Introducing Swedenborg

by Peter Ackroyd

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG is acknowledged today as one of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century and a pioneering figure in the history of Western thought. Described by Jorge Luis Borges as the most extraordinary man in recorded history, Swedenborg’s book Heaven and Hell has had a direct influence on William Blake, Honoré de Balzac, Gerard de Nerval, W B Yeats, S T Coleridge, Fyodor Dostoevsky, C G Jung and many others, and his theory of correspondences is rightly understood as one of the defining influences on Romantic and Symbolist thought. More recently, through the work of Czesław Miłosz, Italo Calvino, A S Byatt and Iain Sinclair, we see his name re-emerge in relation to ‘pyschogeography’, ‘historical realism’ and ‘magical realism’. This brief pocket biography, by award-winning author and biographer Peter Ackroyd, is the perfect introduction to Swedenborg and the first in a series of accessible introductory pocket books.

PETER ACKROYD is a broadcaster, essayist and one of the UK’s foremost biographers and novelists. He has written nearly 40 works of non-fiction, including studies on William Blake, T S Eliot and Isaac Newton, and nearly 20 works of fiction. Among his many awards and honours are the Guardian Fiction Prize (1985), the Whitbread Biography Award (1984) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1998). He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and was awarded a CBE in 2003.

94 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Peter Ackroyd CBE is an English novelist and biographer with a particular interest in the history and culture of London.

Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.

Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.

Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.

Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.

Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.

His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.

From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.

Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.

In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.

Reviews

[Oliver Goddard]

A brief, interesting primer. They don’t make cranks like this anymore — and it’s our loss.

[Dante]

interesting enough (for the bus journey home)

[Niamh · Rating 5 out of 5]

At 60 pages long this one is absolutely borderline for inclusion on Goodreads, I'm sorry, but indulge me. I thought this was a charming introduction to Swedenborg, more biographical than I had bargained for, but Ackroyd is an ideal biographer, and I have to say he reined in his more self-indulgent tendencies admirably in this text. Ackroyd is obviously very interested in Swedenborg's life in London, where he found a community of like-minded dissenters and occultists much more readily than in his native Sweden. He also communicates the key tenets of his philosophy well and concisely, most importantly the idea of correspondences, in which every physical thing has its direct and material counterpart in the spiritual world. I found much that I liked in Swedenborg's spirituality: his rejection of the idea of original sin; the idea that we are not placed into Heaven or Hell by a spiritual judge, but gravitate towards each place according to our own thoughts; and the materiality of all his spirituality - Heaven is not beyond the realm of human comprehension, but a real physical place, like a city, or sometimes a human body. He also rejected the idea that celibacy was necessarily holier than sexuality, and thought women and men should be equal partners in marriage. Bought this book for a niche personal research project and might have accidentally got Swedenborg pilled?

[Chris Browning · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve just been to an extraordinary performance by Folklore Tapes of music they improvised at Swedenborg House last year. The highlight was definitely the society’s librarian who gave three impassioned and fascinating talks between the music about Swedenborg himself, someone I had only been vaguely aware of until today. I bought this at the event - alongside Gary Lachman’s volume - and it’s a pretty great historical introduction to the man with a lot of important context. I suspect Lachman will be more esoteric, so it’s nice to have a more historical volume as a companion. An excellent introduction to a very complex figure

[Shaun Rylands · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have finished the Introduction to Emanuel Swedenborg by Peter Ackroyd. I have developed a fascination for this 18th century Christian mystic who has, through the occult maxim of correspondences, influenced writers such as WB Yeats, ST Coleridge, Sheridan Le Fanu and William Blake. What is natural cannot in any sense come into being without a cause prior to itself. Its cause exists in that which is spiritual.

[Laurie Mercer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and great bio. Down one star as it's expensive for the wordcount.

[Alanseinfeld · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is just as it says on the cover! A good introduction leading to the works of Swedenborg.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ramblings of a weapons grade bampot. 3 stars because Ackroyd never breaks out of character.

[Pavel · Rating 2 out of 5]

The chances of ever coming across this book in real life are close to zero — but thanks to the Swedenborg Center in London for this!