While two thirds of the Historycal Roots team went to Utrecht to explore the background to the Dutch Edition of Equiano’s ‘Interesting Narrative’, Bill Hern was asked by the Equiano Society to research the edition published in Germany in 1792. There is a link to Bill’s full report at the end of this brief introduction.
Equiano saw the publication of nine editions of The Interesting Narrative in Great Britain and Ireland between 1789 and 1794, but there were unauthorised translations of the book into Dutch (1790), German (1792) and Russian (1794). An edition was also published New York in 1791.
A copy of the 2nd edition of the book was sent to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a Professor at Gottingen University, by Alexander (later Sir Alexander) Crichton in 1790. In that year, the director of the Gottingen Library, Christian Gottlob Heyne, recorded that the Library held two copies of the 2nd edition. After almost 230 years, a single copy of the 2nd edition of the Interesting Narrative is still held in the Gottingen Library. However, it is unlikely that this copy comes from Blumenbach’s private collection of books. He was in the habit of writing his name on the book plate and making notes in the books he read. Neither name nor notes appear in the version held in the Library. It seems unlikely that the copy in the Library is the one sent to Blumenbach by Crichton. Mystery surrounds the history of the remaining copy. The original owners are unknown and there is nothing to suggest that Crichton sent two copies to
Germany.
The Interesting Narrative was translated into German by Georg Friedrich Benecke and published by Johann Christian Dietrich in early 1792. The frontispiece of the German version is shown below:
We don’t know who took the initiative to produce the German version but are not ruling out that it was Blumenbach himself who suggested it.
Blumenbach met Equiano on one occasion and it seems this was the first time Equiano got to know about the publication of his book in Germany. The meeting took place in London in February 1792, shortly after the book had been published in Germany. There were no international copyright laws in the 18th century and so Equiano’s permission to publish his work abroad was not needed.
Equiano records that he was ‘glad to hear’ that his Narrative had been published in Holland, Germany and New York. This indicates that up until then he had been unaware of the wider exposure his work had gained. Total strangers had taken his book and published it. They would also take all profits from sales in their country without acknowledging the author but Equiano expressed nothing but gladness.
Equiano tells us in the Interesting Narrative that he was invited to visit Germany by ‘a person of note’ – whom we assume to be Blumenbach – but he did not take up the invitation and, although he did travel the world widely, Equiano never visited Germany at any stage of his life. Indeed, he does not express a particular wish to take up the offer of trips to Germany (or Holland). Equiano was in his 47th year and about to be married when he met those ‘persons of note’. Perhaps, he was conscious that he and his bride-to-be would very quickly want to start a family (daughter Anna Maria was born in 1793 followed by Joanna in 1795) and foreign travel, of which he had already done more than most people, was not conducive to bringing up a young family.
Bill’s report goes into far more detail and can be read in full here: