The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen | Page 5

delight Mr. Bruce, the Baron is willing to fight him on
any terms he pleases." This work was issued separately. London, 1792,
8vo.
Such is the history of the book during the first eight or constructive
years of its existence, beyond which it is necessary to trace it, until at
least we have touched upon the long-vexed question of its authorship.
Munchausen's travels have in fact been ascribed to as many different
hands as those of Odysseus. But (as in most other respects) it differs
from the more ancient fabulous narrative in that its authorship has been
the subject of but little controversy. Many people have entertained
erroneous notions as to its authorship, which they have circulated with
complete assurance; but they have not felt it incumbent upon them to
support their own views or to combat those of other people. It has,
moreover, been frequently stated with equal confidence and inaccuracy
that the authorship has never been settled. An early and persistent
version of the genesis of the travels was that they took their origin from
the rivalry in fabulous tales of three accomplished students at Göttingen
University, Bürger, Kästner, and Lichtenberg; another ran that
Gottfried August Bürger, the German poet and author of "Lenore," had
at a later stage of his career met Baron Munchausen in Pyrmont and
taken down the stories from his own lips. Percy in his anecdotes
attributes the Travels to a certain Mr. M. (Munchausen also began with
an M.) who was imprisoned at Paris during the Reign of Terror.
Southey in his "Omniana" conjectured, from the coincidences between
two of the tales and two in a Portuguese periodical published in 1730,
that the English fictions must have been derived from the Portuguese.
William West the bookseller and numerous followers have stated that
Munchausen owed its first origin to Bruce's Travels, and was written
for the purpose of burlesquing that unfairly treated work. Pierer boldly
stated that it was a successful anonymous satire upon the English
government of the day, while Meusel with equal temerity affirmed in

his "Lexikon" that the book was a translation of the "well-known
Munchausen lies" executed from a (non-existent) German original by
Rudolph Erich Raspe. A writer in the /Gentleman's Magazine/ for 1856
calls the book the joint production of Bürger and Raspe.
Of all the conjectures, of which these are but a selection, the most
accurate from a German point of view is that the book was the work of
Bürger, who was the first to dress the Travels in a German garb, and
was for a long time almost universally credited with the sole
proprietorship. Bürger himself appears neither to have claimed nor
disclaimed the distinction. There is, however, no doubt whatever that
the book first appeared in English in 1785, and that Bürger's German
version did not see the light until 1786. The first German edition
(though in reality printed at Göttingen) bore the imprint London, and
was stated to be derived from an English source; but this was,
reasonably enough, held to be merely a measure of precaution in case
the actual Baron Munchausen (who was a well-known personage in
Göttingen) should be stupid enough to feel aggrieved at being made the
butt of a gross caricature. In this way the discrepancy of dates
mentioned above might easily have been obscured, and Bürger might
still have been credited with a work which has proved a better
protection against oblivion than "Lenore," had it not been for the
officious sensitiveness of his self-appointed biographer, Karl von
Reinhard. Reinhard, in an answer to an attack made upon his hero for
bringing out Munchausen as a pot-boiler in German and English
simultaneously, definitely stated in the /Berlin Gesellschafters/ of
November 1824, that the real author of the original work was that
disreputable genius, Rudolph Erich Raspe, and that the German work
was merely a free translation made by Bürger from the fifth edition of
the English work. Bürger, he stated, was well aware of, but was too
high- minded to disclose the real authorship.
Taking Reinhard's solemn asseveration in conjunction with the
ascertained facts of Raspe's career, his undoubted acquaintance with the
Baron Munchausen of real life and the first appearance of the work in
1785, when Raspe was certainly in England, there seems to be little
difficulty in accepting his authorship as a positive fact. There is no
difficulty whatever, in crediting Raspe with a sufficient mastery of
English idiom to have written the book without assistance, for as early

as January 1780 (since which date Raspe had resided uninterruptedly in
this country) Walpole wrote to his friend Mason that "Raspe writes
English much above ill and speaks it as readily as French," and shortly
afterwards he remarked that he wrote English "surprisingly well." In
the next year, 1781,