background to the story before us. Grundtvig himself had died in 1872, but the Grundtvigians were still a united and powerful body.
The National-Liberals and the Friends of the Peasants were no longer organized parties, but they had left their mark on the minds of the People, whose keen interest in politics was kept alive by the grave dangers that loomed on the constitutional horizon. By the revision of the Constitution in 1866 their liberties were already and somewhat curtailed, and a still more serious incursion on them (to which reference is made in Mr Pontoppidan's later story, "The Promised Land," a sequel to "Emanuel") was soon to be made by the decreeing of provisionary Budgets by the King without the consent of the Rigsdag.
Veilby and Skibberup have their prototypes in two picturesque and remote villages on the Roeskilde Fjord in North Sjoelland. Here Henrik Pontoppidan lived for years, and here he learnt to know the Peasants whom he describes so charmingly, not only in "Emanuel" and "The Promised Land," but also in his volumes of short stories, "Village Pictures," and "From the Cottages." Here, too, the material for the illustrations in this volume and "The Promised Land" was collected.
April 1896.
