An Early Virtual Community Resists Secularization
Wolmar Schildt-Kilpinen's Kansan Lehti 1868-1870
Keywords:
newspapers, the press, 19th-century Finland, public sphere, commoners, modernization, secularizationAbstract
In recent years, a number of new sources such as letters, diaries, autobiographies, and handwritten newspapers have been uncovered in Finland which provide important insights into the writing activities of 19th-century self-educated farmers, crofters, tradesmen, artisans and laborers (see e.g. Makkonen 2002; Nordlund 2005; Salmi Niklander 2006; Kauranen 2007; Kuismin 2013) Few such sources exist from before the 1870s, however, because prior to this time there were very few purposes to which a monolingual Finnish-speaker could put his or her writing skills. Finland had been ruled by Russia since 1809, and although Finnish was the native language of nearly 90 per cent of the rural population and nearly 60 per cent of the urban population, Swedish remained the dominant language of both administration and education, as well as the only official language of Finland until 1863. One of the most important catalysts which motivated Finnish-speakers to write in the years before 1870 was the rise of Finnish-language newspapers, a fact observed repeatedly in autobiographies written by men who had been young adults during this period (Leino-Kaukiainen 1989, 343; Stark 2006). Starting in 1847 with the founding of the newspaper Suometar, Finnish-language newspapers began to print letters written by rural readers, at which point they became a forum for popular discussion and debate.
