Pelle the Conqueror

Pelle the Conqueror

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Title: Pelle the Conqueror, Complete
Author: Martin Anderson Nexo
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PELLE THE CONQUEROR
Contents:
I.--BOYHOOD. Translated by Jessie Muir.
II.--APPRENTICESHIP. Translated by Bernard Miall.
III.--THE GREAT STRUGGLE. Translated by Bernard Miall.
IV.--DAYBREAK. Translated by Jessie Muir.

PELLE THE CONQUEROR, Complete
BY MARTIN ANDERSON NEXO
TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH BY JESSE MUIR AND
BERNARD MIALL

NOTE

When the first part of "Pelle Erobreren" (Pelle the Conqueror) appeared
in 1906, its author, Martin Andersen Nexo, was practically unknown
even in his native country, save to a few literary people who knew that
he had written some volumes of stories and a book full of sunshiny
reminiscences from Spain. And even now, after his great success with
"Pelle," very little is known about the writer. He was born in 1869 in
one of the poorest quarters of Copenhagen, but spent his boyhood in his
beloved island Bornholm, in the Baltic, in or near the town, Nexo, from
which his final name is derived. There, too, he was a shoemaker's
apprentice, like Pelle in the second part of the book, which resembles
many great novels in being largely autobiographical. Later, he gained
his livelihood as a bricklayer, until he somehow managed to get to one
of the most renowned of our "people's high-schools," where he studied
so effectually that he was enabled to become a teacher, first at a
provincial school, and later in Copenhagen.
"Pelle" consists of four parts, each, except perhaps the last, a complete
story in itself. First we have the open-air life of the boy in country
surroundings in Bornholm; then the lad's apprenticeship in a small
provincial town not yet invaded by modern industrialism and still
innocent of socialism; next the youth's struggles in Copenhagen against
employers and authorities; and last the man's final victory in laying the
foundation of a garden-city for the benefit of his fellow-workers. The
background everywhere is the rapid growth of the labor movement; but
social problems are never obtruded, except, again, in the last part, and
the purely human interest is always kept well before the reader's eye
through variety of situation and vividness of characterization. The great
charm of the book seems to me to lie in the fact that the writer knows
the poor from within; he has not studied them as an outsider may, but
has lived with them and felt with them, at once a participant and a
keen-eyed spectator. He is no sentimentalist, and so rich is his
imagination that he passes on rapidly from one scene to the next,
sketching often in a few pages what another novelist would be content
to work out into long chapters or whole volumes. His sympathy is of
the widest, and he makes us see tragedies behind the little comedies,
and comedies behind the little tragedies, of the seemingly sordid lives
of the working people whom he loves. "Pelle" has conquered the hearts

of the reading public of Denmark; there is that in the book which
should conquer also the hearts of a wider public than that of the little
country in which its author was born.
OTTO JESPERSEN, Professor of English in the University of
Copenhagen.
GENTOFTE, COPENHAGEN. April, 1913.

Pelle the Conqueror

I. BOYHOOD

I
It was dawn on the first of May, 1877. From the sea the mist came
sweeping in, in a gray trail that lay heavily on the water. Here and there
there was a movement in it; it