In josiah thompson's biography, Kierkegaard, with the manuscript of Postscript now off his hands and four years of uninterrupted writing behind him, was at loose ends. With nothing to sustain the momentum generated by the break with Regine he looked up from his desk and, fatefully, his eye fell upon a slim volume, just recently published, of literary criticism. Confirming that ‘[i]dleness is a dangerous condition for small boys and writers’, that idle glance led to the notorious Corsair affair. ‘Just as he had teased bigger boys twenty years earlier in the school playground’, the incorrigible polemicist and inveterate tease now began to bait that satiric weekly.

Certainly Kierkegaard's polemical instincts had not deserted him, but there was more to his reaction to what he read on that occasion than just the desire to make trouble. Or, better, there was more to the desire to make trouble than a mere compulsion to tease. The result, by design it seems, was to begin a new chapter of self-induced torment with which, now that Regine had dropped into the background, to keep his mind and pen busy – though from now on largely in the privacy of his journals. For although the exchange was brief, its effect was long-lasting and the pillorying which Kierkegaard provoked from The Corsair made him a social outsider on a scale that he could scarcely have anticipated. It was to fix his image in the minds of generations to come and, for himself, it ushered in a period of self-questioning and, the trait he had always scorned in others, indecision.