Tan calf binding. Title worn off the spine. Gilt banding. Translated from the german of Goethe.

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This is a very rare original publication. The book is in its original binding (please view the photographs) which visibly denotes the passage of two centuries. The contents and illustrations therein are in good readable condition and are fit to last a further two centuries.

George Nicholson was the publisher of Letters of Werter . He was born in Keighley in 1760. His father started the first printing business in Bradford in 1780, and by 1784 Nicholson and his brother had begun their own printing business, also in Bradford (Cooper 44). By 1790, Nicholson had begun commissioning illustrators and engravers to embellish his pieces with illustrations, and one of these artists was the famed Thomas Bewick (Cooper 47). At first, the two did not get along well, as Nicholson was upset that Bewick did not turn in his designs for the illustrations in a timely manner, but the relationship between the two became more amiable as they continued their working relationship (Cooper 48). In 1793, Nicholson moved his business to Manchester, where he self-published his first written work related to vegetarianism in 1797. It was titled, On the Conduct of Man to Inferior Animals: on the Primeval State of Man; Arguments from Scripture, Reason, Fact and Experience, in Favour of a Vegetable Diet, and this work received four editions, the last published in Stourport in 1819 (Cooper 45). This work and his other works on vegetarianism were popular enough to warrant him his own article in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena, written by Howard Williams., M.A., and published in 1883, and even earned Nicholson a page on the International Vegetarian Union’s website for his historic contributions to the cause of vegetarianism.

In 1799, Nicholson moved his business to Ludlow, where it stayed until 1802 (Cooper 44). By 1800, he was self-publishing his own periodical, The Literary Miscellany: or, Selections & Extracts, Classical and Scientific; with Originals in Prose and Verse, which included “eighty titles in twenty volumes” (Cooper 44). These volumes were priced at 9d. to 1s./6d, bound with colored boards, and contained selections from poets, popular religious and moral tracts, some of Nicholson’s own writing (Cooper 44-46), and pieces about the art and practice of music, just to list a few (Cooper 55). Nicholson was said to be “the originator of cheap literature of the best class, and of the most instructive sort,” which can mostly be attributed to his production of The Literary Miscellany (Williams). The text of Letters of Werter was originally published in the fifteenth volume of The Literary Miscellany, July 1, 1802, and was later republished as a novel by Nicholson in 1813 from Stourport, according to the front cover of the actual book (Forgotten Books). The book on its own was priced at 1s./6d.

Content of Book and Author

Now, as for the content of the actual story contained within this little book. As previously stated, the author of Letters of Werter is Johann von Goethe. He was a famous German author and poet and was involved in various kinds of scientific research, such as research about plant and human morphology. He was born to a wealthy family in Frankfurt, educated with private tutors, and suffered from a ruptured blood vessel in his youth before finishing his education. He did end up finishing his education in Frankfurt, though, and then went on to live a life full of writing, research, and other intellectual pursuits (“Johann von Goethe”). Throughout his life, however, he suffered from feelings of “weariness of life,” which, in his autobiography, he attributes to reading English poetry. He thought that English poems, on average, showed people the gloomy “weariness of life.” He seemed to have a lot of sympathy for others who experienced feelings like his own, and even admits in his autobiography that he himself had thoughts of suicide at a few points throughout his life. He also supposedly had an infatuation with a married woman, Charlotte Buff (“Johann von Goethe”).

All of that information leads right into the plot of the book. According to “The Sorrows of Young Werther Summary,” The Sorrows of Young Werther being an alternate English title for this text, Letters of Werter tells the story of a man named Werther who falls madly in love with a woman named Lotte, or Charlotte. Lotte, however, is engaged to be married to a man named Albert and has no intention of leaving her fiancé for Werther, even though Werther feels she would be much happier with him than with Albert. Werther ends up leaving town completely, taking an official position in another town. However, this position doesn’t work out and he feels he must return home. Ah, but alas! When he returns home, he finds himself even further in love with Lotte and feels increasingly hopeless, because she refuses to be with him romantically and insists they remain as friends. Werther, true to character, refuses to accept this, visits Lotte, forces a kiss between them and is then forbidden from seeing Lotte ever again. Finding this dissatisfying, he asks Lotte for Albert’s hunting pistols in a letter, receives them, and then shoots himself in the head. Lotte, Albert, and Lotte’s siblings all have to watch Werther slowly die, and when the novel ends Lotte is in such a mournful state that she seems in danger of possibly ending her life as well.

It seems perfectly logical that Goethe’s depression, thoughts of suicide and feelings of unrequited love for a woman also named Charlotte informed the events of this novel. However, something else of note is that this novel is written entirely through fictional letters that Werther writes to his friend, Wilhelm. In Goethe’s autobiography, he mentions that he thinks these kinds of suicidal/depressed thoughts come from feelings of isolation, so he chose to write the novel through letters. To Goethe, letters allow for a person to express themselves and correspond with others, but at the same time the letter writer is still withdrawn from society and isolated in their feelings of gloomy weariness.

Translation:To begin, the original German title of Letters of Werter was Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. A direct translation of this title would be “The suffering of the young Werther,” or perhaps “The young Werther’s suffering.” Generally, however, the book’s English title is The Sorrows of Young Werther, however whoever translated the text of this particular book chose to use a title that was more descriptive of the book’s format rather than the book’s plot content. The first English translation of this text was possibly made by David Malthus from the French translation of the text (Long 174), however this is contested by another source, which claims that the first English translation was actually made by Rev. Richard Graves (Turner 367). Regardless, the second English translation, which was the first English translation to be made directly from the German, was anonymously published in 1786 (Long 177), and the third English translation was made by John Gifford, published in 1789 (Long 182).

This translation of Die Leiden des jungen Werther was published anonymously in Ludlow in 1799, was made directly from the original German, and was the fourth English translation (Long 186). The translator made a few changes to the original text, which includes the omission of three letters (Long 187) and the translator’s own added preface (Long 186). In this preface, the translator defends Goethe against the accusation of him being “an apologist of suicide” and tells the reader that a few passages that “appeared to lower the general extraordinary merit of the work” have been omitted from the text. These “passages” were all letters in the novel. One of these letters was omitted by the two earlier English translations (Long 187). Another of these letters was omitted by the translation published in 1786 (Long 186), so it is possible that the translator of Letters of Werter was following earlier translators’ examples. However, Letters of Werter was the first English translation to omit “the whole of Werther’s letter pertaining to religion” (Long 187).

As previously mentioned, this translation was republished by Nicholson in The Literary Miscellany. However, according to Arthur E. Turner, the version of the text published in The Literary Miscellany was altered from the original 1799 publication of the translation. There is a paragraph on the very last page of the story, accompanied by an illustration, titled “A Fragment from Charlotte.” Turner claims that this paragraph was “appended to the translation” in Miscellany and was not present in the original translation (367).