Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love

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(b Stockholm, Nov 28, 1793; d Bremen, Sept 26, 1866). Swedish author, pedagogue, journalist, and composer. After an education administered mainly by private tutors, Almqvist attended university in Uppsala and graduated in 1816. He then took a position as a government clerk in Stockholm, where he engaged in youthful and idealistic movements that worshiped Gothic ideals, the early German romanticism, and Swedenborg’s teachings. He was soon the leading spirit in these circles, and with his visionary religiosity he gained almost prophet-like status among them. In an attempt to realize his ideals, from 1823 to 1824 he lived as a farmer in the remote Wermland but soon returned to Stockholm where in 1827 he became a teacher at the Military Academy of Karlberg; he took an additional teaching post in 1829 at the recently founded experimental college Nya Elementarskolan. There he served as headmaster from 1829 to 1841 and wrote a dozen textbooks on different subjects from linguistics to mathematics....