The Bourgeois

Johan Hjerpe was born in Stockholm in 1765 and died sixty years later. The son of a poor Moravian master tailor, he eventually became a member of the evangelical brotherhood, the Moravian brethren.

In his youth, Johan Hjerpe served in the linen shop of the wholesaler Anders Kjellstedt in the Old Town. Like others he started at the bottom but did better than most, rising in time above his humble beginnings. An industrious and decent man, in 1801 he eventually acquired a small workshop for the production of silk thread and camel hair, by which time he was already thirty-five years old. Alone or with an employee, he ran his little workshop for many years before leaving the capital and moving to the country.

In the parish of Synnerby in Skaraborg county, in south-western Sweden, there is an estate called Myran. It was already quite a large estate when Hjerpe purchased it in the early 1820s. Here he spent the last years of his life, as a well-to-do resident of advancing years. The parish register describes him as a fabriqueur who had migrated from the capital.

Ten years before he moved there, Hjerpe had visited Synnerby in the company of a former employer, his good friend Anders Kjellstedt. Presumably planning the purchase far in advance, the site was chosen with care, for his father had once served there as a farm-hand. Unfortunately, Johan fell ill after only five years in his new home and died of a ‘raging fever’ at the age of sixty years and five months. Fortunately, he left behind no wife to mourn him and made no children fatherless, for he had never married and had fathered no offspring. He left only inanimate objects – among them, a large collection of books and several bundles of manuscripts written in his own hand.

These inanimate objects bring the man to life. It is Johan Hjerpe's unpublished literary remains that make him interesting, for they open up his world of ideas. He was not just anyone, he was a man of the people and he did not belong to the tiny aristocracy that loved to put its thoughts on paper and which succeeded in attracting the interest of posterity.