This charming example of a rare illustrated book embraces a series of private lectures on astronomy for young women. The lectures were held in Felsőlendva (Oberlimbach), what is now a Goričko castle, close to Lendava, Slovenia, in the vicinity of the Austrian border, by Joseph A. F. Fladung (1776–1868) on the invitation of the countess Julie von Nádasdy.

The book has been preserved with its original blue wrappers with illustrations of the solar system on the front and the sunspots on the rear cover. The title page showcase the monumental castle Goričko from the river, as it looked in the 19th century. The description of the castle is given on the first pages.

The introduction commemorates the countess of Nádasdy, a former student of Fladung, as a patron of the education of this astronomical course girls. The following text is based on the lectures on observing the sky by night, including through a telescope, which the tutor set in the garden. The accompanying illustrations and folding plates at the back depict the star constellations, observed during the lectures, which also discussed the solar system, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturnus, Uranium, cycle of the stars, Milky Way, comets, south skies, star constellations and stars in the night skies during the four seasons.

The picturesque language of the text represents the atmosphere and teaching procedure of this private course on astronomy.

The patron of the lectures was an Austro-Hungarian noblewoman Julie von Nádasdy, born Forrey (1816-1863). According to the introduction in the book Joseph A. F. Fladung was von Nádasdy’s teacher when she was a little girl.

Julie von Nádasdy came from a wealthy noble family, which was moving in circles of literates and artists. She was born in the family castle Săvârşin, in what is today Romania. Her father was an amateur musician and a friend of Ludwig von Beethoven and her brother was a traveler in the Middle East, explorer and an artist Iván von Forray (1817-1852). In 1835, Julie married Lipot (Leopold) Nádasdy von Nadasd und Fogorasfold from one of the most prominent and richest Hungarian families.

Joseph Fladung 

Not much has been written about A. F. Fladung (1776–1868) in the literature, although his name appears in various publications and reports of the 19th century, usually connected with the upper class educated circles of women.

He was employed as a protocol office adjunct at the of the court war councilor before he started working, possibly after his retirement, as a private tutor for young women of upper class families. Fladung also published circa five books on natural science (astronomy, mineralogy, physics) for the advanced education of young women.
A paragraph on Joseph Fladung, published in a contemporary newspaper, expresses the author’s amusement about the tutor’s attempt to educate women and represents him as a silly old lounge lizard:

… It is the especially known in the ladies‘ world of Vienna Joseph Fladung, who is writing on his knowledge on precious stones, esthetics, logics, astronomy and physics for women… He belongs to the class of “Court Cavaliers” of the times gone by, which feels obligated even in the highest age to be chivalrous and gallant and searches the highest level of aesthetic way for the education of the female gender.

(Unterhaltungen am häuslichen Herd, Volume 1, 1856, p. 428-429)

On the other hand, Joseph Fladung was highly admired by his female students, many of which, as in this case the countess Julie von Nádasdy, employed him as an educator after creating their own families. Fladung among others influenced a career of an Austrian female poet Josephine von Knorr (1827 – 1908) (for details see Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach / Josephine von Knorr. Briefwechsel 1851–1908, 2016) and was befriended with an Austrian world traveler and writer Ida Pfeiffer (1797 – 1858).

Fladung’s most famous student was Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (née Marie Dubský von Třebomyslice, 1830-1916), one of the most prominent German-language writers of the late 19th century. Fladung, who entered the job as Ebner-Eschenbach’s tutor, when she was 13 years old (around the time, when our book was published), immediately noticed her extraordinary talent for writing and convinced her parents to continue Marie’s education in literature and science. Much unusual for the time, Ebner-Eschenbach’s father and stepmother Xaverine Kolowrat-Krakowsky, an educated women herself, agreed to focus Marie’s education on subjects, which were at the time not considered as necessary for young women.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach remained thankful to Joseph Fladung all her life as and fondly remembered this gallant eccentric, who was ahead of his time, in her memoires:

I was thirteen when he was introduced to our house by Mama, and at the time he seemed to me that he might be as old as Methuselah. Nevertheless I was able to enjoy the presence of this extraordinary person for more than two decades. He had always, especially after he retired, occupied himself with the study of natural sciences and antiquity, but in these subjects he only achieved a dilettantism that was worthy of credit.

(Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Meine Kinderjahre)

We could trace five institutional examples, four of which are housed German libraries  (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden) and one in the Austrian National Library (231819-A ALT MAG).

References: OCLC 311938601, 162933839. Cf.: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich: Joseph Fladung. Band: 28 (1874), p. 332.