The Era of Academics
 

Nineteenth-century Norway was a good time to be an academic – if you were a man that is. While some university-educated men like the character of Jørgen Tesman became professors, many other academically trained men occupied high positions in the government, as civil servants. Some, like Judge Brack, became judges, others became ministers. Overall, university-level education had a lot of political, social, and cultural value. As the era of the nobility declined, academics replaced aristocrats as new ruling elite.

 

New methods, new disciplines

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Jørgen Tesman, we know, works research may sound boring, but is it, really? His attention to archives and source texts is actually a relatively new approach to history at this time. The idea that you should use primary archival sources was popularized by Leopold von Ranke in 1830s-ish. So in a sense, Tesman is trying out a new method. Cultural history also was a fairly new topic of research during this time, and academic interest in domestic industries​ would be especially unusual. He is essentially studying and documenting women's work, primarily with textiles: Cloth, spinning, dyeing, sewing – handiwork of the sort that his dying Aunt Rina does so well.

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Eilert Lovborg's research, on the other hand, does sound radical and groundbreaking - a theory of dreams and imagination! Sounds  groundbreaking - at least for the time. The study of dreams, around this time, had just begun to emerge as a specialised field of study with the work of scholars like Alfred Maury  and Hervey de Saint Denis, who both wrote dreams (their own and other people's). Remarkably, Eilert's research ambitions pre-date the work of Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic theories would soon revolutionalize our understanding of dreams, the unconscious and the imagination.​​

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Sources: Myhre, Jan Eivind. "Academics as the ruling elite in 19th century Norway." Historical Social Research (2008): 21-41.​