern nature. Moreover, because the hand of God could be recognised in Creation, it was an act of piety to become better acquainted with nature – an idea that was successfully popularised in the eighteenth century.31 This physico-theological concept of nature was formulated in 1720 by Bernard Nieuwentijt in a book that appeared in English as The religious philosopher, or, the right use of contemplating the works of the Creator, Designed for the conviction of atheists and infidels, Throughout which, all the late discoveries in anatomy, philosophy and astonomy are most copiously handled.32 Rousseau called Nieuwentijt the perfect guide for young people; Voltaire and Diderot also admired him. In addition to this Dutch work, two French publications in particular were responsible for spreading these ideas throughout Europe: Abbé Pluche’s multi-part Spectacle de la nature (published from 1732) and Buffon’s even more comprehensive Histoire naturelle (published from 1749). These two series were such an overwhelming success that they were translated into Dutch: the former appeared in seventeen volumes between 1737 and 1788; the latter was published in eighteen volumes between 1773 and 1793. Pluche’s work, written expressly for children, was part of Otto’s reading regimen for years. He read Buffon in 1793 while staying with his Uncle Paulus, who owned a copy: ‘After coming home I read for a while in, among other things, Buffon’s Natuurlijke historie, and so spent the day happily.’ Pluche sought to show how complicated and beautiful nature was, thus proving the existence of God, for who else could have put nature together in such an ingenious way? Buffon went a step further and rejected the idea of God as an ‘Overseer’, instead viewing nature itself as the motor of history. His idea that animals and plants were continually developing gave a temporal dimension to the ‘ladder’ that anticipated Darwin’s theory of evolution. The mid-eighteenth century saw a boom in the publication of books with a physico-theological message. Lambert’s favourite author was the above-mentioned theologian Wilhelm Jerusalem, who attempted to

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Fig. 147. Thus God is at work everywhere. From C.G. Salzmann’s Hendrik Goedhart, 1804.

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reconcile religion with new scientific insights. He explained all natural phenomena in a teleological light, taking a utilitarian view of nature that declared all things meaningful within the framework of God’s plan. Minor irritations could be explained away quite easily: rain was, admittedly, disagreeable to humans but extremely useful to crops. The preface to Pluche’s Spectacle explains that children learn out of curiosity, and that the combination of usefulness and pleasure is ideal. ‘Nature is the most scholarly and the best of all books for cultivating and training our minds, because it understands the subject matter of all the sciences and because in order to comprehend it, one is not restricted to certain languages or persons. Of this large book – which is open to one and all, even though few read it – I have made a kind of extract to show young readers what riches they possess.’33 Otto read this book systematically in the years 1792 and 1793, possibly because his father was following De Perponcher’s recommendation. De Perponcher praised the book enthusiastically for making fresh insights into nature accessible to the general public. He called the Spectacle ‘a work less highly esteemed than it deserves to be; for young people, at least, I know few or none that are more useful’.34 With pleasure he remembered reading ‘that extremely useful work’ in his youth: ‘In the third and fourth volumes . . . I was amazed that I could understand things that would have been completely incomprehensible to me a short time before.’35 The book was popular in the circles in which Otto’s parents moved. The first volume, dating from 1776, contains a list of subscribers that includes various friends and acquaintances of the Van Ecks, such as Abraham van Stipriaan (their family physician), J.M. Cau (a relative and regent of Delft), the father of Otto’s friend Ceesje Reepmaker, and Otto’s uncles Arend van Eck and Gerrit van Olivier. Lambert van Eck had not subscribed, but it is possible he bought the book from the Delft bookseller De Groot, who ordered numerous copies. Otto’s diary mentions the work often. In October 1792 he read it aloud to his mother, who was lying in bed with a bad back. He chose the passage ‘about the cleverness of spiders in making a web’, and even understood the moral of the story, as Pluche had intended: ‘Every day now I sense the care that Providence extends to the smallest animals. How badly we must therefore act in God’s eyes if we despise creatures for whom He, their Creator, shows so much love and care.’ At this time modern pedagogues all believed in physico-theology. De Perponcher used these ideas not only in his Onderwijs voor kinderen (Lessons

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Fig. 148. The Creator glorified through his creatures. Frontispiece of J. van Westerhoven’s Den schepper verheerlykt, 1771.

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for children), on which Otto was raised, but also in his philosophical works, such as Zedekundige brieven over het geluk (Ethical letters on happiness), in which he argues that congenial surroundings are essential to human happiness, that one must strive for the perfection of society, and that the harmoniousness of Creation is of prime importance. Just as each creature represents the rung of a vast ladder, mankind likewise displays a gradual ascent from the ‘ignorant Hottentot’ to ‘the astute English philosopher’.36 The religious idea of the ‘ladder of natural beings’ testifies to a static and hierarchic world view that contrasted with De Perponcher’s political and social convictions. De Perponcher expounded his thoughts on religion in great detail in the 200-page introduction to his Dutch version of Michaelis’s German translation of the Book of Genesis. According to De Perponcher, after creating the earth and all its creatures, God withdrew from earthly affairs: ‘When a good tool has been produced, its springs, pivots and cogwheels ensure that it accomplishes what its maker intended it to do. But until the parts were produced and put together, they could certainly do nothing. This had to be done by the Maker himself, alone and without recourse to any means outside Himself.’37 The physico-theological message was also hammered into Otto by Martinet’s Katechismus der Natuur (Catechism of nature) – written for the ‘youth of the fatherland’ – in which God’s great scientific insight is repeatedly praised. With respect to birds, for example, he marvelled at the ‘geometric principles applied by the Creator’.38 The fundamental principle of physico-theology recurs time and again in Otto’s diary, often as a result of reading Pluche and Martinet. ‘I must in fact confess that the making of the smallest things in nature (the leaf of a tree, for example) far surpasses in artistry and neatness that of the most superb things wrought by human hands.’39 How firmly physico-theology had taken hold in the Van Ecks’ circle emerges from various publications written by Otto’s teachers, such as the address – dedicated to Otto’s grandfather Adriaan van der Goes – delivered by Abraham van Bemmelen in 1788 in the Walloon Church in Delft. Van Bemmelen began with his observations on ‘the entire circle of created beings’ or ‘the visible chain of creation’.40 Isaac van Haastert, Otto’s drawing teacher, lauded nature in his Mengelpoëzij (Miscellaneous poetry), particularly in poems such as ‘Knowledge of nature’, in which he stressed the idea of the chain running from ‘the

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tiniest moss’ to ‘the beasts of prey’. Only human beings occupied a special place in the chain: Hail to the Man! who on all sides Through time and tide Learns Nature’s ways, Till his spirit soars on examination Of the book of Creation . . .41

As time progressed Otto became so imbued with physico-theological thought that he naturally drew the correct conclusions from his observations of nature. When it snowed in the winter of 1792, he made the following comment: ‘Now I can almost ride again in the sledge; behold once more a diversion offered to me by nature. How rich and magnificent it is in all its manifestations. There is always diversity and yet order in nature.’ This natural philosophy, which is actually rather straightforward, could not have been expressed in a better way. During the 1780s physico-theology found many adherents among the general public, but after that doubts began to surface. How did fossils, for example, fit into this system? Otto’s father was undoubtedly aware of these issues, but presumably thought, like Abbé Pluche, that physico-theology was an excellent means of instilling a religious consciousness in children. When Otto was a bit older, his father thought it wise to take another step. Lambert himself was teetering on the brink of extremely liberal religious ideas, but never confided them to his son. Now he introduced Otto to Professor Bernard Nieuhoff, a modern thinker, who had gone far beyond physico-theology. Lambert had made his acquaintance when they were both serving as representatives to the National Assembly. Otto described his first meeting with this scholar on 12 November 1796: After church I went with Papa to visit Professor Nieuhoff, a learned man who takes a great deal of interest in instructing youngsters. He suggested that I come to him on Sunday mornings and spend an hour talking about natural history. I shall gladly take advantage of his kindness.

Nieuhoff had already written various books, such as De zelfkennis als een voornaame bron van geluk (Self-knowledge as an important source of happiness), a theme that must have appealed to Lambert. Nieuhoff, a progressive thinker, was one of the first in the Netherlands to read Kant. He wrote a study on Spinoza, who had undermined physico-theology a century earlier, even before it had fully taken shape. Spinoza was generally viewed as an atheist, but Nieuhoff read and defended him

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Fig. 149. Martinet talks about ‘the great world of God’. From J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, 1782–89.

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without prejudice. He thought that Spinoza had been ahead of his time, and that his ideas could be of use in his own, more enlightened era. Nieuhoff called his mixture of Spinoza and the Bible ‘theosophy’.42 Otto visited Nieuhoff several times the following year, but did not report what they talked about. By this time Otto was no longer a child going to a teacher to receive his lessons, but a young man with whom one could have a serious conversation. By the nineteenth century it was generally recognised that the system of physico-theology was too simple, and no longer able to bind liberal and orthodox Christians. The contemporaries of Otto who later wrote their memoirs often distanced themselves from the ideas of physicotheology, but admitted that works like Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur had made a deep impression on them at the time. Jacob Nieuwenhuis, who was three years younger than Otto, looked back on his youth at the end of his long and productive life – first as a clergyman, then as a professor of philosophy – and recalled his first encounter with Martinet’s book as though it were yesterday. In 1791, on his fourteenth birthday, it had come to him like manna from heaven: ‘I cannot remember ever being so pleased with the present of a book as I was with this one. I got up in the morning with Martinet and took Martinet to bed with me. . . . I told my good parents everything I read, then reread it all, and copied out this and that.’ Martinet had opened his eyes to the wonders of nature, and had been a beacon of light in his later career as a theologian, natural scientist and philosopher: It was as though Martinet opened up the whole of Creation for me, and the humane, congenial, religious spirit exuded by that work filled me with a reverential view of nature, with deep respect for the wisdom, omnipotence and goodness of the Creator, visible in all his works. Blessed Spirit! If you could now look down on earth and know of the benefit that all your writings have brought about, you would be able to read my heart, and behold the imprint that you made on my spirit and the enthusiasm for natural science with which you filled it, and you would again, after more than half a century, hear the thanks of a seventy-year-old man who here gladly acknowledges his infinite debt to your works!43

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Fig. 150. Frontispiece of Over spinozisme (1798) by B. Nieuhoff.

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Fig. 151. ‘And I shall say, upon seeing your image: this, this is the countenance of my teacher.’ From J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, 1782–89.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE VULNERABLE BODY Coping with Death Death was a regular visitor in Otto’s life. By the age of ten he had lost two younger brothers and a younger sister. He was reminded of their deaths every time he wrote in his diary about the illnesses of his other siblings. The loss he mourned the most, however, was that of his beloved Aunt Vockestaert, who died of puerperal fever shortly after giving birth to a daughter. On the morning she died, Otto had paid her a farewell visit: At seven o’clock in the morning she was still conscious, though. She had taken leave of everyone and was going to her death very cheerfully, for she said herself that [she] would never recover.

Later that day, after she had lost consciousness, Otto had one last look: I saw Aunt again just before she died, but she was unconscious and seemed very short of breath.

The unexpected death of this aunt – whom the Van Ecks had visited the week before to congratulate her on the birth of her daughter – came as a shock, and feelings of grief and compassion fought to gain the upper hand: ‘Aunt’s friendliness towards one and all makes Uncle’s situation worthy of everyone’s compassion, especially ours. Uncle is very sad, as one can well imagine. His poor little children now no longer have a mother.’ Despite his sorrow, Otto’s uncle could not refrain from pointing out to his nephew the useful lessons to be gained from this experience: I seldom give it a thought, but Uncle said that we could learn much from this, and should be obedient to Papa and Mama while they are in good health, so that when they die we need feel no remorse on that score.

Otto was told to feel thankful for the fact that his own mother had survived her lying-in a short time before: ‘We were so happy that she was preserved on a similar occasion. Surely we must thank God for this, and show our gratitude by obeying her wishes.’

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Fig. 152. The Dead Body. ‘Dearest children, do not dread / The sight of people when they’re dead.’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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The death of his aunt moved Otto so deeply that he tossed and turned all night, ‘because the image of Aunt kept appearing before my eyes’. Shortly after this, on 27 May 1794, Otto heard that the stepmother of this deceased aunt had suddenly succumbed to a ‘malignant fever’, from which he drew the conclusion that she ‘had swiftly followed her daughter – to heaven, I hope’. The passage that follows this reveals the extent of Otto’s dismay: ‘Who would have thought this when we were all together just over a fortnight ago, mourning the loss of Aunt? And who knows how many of us might die within the next fortnight? Oh, let this teach us to be on our guard, so that when death catches us unawares, be it sooner or later, we may always be ready for it.’ The death of Uncle van den Steen on 5 January 1793 was easier to accept and even to welcome as a blessing. Uncle’s wife and six children had already died, so ‘his death made him very happy’. Otto took the same attitude towards the death of Mr van Vredenburch’s mother-inlaw, who had gradually declined in strength and died ‘after enjoying a happy old age’. This loss caused Otto more embarrassment than sorrow, for he had neglected to offer his condolences to the surviving relatives and was promptly sent back to make amends. His remark about the deceased’s ‘happy old age’ suggests that this time he was not at a loss for words. His oversight had been due not to negligence but to ‘false shame, because I’m such a lout I didn’t know how to pay my respects’.1 Otto was regularly confronted with the deaths of friends or relatives who died in quick succession, and others who suffered serious illness, balancing precariously between life and death, all at the same time. It was difficult for him to decide what he felt in such circumstances. In the summer of 1793, for example, the Van Ecks sympathised with Mrs Hartman and Mrs van Stipriaan, both of whom had suddenly become gravely ill: ‘There are only horrid tidings to record in my diary. Mrs Hartman and Mrs Stipriaan are both deathly ill, though when I saw them recently they were both still in good health. How quickly a person can be gone. This teaches us never to trust too much to our health, which is in the hands of God, who can quickly deprive us of it. I hope with all my heart that they may soon recover.’ Mrs Hartman’s health improved, but Mrs van Stipriaan remained ‘in the same condition, but not yet dead’. The next day, news of Mrs Hartman’s recovery came on the heels of the announcement of Mrs van Stipriaan’s death: ‘We were happy and sad all at once.’ The mixed emotions that Otto’s mother felt must have been equally confusing,

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particularly when Otto comforted her with words he had once heard her utter: ‘Mama burst into tears. I tried to console her, telling her that perhaps now the deceased is much happier than we who mourn her loss.’ Was Otto wise beyond his years? At the time he was but two years older than eleven-year-old Johanna Constantia Cleve, who cleverly composed a poem to comfort her parents on the loss of a child: Oh, woeful parents! Don’t despair Oh, do not mourn your child now dead! But be consoled, your sorrows bear And to the future look instead.2

Not only the death of loved ones but also the passing of time – as marked by the new year, for instance – could set Otto thinking about death. In November 1793 the beginning of autumn was an occasion for contemplation: ‘So summer is already over. . . . This, I think, is the story of our lives. Now we’re healthy and in a short while we shall all be dead and lost to the world.’ One of the last entries in the diary contains a long reflection on Otto’s own shortcomings, which he links to fears of the death of his parents, ‘who care for my body and soul, thus helping me and enabling me to work towards my own happiness’.3 He went on to say that he was aware that he was harming himself when he refused ‘to obey their orders or follow their good advice’: I hope this thought will occur to me more often, for then I shall be confident that with God’s help my improvement will follow naturally, and I should be able to live much more cheerfully, and undoubtedly bring Papa and Mama much pleasure on earth and let them die more peacefully, if they could have more faith in my behaviour, or, if I were already dead, could be assured of finding me reunited with God.

The very real threat of a sudden, unforeseeable death served as a bugbear to frighten children into obedience. These thoughts could have come from Otto’s parents or from his reading, which was saturated with the same moral principles. Thus Otto read on 17 November 1793 in Sturm’s ‘Daily Communication with God’ that ‘imagining death frequently is very useful in restraining one from many vices’. At the age of eleven, Otto copied from Feddersen’s ‘Examples of Wisdom and Virtue’ the following verse about a dying father: He blesses all his children, As his deathbed they surround. Take heart, he now exhorts them, May your lives to God be bound.

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He urges them to trust in God In their great hour of need, And to take comfort, for the Lord Shall ne’er forsake His seed.

From this poem Otto drew the following lesson: ‘I have learned from the passage I read that it is a great misfortune for children when their father (or mother) dies, but it can often be beneficial nonetheless if, when dying, [their parents] pray for them and bless them on their deathbed.’ The tenor of this entry is similar to the lesson of life that Uncle Vockestaert had given Otto on the occasion of his aunt’s death. In Van Alphen’s verse ‘Clara by the painting of her deceased mother’, we read words that must have been familiar to Otto: I honour you, dear father, And follow mother’s lessons, So that upon my deathbed, You and mother I shall find. Oh blessedness sublime!

What Otto’s reading matter taught him about death crops up not only in his diary but also in his few surviving poems. The verse that Otto wrote on 11 November 1797 for his father’s birthday underlines the imminence of death. May I follow your example, And my happiness pursue, Striving till the moment comes To bid this life adieu!

Otto’s little verse, as well as the children’s books of his day, reflects the literary mode of those years, in which death was ubiquitous. This gloomy theme had made its way to Holland from England, where a furore had been created by Edward Young’s The Complaint: or NightThoughts on Life, Death & Immortality, James Harvey’s Meditations among the Tombs and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. These books, which appeared in Dutch translation, were imitated by such writers as Hiëronymus van Alphen, Jacobus Bellamy, Elisabeth Maria Post and especially Rhijnvis Feith, who in 1792 published Het graf (The grave). These authors were popular, also with the Van Ecks, whose family archives contain a folder of quotations from Feith (‘Conquerors of death! In you I place my trust’) and a ‘song by Lavater’ titled ‘In honour of death’: ‘Deadly terror, begone for ever’.4 Feith had dedicated

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Fig. 153. ‘They scatter flowers on his grave.’ From Nieuwe almanach voor het volk van Nederland voor den jaare 1788.

Het graf to Jacobus Kantelaar – a versifying clergyman and member of the National Assembly – who was also a friend of Lambert van Eck. Feith and Lambert both wrote in Kantelaar’s album amicorum.5 Just how popular death was, at least as the subject of poetry, also emerges from the verse written by Otto’s friend Willem van Vredenburch in his old age to honour his late parents. The poem anticipates Willem’s own demise.6 My parents! Soon indeed now, in your cold and chilly grave Your dust, forever lost to me, will mingle peacefully; To me your life was certainly the best the Good Lord gave; But now your death has put an end to my felicity. Those happy days, oh ’tis a pity! They are now no more. A treasure of enormous value has been lost to me! ............................ I was only four – oh Mother! – when death took from me The benefits of tender love and motherly affection. Of course I knew I lacked a mother’s care, this I could see, But had no understanding of my sorrowful affliction,

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Or my distress at your black dress, why did I not perceive That you were pale, already dead, I sought you constantly . . . How very lonely this parental home now seems to me! The mournful sound of lamentation echoes on all sides ............................ I arise, and by her body I find peace of mind! That face of hers saw death approach and yet did calm remain. How pale and cold she is by now! – Those eyes are surely blind, Her lips are silent, and her blood is stiff in heart and vein.

Even though much of the poetry and prose from that time assures us that the dear departed are better off now than they were on earth, such assertions are tinged with doubt. ‘Beside my father’s coffin’ by Elisabeth Maria Post, for example, has an introduction that is more terrifying than comforting: ‘Oh lonely room, trembling I open your creaking door . . . It is dark here, only a dim light shines through a small crack – what a gloomy scene! The black, flowing shroud covers the doleful coffin.’ In Feith’s Julia, the protagonist regularly visits – preferably at night – the grave of his beloved. Also in Het land (The country) by Post, night is the perfect time to visit the graves of loved ones, illuminated by ‘a half-moon shining dully through the bare trees’. Mournful youths, grieving parents and orphaned children who visit the graves of their loved ones at night long to be reunited with them – in the hereafter, they hope. Yet those who read the funerary poetry of those years cannot help thinking that they would have preferred a reunion in the here and now, if necessary through exhumation. In the late eighteenth century, reactions to death became more and more emotional. Until that time a stoical Christian resignation had been the norm in more genteel circles; after all, great sorrow could be interpreted as resistance to God’s will. Diarists and autobiographers of this time, however, increasingly give free rein to their feelings. Lambert did this in his 1785 account of the death of his youngest daughter from smallpox; in 1791 his contemporary Willem Ackersdijck kept an equally detailed journal of the illness and death of two of his children from the same disease.7 Grief often prompted poetical outpourings. Gerrit Paape, for example, included in his 1792 autobiography a dirge for his daughter, ‘a child for whom I felt the utmost affection!’8 In strict Calvinist circles, however, resignation was de rigueur. Children who died young were thought to stand an excellent chance of being admitted to heaven as God’s elect, mainly because they had had so little

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Fig. 154. ‘In honour of our dearest child.’ From L. van Ollefen’s Bibliotheek der kinderen, 1782.

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time to sin. Circulating among pietists were the testimonies of pious children who had died at a tender age. They exhorted their sorrowful parents not to weep, because they were ‘destined for a more noble state’.9 Such children were referred to as ‘child prodigies’, and their parents often bore witness to their fortitude in pamphlets, such as that written by D. Lamboo of Dordrecht, who in 1798 published a booklet titled Het beste geschenk voor kinderen (The best gift for children) about his son Derk – ‘an example worth following’ – who had died at the age of thirteen.10 The same expressions were sometimes heard among the Van Ecks’ acquaintances. Lambert, for instance, wrote in the journal he kept of his youngest daughter’s fatal illness about this ‘dear, sweet child’ whom ‘faith obliged us, submitting to God, to give back to her Maker’, where a better fate awaited her. Even so, Lambert and his friends adhered to religious ideas that were fundamentally different from those prevailing in more orthodox circles: the Van Ecks sought consolation, but found no certainty. These increasing doubts went hand in hand with a stronger attachment to life. Thus the fear of being mistaken for dead and buried alive took on pathological dimensions, so much so that even the Utrecht Collegium Medicum began in 1796 to press for the construction of crypt-houses – of a type that already existed in French and German cemeteries – for those who appeared to be dead but were suspected of being in a state of suspended animation.11 The year 1794 saw the publication in the Netherlands of a work by the German writer Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland: ‘Treatise on the uncertainty of death and the only sure means of convincing oneself of its truth’. Like Franz Anton Mesmer and Christian Hahnemann, Hufeland succeeded in expressing the fears and obsessions of his day in medical terms. His Kunst om het menschelijk leven te verlengen (The art of prolonging human life), likewise translated from the German, made him the father of macrobiotics. Various enlightened authors, including Benjamin Franklin, were convinced that human life could be lengthened considerably. A few even hoped for immortality.12 It was around this time that the Frenchman Robert le Jeune published his essay on ‘mégalanthropogénesie’, which laid the foundation for eugenics.13 In the meantime, death was still very much a part of life, and so graves were often supplied with stone vaults to protect corpses from intruders, an example being the monumental tomb of Joan Derk van der Capellen. Some diehards had their bodies embalmed: the body of Jeremy Bentham, the inventor of the panopticon, is still on public display

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in London. The wife of the French minister Jacques Necker – with whom Lambert van Eck had conversed frequently in 1788 – asked her husband to preserve her mortal remains in a tub of alcohol. Necker complied with her request, and left instructions for his own body to be likewise preserved. Indeed, it seems as though the desire to remain on earth and the hope of being restored to life grew stronger as belief in the hereafter declined. This idea manifests itself – by means of a novel approach – in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Dr Frankenstein plundered the graves of the recently dead, collecting body parts from which to make his creature, which he brought to life with the help of electricity – an experiment which, as we all know, was far from successful. At first glance the obsession with bodies and graveyards is difficult to reconcile with another novelty of this period: the attempts to move cemeteries away from populated areas. This subject, too, left its mark in Otto’s diary: after attending his aunt’s funeral, he read aloud at supper about the Romans, and how they ‘used to burn their dead, which Papa thought a very good idea, because there could be no danger of infection or suchlike’. In the eighteenth century, people were becoming increasingly aware that it was unhygienic to bury the dead in churches or churchyards in densely populated areas. The practice of dumping the remains of the poor outside the church in mass graves that were constantly being opened and closed, as well as burying the more affluent – the stinking rich – inside the church, meant the constant stench of rotting corpses in and around the church. This was considered a nuisance as well as a danger to public health. The theory that disease could spread through the air was not new, but fear of air-borne germs and aversion to the smell of cadavers were growing, giving rise to an equally strong desire to solve the problem. As usual, the Romans were looked to for inspiration. Their tradition of cremation was already favoured by a few, but it was still a long way from finding general acceptance. A radical break with the Christian tradition of burial would not occur until a century later, and even then, only a small, progressive minority of the Dutch population adopted the practice of cremation. In Otto’s day there were, however, several initiatives to build cemeteries outside the urban centres.

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Ter Navolging In the Netherlands, Abraham Perrenot was the first to advocate extraurban burial. His dissertation on the subject initially met with great resistance, but his ideas gradually won more support. When Perrenot moved to The Hague twenty-five years later, he thought it time to take action. In 1777 he and a number of supporters petitioned the States of Holland for permission to establish a private cemetery in the dunes near The Hague.14 As soon as permission was granted, land was purchased and construction was begun. This new cemetery with the encouraging name of Ter Navolging (An Example Worth Following) was erected in the dunes near Scheveningen and consisted of rectangular, levelled grounds with two rows of fifteen graves. The Nieuwe Nederlandse Jaerboeken (New Dutch Yearbooks) applauded this initiative, taken ‘in order that the harmful practice of burying the dead in public places of Christian worship decrease in the course of time and gradually come

Fig. 155. The desecration of the cemetery outside the city of Arnhem, 1783.

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to an end before the close of our century, if not everywhere, at least in our fatherland’.15 In 1792 Ter Navolging was enlarged to include seventy-two graves,16 but its founder, Perrenot, did not live to see the new addition, for he died in 1784 and so became one of the first to be buried at Ter Navolging. His tombstone bore the following epitaph: ‘My rotting remains must lie far from the city: while living I avoided harming anyone, and I do not wish to do so now that I am dead.’17 Lambert van Eck, who bought a grave early on, was in the vanguard of this movement, as were a number of his friends and relations. Graves were bought by the families of Vockestaert, Hartmann, Gevers, Van Hogendorp and Beerestein. Many of the friends and relatives mentioned in Otto’s diary (including his Uncle Pieter Paulus) were buried at Ter Navolging. The authors Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken, whose writings were familiar to Otto, were eventually buried there as well. The reputation of Ter Navolging is evident from similar initiatives in other cities, not all of which were equally successful. In Zwolle, Joan Derk van der Capellen attempted to establish a cemetery outside town. When permission was refused, he had a family tomb built near the village of Gorssel, where he was buried in 1784.18 A cemetery was built

Fig. 156. The tomb of Joan Derk van der Capellen on the heath near Gorssel, 1788.

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outside the city of Arnhem, but it was closed by the authorities when the populace revolted against this newfangled idea. Meanwhile the Zeeland Society of Arts and Sciences had entered the debate. In 1783 it had held an essay contest on the ‘best means’ to combat ‘the harmfulness of burials inside cities and churches’. The winning essay was submitted by a citizen of Tiel, Johannes Diderik van Leeuwen, whose ideas were supported by his fellow townsman Arend Hendrik van Eck, an uncle of Otto. Together they founded in 1785 a cemetery outside Tiel, named Ter Navolging after its Hague example. Lambert van Eck was one of the donors.19 The dividing line between advocates and opponents of extra-urban cemeteries did not coincide with the political rift between Orangists and Patriots. It would be more appropriate to divide them along such lines as enlightened versus conservative or the elite versus the masses. The Van Eck family and many of their friends were Patriots, but Perrenot, the founder of Ter Navolging, was an Orangist. Although political adversaries lay peacefully side by side in the dunes near Scheveningen, it is true that there was more support for extra-urban cemeteries among the Patriots. The popular protests in Arnhem had Orangist overtones, and an Orangist mob had been responsible for the desecration in 1787 of the cemetery at Tiel – a fate that had previously befallen Van der Capellen’s tomb. It was the Patriots who put extra-urban cemeteries on the political agenda when they came to power in 1795. The first law against burial in churches was enacted in the province of Holland, after the Batavian revolutionaries had seized power there. At the time, however, the scarcity of burial places outside the cities prevented immediate implementation of the resolution.20 The Ter Navolging cemetery in Scheveningen followed an international trend with France at the forefront. As early as 1765, the Académie Royale d’Architecture had held a competition to design a modern cemetery.21 The designs submitted tended to emphasise simplicity, smallness of scale and uniformity, characteristics that stemmed from the new ideal of equality, as well as from the architects’ lack of familiarity with this novel idea. Thus the tombstones lie flat, like those in church floors. The first designs of extra-urban cemeteries, with their geometric rows of unadorned graves, tend to look monotonous. This rational approach soon made way, however, for more romantic designs set in English landscape gardens, intended to create the impression that the deceased were interred in a pre-heavenly paradise. The grave of Rousseau on the country estate of Ermenonville had set the tone. Ter

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Fig. 157. The desecrated tomb of the Capellens. The desecrated tomb of Joan Derk van der Capellen, 1788.

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Navolging remained the prototype of a rationally planned extra-urban cemetery, but elsewhere graves were being situated in landscaped gardens, and a few well-to-do Dutchmen arranged to be buried on their country estates. Novelists such as Rhijnvis Feith, anticipating the fashionableness of this practice, were inclined to set graveside scenes in Arcadian landscapes. Petronella Moens wrote an ode ‘To a cemetery outside the city’.22 The ideal of being buried in a church, preferably as close as possible to the altar or pulpit in hopes of a truly theatrical resurrection, had made way for the ideal of a final resting place in a quiet wooded spot, closer to God from the physico-theological standpoint. But was resurrection still a possibility for those destined to be eaten by worms – as Reformed ministers described with relish in their sermons – before returning to nature? In fact, it was late in the nineteenth century before large, landscaped, public cemeteries were built. Until that time, a posthumous return to nature was reserved for mortals of means – such as the Van Ecks. Illness When Rousseau gave birth to his literary child Emile in 1762, he granted the boy eternal life: Emile could not fall ill. Rousseau deliberately gave his brainchild an iron constitution, for he viewed illness as a sign of inferiority and thought only healthy children capable of building a better future for mankind. He also advised other educators not to waste their time on sickly children.23 As was often the case, however, this notion was easier to adhere to in theory than in practice. The only advice Rousseau gave to the parents of real-life – and thus physically vulnerable – children was to toughen up their tots and consider having them inoculated. Rousseau did not declare himself either for or against this new preventive measure; he preferred to leave it up to the parents to weigh its pros and cons. Emile was not inoculated: even if he were infected with the disease – though the author would do his utmost to prevent this – he would not only survive the ordeal but come out of it strengthened. Smallpox, moreover, was a temporary problem, for in the ideal society that Rousseau (and Lambert) envisioned, illness was a thing of the past. Otto was raised with a more tempered idea of nature: while its design was admittedly ingenious, it was thought that nature could be perfected by human intervention. There were high hopes that medicine would

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be instrumental in correcting nature’s flaws. The newly developed inoculation against smallpox was a step in the right direction, and it was expected that remedies for all kinds of ailments would soon follow. It seemed as though Mercier’s prediction for the year 2440 – in which ‘wondrously simple remedies for heart congestion, consumption, dropsy and other ailments’ would be discovered – would come true earlier, perhaps as early as 1800. In Otto’s day, doctors had already begun to experiment zealously with magnetism and electrotherapy. Knowledge of electricity and magnetism had increased in the second half of the eighteenth century thanks to experiments carried out by inquisitive thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, who had demonstrated that lightning was caused by the discharge of electricity. His experiments with kites were repeated in Delft by amateur physicists such as Isaac van Haastert and Dr van Stipriaan. Electricity, once it had been fully understood, would lead to the cure of countless diseases. The findings of the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer were auspicious in this respect, for in 1778 he announced the discovery of a fluid in humans that consisted of ‘animal magnetic forces’, which, when in a state of imbalance, allowed illness – especially epileptic seizures – to strike. He therefore put his patients in tubs of water that had been ‘mesmerised’ with iron filings. Mesmer had many followers in progressive circles. The Marquis de Lafayette, a fervent champion of Mesmer’s methods, had enthusiastically introduced mesmerism to the United States, and it is not inconceivable that he mentioned the subject during his frequent conversations with Lambert van Eck in the summer of 1788. In Germany, Lavater was one of the most influential advocates of mesmerism, which found resonance mainly among those who were receptive to similar theories and phenomena, including somnambulism, physiognomy and the new system of medical practice known as homeopathy, developed by another German doctor, Samuel Hahnemann. The interest taken in these new ideas and methods of treatment was especially great among Freemasons. Mesmer’s attraction lay in the exotic and political aspects of his teachings. Many intellectuals had come to see the limitations of rationalism and empiricism, which until this time had dominated the Enlightenment. Mesmerism joined the many irrational ‘sciences’ that now began to blossom, such as mysticism, physiognomy, theosophy, macrobiotics and spiritism. Because of the subversive, revolutionary side of mesmerism, this movement also had a certain amount of political appeal. Immedi-

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ately after the French Revolution, Mesmer had approached the French National Assembly with a memorandum in which he explained how a combination of ‘liberty’ and ‘health’ could save the country. He had devised a system in which the life of every Frenchman was to follow a prescribed and regulated course, progressing through seven stages from ‘child’ to ‘veteran’. Many radical revolutionaries embraced Mesmer as an ally, but his dark science and irrational politics actually heralded the end of the Enlightenment.24 But things had not yet come to this pass when Dr van Stipriaan introduced electrotherapy to his bag of medical tricks. Once it had taken hold in the Netherlands, this new therapy became especially popular in the area of Rotterdam, Delft and The Hague. In 1791 a demonstration of electrotherapy in the Rotterdam orphanage caused quite a stir. It was also around this time that Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp conducted electrical experiments and recorded his findings in a private journal. Van Hogendorp was the scion of a Rotterdam regents’ family, with whom the Van Ecks were well acquainted. Magnetism was brought closer to home, however, by their family physician, Dr van Stipriaan, who used this new method in an attempt to cure Otto’s sister Doortje of a vague complaint.25 In a letter to her father, Doortje said that Van Stipriaan was certain of the efficacy of electrotherapy in curing her ailment and that he was ‘expecting great success to come of it’.26 Radical adherents like Van Stipriaan saw mesmerism as proof of their deistic beliefs. Lambert van Eck, ever cautious in medical matters, sought a second opinion from Dr Groen in The Hague. Groen was wary, saying that he had nothing against electrotherapy, because it could do no harm, though he expected little good to come of it. His advice to Doortje was to go riding frequently. Another physician of their acquaintance, the Leiden professor Floris Voltelen, was firmly opposed to electrotherapy. In 1791 he gave a speech in which he stressed the dangers of this treatment, which in his opinion had come into vogue only because of ‘a craving for what is new, unusual or miraculous’. He put animal magnetism on a par with other dubious trends such as physiognomy and hot-air ballooning. Remarkably, Lambert van Eck’s circle of friends included both advocates and adversaries of magnetism. Van Stipriaan remained unflappable, and continued until well into the nineteenth century to sing the praises of magnetism. As late as 1822, he and some fellow supporters appealed to the Minister of the Interior in an effort to publicise this

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Fig. 158. An experiment with electricity. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774.

‘tremendous force of nature, which, invisible and unseen, plays such an important role’. Otto was certainly fascinated by the phenomenon of electricity. On 17 February 1794, he noted in his diary that he was writing an essay ‘on electricity’. Master van Bemmelen was teaching him about the subject, not because it was part of the curriculum, but because they shared an interest in it. Despite the promises held out by medical science, the fact remained that it could still do little to prevent most diseases, and almost nothing to cure them. Medical men were forced to revert to such time-honoured practices as purging and bloodletting. At some point everyone, rich and poor alike, suffered bodily complaints of varying degrees of seriousness, which medical science was powerless to alleviate. Worse still, it was not unusual for a medical man to prescribe a remedy that actually aggravated his patient’s condition. To acquaint ourselves with the notions of sickness and health prevailing in Otto’s milieu, it is worthwhile to read the relevant entries in Chomel’s Algemeen woordenboek (General dictionary), the standard reference work that adorned the bookshelves of so many of Lambert van Eck’s friends and relatives. The entry on ‘health’ explains that this is a condition ‘natural to people’ and is promoted by a ‘natural life’. The reader was exhorted to avoid cities: ‘Foolish inhabitant of a populous city, do not, therefore, accuse the Supreme Being of cruelty. . . . Learn to live according to the simplicity of nature, that is, according to the laws the divine Creator intended you to follow, and you shall be healthy.’ The entry closes with

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several rules of life, one of which expresses strong disapproval of wine and tobacco.27 The entry on ‘illness’ emphasises that one is responsible for one’s own physical condition. Leading a healthy life was considered both a personal and a social obligation. Loss of health was ‘a crime against humanity’. Several rules follow, the most important of which state that the air of the open field is to be preferred to that of ‘stuffy, heavily populated cities’, that one must eat and drink in moderation, that physical activity, especially walking, is beneficial, and that such passions as ambition, spite and envy must be kept in check. Nonetheless, illness could also be beneficial: ‘It can open us up . . . to compassion and helpfulness; resignation, patience and faith are virtues which many learn only in the unfortunate school of experience and misery.’ Only the last paragraph of this entry takes on a religious tone: illness is ultimately part of man’s ‘fate, which befalls him, a mere creature of God’s handiwork; man may weep and wail, but never rail against Providence. God is the master of our fate; God has an eternity in which to make us happy. Be comforted and hope in Him.’ Lambert spoke in similar terms when explaining to Otto why the family spent so much time at De Ruit: country life, he said, encouraged ‘simplicity, temperance and diligence’; in short, it furthered ‘our basic happiness’. Good health was part of that happiness. In the front of the De Ruit account book, someone – perhaps Otto himself – wrote the following maxim: ‘Surely the greatest earthly good to mankind is to have a healthy body and sound mind.’ This motto links health and virtue – a coupling of hygiene and ethics that was not unusual.28 Equating a virtuous existence with a healthy life led to the launching of a pedagogical offensive aimed at the lower classes, who were thought to have no understanding of hygiene. Dr van Stipriaan carried out research in this field, and was later awarded a gold medal for his treatise on the antiseptic value of substances such as ammonia.29 These ideas can be found in the children’s books that Otto read, such as Salzmann’s De boode uit Thuringen (The messenger from Thuringen), originally intended for a popular audience, containing various suggestions for personal hygiene (brushing one’s teeth every morning, for example, and washing behind one’s ears with cold water), as well as the more fundamental message that illness is self-induced and not God’s doing.30 The same view was expressed in Rochow’s popular Kindervriend (The children’s friend), which begins with several stories about sickness and health.31 We read about Hendrik, for example, who worked up a sweat while out walking and so took off his jacket, thus triggering a

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tragic chain of events: on the first day he caught a cold; on the second day he started to cough; on the third day he came down with a fever; on the fourth day he died. Impatient Jan, who developed a rash but could not refrain from scratching, also died prematurely and ‘in great pain’. Karel was more fortunate: the huge quantity of freshly baked bread he had eaten almost killed him, but the doctor came to his rescue in the nick of time. Children would do better to follow the example of Pieter, who obediently took his medicine and made a quick recovery. The influence of illness on everyday life in the eighteenth century becomes palpable in Otto’s diary. Otto had a weak constitution and suffered from chronic colds, hearing loss and other minor ailments. According to Otto’s doctor, the spring fever that felled him in 1793 ‘did him a lot of good’ in the end, because it helped him build up resistance to the ‘old skin disease of last year’. Autumn brought other hazards, such as the tertian ague, an intermittent fever recurring every three days. Otto wrote about it in the autumn of 1795: ‘Tomorrow I won’t be able to write my diary entry or anything else (unless I do it early), because it will again be my day of fever. It usually comes on late in the evening, only slightly, and goes away completely in my sleep, so it doesn’t discomfort me at all. It’s no great matter, but all the same I have the tertian ague and don’t know what to do about it, and the most horrid thing of all is to be in the hands of doctors.’ Just how precarious health could be was impressed upon Otto by an unusual incident that occurred on 14 October 1793, when he accidentally drank his father’s eyewash, which he had mistaken for his stomach medicine. He described this small drama in detail: Something happened to me, the consequences of which could have been very harmful, but fortunately I suffered no more than fright. As it happened, I was about to drink my medicine (which the doctor gave me to fortify my stomach), and in my haste I accidentally picked up Papa’s eyewash, which I carelessly failed to notice until I’d swallowed it. Luckily I didn’t drink a lot of it, and it didn’t taste of anything much, but Mama didn’t know whether or not it was poisonous. The only thing I could do was to wash it down quickly with a glass of cold water, and until now I haven’t felt any nausea or pain, thank God. This has taught me: 1) that one must always be cautious, and 2) that before one knows it, one can suddenly, at any moment, be in danger of losing one’s life or health.

A year earlier he had been taught this valuable lesson in a more painful manner. In the spring of 1792, when he was twelve, he was suddenly struck by a life-threatening disease that manifested itself as follows: ‘I’m

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Fig. 159. Pietje at his sister’s sickbed. ‘Dear Lord Jesus! I beg thee, / To speed Sister’s recovery.’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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Fig. 160. The sick child. ‘My head! Oh dear, it hurts so much!’ From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787.

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not very well now, because my entire body is covered with a very nasty rash, something the doctor has never seen before in his practice. He is continually amazed that I have not been more ill, especially when it first broke out, which could have caused a swelling in my throat that would easily have cost me my life.’ It was thought that Otto suffered from a skin disease akin to infantile eczema, which could be fatal.32 Otto’s whole body was covered with blisters and scabs, to the extent that he could no longer get dressed. He was even too ill to write in his diary. After neglecting his diary for months, Otto resumed writing in July: ‘Having laboured under a painful skin disease for more than three months, during which time I was often unable to pick up a pen (and therefore unable to write my daily diary entry), thank God I now find myself so much improved that I am able to continue my activities with some regularity. Even though I must always endure a lot of pain, I have great reason to be thankful to God, because this disease, which makes other children or adults who have it very ill indeed, has not diminished my internal health or appetite. I can also sleep reasonably well at night, and take great pleasure in strolling in the garden, fishing with hook and line, and other quiet relaxations.’ The next day he reflected on the period of illness that lay behind him: I did not sleep much last night, which is why I did not rise until noon. Having done this, my first task of the day was to bathe myself in seawater and then to dab my body with an ointment consisting of mercury and limewater, which this morning caused me so much pain that I couldn’t do any of my regular tasks until after we’d eaten the midday meal, when the pain lessened somewhat and finally disappeared altogether. During my illness, many days were like this, and I was often prevented by pain and discomfort from doing anything at all, particularly when deprived of the use of my eyes and hands, which occurred frequently. At times I could not even walk, but during all these afflictions I never lost heart entirely, thank goodness, and when I was assailed by gloomy thoughts, Papa or Mama soon chased them away. How much care and love they have shown me, how many useful principles they have instilled in me, and in this respect how much I have gained by being ill.

Various remedies were tried. In the morning Otto stayed in bed until his bathwater arrived: seawater brought daily by a fisherman from Scheveningen. He followed a strict diet and took the pills prescribed by Dr van Stipriaan, which contained a mixture of antimony and cicuta (a type of hemlock). Later he rubbed the affected areas with aqua phagedaenica, a stinging salve of mercury and leaves of bardana,

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all of which were poisonous and had to be handled with care. Advice poured in from all sides. The Van Ecks’ former family physician, Dr Muilman, thought that it would do Otto good to take the waters at the spa in Aachen. Uncle and Aunt Paulus agreed, but Otto’s father and Dr van Stipriaan decided to experiment first with a new salve: a blend of tar and sheep’s fat, ‘which does in fact help me, because although I’ve used it for only two days (which means simply rubbing it on at night and washing it off in the morning, as otherwise my face is so black), it has already made all the scabs on my nose and under my eyes fall off’.33 The daily task of removing the scabs from Otto’s face fell to Otto’s father, and problems therefore arose when his work kept him in The Hague. Dr Groen advised Otto to adhere to a strict diet which forbade all ‘green leafy vegetables’, fruit and fish. Friends and acquaintances also rallied to offer their advice. Their neighbour Teding van Berkhout sent a ‘jar of ointment with Mrs van Collen’s secret remedy for eczema’. Otto guessed that this product contained the same ingredients as his tar salve. The tar helped, which suggests that Otto was suffering from a form of psoriasis, for which saltwater baths and tar are still prescribed.34 The treatment was extremely painful. On 20 August 1792, Otto wrote: ‘This morning, when I was bandaged and saw that I was much worse, I blurted out words that would make anyone who didn’t know me think I despaired.’ Later he wrote: ‘Particularly the tar on my face hurt so much that I screamed in agony.’ After this he was reluctant to rub the tar on his body, ‘because of the terrible pain it caused’.35 Otto confessed to his diary that his protracted illness had caused him to ‘remain downcast the whole day’. To lift his ‘low spirits’, he sometimes went outdoors to ‘sit on a bench’: ‘There I could observe nature in all its beauty and reflect on the discomforts my illness had caused me.’ This approach, too, was only partly successful, for ‘just as people generally do, I did not think about the good things – the moral benefits – which my illness had brought me, nor the fact that there are so many people who suffer a lot more than I do. This made me a bit despondent.’ Sometimes the rash let up, only to worsen again, but during relatively pain-free periods, Otto’s spirits rose accordingly: ‘Thus I am again as contented, happy and grateful as I was previously dejected and listless.’

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He eventually recovered completely, but the seriousness of his illness emerges from an entry written by his father in the family book: Otto was stricken with a terrible skin disease that covered his whole body – right down to his feet and toes – with scabs, blisters and sores. This lasted the whole summer, during which his life was often in danger, and things did not improve until the autumn. The main facts are also recorded in his own diary.

Among Otto’s religious jottings, a ‘New Year’s wish regarding my illness’ has been preserved, in which he looks back on the year 1792: ‘In this past year, God has oft-times heard our prayers and saved us from illness and danger; He has freed my tender youth from death and pain. Now I wish to offer thanks: come, share in my joy.’ Less dangerous, but none the less annoying, was Otto’s periodic loss of hearing. The very first entry in his diary tells of his desire to hear the nightingale sing, but being prevented from doing so by his hearing disability – a recurring theme in the diary. He and his parents adapted to it to some extent by, for instance, attending a church whose minister spoke in a loud, clear voice. Sometimes Otto’s condition improved, however, so presumably his hearing problems were related to his frequent colds. On 15 May 1795, Otto even wrote that he had stayed outdoors longer than usual ‘to hear the nightingale, which was singing divinely’. From 1795 on, Otto suffered from colds more and more frequently. His parents constantly warned him to take care, especially during the winter months. On 15 January 1795, Otto had been allowed to ride along on a farm wagon from Delft to De Ruit, but this had proved imprudent: ‘At one o’clock I arrived home, having ridden in the open farm wagon. We could not drive fast, owing to the load we were carrying, and there was a brisk wind, so I was nearly frozen by the time I got home. Papa said that it was foolish of me to remain seated on the wagon instead of walking next to it. The cold gave me such a fright that I haven’t set foot outside the house. After eating I felt sick and had a headache, but it’s better now and will, I hope, go away completely during the night.’ As is customary with children, Otto had an instinctive dislike of his doctor’s remedies, such as the bandage behind his ear that was supposed to improve his hearing: ‘Last month Papa and Mama couldn’t get me to do it for all the money in the world, but the doctor harangued and

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Fig. 161. A child’s dislike of its medicine. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774 (detail).

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explained so well that all I could say was, “I’ll give it a try.” ’ Two years later Otto was put in his place by Aunt Paulus, who reprimanded him for being impatient when having his ears syringed, another newfangled remedy: ‘You judge, or rather condemn, the outcome after only two treatments: Otto, Otto, how impatient you are.’36 On 30 November 1795, Otto reiterated the precautionary measures his parents took to protect his health, the main two being to stay indoors when it was cold and to adhere to a strict diet. Today the weather was very cold and foggy, so Mama wanted me to stay indoors, which was not to my liking, because I couldn’t go to the market . . . The doctor (who came to see me today) also approved of my staying in the house during such unwholesome, feverish weather. Yesterday I had the same thing again rather badly, which makes it exactly six weeks since I’ve been afflicted with this. Papa says that I’ll have it the whole winter if I don’t protect myself from the cold and follow my diet more strictly. Since I’m now beginning to realise this and it’s beginning to annoy me, I’ve kept a close watch on myself today with respect to everything that could harm me, and shall continue to do so for some time, to see if I can chase my friend away.

Otto’s ‘friend’, the fever, would not be driven away so easily, but there was, in fact, a new medicine that did him good, namely quinine. Experiments with this miracle drug, which had recently been added to the therapeutic arsenal, had led the German doctor Samuel Hahnemann to develop the idea of homeopathy. It is quite possible that Dr van Stipriaan had become acquainted with these ideas through Hahnemann’s publications. On 7 December 1795, Otto wrote: ‘I’ve neglected to write in my diary these last few days. Because I still had a fever on Wednesday, the doctor decided to give me quinine, which had the effect of dispelling the fever completely the day before yesterday. I’m still taking quinine and am waiting impatiently to see what tomorrow will bring. How happy it would make me if I could manage to recover completely, but to do this I shall have to take good care of my health, with regard to my diet and otherwise, says Mama, and I believe she’s right. I had to stay indoors again today, because of the foggy weather.’ Otto struggled through the subsequent winter months. In January he had ‘a very bad cold and was hoarse’. Sometimes this was partly his own fault: ‘On Wednesday I rode to Delft on horseback, which made my cold noticeably worse, since it was not entirely over. And now, to drive it away completely, I stayed indoors all day yesterday.’ Now Otto rarely took his horse out of the stable. His parents urged him, for reasons

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of health, to move about by means of coach and passenger barge. Their advice was not always taken to heart, however. In December 1796, Otto made plans to ride his horse again, for he preferred this form of transport to the tediousness of travelling by barge. Moreover, it gave him the opportunity to move from place to place more quickly and to be the master of his own time. The fact that these justifications were put forward shows that Otto’s mode of transport was a bone of contention. Presumably he did not get his way. However, the outcome of a horseback ride in the spring of 1797 was more convincing than any arguments his parents could offer: ‘On Wednesday I travelled by barge to Delft, where I received my catechism lesson from the Reverend Scheidius, and was then driven home in a coach, so as not to make the same mistake as last week, namely to come down again with a cold, which I’ve now conquered completely.’ Otto’s spirits were rising with the approach of summer. Otto’s diary – his own remarks, his records of conversations with his parents, his notes of the doctors’ reactions – and the letters he received from relatives, as well as the books he read, all speak of illness as a fact of nature and not an act of God. The notion of sickness as punishment for one’s sins – a word totally absent from Otto’s diary – was not current in Otto’s circle. Recovery from illness, on the other hand, was a reason to give thanks to God. Above all, however, the Van Ecks hoped that man’s ever-expanding knowledge of nature would eventually be used to rid the world of sickness and disease. This was also the message of the scientific writings of their family physician, Dr van Stipriaan. Nevertheless, illness could still provide the occasion for a moral lesson and stimulate such virtues as modesty, helpfulness and fortitude. A patient could thus emerge from a period of illness a stronger and better person.

EPILOGUE What did the future hold in store for Otto? From 1797 onward his diary begins to peter out. His entries become less regular, with longer intervals between them, and their opening lines are often contrite: ‘Yet again I’ve neglected or forgotten to write in my diary for two months, and I certainly wouldn’t have thought of it this evening if I hadn’t come across this notebook by chance.’ In the beginning he tried to make amends for this omission by reflecting on the recent past: ‘With regard to my neglect of my diary, I shall say nothing, preferring to make this entry more detailed and say something about each day of the week.’ In the course of the year, even these guilt-ridden apologies become shorter – ‘Haven’t written in my diary for six months. I couldn’t possibly record everything that has happened in that time’ – and on 20 November 1797 he laid down his pen for good after writing his last entry: ‘Didn’t go to church yesterday owing to my severe cold. . . . Bad weather and snow yesterday. Better today, with frost, easterly wind.’ By this time Otto was seventeen, and his parents might have thought it time to loosen the reins. He had had enough exposure to diarywriting: from now on, he would have to look to himself for motivation, like other young diarists of the nineteenth century, some of whom continued to write throughout their lives. They were the exceptions, of course, and their diaries, too, suffered from flagging interest at times. It is possible that Otto’s silence reflects the deterioration of his health or the absence of his father, who was too involved in national politics to have the time to encourage his son. Then, too, it is possible that Otto had never really enjoyed keeping a diary, and had no desire to continue, now that the choice had apparently been left up to him. Moreover, he was extremely busy in 1797, for in that year he had assumed many of his father’s responsibilities, and this burden became even greater in January 1798 when his father was imprisoned. The last six months of Otto’s life are documented only in his father’s writings, which resemble the jottings in his son’s diary in that they, too, were committed to paper under the critical gaze of a supervisor. In the early morning of 22 January 1798, several soldiers arrived unannounced at De Ruit. Their commanding officer had a warrant for

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the arrest of the people’s representative Van Eck. Together with twenty other political prisoners, Lambert was interned in Huis ten Bosch, the former palace of the stadholder that now served as a prison. Lambert van Eck’s account of this period of imprisonment can be read in the letters he was occasionally allowed to send his wife. At first all contact with the outside world was forbidden. An occasional letter was better than none, but he was far from happy with the situation. He speaks of an ‘awkward correspondence, which I can carry on with you only in the presence of the officer who guards us and, even then, only through the offices of the military commander’.1 Lambert’s detention was not unbearable, but he missed his wife and children: ‘Often the thought of them has caused me to weep tender tears.’ Conversely, Lambert assumed that ‘little Jan’ also missed him, now that he had to forgo their ‘daily diversions’. He knew that Otto was unwell and wanted to be kept fully informed of his condition: ‘I long intensely for any news of the patient. His character assures me that what has happened will not have affected his recovery.’ Lambert expressed concern about his wife’s condition, now that, as he described it, she was fulfilling, twice over, her ‘motherly functions’. Hearing that this, too, was going well had set his mind at ease, and he hoped ‘that the thought of having received life from you – twice – will inspire the

Fig. 162. ‘O! tijden, o! zeden (Oh times! Oh mores!).’ J.H. Stoffenberg’s contribution to Lambert van Eck’s album amicorum.

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dear boy to repay your love by being doubly grateful for what you have given him’. This passage must mean that Otto was being breastfed at the same time as his new-born sister Pauline. From time immemorial breast milk had been thought to have a purifying effect. A later letter reveals that this therapy had been Lambert’s idea: ‘With infinite pleasure . . . I heard from the doctor that Otto is making successful use of the maternal medicine cabinet, which I hope will thoroughly cleanse his blood; I take pleasure in recollecting the moment the idea first occurred to me, and regret almost nothing of my inexplicable imprisonment as much as not being able to witness this delightful spectacle.’ Lambert ends his first letter with a request to send money, for he had had almost none on his person at the time of his arrest. By now the officer who had been reading over Lambert’s shoulder as he wrote had had enough: ‘This is expecting too much of the officer, so I shall leave off here and commend you to God’s protection. Give all six children a warm embrace. Adieu.’ From a following letter, dated 12 February, it appears that Lambert had meanwhile received letters from his wife and Otto, and that Doortje had sent him an ‘excerpt from Rousseau, which I shall keep as my article of faith’. Lambert set to work translating a song titled Etre infini, which he sent home a couple of weeks later. He had received a Bible, but an almanac had been intercepted because it contained blank pages: the prisoners were not allowed any paper or writing materials. Powder and pomade had not yet arrived either, which Lambert deplored because he found it ‘most unpleasant’ to have his hair combed ‘in the presence of a corporal’. He was frustrated by the lack of privacy, but also piqued by the inevitable boredom of detention: ‘Thank God I remain in good health; if only I had something useful to do.’ In the following letters he goes into detail about the ways in which he and his fellow prisoners while away the time. The parallels to Otto’s existence begin to manifest themselves: I lead an odd life. Cambier, Van Hooff and Stoffenberg take breakfast with me, after which I amuse myself by reading Zollikofer or Gellert. At half past twelve we gather in the large drawing room, which has been designated as our common room, where we read the newspapers and entertain ourselves, some by playing chess, others by playing at battledore, spinning a top or indulging in other diversions, so that we often imagine that we have returned to our childhood. At three o’clock the meal is served – some linger over it, others leave the table early – and at six o’clock we have tea. Until nine or ten we play ombre and other card games, and

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epilogue afterwards have a student’s supper of bread and cheese with a glass of punch or wine. Then we sit around the fire, and since Vitringa has joined our company, the conversation is often so lively that our minds are not occupied at all by sorrow; and far from being bored or counting the hours, we find time slipping by without having finished our tasks.

In fact, Lambert’s days as a prisoner were surprisingly similar to Otto’s. He was now reading the same books as his son, and the games the detainees played to pass the time were also infantile, at least in Lambert’s eyes. From a later letter we learn that he made fishing nets, a skill which Otto had taught a servant years before. Even Lambert’s habit of referring to his duties as ‘tasks’ – supposedly neglected owing to amusing distractions – is reminiscent of Otto’s diary. The censorship of Lambert’s letters was less subtle, though, as evidenced by the missive quoted above, the last lines of which had simply been torn off. Like Otto, Lambert took his readers into account. Thus he wrote that he expected to eat strawberries and cherries at Huis ten Bosch, another way of saying that he would presumably not be released for some time. Criticism of his guards was carefully formulated. He claimed not to understand why the prisoners were still denied the innocent pleasure of seeing their wives and children or taking a walk out of doors: ‘You can well imagine that because of these deprivations, the other gestures of goodwill that are shown us here (thanks to the goodwill of those in whose care we have been placed) are of little interest to us.’ It is possible that the parenthetical remark – which was written in French – was meant to be relayed by the censor to the agent of the Internal Police, A.J. LaPierre, who exercised the highest authority over the prisoners.2 An earlier letter reveals that Lambert had every confidence that this man would eventually relax the rules: ‘It is thought that permission to go outdoors will soon be granted – LaPierre cannot yet assume full responsibility for our care.’ Lambert’s need to see his family and his longing to spend some time outdoors are recurrent themes in his letters. On 8 March 1798, he writes that his hopes for permission to take a walk outdoors had ‘gone up in smoke’ when it appeared that such ‘curious’ conditions were attached to this privilege that no one had yet exercised it. The conditions were so humiliating that he could not even bring himself to describe them to his wife. In the meantime, Lambert was still unaware of the seriousness of Otto’s condition. His letters reveal that he had great faith in the breast milk his son was receiving and regretted that circumstances prevented

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him from witnessing this domestic scene. The next letter he wrote contains several pieces of advice to Otto regarding the maintenance of De Ruit, namely the garden surrounding the house, the larches, the orchard and the drainage. Lambert’s detention naturally led him to reflect on the recent political upheavals. On 21 February, he requested the Histoire secrète de la Révolution française by François Pagès.3 It is telling that he asked for this particular book, which took a critical look at the course taken by the revolution. Lambert’s manservant Dirk was charged with delivering it, since he travelled back and forth daily to bring Lambert clean linen, as well as tobacco, rope with which to make fishing nets and other indispensable items. Dirk’s missions did not always proceed smoothly. On 2 March Lambert wrote about an incident in which Dirk had refused to take off his hat for the duty officer, who was angered by this act of insolence. Lambert asked his wife to instruct Dirk to mind his manners, because the officer was actually a kind man. He also drew her attention to the fact that the officer was German: ‘Those people, especially the Germans, are often filled with pretensions that are incomprehensible to us.’ Lambert, still denied permission to receive his wife and children, contrived to see them anyway. He instructed his wife to have the children ride past in a coach and blow him kisses; this was to take place around half past one, when he would be sure to stand by the window. After this remote ‘encounter’, he devised a new plan, but not before warning his wife to be careful about what she wrote in her letters, because the censorship had been tightened further: ‘Therefore, exercise more reserve and circumspection in the letters that are not sure to be delivered directly into my hands by A.’ The candour of his own letter indicates that this one would, in any case, be delivered by A. Lambert suggested sending the governess out with the children: ‘Countless numbers of people stroll past here – If Door and Coos and Miss B., along with a chaperon – whether O. or someone else – could do this one time, between one and three o’clock, it would give me great satisfaction.’ They were instructed to walk straight toward the house, turn left and continue until they could go no further, then retrace their steps: ‘They will then see our division assembled in the first room in the right wing, where a window has been bricked shut.’ This plan went without a hitch. Six days later, on 8 March 1798, he reported having seen the children: ‘The sight of the dear children, strolling with the wives and children of my luckless companions . . . covertly begging for a sign of fatherly affection and a paternal blessing, has sent me into a state of rapture

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that set my blood racing and made my nerves tingle the whole day.’ Lambert had observed the children delivering some things for him – stockings and an under-garment – and seeing his little ones again, even from far, had moved him deeply, ‘especially when I noticed that dear Coos had burst into tears’. Even little Jan had been allowed to come along: He ‘also looked downcast and I believe that the poor boy was on the verge of tears when he climbed back into the coach’. Otto had stayed at home, since Lambert had told him not even to think of visiting him until he had recovered completely from his illness. For some time this remained the status quo. The last thing Lambert wanted was for Charlotte to lower herself by trying to bribe the guards. He gave her instructions regarding the bookkeeping, the payment of taxes, and other financial matters. If their tax bill was too high, she should by no means lodge a complaint. The country was desperately in need of money, he wrote patriotically – presumably with his censors in mind. Otto was told to continue replanting the garden, because the old reed beds and bergamot pear trees needed to be replaced. As to the plan to lay out a number of new paths and hedges, Lambert referred to ‘the drawing in Otto’s possession’. Progress reports were not forthcoming, however, and Lambert reacted to this by rescinding his orders: ‘If Ot cannot face the fuss, or if his condition prevents him from dealing with it, don’t worry about making the changes to the orchard.’ Even though he allowed Otto to ignore the garden, Lambert was upset by the fact that ‘O. has not written one word to me’. A week after writing this, Lambert saw his son in person, for he had been given permission to have his children visit him at Huis ten Bosch. The joy that Lambert would normally have felt at this visit was marred by the terrible shock of seeing Otto. During the visit he was able to control his emotions, but in his next letter to his wife he gave vent to his feelings. The many crossed-out words and his unsteady hand betray his emotional turmoil as he wrote the letter – as always, with an officer looking over his shoulder and with only one sheet of paper at his disposal. Dear wife, even though the children will already have told you about the emotions aroused in me by their visit this morning, I am still too strongly affected by it not to confess to you my sadness at the condition in which I found dear Ot. When I saw the face of my dear boy my countenance fell, and my hopes for his recovery, which your letters had led me to entertain, were completely dashed, and I cannot possibly imagine how I

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could have been lulled into thinking that his condition had not deteriorated since my absence. His emaciation, his overall appearance, his weakness, his coughing, everything seemed to me to betoken the utmost danger. I cannot conceal from you the sorrow this causes me, and I need not tell you what my heart feels during this separation in which I shall be kept from you and from him for God only knows how long. Until now I have endured my lot here with patience and cheered myself up with the prospect that, thanks to the famed benevolence of those entrusted with the supervision of our accommodation, our restraints will be relaxed, but now I must face up to circumstances in which every day is a loss for me in aiding and comforting you, and for a beloved child whom we shall perhaps have for only a little while yet, in order to encourage him and to invigorate him with my constant care, which he can receive from no one as well as from me, because he is more attached to me than to anyone else; now I have lost my philosophy, because the duties I must fulfil are so serious and so tender. But God is just, and will not consider it an omission if I do not carry them out; nevertheless, it breaks my heart not to fulfil them, and I fervently pray that the danger will not become greater, at least not as long as you and I are separated, and that he may continue to come and talk to me once in a while, so that I can be of some use to him. This much, at least, I should be granted as consolation, if the doctor judges it to be safe and if the emotions thus aroused do not have too harmful an effect on him. I should have liked to add a few lines for him here, but it would not be possible to conceal my feelings this time, and however much I believe that he has enough firmness of spirit to talk seriously about his dangerous condition, I prefer to save this for a face-to-face conversation, which I wish to have before long with him alone (with no one else present, unless it could be you).

Lambert had judged the situation correctly; Otto was very ill indeed. He had been suffering the whole winter from ‘an inflammatory cold’ that was getting worse every day. Owing to his son’s condition, Lambert was given permission a few days later to travel under guard to De Ruit. Lambert described what followed in a separate account, which has been preserved in the family archives. Otto was happy when his father arrived: ‘He was extremely pleased to have me with him’, but his father found it difficult to keep from breaking down: ‘The look on his face moved me so much that my heart, instead of rejoicing at seeing my family again after such a difficult absence, was filled with bitter sorrow at his wasted condition.’ Dr van Stipriaan diagnosed the complaint as phthisis: pulmonary consumption, or tuberculosis. The first symptoms had already presented themselves: a cold, fever, coughing and fatigue. After years of ups and downs, the disease can suddenly become much worse. New treatments

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were being sought and experiments carried out with quinine, mercury pills and antimony sulphate, but there was still no effective cure.4 Otto’s parents could no longer hope for his recovery. Otto was not told this in so many words, but he knew it well enough: ‘He understood, or rather sensed this verdict with great resignation, prayed to God for support, if – in his early youth, as unprepared as he was and without his worldly guide (by which he was referring to me) – he should be forced to undertake the journey to eternity.’ Even so, Otto said that he still hoped to be saved, ‘and naively declared that such a thing would be infinitely more pleasing, if God would but allow it’. Otto took his medicine faithfully and stuck to his diet, but when visitors appeared at his bedside he bid them ‘a resolute yet warm-hearted farewell’. Parting from his younger sister was especially moving: ‘He still had a childish disagreement to clear up with his sister Cootje, and they were reconciled so affectionately that it melted the hearts of all the onlookers.’ Like many sufferers of tuberculosis, Otto was conscious almost until the end, and took it upon himself – which is also not unusual in such cases – to set the scene for the last act of his life. He confessed to his parents that he had wanted to repay them ‘for all the trouble he had frequently caused and was again causing’, but had been forced to abandon this hope. As Lambert reported, ‘he thus wished to do everything he still could to make us happy.’ Lambert often read aloud to his son, but this was made more and more difficult by Otto’s increasing deafness. By this time he was barely able to carry on a conversation. Until the end he continued to read the newspapers, but skipped articles on ‘the world’s disputes’. He welcomed every bit of nature that was brought to him, such as the flowers in his room: ‘And when the spring sun shone in on it all, he declared that he found it harder to die when it was like this than if it had been dark and the weather bad.’ On Thursday, 29 March it became obvious that the end was near. Until then Otto had not experienced much tightness in his chest, but the previous night he had been kept awake by violent fits of coughing. His parents decided to keep him company and stayed up with him that night. They read together, spoke of various subjects, especially Jesus’ teachings of ‘God’s fatherly goodness towards the humble and repentant, and the trust that this knowledge should inspire in him, that God’s goodness towards us is greater and stronger than that of a mother towards her infant’. It did him much good to hear the parable of the prodigal son who, after a sinful life, returns to his home, filled with remorse, to be embraced by his father.

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Otto thanked his parents for comforting him, but continued to stress that they thought much better of him than he deserved, and ‘also made such a naive confession of his faults and failings that he became ever more lovable in our eyes, and our thankfulness that he was prepared for the blessed state mingled with our sorrow at the loss of such a dear child’. At six o’clock Otto persuaded his parents to get some sleep, but he himself did not go to bed. When they returned to his room at half past eight, they found him at his washstand, as he was every day at that time. He had breakfast and ‘even read the newspapers as usual’. For the first time in hours he found the peace to settle down in his chair, and it seemed as though he might even sleep briefly: But that sleep became a deadly slumber, in which he muttered something we could no longer understand, very softly and without any laboured breathing, with his hands folded and his eyes clouded, until he was carried away from the visible world and into the arms of his heavenly Father, whither our love accompanied him in thought with adoration and emotion!

Lambert closed his account with a message for future generations, first and foremost for Otto’s siblings, the later readers of the family book: Children, who will read this when I am here no longer, spill a grateful tear to the memory of this, your eldest brother. He was of rare character, beloved for his cheerfulness and good manners. His quick wit and ready understanding made him the adviser of many, and oft-times mine as well. His love and trust made him my friend. And if he had continued to live, he would surely have taken my place as your protector and port in a storm.

Otto was one of the first to be buried at Ter Navolging – the cemetery that was such an important symbol of the new era – where he was laid to rest next to his uncle Pieter Paulus. A short while later Lambert van Eck was driven back to Huis ten Bosch, where he was detained again for weeks. His fellow prisoners did their best to console him, and attempted to cheer him up by asking him to write in their friendship albums. In Ysbrand van Hamelsveld’s album amicorum, Lambert expressed the gloom that had come over him: ‘My prospect is eternity.’5 Now that mankind had been ‘struck by one disaster after another’, he would try to behave like ‘a Christian philosopher’. Lambert’s signature was accompanied by a date: ‘twenty-ninth day, second period of my political imprisonment after a grievous absence of several weeks on account of the death of my beloved eldest son in the eighteenth year of his life’.

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In the album of J.A. van der Spijk, Lambert copied out a long quotation from Recueil des extraits de la société des théophilosophes (Collection of extracts from the proceedings of the theophilosophical society).6 Lambert’s choice of this publication suggests that he was leaning more towards deistic religious views. In the meantime he had become convinced that, living as he did in an ‘unreasonable society’, it was better to seek happiness in one’s own heart and in the esteem of one’s peers than in lofty ideals, and added that the ‘sad circumstances of my family’ and ‘the loss of my son’ had made friendship all the more important to him. Perhaps Lambert did eat strawberries and cherries at Huis ten Bosch, but no apples or pears. His detention came to a definite end in the summer of 1798, after the incumbent government had been overthrown by a new coup, carried out this time by the moderates. Lambert van Eck went home, but never again became his old self. He had been disillusioned by politics, just as some of his friends had suffered disappointment soon after the Batavian Revolution. ‘Our horizons, it seems to me, are darker’, his friend Floris Voltelen had told him in May 1795.7 The first doubts about modern pedagogy were also voiced around this time, in the Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (Dutch Literary Review), for example, in which the question had been raised as to why the philanthropinic approach had exerted so little influence on the ‘thought and actions of young people’ and why the ‘effects of such useful writings were not more visible’.8 Petrus de Wacker van Zon – like Lambert, an alumnus of Leiden University and once a militant Patriot – left no room for doubt on this score in his satirical novel Jan Perfect of 1817. He ridicules not only the ‘animal magnetism’, ‘galvanism’, ‘inflammable gas’ and ‘quinine and rhubarb’ of the preceding ‘miraculous century’, but also mocks the current ‘exalted ideas of human ingenuity’ and ‘excessively eccentric pedagogical methods’.9 Lambert was eventually appointed to another judicial post, but he was a broken man. He had always been susceptible to colds, but now they became more severe. He finally died on 5 October 1803 of the same disease as Otto, ‘pulmonary consumption’, as his youngest son recorded in a postscript to Lambert’s notes in the family book.10 Lambert van Eck was buried in turn in the family grave at Ter Navolging. His faithful physician, Dr van Stipriaan, wrote a ‘short verse’ in Lambert’s memory and sent a printed copy of it to his widow. This poem provides some insight into Lambert’s gloomy state of mind. Van Stipriaan, who admit-

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ted in an accompanying letter that poetry was not his ‘daily activity’, spoke of the ‘bumpy path’ of Lambert’s life, where he wandered about ‘stoical and resigned’, enduring his bitter fate. In politics he had been forced to ‘bow to violence’, but he had supported his friends ‘through thick and thin’. Dr van Stipriaan’s medical assistance had been to no avail, however; the boundaries of medical science had been reached, and the doctor had been forced to resort to poetry. In 1872, at the age of eighty-six, Lambert’s daughter Cootje wrote a short autobiography, in which she tells of her father’s last years.11 For Lambert’s children his premature death meant ‘an irreparable loss’. Cootje was sorry that her children never got to know their grandfather. Her memoirs were intended primarily for them, as a ‘respectful memento’ to keep his memory alive: ‘His already weakened constitution could not withstand the frequent shocks to which it was subjected. After the death of my brother, he courageously resumed his usual activities, but laboured under severe headaches, which undermined his health and weakened him even more.’ Together with her eldest sister, she looked after Lambert and brought him ‘relief through reading and conversation’. In the night of 5 October 1803, his life – ‘for us so precious and useful’ – came to an end. Lambert’s widow, Charlotte Vockestaert, bore her sorrow with ‘courage and resignation’, until she died in 1824 of an ‘attack of nerves’. She, too, was buried at Ter Navolging. Their country house, De Ruit, was sold and the household effects divided among the surviving children. The library came into the possession of the only male heir, Arend van Eck, who later became a lawyer.12 Presumably the family papers went to him as well. They must have included Otto’s diary, carefully preserved with a satin ribbon tied around it. Otto’s memory remained alive in the family circle for a long time. Decades later, a relative shared her vivid recollections of this promising child with Otto’s mother: Do you remember when he was eighteen months old, and Mama and I came to stay with you? You opened the door for us with him in your arms, and he exclaimed clearly and unhesitatingly, ‘Dina Grandmama’. It seems to me that I can still hear him saying it, for a sweeter and more beautiful boy has yet to be born. He was everything, and still lies buried in my heart, even though our eyes can no longer delight in the sight of him.13

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Fig. 163. Portrait miniature of Charlotte Amélie Vockestaert (1759–1824) in old age.

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Fig. 164. Séparer sans désunir (Parted and yet together). Drawing in the album of Theodora (Doortje) van Eck (1782–1831).

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The family archives contain the letters of condolence received by Otto’s parents, as well as a poem of mourning composed by Catharina Rottermondt, a friend of the family. Her message is completely in keeping with the belief that God, in his infinite wisdom, had summoned Otto to heaven. The length of the poem and the number of crossed-out words suggest that its composition had been quite an ordeal. In this verse the Creator (‘the Greatest Gardener’ had been deleted) faces fierce competition from Otto’s parents: I have you constantly in mind, The gardeners who were so kind, Bent on the toilsome cultivation, Of your choice, exquisite plant, Nipped in the bud by God’s firm hand. You never shirked your obligation. You were my friends! It did transpire That you received your heart’s desire: A scion of uncommon worth. On him all care you did bestow And for a time you watched him grow, But he was not meant for this earth.14

NOTES Introduction Otto van Eck, Dagboek 1791–1797, edited by Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998). The quotations from this diary can be found by looking for the date or consulting the index of names in this edition. Another early example of a child’s diary is discussed in Brigitte Schnegg, ‘Tagebuchschreiben als Technik des Selbst. Das “Journal de mes actions” der Bernerin Henriette Stettler-Herport (1738–1805)’, in Daniela Hacke (ed.), Frauen in der Stadt. Selbstzeugnisse des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2004), pp. 103–31. On egodocuments and history, see Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, ‘ “De gevaarlijkste van alle bronnen”. Egodocumenten: nieuwe wegen en perspectieven’, in Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker (eds.), Egodocumenten: nieuwe wegen en perspectieven (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2004), pp. 3–23. On the relationship between egodocuments and family archives, see Arianne Baggerman, ‘Autobiography and family memory in the nineteenth century’, in Rudolf Dekker (ed.), Egodocuments and history. Autobiographical writing in its social context since the Middle Ages (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), pp. 161–75. 2 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, What is Enlightenment? and a passage from The Metaphysics of Morals, translated and edited by Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), p. 286. 3 There is growing interest: recent surveys that refer to other literature include Wijnand Mijnhardt and Joost Kloek with the cooporation of Eveline Koolhaas, 1800: Blueprints for a National Community (translated by Beverley Jackson) (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004) and N.C.F. van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland. Van oude orde naar moderniteit, 1750 –1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). 4 For new ideas on this subject, see Fania Oz-Salzberger, ‘New approaches towards a history of the Enlightenment. Can disparate perspectives make a general picture?’, in Telaviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 29 (2000), pp. 171–82, esp. p. 180; Hanco Jürgens, ‘Welke Verlichting? Tijdsaanduidingen en plaatsbepalingen van een begrip’, in De Achttiende Eeuw 35 (2003), pp. 28–35. 1

Prologue Rijksarchief (hereafter RA) Gelderland, Familiearchief (hereafter FA) Van Eck, inv. no. 45. The quotations can be traced by date or through the index of the annotated transcription (which we have used) by M. van Lennep, an edition of which is being prepared in collaboration with Joost Rosendaal and Pieter van Wissing. See also J.J.M. Baartmans, Hollandse wijsgeren in Brabant en 1

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Vlaanderen. Geschriften van Noord-Nederlandse patriotten in de Oostenrijkse Nederlanden, 1787–1792 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2001); Joost Rosendaal, Bataven! Nederlandse vluchtelingen in Frankrijk 1787–1795 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2004). 2 Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, Aan het volk van Nederland. Het democratisch manifest (1781), edited by W.P. Wertheim and A.H. Wertheim-Gijse Weenink (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1966), p. 131. 3 Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience. Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 275. 4 Mirabeau, Aux Bataves, sur le stadhouderat (Amsterdam: n.p., 1788), ‘Notes et pièces justificatives’, p. 25. Mirabeau’s part in this work is open to discussion; he was undoubtedly supplied with the Dutch material. 5 On this subject, see Donald R. Hopkins, The Greatest Killer. Smallpox in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 6 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 140; Louis Gottschalk (ed.), The Letters of Lafayette to Washington 1777–1799 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1976): p. 314, letter of 26 October 1786; p. 317, letter of 13 January 1787; p. 329, letter of 9 October 1787; p. 339, letter of 6 March 1788. The visit is also mentioned in a letter from Lafayette to an unknown person: p. 233, letter of 3 June 1788 (cf. p. 388, letter of May 1788). See also Louis Gottschalk, Lafayette between the American and the French Revolution (1783–1789) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950); Lafayette, Mémoires, correspondance et manuscrits du général Lafayette, 2 vols. (Brussels: Hauman Cattoir, 1837–38). 7 M.L. Clarke, The Noblest Roman. Marcus Brutus and his Reputation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), p. 101. In the eighteenth century this Brutus was more popular than his earlier namesake of imperial Roman times. 8 Luc Vincent Thierry, Guide des amateurs et des étrangers voyageurs à Paris (Paris, 1787); Antoine Joseph Dézalier d’Argenville, Voyage pittoresque de Paris (Paris: Frères de Bure, 1778). 9 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 51v. 10 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 145v. 11 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 43. 12 Richard A. Etlin, Symbolic Space. French Enlightenment Architecture and its Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 113. 13 Thomas H. von der Dunk, ‘Het patriotse bouwen. Een poging tot vaderlandslievende architectuur aan het einde van de achttiende eeuw’, in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 112 (2000), pp. 5–29. 14 The Italian Carlo Giovanni Francesco Giudici – who, after coming to the Netherlands in 1770, called himself Carel Johannes Franciscus Giudici (sometimes spelled Guidici) – had worked since 1786 as an architect in the service of the Rotterdam Admiralty. He appears in Otto’s diary in the entry for 22 December 1793. On Giudici, see, among others, Bart Rijsbergen, ‘De Asser ontwerpen van Jan Giudici’ (undergraduate thesis, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden 1992). 15 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 43. 16 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 114v. 17 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 33v.

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18 When Adriaan van der Willigen visited the city years later, it was still extraordinary to find such a ‘well-furnished room’; see A. van der Willigen, Parijs in den aanvang van de negentiende eeuw, 3 vols. (Haarlem: Loosjes Pz., 1806–07), vol. I, p. 48. 19 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 153. 20 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 177. 21 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 58. 22 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 26. 23 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 65. 24 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 57v. 25 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 139. 26 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 144v. 27 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), letter XI to milord Edouard. One of the letters in this epistolary novel is in fact a treatise on the art of gardening and the new insights in this field, provided with footnotes in which Rousseau disparages ‘fashionable copses’, which one must traverse in a ridiculous manner, zigzagging through them and occasionally having to retrace one’s steps. 28 René Louis Girardin, De la composition des paysages sur le terrain, edited by Michel H. Conan (Paris: Éditions du champ urbain, 1979), p. 21. 29 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fols. 188–89. 30 Quirijn Maurits Rudolph VerHuell, Levensherinneringen 1787–1812, edited by L. Turksma (Westervoort: Van Gruting, 1996), p. 16. 31 RA Gelderland, FA VerHuell, inv. no. 54: Quirijn Maurits Rudolph VerHuell (1787–1860), ‘Pro memoria dat is om ’t onthouden’, diary kept from April to July 1802 and in May 1803. 32 29 January 1796. 33 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 41, Familieaantekeningen (family notes), made by L.E. van Eck, 1778–1801. 34 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 57. 35 De Denker, 12 vols. (Amsterdam: K. van Tongeren and F. Houttuyn, 1763–74), xii, no. 577, pp. 17–25; excerpts from this weekly are included in the encyclopaedia compiled by Lambert van Eck. 36 Betje Wolff, Proeve over de opvoeding, aan de Nederlandsche moeders (1779), edited by H.C. de Wolf (Meppel: Boom, 1978), p. 60.

Chapter One. An Enlightened Education Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (trans. Allan Bloom), p. 37. On the book’s printing history, see Bernard Gagnebin, ‘L’édition orginale de l’Emile’, in Bulletin du bibliophile (1953), pp. 107–30. The authors consulted the Dutch version Emile of over de opvoeding, trans. Anneke Brassinga (Meppel: Boom, 1989). However, because this translation is not complete, they also made use of the edition in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1967–71). This book quotes from the English translation by Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979). 3 Rousseau, Emile, pp. 52–53. 1 2

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Rousseau, Emile, p. 34. Rousseau, Emile, p. 59. 6 Rousseau, Emile, p. 78. 7 Rousseau, Emile, p. 168. 8 Rousseau, Emile, pp. 218–19. 9 Rousseau, Emile, pp. 245–46. 10 Rousseau, Emile, p. 116. 11 Rousseau, Emile, p. 167. 12 Belle van Zuylen, Madame de Charrière, Oeuvres complètes (edited by JeanDaniel Candaux et al.), 10 vols. (Amsterdam: G.A. van Oorschot, 1979–84), vol. vii, p. 207. 13 Julia V. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster. Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 14 Robert Darnton, ‘Lezers reageren op Rousseau: de vorming van het romantische gevoel’, in Idem, De grote kattenslachting en andere episoden uit de culturele geschiedenis van Frankrijk (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1986), pp. 243–92. On Rousseau’s influence in the Netherlands, see Walter Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland. Een onderzoek naar de invloed van de mens en het werk (ca. 1760 – ca. 1810) (Ghent: Secretariaat van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde, 1963). 15 Marijke J. van der Wal, ‘Feral children and the origin of language debate: The case of the Puella Trans-Isalana or the Kranenburg Girl (1717)’, in Gerda Hassler and Peter Schmitter (eds.), Sprachdiskussion und Beschreibung von Sprachen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Münster: Nodus, 1998); Charles Linnaeus, The Animal Kingdom or Zoological System of the Celebrated Sir Charles Linnaeus, trans. with additions by Robert Kerr (London: J. Murray, 1792), pp. 44–45, quoted in Michel Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys. A History of Feral Children (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 38. In a later edition, Linnaeus included a wild child found in the vicinity of Leiden, a case that had been pointed out to him by his teacher, Boerhaave. 16 Gemeentearchief (hereafter GA) Delft, Oud Stads Archief, Consenten voor spellen en kermissen, 1722–1808. Paulus Jordaen receives permission to display ‘wild children’ on a barge. 17 Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment. The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980); Harlan Lane, The Wild Child of Aveyron (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 18 Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Confessions, Geneva, s.n., 1782. An English translation was published in London in 1783. The entry in question was that of Jacques Balexert. 19 Nederlands Adelsboek (1916), p. 62; P.J. Buijnsters, ‘Nederlandse kinderboeken uit de achttiende eeuw’, in H. Bekkering et al. (eds.), De hele Bibelebontse berg. De geschiedenis van het kinderboek in Nederland en Vlaanderen van de middeleeuwen tot heden (Amsterdam: Querido, 1990), p. 194; J. Wille, De literator R.M. van Goens en zijn kring. Studiën over de achttiende eeuw i (Zutphen: G.J.A. Ruys, 1937), p. 400, with reference to letters written by A.H. graaf van Rechteren to Van Goens, of 24 and 29 May 1778, 27 and 28 September 1780. See also Francis Bulhof, Ma patrie est au ciel. Leven en werk van Willem Emmery de Perponcher Sedlnitzky (1741–1819) (Hilversum: Verloren, 1993). 4 5

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20 W.E. de Perponcher, Onderwijs voor kinderen, 3 vols. (Utrecht, 1782), vol. i, pp. iv–xxiii. 21 Buitens- en binnenshuis. Vertellingen uit De Perponchers Onderwijs voor kinderen, herzien door J. van Lennep (Leiden: D. Noothoven van Goor, 1876). 22 De Perponcher, Onderwijs voor kinderen, vol. i, p. 118. Nightingales were popular in eighteenth-century children’s literature. Weekblad voor kinderen even devoted an entire issue to these birds and their ‘inimitable warbling’ (Weekblad voor kinderen, no. 18, pp. 137–44). 23 24 October 1791. 24 Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, ‘Children and the Enlightenment’, in Paula S. Fass (ed.), Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, 3 vols. (New York: Thomson Gale, 2003), vol. i, pp. 321–24. See also, among others, Heikki Lempa, Die Bildung der Triebe. Der deutsche Philanthropismus (1768–1788) (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1993); Reiner Wild, Die Vernunft der Väter. Zur Psychographie von Bürgerlichkeit und Aufklärung in Deutschland am Beispiel ihrer Literatur für Kinder (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlag, 1987); Ulrich G. Herrmann, Aufklärung und Erziehung. Studien zur Funktion der Erziehung im Konstitutionsprozess der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert in Deutschland (Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 1993); Christa Kersting, Die Genese der Erziehung im 18. Jahrhundert. Campes ‘Algemeine Revision’ im Kontext der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft (Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 1992); Fritz-Peter Hager (ed.), Bildung, Paedagogik und Wissenschaft in Aufklärungsphilosophie und Aufklärungszeit (Bochum: Winkler, 1997). With regard to England, see Lutz Roessner, Paedagogen der englischen Aufklärungsphilosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1988). On Rousseau’s continued influence, see, among others, Emmo Thiem, Wie weit erscheint Chris. Gottlob Salzmann von Jean-Jacques Rousseau beeinflusst? (Berlin: G. Schade, 1906); Michaela Jonach, Väterliche Ratschläge für bürgerliche Töchter: Mädchenerziehung und Weiblichkeitsideologie bei Joachim Heinrich Campe und Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997); Ernst Hartmann, JeanJacques Rousseaus Einfluss auf Joachim Heinrich Campe (Neuenburg Wpr.: Franz Nelson, 1904). 25 C.G. Salzmann, Aanleiding tot eene verstandige opvoeding van opvoeders (Haarlem: F. Bohn, 1804). 26 Emil oder über die Erziehung, trans. E.F. Cramer, with notes etc. by Johann Heinrich Campe, 2 vols. (Braunschweig: Verlag der Schulbuchhandlung, 1789). 27 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile of verhandeling over de opvoeding, vol. i (Kampen: J.A. de Chalmot, 1790), p. 18. 28 Joris van Eijnatten, ‘Paratexts, book reviews, and Dutch literary publicity. Translations from German into Dutch, 1760–1796’, in Wolfenbütteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte 25 (2000), pp. 95–127. 29 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, What is Enlightenment? And a passage from The Metaphysics of Morals, translated and edited by Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), p. 286. 30 Immanuel Kant, Über Pädagogik, edited by Friedrich Theodor Rink (Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolavius, 1803). 31 J.B. Basedow, Methodischer Unterricht der Jugend in der Religion und Sittenlehre der Vernunft nach dem in der Philalethie angegebenen Plane (Altona: Ben David

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Iversen, 1764 [repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1981]. This was followed by Das Methodikum für Väter und Mütter der Familien im Völker (Altona: Ben David Iversen, 1770). 32 Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, Plan van philantropijnsche opvoeding, trans. of Philantropinischer Erziehungsplan (Frankfurt am Main: Eidenberg, 1778); C.G. Salzmann, Beschrijving van het opvoedingsinstituut te Schnepfenthal, met eene plattegrond van het landgoed, trans. by Jacobus van Wijk Rzn. (Amsterdam: Johannes van der Heij, 1808). Around the time Otto was born, Dirk (1761–1822) and Gijsbert Karel (1762–1834) van Hogendorp, sons of a Rotterdam regents’ family, were sent for military training to Berlin, where they nevertheless discovered Emile and met philanthropinist pedagogues (see Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland, p. 312). 33 C.G. Salzmann, ‘Ankündigung einer neuen Erziehungsanstalt’, in Chr. Gotth. Salzmanns paedagogische Schriften, edited by Ernst Wagner, vol. i, (Langensalza: Schulbuchhandlung F.B.L. Gertzler, 1899, 4th edition), pp. 145–94, esp. pp. 146, 151, 161–64, 180–82. 34 C.G. Salzmann, Aanleiding tot eene onverstandige opvoeding der kinderen (Amsterdam: Kuijper en Van Vliet, 1791), p. 144. 35 Thomas W. Lacqueur, Solitary Sex. A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003). With regard to the eighteenth century, see Karl Heinz Bloch, Die Bekämpfung der Jugendmasturbation im 18. Jahrhundert. Ursachen, Verlauf, Nachwirkungen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998); S.A. Tissot, Het onanismus of verhandeling over de ziekten, oorspronkelijk uit de zelfbesmetting (Utrecht: Gisbert Timon van Paddenburg, 1777), reprinted in 1785 and 1792; P. Vandermeersch, ‘Simon-André Tissot (1728–1797) en de strijd tegen het onanisme: mythe of realiteit’, in Documentatieblad Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw 17 (1985), pp. 173–95, discusses the debate on this subject. Gert Hekma, ‘De belaagde onschuld. Een strijd tegen de zelfbevlekking in Nederland?’, in Gert Hekma and Herman Roodenburg (eds.), Soete minne en helsche boosheit. Seksuele voorstellingen in Nederland 1300 –1850 (Nijmegen: sun, 1988), pp. 232–55, contains a list of publications in Dutch; see also D.J. Noordam, ‘Zedeloos Nederland? Sexuele losbandigheid rond 1800: visies, remedies, realiteit’, in Idem, pp. 197–209, 198–99. The first Dutch diary in which masturbation is mentioned is that of Alexander van Goltstein: Jurgen Limonard (ed.), De vertrouwde van mijn hart. Het dagboek van Alexander van Goltstein (1801–1808) (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994). F.A. Hartsen was the first autobiographer to broach the subject in a printed work: F.A. Hartsen, Nederlandsche toestanden. Uit het leven van een lijder, edited by Nop Maas (Hilversum: Verloren, 1996). 36 Immanuel Kant, ‘Von der Wohllustigen Selbstschandung’, in Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Tugendlehre, vol. vi of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1907), pp. 424–27. 37 J.H. Campe, Kleine zielkunde voor kinderen (Amsterdam: Joannes van Selm, 1782), pp. xix, 172. 38 De Opmerker (Amsterdam, 1772–78), vol. vi, p. 47, quoted in Rokus Verwoerd, ‘Kindbeeld en pedagogiek in de Nederlandse Verlichting’, Comenius 23 (1986), pp. 318–341. Cf. De zedelijke opvoeding der jeugd uit onze natuurlijke hartstogten

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afgeleid (Leiden: s.n., 1770). A reprint appeared in 1772 in Amsterdam, and a new edition with a foreword by C. van Engelen was published in 1791 in Haarlem by A. Loosjes. 39 Adriana S. Benzaquién, ‘Childhood, identity and human science in the Enlightenment’, in History Workshop Journal, no. 57 (2004), pp. 35–57; Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self. Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 40 Rousseau, Emile, p. 100. 41 27 December 1793; 4 and 14 March 1794; 4 April 1794; 29 January 1794. 42 5 November 1796. 43 Franz Jacobi, Lohn und Strafe bei Johann Bernard Basedow. Eine Studie zur Geschichte des Philantropinismus (Munich: Koesel, 1916); Rudolf Biermann, Die Pädagogische Begründung der Belohnungen und Strafen in der Erziehung bei Basedow, Campe und Salzmann. Ein Beitrag zur Wandlung des Philantropismus zu einem paedagogischen Individualismus auf dem Hintergrund der Aufklärung (Bochum, 1970, dissertation); J.H. Campe, Über Belohnungen und Strafen in paedagogischer Hinsicht. Aus dem Revisionswerke abgedruckt (Braunschweig: Schulbuchhandlung, 1788); Cornelis Esseboom, Onderwijsinghe der jeught. Onderwijs en onderwijstoezicht in de 18e eeuw op het Eiland van Dordrecht (1995, dissertation), p. 165. 44 Salzmann, ‘Ankündigung’ (see note 33 above), pp. 171–75. 45 27 February 1796; 9 February 1793; 20 July 1793; 22 March 1796. Cf. A.H. Huussen, ‘Het kind in Friesland tijdens de 18e en 19e eeuw. Gezinshistorische en strafrechtshistorische aspecten’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 94 (1981), pp. 391–411. 46 H.A. Chatelain, ‘Andwoord op de vraag “Welke zijn de beste middel om reeds in de scholen de Kinderen tot gezellige menschen op te leiden?”, Verhandelingen . . . Algemeen, vol. III, p. 67. 47 Anne Bos, ‘Naar de Franse school’, in Opossum. Tijdschrift voor Historische en Kunstwetenschappen 6 (1997), pp. 12–23; Anne Bos, ‘François et Hollandois’. De Franse kostschool in Boxmeer 1785–1787. Bestudeerd aan de hand van de autobiografie van Christoffel Baerken, thesis (social history), Erasmus University Rotterdam, 1996. 48 J.F. Martinet, Huisboek voor vaderlandsche gezinnen (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1793), p. 200. 49 Martinet, Huisboek (see note 48 above), p. 135. 50 Martinet, Huisboek (see note 48 above), pp. 247, 250, 259. 51 Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken, Historie van den heer Willem Leevend, 8 vols. (The Hague: Isaac van Cleef, 1784), vol. vi, p. 150. 52 Hiëronymus van Alphen, ‘Het geweten’, in Kleine gedigten voor kinderen, edited by P.J. Buijnsters (Amsterdam: Delta, 1998), p. 145 (from Tweede vervolg, 1782). 53 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), vol. iii, ‘Of the influence and authority of conscience’, pp. 134–56, esp. p. 138; Reinhold Mokrosch, ‘Von der Stimme Gottes zur Stimme des Ueber-Ichs. Wandlungen im Gewissensverständnis der Neuzeit’, in Johannes Horstmann (ed.), Gewissen. Aspekte eines

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vieldiskutierten Sachverhaltes (Schwerte: Katholische Akademie Schwerte, 1983); Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner, Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissens (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1991). 54 19 July 1791; 1 October 1792. See the entry for 31 January 1793 for another mention of ‘geweten’ (conscience). 55 Hylke Hanekuyk, ’s Menschen geluk op deeze waereld (Harlingen: V. van der Plaats, 1801), chapter iv, ‘Van een goed geweeten’, pp. 12–19. Chapter Two. Otto’s Diary 1 Johannes Henricus Nieuwold, Voor een kind om zichzelven te leeren kennen (Groningen: A. Groenewolt, 1802), first printed in 1792. This book went through at least twelve printings. 2 Handboekjen der theophilantropijnen of aanbidders van God en vrienden der menschen (Amsterdam: s.n., 1798), p. 23. On the theophilanthropists and Lambert’s affinity with this movement, see Chapter 11. 3 Pieter ’t Hoen, ‘Zelfkennis’, in Fabelen en kleine gedichten voor kinderen (Amsterdam: Jacobus de Ruijter, 1803), p. 31. 4 Campe, Kleine zielkunde (see Chapter 1, note 37), p. 3. 5 Campe, Kleine zielkunde (see Chapter 1, note 37), p. 7. 6 Campe, Kleine zielkunde (see Chapter 1, note 37), p. 51. 7 Allard Hulshoff, ‘Verhandeling over de zedelijke en verstandelijke opvoeding’, Verhandelingen uitgegeven door de Hollandsche Maatschappije van Wetenschappen te Haarlem (Haarlem, 1765), vol. ix, 2nd piece, p. 22. 8 Nicolaas Sinderam, Redevoering, ten betooge: dat eene verstandige en godsdienstige opvoeding der jeugd een zeer voornaam middel is, ter bevordering van het volksgeluk. Uitgesproken ter opening van de jaarlijksche algemeene vergadering der Bataafsche Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen den 13 van oogstmaand, 1799 (Amsterdam, 1799), p. 14. 9 Martinet, Huisboek (see Chapter 1, note 48), pp. 164–65. This refers to the ‘four temperaments’ (also known as the ‘four humours’) identified by the Greek physician Galen. 10 On the popularity of physiognomy in the Netherlands, see Arianne Baggerman, Een lot uit de loterij. Familiebelangen en uitgeverspolitiek in de Dordtse uitgeversfirma A. Blussé en zoon (1745–1830) (The Hague, sdu, 2001), pp. 171–74. 11 August Hermann Niemeyer, Grondbeginselen van de opvoeding en het onderwijs, 6 vols. (Haarlem: François Bohn, 1799–1810), vol. i, pp. 2, 507; translation of Grundsätze der Erziehung und des Unterrichts (Halle, 1796); vol. ii, pp. 97–98, 509. 12 C.G. Salzmann, Aanleiding tot eene verstandige opvoeding van opvoeders (Haarlem: F. Bohn, 1806), p. 9. 13 Salzmann, Aanleiding (see previous note), p. 45. 14 M.C. Münch, Universal-Lexicon der Erziehungs- und Unterrichtslehre für ältere und jüngere Christliche Volksschullehrer, 3 vols. (Augsburg, 1840–42), vol. iii, p. 5. 15 Lettergeschenk voor de jongelingschap, behelzende wyze raedgeevingen omtrent de verkeering in de waereld (Amsterdam: F. Houttuyn, 1749), pp. 162–64. Reprint Amsterdam: Jan Schalker, 1773. 16 Lettergeschenk voor de jongelingschap (see note 15 above), pp. 104–05.

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Chatelain, ‘Antwoord op de vraag’ (see Chapter 1, note 46). The original French edition was published in Bibliothèque universelle et historique 2 (1687). The Dutch edition was published in 1769 in Amsterdam by S.J. Baalde. Locke himself kept a diary and a ‘common-place book’; see Lord King, The Life and Letters of John Locke with Extracts from his Journals and Common-place Books (London: Bell and Daldy, 1864). 19 C.F. Gellert, Zedekundige lessen, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Pieter Meyer, 1774), 2nd edition, p. 566. 20 Gellert, Zedekundige lessen, p. 249; John Mason, Self-Knowledge (London, 1745). Translation of the 5th English edition: Verhandeling van de zelfkennis (Rotterdam: Jakob Burgvliet, 1761); a reprint appeared in 1762. 21 John Mason, Self-Knowledge. A Treatise shewing the Nature and Benefit of that Important Science and The Way to attain it. Intermixed with various Reflections and Observations on Human Nature (London: J. Waugh, 1745), p. 131. 22 Mason, Self-Knowledge, p. 132. 23 Mason, Self-Knowledge, p. 254. 24 Mason, Self-Knowledge, pp. 253–54. 25 Benjamin Bennet, The Christian Oratory: or, the Devotion of the Closet Display’d, 2nd edition (London: S. Chandler, 1728), p. 14. 26 Bennet, Christian Oratory, pp. 577–78. 27 Jeroen Blaak, Geletterde levens. Dagelijks lezen en schrijven in de vroegmoderne tijd in Nederland 1624–1770 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2004), pp. 229–92, Idem, ‘Schrijven over lezen. Het dagboek van Jacoba van Thiel 1767–1770’, in Baggerman and Dekker (eds.), Egodocumenten: nieuwe wegen en perspectieven, pp. 82–101; Thea Gaasbeek, ‘Het dagregister van Jacoba van Thiel, 1767–1770’, 1995 thesis, Faculty of History and Arts, Erasmus University, Rotterdam; Idem, ‘Opvoeding en kindbeeld in de achttiende eeuw: Jacoba van Thiel en haar dagboek’, Opossum. Tijdschrift voor Historische en Kunstwetenschappen 6 (1997), pp. 32–38. 28 Bennet’s book appeared in a Dutch translation in 1744: De godsdienstige Christen in zijn binnekamer (Haarlem: Jan Brinck, 1744); it was reprinted in 1746. Cf. Vervolg op Benjamin Bennet’s De godsdienstige christen in zyn binnekamer (Haarlem: Jan Brinck, 1741). 29 P.J. Buijnsters, Wolff en Deken. Een biografie (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), p. 364. Only in nineteenth-century American editions was Mason adapted for a younger readership consisting of secondary school and university students. On this subject, see John Mason, A treatise on self knowledge . . . to which are added questions adapted to the work for the use of schools and academies (Boston: Rivington, 1822). 30 Johann Caspar Lavater, Brieven aan jongelingen (The Hague: Isaac van Cleef, 1783), p. 38. A reprint followed: Amsterdam, J. Aariksen, 1820. Translation of Brüderliches Schreiben an verschiedene Jünglinge (1782). 31 [ Johann Caspar Lavater,] Geheimes Tagebuch von einem Beobachter seiner selbst (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1771), [ed. G.J. Zollikofer] and the second part: Unveränderte Fragmente aus dem Tagebuche eines Beobachteres seiner selbst; oder des Tagebuches zweyter Theil, nebst einem Schreiben an den herausgeber desselben (Leipzig, 1773). Dutch translation: Geheim dagboek, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: M. de Bruyn, 1780). 32 Lavater, Geheim dagboek (see previous note), p. 195. 17

18

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33 J.A. Nijland, Leven en werken van Jacobus Bellamy, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1917), vol. i, pp. 60–70; Hiëronymus van Alphen, ‘Fragmenten uit het dagboek van E.V.C.’, in Mengelingen in proze en poëzy (Utrecht: Wed. J. Terveen en zoon, 1798); on this subject, see also P.J. Buijnsters, ‘Het geheime dagboek van Hieronymus van Alphen’, in De Nieuwe Taalgids 61 (1968), pp. 73–83. 34 GA Dordrecht, FA Blussé, uninventoried, box 52. With regard to this, see also Baggerman, Een lot (see note 10 above), pp. 265–70. 35 Limonard (ed.), Vertrouwde (see Chapter 1, note 35). 36 B. Franklin, 1st edition: Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin (Paris, 1791); back-translated as: The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin (London, 1793); the first complete English-language version based on the original manuscript appeared in London in 1817. Dutch translation: Het leven van Benjamin Franklin: door hem zelven beschreven benevens deszelfs zede-, staat- letterkundige en geestige schriften, 2 vols. (Groningen: W. Zuidema, 1798–1800). 37 C. Nicolai’s book also appeared in a Dutch translation: Over zelfkennis, menschenkennis en verkeering met menschen. Naar den tweeden, geheel omgewerkten, en dus verbeterden hoogduitschen druk, translated and edited by W. Goede, 2 vols. (Arnhem: C.A. Thieme, 1827), vol. i. 38 De Menschenvriend (1788), p. 39. 39 J.H. Campe, Allgemeine Revision des gesammten Schul- und Erziehungswesen von einer Gesellschaft praktischer Erzieher, 16 vols. (1785–91) vol. v, p. 413. Volledig leerstelsel van opvoeding was published in Dutch in four parts in six volumes (Amsterdam: Erven P. Meijer, 1785–1788). Only the first four parts were translated. 40 Campe, Allgemeine Revision (see note 39 above), vol. v, p. 413. 41 C.G. Salzmann, ‘Ankündigung einer neuen Erziehungsanstalt’, in Ernst Wagner (ed.), Chr. Gotth. Salzmanns paedagogische Schriften, 2 vols. (Langensalza: Schulbuchhandlung, 1894–99), vol. i, p. 170. 42 Memoirs of the Life, Character and Writings of the Late Reverend Philip Doddridge, D. D. of Northampton (London: J. Cotton and J. Eddowes, 1766), p. vi (Preface by Job Orton). 43 J.W. Statius Muller, Het leven en karakter van den beroemden Engelschen godgeleerde Dr. P. Doddridge (Nijmegen: Thieme, 1837), p. 8. The book in question is a translation of Memoirs of Doddridge of 1766, which first appeared in Dutch in 1768. On Doddridge’s popularity in the Netherlands, see J. van den Berg and G.F. Nuttall, Philip Doddridge (1702–1751) and the Netherlands (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1987). 44 Jacobus Koelman, De pligten der ouders in kinderen voor Godt op te voeden (Amsterdam: J. Wasteliers, 1679). 45 Noël Chomel and J.A. de Chalmot, Algemeen huishoudkundig-, natuur-, zedekundig-, en konst-woordenboek, 7 vols. (Leiden: Joh. le Mair, 1778–93), 2nd edition; vols. 8–16 appeared under the title Vervolg op M. Noël Chomel Algemeen [. . .] woordenboek, 8 vols. (Kampen: J.A. de Chalmot, 1786–93). Here quoted from Vervolg algemeen woordenboek, vol. ii (1787), p. 1041, under the headword ‘dagregister’. 46 VerHuell, Levensherinneringen (see Prologue, note 30), p. 24. 47 The letter dates from 3 November 1812. Het Thorbecke-archief 1798–1872,

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edited by J. Brandt-van der Veen (Utrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1955), vol. i, p. 11. Another example from this period is the diary of Willem de Clercq (1795–1844); see A. Pierson and A.E. Kluit-de Clerq (eds.), Willem de Clercq naar zijn dagboek, 2 vols. (Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1870–1873; 2nd expanded edition Haarlem, 1888). 48 Het Thorbecke-archief 1798–1872, p. 3. The quotation was taken from an undated letter sent from Zwolle. 49 6 May 1791. 50 9 July 1796. 51 14 June 1791. M.G. de Cambon-van der Werken, De kleine Grandisson of de gehoorzaame zoon. In eene reeks van brieven en saamenspraaken, 2 vols. (The Hague: H.H. van Drecht, 1782); this ‘classic’ was translated into English by Mary Wollstonecraft and appeared in 1790 as Young Grandison. 52 19 August 1793. 53 11 October 1793. 54 11 November 1793; Otto had read about Doddridge in J.F. Feddersen, Voorbeelden van wijsheid en deugd, uit de geschiedenissen, met vermaaningen voor kinderen (translated from the German) (Amsterdam, 1786), p. 126. 55 18 October 1792; 12 October 1792; 12 November 1795; 7 February 1795; 24 February 1794; 5 November 1792; 11 August 1791; 17 July 1793; 12 November 1794. 56 3 and 6 January 1796. 57 4 February 1796; 14 October 1795. 58 16 May 1795. 59 18 May 1795; 3 June 1795; 2 September 1795; 10 November 1795. 60 In Michel Foucault’s view, the panopticon was exemplary of the Enlightenment as a disciplinary ideology. M. Foucault, Surveillir et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), esp. pp. 197–229; Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon or the inspection-house, containing the idea of a new principle of construction applicable to any sort of establishment and in particular to penitentiary-houses, prisons, houses of industry, poor-houses, manufactories, mad-houses, lazarets, hospitals, and schools (1791), reprinted in John Browning (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843). 61 14 June 1794. 62 29 September 1791; 9 November 1792; 17 August 1793. 63 24 March 1794. 64 14 September 1795. 65 7 October 1795. 66 2 April 1796. 67 20 June 1795. 68 De Vriend der Kinderen (Haarlem: François Bohn, 1791), 3rd edition (1st edition 1779–83), pp. 2, 45, 46, 49, 50, a translation of Christian Felix Weisse, Der Kinderfreund (Berlin, 1773). 69 De Vriend der Kinderen, p. 46. 70 De Vriend der Kinderen, p. 49. 71 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 48. 72 25 August 1791.

496 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

notes – chapter three ‘De olifant en zijne konsten’, in De Vriend der Kinderen, vol. i, pp. 90–125. Martinet, Huisboek (see Chapter 1, note 48), p. 142. 30 September 1791; 29 January 1793. 2 March 1794. 31 July 1795. 5 July 1795. 13 July 1793. 7 May 1796. 16 May 1791; 31 May 1791; 14 August 1793. 10 October 1793. 3 and 4 July 1794; 8 March 1796; 7 November 1796. 5 March 1796; 24 September 1796; 14 May 1796. 5 July 1796; 15 July 1796. 30 April 1796. 7 May 1796. 8 October 1793. 23 July 1794. 7 May 1796. 27 November 1796. Chapter Three. Required Reading

Bijdragen tot het Menschelijk Geluk 2 (1789), p. 560. On the history of reading, see also the introduction to Blaak, Geletterde levens (see Chapter 2, note 27). 2 For a more detailed treatment of this subject, see Arianne Baggerman, ‘Keuzecompetentie in tijden van schaarste en overvloed. Het debat rond jeugdliteratuur voor en na Hiëronymus van Alphen (1760–1840)’, in G.J. Johannes et al. (eds.), Een groot verleden voor de boeg. Cultuurhistorische opstellen voor Joost Kloek (Leiden: Primaverapers, 2004), pp. 17–36. See also Idem, ‘Otto van Eck en de anderen. Sporen van jonge lezers in schriftelijke bronnen’, in B. Dongelmans et al. (eds.), Tot volle waschdom. Nieuwe hoofdstukken voor de geschiedenis van de kinder- en jeugdliteratuur (Zutphen 2000), pp. 211–25 (http//www.kb.nl/ coop/bibliop/bibl-html/studies). 3 Chatelain, ‘Antwoord’ (see Chapter 1, note 46), p. 69. 4 Wolff, Proeve (see Prologue, note 36), p. 84. 5 Chatelain, ‘Antwoord’ (see Chapter 1, note 46), pp. 38, 43, 48. 6 J. Trembley, ‘Antwoord op de vraage: Welke is de nuttigheid der zielkunde (psychologie) in de opvoeding en bestiering van den Mensch?’, Verhandelingen uitgegeven door de Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen te Haarlem xx (1781), p. 51. 7 ‘Zamenspraak over ’t overdreevene gevoel’, in De Nieuwe Nederlandsche Spectator, no. 27 (1788), pp. 209–16. 8 De Nieuwe Nederlandsche Spectator, no. 27 (1788), pp. 209–16, 211. 9 De Nieuwe Nederlandsche Spectator, no. 27 (1788), pp. 209–16, 216. 10 Johann Ludwig Ewald, Godsdienstig handboek voor christen-vrouwen en dochters (Amsterdam: J. van der Heij, 1809), p. 373. 1

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Martinet, Huisboek (see Chapter 1, note 48), p. 228. Bijdragen tot het Menschelijk Geluk 2 (1789), pp. 560–61. 13 Hulshoff, Verhandeling (see Chapter 2, note 7), p. 39. 14 On this subject, see P.J. Buijnsters, ‘Nederlandse kinderboeken uit de achttiende eeuw’ (see Chapter 1, note 19), pp. 195–228. See also the Bibliografie van Nederlandse school- en kinderboeken 1700 –1800 (Zwolle: Waanders, 1996), compiled by P.J. Buijnsters and L. Buijnsters-Smets. 15 Martinet, Huisboek (see Chapter 1, note 48), p. 226. 16 Campe, Volleedig leerstelsel (see Chapter 2, note 39), vol. iv, p. 525. 17 Wolff, Proeve (see Prologue, note 36), p. 84; Nieuwe Nederlandsche Spectator no. 27 (1788), p. 211; Bijdragen tot het Menschelijk Geluk 2 (1789), p. 560. 18 Bijdragen tot het Menschelijk Geluk 2 (1789), p. 568. 19 Gellert, Zedekundige lessen (Chapter 2, note 19), p. 566. 20 [ Johann Bernhard Basedow,] Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, ouvrage utile à tout ordre de lecteurs, en particulier aux parents et aux maîtres [translated by Mich. Huber], 4 vols. (Berlin/Dessau: s.n., 1774). 21 Theodor Brüggemann and Hans-Heino Ewers, Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur von 1750 bis 1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982), p. 965. 22 Georges Louis Leclercq de Buffon (1707–1788) and Louis J.M. Daubenton (1766–1799), Algemeene en bijzondere natuurlijke historie, 18 vols. (Amsterdam/Dordrecht: J.H. Schneider/A. Blussé, 1773–93); J.F. Martinet, Kort begrip der waereldhistorie voor de jeugd. Met kaarten (Amsterdam: J. Allart, 1789); Idem, Katechismus der natuur, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1782) 5th edition; [Claude François Xavier Millot, 1726–1785,] Oude en hedendaagsche algemeene waereldlijke geschiedenis. Gevolgd naar het Fransch [by P. Loosjes Az.], 14 vols. (Amsterdam/Haarlem: Yntema and Tieboel, A. Loosjes Pz., 1776–95); Martinus Stuart, Romeinsche geschiedenissen, 30 vols. (Amsterdam, 1794–1810); Noël-Antoine Pluche, Schouwtoneel der natuur, of samenspraaken over de byzonderheden der natuurlyke histori, die men bequaamst geoordeeld heeft om den jongen lieden leerzucht in te boezemen, en hun verstand op te leiden. Uit het Fransch vertaald door P[ieter] le Clercq, 17 parts in 9 vols. (Amsterdam: Schneider, Dordrecht: A. Blussé, 1737–88) (original French title: Le spectacle de la nature, ou Entretiens sur les particularités de l’histoire naturelle qui ont paru les plus propres à rendre les jeunes gens curieux et à leur former l’esprit)’; Charles Rollin and M. Crevier, Histoire romaine, depuis la fondation de Rome jusqu’à la bataille d’Actium, c’est à dire jusqu’à la fin de la République, 9 vols. (Paris: Estienne, 1738); there was also an Abrégé de l’Histoire romaine de Rollin, à l’usage des jeunes gens, par l’abbé Tailhie (1755, reprinted 1784); Jan Wagenaar, Vaderlandsche historie, 21 vols. (Amsterdam, 1790–96), 1st edition 1749–59. 23 Wolff, Proeve (see Prologue, note 36), p. 59; Letter from Pieter Paulus to Meinardus Tydeman dated 25 July 1778, in H. Suringar, Biographische aanteekeningen betreffende Mr. Pieter Paulus. Eerste gedeelte (1753–1784) (Leiden: Suringar, 1879). 24 Hulshoff, Verhandeling (see Chapter 2, note 7), p. 44. 25 Wolff, Proeve (see Prologue, note 36), p. 59. 26 Basedow, Elementarbuch, 10th book, p. 528; De Philosooph, no. 57 (9 November 1767), p. 40; Heinrich Mathias Augustus Cramer, Aanleiding ter bevordering der 11 12

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huisselijke gelukzaligheid (Amsterdam: G.W. van Egmond, 1786), translated from the German, p. 58. 27 Johann Jacob Hess, Geschiedverhalen des O. en N. Testaments, inzonderheid geschikt voor de jeugd (The Hague: Isaac van Cleef, 1778) (original German title: Biblische Erzählungen für die Jugend. Altes und Neues Testament), pp. xiii–xiv. 28 Johann August Hermes, Godsdienstig handboek of betrachtingen over het geloof en de zedeleer der Christenen, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Wed. A.D. Sellschop & P. Huart, 1789), 2nd edition (original German title: Handbuch der Religion); Johann Jacob Hess, Geschiedverhalen des O. en N. Testaments (see previous note); Georg Friedrich Seiler, Kleiner und historischer Katechismus oder erste Grundlage zum Unterricht in der biblischen Geschichte und der evangelischen Glaubens- und Sittenlehre (Bayreuth/Lübeck 1775), 2nd edition; C.G. Salzmann, Gottesverehrungen gehalten im Betsale des Dessauischen Philantropins, 4 vols. (Dessau, 1781–83). 29 François Thomas Marie de Baculard d’Arnaud, Oeuvres d’Arnaud, 12 vols. (Paris: Laporte, 1795). 30 Marie Elizabeth (Bouée de) la Fite, Entretiens, drames et contes moraux, destinés à l’éducation de la jeunesse de l’un et de l’autre sexe, et à la former aux vertus religieuses et sociales; ouvrage enrichi de gravures en taille-douce; dédié à la reine de Grande-Bretagne (The Hague: De Tune, 1778); Louise Florence Pétronelle Tardieu d’Esclavelles d’Epinay, Les conversations d’Emilie (Leipzig: s.n., 1774); Caroline Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis, Adèle en Theodoor, of brieven over de opvoeding, door mevrouw de gravin de Genlis, uit het Fransch vertaalt en met aanmerkingen uitgegeven door E. Bekker wed. ds. A. Wolff, 3 vols. (The Hague: Isaac van Cleef, 1782). 31 Caroline Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis, Avondtijdkortingen van het kasteel of zedelijke verhalen ten dienste van de jeugd, 4 vols. (The Hague: Isaac van Cleef, 1786–87), vol. i, pp. 64–70. 32 De Genlis, Avondtijdkortingen van het kasteel (see note 31 above), vol. i, pp. 43–44. 33 Van Alphen, Kleine gedigten (see Chapter 1, note 52), p. 169. 34 Weekblad voor Neerlands Jongelingschap (1784), pp. 46–48. 35 De Vriend der Kinderen, pp. 96, 136. 36 De Vriend der Jeugd [. . .] Alles geschikt om het hart en verstand der jeugd, door eigene oefening, te verbeteren. (1st edition 1800–01; 3rd edition Amsterdam: M.H. Helmig, 1819), pp. 10–11. 37 Van Alphen, Kleine gedigten (see Chapter 1, note 52), pp. 73, 148. 38 M.G. Cambon-van der Werken, De kleine Grandisson of de gehoorzaame zoon, 2 vols. (The Hague: H.H. van Drecht, 1782), vol. i, pp. 8, 15, 16; vol. ii, p. 14. 39 G.C. Claudius, Leerzaame bezigheden voor kinderen (The Hague: Leeuwensteijn, 1792), p. 69. 40 On this subject, see Baggerman, Een lot (see Chapter 2, note 10), pp. 320–24. 41 G.CH. Raff, Gesprekken voor kinderen (Zutphen: H.C.A. Thieme, 1814), p. 120. 42 G.C. Raff, A System of Natural History, adapted for the Instruction of Youth, in the Form of a Dialogue, translated from the German, vol. 1 (London: J. Johnson, and G.G. & J. Robinson; Edinburgh, G. Mudie and Son, 1796), p. 255. 43 De Vriend der Kinderen, vol. iii, p. 126.

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44 De Vriend der Kinderen, vol. iii, pp. 127–31. This refers to the Swiss physicist Abraham Trembley, for a time tutor to the children of Willem Bentinck van Rhoon at Sorgvliet near The Hague. A depiction has survived of Trembley instructing the Bentinck children with the aid of a microscope. Abraham Trembley, Unterricht eines Vaters für seine Kinder über die Natur und Religion. Aus dem Französisch übersetzt, 6 vols. (Leipzig: Junius, 1776–83). Abraham Trembley, Onderwyzingen van een vader aan zyne kinderen in de natuur en in den godsdienst, 2 vols. (The Hague: Isaac du Mee, 1776–77). Abraham Trembley, Introduction d’un père à ses enfants (Geneva: Jean Samuel Caillier, 1775). Jean Trembley, Mémoire historique sur la vie de [. . .] Abraham Trembley (Neuchatel: Fauche, 1787). John Baker, Abraham Trembley, Scientist and Philosopher (London: Edward Arnold, 1954). 45 De Genlis, Avondtijdkortingen van het kasteel (see note 31 above), vol. i, p. 43. The publication alluded to is Arnaud Berquin, L’ami des enfans, which appeared from 1782 onwards. 46 Genlis, Adèle et Theodore (see note 30 above), vol. iii, pp. 380–81. 47 The story in question is ‘Kapitein Spek en zoon, beiden gekwetst’ (‘Captain Spek and son, both wounded’), in De Vriend der Kinderen, vol. v, pp. 50–59. 48 De Vriend der Kinderen, vol. v, pp. 50–51. 49 De Vriend der Kinderen, vol. v, p. 58. 50 De Vriend der Kinderen, vol. v, pp. 170–73. 51 De Genlis, ‘Delphine of de gelukkige genezing’, in Avondtijdkortingen van het kasteel (see note 31 above), p. 20; the other references are to pp. 24, 27, 73. 52 13 September 1792. 53 16 September 1792. 54 Martinet, Huisboek (see Chapter 1, note 48), p. 193. 55 Van Alphen, Kleine gedigten (see Chapter 1, note 52), p. 17. 56 28 August 1791. 57 Maria Geertruida de Cambon-van der Werken, De kleine Klarissa, in brieven en samenspraken, bevattende schoone characters (The Hague: J.F. Jacobs de Agé, 1791). 58 2 September 1794. 59 De Genlis, Adèle et Theodore (see note 30 above), vol. i, p. 149. 60 C.G. Salzmann, Stichtend en vermaeklijk handboekje voor kinderen en kindervrienden (Leiden: A. en J. Honkoop 1792), pp. 145–46. 61 27 February 1796. 62 De Genlis, Adèle et Theodore (see note 30 above), vol. ii, p. 230. 63 De Genlis, Adèle et Theodore (see note 30 above), vol. ii, p. 335. 64 De Vriend der Jeugd, p. 18. 65 De Vriend der Jeugd, p. 22. 66 J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg, Geschenk voor de Jeugd, 6 vols. (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1781–89), vol. iv, p. 207. 67 De la Fite, Entretiens, drames et contes moraux. Translated into Dutch as Zedelyke samenspraaken, toneelstukjes en vertellingen voor kinderen, 1st edition (Utrecht/ Amsterdam, 1780). The passage in question was found in a later edition of

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the Dutch translation (Amsterdam, 1794), pp. 391–92. Otto refers in his diary to ‘Les Contes moraux par mad. la Fite’, so he must have read the book in French. 68 De Genlis, Adèle et Theodore (see note 30 above), vol. ii, p. 112. 69 20 September 1793. 70 De Genlis, Adèle et Theodore (see note 30 above), vol. i, pp. 72–73. 71 Cambon-Van der Werken, De kleine Grandisson (see Chapter 2, note 51), vol. i, pp. 51–54. 72 24 March 1794. 73 Van Alphen, Kleine gedigten (see Chapter 1, note 52), p. 103. 74 10 November 1795. 75 8 November 1796. 76 12 January 1793. 77 Van Alphen, Kleine gedigten (see Chapter 1, note 52), p. 213. 78 21 October 1791. 79 Van Alphen, ‘De vogel op de kruk’, in Kleine gedigten (see Chapter 1, note 52), p. 113. 80 12 October 1793. 81 De Vriend der Kinderen, vol. iii, p. 108. 82 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500 –1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 279. 83 Cambon-Van der Werken, De kleine Grandisson (see Chapter 2, note 51), p. 51. 84 A.B. van Meerten-Schilperoort and C.P.E. Robidé van der Aa, Nuttige tijdkorting voor de jeugd (Amsterdam: G.J.A. Beijerinck, 1835), p. 43. 85 25 September 1791. Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, Sebastian Kluge. Ein Volksbuch (Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1790), translated into Dutch as Geschiedenis van den landman Kluge (Amsterdam, 1818), 3rd edition. 86 25 June 1794. 87 Lettergeschenk voor de Nederlandsche jeugd (Haarlem: A. Loosjes Pz., 1790), p. 42. 88 12 December 1795. 89 Campe, Volleedig leerstelsel (see Chapter 2, note 39), vol. iv, p. 525. 90 17 October 1791. 91 Cambon-Van der Werken, De kleine Grandisson (see Chapter 2, note 51), vol. ii, pp. 140–51. 92 4 October 1792. 93 5 July 1796. 94 5 July 1796. 95 Basedow, Manuel élémentaire (see note 20 above), vol. iv, tables xi and xlvii. 96 For a more detailed treatment of Otto’s reading habits, see Arianne Baggerman, ‘Lezen tot de laatste snik. Otto van Eck en zijn dagelijkse literatuur (1780–1798)’, in H. Brouwer et al. (eds.), Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis i (Wageningen: Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging, 1994), pp. 57–89, (http//www.kb.nl/coop/bibliop/bibl-html/studies); Idem, ‘The Cultural Universe of a Dutch Child, Otto van Eck and his Literature’, Eighteenth Century Studies 31 (1997), pp. 129–34.

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23 January 1794. 25 June 1794. 99 28 May 1794. 100 6 June 1794. 101 13 June 1794. 102 17 February 1794. 103 13 September 1792. 104 31 October 1792. N.A. Pluche, Schouwtoneel der natuur (see note 22 above), vol. i, pp. 133–47. 105 28 July 1793. 106 27 July 1795. 107 25 May 1795. 108 25 January 1794. 109 18 April 1795. 110 4 August 1794. 111 15 June 1791. 112 14 June 1791. 113 2 August 1793. This story could not be traced. 114 19 February 1792. 115 2 December 1792. 116 21 October 1791. 117 J.F. Martinet, Katechismus der natuur (see note 22 above). This book also existed in an abridged version for children: Idem, Kleine katechismus der natuur voor kinderen (Amsterdam: J. Allart, 1779). Otto’s summaries reveal, however, that he was studying the larger, four-volume work. 118 2 December 1792. Martinet, Katechismus der natuur (see note 22 above), vol. i, pp. 195–96. 119 Martinet, Katechismus der natuur (see note 22 above), vol. i, pp. 146–52. 120 16 November 1792. 121 Basedow, Manuel élémentaire (see note 20 above), vol. i, pp. 143–47. 122 Martinet, Katechismus der natuur (see note 22 above), vol. i, pp. 34–40. 123 17 November 1792. 124 On the reception of Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur in the Netherlands in general and by children in particular, see Arianne Baggerman, ‘ “Looplezen” rond 1800. Kinderen en het boek der natuur’, Literatuur zonder leeftijd, vol. 16, no. 58 (2002), pp. 188–209. 125 22 October 1791. 126 20 October 1791. 127 Basedow, Manuel élémentaire (see note 20 above), vol. I, p. 122. 128 10 July 1794. 129 17 November 1792. Martinet, Katechismus der natuur (see note 22 above), vol. i, pp. 14–15. In more detail and with illustrations in Idem, vol. iii, pp. 272–82. 130 17 November 1792. 131 On, for example, 1 October 1792 and 1 January 1793. 132 Feddersen, Voorbeelden van wijsheid en deugd (see Chapter 2, note 54), p. 81. 97 98

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133 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 50. Hesse is presumably the author Hess, whose work Otto read. 134 This moral is to be found in, among others, Feddersen, Voorbeelden van wijsheid en deugd (see Chapter 2, note 54), pp. 86, 100. 135 29 June 1793. 136 De Genlis, Adèle et Theodore (see note 30 above), vol. ii, pp. 118–19. 137 De Genlis, Adèle et Theodore (see note 30 above), vol. iii, pp. 56–61. 138 5 November 1793. 139 3 September 1794. 140 11 January 1795. 141 1 February 1796. Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, Blijspelen. Uit het Hoogduitsch (translated from the German) (Amsterdam: Gerrit Warnars/Petrus den Hengst, 1778). 142 Cf. the entry for 5 February 1792, when the family was preparing to leave for their country house. Otto ‘helped Papa to carry his books and to take apart the bookcases (for they must be sent to the country tomorrow to be set up there)’. 143 12 January 1795. 144 On the subscription list included in the second edition of Stuart’s Romeinsche geschiedenissen of 1794 we find, among the approximately 150 subscribers, ‘Lambert Engelbert van Eck. Raadsheer in de Raad van Brabant’ (M. Stuart, Romeinsche geschiedenissen, 30 vols., Amsterdam, 1794–1810), vol. i. 145 Rousseau, Emile (see Chapter 1, note 2), p. 116. 146 1 November 1793. 147 18 November 1795. 148 12 August 1794. 149 17 January 1794. 150 21 January 1795. 151 28 August 1793. 152 12 January 1795. 153 This book is referred to indirectly in Weekblad voor kinderen (Amsterdam: Johannes van der Heij, 1798), no. 21, p. 166, in an article on life in the country. 154 A bibliography of publications (until 1970) about this book appears in Thomas Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur (New York: Twayne, 1970). More current, but much more concise: Alan Charles Kors, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, 4 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2003), vol. i, p. 312. P. Monette compiled an exhaustive bibliography of the various editions of Letters and Crèvecoeur’s other work, as well as an overview of the literature in English and French in which the oeuvre of Crèvecoeur is discussed. It can be consulted on the website http://www.unites. uquam.ca/arche/alaq/PM-Crevecoeur/6Travaux. 155 For a more detailed treatment, see Arianne Baggerman, ‘De vele gedaantes van een boer uit Pennsylvania. Nederlandse reacties op Crèvecoeurs Letters from an American Farmer’, Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman 26 (2003), pp. 142–58; M. Cunliffe, ‘Crèvecoeur revisited’, Journal of American Studies (1975), pp. 129–44, 131.

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156 Crèvecoeur, Brieven, pp. 6–8. The English translation is based on the Dutch version. 157 In essence the reverse of the feeling Europeans normally experienced when they set foot on another continent: the civilisation encountered was viewed as being a few steps backward in time. For more on this incentive for a modern historical consciousness, see P. Blaas, ‘Het oog van de geschiedenis. Europese expansie en historisch besef ’, in M. Baud (ed.), Tien jaar historisch onderzoek in Rotterdam (Rotterdam: Faculty of History and Arts, Erasmus University, 1988), pp. 18–37. See also S. Stuurman, ‘Tijd en ruimte in de Verlichting. De uitvinding van filosofische geschiedenis’, in M. Grever and H. Janssen (eds.), De ongrijpbare tijd. Temporaliteit en de constructie van het verleden (Hilversum: Verloren, 2001), pp. 79–97. 158 Crèvecoeur, Brieven, p. 549. 159 Crèvecoeur, Brieven, p. 285.

Chapter Four. The Garden as a Pedagogical Project 20 November 1796. Verscheide zedige werken van Plutarchus, translated into Dutch by J.H. Glazemaker (Amsterdam: Gerrit van Goedesberg, 1661), ‘Van de naturelijke liefde der ouders tot hun kinderen’, pp. 1–19; the poem is quoted from Jeronimus van der Voort, Het heerlijck bewijs van des menschen ellende ende miserie (Rotterdam: Matthijs Wagens, 1648), unpaginated; with regard to this theme in painting, see Wayne Franits, ‘ “Betemt de jeughd, Soo doet sy deughd”. A pedagogical metaphor in seventeenth-century Dutch Art’, in E.J. Sluijter et al. (eds.), Nederlandse portretten. Bijdragen over de portretkunst in de Nederlanden uit de zestiende, zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (The Hague: sdu, 1990), pp. 217–26; Jan Baptist Bedaux, ‘Discipline for innocence. Metaphors for education in seventeenthcentury Dutch painting’, in Idem, The reality of symbols. Studies in the iconology of Netherlandish art, 1400 –1800 (n.p.: Gary Schwartz/sdu, 1990), pp. 109–71. It was also common to compare children and trees when discussing physical education. A medical handbook from this period contains an engraving of a crooked tree tied to a pole as an illustration of how important it is for children to have a straight back. Nicolas Andry, De la generation des vers dans le corps de l’homme, 2 vols. (Paris: Laurent D’Houry, 1700–01), vol. ii, p. 210. A Dutch translation appeared in 1741 and was reprinted in 1743. 3 Rousseau, Emile (see Chapter 1, note 2), p. 37. 4 C.G. Salzmann, Koenraad Kiefer of aanleiding tot een verstandige opvoeding van kinderen (Amsterdam: Weduwe J. Doll, 1797), pp. 3–4. 5 De Vriend der Kinderen, p. 2. 6 J.L. Ewald, School van wijsheid en deugd (Amsterdam: J. van der Heij, 1817), p. 17, see also p. 27: Young yew trees were pruned for their own good. 7 Johann Kaspar Hirzel, De wysgeerige Landman of Jacob Gouyer. Een landbouwer en wysgeer te Wermetschweil naby Zurich in de bestiering zyner landeryen en huishouding, de opvoeding zyner kinderen, zyn godsdienst en zedelyk karakter, translated from 1 2

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the French (Deventer: Lucas Leemhorst, 1768). The excerpt appeared in De Denker of 1765. 8 Erhard Hirsch, Die Dessau-Wörlitzer Reformbewegung im Zeitalter der Aufklärung. Personen, Strukturen, Wirkungen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002); Ursula Bode et al., For the friends of nature and art. The garden kingdom of Prince Franz von Anhalt-Dessau in the Age of Enlightenment (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1997); Erhard Hirsch, Dessau-Wörlitz. Zierde und Inbegriff des xviii. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1985), p. 228; On De Ligne, see Philip Mansel, The Life of Charles-Joseph de Ligne (1735–1814) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003). De Ligne, a military officer and man of letters, corresponded with Voltaire and others; Wouter Reh, Arcadia en metropolis. Het landschapsexperiment van de Verlichting (Delft: Publikatieburo Bouwkunde, 1996), pp. 359–89. 9 August Rode, Beschreibung des fürstlichen Anhalt-Dessauischen Landhauses und Englischen Gartens zu Wörlitz (Dessau: Heinrich Tänzer, 1798), reprinted in Paul Mandref, Der Englische Garten zu Wörlitz (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1994, 2nd edition). 10 The laws of architecture were traditionally applied to the layout of gardens. Like buildings, gardens had to reflect the proportions of the human body according to the rule of the Golden Section. This view was represented in particular by the Stoic philosophers; see Marianne Cline Horowitz, Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). The Stoics compared the human mind to a garden, and this image remained popular until well into the eighteenth century. Erik de Jong, Natuur en kunst. Nederlandse tuin- en landschapsarchitectuur 1650 –1740 (Amsterdam: Thoth, 1993). 11 Marc Glaudemans, Amsterdams arcadia. De ontdekking van het achterland (Nijmegen: sun, 2000). 12 This idea comes from Eveline Koolhaas. See also her contribution in Kloek and Mijnhardt, 1800, especially ‘Nature and culture ii’, pp. 333–342. 13 A. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Brockhaus 1818–19), vol. ii, chapter 33, p. 478. 14 Among the members we find a number of people from the Van Ecks’ circle, including W.E. de Perponcher. ‘Work and experimentation’ was intended to enlarge agricultural knowledge, since ‘chemistry, botany, meteorology, etc.’ were the ‘true bases of knowledge of farming’. Verhandelingen uitgegeven door de Maatschappij ter Bevordering van den Landbouw te Amsterdam opgerigt, i (Amsterdam: Cesar Noël Guerin, 1778), p. iii. P. van Schaik, ‘De Maatschappij ter Bevordering van den Landbouw (1776–1847)’, in Landbouwkundig Tijdschrift 74 (1962), pp. 24–31. 15 Eveline Koolhaas, ‘Van de tuin naar de wildernis. Over de waardering voor de natuur en het landschap in Nederland in de achttiende eeuw’, in Langs velden en wegen. De verbeelding van het landschap in de 18e en 19e eeuw (Blaricum: v+k Publishing/Inmerc, 1997), pp. 47–71, esp. p. 67; Martinet, Katechismus (see Chapter 3, note 22), vol. iv, p. 86. 16 ‘Het schone en schilderachtige der lusthoven’, in Nieuwe Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1770), no. 54. 17 De burger-boer of land-edelman, zijnde een beknopt zak-woordenboek voor het buitenleeven, translated from the French, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Steven van Esveldt, 1766). In vol. iii, p. 378, it is stated that the yew ‘is being removed from our

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gardens’ because it is ‘depressingly green’; Willem Gentman, Tuincatechismus voor liefhebbers van tuinen (Utrecht: S. van den Brink, 1783). 18 On the diary of Jacoba van Thiel, see Blaak, Schrijven over lezen, and Gaasbeek, ‘Het dagregister van Jacoba van Thiel’; Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague, G.K. van Hogendorp, ‘Aantekeningen op Adrichem’ and ‘Gedagten over Adrichem’, quoted in Koolhaas, ‘Natuur en cultuur ii’; Thomas Jefferson, Garden Book 1766–1824, edited by Edwin Morris Betts (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1944). 19 Ulbe Mehrtens, ‘Johan Frederik Willem baron van Spaen en de aanleg van Biljoen en Beekhuizen’, in Nederlandse tuinen in de achttiende eeuw. Handelingen van het symposium georganiseerd door de Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw (Amsterdam: APA/Holland University Press, 1987), pp. 55–76, esp. p. 57; Idem, De aanleg van Biljoen en Beekhuizen in de tijd van J.F.W. baron van Spaen (Zeist: Rijksdienst voor de Monumentenzorg, 1984); Heimerick Tromp, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’. Aspecten en achtergronden van de landschapsstijl in Nederland in de tijd van J.F.W. van Spaen van Biljoen (1760 –1800) (dissertation 2001). 20 Mehrtens, ‘Johan Frederik Willem baron van Spaen’ (see previous note), p. 64. Van Spaen was in fact buried there, but a gravestone was not erected until the 1820s. 21 Trudi Woerdeman, ‘De “wildernis” geïdealiseerd. Tuinkunst en natuurbeleving: veranderingen aan het eind van de 18de eeuw’, in De woonstede door de eeuwen heen, no. 126 ( June 2000), p. 21. 22 Tromp, Arcadia (see note 19 above), p. 273. Les jardins ou l’art d’embeller les paysages was first published in 1782; it was later translated into Dutch by Willem Bilderdijk as Het buitenleven, in vier zangen (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1804); the English version quoted here is The Gardens, A Poem, translated from the French of the Abbé de Lille, printed by T. Bensley, London, 1798; Woerdeman, ‘De “wildernis” ’ (see note 21 above), p. 21. 23 Mehrtens, ‘Johan Frederik Willem baron van Spaen en de aanleg van Biljoen en Beekhuizen’ (see note 19 above), p. 67. 24 Tromp, Arcadia (see note 19 above), p. 283; Albertus Nicolaas Paasman, ‘Dichters in Gelders Arcadia: “et in arcadia ego” ’, Nederlandse tuinen in de achttiende eeuw. Handelingen van het symposium georganiseerd door de Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw (Amsterdam: APA/Holland University Press, 1987), pp. 77–95. 25 RA Gelderland, Handschriften 432, Gastenboek (guestbook) Biljoen. The following quotations were taken either from this guestbook or from Bert Paasman, ‘Dichters in Gelders Arcadia’ (see note 24 above), pp. 78–79, 84, 87, where there is more information about the context. 26 H. van Hogendorp (ed.), ‘Dagboek van eene reis naar Nijmegen en het kasteel Biljoen in 1787, gehouden door jonkvrouwe A.C.W. van Hogendorp’, in Gelre 7 (1904), pp. 415–49. Johan Frederik Willem van Spaen (1746–1827) was married to Sara Johanna van Hogendorp, who died in 1828. 27 Van Hogendorp, ‘Dagboek’ (see note 26 above), p. 437. 28 Van Hogendorp, ‘Dagboek’ (see note 26 above), p. 443. 29 17 September 1795. 30 On Sion, see Anna G. Bienfait, Oude Hollandsche tuinen (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1943), pp. 144–45. 31 29 October 1796.

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20 November 1796. F.H.B. Vermeulen, Mariëndaal; klooster, landgoed, laboratorium (s.l.: s.n., 1983), p. 22, quotations on pp. 64 and 67; [I.A. Nijhoff,] Wandelingen in een gedeelte van Gelderland of geschiedkundige en plaatsbeschrijvende beschouwing van de omstreken der stad Arnhem (Arnhem: P. Nijhoff, 1820), pp. 39–51. 34 Vermeulen, Mariëndaal (see note 33 above), pp. 22, 25–30. 35 19 August 1793. C.C.G. Quarles van Ufford, Doorwerth. De geschiedenis van het kasteel (Arnhem: Stichting Vrienden der Geldersche kasteelen, 1991), pp. 2–8. 36 Nijhoff, Wandelingen (see note 33 above), pp. 55–56. 37 19 August 1793. 38 Nijhoff, Wandelingen (see note 33 above), p. 58; E.J. Demoed, Van een groene zoom aan een vaal kleed (Arnhem: Gysbers en Van Loon), pp. 142–48. An 1888 sale catalogue of Duno (in the RA Gelderland) gives additional information: ‘The Duno is the highest peak of the chain of hills along the Rhine. The distant view of Arnhem, the Eltenerberg, the Rhine, the Betuwe and its blossoming background from the gently sloping terrace in front of the house on the woody heights at the left is startlingly beautiful.’ However, we could not find anything in the literature about a stairway with all of 232 steps leading down. During our field research we did see the remains of stone stairs. GA Arnhem, Br. 119, p. 26. 39 22 August 1793. 40 Cf. Lucia H. Albers, ‘Follies, bizarre architectuur in Holland. Van houten kluizenaars en andere tuinsieraden op de landgoederen Beeckesteijn, Velserbeek, Elswout en Frankendael’, in Holland 35 (2003), pp. 230–236. 41 Arnhem Public Library, ms 42, 11 January 1792, p. 423. 42 W. Meulenkamp, ‘ “Een schilderachtige hermitage . . .”. Een inventarisatie van sierhermitages en kluizenaarspoppen in Nederland’, in Antiek 21 (1986/7), pp. 297–301, 298. 43 A.G. Schulte and C.J.M. Schulte-van Wersch, Monumentaal groen. Kleine cultuurgeschiedenis van de Arnhemse parken (Utrecht: Matrijs, 1999), p. 57. 44 See Chapter 6. 45 4 June 1791 (Van der Linde the farmer); 24 April 1797; 29 April 1797. The Van Ecks’ farm in Maasland was called Middenhoef. 46 5 October 1793. 47 Erik de Jong, ‘ “De jongste zuster der schoone kunsten”. Tuinkunst in 18e-eeuws Nederland’, in Nederlandse tuinen in de achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: APA/Holland University Press, 1987), pp. 1–31, esp. p. 6. 48 Up to now little use has been made in the Netherlands of egodocuments as a source for studying the experience of nature. Wendy Jansen, ‘Verfrissing van lichaam en geest. Aspecten van de wandeling in de 17e en 18e eeuw’, in Holland 28 (1996), pp. 22–38; Tom Gitsels, ‘Natuur- en landschapsbeleving volgens het dagboek van de student Nicolaas Beets’, in Maarten Beks and Tom Gitsels, Een eeuwige zondag. Wandelingen door het land van Nicolaas Beets (Maastricht: Stichting Manutius, 1989), pp. 78–88. 49 21 December 1792. 50 13 March 1793; 9 May 1791. 32 33

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11 February 1792. 3 August 1792; 24 March 1795; 21 November 1793. 53 30 September 1791; 26 October 1791; 11 March 1794; 25 July 1793. 54 12 October 1793; 18 November 1793. 55 13 May 1794; 19 April 1795. 56 4 June 1793; 12 February 1795; 10 July 1794; 20 November 1792. 57 Almanak voor de beschaafde jeugd voor het jaar 1799 (Amsterdam: Wed. J. Doll, 1799), p. 45. 58 C.G. Salzmann, Leerrijke en aangenaame onderhoudingen voor de jeugd (Leiden; D. du Mortier en zoon, 1794), p. 15. 59 31 January 1794; 10 March 1794; 20 March 1794. 60 19 January 1795. 61 30 May 1793; 2 July 1794; 10 December 1795. 62 18 January 1795; 22 June 1793; 12 December 1795. 63 10 January 1795. 64 23 September 1791. 65 13 February 1794; 17 April 1794; 5 March 1795; RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 83, letter presumably written in March 1794. 66 9 April 1794; 30 April 1794; 24 May 1794. 67 11 September 1794; 10 October 1795; 18 November 1794. 68 28 March 1795; 28 May 1794; 22 September 1795. 69 13 October 1792; 22 October 1792. 70 19 June 1794; 8 August 1791; 12 April 1795. 71 27 March 1795. 72 17 September 1796. 73 17 July 1791; 29 July 1791. 74 J.H. Campe, Beknopte zedeleer voor kinderen van beschaafde lieden, volgens de tweede verbeterde druk uit het Hoogduitsch vertaald, derde druk (Amsterdam: Wed. J. Doll, 1807). 75 21 March 1793. 76 12 October 1795. 77 22 February 1796. 78 16 April 1797; 16 December 1795. 79 10 December 1792. 80 27 January 1794. 81 1 September 1791. 82 13 April 1797. 83 10 May 1797. 84 Pieter ’t Hoen, ‘Het landleven’, in Nieuwe proeve van klijne gedichten voor kinderen, 3rd piece (Utrecht: Wed. S. de Waal en zoon, 1789), p. 85. 85 Isaac van Haastert, Mengelpoëzij (Delft: P. de Groot, 1826), p. 60. 86 Claas Bruin, Kleefsche en Zuid-Hollandsche Arkadia (2nd edition, Amsterdam: Evert Visscher, 1730), p. 200; H. Numan, Vierentwintig printtekeningen met couleuren verbeeldende Hollandsche buitenplaatzen (Amsterdam: s.n., 1797); A. Loosjes Pzn., Hollands Arkadia of wandelingen in de omstreeken van Haarlem (Haarlem: A. Loosjes, 1804); A. Rademaker et al., Hollandsche arkadia in zeshonderd en meer afbeeldingen 51 52

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(Amsterdam: J.S. van Esveldt-Holtrop, 1807). On the genre, see Hans Groot, ‘Achttiende-eeuwse arcadia’s: tussen literatuur en geschiedenis’, in Holland 17 (1985), pp. 241–52. 87 Janet Hiddleston, George Sand and Autobiography (Oxford: Legenda, 1999), p. 93. 88 Herman Frederik Deel [= Jean Philippe Marie Deel], Een Haagsch patriciër in den Franschen tijd. Herinneringen aan het voorledenen (Zutphen: Thieme, 1953), pp. 18–19. 89 Willem Hendrik Warnsinck (1782–1857), ‘Herinneringen uit mijne kinderjaren’, in Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1849), vol. ii, pp. 206–23, 383–96; Idem, ‘Levensbericht van W.H. Warnsinck, 1841’, in Algemeen Nederlandsch Familieblad 2 (1885), pp. 83–97. 90 G.J. Mulder, Levensschets, 2 vols. (Rotterdam: Kramers, 1881), vol. i, p. 13. 91 Mulder, Levensschets (see previous note), vol. i, p. 16. 92 Mulder, Levensschets (see note 90 above), vol. i, p. 16. 93 Hirsch, Die Dessau-Wörlitzer Reformbewegung (see note 8 above), p. 228. 94 Tromp, Arcadia (see note 19 above), p. 433. Later this portrait was used as a vignette on the front page of Nijhoff’s Geldersch Arkadia of wandeling over Biljoen en Beekhuizen. 95 Loosjes, Hollands Arkadia, illustrated in Frans Grijzenhout and Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken (eds.), Edele eenvoud. Neo-classicisme in Nederland 1765–1800 (Zwolle: Waanders, 1989), p. 86. 96 C.C.L. Hirschfeld, Aanmerkingen over de landhuizen en tuinkunst, translated from the German (Utrecht: G.T. van Paddenburg, 1779); G. van Laar, Magazijn van tuinsieraden (Amsterdam: Ruyter, 1802). 97 Erwin Panofsky, ‘ “Et in Arcadia Ego”: Poussin and the elegiac tradition’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 295–320. 98 Richard Verdi, Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665 (London: Zwemmer, 1995). Additional literature includes Alain Merot, Nicolas Poussin (Paris: Hazan, 1990). Chapter Five. Social World National Library (KB), The Hague, Manuscript Department. RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 85, album amicorum T.H. van Eck (1797 – after 1804). 3 ARA (RA Zuid-Holland), FA Van Vredenburch, inv. no. 319. 4 The term ‘social capital’ comes from Luuc Kooijmans, Vriendschap en de kunst van het overleven in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1997). 5 Lambert Engelbert van Eck and Charlotte Amélie Vockestaert had the following children: 1 2

1. daughter: still-born 27 May 1779 2. Otto Cornelis van Eck: born 26 April 1780, died 29 March 1798 3. Theodora Henriëtte (Doortje) van Eck: born 26 April 1782, died 13 July 1831

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4. Anna Maria van Eck: born 18 October 1783, died 30 December 1784 5. Jacoba Barbara Maria van Eck (Cootje): born 4 January 1786, died 6 November 1875 6. Adriaan van Eck: born 12 November 1787, died 3 January 1788 7. Franc Adriaan van Eck: born 9 May 1789, died 11 February 1790 8. Bernardina Lucretia (Dientje) van Eck: born 7 July 1791, died 8 August 1871 9. Lambert Johan Arend van Eck ( Jantje): born 25 November 1793, died 14 December 1867 10. Pauline Françoise van Eck: born 5 April 1797, died 6 August 1860. 6 13 July 1793; 2 October 1793; 20 July 1793; 10 August 1793; 20 August 1793; 17 November 1793; 3 April 1794. 7 1 October 1791; 23 August 1791; 19 March 1794. 8 29 January 1796; 20 March 1794. 9 10 August 1792; 19 January 1794; 4 October 1792. 10 19 February 1795; 25 July 1794; 4 September 1791; 10 January 1794; 9 January 1795; 28 November 1794. 11 Conversation with C.C. van Lidth de Jeude, her great-grandson, at Huis De Groote Brug, Tiel; the photograph was in his possession. 12 Baggerman, Een lot (see Chapter 2, note 10), pp. 352–67. 13 M.D. Ozinga, ‘De fundatie der vrijvrouwe van Renswoude’, in Delftse studiën (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1967), pp. 268–93. 14 27 April 1794; 8 August 1795; 18 July 1794. 15 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 42. 16 28 August 1792; 5 November 1792; 16 October 1792; 30 November 1792. 17 13 January 1795; 30 November 1793; 24 December 1793. 18 Margaretha Johanna Philip, the daughter of a Hague surgeon/malemidwife, baptised 29 July 1778; see Nederland’s Patriciaat 41 (1955), p. 190. 19 ARA, FA Van Vredenburg, inv. no. 530, autobiography J.W.v.V.; Publications: J.W. van Vredenburg, Memorie over het schoolwezen (Rijswijk, 1829), Ter nagedachtenis van mijne ouders (Delft: s.n., 1814), Redevoering over het doel der regering (n.p.: s.n., 1821). 20 D.P.M. Graswinckel, Graswinckel. Geschiedenis van een Delfts brouwers- en regentengeslacht (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956), p. 369. 21 Jacob Reepmaker, Genealogie der familie Reepmaker (Rotterdam: Tuinzing, 1905). 22 ARA ii, FA Beerestein, inv. no. 155, Ontgroeningsbul (certificate of ragging), p. 156, Doctorsbul (certificate of doctoral degree) of Willem Jacob van Beerestein (1778–1845), son of Christiaan van Beerestein and Anna van Kuffeler, who married Agneta Wendela Bicker (1782–1842) on 24 July 1804. 23 It is not known which school Otto attended, since he refers to the schoolmaster only as ‘monsieur’. A number of the teachers who came to his home could not be identified either (Beems; Lou, the German teacher; Spil; Welding; De Wilde). 24 His wide-ranging interests emerge from the title of a collection of his writings: G.C.C. Vatebender, Mengelwerk in ongebonden en gebonden stijl bevattende

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verhandelingen over de cultuur der duinen, de belooningen van verdiensten, en de spelling der Nederduitsche taal, benevens eenige oorspronkelijke dichtstukjes en overzettingen (Miscellaneous work in unbound and bound style, containing treatises on the cultivation of dunes, the rewarding of services, and the spelling of the Dutch language, in addition to some original poems and translations) (Delft: M. van Graauwenhaan, 1802). 25 Annemieke Meijer and Diederik van Werven, ‘ “Maar wie, heeren, leest er Engelsch?” De kennis van het Engels in Nederland rond 1830 en de “English literary society” ’, in Gert-Jan Johannes et al. (eds.), Een groot verleden voor de boeg. Cultuur-historische opstellen voor Joost Kloek (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2004), pp. 85–107. 26 Baggerman, Een lot (see Chapter 2, note 10), pp. 276–77. 27 Beginning with François Fénelon, whose treatise appeared in a Dutch translation: De opvoedinge der meisjes (The education of girls) (Amsterdam: Wessing Willemsz, 1771); see also, among others, De beschaafde of wellevende juffer voorgesteld in eene reeks van brieven van eene moeder aan hare dochter, over de opvoeding en gemeenzaamste pligten in de zamenleving (The cultivated or courteous lady presented in a series of letters from a mother to her daughter, concerning education and the most common social duties) (Rotterdam: Jacob Burgvliet en zoon, 1777); J.H. Campe, Väterliche Rath für meine Tochter (Fatherly advice to my daughter) (1789); Willeke Los, ‘Between nature and culture. A reinterpretation of J.H. Campe’s view on the education of girls’, unpublished paper; on girls’ education, see, among others, Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 28 Diary of A.C.W. van Hogendorp, p. 423. 29 19 January 1793. 30 Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, 2 vols. (London, 1773), modern edition: An Eighteenth-Century Musical Tour in Central Europe and the Netherlands. Dr. Burney’s Musical Tours in Europe, edited by Percy A. Scholes (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 235. See also L.J. Meilink-Hoedmaker, Luidklokken en speelklokken in Delft (Utrecht: s.n., 1985, dissertation); F.C. Kist, ‘Biographie: Frederik Johannes Berghuijs’, in Nederlandsch Muzikaal Tijdschrift (1841), pp. 104–05. 31 GA Delft, Verzameling Berghuis. 32 See Chapter 2, Fig. 34; Chapter 3, Fig. 46; Chapter 4, Fig. 64; Chapter 5, Fig. 83; Chapter 6, Fig. 89; Chapter 10, Fig. 143. 33 Proeve van mengelpoësy (1785), Prysvaarzen (1790), De godsdienst (1802), Mengelpoëzie (1826). Johann Caspar Lavater, Algemene geheimregels der gelaatkunde (Leiden: A. en J. Honkoop, 1807). 34 Little has been written on clergymen of the eighteenth century, especially in comparison with the preceding and following centuries; see Dirk Theodoor Kuiper et al. (eds.), Predikant in Nederland (1800 – heden) (Kampen: Kok, 1997). 35 Dagverhaal der Handelingen van de Nationaale Vergadering representeerende het Volk van Nederland, 6 vols. (The Hague: Swart en comp., 1796–97), vol. i, pp. 53, 112; vol. vi, pp. 400, 413–14, 770, 805; vol. vii, pp. 176, 222–24. 36 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 42. 37 Th. Hooft (ed.), ‘Het verhaal van den balling in den patriottentijd.

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Dominicus Namna le Balleur te Zaltbommel’, in Bijdragen en Mededelingen Gelre 9 (1906), pp. 305–43; J.S. Veen, ‘De zaak-Le Balleur’, in Bijdragen en Mededelingen Gelre 9 (1906), pp. 151–86. 38 Leiden University Library, Collection of Manuscripts, Letters from Lambert van Eck to Johan Luzac. 39 26 March 1797. 40 J. le Francq van Berkhey, Natuurlijke historie van Holland, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: Yntema en Tieboel, 1769–79), vol. iii, p. 239, quoted in Ton Dekker, ‘Ideologie en volkscultuur ontkoppeld: een geschiedenis van de Nederlandse volkskunde’, pp. 13–66, in Ton Dekker et al. (eds.), Volkscultuur. Een inleiding in de Nederlandse etnologie (Nijmegen: sun, 2000), p. 16; Eveline Koolhaas, ‘ “Mensch, ken u zelven”. Anthropologie als bron voor de volkskunde van Johannes Le Francq van Berkhey’, in De Achttiende Eeuw 35 (2003), pp. 69–87. 41 Ysbrand van Hamelsveld, De zedelijke toestand der Nederlandsche natie op het einde der achttiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1791). 42 Van Hamelsveld, De zedelijke toestand (see note 41 above), pp. 506–08. 43 W.A. Ockerse, Ontwerp tot eene algemeen characterkunde (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1797); Tafreel van de zeden, opvoeding, geleerdheid, smaak en verlichting in het voormalige gewest Holland door een Cosmopoliet (Amsterdam: M. Schalekamp, 1798); Bernardus Bosch, De weelde in Nederland. Met ophelderende aanteekeningen en byvoegzels (Dordrecht: A. Blussé en zoon, 1784); [ J.H. Swildens,] ‘Over de tegenwoordige toestand der samenleving in onze Republiek’, introduction to Knigge, Over de verkeering met menschen, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1789); Cornelis Rogge, De armen, kinderen van den staat, of onderzoek nopens de verplichting van het gouvernement om de armen te verzorgen (Leiden: Du Mortier en Zoon, 1796). 44 J.A.A. van Doorn, Beeld en betekenis van de Nederlandse sociologie (Utrecht: Bijleveld, 1964), p. 17. 45 Johan Heilbron, Het ontstaan van de sociologie (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1990); Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self (see Chapter 1, note 39), p. 316. 46 Paul M.M. Klep, ‘A historical perspective on statistics and measurement in the Netherlands 1750–1850’, and Idem and Astrid Verheusen, ‘The Batavian statistical revolution in the Netherlands 1798–1802’, in Paul M.M. Klep and Ida H. Stamhuis (eds.), The statistical mind in a pre-statistical era. The Netherlands 1750 –1850 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2002), pp. 29–71, 217–41. 47 The following list contains the Dutch names of the societies mentioned here only in English: Natuur- en Geneeskundige Correspondentie Sociëteit; Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen; Provinciaal Utrechts Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen; Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen; Bataafsch Genootschap der Proefondervindelijke Wijsbegeerte; Zeeuws Genootschap der Wetenschappen; Tekenacademie (Middelburg); Physisch Genootschap (The Hague); Orde der Illuminaten (in Germany). 48 ‘De maatschappij’, in Weekblad voor Kinderen, no. 311, p. 282. 49 Merel Stikkelorum, ‘Gelijkheid voor joden in Bataafs Den Haag. Een onderzoek naar het Haagse Departement van de Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen 1796–1798’ (thesis, Faculty of History and Arts, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 2004). 50 The Dutch Freemasons found inspiration in the more utopian side of

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Rousseau’s thought, according to Margaret Jacob in Living the Enlightenment. Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 155. 51 Use has been made of the membership records preserved in the Cultural Masonic Centre ‘Prins Hendrik’ of the Order of Freemasons under the Grand Orient of the Netherlands, The Hague. 52 Hermann Schuettler, Die Mitglieder des Illuminatenordens (Munich: Ars Una, 1991); Manfred Agethen, Geheimbund und Utopie. Illuminaten, Freimaurer und deutsche Spät-Aufklärung (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1987), esp. chap. 6, ‘Das Bildungsprogramm des Illuminatenbundes’, pp. 164–225. 53 Joost Rosendaal, ‘Vrijmetselarij en revolutie’, in Anton van de Sande and Joost Rosendaal, ‘Een stille leerschool van deugd en goede zeden’. Vrijmetselarij in Nederland in de 18e en 19e eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 1995), pp. 63–83. 54 See the excerpt in K. Rutschky (ed.), Schwarze Paedagogik. Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), pp. 185ff. 55 Manfred Agethen, Geheimbund und Utopie (see note 52 above), pp. 204–05; Mathilde Köhler, Amalia von Gallitzin. Ein Leben zwischen Skandal und Legende (Paderborn: Schöning, 1995). Chapter Six. Broadening Horizons Ernst Hartmann, Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Einfluss (see Chapter 1, note 24), pp. 31–34. 2 14 June 1794. 3 The first successful hot-air balloon flight in the Netherlands did not take place until 1804. Peter Altena, ‘Geen sterveling deed ooit zulk een smak’, in Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman 21 (1995), pp. 86–95. 4 Thomas Frangenberg, Der Betrachter. Studien zur florentinischen Kunstliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1990), ‘Die Reise und der Ausblick’, pp. 148–61. 5 Martinet, Huisboek (see Chapter 1, note 48), p. 184. 6 C.G. Salzmann, Reizen der kweekelingen van Schnepfenthal (Amsterdam: M. Schalekamp, 1800), p. 28. 7 Samuel Ireland, A Picturesque Tour (London: T. and I. Egerton, 1796). 8 J.C. Bottema, ‘Kroniek van een verdwenen huis’, in Kroniek. Orgaan van de Historische Vereniging Rijswijk 10 (1993), pp. 79–83. D.P.M. Graswinckel, Geschiedenis van een Delfts brouwers- en regentengeslacht (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956), pp. 227–29. 9 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 329. 10 Th. Wijsenbeek-Olthuis, Achter de gevels van Delft. Bezit en bestaan van rijk en arm in een periode van achteruitgang (1700 –1800) (Hilversum: Verloren, 1987). 11 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 330. 12 27 January 1795. 13 12 February 1793. 14 H.J.J.M. van Diepen, ‘Een historisch plekje’, in Die Haghe (1941), pp. 56–122, esp. pp. 91–92. A. ter Meer Derval, ‘Namen van de opeenvolgende 1

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eigenaars der huizen, staande aan de noord-, west-, en oostzijde van het Buitenhof van 1600 tot circa 1830’, in Die Haghe (1941), pp. 123–42. See also A.L.H. Ising, Haagsche schetsen, 4 vols. (The Hague: Van Stockum, 1878–95) vol. iii, p. 321. 15 13 January 1796. 16 The map of Delfland: RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 329, Inventaris De Ruit, 1786. See also C.G.D. de Wilt et al., Delflands kaarten belicht (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000), pp. 28–30; Kruikius’ Kaart van Delfland, 1712, edited by C. Postma (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 1977). Regarding the map of Delft, see De kaart figuratief van Delft, edited by H.L. Houtzager, G.C. Klapwijk et al. (Rijswijk: Elmar, 1997); S.J. Fockema Andreae, ‘De Kaart Figuratief ’, in Delftse studiën. Een bundel historische opstellen over de stad Delft geschreven voor dr. E.H. ter Kuile [. . .], (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1967), pp. 236–49. For the map of The Hague, see Cornelis Elandts, Figuratieve kaart van Den Haag (1681). On the appearance of the countryside, see Auke van der Woud, Het lege land. De ruimtelijke orde van Nederland 1798–1848 (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1987). The country estate of De Ruit also appears on a map in Tegenwoordige staat der Verenigde Nederlanden vi (Amsterdam: Isaac Tirion, 1746). 17 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Cf. Jeremy Black, Cartografie. De verbeelding van de wereldgeschiedenis (Warnsveld: Terra, 2004); C. Koeman, Geschiedenis van de kartografie van Nederland. Zes eeuwen land- en zeekaarten en stadsplattegronden (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 1983). 18 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 19 Hermann Lorenz, ‘De leermiddelen en de handenarbeid van het Philanthropinum van Basedow’, in Tijdschrift voor Onderwijs en Handenarbeid 12 (1907), pp. 59–70, 69–70. 20 J.H. Campe, Reisbeschrijvingen voor de jeugd, 6 vols. (Amsterdam: J. Doll, 1786–1804). 21 Wolff, Proeve (see Prologue, note 36), p. 59. 22 J.F. Martinet, Kort onderwijs in de geografij (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1801), previously published as the third volume of Geschenk aan de jeugd (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1784). 23 Charles W.J. Withers, ‘Geography, Enlightenment and the Paradise Question’, in Charles W.J. Withers and David N. Livingstone, Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 67–93. 24 W.E. de Perponcher, Nieuwe aardryks-beschryving voor de Nederlandsche jeugd, 3 vols. (Utrecht: Wed. J. van Schoonhoven, 1784–86). The material is presented step by step and adapted to the child’s age group. 25 Geographisch hand-boekje voor de jeugd (Amsterdam: Willem Holtrop, 1801), 2nd edition. 26 Geografische oeffening (Amsterdam: F. Houttuyn, 1758); the 5th edition appeared in 1783. 27 J.H. Swildens, Vaderlandsch a-b-boek voor de Nederlandsche jeugd (Amsterdam: W. Holtrop, 1781). 28 Leiden University Library, letters from Lambert van Eck to Swildens.

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29 Het Vaderland (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1791), possibly written by J.F. Martinet. 30 N.C.F. van Sas, Vaderland. Een geschiedenis vanaf de vijftiende eeuw tot 1940 (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1999), esp. N.C.F. van Sas, ‘De vaderlandse imperatief. Begripsverandering en politieke conjunctuur, 1763–1813’, pp. 275–309, and Dedalo Carasso, ‘Het vaderland in beeld’, pp. 181–99. 31 Pieter Paulus, Verhandeling over de vrage: In welke zin kunnen de menschen gezegd worden gelijk te zijn? In welke zin de regten en pligten, die daaruit voortvloeien?, 4th edition (Haarlem: C. Plaat, 1794), p. 45. 32 6 October 1792. 33 For a more detailed discussion, see E.J. Vles, Pieter Paulus (1753–1796). Patriot en staatsman (Amsterdam: Bataafse Leeuw, 2004), pp. 114–19. 34 4 August 1795. 35 A health resort was later built beside this lake, the so-called Waalse Meertje. For more information on the composition of the soil and water here, see A.H. Blaauw, ‘Rokanje’, in De levende natuur (1903), pp. 134–38. 36 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 96. 37 RA Gelderland, FA Van Lidth de Jeude, inv. no. 125. 38 ARA (RA Zuid-Holland), FA Emants, inv. no. 74. He was a son of Guilliam Balthasar Emants (1735–1805), lawyer and secretary of the States of Holland, and Christina Cornelia Vockestaert, a sister of Otto’s mother.

Chapter Seven. Changing Concepts of Time RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 55, receipt for 38 guilders from the Hague clockmaker P. Reider, dated 14 March 1797. 2 Baggerman, Een lot (see Chapter 2, note 10), p. 45. 3 G.J. Whitrow, Time in History. The Evolution of our General Awareness of Time and Temporal Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 148. Cf. Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 158–84, on Rousseau; Mark J. Temmer, Time in Rousseau and Kant. An Essay on French Pre-Romanticism (Geneva: Droz, 1958). Cf. Rudolf Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur. Geschichte des Zeitbewusstseins in Europa (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1980). 4 Chalmot, Vervolg algemeen woordenboek, vol. vi (1793), pp. 6339–44. 5 Van Alphen, Kleine gedigten (see Chapter 1, note 52), p. 39. 6 R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), p. 63. Koselleck refers to this period as the Sattelzeit. See also, among others, Grever and Janssen (eds.), De ongrijpbare tijd; Whitrow, Time in History (see note 3 above), p. 146; Ph. Turetzky, Time (London: Routledge, 1998); for an overview that focuses on the Netherlands, see R.H. Kielman, ‘ “Geloof mij, het einde nadert”. Tijdsbesef en toekomstperspectief rond 1800’, Leidschrift 14 (1999), pp. 123–51. 7 Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, vol. xvii, part 1 (The Hague/Leiden 1960), pp. 503–08. 1

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8 Jan Cantzlaar, Korte wijsgerige verhandeling over de voorstelling dat het jaar 1800 (en niet het jaar 1801) het begin der negentiende eeuw is of moet zijn (Rotterdam, s.n., 1799); Idem, De tijd- en eeuwonderzoek voor het jaar 1800 bevattende de ontwikkeling der gronden en bewijzen van de sterrekundigen omtrent de stelling dat het jaar 1800 na de geboorte J.C. het eerste jaar der negentiende eeuw is (Rotterdam: Nicolaas Cornel, 1800), in 12 volumes. 9 Johannes Kinker, Eeuwfeest bij den aanvang der negentiende eeuw: zinnebeeldige voorstelling (Amsterdam: A. Mars, 1801), closing line. 10 Gulielmus Titsingh, Bedenkingen over de schaarsheid van zeevarend volk in het gemeen, en het verval onzer nationale zeevaart (Amsterdam: H.W. en C. Dronsberg, 1780). 11 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1687), edited by A.D. Woozley (London: Fontana/Collins, 1964) pp. 144–53, esp. p. 145. 12 In Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the entry on ‘time’ (tems [temps]) covers twentyseven pages. 13 Paulus van Hemert, Beginzels der Kantiaansche wijsgeerte (Amsterdam: Wed. J. Doll, 1796), review in Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1796), p. 121. 14 ‘Tijd’, in Chalmot, Algemeen woordenboek (1778), pp. 3735–36. See also Arianne Baggerman, ‘Het boek dat andere boeken overbodig zou maken. De mislukte lancering van een achttiende-eeuwse Nederlandse encyclopedie’, in Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis 6 (1999) pp. 139–65, 149–52. 15 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: Routledge, 1934), p. 14. See also, among others, Carlo Cipolla, Clocks and Culture, 1300 –1700 (New York: Collins, 1977). Cf. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time. Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1983); G. Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour. Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Maurits Elias, Het horloge in den loop der eeuwen (Zutphen: Thieme, 1935); J. Zeeman, De Nederlandse staande klok (Zwolle: Waanders, 1996). 16 Oeuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens, publiées par la Société Hollandaise des Sciences, 22 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888–1950), vol. xviii, pp. 114–23. See also the issue devoted to Christiaan Huygens of De Zeventiende Eeuw 12 (1996) no. 1. 17 Around 1730 only one-quarter of the households in the town of Weesp had a clock, whereas more than eighty per cent of the farmers in the surrounding countryside had a timepiece; see H. van Koolbergen, ‘De materiële cultuur van Weesp en Weesperkarspel in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw’, in Anton Schuurman et al. (eds.), Aards geluk. De Nederlanders en hun spullen van 1550 tot 1850 (Amsterdam: Balans, 1997), pp. 121–61, also published (with footnotes) in Volkskundig Bulletin 9 (1983), pp. 3–53. Cf. Hester Catherine Dibbits, Vertrouwd bezit. Materiële cultuur in Doesburg en Maassluis, 1650 –1800 (Nijmegen: Sun, 2001), section ‘Tijd lezen of klok kijken’. 18 Review in Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1793), vol. ii, p. 341. 19 Theodor Gottlieb Hippel, De man naar de klok (Amsterdam: Pieter Meijer, 1780), translated from the German; reprinted in Alkmaar in 1792.

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20 Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken, Historie van den heer Willem Leevend, 8 vols. (The Hague: Isaac van Cleef, 1784–85), vol. iii, p. 138. 21 [A. Fokke], Het onscheidbaar drietal redewezens verlichting, deugd en tijd, op eene zonderlinge zinspelende wijze geschetst (Haarlem: Bohn, 1799). 22 Chomel, Algemeen woordenboek, vol. i, pp. 399–403, here p. 401; P. Reinders and Th. Wijsenbeek, Koffie in Nederland. Vier eeuwen cultuurgeschiedenis (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), pp. 107–08; J.J. Voskuil, ‘De verspreiding van koffie en thee in Nederland’, Volkskundig Bulletin 14 (1988), pp. 68–93. 23 P. ’t Hoen, Fabelen en kleine gedichten voor kinderen (Amsterdam: De Ruijter, 1803), p. 33, ‘De morgenstond’. 24 With regard to Belgium, research was carried out by Bruno Blondé, ‘Steenwegen, transportkosten, tijdsbesef, economische ontwikkeling en verkeerscongestie in de eeuw van de Verlichting. Het voorbeeld van de Brabantse steenwegen’, in Tijdschrift voor Ecologische Geschiedenis 2 (1997), pp. 18–26. 25 F.C. Kist, ‘Biographie: Frederik Johannes Berghuijs’, in Nederlandsch Muzikaal Tijdschrift (1841), pp. 104–05. 26 GA Amsterdam, Felix Meritis Archives, inv. no. 333, concert programmes from 1795. 27 Thera Wijsenbeek-Olthuis, Achter de gevels van Delft (see Chapter 6, note 10), p. 462. 28 Stuart Sherman, Telling Time. Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form 1660 –1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Rudolf Dekker, ‘Tijd meten en dagboek schrijven in de zeventiende eeuw. De relatie tussen innovatie in techniek en cultuur bij Constantijn junior en Christiaan Huygens’, in Baggerman and Dekker (eds.), Egodocumenten: nieuwe wegen en perspectieven (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2004), pp. 23–40. 29 Constantijn Huygens, ‘Orlogiën’, in Koren-bloemen. Nederlandsche gedichten, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Johannes van Ravesteyn, 1672), vol. ii, p. 501. 30 Constantijn Huygens den zoon, Journaal van Constantijn Huygens den zoon (Utrecht: Kemink, 1876–77). 31 31 December 1795. 32 E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, in Idem, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), pp. 352–404; H.J. Rutz (ed.), The Politics of Time (American Ethnological Society Monograph Series, no. 4, 1992). See also the work of J. Fabian, including Time and the Work of Anthropology. Critical Essays 1971–1991 (Chur: Harwood, 1991). 33 21 May 1794; 12 August 1795; 5 November 1796; 24 April 1797. 34 8 May 1791; 20 July 1793. 35 30 June 1794. 36 G.J. Zollikofer, Predigten, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1772–74). Otto probably read the translation Leerredenen. Naar den tweeden druk in het Nederduitsch overgezet, 11 vols. (Amsterdam, s.n., 1773–89). 37 31 March 1794; 20 May 1794; 2 April 1794; 20 November 1792. 38 Similarly, little attention is paid to birthdays in the diary kept from 1790 by the Zeeland regent’s son Pieter Pous (1777–1851). RA Zeeland, FA Mathias-Pous-Tak van Poortvliet, inv. nos. 330–34. 39 Deel, Haagsch patriciër (see Chapter 4, note 88), 61.

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Chapter Eight. Reconstructing Man and Society C.G. Salzmann, De hemel op aarde (Amsterdam: M. Schalekamp, 1798); a third edition appeared in Leeuwarden, printed by G.N.T. Suringar in 1827, in which the translator says in his introduction that he has thoroughly adapted the book. Nowhere, in fact, did Salzmann give his thesis biblical underpinnings; the translator took it upon himself to do this, to make the work ‘livelier and more powerful’. 2 Withers, ‘Geography, Enlightenment and the Paradise Question’ (see Chapter 6, note 23). 3 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Die Verzeitlichung der Utopie’, in Wilhelm Voskamp (ed.), Utopieforschung. Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie, 3 vols., (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), vol. i, pp. 1–15. 4 Paul G. Haschak, Utopian/Dystopian Literature. A Bibliography of Literary Criticism (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1994). 5 Blaas, ‘Het oog van de geschiedenis’ (see Chapter 3, note 158). 6 A.J. Hanou, ‘Verlichte vrijheid. Iets over een denkbeeld in imaginaire reizen’, in E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and W.R.E. Velema (eds.), Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van de vijftiende tot de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp. 187–213; P.J. Buijnsters, ‘Imaginaire reisverhalen in Nederland gedurende de achttiende eeuw’, in Idem, Nederlandse literatuur van de achttiende eeuw (Utrecht: Hes, 1984), pp. 7–35; Willem Frijhoff, ‘La société ideale des patriotes bataves’, in Willem Frijhoff and Rudolf Dekker (eds.), Le voyage révolutionnaire. Actes du colloque franco-néerlandais du Bicentenaire de la Révolution française. Amsterdam 12–13 octobre 1989 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1991), pp. 137–51; Kloek and Mijnhardt, 1800 (see Introduction, note 3), pp. 129–30. 7 Hendrik Smeeks, Beschryving van het magtig koningryk Krinke Kesmes (1708), edited by P.J. Buijnsters (Zutphen: Thieme, 1976); The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes, edited by David Fausett (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995). 8 Hanou, ‘Verlichte vrijheid’ (see note 6 above); Gobbers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland (see Chapter 1, note 14). 9 De Perponcher, Nieuwe aardryks-beschryving (see Chapter 6, note 24). 10 L.S. Mercier, Het jaar twee duizend vier honderd en veertig. Een droom, 3 vols. (Haarlem: F. Bohn & A. Loosjes, 1792–93). Cf. Riikka Forsstroem, Possible worlds. The idea of happiness in the utopian vision of Louis-Sebastian Mercier (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuulen Seura, 2002). 11 Condorcet, Schets van een historisch tafereel der vorderingen van ’s menschen geest (Haarlem: F. Bohn, 1802). 12 [ Betje Wolff ], Holland in ’t jaar 2440 (Hoorn, 1777), new edition: edited by G.W. Huygens (The Hague: Manteau, 1978); Arend Fokke Simonsz, Het toekomend jaar 3000. Een mijmering (Amsterdam: s.n., 1792); W. Goede, Een voorspellende droom (Rotterdam: s.n. 1807). 13 Gerrit Paape, De Bataafsche Republiek, zoals zij behoord te zijn en zoals zij weezen kan, of revolutionaire droom in 1798, edited by Peter Altena (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 1998). Previous writings under the name of J.A. Schasz include Reize door het aapenland, edited by P.J. Buijnsters (Zutphen: Thieme, s.a.). 14 Petronella Moens, Aardenburg of de onbekende volksplanting in Zuid-Amerika, edited by Ans Veltman-van den Bos and Jan de Vet (Amsterdam: Amsterdam 1

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University Press, 2001), pp. 77–78. Cf. Annie Jacoba van den Bos, Petronella Moens (1762–1843), ‘De Vriendin van ’t Vaderland’ (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2000), pp. 25–42, 176; on the role played by friends, see pp. 59–73 (their mutual friends included Ysbrand van Hamelsveld and Jan Washington). On education and utopia in the past, see, among others, Bronislaw Baczko (ed.), Une éducation pour la democratie. Textes et projets de l’époque révolutionnaire (Paris: Garnier, 1982); Paul A. Olson, The Kingdom of Science. Literary Utopianism and British Education 1612–1870 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Robert T. Fisher, Classical Utopian Theories of Education (New York: Brookman, 1963); Frijhoff, ‘Société ideale’ (see note 6 above). 15 This notion is typical of eighteenth-century thought in general; see Peter Buijs, ‘Naar een geschiedenis van het geluk in de Republiek ten tijde van de Verlichting’, in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 108 (1995), pp. 188–208. 16 Garry Wills, Inventing America. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1978), pp. 240–59. 17 Verhandelingen Provinciaal Utrechtsch Genootschap, vol. ix, pp. 60–61, quoted in Kloek and Mijnhardt, 1800 (see Introduction, note 3), p. 228. See also G.C.C. Vatebender, ‘Plan van een Nederlandse opvoedings-school voor alle aenzienelyke leevens-standen’, in Mengelwerken der Kamer van Rhetorica genaemd Goudsbloemen (Gouda: s.n., 1792), pp. 31–136. 18 J. Paul Hunter (ed.), Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), also containing Marilyn Butler, ‘Frankenstein and Radical Science’, pp. 302–13 and Lawrence Lipking, ‘Frankenstein, the True Story: or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques’, pp. 313–33. 19 J.G. Gruber, De hel op aarde tegen Salzmann’s hemel op aarde (Zutphen: W.C. Wansleven, 1830). 20 W.H. de Beaufort (ed.), De gevangenneming van W.E. de Perponcher Sedlnitzky te Utrecht in november 1813 door de Fransen en zijne wegvoering naar Parijs door hemzelven verhaald (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon, 1913), pp. 12–13. 21 B.D. [= Bruno Daalberg, pseudonym of Petrus de Wacker van Zon], Willem Hups. Eene anecdote uit de XVIIe eeuw, ongelooflijk zelfs in onze dagen (The Hague: Johannes Immerzeel, 1805); see also Johanna Reiniera van der Wiel, De geschiedenis in balkostuum. De historische roman in de Nederlandse literaire kritiek (1808–1874) (Apeldoorn: Garant, 1999). 22 See Rudolf Dekker, Childhood, Memory and Autobiography in Holland from the Golden Age to Romanticism (London: Macmillan, 1999). 23 Hildebrand (pseudonym of Nicolaas Beets), Camera obscura (Haarlem: Bohn, 1839), pp. 31–32, esp. p. 29. 24 Dieter Richter, Das fremde Kind. Zur Entstehung der Kindheitsbilder des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1987), quoted from Schiller, ‘Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, in Sämtliche Werke, edited by G. Fricke and H. Göpfert, vol. v (Munich: C. Hansen, 1962), p. 695. 25 Arianne Baggerman, ‘Het boek dat andere boeken overbodig zou maken’ (see Chapter 7, note 14), pp. 137–56. 26 Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment. The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 27 When Van Eck and Paulus traveled through France in 1788, they

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referred to the Orangist ‘revolution’ of the previous year. Nowadays we speak of ‘restoration’, a word used only occasionally in those days to refer to the return of Stadholder Willem v to The Hague. See Sermon sur Exode 17:8–15. Gehouden ter ere van de restauratie van het stadhouderschap van Willem v in 1787 (s.l.: s.n., 1787). The word restoration did not come into vogue in historical and political parlance until later in the nineteenth century. 28 ‘Korte verklaring van enige thans in gebruik zijnde staatkundige woorden’, in Bataafsche volks-almanak voor het schrikkeljaar mdccxcvi (Amsterdam: G. Roos, 1796). 29 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française ii (Paris, 1798) 5th edition, pp. 756–76. One example is the word ‘vandalisme’, invented by a revolutionary to describe and combat excesses: ‘Je créai le mot pour tuer la chose’ (I created the word to kill the thing), as he himself said. N.C.F. van Sas, ‘Begrippen in het constitutionele debat. Over gelijkheid en geluk’, in Grondwetgeving 1795–1806 (Haarlem: Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen, 1997), pp. 51–63. 30 Condorcet, Sur le sens du mot ‘révolutionnaire’ (s.l.: s.n., 1793). 31 Opgaven van maaten en gewichten der departementen, Middelburg, Delft, Vlaardingen, Maassluis, enz. (Haarlem: J. van Walré, 1784). 32 De Gou, Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1985), vol. iii, Appendix. 33 See Swindon’s travel account: National Library (KB), The Hague, 78 f 6. J.M.A. Maenen, De invoering van het metrieke stelsel in Nederland tussen 1793 en 1800. Aspecten van een beschavingsproces (Enschede: s.n., 2002). 34 Arent Johannes van Soelen, Redevoering ten betooge dat er zonder orde geen geluk bestaat, in Redevoeringen en aanspraaken gedaan in de onderscheiden vergaderingen der Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen, vol. iii (s.l., s.n. ‘alleen voor de leden’ [for members only], s.a. [1799?]). 35 J.G. de Bruijn, Inventaris van de prijsvragen uitgeschreven door de Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen 1753–1917 (Haarlem: Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen/Groningen: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1977). 36 Bert Sliggers and M.H. Besselink (eds.), Het verdwenen museum. Natuurhistorische verzamelingen 1750 –1850 (Haarlem: Teylers Museum, 2002), p. 140. His impressive library, which was sold at auction after his death, contained no fewer than 1,733 books; see Catalogue de deux collections de livres [. . .], dont la première provient de la bibliothèque de mr. G. van Olivier (Leiden, 1828). 37 Verhandelingen uitgegeven door de Maatschappij ter Bevordering van de Landbouw te Amsterdam i (Amsterdam: César Noël Guerin, 1778). 38 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 44, Journaal der inentinge van Otje en Doortje, gedaan terstond na onse terugkomst uit Gelderland, terwijl in ’s Hage eene algemeene epidemie regeerde. De verslagen van de andere kinderen volgen hierop ( Journal of the inoculations of Otje and Doortje, recorded immediately after our return from Gelderland, while a general epidemic was raging in The Hague. The reports of the other children follow). 39 Willibrord Rutten, ‘De vreselijkste aller harpijen’. Pokkenepidemieën en pokkenbestrijding in Nederland in de achttiende en negentiende eeuw; een sociaal-historische en historisch demografische studie (’t Goy-Houten: hes, 1997), p. 40.

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40 ARA (RA Zuid-Holland), FA Teding van Berkhout, Journaal door W.H.T. van Berkhout (1745–1809) gehouden gedurende de perioden waarin hij en zijn kinderen werden ingeënt tegen de pokken, met recepten voor aardappel-, peen-, en erwtensoep en voor verschillende soorten pudding 1770–1803 en z.d. ( Journal kept by W.H.T. van Berkhout during the period in which he and his children were inoculated against smallpox, with recipes for potato, carrot and pea soup and for various kinds of pudding [1770–1803 but undated]); cf. Teding van Berkhout, Dagboek, 8; for other accounts, see Amsterdam University Library, MS IVA99: Cuperus, ‘Journael van d’inentinge der kinder-ziekte’, report from 1771; ARAII Coll. Falck, inv. no. 21: Journaal van de inenting van de kinderen van O.W. Falck, 1782. 41 RA Drenthe, FA Heiden Reinestein, inv. no. 865. Maria Frederica van Reede van Amerongen of The Hague was descended from a Dutch family that had been elevated to the peerage in England. Her father was the Earl of Athlone. 42 Lettre à Mr. Sutherland [. . .] sur la nouvelle méthode d’inoculer la petite vérole, et réponse du Dr. Sutherland (The Hague: s.n., 1768); cf. Johannes Ingen-Housz, Lettre à monsieur Chais au sujet de sa lettre à mr. Sutherland (Amsterdam: s.n., 1768). 43 Rutten, ‘De vreselijkste aller harpijen’ (see note 39 above), p. 218. 44 Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, translated by John Wood (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 45; the passage occurs in the Dutch translation (De barbier van Sevilie, Utrecht: H. Spruit, 1781) on pp. 12–13. 45 Rousseau, Oeuvres complets (see Chapter 1, note 2), p. 378. 46 Benjamin Sowden, Verhandeling over de inenting der kinderziekte, als een zedelijke pligt beschouwd en aanbevolen (Amsterdam: J.A. Crajenschot, 1792). Sowden was also the translator of Mason’s treatise on self-knowledge. 47 Martinet, Katechismus der natuur, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: Wed. Loverlinghnen Allart, 1777) vol. i, (1777), pp. 340–42. See also B. Paasman, J.F. Martinet, een Zutphens filosoof in de achttiende eeuw (Utrecht: Hes, 1997). 48 Le Francq van Berkhey, Natuurlijke historie van Holland, vol. viii, p. 491; C.C. Reich, Waarachtig en naauwkeurig onderwijs voor den landman aangaande de rundveeziekte en derzelver inenting (Zutphen: Thieme, 1799). 49 GA Rotterdam, Handschriften, inv. no. 833, letter dated 21 November 1776. The clergyman, G.J. Nahuys, had his sermon printed: De bedroefden, wegens het verlies hunner kinderen en nabestaanden door de kinderziekte tot eene betamelijke en troostrijke onderwerping aangespoort en de geoorloofdheid der inenting overwogen (Rotterdam: Jacobus Bosch, 1777), 2nd edition. 50 De inenting. Kluchtspel (The Hague: H.C. Gutteling, 1768). 51 Abraham van Stipriaan, Redenvoering over het nut der scheikunde in het algemeen en over derzelver invloed op de geneeskonst in het bijzonder (Delft, s.n., 1790). On Van Stipriaan, see, among others, Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragenden Aertze aller Zeiten und Völker (Berlin: Urban und Schwarzenberg, 1931), p. 864. 52 Assuerus Doijer, Leerrede ter aanprijzing der koepok-inenting (4th edition, Zwolle: A.Az. Doijer, 1823) (1st edition 1808). 53 J.F. Martinet, ‘Antwoord op de vraage opgesteld door de Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen: Wat is er tot nu toe over de natuurlijke

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historie van ons vaderland geschreven? Wat ontbreekt er nog aan? En, welke is de beste wijze waarop de gemelde geschiedenissen zouden dienen geschreven te worden?’, in Verhandelingen uitgegeven door de Hollandsche Maatschappij van Wetenschappen 9 (1769), vol. ii, pp. 61–336. 54 Articles 62 and 31 of the ‘Burgerlijke en Staatkundige Grondregels’ (Civic and Political Precepts) of the constitution of 1798, in De Gou (ed.), Staatsregeling. 55 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 52, letter dated 31 December 1784. 56 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 52, letter dated 29 December 1784. 57 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 52, letter written by M.B. Mackay and dated 1 January 1785. Chapter Nine. Revolution in the Netherlands RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. nos. 57 and 83. Vaderlandsche pro-memoria of welmeenende herinneringen voor dit provisioneel tijdperk (1795), p. 130. The author is presumably J.H. Swildens. 3 Paulus, Verhandeling over de vrage: In welke zin kunnen de menschen gezegd worden gelijk te zijn? In welke zin de regten en pligten, die daaruit voortvloeien? (Treatise on the question: In what sense can people be said to be equal? In what sense the rights and duties stemming therefrom?), 4th edition (Haarlem: C. Plaat, 1794), p. 153. 4 Nieuwe Nederlandse Jaarboeken (1795), 61ff.; H.E. van Gelder, ‘De regeering van ’s Gravenhage 1795–1851’, in Die Haghe (1908), pp. 216–58. 5 Rudolf Dekker and Anje Dik (eds.), Journal de Magdalena van Schinne (1786–1805) (Paris: Coté-femmes, 1994), p. 166. 6 Renger Evert de Bruin, Burgers op het kussen. Volkssoevereiniteit en bestuurssamenstelling in de stad Utrecht, 1795–1813 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1986), p. 46; Gabriël van den Brink, De grote overgang. Een lokaal onderzoek naar de modernisering van het bestaan -Woensel 1670 –1920 (Nijmegen: sun, 1996). 7 Dagbladen van het verhandelde ter Vergadering van de Provisioneele Repraesentanten van het Volk van Holland, 4 vols. (The Hague: I. van Cleef, B. Scheurleer, J. Plaat, 1795–96). 8 Pieter Paulus, Verhandeling (see note 3 above), pp. 48, 50, 56, 90–91. On this subject, see, among others, E. van der Wall, ‘Geen natie van atheïsten. Pieter Paulus (1753–1796) over godsdienst en mensenrechten’, in Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse letterkunde te Leiden (1995–1996) (Leiden, 1997), pp. 45–62. For the context, see Lynn Hunt, ‘The paradoxical origins of human rights’, in Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom et al. (eds.), Human Rights and Revolutions (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 19–43. 9 Bas van Peijpe, ‘Uit ons eigen Nederlandsche Brein geboren. De rechten van de mens in de Republiek rond 1795’, in Skript. Historisch Tijdschrift 19 (1997), pp. 23–39. 10 F.H. van der Burg and H. Boels (eds.), Tweehonderd jaar rechten van de mens in Nederland. De verklaring van de rechten van de mens en de burger van 31 januari 1795 1 2

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toegelicht en vergeleken met Franse en Amerikaanse voorgangers (Leiden: M. van Asbeck Centrum voor Mensenrechtstudies, 1995), p. 55. 11 Adriaan Kluit, a conservative professor at the University of Leiden, considered a formulation of rights and obligations unnecessary, since for 200 years the Republic had already had a ‘lawful, hereditary, national and stadholderly government determined by privileges’. Kluit was referring to the Union of Utrecht – an alliance of provinces formed at the beginning of the Dutch Revolt as a defence pact against their sovereign ruler, the Spanish king Philip II – which had been a source of inspiration for the French and American declarations. (A. Kluit, De rechten van den mensch in Vranckrijk, geen gewaande rechten in Nederland, s.l.: s.n., 1793.) The elderly but still very progressive professor F.A. van der Marck expressed criticism from yet another perspective: the Declaration mentions nothing about the rights of women; cf. his Schets over de rechten van den mensch (Groningen: Wed. Jacob Bolt, 1798). 12 Dekker and Dik (eds.), Journal de Magdalena van Schinne (see note 5 above), p. 166. 13 L. de Gou (ed.), Dagboek van een patriot. Journaal van Willem Hendrik Teding van Berkhout (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982). 14 Dagverhaal der Handelingen van de Nationaale Vergadering representeerende het Volk van Nederland, 6 vols. (The Hague: Swart en comp., 1796–97), vol. iii, no. 215 dated 16 October 1796, session dated 12 October 1796, p. 366; Dagverhaal ii, no. 141 dated 5 August 1796, session dated 2 August 1796, p. 507. Use was made of the handwritten index of names compiled by B. Haak, preserved in the library of the Historisch Seminarium of the University of Amsterdam, and also of the handwritten index compiled by Rollin Couquerque, preserved in the Algemeen Rijksarchief. See A.M.M.M. van Zeijl, Toegang tot het dagverhaal van de Nationale Vergadering 1796–1798 (Amsterdam: Nederlands Centrum voor Rechtsgeleerdheid, 1979). 15 ARA, Persoonlijk Archief (PA) Cornelis de Gijselaar, inv. no. 20, dated 13 March 1796. 16 Dagverhaal i, no. 12 dated 19 March 1796, session dated 17 March 1796, pp. 94–95. 17 De Gou (ed.), Dagboek van Teding van Berkhout, pp. 39–41. 18 The diary of Petrus Jacobus Groen van Prinsterer, copy, private collection. 19 Also recorded in Catalogue de deux collections de livres [. . .] dont la première provient de la bibliothèque de G. van Olivier (Leiden, 1828). 20 Eenige digtstukjens op het afsterven van mr. Pieter Paulus (Amsterdam: Dirk Barentse, s.a.). 21 Readers of the periodical De Navorscher tackled this problem with few results: De Navorscher (1858), p. 354 and (1859), p. 141. The rumours from Paris were mentioned by A.R. Falck in a letter: Brieven van A.R. Falck, 1795–1843 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1857), 2nd edition, p. 86. 22 Dagverhaal i, no. 14 dated 22 March 1796, session dated 18 March 1796, p. 109. 23 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 83, letter dated 1 March 1797. See also Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, ‘ “Ach, stel u dien brave man tog ten voorbeelde”. Pieter Paulus (1753–1796) in kleine kring’, in Nieuw

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Letterkundig Magazijn. Mededelingenblad uitgegeven door de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde gevestigd te Leiden 20 (2002), pp. 34–44. 24 Aanspraak van mr. Pieter Paulus, eersten president der Nationale Vergadering, gedaan by de opening van dezelve vergadering. Op den 1 maart 1796 (The Hague, 1796), pp. 17, 9, 10, 8, 4, 18 (the order in which these pages are quoted). The last quotation was taken from Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands 1780 –1813 (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), p. 305. 25 Dagverhaal der Handelingen van de Nationaale Vergadering, vol. iv, no. 352 dated 1 February 1797, session dated 27 January 1797, p. 662, footnote. 26 Dagverhaal iv, no. 278 dated 6 December 1796, session dated 6 December, p. 88. 27 Dagverhaal i, no. 12 dated 19 March 1796, session dated 17 March 1796, p. 95. 28 ‘Nieuw staatkundig woordenboek’, in De Democraten (1798), no. 29, pp. 223–24. 29 12 and 14 February 1795. 30 22 October 1796. 31 14 July 1791. 32 Dagverhaal v, no. 543 dated 30 May 1797, session dated 20 May 1797, pp. 1134–35; Dagverhaal vi, no. 550 dated 3 June 1797, session dated 23 May 1797, p. 31; Dagverhaal der Handelingen van de Tweede Nationaale Vergadering representeerende het Volk van Nederland (The Hague: Swart en comp., 1797), vol. vii, no. 749, session dated 17 November 1797. 33 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 42. Van Eck referred to the arguments put forward by the Italian Cesare Beccaria, a Dutch translation of which had appeared in 1768 (Verhandeling over de misdaaden en straffen). J.W. Buisman, Tussen vroomheid en Verlichting. Een cultuurhistorisch en -sociologisch onderzoek naar enkele aspecten van de Verlichting in Nederland (1755–1810), 2 vols. (Zwolle: Waanders, 1992), pp. 269–307. 34 Dagverhaal v, no. 403 dated 2 March 1797, session dated 24 February 1797, p. 10. 35 5 July 1795. 36 Dagverhaal iv, no. 318 dated 11 January 1797, session dated 9 January 1797, p. 393. 37 Dagverhaal iv, no. 347 dated 28 January 1797, session dated 25 January 1797, pp. 624–25. 38 De Gou (ed.), Dagboek Teding van Berkhout (see note 13 above). 39 Dagverhaal iv, no. 347 dated 28 January 1797, session dated 25 January 1797, pp. 624–25. 40 Dagverhaal v, no. 473 dated 12 April 1797, session dated 6 April 1797, p. 576. 41 Dagverhaal iv, no. 379 dated 15 February 1797, session dated 10 February 1797, p. 882. 42 Dagverhaal iv, no. 285 dated 10 December 1796, session dated 28 November 1796, pp. 130–31. 43 W.R.E. Velema, ‘Revolutie, Republiek en constitutie. De ideologische context van de eerste Nederlandse grondwet’, in N.C.F. van Sas and H. te

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Velde (eds.), De eeuw van de grondwet. Grondwet en politiek in Nederland 1798–1917 (Deventer: Kluwer, 1998), p. 32. 44 Dagverhaal iv, no. 295 dated 16 December 1796, session dated 2 December 1796, p. 212. 45 On this subject, see Schama, Patriots (see note 24 above), pp. 257, 264. 46 Schama, Patriots (see note 24 above), p. 263, where it is called the ‘Thick Book’. 47 Schama, Patriots (see note 24 above), p. 269. 48 H. de Lange, ‘De Gemeenebestgezinde burgersociëteit te Den Haag, 1797–1798’, in Die Haghe (1970), pp. 42–81, esp. p. 56. 49 De Lange, ‘Gemeenebestgezinde burgersociëteit’ (see note 48 above), p. 46. 50 Dagverhaal iv, no. 292 dated 14 December 1796, session dated 1 December 1796, p. 189. 51 De Lange, ‘Gemeenebestgezinde burgersociëteit’ (see note 48 above), p. 58. The piece appeared in, for instance, the Rotterdamsche Courant of 1 April 1797. 52 De Lange, ‘Gemeenebestgezinde burgersociëteit’ (see note 48 above), pp. 56–62. 53 Quoted in Velema, ‘Revolutie, Republiek en constitutie’ (see note 43 above), p. 37. 54 Schama, Patriots (see note 24 above), p. 268. 55 A.M. Elias and Paula C.M. Schölvinck, Volksrepresentanten en wetgevers. De politieke elite in de Bataafs-Franse tijd (Amsterdam: Van Soeren, 1991), p. 78. 56 L. de Gou (ed.), De Staatsregeling van 1798. Bronnen voor de totstandkoming, 3 vols. (The Hague: Rijksgeschiedkundige Publicatiën, 1988), vol. i, pp. x–xii. 57 Schama, Patriots (see note 24 above), pp. 269, 276. 58 Schama, Patriots (see note 24 above), p. 297. 59 De Gou, De Staatsregeling (see note 56 above), vol. i, p. xviii. 60 The preceding is based on De Gou, De Staatsregeling (see note 56 above), vol. i, pp. x–xiii. 61 De Gou, De Staatsregeling (see note 56 above), vol. i, pp. xvi–xvii. 62 De Gou, De Staatsregeling (see note 56 above), vol. i, p. xxii. 63 Dagverhaal der Handelingen van de Tweede Nationaale Vergadering representeerende het Volk van Nederland, vol. viii, nos. 791, 792, 793, session 21 December 1797, pp. 201–23. 64 Dagverhaal der Handelingen van de Tweede Nationaale Vergadering representeerende het Volk van Nederland viii, no. 795, session dated 22 December 1797, pp. 233–34. 65 Dagverhaal der Handelingen van de Tweede Nationaale Vergadering representeerende het Volk van Nederland, vol. viii, no. 800, session dated 2 January 1798, pp. 275–78. 66 Schama, Patriots (see note 24 above), p. 249; see also A.H. Huussen, ‘De staatsregeling van 1798 en het slavernijvraagstuk’, in O. Moorman van der Kappen and E.C. Coppens (eds.), De staatsregeling voor het Bataafsche Volk van 1798 (Nijmegen, 2001), pp. 213–32 and ‘The Dutch constitution of 1798 and the problem of slavery’, in Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 67 (1999), pp. 99–114. 67 Dagverhaal der Handelingen van de Tweede Nationaale Vergadering representeerende het Volk van Nederland, vol. viii, nos. 792 and 793, session dated 21 December 1797, pp. 216–17.

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68 Dagverhaal der Handelingen van de Tweede Nationaale Vergadering representeerende het Volk van Nederland, vol. viii, no. 804, session dated 4 January 1798, pp. 307–08. 69 Dagverhaal der Handelingen van de Tweede Nationaale Vergadering representeerende het Volk van Nederland, vol. viii, no. 811, session dated 15 January 1798, pp. 363–64. 70 De Gou, De Staatsregeling (see note 56 above), vol. i, p. xxiii. 71 De Gou, De Staatsregeling (see note 56 above), vol. i, p. xl. 72 De Gou, De Staatsregeling (see note 56 above), vol. i, pp. xliv–xlv. 73 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 41. 74 De Gou (ed.), Dagboek Teding van Berkhout (see note 13 above), p. 233. 75 De Gou, De Staatsregeling (see note 56 above), vol. i, p. xliv. 76 De Lange, ‘Gemeenebestgezinde burgersociëteit’ (see note 48 above), pp. 45, 46, 57. 77 Monument voor het aankomend geslacht; opgericht in de Bataafsche Republiek; of karakterschets der Volksvertegenwoordigers, zitting hebbende in de Nationale Vergadering (s.n.: s.l., s.a.) (W.P.C. Knuttel, Catalogus van de pamfletten [. . .] in de Koninklijke Bibliotheek, mentions two editions [22881 and 22882], both dated 1797, but it is possible that the second edition was printed slightly later, c. 1800). 78 Korte characterschets der mannen, welken het ingeleverd plan van constitutie voor de Bataafsche Republicq, tot een grondslag van deliberatie van de Nationale Vergadering, repraesenterende het volk van Nederland, hebben aangenomen [s.l.: s.n., s.a.]. Knuttel dates this pamphlet to c. 1795, but its contents make the year 1796 more likely. 79 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 57, letters from Lambert van Eck. 80 National Library (KB), The Hague, hs 131 e 20, 65. 81 Schama, Patriots (see note 24 above), p. 288. 82 De vrijheid van de drukpers onafscheidelijk van de vrijheid der republicq [and] Brief aan den regent van eene Hollandsche stad rakende de drukpers (s.l., s.n., 1769); De vrijheid der drukpers onafscheidelijk van de vrijheid der Republicq (Amsterdam: Petr. Conradi, 1782); Consideratiën, in hoe verre het verbieden van naamloze geschriften dienstig is, en welke daaronder moeten begrepen worden (s.l., Genootschap Amore Patriae te Rotterdam, 1781). On De Opmerker, see Ton Jongenelen, ‘Een optimistische dinosaurus. Johannes Petsch als spectatorschrijver’, in Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland 2 (1991), pp. 49–69. 83 Brief aan den regent van eene Hollandsche stad rakende de drukpers (s.l., s.n., 1769), see John Christian Laursen and Johan van der Zande (eds.), Early French and German defenses of freedom of the press (Leiden: Brill, 2003), especially the appendix by Wyger R.E. Velema. 84 Ton Jongenelen, Van smaad tot erger. Amsterdamse boekverboden 1747–1794 (Amsterdam: Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman, 1998). 85 Bijlagen tot de Post van den Neder-Rhijn xvi (Utrecht: G.T. van Paddenburg en zoon, 1786), pp. 12–39. Cf. P.J.H.M. Theeuwen, Pieter ’t Hoen en ‘De Post van den Neder-Rhijn’ (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), p. 641. 86 GA The Hague, Archives of the booksellers’ guild, guild book [1703] 1767–97, with thanks to A.H. Huussen Jr for permission to peruse his notes and those of L. de Gou. Walter Gobbers, ‘ “Emile” in Nederland. Een studie over het onthaal en de invloed’, in Paedagogica Historia 2 (1962) pp. 424–57 and Idem, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland (see Chapter 1, note 14), p. 245.

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87 W.R.E. Velema, ‘Vrijheid als volkssouvereiniteit. De ontwikkeling van het politieke vrijheidsbegrip in de Republiek, 1780–1795’, in E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and W.R.E. Velema (eds.), Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van de vijftiende tot de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp. 287–305. 88 French edition: Amsterdam: s.n., 1770–74, 6 vols., Dutch translation: Wysgeerige en staatkundige geschiedenis van de bezittingen en den koophandel der Europeaanen in de beide Indiën (Harlingen: F. van der Plaats en Junior, 1774), 2nd edition: Amsterdam: Schalekamp, 1775–83, 10 vols. 89 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 51.

Chapter Ten. Children of the Future Dagverhaal iv, p. 625, no. 347, 28 January 1797, session 25 January 1797; L. de Gou (ed.), Ontwerp van Constitutie (see Chapter 8, note 32), i, p. 256. 2 Dagverhaal iv, p. 454, no. 318, 11 January 1797, session 9 January 1797. 3 Van Sas, ‘Over gelijkheid en geluk’ (see Chapter 8, note 29), p. 59. 4 Mirabeau, Aan de Batavieren, over het stadhouderschap (Antwerp: P. Rymers, 1788), p. 102. 5 J.H. Swildens, Politiek belang-boek voor dit provisioneel tydperk. Gewigtig tans, gedenkwaardig hierna (Amsterdam: Joannes Roelof Poster, 1795), quoted in N.C.F. van Sas and H. te Velde (eds.), De eeuw van de grondwet (see Chapter 9, note 43), in particular W.R.E. Velema, ‘De ideologische context van de eerste Nederlandse grondwet’, pp. 21–44. 6 Vrije gedachten over de opvoeding van het menschdom (Zaandam: H. van Aken, 1794). 7 Arent Johannes van Soelen, Redevoering over de ernstige behartiging van de opvoeding der jeugd en het algemeen volks-onderwijs, beschouwd in verband met den bloei der burgerlijke maatschappij en ter aanspooring van alle waare patriotten toegepast op den tegenwoordigen toestand onzes vaderlands (Amsterdam: Fredrik Draijer, 1795). 8 G.C.C. Vatebender, Antwoord op de vraage: Welke wijze van opvoeding is de meest verkiezelijke? Eene publique of eene huizelijke (Utrecht: B. Wild, L. Altheer, J. de Waal, [1793]); a second edition followed in 1798. Also included in Verhandelingen van het Provinciaal Utrechts Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen ix (1801). 9 Jan Noordman, ‘Onderwijsdemocratisering in de Patriottentijd. Vatebenders plan voor een radicale vernieuwing van het Nederlandse onderwijs’, in Comenius 1 (1981), pp. 521–53. See also Simon Schama, ‘Schools and politics in the Netherlands, 1796–1814’, in Historical Journal 13 (1970), pp. 589–610. 10 G.C.C. Vatebender, ‘Plan voor een Nederlandse opvoedings-school, volgens het welk, onder opzicht van eenen directeur en tien leermeesteren, zestig jongelingen in den tijd van zeeven jaeren kunnen onderweezen worden’, in Mengelwerken der Kamer van Rhetorica genaemd de Goudsbloemen (Gouda: s.n., 1792); G. Bolkestein, De voorgeschiedenis van het middelbaar onderwijs 1796–1863 (Amersfoort: Van Amerongen, 1914), p. 21ff.; A.M. van der Giezen, De eerste fase van de schoolstrijd in Nederland (1795–1806) (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1937), p. 61ff. An advice book had meanwhile been published by the Maatschappij tot Nut 1

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van ’t Algemeen (Society for the Promotion of the Public Good) that boiled down to a conservative version of Vatebender’s plan; see N.L. Dodde, Een onderwijsrapport. Een historisch-pedagogisch onderzoek naar de invloed van een onderwijsrapport over onderwijsverbetering en -vernieuwing op de onderwijswetgeving na 1801 (Den Bosch: Malmberg, 1971). 11 Pierre de Vargas, ‘L’éducation du “petit Jullien”, agent de Comité de Salut Public’, in L’enfant, la famille et la Révolution française, edited by Marie-Françoise Levy (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1990), pp. 219–39; H. Goetz, Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris (1775–1848), der geistige Werdegang eines Revolutionärs (Zürich: Dirnbirn, 1954). 12 Essai pour une méthode qui à pour objet de bien regler l’emploi du temps, premier moyen d’être heureuz (Firmin-Didot, 1808) Marc-Antoine Jullien, Mémorial horaire ou thermomètre d’emploi du tems (Milan: Imprimerie royale, 1813); Marc-Antoine Jullien, Essai sur l’emploi du tems ou méthode qui à pour objet de bien regler l’emploi du tems destinée spécialement à l’usage des jeunes gens de 15 à 25 ans, 2nd edition (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1810). 13 Limonard (ed.), Vertrouwde (see Chapter 1, note 35), p. 122. 14 P.J. Buijnsters, ‘De patriot als schoolmeester: patriotse ideologie in achttiende-eeuwse kinderboeken?’, in T.H.S.M. van der Zee, J.G.M.M. Rosendaal and P.G.B. Thissen (eds.), 1787 De Nederlandse revolutie? (Amsterdam: Bataafsche Leeuw, 1987), pp. 100–12, esp. p. 104. 15 Condorcet, Sur l’instruction publique, in Oeuvres de Condorcet, edited by A. Condorcet O’Connor and M.F. Arago (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1847–49), vol. vii, pp. 201, 211–15; cf. Emma Rothschild, ‘Condorcet and Adam Smith on education and instruction’, in Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives, edited by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 209–26. 16 De Fransche catechismus of beginselen van republikeinsche zedekunde, in vaersen gevolgd, naar het Fransche van La Chaubeaussire in de vertaling van Anna Catharina Brinkman (Amsterdam: M. Schalekamp, 1796), the Catechismus over de algemeene plichten van den mensch (Utrecht: J. van der Schroeff Gz., 1795) and the Patriotsche Catechismus der zedenleere voor de burgeren van het Bataafsche gemeenebest by Wabe Kamp (Amsterdam: s.n., 1795). A variant without the word ‘catechism’ in the title is [Cornelius Rogge], De regten van den mensch en burger en de pligten daaruitvoortvloeijende voor de Vaderlandsche jeugd (Leiden: s.n., 1795). 17 In this politicising of the past, Stuart followed French examples. See Simon Vuyk, Uitdovende Verlichting. Remonstranten als deftige vaderlanders 1800 –1860 (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1998), pp. 68–90; Van Sas, ‘Voor vaderland en oudheid’, in Edele eenvoud, p. 30; Arjan Terpstra, ‘Historia pro Patria. Vaderlandse geschiedenis en natievorming in de Bataafs-Franse tijd’, in Skript 18 (1996), pp. 153–63. 18 29 October 1791. 19 Lettergeschenk voor de Nederlandsche jeugd (see Chapter 3, note 87), see the chapter on the Batavians. 20 De mislukte bedoeling der heerschzucht; of de verkorte geschiedenis van een Gemeenebest op de maan (Amsterdam: J. Weege, 1786), p. 6. 21 Christian-Marc Bosseno, ‘L’enfant et la jeunesse dans les fêtes révolutionnaires’, in L’enfant, la famille et la Révolution française, edited by Marie-Françoise Levy (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1990), pp. 207–17, esp. p. 214; Mona Ozouf, La

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fête révolutionnaire 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). On the symbolic connection between children and trees, see also Chapter 4. 22 Het planten van den eersten vryheidsboom in s’ Haage den 6 februari deezes jaars 1795 (s.l.: s.n., s.a.). 23 Reproduced in Kloek and Mijnhardt, 1800 (see Introduction, note 3), p. 370. 24 Nieuwe Nederlandse Jaarboeken (1796), p. 911, cf. p. 897. 25 Martinet, Katechismus (see Chapter 3, note 22), vol. iv, p. 180. 26 Algemeene Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1780), vol. ii and (1781), vol. ii; William Alexander, De geschiedenis der vrouwlyke sexe; of een onpartydig onderzoek van de trapswyze vordering der vrouwen, van haaren laagen rang onder de onbeschaafde stammen, tot den hoogsten rang by beschaafde volken. In eenige brieven. (Uit het Engelsch), reviewed in Algemeene Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1796), vol. ii. Cf. Rudolf Dekker, Lotte van de Pol and Wayne Te Brake, ‘Women and political culture in the Dutch revolutions’, in Darline G. Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite (eds)., Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), pp. 109–47; Rudolf Dekker and Judith Vega, ‘Women and the Dutch Revolutions of the late eighteenth century’, in Christine Fauré (ed.), Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 127–38. Mary Wollstonecraft, Verdediging van de rechten der vrouwen. Benevens aanmerkingen over burgerlyke en zedelyke onderwerpen Uit het Engelsch, volgends den 11den Druk. Met Aantekeningen en eene Voorreden van Christiaan Gotthilf Salzmann. Door Ysbrand van Hamelsveld i (The Hague: J.C. Leeuwestyn, 1796). The work was discussed in Algemeene Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1797). 27 F.A. van der Marck, Schets over de rechten van den mensch, het algemeen kerken-, staats- en volken-recht, ten dienste der burgery ontworpen. Alsmede Tafereel van deelen, afdeelingen en hoofdstukken, tot een algemeen Bataafsch wetboek (Groningen: Wed. Jacob Bolt, 1798). 28 P.B. v. W., Ten betooge dat de vrouwen behooren deel te hebben aan de regeering van het land (Harlingen: V. van der Plaats, 1795), reissued by Judith Vega: ‘Het beeld der vryheid; Is het niet uwe zuster?’, in Socialistisch-feministische Teksten 11 (1989), pp. 89–111. 29 Gerrit Paape, De Bataafsche Republiek, zoals zij behoord te zijn en zoals zij weezen kan; of revolutionnaire droom in 1798 wegens toekomstige gebeurtenissen tot 1998. Vrolijk en ernstig (s.l.: s.n., 1798), reissued by Peter Altena (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 1998). 30 Lieve van Ollefen, Het revolutionaire huishouden; naspel (Amsterdam: s.n., 1798). 31 Jacobus Kantelaar, ‘Redevoering over den invloed der waare Verlichting op het lot der vrouwen en het huwelijksgeluk’, 13 August 1793, in Redevoeringen en aanspraaken gedaan in de onderscheiden vergaderingen der Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen iii (Leiden/Amsterdam, 1799), pp. 1–92. On Kantelaar, see P.J.A.M. Buijnsters, Tussen twee werelden. Rhijnvis Feith als dichter van ‘Het Graf ’ (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1963), p. 97. 32 Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1783), pp. 91, 469; Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen (1787), p. 133. 33 Ontwerp van Constitutie voor het Bataafsche volk door de Nationale Vergadering ter goed- of afkeuring aan hetzelve volk voorgedragen (The Hague: ’s Lands Drukkerij,

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1797), p. 9 (photomechanical reprint in De Gou, Het Ontwerp van Constitutie van 1797, vol. iii). 34 E.J. Potgieter, Het uurwerk van ’t metalen kruis (Amsterdam: J.C. Loman Jr, 1856). 35 Debora Cadbury, The Lost King of France: Revolution, Revenge and the Search for Louis XVII (London, Fourth Estate, 2002); Edmond Dupland, Vie et mort de Louis XVII (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1987), pp. 146–52. 36 Johannes Hazeu, Historie der omwenteling in vaderlandsche gesprekken voor kinderen (Amsterdam: Van Vliet en Hazeu, 1796), p. 337. Chapter Eleven. Theophilanthropists and Physico-Theologians Jack de Mooij, ‘Protestantse huisgodsdienst in Nederland in het begin van de negentiende eeuw’, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 82 (2003), pp. 301–23. J. Scheidius, Bijbelsch huisboek (Leiden: A. en J. Honkoop, 1801). 2 The word ‘God’ occurs less frequently later on in Otto’s diary. In 1791 he mentioned God once in every 240 words, whereas in 1797 he mentioned God once in every 746 words, i.e. three times less frequently. The mention of God per number of words: in 1791, 1:240; in 1792, 1:300; in 1793, 1:480; in 1794, 1:1,500; in 1795, 1:800; in 1796, 1:616; in 1797, 1:746. 3 1 September 1791. 4 16 January 1793. 5 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 52. 6 Meike Sophia Baader, Die romantische Idee des Kindes und der Kindheit. Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Unschuld (Luchterhand Verlag, Neuwied, 1996); Dekker, Childhood (see Chapter 8, note 22). 7 GA Delft, manuscripts of Paulus Abrahamse van der Spek (1723–1809?); F.A. van Lieburg, ‘Drie eeuwen Van der Spek. Een piëtistische genealogie’, in J.C. Okkema et al. (eds.), Heidenen, papen, libertijnen en fijnen. Artikelen over de kerkgeschiedenis van het zuidwestelijk gedeelte van Zuid-Holland van de voorchristelijke tijd tot heden (Delft: Eburon, 1994), pp. 171–85. 8 For the context, see Joris van Eijnatten, Liberty and concord in the United Provinces. Religious toleration and the public in the eighteenth-century Netherlands (Leiden: Brill, 2003). See also the special issue ‘Religie en Verlichting’ of De Achttiende Eeuw, including Wiep van Bunge, ‘Rationaliteit en Verlichting’, De Achttiende Eeuw 32 (2000), pp. 145–65. 9 J.F.W. Jerusalem, Verhandeling over de voornaamste waarheden van den godsdienst vert. Balthazar Carull, 3 vols. in 2 parts (Amsterdam: Pieter Spriet en zoon, 1778–81). 10 Martinet, Huisboek (see Chapter 1, note 48), p. 385. Otto’s notes were found by his parents after his death, a fact recorded by Lambert van Eck in the journal he kept of his son’s last days. 11 For detailed information, see the introduction to the edition of the diary: Limonard (ed.), Vertrouwde (see Chapter 1, note 35). 12 Het leven van Benjamin Franklin: door hemzelven beschreven (Groningen: W. Zuidema, 1798). The second part appeared in 1800. 1

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13 Limonard (ed.), Vertrouwde (see Chapter 1, note 35). The passages quoted date from 15 May 1803, 27 January 1805 and 15 October 1805. 14 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 45, fol. 46. 15 Paul van Gestel, ‘ “De verbasteringen van het christendom”. Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) en de Nederlandse Verlichting’, in De Achttiende Eeuw 30 (1998), pp. 3–31. 16 Jan Scharp, Godgeleerd-historische verhandeling over de gevoelens, de gronden, het gewigtige voor de eeuwigheid en burgermaatschappijen, den voortgang, en den tegenstand der hedendaagsche zoogenaamde verlichting en godsdienst-bestrijding (Rotterdam: Johannes Hofhout, 1793), pp. 55, 56, 87, 88, 102, 103, 123, 125, 144. 17 Regarding this material, see Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe. Two Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945). 18 J.J. Kloek, Over Werther geschreven . . . Nederlandse reacties op Goethes Werther 1775–1800, 2 vols. (Utrecht: Hes, 1985). 19 Roger Paulin, Der Fall Wilhelm Jerusalem. Zum Selbstmordproblem zwischen Aufklärung und Empfindsamkeit (Wolfenbüttel: Lessing-Akademie, 1999). 20 ‘Stadt hat keine Juden’: Johann Jacob Volkmann, Neueste Reisen durch die Vereinigten Niederlande (Leipzig: Caspar Fritsch, 1783), index. 21 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 52, letter dated 3 May 1795. 22 Martinet, Huisboek (see Chapter 1, note 48), p. 511. 23 Edward Georg Arnold, ‘Kris-kras’. Het godsdienstige genootschap Christo Sacrum (Delft, 1797–1838), een studie naar privatisering van de godsdienst omstreeks 1800 (Utrecht: privately published dissertation, 2002), p. 194 note 38; R. van der Laarse, ‘Christo Sacrum. Verlichte sociabiliteit te Delft, 1797–1838’, in J.C. Okkema et al. 1994 (see note 7 above), pp. 221–47. 24 P. Maas, a prominent member of Christo Sacrum, bought the country estate of De Ruit after the death of Otto’s mother. Perhaps this was a coincidence, but it shows how small Delft was at this time. Bottema, ‘Kroniek’ (see Chapter 6, note 8), p. 81. 25 Albert Mathiez, La théophilanthropie et le culte décadaire 1796–1801. Essai sur l’histoire religieuse de la Révolution (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1904), pp. 386–88 on the Netherlands. Religious theophilanthropists had nothing to do with the pedagogical philanthropinists, at least not directly. 26 Recueil de cantiques, hymnes et odes pour les fêtes religieuses et morales des Theophilantropes ou adorateurs de Dieu et amis des hommes, precédé des invocations et formules qu’ils récitent dans lesdites fêtes (Paris: Au Bureau des Ouvrages de la Theophilanthropie, 1798). 27 Wayne Te Brake, ‘Religious Identities and the Boundaries of Citizenship in the Dutch Republic’, in James E. Bradley and Dale K. Van Kley (eds.), Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), pp. 254–94. 28 A. Fokke, De wegen des levens of de vraag welk beroep wilt gij kiezen? (Amsterdam: Johannes van der Heij, 1809). 29 Chomel, Algemeen woordenboek iv (1778), pp. 2258–60; Robert Boyle, Onderzoek wegens de eynd-oorzaaken der natuurlyke dingen (Amsterdam: Weduwe Steven Swart, 1688).

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30 Bespreking van J.C. Sepp, Nederlandsche insecten (Amsterdam: J.C. Sepp, 1791) in Vaderlandsche Letteroeffeningen (1791), p. 343. 31 Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1936). Cf. Marion Leathers Kuntz et al. (eds.), Jacob’s Ladder and the Tree of Life (New York: Lang, 1987); Arianne Baggerman,‘Children’s Walks in the Book of Nature: The Reception of J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der Natuur around 1800’, in Klaas van Berkel and Arjo van der Jagt (eds.), The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History (Leuven: Peeters / Paris: Dudley, 2006) pp. 141–55. 32 Bernard Nieuwentijt, The religious philosopher, or, the right use of contemplating the works of the Creator, Designed for the conviction of atheists and infidels, Throughout which, all the late discoveries in anatomy, philosophy and astonomy are most copiously handled, translated by John Chamberlayne (London: J. Senex and W. Taylor, 1718–19). The Dutch, which appeared in 1715, is titled Het regt gebruik der werelt beschouwingen ter overtuiginge van ongodisten en ongelovigen. Cf. J. Bots, Tussen Descartes en Darwin. Geloof en natuurwetenschap in de achttiende eeuw in Nederland (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972). 33 N.A. Pluche, Schouwtoneel der natuur (see Chapter 3, note 22). 34 W.E. de Perponcher, introduction to Nieuwe overzetting des Ouden Testaments door J.D. Michaelis, vol. ii (Utrecht: J. van Schoonhooven, 1788), p. xv. 35 W.E. de Perponcher, Nieuwe aardryks-beschryving (see Chapter 6, note 24), vol. iii, preface. Betje Wolff, too, had been a great reader of Pluche in her youth. 36 Bulhof, Ma patrie est au ciel (see Chapter 1, note 19), pp. 65, 79. 37 W.E. de Perponcher 1788 (see note 34 above), p. xv. 38 Martinet, Katechismus (see Chapter 3, note 22), vol. ii, p. 186. 39 17 November 1792. 40 Redevoering over de verplichting der menschen om de vermogens hunner ziel door wijsgerige kundigheden te beschaaven (Delft: Jan de Groot P.Z., 1788). 41 Van Haastert, ‘Natuurkennis’, in Mengelpoëzij (see Chapter 4, note 85), pp. 56, 58, 42 M.R. Wielema, Ketters en verlichters. De invloed van het spinozisme en wolffianisme op de Verlichting in gereformeerd Nederland (VU Amsterdam: dissertation, 1999), pp. 159–73. The term ‘theosophy’ later came to have another meaning. 43 ARA ii, Stukken Nieuwenhuis, N. Domela and D.N. Nyegaard, inv. no. 151. On the reception of Martinet around 1800, see also Baggerman, ‘Looplezen’ (see Chapter 3, note 125).

Chapter Twelve. The Vulnerable Body 20 January 1796. On the changing attitude to death in this period, see Pieter Spierenburg, De verbroken betovering. Mentaliteit en cultuur in preïndustrieel Europa (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998), pp. 161–203; cf. Hans-W. van Helsdingen, Politiek van de dood. Begraven tijdens de Franse Revolutie 1789 –1800 (Amsterdam: sua, 1987). 1

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2 Johanna Constantia Cleve, Jeugdige dichtproeven (The Hague: Johannes Allart, 1813), pp. 32–33. 3 5 July 1796. 4 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 49. The library of G. van Olivier contained a copy of Young’s Night-Thoughts; see Catalogue de deux collections de livres. 5 National Library (KB), The Hague, Manuscript Department. 6 J.W. van Vredenburch, Ter gedachtenis van mijne ouders Mr. Jacob van Vredenburch overleden den 7 januarij 1814 en Willemina Machtilde van Assendelft overleden den 1 november 1786 (1814). 7 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 44; Dekker, Childhood (see Chapter 8, note 22), p. 130; W. Cappers, ‘Ruimte voor rouwen. Sterfte en het vullen van de leegte door twee protestantse huisvaders 1791–1886’, in De Negentiende Eeuw 25 (2001), pp. 101–20. 8 Gerrit Paape, Mijne vrolijke wijsgeerte in mijne ballingschap (Dordrecht: De Leeuw en Krap, 1792), pp. 100–06. Re-issued by P. Altena (Hilversum: Verloren, 1996). 9 L.F. Groenendijk and F.A. van Lieburg, Voor edeler staat geschapen. Levensen sterfbedbeschrijvingen van gereformeerde kinderen en jeugdigen uit de 17e en 18e eeuw (Leiden: J.J. Groen, 1991). 10 D. Lamboo, Het beste geschenk voor kinderen ter navolging aangeprezen uit het zeldzaam leven van hun dertienjarige metgezel Derk Lamboo, overleden den 18 november 1791 (Dordrecht: A. van den Kieboom, 1798). 11 Else M. Terwen-Dionisius, ‘Het schijndodenhuis op de Algemene Begraafplaats in Den Haag’, in Die Haghe (1986), pp. 67–99, esp. p. 74; Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Verhandeling over de onzekerheid des doods en het eenig zeker middel om zich van zijne waarheid te overtuigen (Haarlem, 1794), Idem, Kunst om het menschelijk leven te verlengen (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1789). Klaus Pfeifer, Medizin der Goethezeit. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland und die Heilkunst des 18. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000). See also W.P.H.A. Cappers, ‘Lasten en baten rond het redden van drenkelingen. De financiële factor binnen het Nederlandse vertoog over schijndood in de tweede helft van de 18e eeuw’, in Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 17 (1991), pp. 271–95. 12 Lucian Boia, A Cultural History of Longevity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Reaktion, 2004). 13 Anne Caro, ‘Médicine et eugénisme en France ou le rêve d’une prophylaxie parfaite (XIXe-première moitié du XXe siècle)’, in Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 43 (1996), pp. 618–31. The Essay sur la mégalanthropogénesie appeared in 1801. 14 J. Belonje, ‘Ter Navolging’, Die Haghe (1950), pp. 96–128. See also J. Smit, ‘Haagsche begraafplaatsen’, in Die Haghe (1917/1918), pp. 132–215. 15 Nieuwe Nederlandse Jaerboeken (1777), pp. 418–19. Cf. Nieuwe Nederlandsche Jaarboeken (1782), pp. 186–88. 16 Nieuwe Nederlandse Jaarboeken (1792), p. 6745. 17 Contemporary translation from the Latin in Vaderlandsche Letteroeffeningen, vol. ii b, p. 35. Cf. J. Trapman, ‘Het grafschrift van Abraham Perrenot op de begraafplaats Ter Navolging’, in Die Haghe (1991), pp. 45–47.

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533

18 E.A. van Dijk et al., De wekker van de Nederlandse natie. Joan Derk van der Capellen 1741–1784 (Zwolle: Waanders, 1984), pp. 18–19. 19 A.T.M. Ruygt, Begraafplaats Ter Navolging Tiel: een voorbeeld van verlicht denken (Tiel: Streekarchivariaat Tiel-Buren-Culemborg, 1998). 20 Wim Cappers, Vuurproef voor een grondrecht. Koninklijke Vereniging voor Facultatieve Crematie, 1874–1999 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1999), p. 19. 21 Richard A. Etlin, The Architecture of Death. The Transformation of the Cemetery in 18th Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). 22 Van den Bos, Petronella Moens (see Chapter 8, note 14). 23 Hartmann, Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Einfluss (see Chapter 1, note 24) reference to Emile, vol. i, sections 91–93. 24 Robert Darnton, Mesmerisme en het einde van de Verlichting in Frankrijk (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1988). 25 Joost Vijselaar, De magnetische geest. Het dierlijk magnetisme 1770 –1830 (Nijmegen: sun, 2001), p. 489ff. 26 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 52, letter from Theodora to her father, Lambert, dated 4 July [1798?]. 27 Chomel, Algemeen woordenboek, vol. iv (1778), pp. 869–72; vol. iv (1789), 2nd part, pp. 2378–87. The text of this entry was taken largely from a treatise by Gellert. The first edition also contained a short entry on ‘ziekte’ (illness): vol. vii (1778), p. 4328, followed by a purely medical entry on ‘ziektenskunde’ (pathology), pp. 4328–29. 28 Bernard Kruithof, Zonde en deugd in domineesland. Nederlandse protestanten en problemen van opvoeding, zeventiende tot twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam: dissertation, 1990), p. 371. 29 J.G. de Bruijn, Inventaris van de prijsvragen uitgeschreven door de Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen 1753–1917 (Haarlem: Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen/Groningen: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1977), essay contest held in 1814. 30 C.G. Salzmann, De boode uit Thuringen, 5 vols. (Amsterdam: Willem Houtgraaf, 1789–91), vol. I, pp. 199–200. The piece ends with the recommendation of a book by Campe, Hoognoodige leering en waarschuwing voor jonge maagden. 31 Frederick Eberhard von Rochow, De kindervriend (Groningen: J. Groenewolt, 1810) (10th edition). 32 Karl Strack, Geneeskundige verhandeling over de dauwworm der kinderen (Amsterdam: Lodewijk van Es, 1791), p. 41. 33 16 September 1792. 34 1 September 1792; 28 August 1792; 27 October 1792; 10 September 1792. 35 19 October 1792; 2 November 1792. 36 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 83, letter dated 1 March 1797.

Epilogue RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 57, letters to C.A. van Eck-Vockestaert, 1784–1823, letter dated 6 March 1798. 1

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2 Hendrik Boels, Binnenlandse Zaken. Ontstaan en ontwikkeling van een departement in de Bataafse tijd, 1795–1805 (The Hague: sdu, 1993), p. 199. 3 François X. Pagès, Histoire secrète de la Révolution française, 7 vols. (Paris: Jansen, 1797–1802). 4 Thomas Dormandy, The White Death. A History of Tuberculosis (London: Hambledon Press, 1999). 5 National Library (KB), The Hague, Hs. 74 h 29, pp. 143–144. He wrote the same thing in J. Spijk’s album, likewise preserved at the KB, The Hague. 6 KB 131 H 38, 66. 7 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 52, letter dated 3 May 1795. 8 Book review of 1794, quoted in Anne de Vries, Wat heten goede kinderboeken? Opvattingen over kinderliteratuur in Nederland sinds 1880 (Amsterdam: Querido, 1989), p. 22. 9 Wacker van Zon, Jan Perfect of de weg der volmaking (The Hague/Amsterdam: Gebroeders Van Cleef, 1817), pp. 4–5, 31, 181. 10 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 41, note made by Lambert Jr. 11 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 42. Autobiography of J.B.M. van Eck-van Lidth de Jeude. 12 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 63. Documents concerning the estate of C.A. van Eck-Vockestaert. Document notarised by J.W. van Alphen at The Hague, dated 1 August 1825, registered 8 September 1825. 13 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 57. 14 RA Gelderland, FA Van Eck, inv. no. 84. Mrs Catharina Cornelia Rottermondt, widow of Hendrik Rottermondt. She died on 22 February 1811 in Haarlem at the age of sixty-six and was buried there in the Great Church. Otto’s diary mentions her a couple of times as a visitor to De Ruit.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Prologue 1. The Bastille. From J.H. Campe’s Over de staats-omwenteling in Frankrijk in brieven, 1790 .................................................... 2. The Batavian addresses Willem the Tyrant. Political cartoon by Rienk Jelgerhuis, 1786 ........................ 3. The Patriot army outside Delft by the River Vliet, 1787 ..................................................................................... 4. Orangists plundering houses in Delft, 1787 ....................... 5. Portrait of Lafayette. From J.H. Campe’s Over de staatsomwenteling in Frankrijk in brieven, 1790 .................................. 6. The Church of Saint-Geneviève under construction. From Lambert’s travel guide, Guide des amateurs et des étrangers voyageurs à Paris, 1787 .............................................. 7. The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. From De gruwel der verwoestinge of Vrankryks moord- en treurtoneel, 1794 ..................................................................... 8. C.N. Ledoux’s design for a toll-gate near Paris .................. 9. The construction of modern sewers in Paris. From Description des arts et métiers (published between 1761 and 1789) by Duhamel de Monceau et al. ............... 10. Rousseau’s grave on the island at Ermenonville, c. 1785 ................................................................................. 11. The Van Eck family in 1789, pastel by Rienk Jelgerhuis .............................................................................. 12. Waking up. From J. Hazeu’s Kinderpligt en zinnebeelden, 1789 ..................................................................................... 13. Rural life. From Pieter ’t Hoen, Nieuwe proeve van klijne gedichten voor kinderen, 1779 ....................................................

10 13 15 17 23 26 27 29 32 36 38 39 42

536

list of illustrations

Chapter One. An Enlightened Education 14. Parents attempting to keep their children out of harm’s way. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774 ..................................................................................... 15. J.H. Campe’s translation of Robinson Crusoe, 1791 .............. 16. Reason. From Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798–1800 ............... 17. The Philanthropinum with pupils working in their own gardens. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774 ..................................................................................... 18. Brochure describing Salzmann’s school in Schnepfenthal, 1808 ..................................................................................... 19. The portrayal of various emotions. From J.H. Campe’s Kleine zielkunde, 1782 ............................................................. 20. The Passions. From Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798–1800 ...... 21. Country Life. From Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798–1800 .... 22. ‘Merit table’, or school report. From Verhandelingen uitgegeeven door de Nederlandsche Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen, 1798 ................................................................... 23. A father steps in to prevent disaster. From J.H. Swildens, Vaderlandsch A–B-boek, 1781 .................................................... 24. The Conscience. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 ....

50 57 58 59 61 64 65 70 71 74 78

Chapter Two. Otto’s Diary 25. To gain self-knowledge. From J.H. Nieuwold’s Voor een kind, 1792 ................................................................ 26. ‘Our soul is a mirror that can look into itself.’ From J.H. Campe’s Kleine zielkunde, 1782 ............................ 27. Memory. From Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798–1800 .............. 28. Frontispiece of Geheim dagboek by J.C. Lavater, 1780 .......... 29. ‘What a slave I am to my own temperament!’ From J.C. Lavater’s Geheim dagboek, 1780 ............................ 30. A page from Otto’s diary .................................................... 31. Children were often portrayed writing. Painting, oil in canvas, c. 1800 ........................................................... 32. Mietje at the harpsichord. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 .......................................................................

82 84 88 92 93 100 104 111

list of illustrations 33. The kindly father. From Economische liedjes (1791) by B. Wolff and A. Deken ................................................... 34. The fate of a disobedient child. By Otto’s drawing teacher Isaac van Haastert. From Aangenaam kinder-school, 1781 ..................................................................................... 35. The Emants children (Otto’s cousins). Silhouette, c. 1795

537 114 115 116

Chapter Three. Required Reading 36. The first stirrings of the intellect. From Economische liedjes (1791) by B. Wolff and A. Deken .............................. 37. Frontispiece of Algemeene en byzondere natuurlyke historie by G.L. Leclerc de Buffon, 1798 ......................................... 38. Children hungry for books. From J. Hazeu’s Leerzaame gesprekjens, 1790 ..................................................................... 39. The peach. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 .............. 40. Kees threw himself on his dear friend / And tried to stop the bleeding. From Geschenk voor de jeugd (1784) by J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg ................................ 41. Pietjen and his pet bird. From Stukken het schoolwezen betreffende, uitgegeven door de Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen, 1785 ................................................................... 42. Jacob opened up the cage. From Geschenk voor de jeugd (1784) by J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg ..................... 43. The Dying Goat. From Lettergeschenk voor de Nederlandsche jeugd, 1790 ............................................................................ 44. A dying man. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774 .................................................................... 45. Spiders. From N.A. Pluche’s Schouwtoneel der natuur, 1737–88 ............................................................................... 46. The cosy winter evening. By Otto’s drawing teacher Isaac van Haastert. From Almanak voor de beschaafde jeugd, 1799 ..................................................................................... 47. ‘Sand, disdainfully thought simple, is to my mind a miracle.’ From J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, 1782–89 ............................................................................... 48. The sun. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 .................. 49. The obedient boy. From Economische liedjes (1791) by B. Wolff and A. Deken ........................................................

121 125 130 136 139 141 144 146 148 151 152 157 159 162

538

list of illustrations

50. ‘Am I now yours?’ Illustration from the book that Otto was not allowed to read: C.F. Gellert’s Blijspelen, 1778 ...................................................................... 51. Portrait of Ceesje Reepmaker, c. 1795, attributed to J. Parker ................................................................................

165 166

Chapter Four. The Garden as a Pedagogical Project 52. Lambert van Eck, portrait by A. Bauer, 1757 .................... 53. A father gives one of his children something to read. From the first issue of the Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798 ...... 54. Children are taught how to bind a tree to a pole. From Geschenk voor de jeugd (1784) by J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg ................................................................... 55. The landscape around Rederoord. From J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, 1782–89 ............................................. 56. View of the house and gardens of the Sion estate ............ 57. The Mariëndaal estate. Drawing by Jacoba (Cootje) van Eck ................................................................................ 58. Martinet takes a pupil to visit the waterfall in the Imbos on the Hoge Veluwe. From J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, 1782–89 .................................................................... 59. Peasant ploughing. From J. van Westhoven’s Den Schepper verheerlijkt, 1771 ..................................................................... 60. Hermit and other garden accessories. From G. van Laar’s Magazijn van tuinsieraden, 1802 ................................... 61. Design for a hermitage to be built on the Rederoord estate, 1797 .......................................................................... 62. Map of De Ruit, detail of the map of Delfland, 1712 ..... 63. Garden maintenance. From Geschenk voor de jeugd (1784) by J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg ................................ 64. Livestock for slaughter. Children watching a pig being slaughtered, by Otto’s drawing teacher Isaac van Haastert. From the Almanak voor de beschaafde jeugd voor het jaar 1799 .......................................................................... 65. The animal market at Delft. From Hollandsche Arkadia in zeshonderd en meer afbeeldingen, 1807 ....................................... 66. Donkey / Child reading / Writer / Farmer / Dog / Fisherman. From K.Ph. Moritz, Proeve eener korte beoeffenende redeneerkunde voor de jeugd, 1789 .............................

172 173 175 181 182 184 186 187 188 189 190 193

195 199 202

list of illustrations 67. The inquisitive Karel reading aloud. From J.H. Campe’s Beknopte zedeleer voor kinderen van beschaafde lieden, 1806 .......... 68. Diligent Jantje. Jantje prefers reading to catching butterflies. From Geschenk voor de jeugd by J.F. Martinet and A. van den Berg ........................................................... 69. The water is dangerous. From Pieter ’t Hoen, Nieuwe proeve van klijne gedichten voor kinderen, 1779 ............................

539 203 205 208

Chapter Five. Social World 70. Anthonie van der Heim’s contribution to Lambert van Eck’s album amicorum ............................................................. 71. A mother nursing her child. From J.H. Swildens, Vaderlandsch A–B-boek, 1781 .................................................... 72. The lament of little Willem. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 ....................................................................... 73. Evening at home. An evening in the family circle. From De vier stonden, 1798 .................................................... 74. Domestic scene from C.C. Claudius, Zestig kleine verhalen, 1804 ..................................................................................... 75. The Magic Lantern. From R. Arends’s, Vaderlandsche kermisvreugd, 1782 .................................................................. 76. A letter from Carel to his sister Caatje. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 ............................................ 77. Jacoba (Cootje) van Eck (1786–1875), portrait by Berend Kunst, 1836 ............................................................. 78. Jacoba (Cootje) van Eck (1786–1875), photograph, c. 1860 ................................................................................. 79. Otto’s Uncle and Aunt Emants at tea. Silhouette by J.A. Schmetterling, 1794 ...................................................... 80. Kinship. From F.L. Kersteman’s Secretarij der Hollandsche voogdijen ontslooten, 1790 ......................................................... 81. A portrayal of friendship. W.R. Brantsen’s entry in Lambert van Eck’s album amicorum ...................................... 82. Some of the passions or emotions, including the maidservant’s unguarded laughter. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774 ........................................

216 217 218 221 222 223 225 226 227 231 233 235 237

540

list of illustrations

83. The Master and the Gardener. By Otto’s drawing teacher, Isaac van Haastert. From Aangenaam kinderschool, 1781 ..................................................................................... 84. The Education of Girls. Frontispiece of De opvoedinge der meisjes by F. de Fénelon, 1770 ........................................ 85. Silhouette portraits en famille were popular around 1790, such as this one of Joan Muijsken and his family .............. 86. Meeting of the Society for the Promotion of the Public Good in 1790. From Arend Fokke, Vaderlandsche geschiedenis in themata, 1796 .....................................................................

240 246 247 255

Chapter Six. Broadening Horizons 87. A demonstration of the usefulness of astronomy. From Rousseau’s Emile, 1780 .............................................. 88. Children using a map to find their way home. From Gallerij van beroemde kinderen, 1822 ............................... 89. The Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) of Delft. Optical print by Isaac van Haastert, c. 1780 ............................................ 90. The River Vliet near Delft. From S. Ireland’s A Picturesque Tour, 1790 ......................................................... 91. Children’s pastimes. From Pieter ’t Hoen, Nieuwe proeve van klijne gedichten voor kinderen, 1779 ..................................... 92. Country house near Delft. Detail of the border decoration of the map of Delfland, 1712 .......................... 93. A girl in a library with maps on the wall and a musket in the corner. From J. Hazeu’s Het beloofde geschenk, 1800 ....... 94. ‘The Netherlands is your fatherland . . .’. From J.H. Swildens, Vaderlandsch A–B-boek, 1781 .................................... 95. Frontispiece of Nouvel Atlas des Enfans, 1799 ....................... 96. The road along the River Vliet. Drawing from a travel account by R. Bransby Cooper ........................................... 97. Pasgeld House on the River Vliet. Engraving after a painting by J. van der Heijden ............................................ 98. The hall of columns at the Felix Meritis Society in 1793, the year in which Otto visited this ‘Temple of Enlightenment’, opened in 1787 ......................................... 99. Drawing of ships from Lambert van Eck’s album amicorum ................................................................................

260 261 262 264 268 272 274 275 278 280 281 285 286

list of illustrations 100. Oostvoorne Castle with the well-known scene of a man either pointing at something or giving pointers to a child. Watercolour, 18th century .................................................

541

288

Chapter Seven. Changing Concepts of Time 101. Pocket watch and pendulum with a weight: the mechanism of the watch. From N.A. Pluche’s Schouwtoneel der natuur, 1737–88 .......................................... 102. ‘The hours fly by, one by one.’ From J.H. Swildens, Vaderlandsch A-B-boek, 1781 ................................................... 103. Sometimes up and sometimes down. Cyclical time portrayed: Father Time turns the wheel of war, 1780 ..... 104. The sensible young lady. Interior with a pendulum clock on the mantelpiece. From Economische liedjes (1791) by B. Wolff and A. Deken ................................................. 105. ‘At five o’clock we take our places.’ Illustration from De man naar de klok by Th.G. Hippel, 1792 ....................... 106. An uncommonly fine standing and walking human clock. From A. Fokke’s Verhandeling over de algemeene gelaatkunde, 1801 ................................................................. 107. The early riser. From Leerzame spiegel . . . voor kinderen, 1795 ................................................................................... 108. Diligence. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 ............. 109. Time. From Stukken het schoolwezen betreffende, uitgegeven door de Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen, 1785 ................. 110. The Future. Beware! The future according to the Orangist draughtsman David Hess in Hollandia regenerata, 1796 ...................................................................................

292 294 297 300 301 304 306 307 308 315

Chapter Eight. Reconstructing Man and Society 111. Device of the Utopiaansche Courant in the year 5569, 1819 ................................................................................... 112. Have a pleasant journey. Illustration to an article on the hot-air-balloon flights of the Montgolfier brothers and De Jonge in Paris in 1783. From Aanhangsel tot den Nederlandschen Courant, 1783 ................................................

318

322

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list of illustrations

113. The constitutional draft is still being debated. From De Lantaarn voor 1796 by P. van Woensel ................................ 114. The ‘new man’ comes into the world like a bolt of lightning. From J.L. Perée’s L’homme régénerée, 1795 ........... 115. Willem Hups. Time machine in the shape of a nightcap on the title page of the novel Willem Hups, 1805 ............. 116. Infancy / Childhood. From De nuttelyke en aangenaame staatsalmanak, 1787 .............................................................. 117. Enlightenment. Allegorical representation of the Enlightenment, 1795 ......................................................... 118. Frontispiece of De inënting, kluchtspel (Inoculation, A Farce) of 1768 ................................................................ 119. Treatise advocating inoculation with cowpox, by Assuerus Doijer; written in 1808, published in 1823 .......

323 326 329 330 333 339 341

Chapter Nine. Revolution in the Netherlands 120. The beheading of Louis XVI. From De gruwel der verwoestinge of Vrankryks moord- en treurtoneel, 1794 ............... 121. Mirabeau ascending to heaven. From Hommage à Mirabeau, 1792 .................................................................... 122. Mirabeau’s books, including Aux Bataves. Detail of Hommage à Mirabeau, 1792 ................................................. 123. Rousseau’s grave on the island at Ermenonville. Detail of Hommage à Mirabeau, 1792 ................................. 124. The news. From Economische liedjes (1791) by B. Wolff and A. Deken ..................................................................... 125. Paradise Lost. Willem V and his family being driven out of Holland, 1795 ........................................................ 126. The arrest of the Grand Pensionary Van den Spiegel. From C. Rogge’s Tafereel van de geschiedenis der jongste omwenteling, 1796 ................................................................. 127. Desecration of the tomb of the Countess of Solms at Utrecht, 1795 ................................................................ 128. The Removal Committee. Graves desecrated by the Removal Committee. Satirical print from David Hess’s Hollandia regenerata, 1796 .................................................... 129. The National Assembly. From C. Rogge’s Tafereel van de geschiedenis der jongste omwenteling, 1796 ............................

346 347 348 348 350 351 352 353 354 357

list of illustrations 130. Lambert van Eck, silhouette as a representative of the people. From C. Rogge’s Geschiedenis der Staatsregeling voor het Bataafsche volk, 1799 ....................................................... 131. Monument to Pieter Paulus, 1797 .................................... 132. The committee of public information. From David Hess’s Hollandia regenerata, 1796 ......................................... 133. The draft of the constitution is carried to the grave on 8 August 1797 .................................................................... 134. Freedom of the Press. Frontispiece of a pamphlet by Batavus, 1785 ..................................................................... 135. The burning of the Post van den Neder-Rhijn at Arnhem. The executioner burns the periodical Post van den Neder-Rhijn on the scaffold at Arnhem, 1784 ............... 136. Writings of exiled Patriots are burned in Amsterdam by the executioner on the scaffold. From Atlas van vaderlandsche gebeurtenissen, 1789 ...........................................

543

359 363 365 384 388 390 392

Chapter Ten. Children of the Future 137. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is explained to a child. From Weekblad voor Kinderen, 1798–1800 ......................................................................... 138. Love of the Fatherland. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 ..................................................................... 139. Portrait of Pieter Paulus in the Republykynsche katechismus, 1795 ................................................................................... 140. The murder of the De Witt brothers. From J. Wagenaar’s Vaderlandsche historie, 1794 ................................................... 141. The Batavians. From Lettergeschenk voor de Nederlandsche jeugd, 1790 .......................................................................... 142. The liberty tree in the Hague Buitenhof and the parade of 3 March 1796. Detail from Monument voor Pieter Paulus, 1797 ................................................................................... 143. Fusilier. Itinerant French soldier, depicted by Otto’s drawing teacher Isaac van Haastert, 1795 ....................... 144. Mocking him. The young son of Louis XVI and his guard. From Gallerij van beroemde kinderen, 1822 ............

398 403 405 407 408 410 415 417

544

list of illustrations

Chapter Eleven. Theophilanthropists and Physico-Theologians 145. Moderation in outward appearance and wealth. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774 ... 146. God’s goodness. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 ... 147. Thus God is at work everywhere. From C.G. Salzmann’s Hendrik Goedhart, 1804 ..................................... 148. The Creator glorified through his creatures. Frontispiece of J. van Westerhoven’s Den schepper verheerlykt, 1771 ................................................................................... 149. Martinet talks about ‘the great world of God’. From J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, 1782–89 ......... 150. Frontispiece of Over spinozisme (1798) by B. Nieuhoff ....... 151. ‘And I shall say, upon seeing your image: / this, this is the countenance of my teacher.’ From J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur, 1782–89 ...........................................

421 423 434 436 439 441 442

Chapter Twelve. The Vulnerable Body 152. The Dead Body. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 .. 153. ‘They scatter flowers on his grave.’ From Nieuwe almanach voor het volk van Nederland voor den jaare 1788 ......... 154. ‘In honour of our dearest child.’ From L. van Ollefen’s Bibliotheek der kinderen, 1782 ................................................. 155. The desecration of the cemetery outside the city of Arnhem, 1783 .................................................................... 156. The tomb of Joan Derk van der Capellen on the heath near Gorssel, 1788 ............................................................. 157. The desecrated tomb of the Capellens. The desecrated tomb of Joan Derk van der Capellen, 1788 .. 158. An experiment with electricity. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774 ...................................... 159. Pietje at his sister’s sickbed. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 ..................................................................... 160. The sick child. From H. van Alphen’s Gedigten, 1787 .... 161. A child’s dislike of its medicine. From J.B. Basedow’s Manuel élémentaire d’éducation, 1774 (detail) ..........................

444 448 450 453 454 456 460 463 464 468

list of illustrations

545

Epilogue 162. ‘O! tijden, o! zeden (Oh times! Oh mores!).’ J.H. Stoffenberg’s contribution to Lambert van Eck’s album amicorum .................................................................... 163. Portrait miniature of Charlotte Amélie Vockestaert (1759–1824) in old age ...................................................... 164. Séparer sans désunir (Parted and yet together). Drawing in the album of Theodora (Doortje) van Eck (1782–1831) ........................................................................

472 482 483

INDEX

Ackersdijck, Willem Cornelis, 449 Adams, John, 11 Alexander, William, 411 Alphen, Hiëronymus van, 79, 91, 127, 128, 135, 140, 142, 143, 295, 399, 447 Alsche, George Frederik, 250, 282 Alva, Duke of, 331 Ange, Pierre l’, 247 Anthing, Carl Heinrich Wilhelm, 215, 386 Aristotle, 63 Arnaud, François Thomas Marie de Baculard d’, 126, 130 Baerken, Christoffel, 73 Bahrdt, Karl Friedrich, 257 Balleur (Otto’s cousin), 235 Balleur, Dominicus Namna le, 248, 249 Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco (Il Guercino), 213 Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 57, 58, 60, 66, 71, 72, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 148, 154, 155, 156, 174, 178, 237, 257, 273, 275, 276, 399, 420, 421, 427, 460 Bavaria, Jacoba of, 287 Beaumont, Madame de, 126 Beerestein, van, family, 249, 454 Beerestein, Willem Jacob Jan van (b. 1778), 74, 241, 242, 255 Beets, Nicolaas, 330 Bellamy, Jacobus, 91, 447 Bemmelen, Abraham van, 243, 254, 437, 460 Bennet, Benjamin, 90 Bentham, Jeremy, 105, 321, 451 Berg, Ahasuerus van den, 399 Berghuis, Johannes, 245 Berghuis, Frederik, 245, 259, 262, 303 Berquin, Arnaud, 130 Beyma, Coert Lambert van, 358, 374, 378, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385 Bicker, family, 230, 242 Bicker, Jan Bernd, 378, 379, 382, 383 Bilderdijk, Willem, 505, note 22 Bloys, widow of, 283

Bloys van Treslong, Johan Arnold, 281, 287 Blok, Bernardus, 360 Blussé, Abraham, 91, 93 Blussé, Pieter, 292 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 176 Bosch, Bernardus, 251, 252, 358, 383, 386 Bosch, C.J. ter, 179 Bosch Kemper, Jeronimo de, 252 Bosveld, Paulus, 358, 360, 363 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 279, 318 Boullée, Etienne Louis, 28 Boyle, Robert, 432 Brantsen, family, 215 Brantsen, Gerard, 19 Brantsen, H., 190 Bruin, Claas, 209 Bruin (Otto’s friend), 239, 241 Brutus, L. Junius, 158 Brutus, M. Junius, 25 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 31, 124, 126, 127, 129, 298, 433 Burch, van den, family, 215, 235 Burch, Franco van den, 183, 216, 224, 230, 232, 235, 249, 279, 280, 281 Burch, Franco Willemsz van den, 234 Burke, Edmund, 355 Burney, Charles, 245 Caan, Adriaan, 282 Caan, Hester van Staphorst, 283 Caesar, Julius, 25 Cambier, Jacob Jan, 473 Cambon-van der Werken, Maria Geertruida, 126, 135 Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 56, 57, 60, 62, 63, 69, 72, 83, 84, 95, 109, 134, 204, 213, 253, 275, 399 Capellen tot den Marsch, Robert Jasper, baron van der, 18 Capellen tot den Pol, Joan Derk van der, 11, 12, 389, 391, 451, 454, 455 Capet, Louis (see Louis XVII) Carteret, Philip, 279 Castrop, Hendrik van, 385, 394 Castries, Charles de, 349

548

index

Cau, family, 231, 282 Cau, Jan Jacob, 16, 256, 352 Cau, J.M., 435 Chalmot, Jacques Alexandre de, 97, 108, 293, 295 Champcenetz, Sophia van Neukirchen-Nijvenheim de, 20, 349 Charles II, King of England, 263 Chatelain, H.A., 88, 119 Chomel, Pieter, 191, 432, 460 Cicero, 63, 84, 109 Clement, J.C., 179 Cleve, Johanna Constantia, 446 Collen, Mrs (Maria Suzanna?), van, 466 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de, 320, 324, 334, 389, 398, 400, 404 Confucius, 331, 425 Cook, James, 276, 279, 318 Cramer, Heinrich Matthias August, 126 Crèvecoeur, Michel-Guillaume-Jean (St. John) de, 167, 168, 169 Daalberg, Bruno, pseudonym (see Petrus de Wacker van Zon) Daendels, Herman Willem, 387 Danton (French officer), 414 Darwin, Charles, 433 Daubenton, Guillaume, 31 Deel, Jean, 210, 314 Defoe, Daniel, 51 Deken, Aagje, 77, 90, 302, 454 Delacroix, Charles, 376, 381, 382 Demmerrie (Demny), Pierre Toussaint, 68, 245 Descartes, René, 296, 318 Diderot, Denis, 62, 252, 272, 331, 332, 405, 425, 433 Doddridge, Philip, 96, 99, 101, 137, 419 Doeveren, Cornelius Emilius, 282, 283 Doeveren, Esther Jeanne Hartman van, 216 Doijer, Assuerus, 340 Dumas, Monsieur, 250 Ebert, Johann Jacob, 130 Eck, Arend Hendrik van (1761–1805), 234, 455 Eck, Charlotte Amelia van (1696–1744), 230 Eck, Charlotte Amélie Vockestaert van, (see Vockestaert) Eck, Cornelis van, 228

Eck, Gerard (Gerrit) van (b. 1785), 184 Eck, Jacob Nicolaas van (1752–1833), 232 Eck, Jan Stevensz. van (c. 1542), 228, 229 Eck, Johan van (1601–1650), 228 Eck, Johan van (1652–1705), 228 Eck, Lambert van (1682–1736), 228 Eck, Lambert van, passim Eck, Lambert Engelbert van (1627–1667), 228 Eck, Lambert Stevensz van (1581–1624), 228 Eck, Margaretha Lamberta van (1751–1811), 232, 234 Eck, Otto van (1719–1781), 228 Eck, Otto van (1780–1798), passim Edgeworth, Richard, 52 Egmond, Count of, 18 Emants, Christina (b. 1786), 241, 242, 431 Emants, family, 116, 231, 254 Emants, Jacoba (1779–1820), 241 Emants, Marcellus (1778–1854), 289 Engelen, Hester Henriëtte, 183 Epinay, Louise Florence Petronelle d’, 126, 127 Erasmus, Desiderius, 253 Evans, Anna Maria (boarding school proprietress), 244 Evers, Jan Willem, 385 Ewald, Johann Ludwig, 120, 173 Eyck, Aemalia Catharina van (1747–1818), 232, 235 Feddersen, Jakob Friedrich, 99, 126, 137, 160, 412, 446 Feith, Rhijnvis, 120, 328, 447, 448, 449, 457 Fijnje, Wybo, 14, 16 Fite, Marie Elísabeth Bouée (Madame) de la, 55, 126, 127, 147, 295 Florijn, Jacob, 243, 254, 273 Fokke Simonsz., Arend, 302, 320, 431 Foucault, Michel, 332 Francq van Berkhey, Joannes le, 250 Franklin, Benjamin, 91, 94, 426, 451, 458 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, 393 Gallitzin, Amalia von, 257 Garve, Christian, 94 Gauthier, Nicolaas, 244

index Gellert, Christian Fürchtegott, 89, 123, 163, 164, 473 Genlis, Caroline Stéphanie Felicité (Madame) de, 126, 127, 130, 131, 133, 150, 161 Gérard (French officer), 414 Gérard de Rayneval, Joseph-Matthias, 19, 34 Geraud, Samuel, 247 Gessner, Salomon, 212 Gevaerts, Ocker, 16 Gevers, family, 231, 454 Gevers, Abraham, 256 Gevers, Hugo, 256, 380, 381 Gevers, Paulus, 10, 14, 358 Gevers, Mrs, 10 Gijselaar, Cornelis de, 16, 358 Girardin, René Louis, Marquis de, 35, 178 Giudici, Jan, 28, 250 Godwin, William, 324, 325 Goede, Willem, 320, 429 Goens, van, Mr, 224 Goes, van der, family, 232 Goes, Adriaan van der (1724–1803), 231, 232, 248, 271, 352, 437 Goes, Agatha Maria (Mouchon) van der (1722–1803), 232, 234, 313 Goes, Anna Maria van der (1732–1792), 232 Goes, Catharina Elisabeth Scholten-van der, 232 Goes, Franco van der, 256 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 212, 428 Gouverneur, family, 249 Gouverneur, Mattheus (1782–1862), 241, 242, 431 Gouverneur, Sara Bartha (b. 1778), 241, 242 Gogel, Isaäc Alexander, 259 Goltstein, Alexander van, 93, 94, 402, 426 Goodricke, Henry, 427 Grammont, Beatrice Choiseuil, Comtesse de, 20, 349 Grasveld, A.M. van, 179 Graswinckel, family, 231, 242, 263 Gray, Thomas, 447 Groen van Prinsterer, Petrus Jacobus, 282, 342, 361, 459, 466 Groot, P. de (bookseller), 435 Gruber, J.G., 327 Guercino (see Barbieri) Guyer, Jakob, 174

549

Haafner, Jacob, 328 Haeften, van, family, 231 Hanekuyk, Hylke, 79 Haastert, Isaac van, 196, 209, 245, 254, 256, 413, 430, 437, 458 Hahn, Jacob, 360, 370, 375, 381, 387 Hahnemann, Christian Friedrich Samuel, 451, 458, 469 Hamelsveld, Ysbrand van, 215, 251, 252, 257, 358, 382, 383, 384, 386, 391, 394, 411, 427, 479 Hannij, Christiaan, 188 Harris (piano teacher), 245 Hartman, family, 249, 454 Hartman, Nicolaas Willem, 282, 283 Hartman, Johanna Emilia Pfaff-, 160, 216, 445 Harvey, James, 447 Hasselt, van (Otto’s cousins), 234 Hasselt, Gerard van, 235 Hazeu, Johannes, 416 Heim, Anthonie van der, 215 Helman (Otto’s friend), 239, 241 Hemert, Paulus van, 298 Hermes, Johann August, 73, 126, 149, 150 Hess, Johann Jacob, 126, 160, 419, 150 Hirschfeld, Christian Cay Lorenz, 179, 213 Hoen, Pieter ’t, 83, 127, 149, 150 Hoeven, Cornelis van der, 379 Hoffman, Bernard, 369 Hogendorp, family, 454 Hogendorp, Antje van (1766–1802), 179, 183, 244 Hogendorp, Gijsbert Karel van, 177, 459 Hogendorp, Willem van (d. 1799), 282 Holtrop, Willem, 404 Hoogendijk van Domselaar, Adrianus Johannes, 282, 287, 289 Hoogendijk van Domselaar, Cornelia van Eck-, 282, 287, 289 Hooff, Jan van, 379, 381, 382, 384, 473 Hoop, Cornelis van der, 374, 383 Horne, Count of, 18 Horace, 178 Houdetot, Comtesse d’, 168 Hoyer, Willem, 232 Hufeland, Christoph Wilhelm, 451 Hulshoff, Allard, 88, 120, 124, 126 Hume, David, 425 Huygens, Christiaan, 299, 303 Huygens, Constantijn, 305 Huygens Jr, Constantijn, 305

550

index

Ireland, Samuel, 263 Itard, Jean Marc Gaspard, 53, 325 Jefferson, Thomas, 21, 40, 177, 397 Jelgerhuis, Rienk, 37, 217 Jenner, Edward, 337 Jerusalem, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm, 425, 427, 428, 433 Jones, Paul, 11 Joseph II, Emperor, 15 Jullien Jr, Marc Antoine, 401, 402 Kaat Mossel (nickname of Catharina Mulder), 14 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 5, 58, 63, 298, 411, 438 Kantelaar, Jacobus, 215, 374, 382, 383, 385, 412, 448 Kasteele, Pieter Leonard van de, 387 Kersseboom, Gijs, 40, 238, 239 Kinker, Johannes, 296 Knigge, Adolph Franz Friedrich Ludwig von, 252 Koelman, Jacobus, 96 Kogel, Mr (see Gogel) Kruikius, Jacob, 70 Kruikius, Nicolaas, 70 Kuik, Michaël van, 75 Laar, G. van, 189 Lafayette, Marie Joseph Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de, 21, 22, 24, 25, 40, 168, 256, 349 Lamboo, Dirk, 451 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 325, 427 Langeveld, D.M., 391 LaPierre, Abram Jacques, 474 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94, 247, 257, 424, 426, 447, 458 Le Jeune, Robert, 451 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas, 28 Leeuwen, Johannes Diederick van, 455 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 4, 297 Lemon, Hartog, 379 Lennep, Jacob van, 55 Lennep, J.A. van, 213 Leopold III, Friedrich Franz, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, 60 Lepeletier de Saint Fargeau, Michel, 400 Lidth de Jeude, van, family, 232, 248, 256 Lidth de Jeude, Cornelis Christiaan (Ceesje) van (1777–1858), 224, 241, 242, 282, 289

Lidth de Jeude, Jan Richard van (1754–1803), 232, 248, 254, 256 Lidth de Jeude, Margaretha Lamberta van Eck van, 204 Lidth de Jeude, Otto Cornelis Adriaan van (1819–1863), 224 Ligne, Charles-Joseph, de, 174 Lille, Jacques de, 178, 179, 180, 212 Linnaeus, Carolus, 335 Locke, John, 49, 70, 88, 253, 297, 298, 331 Loménie de Brienne, Etienne Charles de, 19, 20, 346 Loo, Dirk van de, 179 Loosjes, Adriaan, 209 Lou (teacher), 224 Louis XVI, King of France, 2, 25, 345, 349, 381, 382, 416 Louis XVII (Louis Capet), 414, 416 Louis Napoleon, King of Holland, 327 Luzac, Elie, 389 Luzac, Johan ( Jean) (1746–1807), 249, 282, 391 Mackay (cousin of Mrs van Eck) (Ursulina van Haeften), 343 Mackintosh, James, 355 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 324 Manlius (Roman consul), 158 Marck, Frederik Adolf van der, 411, 522 Marcus, Pieter Jan, 282 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 20, 34, 416 Marle, Gerard Willem van, 383 Marmontel, Jean François, 331 Martens, Mr, 250 Martinet, Johannes Florentius, 147, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 176, 177, 181, 186, 192, 244, 263, 276, 277, 279, 283, 338, 340, 399, 405, 406, 411, 420, 421, 426, 429, 437, 439, 440 Mary of Austria, Archduchess, 15 Mason, John, 89, 90 Massé (restaurant owner in Paris), 29 Maurits, Prince of Orange, 2, 11 Mensinga, J., 179 Mercier, Louis Sebastien, 319, 320, 324, 458 Mercy d’Argenteau, Florimund, 21 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 451, 458, 459 Michael, Johan Georg, 178 Michaelis, Johann David, 425, 429, 437 Midderigh, Johannes Henricus, 382 Millot, Claude François Xavier, 124, 406

index Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de, 21, 27, 40, 349, 389, 397 Mist, Jacob Abraham de, 383 Moens, Petronella, 321, 328, 457 Mol, Miss, 361 Montmorin, Armand Marc, Comte de, 19, 20, 25, 35, 346 Mortier, Miss, 215 Mouchon, family, 232 Mouchon, Adriaan (1701–1772), 97, 230, 231, 232 Mouchon, Theodora Catharina (1731–1759), 230 Muilman (physician), 342, 466 Mulder, Gerrit Jan, 210, 211, 328 Napoleon Bonaparte, 327 Necker, Jacques, 20, 452 Newton, Isaac, 28, 252, 297, 298, 431 Nicolai, Carl, 94 Niemeyer, August Hermann, 85, 86, 257 Nieuhoff, Bernard, 438, 440 Nieuwenhuis, Jacob, 440 Nieuwentijt, Bernard, 433 Nijhoff, Isaac Anne, 185 Noël, François, 376 Numan, Hendrik, 209 Ockerse, Willem Anthonie, 251 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van, 12 Olivier, Gerrit van, 335, 353, 435 Olivier, J.A. van (Otto’s cousin), 216 Ollefen, Lieve van, 412 Osmond, Marquis d’, 25 P.B. v. W., 412 Paape, Gerrit, 176, 320, 412, 449 Pahud (governor), 244 Paine, Thomas, 355 Palm, Johannes Hendricus van der, 179, 401 Palm, Kornelis van der, 126 Pasteur, Jan David, 382 Paulus, Pieter, 215, 236 and passim Paulus (Aunt) (see Vockestaert, Françoise Henriëtte) Perponcher, Willem Emmery de, 54, 55, 56, 69, 123, 124, 126, 127, 231, 276, 277, 319, 320, 321, 327, 405, 435 Perrenot, Abraham, 453, 454, 455 Petrarch, Francesco, 178 Philip, Margaretha Johanna (Tietje), 167, 216, 241, 242, 243, 435, 437, 438 Plato, 211

551

Pluche, Noël Antoine, 124, 126, 127, 150, 244, 433, 435, 437, 438 Pogwisch, Ottilie von, 212 Poot, Hubert Kornelisz, 332 Post, Elisabeth Maria, 179, 187, 188, 449 Poussin, Nicolas, 212, 213 Price, Richard, 389 Priestley, Joseph, 389, 427 Radboud (King), 331 Racine, Jean, 178 Raff, Georg Christian, 129, 275 Rasch, Bernard, 224 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, 391 Reepmaker, family, 249 Reepmaker, Adriaan Cornelis (Ceesje) (1782–1836), 68, 166, 241, 242, 244, 255, 435 Reepmaker, Jacob, 68, 254, 283, 353 Reepmaker, Mrs, 283 Regnère, La, Mr, 224 Reinhardt, Franz Volkmar, 94 Renesse (Otto’s cousins), 234 Robespierre, Maximilien, 381, 400, 401 Rochow, Friedrich Eberhard von, 130, 461 Rogge, Cornelis, 251, 252 Roland, Manon, 53 Rollin, Charles, 124, 127, 149, 163, 164, 167, 191, 204 Roseveldt Cateau, François Adriaan van, 379 Rottermondt, Catharina Cornelia, 484 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 5, 30, 35, 36, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63, 66, 69, 71, 84, 85, 116, 120, 134, 164, 168, 171, 172, 178, 205, 210, 212, 213, 244, 252, 253, 259, 260, 263, 293, 319, 325, 338, 348, 355, 371, 378, 400, 402, 412, 414, 427, 433, 455, 457, 473 Sade, Marquis de, 27, 320 Saint-Just, Louis Antoine Léon de, 401 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 56, 60, 61, 62, 67, 72, 86, 95, 122, 126, 135, 145, 173, 196, 239, 253, 257, 263, 295, 317, 327, 399, 411, 430, 461 Scharp, Jan, 427 Scheidius, Jacob, 99, 247, 419 Scheltema, Jacobus, 257, 374, 383 Schiller, Friedrich, 330 Schimmelpenninck, Rutger Jan, 368, 371, 372

552

index

Schinne, Magdalena Antoinette van, 352, 358 Seiler, Georg Friedrich, 126, 163 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, 355 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 325 Shelley, Mary, 325, 452 Smeeks, Hendrik, 318, 320 Smith, Adam, 79 Socrates, 331 Soelen, Arent Johannes van, 335, 399 Soufflot, Jacques Germain, 28 Sowden, Benjamin, 338 Spaen, Johan Frederik Willem baron van, 177, 178, 187, 189, 212, 213, 428 Spiegel, Laurens Pieter van de, 351 Spek, Paulus van der, 197, 424 Spijk, Johan Albert van der, 215, 480 Spil (Master), 199 Spinoza, Baruch, 318, 432, 438, 440 Steen, van, family, 229, 230, 232, 235 Steen, Adriana van den, 235 Steen, Bernard van den (1738–1798), 229, 234, 235, 236 Steen, Cornelia Maria van den (1720–1798), 228, 234 Steen, Cornelis Aenaeus van den, 234 Steen, Diederik Jacob Arent van den (1780–1811), 230 Steen, Gertrude Françoise van den (1755–1812), 230 Steen, Jacob Bertram van den (1726–1793), 229, 445 Steen, Jacob Diederik van den (1751–1823), 230 Steen, Jacob Nicolaas van den (1695–1777), 228 Steen, Maria Jacoba van den (b. 1750), 218, 230 Steen, Petronella van den (1754–1786), 230 Stipriaan (Luïscius), Abraham van, 249, 254, 256, 335, 336, 337, 340, 342, 435, 458, 459, 461, 465, 466, 469, 470, 477, 480, 481 Stipriaan, van, Mrs, 445 Stoffenberg, Jan Hendrik, 472, 473 Stuart, Martinus, 124, 164, 349, 406 Sturm, Christoph Christian, 314, 419, 446 Sutherland, Alexander, 337 Swildens, Jan Hendrik, 252, 279, 398 Teding van Berkhout, family, 215, 248, 289 Teding van Berkhout, Iman Willem (1783–1810), 241

Teding van Berkhout, P., 216 Teding van Berkhout, Willem Hendrik, 242, 248, 249, 254, 281, 337, 358, 361, 369, 374, 385, 466 Thiel, Jacoba van, 90, 117 Thorbecke, Johan Rudolf, 98 Titsingh, Guilhelmus, 250, 296 Toulon, van, family, 231 Toulon, Lodewijk van, 250, 256 Toulon, van (cousins), 234 Trembley, Jean, 119, 130 Usson, Margaretha Cornelia van de Poll, Comtesse d’, 20 Valckenaer, Johan, 375, 376 Vatebender, family, 256 Vatebender, G.C.C., 243, 324, 358, 366, 399, 400, 401 Vérac, François, 21 Virgil, 178, 209 VerHuell, Quirinius Maurits Rudolf, 41, 97, 98, 328 Villaume, Peter, 95, 122, 145, 161 Vockestaert, family, 230, 231, 342, 454 Vockestaert, Charlotte Amélie van Eck- (1759–1824), 45, 230 and passim Vockestaert, Cornelia Henriëtte (b. 1787), 216 Vockestaert, Françoise Henriëtte (tante Paulus), 234, 345 and passim Vockestaert, Hendrick (1730–1786), 230, 231, 232, 263 Vockestaert, Hendrick (1763–1807), 230, 234, 235, 313, 447 Vockestaert Hugenholtz, Anna Maria (1762–1794), 235 Voet, Miss, 361 Voet, Eusebius, 361 Voltaire, 4, 5, 27, 30, 331, 337, 389, 427, 433 Voltelen, Floris Jacobus, 249, 282, 284, 342, 428, 459, 480 Vos van Steenwijk, Carel de, 382 Vredenburch, van, family, 249, 282 Vredenburch, Johan Willem (Wim) van (1782–1849), 241, 242, 283, 353, 422, 448 Vredenburch, Jacob van (1744–1814), 216, 254, 256, 445 Vredenburch, Jacob van (forefather), 271 Vreede, Pieter, 14, 358, 372, 365, 376, 389, 401

index Wacker van Zon, Petrus de, 328, 480 Wagenaar, Jan, 124, 126, 149, 406 Walter, Lucy, 263 Warnsinck, Willem Hendrik, 210, 328 Washington, Jan, 250 Washington, George, 22, 167 Weisse, Christian Felix, 257 Welding (teacher), 243, 244, 276 Wentholt, Jan Steven, 375 Wilhelmina, Princess of Prussia, 14, 16 Willem I, King of the Netherlands, 4 Willem III, Prince of Orange, 12

553

Willem V, Prince of Orange, 3, 4, 11, 12, 14, 19, 25 Witt, Johan, 12, 331, 406 Wolff, Betje, 47, 54, 77, 119, 122, 124, 127, 275, 302, 320, 321, 328, 454 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 127, 325, 411 Young, Edward, 447 Zollikofer, Georg Joachim, 312, 419, 424, 473 Zuylen, Belle van, Madame de Charrière, 52

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam 142, 143

112, 131,

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris 9, 114 Felix Meritis, Amsterdam Gemeentearchief Delft

Persmuseum, Amsterdam

98 56

Gemeentearchief Den Briel

100

Gemeentearchief Dordrecht 58, 149

47, 55,

Iconografisch Bureau, The Hague 35, 51, 52, 79, 85, 97 National Library, 13, 15, 16, 18, 29, 37, 38, 40, 54, 59, 60, 64,

74, 84, 88, 90, 91, 95, 96, 101, 109, 116, 118, 119, 137, 141, 144, 148, 150, 153

31,

The Hague 1, 12, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 41, 43, 45, 46, 50, 53, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73,

111

Private collections 2, 4, 8, 10, 11, 24, 32, 33, 36, 39, 48, 49, 57, 72, 76, 77, 78, 89, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 117, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 138, 140, 146, 152, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163 Rijksarchief Gelderland, Arnhem 61, 70, 81, 99, 162, 164

30,

Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam 5, 6, 7, 14, 17, 23, 25, 26, 34, 42, 44, 62, 63, 71, 75, 80, 82, 83, 86, 87, 92, 93, 94, 102, 106, 107, 113, 115, 120, 121, 122, 123, 129, 134, 139, 145, 154, 158, 161

Egodocuments and History Series ISSN 1873-653X 1.

Baggerman, A. & R. Dekker. Child of the Enlightenment. Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary. Transl. by D. Webb. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17269 2

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