Jacob van Lennep's lifetime (1802-1868) corresponds to a period when the Northern Netherlands was very much not the happening place in European culture. Britain, Germany, France, and even the Southern Netherlands (Belgium from the 1830s on) were modernising, industrialising, philosophising, and producing internationally-relevant writers, painters, musicians and scientists by the bucketful, whilst the Northern Netherlands was still stuck deep in the post-Napoleonic economic dip, and had trouble seeing beyond the tip of its own perfectly-formed seventeenth-century nose. There's really only one mid-19th-century Dutch writer who has had any long-term influence in the wider world, and that's Multatuli (E Douwes Dekker), the whistle-blower of Dutch colonialism.

Van Lennep was versatile, talented, witty, privileged, and above all provided with apparently inexhaustible reserves of energy, and his contemporaries — even those who didn't like him — treated him as one of the leading Dutch literary figures of the age, but his vast body of prose fiction, non-fiction, verse and stage-work was almost entirely taken up with a Romantic/antiquarian, Walter-Scott-like interest in Dutch history that proved to be of little interest to later generations of readers. He also shared Scott's rather conservative (absolutist, anti-Catholic) political attitudes, quite out of tune with the spirit of 1848.

But that doesn't stop him from being an interesting figure from a period of Dutch history we don't often hear much about, apart from the big constitutional questions. Mathijsen has obviously had plenty of experience teaching 19th century literature to students who don't know their Alberdingk Thijm from their Thorbecke, so she tactfully and efficiently fills us in on the historical background as she goes along, and takes care to situate van Lennep within that background. In fact, the book often comes close to turning into a cultural history of early to mid 19th-century Amsterdam, which I found fascinating, since so much of it was stuff I only knew about very sketchily.

Despite his huge output of published work, what's probably van Lennep's most-read work nowadays is, ironically enough, a private diary he never intended for publication, describing a walking-tour of the Netherlands he took with another privileged Leiden student in the summer vacation of 1823, getting to know the country in which both of them expected to take up official posts later on. That diary is very revealing in the way it shows the apparent contradiction in van Lennep's character between his serious, socially-concerned side and his drinking, gambling and womanising. Oddly-enough, as he got older, it seems to have been the serious side that became less important: the wildness became more discreet, but it never went away. Even in his sixties he was still fathering illegitimate children, and no-one ever seems to have painted him without giving him a mischievous twinkle in the eye.

Mathijsen has fun disentangling some of this misbehaviour, which, needless to say, is the only bit of van Lennep's life that is not vastly over-documented in the family archives. The most interesting puzzle is Geertruijda Elisabeth Tulle, born in 1822 (when Jacob was 19), but only legally acknowledged as his daughter in 1855. The circumstances suggest that her real mother must have been someone out of Jacob's own social circle, the working-class woman who registered her birth being paid to act as foster-mother. Mathijsen hazards a couple of guesses as to who it might have been (entertainingly, almost all the women in van Lennep's life at this point were called Henriette...), but concludes, regretfully, that there simply isn't enough evidence to be sure.

Altogether, a very interesting and engaging biography of someone who did quite a few important things in his life — not only preparing the first comprehensive modern edition of Vondel, but providing Amsterdam with numerous statues and a safe, clean water supply, and shepherding the two prickliest pseudonymous writers of the age, Multatuli and De Schoolmeester, into print for the first time. Not that Multatuli thanked him for it: there was a long period of acrimony and law-suits over the first edition of Max Havelaar, in which Multatuli has tended to get the last word, leaving van Lennep with the reputation of the scoundrel exploiting the poor unknown. Mathijsen treats Multatuli's accusations of copyright theft as paranoia and misunderstanding, but she does concede that van Lennep probably went too far in "taming" the book for publication. Quite apart from his habitual conservative repugnance at the whole idea of a protest novel, he had sons and sons-in-law working in Indonesia, and many of his close friends were involved in the colonial trade. ( )