................................
THE TEAM
CONTACT
It may be said that Herculano’s formative years do not follow the usual pattern of the Portuguese social elite of his time. He was born in 1810 in Lisbon. Upon learning to read with his father, he attended Colégio dos Oratorianos [Congregation of the Oratory] when he was between 10 and 15 years of age and then, most likely in 1825-26, he attended Academia Real de Marinha [the Royal Naval Academy], where he studied mathematics. His plan to enter Universidade de Coimbra [University of Coimbra] did not materialise due to family circumstances: his father became blind in 1827 (“Autobiografia”, 25 [“Autobiography”]). Such misfortune left the family in straitened circumstances, which most probably influenced Herculano’s choice of the commercial instruction offered by the Aula do Comércio [Commerce Lectures]. The same misfortune may also have been the reason why Herculano attended the diplomatic course in Torre do Tombo [National Archives at Torre do Tombo] between 1830 and 1831, which was then a prerequisite for professions such as the archivist and notary. In this latter course, Herculano acquired knowledge and techniques that proved fundamental to his later intellectual work. (Nemésio, A mocidade de Herculano, 107-109; 145, 187-200; 335-342). Far more than the formal instruction obtained in those different institutions, Herculano’s intellectual and aesthetic knowledge was marked by some extent of self-instruction, in so far as it was mediated by the contact with the literary world he had managed to establish in his early years. In a way that his biographers have never been able to fully explain, Herculano had already managed to befriend relevant figures of Lisbon’s cultural milieu before he had turned 18. He was part of the bohemian literary circle around the poet and theatre man Francisco de Paula Cardoso, a nobleman who went by the name of Morgado de Assentiz. Within that circle, he met personalities such as António Feliciano de Castilho, who along with Herculano himself and Almeida Garrett, became a pivotal figure in the so-called first generation of Portuguese romantic writers. Herculano also enjoyed the patronage of veteran poet Leonor de Almeida Portugal, the Marquesa de Alorna [Marchioness of Alorna], who he once likened to Germaine de Staël for her Germanophile inclinations and for the literary circle that gathered around her (“D. Leonor de Almeida”, 123).
Under the aegis of these and other figures, Herculano matured with the assistance of eclectic readings, the traces of which can be discerned in the texts he wrote or translated in the 1830s. In addition to several of the main authors of the classic and Christian canons, and Renaissance writers such as Ariosto, Tasso, and Camões, he was influenced by the historical fiction of Walter Scott, as well as by the Catholic-liberal essays of François-René de Chateaubriand and Hughes de Lammenais.
