(Multatuli, Volledige werken X, 1950-1995, p. 55)
Multatuli is Latin for ‘I suffered much’, or ‘I endured much’. It was under this pseudonym that Eduard Douwes Dekker wrote the novel that – when it was published in May 1860 – sent a “shiver” through the Netherlands. Max Havelaar, of de koffieveilingen der Nederlandse Handel-Maatschappij (#first translated into English in 1868 as Max Havelaar, or the coffee auctions of the Dutch Trading Company) was written, incredibly, in just six weeks in a cheap hotel room in Brussels, Belgium. Douwes Dekker was then forty years old, poor, jobless and still unknown as a writer. Why had he suffered much? This question will be answered in the following pages, in which you will learn more about Multatuli’s rather tumultuous life and work.
Eduard Douwes Dekker at the age of Max Havelaar (Multatuli Museum, Amsterdam).
Eduard Douwes Dekker was born on 2 March 1820, in Amsterdam, as the fourth of five children. He came from a reasonably well-off, middle-class family. His father, Engel Douwes Dekker, was a Dutch sea-captain and seldom home for long. Douwes Dekker was brought up by his mother, Sietske Eeltjes Klein, a devout Protestant woman who lived entirely for and through her children. She meant a great deal to Eduard during his early youth and he was said to have inherited his mother’s “emotional frailty and nervousness”. Later in his life, in the eyes of many, these traits formed the short-tempered, recalcitrant yet soft-hearted person that Douwes Dekker was.
Max Havelaar contains a self-portrait of alter ego Havelaar which illustrates this character:
(Max Havelaar, of De Koffieveilingen der Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappij,
ed. Annemarie Kets-Vree, 1998, p.114)
The house where Multatuli was born, in Amsterdam (Multatuli Museum, Amsterdam).
When he was twelve, Douwes Dekker studied at the Latin School in Amsterdam, planning to become a minister of the church like his elder brother Pieter. However, he left his studies after three years for unknown reasons, and went to work in a textile company. At the age of eighteen, on 23 September 1838, he went to the Dutch East Indies, on his father’s ship Dorothea, and with his brother Jan as a second mate.Click >here to continue.
