Tag Archive: 0nineteenth century

This is a copy of the first edition of My Jubilee or Fifty Years of Artistic Life (1889), the published memoirs of John Sims Reeves (1818–1900), one of the leading English tenors of the nineteenth century.  ‘He made his début at La Scala in 1846 as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor [featured in one of the plates […]

Among the Faust–related items included in our Anglo-German Cultural Relations catalogue, item 214 may be the most charming. Faust and ‘Phisto is a cheeky example of Victorian Goetheana that appeared in the Sixteenth Season of Beeton’s Christmas Annual (London, Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1875). ‘In “Faust and ’Phisto” Goethe’s famous creation will be adapted and […]

German interest in folksongs began in the middle of the eighteenth century, stoked in no small part by the Europe-wide mania for Ossian.  Thomas Percy’s influential Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was also much admired, and the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who had been sent a copy by Rudolf Erich Raspe (of Munchausen fame) […]

The story of Anglo-German cultural relations is inextricably linked with the British royal family, particularly in the Victorian era. This connection is perhaps most apparent in item of 204 of Anglo-German Cultural Relations (also listed as no. 16 in our New York book fair list): an inscribed copy of the first edition of German Hymns […]

No catalogue on Anglo-German cultural relations would be complete without at least one mention of Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition. One of our favourite things in the catalogue is item 191, a very rare and attractive Great Exhibition souvenir. Taking inspiration from the popular nursery rhyme ‘The House that Jack built’, the large cotton […]

One of the connecting threads of our Anglo-German Cultural Relations catalogue is James Macpherson’s highly influential and notoriously fraudulent tales of Ossian. Another, as one might expect, is Goethe. Ossian’s reach was international, and soon made its mark on the young German writer (still only 23), who published his own four-volume edition, in English, in […]