Travels Through Germany, in a Series of Letters, 3 volumes (First English Edition)

RIESBECK, Johann Kaspar, "The Baron" (trans. Rev. Paul Henry Maty). Travels through Germany, in a Series of Letters. London: Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand, 1787. 3 volumes.

Small Octavo. All three volumes bound in mottled calf, spines gilt-decorated. Titling to spines on red Morocco panels. Vol I: 319pp.; Vol. II: 298pp.; Vol.III: 331pp. First English edition.

Johann Kaspar Riesbeck (1754–1786) died the year before this translation appeared, having achieved genuine notoriety across Europe for a work he had originally published anonymously and under a deliberately misleading pretence: Briefe eines reisenden Franzosen über Deutschland ("Letters of a Travelling Frenchman on Germany"), first issued in Zurich in 1783. Riesbeck adopted the persona of a sceptical, well-travelled Frenchman writing candid letters home to his brother in Paris, using the disguise to level sharp, satirical criticism at the political fragmentation, provincialism, and social pretensions of the many small German states, principalities, and free cities that together constituted the Holy Roman Empire in the years before its dissolution. He wrote, in a passage that captures the whole spirit of the work, that it was "more difficult to know Germany than any other country," since unlike France, where the manners of the capital set the tone for the whole nation, Germany was "divided into [a] numberless variety of large and small states, differing from each other in religion, government, opinions, and which have no bond of union whatever, except their common language."

The book's satirical edge and its author's initial anonymity made it a genuine sensation on the Continent, and its rapid translation into English brought Riesbeck's caustic, observant account of the fractured German-speaking world to an English readership eager for informed, entertaining, and pointedly critical travel writing on a Europe still arranged along its old dynastic and territorial lines, in the years immediately preceding the upheavals of the French Revolution. Modern historians of the period continue to cite Riesbeck's account directly as a valuable contemporary source for understanding attitudes toward the fractured governance of the German states on the eve of the revolutionary era.

Near fine. Bindings tight on all volumes. Some mild wearing at spine ends and corners. Contents generally fine throughout, clean and bright. Occasional spotting here and there.

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Catalogue Number: HH000707