Fan Frenzy

Ardent opera buffs descend like locusts on Jenny Lind’s hotel, eager for a memento.

1847

Queen Victoria 1837-1901

Introduction

In a letter to Douglas Jerrold, dated Paris, February 14th, 1847, Charles Dickens related an anecdote about the opera singer Jenny Lind (1820-1887), popularly known as the Swedish Nightingale. Her celebrity throughout Europe bordered on the hysterical, as Dickens shows.

by Charles Dickens 1812-1870

I AM somehow reminded of a good story I heard the other night from a man who was a witness of it and an actor in it. At a certain German town last autumn there was a tremendous furore about Jenny Lind,* who, after driving the whole place mad, left it, on her travels, early one morning.

The moment her carriage was outside the gates, a party of rampant students who had escorted it rushed back to the inn, demanded to be shown to her bedroom, swept like a whirlwind upstairs into the room indicated to them, tore up the sheets, and wore them in strips as decorations.

An hour or two afterwards a bald old gentleman of amiable appearance, an Englishman, who was staying in the hotel, came to breakfast at the table d’hôte, and was observed to be much disturbed in his mind, and to show great terror whenever a student came near him.

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Johanna Maria ‘Jenny’ Lind (1820-1887). Lind settled in England in 1855, a country she had come to know and love as a friend of Felix Mendelssohn. She became a favoured performer of his music, as well as an acclaimed interpreter of the operas of Mozart, Bellini, Schumann and Dickens’s friend Meyerbeer. In 1882 she was appointed professor of singing at the Royal College of Music in London.

Précis

In 1847, Charles Dickens recounted an anecdote about a recent visit of opera singer Jenny Lind to Germany. It seems that after she left her hotel, besotted student admirers sought out her room in order to grab mementos of her visit, and in doing so badly scared a harmless old English gentleman staying at the same establishment.

Sevens

Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.

Where did the events described by Charles Dickens take place?

Suggestion

In the hotel of an German town.

Jigsaws

Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.

A man told Charles Dickens a story about Jenny Lind. The man was an eyewitness. Dickens told the story to Douglas Jerrold.

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