 |
 |
   |
|
|
|
|
The English DaneEditions
ReviewBorn in Copenhagen in 1780, the son of a middle-class clock maker, Jorgen Jorgensen went to sea at fourteen on a passing English collier. By 1802 he was first mate on the Lady Nelson, charting the coast of New South Wales alongside Matthew Flinders. In 1804 he helped establish the new settlement at Sullivan’s Cove, later Hobart, in Tasmania. Coming back to England via Tahiti, he sought out Joseph Banks before returning – by now a passionate Anglophile – to Denmark. England’s savage pre-emptive attack on Copenhagen in 1807 put him in an awkward position, which he tried to redeem by a bold assault on an English ship… But one thing led to another and he was a persuasive fellow, and before long he was the King of Iceland. Sort of. By the 1820s Jorgenson was back in Van Diemen’s Land as a convict, where he died in 1841, drunk and broke but (in Tasmania, at least) celebrated. Throughout his picaresque life, and with especial zeal when cooling his heels in prison, Jorgensen wrote. There were books and pamphlets on Danish and English politics, not to mention Icelandic and Tasmanian; there was ‘The State of Christianity in the Island of Otaheite’ and, more valuably, ‘A Shred Of Autobiography’. He also wrote many emotional letters to his friend from Iceland days, the naturalist William Hooker. These original sources and some sensitive reconstruction have enabled Sarah Bakewell to create a vivid, moving portrait of a man who was regarded by his contemporaries as extraordinary but flawed, larger than life. And it is this essential quality, superbly conveyed, that makes this book more than just an entertainment. For other people were always obliged to react to Jorgensen, and in these reactions – from Danish school to English prisons, from Icelandic delusions of grandeur to Tasmanian penal settlement and bush – the mobility, interests and contours of an age are reflected. The English Dane is a notable example of how a book about a minor character can succeed. By recognising what was dynamic in this maddening fellow, who screwed up every time things were about to get better, Bakewell illuminates some of the contradictions inherent in the Colonial experiment itself. - review by Johnny de Falbe |
|
John Sandoe [Books] Ltd |
Fax:
020 7581 2084