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Telling Tales

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David Blamires

1. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

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1. Adventures of the Renowned Baron Munchausen, Containing Singular Travels, Campaigns, Voyages, and Adventures (1811).
Frontispiece by Thomas Rowlandson.

1It may seem wayward to begin a consideration of the contribution of Germany to British children’s literature with a book that was not really designed for children. But the stories about Baron Munchausen were quickly adopted by children and became a runaway success. They were, moreover, the earliest such children’s book to be published in England. Children love fun, adventure and characters that are larger than life, and the tall stories of Munchausen provide all of those things in plenty. The colourful, eccentric Baron has proved an enduringly popular hero for more than two hundred years, and his stories have been expanded and embroidered, diversely illustrated and adapted for all sorts of other media in a way that is hard to beat. What children are likely to encounter today, however, is very different from the book that first appeared in 1785.

2Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia was first published in Oxford with the date 1786. No author’s name was given. But the book was actually reviewed in December 1785 in the Gentleman’s Magazine and the Critical Review, so it must have appeared late in 1785 and been post-dated. It was a slim duodecimo volume containing just seventeen anecdotes about the Baron’s exploits. This core text was subsequently expanded, at first modestly, then increasingly extravagantly, so that the texts which circulated during the nineteenth century were several times the length of the English original.

  • 1 ext reprinted in Werner R. Schweizer, Münchhausen und Münchhausiaden. Werden und Schicksale einer (...)

3The core text is based on two collections of anecdotes first printed in German under the headings M-h-s-nsche ’Geschichten’ (M-h-s-n Stories) and ’Noch zwei M-Lügen’ (Two more M-Fibs) in a Berlin humorous magazine called Vade mecum für lustige Leute (Handbook for Fun-loving People), nos. VIII and X, published in 1781 and 1783.1 These anecdotes also appeared anonymously, but their author and the author of the English core

  • 2 Schweizer, p. 55.
  • 3 John Carswell, The Prospector. Being the Life and Times of Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737-1794) (London: (...)
  • 4 John Carswell (ed.), Singular Travels, Campaigns and Adventures of Baron Munchausen, by R. E. Rasp (...)

4text have since been identified as one and the same person, namely Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737-94), a German scientist and scholar who was forced to flee from Germany in 1775 as a result of virtual bankruptcy compounded by embezzlement from the art collections of the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. Raspe’s authorship was proposed in Germany as early as 1811,2 but it was not until 1857 that an article in the Gentleman’s Magazine provided evidence in English.3 Editions of Munchausen, however, continued to circulate the stories anonymously, and Raspe seems not to have been credited as author on a title-page until John Carswell’s edition of 1948.4

  • 5 Schweizer, p. 389.

5This state of affairs did not obtain in Germany, because there the stories go under the name of the poet Gottfried August Bürger, best known in Britain for his Romantic ballad ’Lenore’, which was translated into English by at least five different hands. Bürger translated the third English edition of Munchausen into German, and this was published anonymously in 1786 in Göttingen by Johann Christian Dieterich, but with a false London imprint. The Wunderbare Reisen zu Wasser und Lande ... des Freyherrn von Münchhausen (Wonderful Journeys of Baron Munchausen by Land and Sea), first actually credited to Bürger in a Hamburg edition of 1821,5 enjoyed even greater popularity in Germany than the English version did in the British Isles.

  • 6 Carswell, The Prospector, p. 255, states ’near Killarney’, correcting his introduction to Singular (...)

6But why all this mystery and skulduggery about the authorship of these tall stories? It was not uncommon in the late eighteenth century for books to be published anonymously, especially when they were not works of scholarship or ambitious poetry. A book of comic tales or anecdotes would not have been considered worthy of literary recognition. In any case Raspe had lost what credit he used to have in London and the universities through being ejected from the Royal Society, to which as a scientist he had belonged. Thereafter he moved around the United Kingdom, working far away in the Cornish tin mines, the Western Highlands of Scotland and in Muckross, Co. Kerry, where he died of scarlet fever in 1794.6 The scholar and scientist that he was, and still wanted to be recognized as, did not covet, apparently, the notoriety which this casual collection of tales would have heaped on him.

7But there was another reason too. In the pretty little town of Bodenwerder, situated on the River Weser a few miles south of Hamelin (of Pied Piper fame), among picturesque wooded hills and rolling farmland, there lived a real baron, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Münchhausen (1720-97), who in his latter years was renowned for telling after-dinner tales of palpable absurdities as if they were completely true. As a youth he had been in the Russian service as a cornet with the Brunswick Regiment and had been present in 1737 at the capture of Oczakow in the war against the Turks. In 1740 he became a lieutenant, and in 1750 the Empress Elizabeth promoted him to captain. But after 1752 he was back in Bodenwerder, living in rural contentment, having married Jacobine von Dunten in 1744.

8Bodenwerder is no great distance from Kassel, where Raspe worked for the Landgrave of Hesse, or from Göttingen, where he had been a student at the newly founded university. It is possible that Raspe had heard the Baron telling some of the tales himself. When he first published some of these anecdotes in the Vade mecum für lustige Leute, he partly identified their narrator as ’M-h-s-n’, enough for many readers to identify him satisfactorily, but not naming him outright. With the book publications, however, in both English and German, the Baron was explicitly named. He was mortified at having his private tales thus treated and at himself, a member of the nobility, being made into a figure of fun.

9In Britain Raspe was far from Bodenwerder, but for someone in so precarious a social and financial position as he was it was prudent not to reveal himself when making fun of the aristocracy. The King of Great Britain was also the ruler of Hanover, where Raspe was himself born. Perhaps – though this is speculation – the poverty-stricken Raspe also harboured some resentment or jealousy towards the Baron’s powerful kinsman, Gerlach Adolf von Münchhausen, who had formerly been the Hanoverian Minister in London and had founded in 1737 the now famous University of Göttingen. Certainly, the original English text of Munchausen contains various satirical sallies against the aristocracy, as the fictional Baron insinuates in his remarks on arriving in St. Petersburg:

  • 7 Carswell, Singular Travels, pp. 9-10.

I shall not tire you Gentlemen with the politicks, arts, sciences, and history of this magnificent metropolis of Russia; nor trouble you with the various intrigues, and pleasing adventures I had in the politer circles of that country, where the lady of the house always receives the visitor with a dram and salute. I shall confine myself rather to the greater and nobler objects of your attention, to horses and dogs, of which I have always been as fond as you are, to foxes, wolves and bears, of which and other game Russia abounds more than any other part of the world, and to such sport, manly exercises, and feats of gallantry and activity as make and show the gentleman, better than musty Greek or Latin, or all the perfume, finery and capers of French wits or hair dressers.7

10Other passages in the core text and, more especially, in the additions place the Baron’s supposed exploits in a real historical and geographical context and make specific satirical references to people and events of the day. For contemporary readers Munchausen’s adventures would have had an edge that today is completely lacking. Nothing dates so quickly as topicality. Fortunately, the kernel of the stories has an enduring appeal that transcends these local allusions.

11Although the fictional Baron tells his various anecdotes as if they really happened to him and were thus autobiographical, many of them belong to an international stock of traditional tales. Several late medieval or early modern German collections provide manuscript or printed sources, but many of the Munchausen tales, in both Raspe’s core text and the later accretions, can be found in the oral literature of Germany and elsewhere. Where analogues can be located, they almost invariably come from continental Europe rather than the British Isles. For example, in the tale about the stag that grows a cherry tree between its antlers after Munchausen has fired cherry stones at it, the reference to St. Hubert would have had little resonance in Britain, but much on the Continent. St. Hubert was a missionary in the Ardennes in the early eighth century. Similarly, the tales involving wolves, bears and boars also posit Continental conditions.

12Raspe’s core text, beginning with Munchausen’s sharing his mantle with a frozen old beggar (a parody of the famous incident attributed to St. Martin) and ending with the tunes being thawed out of the postilion’s horn, reflects the history and geography of the real Münchhausen’s career. It opens with the Baron’s winter journey through northern Germany, Poland, Courland and Livonia (i.e. present-day Latvia) to St. Petersburg. That provides us with the striking episode in which Munchausen has to rest overnight in deep snow and ties his horse to what he thinks is the stump of a tree, only to find next morning, when the snow has miraculously thawed, that his horse is dangling from the weather-cock on a church steeple. This is followed by the episode in which a ravenous wolf eats Munchausen’s horse from the rear and then takes its place in pulling our hero’s sledge. The early English editions have a misprint in the location of this latter episode, about which the Baron says he does ’not exactly recollect whether it was in Esthland or Jugemanland’. ’Jugemanland’ is a mistake for ’Ingermanland’, the area in which St. Petersburg is situated. In Richard Griffin’s Glasgow edition of 1827 it is rationalized into ’Judgemanland’, and it is omitted altogether from Thomas Tegg’s edition of 1809. Neither ’Jugemanland’ nor ’Judgemanland’ seems to have been understood in Britain, but both forms are to be found in many later nineteenth-century editions. Many editions give ’Esthland’(Estonia) as ’Eastland’. The precise form of these names does not matter particularly for enjoyment of the book, but it is symptomatic of British ignorance that they remain uncorrected.

13The episode in which Munchausen’s horse demonstrates its skills on the tea-table takes place in Lithuania at the country seat of Count Przobofsky. Most English editions have ’Przobossky’, which presumably came about through the ’f’being confused with a long ’s’. The Lithuanian horse features in another much illustrated episode: it survives being chopped in two by a falling portcullis, and its front half drinks thirstily at a spring in the market-place, with the water immediately pouring on to the ground behind it. Not only this, though: the two halves of the horse are sewn back together with sprigs of laurel, the wound heals, and a bower grows out of the shoots, providing the rider later with ample shade. This episode is located in Oczakow (Ochakov), a small port on the Black Sea and the lagoon of the River Dniepr, where the Russians fought a battle with the Turks in 1737. The historical Münchhausen was present at this engagement. However, the area was not annexed to Russia until 1791.

14To the Oczakow incident Raspe links a supposed period of Turkish slavery, during which Munchausen experiences adventures told in the folktale that the Grimms published thirty years later as ’Der Dreschflegel vom Himmel’ (The Flail from Heaven), a story akin to the English ’Jack and the Beanstalk’. The Grimms got their version of this story through the Haxthausen family, who lived in Bökendorf, near Paderborn, an area not very far from where Raspe had lived and worked. His inclusion of it in the Munchausen tales is valuable evidence of its earlier oral currency.

15The core text ends with the episode of the frozen horn which, when it thaws, plays the tunes that the postilion earlier could not get out of it. For this we have a much earlier analogue from Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, first published in Italian in 1528, with an English translation made by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561. Raspe probably knew the German translation by Lorenz Kratzer. The geographical context in Castiglione is astonishingly similar to that of the Munchausen story, which, however, is somewhat different in details:

  • 8 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London: Dent; New York: (...)

[A] merchant man of Luca [sic] travailing then with his company toward Moscovia, arrived at the river of Boristhenes, which he found hard frozen like a marble stone, and saw the Moscovites which for suspicion of the warre were in doubt of the Polones, were on the other side, and nearer came not than the breadth of the river.
So after they knew the one the other, making certain signes, the Moscovites beganne to speake aloude, and tolde the price howe they would sell their Sables, but the colde was so extreme, that they were not understood, because the wordes before they came on the other side where this merchant of Luca was and his interpreters, were congeled in the ayre, and there remained frozen and stopped. So that the Polones that knew the manner, made no more adoe, but kindled a great fire in the middest of the river (for to their seeming that was the point whereto the voyce came hote before the frost tooke it) and the river was so thicke frozen, that it did well beare the fire.
When they had thus done, the wordes that for space of an hour had beene frozen, beganne to thaw, and came downe, making a noyse as doth the snow from the mountaines in May, and so immediately they were well understood: but the men on the other side were first departed; and because he thought that those wordes asked too great a price for the Sables, he woulde not bargaine, and so came away without.8

  • 9 Carswell, Singular Travels, p. 171.

16Munchausen’s Russian adventures were all that was printed in the first and second editions of the book. The third edition, also dated 1786, added five new stories and four engravings signed ’Munchausen pinxit’. Carswell thinks these additional stories were also by Raspe and states: ’It is just possible that the four illustrations are also from Raspe’s pencil – we know that he prided himself on his draughtsmanship and did in fact illustrate some of his scientific and antiquarian works’.9 After this the stories always appeared with illustrations, and as the nineteenth century proceeded the enlarged book was illustrated by many distinguished artists. That was often the publisher’s chief concern.

17The five new stories set the tone for the subsequent additions to the core text: they tend to be tales of the fantastic rather than wittily pointed traditional tales. Increasingly, they allude to places in England and to English habits and public figures. They also contain slightly risqué elements, which later editions occasionally remove. For example, in the adventure with the whale that is half a mile long and pulls away the ship’s anchor, the ship springs a leak a foot in diameter, which Munchausen is able to plug with an unnamed part of his body ’without taking off my small-clothes’. The fact that the text prints a dash at this point invited the reader to imagine an indelicacy. A similar note is struck at the end of this section with the tale implying that the narrator (in some editions Baron de Tott (1730-93), who distinguished himself in service in the Orient, in other editions Munchausen himself or a friend of his) is the son of an oyster-woman and ’Pope Ganganelli, commonly called Clement XIV’. Another tale concerns Munchausen being swallowed by a large fish while swimming in the Mediterranean, and a third centres on him being carried in a boat into an almond tree in a Nile flood.

18Further tales focus on the shooting down in Constantinople of a balloon that has flown from Land’s End in Cornwall. In 1784 the Montgolfier brothers had invented the hot air balloon, François Blanchard had crossed the Channel and Vicenzo Lunardi had made the first aerial ascent from English soil, so Munchausen’s encounter at the opposite end of Europe has a designedly topical flavour. The next section of ’Further Surprising Adventures’ presents explicit acknowledgement of the Montgolfiers when the Baron makes a giant balloon by means of which he is able to lift up the College of Physicians and keep it in the air for more than three months. His comments on the extravagant dining habits of the College shows the satirical aspect of many of the succeeding episodes coming to the fore.

19Already the section entitled ’Further Surprising Adventures’ by Carswell, which opens with ’the late siege of Gibraltar’and pokes fun at Captain John Phillips’s voyage of discovery to the Arctic in 1773, reveals itself to be by a hand other than Raspe’s. Munchausen’s adventures increasingly display an acquaintance with specific locations and personages in the British Isles, and this true too of the ’Travels in Ceylon, Sicily, the South Seas and elsewhere’ that follow. The adventures range far and wide over the globe and even to the Moon. Several are borrowed from Lucian’s True History, e.g. the physical nature of the inhabitants of the Moon, life inside the belly of a gigantic whale, and the island of cheese in a sea of milk. Although a few episodes capture the mood of the original Munchausen tales – for example, Munchausen’s escape from the lion and crocodile attacking him from opposite sides, which ends with the lion’s death in the crocodile’s gullet – they mainly deal in fantasy for its own sake or indulge a taste for satirical commentary on the events and manners of the day.

  • 10 Carswell, Singular Travels, p. 68.
  • 11 Robert L. Wyss, ’Der schweizerische Robinson. Seine Entstehung und sein Manuskript’, ’Stultifera n (...)

20Occasionally the satire is disrupted by a remark of unexpected insight, as when Munchausen says, on arriving at Botany Bay: ’This place I would by no means recommend to the English government as a receptacle for felons, or place of punishment: it should rather be the reward of merit, nature having most bountifully bestowed her best gifts upon it’.10 Botany Bay was discovered by Captain James Cook in 1770, and in 1787 it was chosen as the site of the penal settlement that marks the beginning of white settlement in Australia. Munchausen and his party were driven away by storm after a three-day stay. Not very many years later another group of fictional voyagers will be storm-tossed for six days after leaving Botany Bay, but the Swiss Family Robinson have a tropical and uninhabited island on which to engage in their great didactic adventures, rather than the land of cheese in a sea of milk that is Munchausen’s lot. Johann David Wyss wrote his Schweizerischer Robinson for his four sons between 1792-98, though it did not make it into print until 1812-13 and 1826-27.11

21Botany Bay obviously had great symbolic resonance at the turn of the eighteenth century. We shall be looking at the Swiss Family Robinson in more detail later.

22By the time of the so-called ’third’ edition of Munchausen of 1786 not only the content of the book, but also its title have been changed. It now reads: Gulliver Revived, or the Singular Travels, Campaigns, Voyages, and Adventures of Baron Munikhouson, commonly called Munchausen, following the spoof affirmation of the book’s veracity placed in the second edition and signed ’Gulliver X, Sinbad X and Aladdin X’. This ’third’ edition is also marked by a change of publisher to G. Kearsley of Fleet Street. The placing of Munchausen’s adventures in the context of Gulliver’s Travels and the tales of Sindbad and Aladdin in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments removes our German hero rather unsubtly from contemporary history, real places and events into the realms of fiction. The Sequel, first published in 1792, underlines this further by having Munchausen encounter Don Quixote at the end of chapter VIII and in the whole of chapter IX.

2. Title page of The Life and Exploits of Baron Munchausen. Who Outdid All Other Travellers. Related by Himself (1827).

23The Sequel began its life as a separate and, initially, a competing publication to Gulliver Revived and introduced the characters of Hilaro Frosticos, Lady Fragrantia and the Marquis de Bellecourt. It bears the title A Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen humbly dedicated to Mr Bruce the Abyssinian Traveller (London: H. D. Symonds, 1792). The mocking dedication to James Bruce of Larbert (1730-94), who published his Travels to discover the Source of the Nile in 1790, shows how real contemporary explorations in places remote from Europe might seem very similar to the most extravagant imaginary journeys in the imagination of the times. The Sequel, which is about the same length as what Carswell terms the Singular Travels, Campaigns and Adventures of Baron Munchausen, is full of digs at personalities and ideas of the time, most of which would have been opaque to children. However, the concrete details of the fantasy would still have had an appeal for them. With the Sequel and probably also with the ’Travels in Ceylon, Sicily, the South Seas and elsewhere’ one can easily envisage the text being read in quite different ways by children and adults. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the Sequel is generally included as an integral part of the Munchausen adventures. No reference is made in presentation or chapter headings to its separate origin.

  • 12 Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge, Omniana or Horae Otiosiores, edited by Robert Gibbings (Fontwe (...)

24In an exclamation recorded in the first decade of the nineteenth century Robert Southey asked: ’Who is the author of Munchausen’s Travels, a book which everybody knows, because all boys read it?’12 Just what form of the tales Southey was referring to isn’t clear, but certainly from the very outset of the nineteenth century there were abridgements of the text and versions specifically designed for children in chapbook format. The Glasgow firm of Chapman & Lang seems to have been first in the field with an abridged form adorned with three engravings in 1802. The Edinburgh publishers W. and J. Deas included a version in their New Juvenile Library in 1809. Many more Scottish and English publishers followed suit – Dean & Munday of London (1810), H. Mozley of Gainsborough (1814) and Derby (1821), W. and T. Fordyce of Newcastle upon Tyne, C. Croshaw of York, Thomas Richardson of Derby, William Cole of London (all the latter undated); the list in not exhaustive. These are concentrated in the first half of the century, as chapbook production tailed off dramatically after about 1850.

25A copy of an early undated chapbook is to be found in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. It bears the title The Surprising Adventures, Miraculous Escapes, and Wonderful Travels, of the Renowned Baron Munchausen, who was carried on the back of an eagle over France to Gibraltar, &c. &c. It has no indication of publisher, place or date, but states simply ’Entered according to order’. Its only illustration is a crude woodcut of a man’s head on the outside front page. In a mere eight pages it relates several of Munchausen’s adventures, beginning with his fight on the back of a giant eagle and ending with his return to Wapping and being shot from a cannon into a haystack, where he sleeps for three months. The episodic form of the original work allows for chapbook compilers to pick adventures at random from the expanded texts without having to follow a coherent narrative structure. This chapbook probably dates from around 1800.

26A twelve-page chapbook produced by Webb, Millington and Co. in their Penny Pictorial Library c. 1860 is a late outlier of this kind of production. It has a hand-coloured frontispiece depicting the Baron with the crocodile and the lion, and there are seven further wood-engravings scattered through the text. The Baron is supposed to have lived in ’the castle of Airreblast, near the town of Laybach, in Carniola’. Laybach (the present Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia) probably also has the punning sense of ’lay back’. The various episodes are picked from here and there in the Baron’s adventures, but exclude those in the Sequel.

3. Baron Munchausen (c. 1865). Hand-coloured frontispiece.

  • 13 The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, illustrated by William Strang and J. B. Clark, with (...)

27At the very end of the nineteenth century and during the Edwardian era we have a number of versions of Munchausen explicitly designed for children. W. T. Stead included Tales from the Travels of Baron Munchausen very early in his popular Books for the Bairns. It appeared as no. 23, first published in January 1898, price one penny. Like all the books in this series, it had line illustrations on every page, here, as usual, by Brinsley Le Fanu. Stead found it necessary to stress that lying in order to deceive is wrong, but that the kind of lies found in Munchausen’s tales were not meant like that, but were ’monstrous whoppers’ designed to amuse. However, concerned as he was to emphasize that the tales were ’not true, not a world of them is true’, he wrongly claimed that ’Baron Munchausen never existed’. In this he was simply restating the common nineteenth-century view, though in 1895 Thomas Seccombe had provided what is now the standard information about Hieronymus von Münchhausen and R. E. Raspe as the author of his tales.13 In sixty pages Stead reproduces nineteen tales, including ’The Storm and the Cucumber-Trees’, ’The Stag and the Cherry-Tree’ and ’The Trip to the Moon’. No tales are taken from the Sequel.

28The allusions to contemporary events and figures are, naturally, entirely omitted.

29In 1902 the London firm of Grant Richards published The Surprising Travels and Adventures of Baron Munchausen in a series called The Children’s Library. It had four colour illustrations by W. Heath Robinson. The text, however, was scarcely different from the one usually offered, including the Sequel, and arranged in thirty-four chapters. There had, of course, been multifarious editions of Munchausen in the course of the nineteenth century, with texts offering greater or lesser variations from those of the eighteenth century. Clearly, many of these had been read by children. What is interesting about Grant Richards’s edition is its explicit inclusion in a collection for children and its use of colour plates.

30Grant Richardsobviously saw commercial advantage in their involvement with Munchausen, since in the previous year they had published John Kendrick Bangs’s Mr. Munchausen, a set of new Munchausen stories for an American readership. These were ostensibly told to two small children called Diavolo and Angelica by the democratized Mr. Munchausen, whom they call Uncle Munch (a neat allusion to the Munchkin’s of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900), through the agency of a reporter, Mr. Ananias (here a New Testament allusion) of the Gehenna Gazette. This is one of the rare occasions after the publication of the Sequel when new tales are foisted on to Munchausen, and one can only say that Bangs does it in the spirit of the original and succeeds in making an amusing new book. To my knowledge, however, it has not been reprinted.

31Tracing the large number of editions of Munchausen through the whole of the nineteenth century up to the First World War would burst the limits of this book. The stories were presented in a large variety of formats, most of which would have been accessible to children, even if they might not have understood all they read. The original illustrations from the eighteenth century were recycled, as were the additions by George Cruikshank. Increasingly, it was the illustrations that sold the new editions, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth. To pursue all of this would involve a much fuller discussion of the role of illustrations in children’s books than is possible here.

32The important thing to remember is that Rudolf Erich Raspe unwittingly and anonymously made one of the most far-reaching contributions to Anglo-German literature that has ever happened. More than two hundred years since Munchausen first made an appearance in England he is still a houehold name, more now for children than he was in his first hundred years. Not only are there new editions and retellings of his unforgettable tales, but there have been the most extravagant of films. With the cultural changes that have occurred through film and television, Munchausen is now much more a visual than a literary figure. The museum at Bodenwerder has a marvellous collection of illustrated editions of Munchausen in English, German and many other languages from all periods of the stories’ popularity.

Note

1 ext reprinted in Werner R. Schweizer, Münchhausen und Münchhausiaden. Werden und Schicksale einer deutsch-englischen Burleske (Bern und München: Francke, 1969), pp. 36-40.

2 Schweizer, p. 55.

3 John Carswell, The Prospector. Being the Life and Times of Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737-1794) (London: The Cresset Press, 1950), p. 185.

4 John Carswell (ed.), Singular Travels, Campaigns and Adventures of Baron Munchausen, by R. E. Raspe and others (London: The Cresset Press, 1948).

5 Schweizer, p. 389.

6 Carswell, The Prospector, p. 255, states ’near Killarney’, correcting his introduction to Singular Travels, p. xliv, where he gives ’Donegal’.

7 Carswell, Singular Travels, pp. 9-10.

8 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1966), p. 147.

9 Carswell, Singular Travels, p. 171.

10 Carswell, Singular Travels, p. 68.

11 Robert L. Wyss, ’Der schweizerische Robinson. Seine Entstehung und sein Manuskript’, ’Stultifera navis’, Mitteilungsblatt der Schweizerischen Bibliophilen-Gesellschaft, 12. Jahrgang, Nr. 3/4 (Oktober 1955), p. 125.

12 Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge, Omniana or Horae Otiosiores, edited by Robert Gibbings (Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1969), p. 95.

13 The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, illustrated by William Strang and J. B. Clark, with an introduction by Thomas Seccombe (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1895)

Indice delle illustrazioni

Legenda 1. Adventures of the Renowned Baron Munchausen, Containing Singular Travels, Campaigns, Voyages, and Adventures (1811).Frontispiece by Thomas Rowlandson.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/600/img-1.jpg
File image/jpeg, 924k
Legenda 2. Title page of The Life and Exploits of Baron Munchausen. Who Outdid All Other Travellers. Related by Himself (1827).
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/600/img-2.jpg
File image/jpeg, 375k
Legenda 3. Baron Munchausen (c. 1865). Hand-coloured frontispiece.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/600/img-3.jpg
File image/jpeg, 1,4M

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