Without Lifting A Finger

Can't find much on him in English, but this seems to be the Beskow Strindberg is alluding to. *         [From Pilgrims and Travellers in Search of the Holy , edited by Rene Gothoni]   

     He was also a pietist from spiritual pride, as all pietists are. Beskow, the repentant lieutenant, had come home from his pilgrimage to the grave of Christ. His Journal was read at home by John's stepmother, who inclined to pietism. Beskow made pietism gentlemanly, and brought it into fashion, and a considerable portion of the lower classes followed this fashion. Pietism was then what spiritualism is now--a presumably higher knowledge of hidden things. It was therefore eagerly taken up by all women and uncultivated people, and finally found acceptance at Court.

     These memories lie in confusion, unformed and undefined, like pictures in a thaumatrope. But when it is made to revolve, they melt together and form a picture, significant or insignificant as the case may be.

A thaumatrope is a toy that was popular in Victorian times . A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to the phi phenomenon and persistence of vision . [ 1 ] Examples of common thaumatrope pictures include a bare tree on one side of the disk, and its leaves on the other, or a bird on one side and a cage on the other. They often also included riddles or short poems, with one line on each side. Thaumatropes were one of a number of simple, mechanical optical toys that used persistence of vision. They are recognised as important antecedents of cinematography and in particular of animation . The coined name translates roughly as "wonder turner", from Ancient Greek : θαῦμα "wonder" and τρόπος "turn". The invention of the thaumatrope is usually credited to either John Ayrton Paris or Peter Mark Roget ...

Have left the plays for now (I've read three thus far) to return to Strindberg's autobiographical work. The beginning of The Son of a Servant :      In the third story of a large house near Clara Church in Stockholm, the son of the shipping agent and the servant-maid awoke to self-consciousness. The child's first impressions were, as he remembered afterwards, fear and hunger. He feared the darkness and the blows, he feared to fall, to knock himself against something, or to go in the streets. He feared the fists of his brothers, the roughness of the servant-girl, the scolding of his grandmother, the rod of his mother, and his father's cane....