The Home: a book from the year 1839 sounds like it was written today

The Home is a book about a family in Sweden in the early 1800s. They have like 7 kids. The author is Fredrika Bremer. I got to know her through an exhibit I saw at the Swedish museum in Philadelphia.

I found The Home in the Loserville Library, in Swedish. In the original Swedish, the book is called Hemmet, and that was the copy that I read.

Now, of course many of the happenings and customs of the books are clearly coming from an earlier time. For example, there’s no internet and TV. Instead, every evening, the family gathers round the piano and sings and dances together. That was apparently their only source of entertainment. I do remember that in Little Women, there was also a lot of singing at the piano, but with this Swedish family, it was literally every night. Since when does any family these days gather around the piano and sing and dance every evening? It was all the more jarring, therefore, when in the midst of this old-timey-ness, suddenly a character would say something that sounded like someone today was saying it.

First, this book was written by a woman who never got married, and many of the girl characters also grow up to never get married. There’s quite a few discussions about this, but not aimed at condemning these girls, but instead encouraging them to see different outcomes and possibilities for their lives. During one of these discussions, a character says something like: This is a brand-new time! Women have more opportunities opening up to them constantly!

Isn’t that crazy? We think of 1839 as hopelessly stuffy and backwards, don’t we? We think that women didn’t go to school and didn’t work and had to serve their husbands. But at the time, this author felt completely different.

Second, at one point, a character is complaining how “today, people place value only on themselves, while because of that, they become less and less worthy all the time. All people want to be noticed and famous. Everyone comes forth and shouts loudly, ‘me, me!’ Even women no longer understand the nobility in being incognito; even she wants to scream out ‘me!’ to the world. Hardly anyone sincerely says ‘you’ anymore. While at the same time, it is in ‘you’ that people forget their selfish ‘me’ and find their truest happiness.”

Well, isn’t that hilarious? What would these people say if they traveled to our time and saw all our selfies and influencers and social media “likes” and the pranks people pull just to get noticed online?

Then there was one third thing that stuck out to me, except it wasn’t because it felt true to today, it was because of how wrong this prediction was. The character Petrea says: “Oh, I am so sincerely glad about our time’s industrial direction. It’s going to make it easy for the masses to clothe and feed themselves, and then, the masses will start to live for their souls. Because these ancient words are true: ‘When the necessary needs are satisfied, a person can then turn towards the higher…. Searching after the eternal, a people whose lives it will be to (go towards) the soul and truth. And then the day will come when the angels will sing ‘Peace on Earth!'”

Has any prediction ever been more wrong than that?