Why was anxiety such a major issue for Søren Kierkegaard and his contemporaries? This book revisits the “original” age of anxiety, the time and place where Kierkegaard’s ground-breaking thoughts on anxiety were formed. The pseudonym used by Kierkegaard in *The Concept of Anxiety* (1844), Vigilius Haufniensis, is Latin for “the watchman of Copenhagen.” A guiding question is what the vigilant Haufniensis might have observed in his city—and especially in the literary culture of his time and day? Exploring freedom in many forms, Kierkegaard and his contemporaries found combinations of fear and desire that have later been considered symptomatic of modernity.