The world familiar to resident Europeans in the early nineteenth century differed from the one we know today in ways it is easy to lose sight of. The street names after all remain the same and many of the buildings. But we can easily forget that in Kierkegaard's time in the whole world only Paris, London, and Berlin had populations in excess of one million. Copenhagen was even then, by comparison, a small city of less than 150,000, and Denmark itself, or at least that part of it that had a majority of native Danish-speakers, numbered less than a million. In the south of Jutland (Jylland) there was a blend of Danishand German-speakers in Schleswig (Slesvig), and Holstein (Holsten) was entirely German-speaking. These two ‘duchies’ were to generate acute political problems and turmoil towards the middle of the nineteenth century.

Formerly almost exclusively agrarian in its economy, and with whatever power not invested in the absolute monarch in the hands of landowners, during the eighteenth century Denmark prospered greatly as a trading nation, largely helped by an alliance of ‘armed neutrality’ with Russia and Sweden, later also with Prussia, offering such a strategically situated maritime state great opportunities. Apart from carrying trade to the belligerents in a time of almost incessant war, Denmark also acquired colonies in India and the West Indies, and although it was the first country to banish slave-trading, that too – from a base in Ghana – was among the many sources of its new prosperity.