An Antidote to the French?: English Novels in German Translation and German Novels in English Translation 1770-99

An Antidote to the French? English Novels in German Translation and German Novels in English Translation 1770-99 James Raven With the completion of a new bibliography of prose novels in English first published in the British Isles and Ireland in the late eighteenth century, numerous new attempts can be made to identify trends in publishing, writing, and reviewing.1 The following considers one of these derivatives—the traffic in imaginative literature between Britain and Germany. This trade does not simply comprise the volume of books travelling in both directions across the English Channel, but the exchange of individual texts and their translation. No full modern study yet exists of the influence of the English novel in Germany in this period, or of the German novel in England . Existing analyses are either partial or inaccurate. In particular, as has become obvious as the new project has continued, the various 1 The English Novel 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey ofProse Fiction Published in the British Isles, Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, gen. eds, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). References in this article are based on the listings of volume 1, edited by Antonia Forster and James Raven. I am extremely grateful to Antonia Forster for her continuing assistance in this project. Verena Ebbes, University of Paderborn, and Marie-Luise Spieckermann, Institutum Erasmianum, Münster, kindly provided further checking and corrections. Other corrections were generously made by Werner Huber, for whom this paper was originally prepared. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Numbers 3-4, April-July 2002 716EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION works by Lawrence Marsden Price and Mary Bell Price, the fullest listings to date ofEnglish novels in translation in eighteenth-century Germany, are flawed by misleading attribution and incorrect dating.2 It is now over sixty years since Price wrote that "we are convinced that when Professor Greenough's list [ofEnglish novels] is published and can be compared in toto with our own, additional identifications can be achieved."3 The Greenough project was never completed and no fiction bibliographical checklist for the period has been available until now. Most uncomfortable in the research for the post-1770 survey that follows are the dates given by Price for German translations of novels which were in fact some four or five years earlier than the dates of publication of their English originals.4 Even greater uncertainty has obscured the appearance of the German novel in English translation in Britain in this period. It was a textual import trade, as we shall see, that involved both literary and commercial exchanges back and forth across the Channel. Since Price, numerous scholars have explored the history of the popular novel in Germanyin this period in an attempt to understand its broader literary and social context. Eva Becker, Michael Hadley, and Manfred Heiderich each offered profiles of novels published in a single year, studying 1780, 1790, and 1800 respectively, but of recent approaches to recovering novels "zu Unrechtvergessen," perhaps the most adventurous has been that of Linda Marlow, whose book rebelled against classifications of "Briefroman," "Bildungsroman ," "Familienroman," "Frauenroman," and "Empfindungsroman ." Instead, Marlow searched for the development ofthe concept of Tugend from the broadest possible range of imaginative liter2 Lawrence Marsden Price, English—German Literary Influences: Bibliography and Survey, University ofCalifornia Publications in Modern Philology 9 (1919); Lawrence Marsden Price, English Literature in Germany, University of California Publications in Modern Philology 37 (1953), a revised edition of Lawrence Marsden Price, The Reception of English Literature in Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1932); and Mary Bell Price and Lawrence Marsden Price, The Publication of English Literature in Germany in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934). We eagerly await the account of Rainer Schöwerling, Karin Wünsche, and Verena Ebbe for the new Bibliographie englischerRomane in Deutschland 1790-1834. 3 M.B. Price and L.M. Price, Publication ofEnglish Literature in Germany, p. 21 . 4 Including, for example, Betsi oder Der Eigensinn des Schicksals (1771), Die Frau nach der Mode (1772), Der Sommerbesuch (1788), Der KleineJack (1788), Georgina; einewahre Geschichte (1796). The date of the English original edition is given in parentheses. ENGLISH NOVELS IN GERMAN; GERMAN NOVELS IN ENGLISH 717...