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Madame Leprince de Beaumont in the
Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic : Library
Catalogues, Readers, and Writers
Alicia C. Montoya
To cite this version:
Alicia C. Montoya. Madame Leprince de Beaumont in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic : Library Catalogues, Readers, and Writers. XIVe Congrès international d’étude du dix-huitième siècle : L’ouverture des marchés et du commerce au XVIIIe siècle, Jul 2015, Rotterdam, Netherlands. �hal-01885939�
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Paper presented at ISECS congress, July 2015, Rotterdam
Madame Leprince de Beaumont in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic : Library Catalogues, Readers, and Writers
Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s phenomenal commercial success in the eighteenth century is increasingly well documented, as is the fact that her works enjoyed a truly European, if not world-wide readership. Beaumont’s most well-received title, her Magasin des enfants, was translated or adapted into over a dozen languages, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Danish, Czech and of course Dutch, as well as Russian, Greek, Bulgarian, and others. Because of the large number of editions, reprints, translations and adaptations involved, however, any attempt to adequately address the question of Leprince de Beaumont’s reception will necessarily at some point have to involve the quantitative methods and materials of book history. So what I would like to do today is use Beaumont’s reception in the Dutch Republic as a case study to speak a little about one source that may prove especially useful in studying this reception, i.e. library auction catalogues. I will then move on from the statistical findings this source can provide us, to a number of individual reactions in the Dutch Republic to Beaumont’s works. While most of the findings I will be presenting are not new,1 I hope that what will appear
here is a new configuration or a larger pattern in the reception of her work, that invites us to further explore the possibilities offered by these book history methods and material.
Library auction catalogues
Let me begin with private libraries. Over a century ago now, Daniel Mornet was one of the first scholars to make use of library auction catalogues as a source for reconstructing the reception of eighteenth-century authors. In his still-classic article, ‘Les enseignements des bibliothèques privées (1750-1780)’, published in 1910 in the Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, he convincingly showed that a number of authors that had been forgotten in his day, such as Madame de Graffigny, had apparently enjoyed widespread commercial success in the eighteenth century – at least, if we are to go by the impressive number of occurrences of her works in these catalogues. Mornet’s work was quickly picked up in the Netherlands, where S.A.
1 In this article, I revisit some of the findings first presented in A.C. Montoya and S. van Dijk, ‘Madame Leprince
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Krijn published an article in 1917, ‘Franse lektuur in Nederland in het begin van de 18e eeuw’, in which she carried out a similar research project. Then after some decades of relative silence on this front, in the 1980s, the late Dutch book historian Bert van Selm started looking anew at this source, approaching it now from a historical perspective. In fact, as he showed in his 1987 opus magnus, ‘Een menighte treffelijke boeken.’ Nederlandse boekhandels-catalogi in het
begin van de 17e eeuw, the printed library auction catalogue was a Dutch invention, that dates
back at least to 1599, or the moment during which the Dutch Republic started to become a focal point of the European book trade. The printed auction catalogue led to the rapid development of a flourishing auction system in several Dutch cities, most prominently The Hague, Amsterdam and Leiden. As Van Selm demonstrated, these catalogues soon became a staple of the international book trade, and sellers travelled from other parts of Europe to the Netherlands to attend its auctions. Thus, private libraries of high-ranking officials, foreign ambassadors, and other collectors were also shipped to The Hague to be sold at auction. While these were largely professional libraries, many of them also contained books that had belonged to the wives, daughters and other family members of the owners, and so they also tell us something about leisure reading in the eighteenth century at large. In addition, several of these libraries belonged to authors in their own right, so may reflect trends in literary taste more generally.
Inspired by Van Selm’s pioneering work, in the 1990s a number of Dutch scholars started to locate and photograph the extant Dutch library auction catalogues in libraries throughout Europe, bringing them together in a microfiche collection that came to be known under the title Book Sales Catalogues of the Dutch Republic. This research took them to over 50 libraries and archives, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Royal Dutch Library in The Hague, the British Library, the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, as well as many university libraries and a number of private collections. This was, in short, an ambitious project, and so it is good news that one year ago, the publisher Brill decided to render these catalogues available online. This new database, Book Sales Catalogues Online (BSCO) offers digitized scans of all known book sales catalogues printed in the Dutch Republic before 1801,2 and currently provides facsimiles of slightly under 4.000 catalogues.
Beaumont in the Dutch Republic: Library auction catalogues
2 B. van Selm, J.A. Gruys, H.W. de Kooker, continued by K. Bostoen, O.S. Lankhorst, A.C. Montoya and M. van
Delft (eds.), Book Sales Catalogues Online - Book Auctioning in the Dutch Republic, ca. 1500-ca. 1800, http://primarysources.brillonline.com/browse/book-sales-catalogues-online [accessed July 1st, 2015].
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So what do these library auction catalogues tell us exactly about Mme Leprince de Beaumont’s reception in the Dutch Republic? Some years ago, I studied a selection of several hundred of the auction catalogues that now make up the BSCO collection, including 175 that dated from the second half of the eighteenth century, or the period during which Leprince de Beaumont was active.3 The owners of these libraries were representative of a broad, if largely elite swath of Dutch society. About a third of the library owners worked in law and government, 15% were ministers or other churchmen, an equal number were university professors or private tutors, while the rest were to be found in the fields of medicine, the military and navy, industry and commerce and the arts. About 13% of them were themselves published authors. In addition, the libraries were very cosmopolitan in their linguistic composition. Fully 86% of the libraries listed five or more titles in French, and 36% listed five or more titles in English.
Within this corpus of libraries, I discovered that Leprince de Beaumont was among the most often cited authors of all, with her works present in 50% of all the library catalogues I examined. This is the top ten of the most frequently cited eighteenth-century authors:
Table 1. Top ten French, English and Dutch eighteenth-century authors
1. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele 65%
2. Voltaire 63%
3. Rhijnvis Feith 59%
4. Marie Leprince de Beaumont 50%
5. Alain-René Lesage 49%
6. J. van Effen /Montesquieu /abbé Prévost /J.-J. Rousseau /J. Swift 43%
7. Daniel Defoe 42%
8. Joseph Fielding 41%
9. Samuel Richardson 40%
10. Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken (excl. translations) 35%
This means that, among French-language authors of the eighteenth century, Beaumont was the second most frequently cited in the library catalogues, after Voltaire alone, and before the likes
3 The results of this first study are described in A.C. Montoya, ‘French and English Women Writers in Dutch
Library Auction Catalogueues, 1700-1800: Some Methodological Considerations and Preliminary Results’, in S. van Dijk, P. Broomans, J. van der Meulen and P. van Oostrum Pim (eds.), ‘I Have Heard About You’: Foreign
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of Rousseau and Diderot. I would however hypothesize that Beaumont’s influence extended well beyond her own works. Thus, pedagogical and children’s literature account for about one quarter of the most frequently found works by women authors, with titles such as Mme de Genlis’ Adèle et Théodore, Elisabeth Boué de Lafite’s Entretiens, drames et contes moraux or Louise d’Epinay’s Conversations d’Emilie holding respectable positions on the list of most frequently found titles. The Leprince de Beaumont phenomenon was certainly a larger European one, but may have been especially pronounced in the Dutch Republic and may merit closer examination in the light of the later popularity of domestic pedagogical literature such as Hiëronymus van Alphen’s children’s poetry, most famously his Proeve van kleine gedigten
voor kinderen from 1778. Mornet, who was concerned mainly with novels, did not mention Le Magasin des enfants at all in his sampling. The only titles by Beaumont which he did search
for, Le triomphe de la vérité and Lettres de Madame du Montier, occurred respectively in three and in a single one of the 392 library catalogues he studied. This seems a far cry from the 12 and 18 occurrences of this title in my own, smaller corpus of 175 catalogues, and may possibly point to important cultural differences, perhaps linked to the Dutch Republic’s oft-cited bourgeois culture in the eighteenth century.
The distribution per decade of Beaumont’s works is described in the following table, which shows the percentage of libraries listing her works per decade:
Table 2. Distribution per decade of Beaumont’s works
1751 – 1760: 19% 1761 – 1765: 35% 1766 – 1770: 45% 1771 – 1775: 38% 1776 – 1780: 56% 1781 – 1785: 45% 1786 – 1790: 65% 1791 – 1795: 61% 1796 – 1800: 59%
After a clear rise in the 1750s through 1780s, Beaumont’s popularity started to decline in the 1790s, a finding that would seem to be in keeping with anecdotal evidence suggesting that from the 1780s onwards, readers started turning away from her works in the Dutch Republic. This
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decline in her reception was perhaps partly influenced by her reception in neighbouring countries. In Germany for example, with the rise of the educationalist movement of the Philantropins, several authors started to distance themselves from Beaumont’s Magasins. Johann Bernhard Basedow and, after him, Christian Felix Weisse criticized Beaumont’s in their eyes disturbing combination of different genres, noting disapprovingly that ‘what is curious in this book is its mix of fairy tales, biblical and profane history, rules of conduct that are half true and false and scientific fragments.’4 This objection to Beaumont’s esthetics of variety was not
altogether new. In Holland already, in 1761, we find the reviewer of the prestigious periodical
Vaderlandse Letteroefeningen criticizing her Magasin des adolescentes, and visibly bristling at
her so-called ‘French vivacity’:
It seems to us that the manner of teaching proposed here is by no means the most appropriate: the Governess conducts a conversation with her Pupils, jumping with a French vivacity from one object to the next, providing usually no more than superficial ideas; which are often interrupted by other thoughts that occur to her, before they have been properly explained; so that no Young Lady can be led by such a path to a regular way of thinking, nor even to a sufficiently superficial proficiency in some branch or other of knowledge.5
In the context of the rise in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic of sentiments of national self-awareness, it appears quite possible, then, that Beaumont’s very Frenchness could also be used against her.
Most successful titles
Auction catalogues finally also provide important information on the relative popularity in the eighteenth-century Netherlands of Beaumont’s different works:
Table 3: Titles cited in the largest number of libraries
no. of copies % libraries6 French Dutch English
4 ‘Wie seltsam ist im diesem Buche die Mischung von Feenmarchen, heiliger und Profangeschichte; von
halbwahren und schiefen Klugheitsregeln und wissenschatlichen Brocken.’ Christian Felix Weissens
Selbstbiographie, Leipzig, Georg Voss, 1806, 506. My translations throughout.
5 ‘[Het] komt [...] ons voor, dat de hier voorgestelde manier van onderwys geenszins de bekwaemste is: de
Gouvernante houdt een gemeenzaem gesprek met hare Leerlingen , springt met ene Fransche levendigheid van 't ene voorwerp op 't andere, geeft gemeenlyk niet dan zeer oppervlakkige denkbeelden; die nog dikwils door andere invallende gedagten afgebroken worden, eer ze regt opgehelderd zyn; zo dat geen jonge Juffrouw langs dien weg tot ene regelmatige manier van denken, of zelfs ene genoegzame oppervlakkige kundigheid van deze of gene wetenschap gebragt konne worden.’ Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen, 1761, 458.
6 To calculate the relative presence of a title in the libraries, I counted only the libraries that were sold or advertised
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1. Magasin des enfants 37 31% 71% 29%
2. Magasin des jeunes dames 20 25% 57% 43%
3. La nouvelle Clarice 15 19% 63% 35% 3%
4. Magasin des adolescentes 19 19% 95% 5%
5. Education complète 16 15% 100%
6. Magasin des pauvres 8 15% 70% 30%
7. Contes moraux 10 14% 81% 19%
8. Lettres d’Emerance 10 14% 100%
9. Mém. de Mme de Batteville 9 10% 100%
10. Lettres de Mme du Montier 6 9% 100%
As is to be expected, Beaumont’s Magasin des enfants was, in the Dutch Republic as elsewhere in Europe, her most frequently cited title. Beaumont’s works were all read more frequently in the French original than in Dutch translation, lending support to evidence suggesting that her works were often used as a means to teach pupils the French language.7 Thus in an early inventory of works used in Holland in teaching French, the Esquisse historique de
l’enseignement du français en Hollande du XVIe au XIXe siècle (1919), Karl Riemens
distinguished a large category of works read in the original by young French learners, of which the most frequently used were Fénelon’s Télémaque, Beaumont’s Magasins and the genre of the Robinsonnades. Despite these French-language readings, however, six of Beaumont’s works were also translated into Dutch, some – such as her Magasin des enfants – in a number of different translations; the rest were necessarily read in the original French. Of her major works, finally, the only one completely absent from the auction catalogues is her periodical
Nouveau magasin français (1750 – 1751).
Let me conclude this statistical overview by pointing to one last interesting finding, namely on Beaumont’s presence in circulating libraries. These libraries date back to 1750, the year in which the Hague bookseller Hendrik Scheurleer Jr., almost certainly inspired by his knowledge of circulating libraries in England, created a ‘public library’ of his own in the Hague.
explained by the fact that some libraries listed multiple copies of a single title, so that while that title might be present only in a small number of libraries, the total number of copies might exceed the number of libraries.
7 M.-C. Kok Escalle, ‘Une entreprise sur le long terme: les repertoires de manuels utilizes pour l’enseignement du
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Of the 15 or 16 circulating libraries presently known to have existed in the Dutch Republic during the eighteenth century, we currently possess catalogues of six:
Table 4. Circulating libraries in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic
• Hendrik Scheurleer Jr., The Hague 1750 – 1763 (surviving catalogues: 1751 – 1762) • R. J. Noordbeek, Leeuwarden, started before 1754, continued by A. van Lingen until
1762 (surviving catalogues: 1754 – 1756)
• Hendrik Bakhuyzen, The Hague, 1764 – 1818? (surviving catalogues: 1777 – 1812) • Van Riemsdyk and Van Bronkhorst, Bergen op Zoom, started before 1790 (surviving
partial catalogue: 1792)
• Jan van Gulik, Amsterdam, started between 1776 – 1785, until at least 1811 (surviving catalogues: 1797 – 1798)
• Johannes Jacobus Beets, Haarlem (surviving catalogues: 1797 – 1799)
Now all six of these circulating libraries carried Beaumont’s works. These findings are significant, then, for the indications they also provide of the first date at which Beaumont’s works became known in the Netherlands. Often, the first occurrence of het works was in one of the circulating library catalogues:
Table 5. First occurrence of Leprince de Beaumont’s works in catalogues
Magasin des enfants (1756) 1757 Scheurleer circulating library
Magasin des jeunes dames (1764) 1765 Paulus van Assendelft, Pieter de Veer La nouvelle Clarice (1767) 1769 Daniel Isaac baron van Cronstrom
Magasin des adolescentes (1760) 1761 Jan Carel, baron van Eck, J.F. Huysmans, etc.
Education complète (1753) 1757 Scheurleer circulating library
Magasin des pauvres (1768) 1777 Scheurleer circulating library
Contes moraux (1774) 1777 Scheurleer circulating library
Lettres d’Emerance (1765) 1769 Daniel Isaac baron van Cronstrom
Mémoires Mme de Batteville (1766) 1769 Daniel Isaac baron van Cronstrom Lettres de Mme du Montier (1756) 1776 Jacob Regenboog
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In all cases, Beaumont’s works made their first appearance in the catalogues almost immediately after their publication in France. More generally, the recurrence of works not only by Beaumont, but also by Genlis, La Fite and other pedagogical authors suggests that pedagogical and children’s literature were a favourite with the audiences targeted by circulating libraries, just as they had been with other Dutch audiences.
I hope to have provided a glimpse of the kinds of insights that auction catalogues can provide. Much work is however still needed to fully exploit their possibilities We will need, first of all, to create advanced search capabilities to treat the material in the existing BSCO corpus, allowing us to search by specific book titles.8 This would allow us to ask questions such as: Did typical readers or owners of Voltaire’s works, for example, also usually own Beaumont’s Magasins? What is the sociological profile of the library owners who owned her works? Should Beaumont’s works be considered primarily as an isolated success story, or rather be seen as part of a larger tradition of pedagogical writings, possibly by male as well as female authors, that should properly be understood as a literary system, to use Franco Moretti’s term, rather than as a collection of individual titles?
Dutch readers: From Charrière to La Fite
Leaving the realm of auction catalogues now, I would like to say a few words about Beaumont’s readers in the Dutch Republic. I will not linger here on Beaumont’s best-known eighteenth-century readers, Belle van Zuylen a.k.a. Isabelle de Charrière, and the famous female writing couple Agatha Deken and Elizabeth Wolff, who respectively reminisced on their youthful readings of her and plagiarized her work.9 Both of these cases have been studied in some detail
8 This is the aim of the Open Access MEDIATE database which I am currently developing as part of an
ERC-funded project based at Radboud University. This database will also include auction catalogues from France, the British Isles and Italy. My premise is that the aggregation of these diverse sources will make it possible to discover new textual and statistical relationships within the collections and between lines of research. See the project website www.mediate18.nl for more information [note updated August 2018 to reflect developments since 2015].
9 Charrière’s correspondence includes several references to Beaumont’s works. The earliest one is in 1764, when
in a letter to Constant d’Hermenches, Charrière recounted how her younger sister Mitie, frightened by thunder, came to her bedside one night: ‘Elle s’assit à côté de mon lit, et pour changer je lui fis conter une histoire de Mlle Bonne qu’elle venait d’achever’. That a young mother like Mitie, who had just given birth to her daughter Jacoba Marie, was reading Beaumont’s works before going to sleep need hardly surprise us, given their widespread presence in Dutch libraries in the 1760s. However, decades later Charrière still evoked Beaumont’s works. In 1793, she recommended them as suitable reading for a young servant-boy who had recently entered her husband’s service: ‘Je lui ai procuré Mlle Bonne; il faut qu’il écrive et soit un heureux petit garçon’. And a decade later, in 1803, she writes to her one-time literary collaborator Isabelle Morel de Gélieu recommending that she teach a young German pupil of hers: ‘Je suis d’avis que votre jeune allemande apprenne le latin de vous et de votre mari, le François de tout le monde. Les premieres lectures seront Mlle Bonne et les mille et une nuits et vous lui ferés apprendre et prononcer les fables de la Fontaine.’ As for Leprince de Beaumont’s reception by Holland’s most famous female writing couple, Elizabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken, Suzan van Dijk has showed that although they never explicitly mentioned Beaumont in their writings, they possibly copied her in one of their own polemical texts. Montoya and Van Dijk, ‘Madame Leprince de Beaumont, Mademoiselle Bonne’; S. van Dijk and T. van
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by my colleague Suzan van Dijk, and I gladly refer to the articles in which she does so. Instead, I focus now on two less-studied imitators of Beaumont, the educationalists Marie-Elisabeth de La Fite and Anna Barbara van Meerten-Schilperoort.
Some decades after Charrière first referred to Beaumont’s works, another cosmopolitan author based in the Dutch Republic was to draw on their example. Marie-Elisabeth Boué de La Fite, the German-born wife of the pastor of the Eglise wallonne in The Hague, was a woman of letters who modeled her own writings on those of Beaumont. However, by the time she embarked on her own literary career, in the 1780s, the criticisms leveled at Beaumont by the German Philantropins had already made themselves felt. Consequently, when La Fite composed an educational work of her own, her Entretiens, drames et contes moraux (1778) clearly imitating Beaumont’s Magasins, she was careful to distance herself from some aspects of her predecessor’s method, most notably her mixing of fairy tales with more serious matter. In one episode for example, the governess Madame de Valcour has just finished telling her pupil Annette about the metamorphosis of butterflies, at which point her pupil replies:
On m’a fait lire des contes de fées où l’on parlait aussi de métamorphoses, de campagnes désertes qui devenaient tout-à-coup des jardins superbes, de princes qui se changeaient en oiseaux, de princesses en statues, etc. Les métamorphoses des chenilles sont bien plus intéressantes, car elles sont vraies.10
This seems a transparent reference to Beaumont’s ‘Belle et la bête’, which of course was immediately followed in the Magasin des enfants by a dialogue about the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies. While La Fite elsewhere explicitly condemns fairy tales as a pedagogical means, yet Beaumont’s influence is still clear in her choice of the dialogue form, as well as her natural theology, on which she further builds by making use of a popular work by a Dutch author, J.F. Martinet’s Katechismus der natuur (1777 – 1779).
From schoolroom to women’s movement: Van Meerten-Schilperoort and Agatha
Although they go well beyond the eighteenth-century timeframe, I will end by saying something about Beaumont’s role in the history of the Dutch women’s movement. Because of the importance of female education for the early women’s movement, it is perhaps inevitable that
Raamsdonk, ‘Ik vermane mijne Sex, leer denken, net denken…’ Betje Wolff en Jeanne Leprince de Beaumont: plagiaat of citaat zonder bronvermelding?’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 114 (1998), 345-356.
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some of Holland’s earliest feminists turned to Beaumont’s works for inspiration. Thus, in the early nineteenth century, one of the most interesting translations of Beaumont’s Magasin des
enfants was produced by the schoolteacher Anna Barbara van Meerten-Schilperoort, who
incorporated these texts into new schoolroom practices of her own. Van Meerten had started her own career as a schoolteacher around 1810, when she began a small boarding school for a number of girls that she taught together with her own children. A few years later, she started publishing textbooks for children, and in 1816, she petitioned the Dutch government to establish a state training school for women, of which she would be the director. Then in 1819, she published one of her first major works, her adaptation of Beaumont’s Magasin des enfants. This was of course not the first time the Magasin had been translated into Dutch: a previous, very literal translation had appeared already in 1757, by Otto van Thol, followed possibly by another one in 1759, by one J.J. Dusterhoop. In her preface to her own adaptation, Van Meerten reminisced about her own childhood:
So unforgettable was the impression that reading Mrs. Le Prince de Beaumont’s
Magasin des enfants made on me. It is well-known that in the time in which it was
published, there were few good children’s books available. No wonder then that all children devoured this Magasin, that was so entirely suited to them.11
The hyperbolic terms Van Meerten-Schilperoort used – ‘unforgettable’, ‘all children’, ‘devoured’ – reflect the intensity of this decades-old reading experience. However, as she went on to explain, Beaumont’s works had by the early nineteenth century fallen out of favour with readers. Elaborating on Van Meerten’s preface, the anonymous reviewer of her translation in the Vaderlandse Letteroefeningen wrote that:
The little work, that provided the basis, and more than a basis, for the present work, is well enough known and held in high esteem; it naturally kept its place in the book collections of many a now elderly Lady, and when it first saw the light, in our language too, it was a useful and agreeable reader for our future women of the higher and civilized bourgeoisie, and remained so for many years. It has since been replaced by a number of other, and among them perhaps even better, writings for young people; despite this, we often encounter among many an honest housewife the memory of those same things in
11 ‘Zoo onvergetelijk was mij immer de indruk, welke op mij maakte de lezing van het Magazijn der kinderen door
Mev. Le Prince de Beaumont. Het is bekend dat in dien tijd, in welke dit werkje verscheen, de vooraad van goede kinderboekjes nog zeer gering was. Geen wonder dus dat alle kinderen dit Magazijn, hetwelk zo geheel voor hen geschikt was en door hen verstaan werd, als verslonden’. A.B. van Meerten, Magazijn voor kinderen, The Hague, Erve J. Thierrij en C. Mensing en zoon, 1819, xviii.
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which their own daughters are now being instructed, civilized and formed, of which they had once read, with unspeakable pleasure, in their BONNE.12
But after all this praise, both the reviewer and Van Meerten herself concluded that Beaumont’s work had unfortunately become out-of-date, and needed to be modernized. Van Meerten’s version presented a thorough, even draconian revision of Beaumont’s original text, that on occasion became entirely unrecognizable under her pen. Many of the changes she made seemed inspired by previous criticisms directed at Beaumont’s works. Thus, Van Meerten countered the accusations of French frivolousness, specifically Beaumont’s hopping from one subject to the next, by thoroughly reorganizing the subject matter into a more logical order and by dividing chapters into clearly marked categories: one chapter for biblical stories, one for natural history, etc. Within each section, she then followed a systematic order, with clear subject headings. In the chapters on natural history, for example, she started with an exposition of the six kingdoms into which the natural world was divided, and then worked her way through the taxonomic ranks of biology, starting with the highest species, i.e. human beings, down to the more intelligent mammals, and so forth. In addition, Van Meerten chose to considerably expand the sections on natural history and to remove the sections on geography. Perhaps following Mme de Genlis’ example, she also had her young pupils visit a number of factories and learn the rudiments of modern technology. Finally, abandoning the semi-allegorical names Beaumont had given her pupils, Van Meerten provided them with new names that, just as Beaumont had done, in some instances referred to pupils she had herself once taught. The complete list of characters includes the widow Belcour, i.e. the governess; Constance d’Erneville, aged 14; Eleonore Lichtfield, also aged 14; Dorothea Berger, aged 13; Sophia du Verney, aged 11; Charlotte de Wit, aged 10; Christina Eldenberg, aged 9; Annette Mulder, aged 8; Maria Williams, aged 6; and Frederika Bekker, aged 5. Mademoiselle Bonne became the venerable widow Mevrouw Belcour, a character with whom – despite Van Meerten’s own denials – she clearly identified, to the extent that at least one modern critic has called her Van Meerten’s ‘alter ego’.13 Most shockingly perhaps to modern readers, Van Meerten responded to criticism
12 ‘Het werkje, dat bij het tegenwoordige ten grondslag, en meer dan ten grondslag ligt, is genoegzaam bekend en
in hooge achting; het hield toch natuurlijk zijne plaats in de boekverzameling van menige nu reeds bejaarde Dame, en toen het, in onze taal ook, in het licht kwam, was het het nuttig en aangenaam leesboek voor onze aankomende meisjes in den hoogeren en beschaafden burgerstand, en bleef dit jaren aaneen. Het is sinds door een aantal andere, en daaronder misschien zelfs betere, geschriften voor de jeugd verdrongen; evenwel troffen wij bij menige brave huismoeder niet zelden de herinnering aan, dat zij hetzelfde, waarmede hare meisjes nu werden onderrigt, beschaafd en gevormd, even goed en met onuitsprekelijk genoegen in hare bonne gelezen had.’Vaderlandsche
Letteroefeningen, 1819, 494.
13 M. van Essen, ‘Anna Barbara van Meerten-Schilperoort (1778-1854): Feminist Pioneer?’, Revue belge de
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of the fairy tales by removing many of them, including Beaumont’s most famous tale of all, ‘La Belle et la Bête’. Perhaps in her defense, I should add that Van Meerten often did find interesting replacements for the tales she omitted, including texts by authors such as Mme de Genlis, the Dutch female author Fenna Mastenbroek, the French dramatist Jean-Nicolas Bouilly and the German educationalist Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, who had previously been translated into English by Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Mary Yonge.
But despite these considerable changes, some of the original spirit of Beaumont’s work did remain in Van Meerten’s adaptation, notably in her guiding ideal of a serious form of women’s education. Thus, right after completing her translation, Van Meerten started editing the only women’s journal published in these decades, Penelope, thereby echoing Beaumont’s own excursions into journalism. Van Meerten defended, among other causes, sex education for women, and published a physics textbook for girls. She went on to make a name for herself in the early women’s movement, not only as school director and author, but also as a social worker, especially through her work in favour of prisoners, with whom she often spent time reading morally uplifting works. One cannot but wonder, indeed, whether Beaumont’s
Magasins were among those works read by prisoners in nineteenth-century Holland? As
feminist historian Mineke van Essen has written, ‘Van Meerten-Schilperoort’s philanthropic work paved the way for late nineteenth-century social care as a female profession,’14 and
historians of Dutch feminism need to take into account the shaping role of Beaumont’s works during the early years of Van Meerten’s long and distinguished career.
Since time is short, I can do no more than mention a second feminist translator of Beaumont, namely Agatha, the pseudonym of Reinoudina de Goeje. Like Van Meerten, Agatha distinguished herself both as a children’s book author, but also as an activist in the women’s movement. Most recently, scholars have focused on her role as author of the feminist periodical
Ons Streven.15 But Agatha was also a fervent translator of Beaumont’s works, specifically her ‘Belle et la Bête, of which she produced no less than three different translations, that are both visually and materially of considerable interest.16 For those who would like to know more, I would direct you to the virtual exhibition the Dutch national library has put together of Dutch ‘Beauty and the Beast’ adaptations.17
14 M. van Essen, ‘Anna Barbara van Meerten-Schilperoort (1778-1853)’.
15 L. Jensen, ‘Bij uitsluiting voor de vrouwelijke sekse geschikt’: vrouwentijdschriften en journalistes in Nederland
in de achttiende en negentiende eeuw, Hilversum, Verloren, 2001.
16 D. Hoogenboezem, ‘Du salon littéraire à la chambre d’enfant. Réécritures des contes de fées français aux
Pays-Bas’, Féeries 8 (2011), 91-115.
17 KB-National Library, ‘Beauty and the Beast’:
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I hope to have shown, by focusing on the Dutch Republic as a representative case study, that if we wish to fully understand the European impact of Leprince de Beaumont, we will need to combine book history or quantitative research with qualitative research focusing on specific readers’ reactions to her texts. The findings I have presented here suggest that, if we are really to understand Beaumont’s works, we will need to consider them as part of a larger literary system, encompassing both networks of intellectual women, and a broader corpus of moral-pedagogical works and authors, of which she is surely one of the most remarkable representatives.
Alicia C. Montoya (Radboud University, Nijmegen)
Bella en de beer / Agatha. – Amsterdam, Robbers, [1893] (Agatha's pantomime prentenboeken 4), call number Ki
6440; Ant. L. De Rop, 't Is lang geleden : keur van tooversprookjes en gedichtjes, Amsterdam, Jacs. G. Robbers, [1893], call number Ki 2255; and Tine van Berken, Bella en de Beer, Amsterdam, H.J.W. Becht, [c. 1900], call number BJ 02262.
