Explore "Jenny Lind the Artist" by Henry Scott Holland on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"A Child of the Drama"-so we have named her-and not without reason; for it was within the shelter of the Royal Theatre at Stockholm that she first found the comfortable warmth of a steady and a tender home, in which her child-heart, with its intense affections, could freely and candidly expand. She was hardly ten years old when she came under the guardianship of the Royal Theatre; and throughout those nine early years, she was a forlorn little pilgrim, often passed about through the hands of strangers, and pitifully deprived of that deep security which a fixed and stable home-life inbreeds in us through its traditional sanctities and immemorial kindnesses.
Her birth, which took place in the parish of St. Clara, in Stockholm, on October 6th, 1820, found both her parents somewhat under difficulties. Her father, Niclas Jonas Lind, son of a lace-manufacturer, seems to have been able to do little or nothing towards providing a home for mother and child. He was very young, only twenty-two years old; he had, through lack of energy, failed to continue his father's business, and at this time, kept the ledgers at a private merchant's house; in virtue of which office he is entered as "Accountant" in the church register at the baptism of his little daughter, who was christened, on the day after her birth, with the name "Johanna Maria."