(2) [Faustus: 1825]
Faustus: / His / Life, Death, / and / Descent into Hell. / Translated from the German. / Speed thee, speed thee, / Liberty lead thee, / Many this night shall harken and heed thee. / Far abroad, / Demi-god, / Who shall appal thee! / Javal, or devil, or what else we call thee. / Hymn to the Devil. / London: / W. Simpkin and R. Marshall. / 1825.
Collation:—Foolscap octavo, pp. xii + 251; consisting of: Half-title (with imprint “Printed by / J. and C. Adlard, Bartholomew Close” at the foot of the reverse) pp. i–ii; Title-page, as above (with blank reverse) pp. iii–iv; Preface (headed The Translator to the Public) pp. v–viii; Table of Contents pp. ix–xii; and Text pp. 1–251. The reverse of p. 251 is occupied by Advertisements of Horace Welby’s Signs before Death, and John Timbs’s Picturesque Promenade round Dorking. The headline is Faustus throughout, upon both sides of the page. At the foot of the reverse of p. 251 the imprint is repeated thus, “J. and C. Adlard, Bartholomew Close.” The signatures are A (6 leaves), B to Q (15 sheets, each 8 leaves), plus R (6 leaves).
Issued (in April, 1825) in bright claret-coloured linen boards, with white paper back-label. The leaves measure 6¾ × 4¼ inches. The published price was 7s. 6d.
The volume has as Frontispiece a coloured plate, engraved upon copper, representing the supper of the sheep-headed Magistrates, described on pp. 64–66. The incident selected for illustration is the moment when the wine ‘issued in blue flames from the flasks,’ and ‘the whole assembly sat like so many ridiculous characters in a mad masquerade.’ This illustration was not new to Borrow’s book. It had appeared both in the German original,
and in the French translation of 1798. In the original work the persons so bitterly satirized were the individuals composing the Corporation of Frankfort.
In 1840 ‘remainder’ copies of the First Edition of Faustus were issued with a new title-page, pasted upon a stub, carrying at foot the following publishers’ imprint, “London: / Simpkin, Marshall & Co. / 1840.” They were made up in bright claret-coloured linen boards, uniform with the original issue, with a white paper back-label. The published price was again 7s. 6d.
Faustus was translated by Borrow from the German of Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger. Mr. Shorter suggests, with much reason, that Borrow did not make his translation from the original German edition of 1791, but from a French translation published in Amsterdam in 1798.
The reception accorded to Faustus was the reverse of favourable. The Literary Gazette said (July 16th, 1825):—
“This is another work to which no respectable publisher ought to have allowed his name to be put. The political allusion and metaphysics, which may have made it popular among a low class in Germany, do not sufficiently season its lewd scenes and coarse descriptions for British palates. We have occasionally publications for the fireside,—these are only fit for the fire.”
Borrow’s translation of Klinger’s novel was reprinted in 1864, without any acknowledgment of the name of the translator. Only a few stray words in the text were altered. But five passages were deleted from the Preface, which, not being otherwise modified or supplemented, gave—as was no doubt the intention of the publishers—the work the appearance of a new translation specially prepared. This unhallowed edition bears the following title-page:
Faustus: / His / Life, Death, and Doom. / A Romance in Prose. / Translated from the German. / [Quotation as in the original edition, followed by a Printer’s ornament.] / London: / W. Kent and Co., Paternoster Row. / 1864.—Crown 8vo, pp. viii + 302.
“There is no reason to suppose,” remarks Mr. Shorter (George Borrow and his Circle, p. 104) “that the individual, whoever he may have been, who prepared the 1864 edition of Faustus for the Press, had ever seen either the German original or the French translation of Klinger’s book.”
There is a copy of the First Edition of Faustus in the Library of the British Museum. The Press-mark is N.351.
