Cloth binding. Black lettering with gilt title on front cover.

Thomas Holcroft, the translator of these Memoirs of Baron Trenck, was the author of about thirty plays, among which one, The Road to Ruin, produced in 1792, has kept its place upon the stage.  He was born in December 1745, the son of a shoemaker who did also a little business in horse-dealing.  After early struggles, during which he contrived to learn French, German, and Italian, Holcroft contributed to a newspaper, turned actor, and wrote plays, which appeared between the years 1791 and 1806.  He also produced four novels, the first in 1780, the last in 1807.  He was three times married and lost his first wife in 1790.  In 1794, his sympathy with ideals of the French revolutionists caused him to be involved with Hardy, Horne Tooke, and Thelwall, in a charge of high treason; but when these were acquitted, Holcroft and eight others were discharged without trial.

Holcroft earned also by translation.  He translated, besides these Memoirs of Baron Trenck, Mirabeau’s Secret History of the Court of Berlin, Les Veillées du Château of Madame de Genlis, and the posthumous works of Frederick II., King of Prussia, in thirteen volumes.

The Memoirs of Baron Trenck were first published at Berlin as his Merkwürdige Lebensbeschreibung, in three volumes octavo, in 1786 and 1787.  They were first translated into French by Baron Bock (Metz, 1787); more fully by Letourneur (Paris, 1788); and again by himself (Strasbourg, 1788), with considerable additions.  Holcroft translated from the French versions. See: Caroline-Stéphanie-Félicité, Madame de Genlis (25 January 1746 – 31 December 1830) was a French writer of the late 18th and early 19th century, known for her novels and theories of children’s education. She is now best remembered for her journals and the historical perspective they provide on her life and times.

Thomas Holcroft (10 December 1745 – 23 March 1809) was an English dramatist, miscellanist, poet and translator. He was sympathetic to the early ideas of the French Revolution and helped Thomas Paine publish the first part of The Rights of Man.

Holcroft went to Paris as correspondent of the Morning Herald. Here he attended the performances of Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro until he had memorized the whole. His translation of it, with the title The Follies of the Day, was produced at Drury Lane in 1784. His comedy The Road to Ruin, his most successful play, was produced in 1792; a revival in 1873 ran for 118 nights.

His novels include Alwyn (1780), an account, largely autobiographical, of a strolling comedian, Anna St. Ives (the first British Jacobin novel, published in 1792), and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794–1797). He also wrote Travels from Hamburg through Westphalia, Holland and the Netherlands to Paris, some volumes of verse, and translations from French and German. One of these was Letters Between Frederic II and M. De Voltaire (1789).

Sympathetic to the early ideals of the French Revolution, Holcroft assisted in publishing the first part of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man in 1791. He joined the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) in 1792 and was appointed a member of a liaison committee to work with the LCS in early 1794. As a result of his activism, Holcroft was indicted in the autumn of 1794 for high treason and held in Newgate Prison whilst three other treason trials proceeded. In early December 1794 Holcroft was discharged without trial after those cases, against London Corresponding Society secretary Thomas Hardy, and SCI figure John Horne Tooke, resulted in acquittals.

As one of what Secretary of War William Windham called “acquitted felons”, Holcroft’s post-arrest reputation meant that his plays achieved little success after 1795, although he was instrumental in bringing melodrama to Britain at the end of the decade with his Deaf and Dumb (1801) and A Tale of Mystery (1802, an unacknowledged translation of de Pixerécourt’s Cœlina, ou, l’enfant du mystère). Despite a modicum of success with A Tale of Mystery, the remainder of the decade was marked by unsuccessful attempts to return to the public eye. He died in 1809, not long after a deathbed reconciliation with his closest friend from the 1790s (lately estranged), William Godwin. His Memoirs written by Himself and continued down to the Time of his Death, from his Diary, Notes and other Papers, by William Hazlitt, appeared in 1816, and was reprinted, in a slightly abridged form, in 1852.