4.4 Marriage
59
Fig. 4.8 The layout of their home, as Kapteyn, who imagined it and sent it to his fiancée
Elise Kalshoven with a letter to her dated January 24, 1879. Reprinted from the Love
Letters
not very far from his own field of research; his complaint that he knew too
little about it seems to indicate an unjustified lack of self-confidence.
Kapteyn also asked his fiancée to write in English. Apparently he was less
familiar with that language. At the boarding school in Barneveld French was
spoken at the dinner table and German was in that period the lingua franca of
science; until after the turn of the century Kapteyn himself published mainly
in German. He even described Elise Kalshoven as half-English. From the letter of February 23, 1879: ‘I was actually foolish enough to start an English
epistle. What a foolishness. What are people supposed to think of me: English
housekeeping, English clothes and curtains, English sisters, an half-English
wife and now English letters as the crown to my work?’ His sister Albertina
Maria (‘Bertamie’) lived in England and their intended furnishing of their
house was apparently English. Later, Kapteyn was one of the first scientists
to show an Anglo-Saxon orientation and publish in English, which was still
unusual in the Netherlands at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Another theme is the search for housing for after they would marry. The
letters contain an extensive inventory of the number of rooms they would need
(see Fig. 4.8). He starts with ten, but brings it back to five or six (two guestrooms
59
Fig. 4.8 The layout of their home, as Kapteyn, who imagined it and sent it to his fiancée
Elise Kalshoven with a letter to her dated January 24, 1879. Reprinted from the Love
Letters
not very far from his own field of research; his complaint that he knew too
little about it seems to indicate an unjustified lack of self-confidence.
Kapteyn also asked his fiancée to write in English. Apparently he was less
familiar with that language. At the boarding school in Barneveld French was
spoken at the dinner table and German was in that period the lingua franca of
science; until after the turn of the century Kapteyn himself published mainly
in German. He even described Elise Kalshoven as half-English. From the letter of February 23, 1879: ‘I was actually foolish enough to start an English
epistle. What a foolishness. What are people supposed to think of me: English
housekeeping, English clothes and curtains, English sisters, an half-English
wife and now English letters as the crown to my work?’ His sister Albertina
Maria (‘Bertamie’) lived in England and their intended furnishing of their
house was apparently English. Later, Kapteyn was one of the first scientists
to show an Anglo-Saxon orientation and publish in English, which was still
unusual in the Netherlands at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Another theme is the search for housing for after they would marry. The
letters contain an extensive inventory of the number of rooms they would need
(see Fig. 4.8). He starts with ten, but brings it back to five or six (two guestrooms