Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Erster und zweiter Theil. Leipzig, Weygand'sche Buchhandlung, 1774.
Two parts in one volume, 224 pp. The first printing, the deluxe issue on strong paper, with the points recorded by Hagen, the errata notice on p. 224, the uncorrected page number 36 for 39, press-corrections on pp. 16 and 101, and all cancel leaves present. Small octavo (158 × 95 mm).
With the engraved title-vignette by Adam Friedrich Oeser, Goethe's drawing-master in Leipzig, and a woodcut vignette to the Second Part.
Contemporary half-leather, the spine richly gilt with floral tooling. On strong and entirely spotless paper, exceptionally fresh.
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Werther appeared in 1774, when Goethe was twenty-five, and it was an immediate sensation. It lifted an ambitious young lawyer from Frankfurt to the front rank of living writers, and its hero soon became a figure readers imitated, defended, condemned, dressed like, pitied and feared.
Goethe drew on the Wetzlar circle of Charlotte Buff and Johann Christian Kestner, and on the 1772 suicide of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, whose death stands behind Werther's. Yet the result was never simply a confession.
Goethe later described its composition as almost "somnabulistic" (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Bk. 13), and to Eckermann he gave the still more violent image, that Werther was "a creation which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart" (Eckermann, 2 January 1824).
What he had made from private experience was something more dangerous and more portable, a novel that allowed a generation to hear its own inwardness spoken aloud.
Released at the Leipzig autumn fair in September 1774, the first edition sold out at once; Weygand reprinted it twice before the year was out, and within little more than a decade some twenty pirated editions had appeared in Germany alone, the surest measure of a demand the legitimate trade could not satisfy.
Readers did not encounter Werther as an invented character only; they recognized in him a style of feeling, a costume, a posture toward the world.
Admiration was accompanied almost at once by alarm. Lessing, who had known Jerusalem and saw the force of the final allusion to Emilia Galotti, wanted the ending cooled down, made harder, less seductive (Lessing to Eschenburg, 26 October 1774).
In England the Gentleman's Magazine reported the 1784 suicide of a Miss Glover, noting that "The Sorrows of Werther were found under her pillow" (Atkins, The Testament of Werther, p. 40; Bell, Early American Literature 46 (2011)). In France it entered the literature of sensibility almost at once.
Napoleon carried Werther through the Egyptian campaign and later told Goethe he had read it seven times [Jaeck 6] [Eckermann, 7 April 1829].
At Erfurt in 1808, when the conqueror of Europe finally met the author, he did not offer polite admiration only; he pressed Goethe on the construction of the plot, faulting one passage as untrue to nature, a judgement Goethe conceded was just (Annalen, 1808).
The encounter is extraordinary for what it reveals, that by then Werther was no longer merely "A German Story" as it was called nearly thirty years earlier when the first English translation was released in London.
From the beginning the novel was taken with extraordinary literalness. Young men took up Werther's own dress, the blue coat and yellow waistcoat, in what became known as Werther fever.
The book, with that style of dress, was banned in Leipzig in 1775, where the novel had first appeared; the theological faculty there having moved to suppress it at the start of that year, and it was banned in Denmark and Italy as well [Sauerland, "Wertherfieber," EGO — Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte; Atkins, The Testament of Werther, p. 40; Bell, Early American Literature 46 (2011); Lancet Psychiatry, 2014].
Contemporaries also feared it would prompt imitative suicides. Whether it actually did so remains debated, the surviving evidence being largely anecdotal (Lancet Psychiatry, 2014), but the fear proved lasting, and the phenomenon of copycat suicide eventually took its name from the book, the "Werther effect," a term coined by the sociologist David Phillips in 1974 (Phillips, American Sociological Review, 1974).
The novel was not simply read; it was carried into conduct, clothing and gesture.
PROVENANCE
The Heribert Tenschert Collection.
REFERENCES
Hagen 80; Goedeke IV/3, 163, 1; Kippenberg I, 3039.
J. P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe; Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Bk. 13, and Annalen, 1808; R. M. Meyer, Goethe, I; Monthly Review, June 1785; Gentleman's Magazine, November 1784; E. G. Jaeck, Madame de Staël and the Spread of German Literature (Oxford, 1915); G. Lukács, Goethe and His Age (Merlin Press, 1968); M. Swales, Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Cambridge, 1987); T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre (Oxford, 1980); N. Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, I (Oxford, 1991); D. P. Phillips, "The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide," American Sociological Review 39 (1974); "Goethe's Werther and its Effects," Lancet Psychiatry (2014).
FROM THE HERIBERT TENSCHERT COLLECTION
