‘WERTHER FEVER’ – REVIEWED BY WOLLSTONECRAFT
PICKERING, Amelia.
The Sorrows of Werter: a Poem …
London, T. Cadell … 1788.
4to, pp. xxii, 69, [1 (blank)]; with half-title and a 16-pp. list of 961 subscribers; first few leaves creased and slightly dust-soiled at lower corner; else a very good copy, uncut, in the original blue-grey wrappers and tan paper spine; edges frayed, a few chips to spine.
First edition of this retelling of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, here giving a voice to Charlotte, preceded by a list of nearly one thousand subscribers, largely from Bristol and London.
Pickering’s (1747–1814) poem, laid out in thirteen elegiac epistles, presents Werther’s love as pure and his death as a heroic act of love, and Charlotte as ‘ideal heroine of sensibility’, giving Charlotte a voice, ‘if rather weakly moralistic, and to Werter suffering which is acute, credible and unhysterical’ (Conger). ‘The Sorrows of Werter’ was one of a spate of works in English and German founded on Goethe’s novel, including poems by Charlotte Smith (Elegiac Sonnets) and Mary Robinson (‘Elegy to the Memory of Werter’), both subscribers here. Other subscribers include Joshua Smith and Mrs Smith (their daughter, Emma, married Jane Austen’s nephew and biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh), and Henry Addington, Prime Minister from 1801 to 1804.
Both Pickering and Smith came under fire by contemporary critics for their sympathetic portrayal of Werther’s suicide: Charles Moore’s 1790 Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide accuses both of ‘lowering the standard of right and wrong, by giving “soft names” to crimes of magnitude – and such Werter’s certainly were’. Mary Wollstonecraft was likewise unenthusiastic about Pickering’s work, albeit for different reasons. ‘To pity Werter we must read the original ... The energy … is lost in this smooth, and even faithful, imitation … Werter is dead from the beginning: we hear his very words; but the spirit which animated them is fled …’ (Analytical Review, January 1789).
ESTC T107336; Speck Collection 1155. See Conger, ‘The Sorrows of Young Charlotte: Wether’s English Sisters 1785–1805’, in Goethe Yearbook 3 (1986), pp. 21–56.
