he was now in Providence with a merchant named James C. Richmond,
who had attempted, thus far without success, to find him a position. Like
thousands of other hopeful immigrants, Niels Andreas had been compelled
to realize that the country that was supposed to be flowing with milk and
honeywaspopulatedwithrestlesslybusyfortunehunterswhodidnotkeep
theirword butcheerfully bluffedtheir waythroughas bestthey could.The
lowself-esteemoftheletter’sauthorwasreflectedinhishandwriting,which
wasneat,almostelegant,butwaswithoutanypersonalstamp;onlywhenhe
signshimself“Yourdevotedson,N.A.Kierkegaard,”doeshishandwriting
become as firm as that of his father.
In his next letter, dated February 26 and addressed to Peter Christian,
who had informed himof Nicoline Christine’sdeath,Niels Andreas related
that he had left Providence and was again in Boston. He had still not been
successful in “finding employment in my field.” Indeed, if he could only
find a position in “a good office,” he would work without pay. It is not
surprisingthathefoundeverythingintheNewWorldtobeveryexpensive.
America, he declared quite touchingly, is “home to every artisan, every
ordinary working man, and every segment of society excepting merchants
without money and office workers without special fluency in modern lan-
guages.”HewhiledawayhismanyidlehoursstudyingEnglish,andhemade
progress:HehadalreadybeentakenforanAmericanacoupleoftimes.And
he had also begun to learn Spanish for business use. He wanted to keep up
his native tongue, however, and he therefore hoped that his letter could
serve as the start of a “lively correspondence” with Peter Christian, who
must absolutely correct him whenever he “might make mistakes, whether
inlanguage or instyle.” IfPeter Christian would ask SørenAabye todo the
same, it would make Niels Andreas very happy: “He has a good head and
has made better use of his talents than I have made of mine thus far.”
Shortly after this first letter arrived Peter Christian cobbled together a
letter based on his father’s dictation. The letter was mailed off on March 23
and has since been lost, as has Peter Christian’s own letter of May 6, but
from a short summary of its contents in Peter Christian’s diary we can con-
clude that he not only expressed criticis mof the usefulness of his younger
brother’s “linguistic and historical studies, et cetera,” but that he also ex-
pressed “at length” his doubts regarding the risky business schemes his
brother had hatched. Niels Andreas wanted to import drapery goods to
Boston and with this in mind he had suggested to his brother-in-law Johan
Christian Lund that they establish transatlantic cooperation. The young
wholesaledealerLundfoundthisidea soattractivethatdespitePeterChris-
tian’s reservations he had started shipping goods fro mCopenhagen to Bos-
ton, where Niels Andreas was to serve as a distributor.42 {1813–1834}