Henrik Ibsen was neither born an artist nor a poet. He was born the son of a patrician in Skien. A poet was something that circumstances made him able to become – and made him actually become.
These circumstances are what we can call the "modern."
The "modern" as a time period is the common term for the development after 1500 with a new worldview, new ways of thinking and a new relationship between people and their surroundings through mining and early industrialization.
In this sense, Norway, and especially Skien, has been modern since the Reformation.
Another important characteristic of modernity is literacy. Because Norway has had such a large proportion of free farmers, Norway has been modern since the introduction of compulsory education in the countryside in 1739.
A third characteristic of modernity is nationalism as a movement and ideology and that the nation-state is the very condition for and core of modern society. The founding of a modern state therefore occurs through convening a constituent assembly and adopting a constitution. This means that Norway has been a modern state since May 17, 1814 – and in this sense Norway has actually been modern earlier than Denmark, which first received its constitution on June 5, 1849.
All these meanings of modernity highlight that Norway and Skien were developed much earlier than most Ibsen scholars assume. Norway was therefore not at all an underdeveloped post-colonial province, as many have claimed, but was in fact, in all important senses of the word, modern long before our so-called "colonial power" Denmark.
Skien was at the forefront of modern development in Norway, and Norway was the industrialized and earliest modern part of Denmark-Norway. At the same time, the patrician class that drove this development after the Reformation was largely based on a "traditional" order.
There were very close and tight family ties between the members. All relationships were based on mutual trust and a common set of unwritten rules for action, benefits and reciprocity. We can therefore well describe the patrician class and its members with pre-modern terms such as "tribe", "clan" or "caste".
It is this dense network and the mentality and way of acting it implied that was challenged after 1828, the year Henrik Ibsen was born.
Although they had started the modern development in the 16th century, the patrician class in Skien had by the 19th century lagged behind the general modernization that was taking place in Norwegian society. An important reason for this was that the children of the city patricians were not covered by the law on general schooling. It was only required by law for children in the countryside and at the larger works. This is the explanation for the fact that Knud Ibsen, unlike his half-brothers Paus, had no higher education and that his son Henrik Ibsen did not receive it either.
The patricians had been central players in the process before and in 1814, but it was not the patrician class that followed up after 1814 and established the modern nation-state of Norway. When Henrik Ibsen did not start at the Latin school in Skien, it was not because of the economy. He could have received a scholarship and a free place. It was because of ideology and tradition. Higher education had no tradition in the strongly traditional patrician class.
1814 therefore meant a collapse of the patrician class, which in turn opened up new opportunities for the civil service class – and now it was this class, and not the patrician class, that
attracted the young and ambitious.
Norway after 1814 has therefore been called the “state of civil servants.” All power was now concentrated in what is referred to as “the thousand academic families” – whereas in the centuries before 1814, power had been concentrated in a correspondingly small number of patrician families.