ANGLO-GERMAN CULTURAL RELATIONS Language & Literature
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ANGLO-GERMAN CULTURAL RELATIONS Language & literature, travel & tourism, c.1714–1914 The catalogue before you, published to mark my tenth anniversary as an independent bookseller, has been years in the making. Many people know me for selling Russian material, but in fact my interest in Germany About has always been stronger. German has always been my favoured foreign this language and I have enjoyed finding, researching, and writing about the catalogue books, manuscripts, music, and ephemera which make up this catalogue. It’s only when you specialize, and collect, in any depth that things start to get interesting, and that has certainly been the case here. You see connections, reactions, and developments; pieces of a historical jigsaw fall into place. The material here charts the cultural connections between the English- and German-speaking worlds in, roughly, the two hundred years between the Hanoverian Succession and the First World War. Through travel and translation, one culture discovers another; discovery then leads to influence. A German immigrant teaches music in London, the same year (1737) an Englishman in Göttingen compiles the first anthology of English literature for Germans. Later, in the 1760s, the first English translations of German literature are mirrored by the appearance of Wieland’s influential edition of Shakespeare. The catalogue documents two major eighteenth- century European literary events: Ossian and Werther, both linked by and to the young Goethe, whose own Faust so captured the English imagination in the nineteenth century. (The web of influence within literature itself is likewise tantalising: Werther reads Ossian, Frankenstein’s monster reads Werther.) The rise of the Gothic is also found here: Bürger’s Lenore in five English translations (1796–7), one of them Walter Scott’s first book, but the influence, surprisingly perhaps, was felt even earlier (and the other way round), in Sophia Lee’s The Recess, translated by Benedikte Naubert in 1786. The English Romantics took inspiration from visiting Germany and reading its literature: the catalogue features books formerly in the possession of Coleridge, and Southey. Other presentation or association copies include Isaac Watts, Thomas Carlyle, Queen Victoria, Simon Beattie, Chesham, UK and Henry Irving. In music, there were constant connections, from Pearsall www.simonbeattie.co.uk and Sterndale Bennett, through Mendelssohn, Wagner and, later, Bach Printed by (a fascinating survival). Henry Ling, Dorchester, UK Travel, after the Napoleonic Wars, became tourism, as Victorians Typefaces Quadraat OT discovered the delights of the Rhine, in particular. Later, strained political Quadraat Sans Pro relations are reflected in each country’s literature, as things darken towards Paper the end of the nineteenth century and the approach of war. Munken Pure Smooth The catalogue features some very rare, and in some cases unrecorded 100gsm and 300gsm Designed by material, both printed and manuscript, whether text, music, or graphic art. Sara Chapman It is arranged chronologically, but there is also an index of authors and www.letterg.co.uk subjects at the end. Simon Beattie, January 2020 ( 1 ) BENTHEM, Heinrich Ludolf. Engeländischer Kirch- und Schulen-Staat. Lüneburg, verlegts Johann Georg Lipper. Anno M.DC.XCIV [1694]. 8vo (165 × 97 mm), pp. [80], 720; without the 4 pp. of errata at the end (as in the copies at Wolfenbüttel, Göttingen, and Halle), but complete with the etched frontispiece and 13 further plates (of which one double-paged, another two folding); etched title vignette, woodcut ornaments; some light offsetting; contemporary vellum, a little soiled, marbled edges, spine lettered in ms. ink. £ 1200 1 An important account First edition of an important, if largely overlooked, travel account, dedicated to Sophia of Hanover (1630–1714), granddaughter of James I and the mother of George I, as he became. Benthem (1661–1723), a Hanoverian pastor who visited England in 1686–7, ‘is now utterly forgotten, but he deserves a place in the history of Anglo- German cultural relations. For he was the first German to give a full and systematic account of important aspects of English intellectual life— an account based on his own assiduous investigations and not on the antiquated reports of the sixteenth-century cosmographers. It is no exaggeration to say that Benthem’s book is the first systematic account of England by a German which does not smack in some degree of the medieval chronicle. It is also the first German study of this country which is thoroughly and, one may say, intelligently positive in its attitude’ (Robson-Scott, German Travellers in England, p. 93). The third chapter, ‘Von der Engelländischen Sprach-Kunst’, is an early introduction to English for German speakers (not in Alston, or ESTC). Not found in Cox. SIMON BEATTIE 2010 – 2020 7 ( 2 ) [SAVAGE, John]. The Antient and Present State of the Empire of ( 3 ) D[OBBELER], D[ietrich von]. Merckwürdige Fata der Groß-Britan[n]ischen Germany; containing the respective Histories of the Electorates, Crone, sint der Zeit, da die Religion reformiret worden; schon damals Principalities, &c. And an Account of the Empire and all its Dependencies. verkündiget durch den Welt-berühmten Propheten Michael Nostradamus, der To which is added, a new and exact Map of Germany, by Mr. Moll. London: Anno 1566. gestorben; jetzt aber aus dessen Vaticiniis, so in jedermans Händen, Printed for A. Roper, A. Bosvile, R. Basset … and F. Coggan … 1702. mit Fleiß zusammen gesuchet, und mit einer kurtzen Erzehlung der Geschichten erläutert von D. D. Hamburg, gedruckt mit sel. Georg Königs Schrifften, und bey 8vo (193 × 115 mm), pp. [8], 408, xl; with an etched frontispiece and folding map dessen Erben zu bekommen … 1714. (a little worn at the edges) by Herman Moll; contemporary panelled calf, joints neatly repaired; armorial bookplate of James Clayhills of Invergowrie (d.1825). £ 300 Small 4to (200 × 163 mm), pp. [4], 72; cancelled stamp of the Universitäts- � und Landesbibliothek Halle to title The verso; a few leaves a little creased, Hanoverian with some slight dust-soiling, but a 2 Succession good copy in recent boards. £ 500 foretold by An early First edition, dedicated to Nostradamus history George I, less than a week after his coronation. Dobbeler (1663–1718), a Hamburg merchant, here provides a potted history of Britain since the Reformation through the predictions of Nostradamus, citing over thirty quatrains from Les Prophéties, both in the original and German translation, right through to the Hanoverian Succession itself. ( 4 ) FRANCKE, Gotthilf August. Programmatum in Academia Fridericiana publice propositorum pentas. Adjectae sunt B. Augusti Hermanni Franckii First edition of an early English account of Germany, ‘one of the greatest Reliquiae programmatum et aliorum opusculorum. Halae Magdeburgicae, Countries in Europe’ (p. 1). Savage (1673–1747) was educated at Westminster impensis Orphanotrophei, 1735. School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, after which he spent eight years travelling round Europe as the tutor to the young James Cecil, fifth Earl of 8vo (188 × 118 mm), pp. [16], [1]–[2], 15–352, [16]; lacking pp. 3–14, where the sewing Salisbury (1691–1728). presumably came loose (remains of thread); title printed in red and black, with an ‘A colourful character and a hedonist, known by some as the “Aristippus etched vignette; title torn and a little ragged along the gutter, waterstain in the of the age”, he was also a prolific writer and translator … He wrote the first lower margin in places, marginal browning elsewhere; uncut in the original volume, and superintended the second, of A Compleat History of Germany (1702), uncovered boards, orange paper spine, torn, upper board all but loose. £ 1400 based on German and Latin sources, claiming that “the like [was] never extant First edition, this copy inscribed ‘J Watts. 1735 Ex dono Cl[arissimi]. in any language” … Savage died at the rectory, Clothall [Hertfordshire], on 24 Autoris’. As the son of August Hermann Francke, the German theologian March 1747, after falling from the scaffolding erected in Westminster Hall for Gotthilf August Francke (1696–1769) took an early interest in the Franckesche Lord Lovat’s trial’ (Oxford DNB). Stiftungen (‘Francke Foundations’) which his father had created in Halle in Cox I, 320. 1695, a school for deprived and orphaned children which soon developed into the children’s charitable institution it remains today. Among its activities was printing, and many books from eighteenth-century Halle bear the imprint ‘In Verlegung des Wäysenhauses’ (Waisenhaus in modern German), or 8 ANGLO-GERMAN CULTURAL RELATIONS c.���� – ���� SIMON BEATTIE 2010 – 2020 9 ‘Orphanotropheum’ as it is in Latin. at Helmstad in Saxony’ as the title-page here styles him, arrived in London Isabel Rivers notes that, as about 1725, ‘when he became a bassoon player in the opera band. According well as corresponding with ministers to Burney, Handel had the first British contrabassoon made for Lampe to play in New England, Isaac Watts enjoyed for George II’s 1727 coronation’ (Oxford DNB), although ‘he did not attract 4 ‘a similar pattern of reciprocal much public attention until 1732–3, when he was the prime mover in a project A gift influence in Germany … from [his] to promote English opera at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket’ (New Grove), for Isaac friendship with Anton Wilhelm Boehm, turning out three full-length operas within a year. His popularity as a Watts translator of works by the pietist composer in England was assured; The Dragon of Wantley (1737), to a libretto A. H. Francke. Francke arranged for by Henry Carey, held the stage until 1782. Watts’s Death and Heaven (his funeral The early American bookplate here, set in elegant italics, is attractive discourses for the Hartopps) to be in its simplicity. ‘These old type-set labels with their quaint borders of translated into German with a preface ornamental type,—scrolls, flourishes, stars, vines, and even grammatical by J.