Author: GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von
Biography:
GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832: Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Germany’s greatest poet was also a dramatist, a novelist, a scientist, a government minister, and a very long-lived man. Born in Frankfurt to wealthy parents, he was educated at home and then at the universities of Leipzig and Strasburg, where he took a degree in law (1771) and wrote his first plays. On the invitation of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar he moved to Weimar in 1775 and soon took on major responsibilities in affairs of state. He was ennobled and became “von Goethe” in 1782. A long journey to Italy 1786-8 brought about a reorientation of his thinking and after returning to Weimar he devoted most of his time to antiquarian and scientific studies, and to writing. The collections of his works that he started iussuing in 1787 eventually reached a definitive form in 60 volumes (1827-42). Much of Goethe’s lyric poetry was inspired by a succession of ultimately unhappy love affairs, but his five children, only one of whom survived to adulthood, were born to his mistress Christiane Vulpius (1765-1816), whom he married in 1806. He died at Weimar on 22 Mar. 1832. Of his translators, ten have headnotes: George Wright, William Taylor of Norwich, Thomas Holcroft, James Beresford, Joseph Charles Mellis, Francis Leveson Gower, George Bancroft, P. B. Shelley, Robert Talbot, and John Auster. Frederick Page is included in the headnote for Schiller. Charles Des Voeux (1779-1858) was an Irish baronet recorded in the census of 1851 as living in Belgravia, London, with his wife, five children, and 23 servants. David Syme (fl 1829-34) was a Scottish advocate who published, besides law reports (1829) and the Faust (1834), a translation of a novel from Italian (1830). A rival Faust, also 1834, was the first publication of John Stuart Blackie (1809-95), an Edinburgh advocate who became a university professor at Aberdeen (humanities) and Edinburgh (Greek). His many publications included a verse translation of Aeschylus in 1850, a translation of Homer’s Iliad in 1866, and The Language and Literature of the Highlands (1876). Warburton Davies (c. 1790-1870), born in Calcutta, India, was a landholder in Sussex. With Sophia Ann Burges (1792-1858), whom he married in 1821, he had one son. He died at their London home on Devonshire St. on 23 Sept. 1870. (Encyclopaedia Britannica [1911] 12: 182-8; ODGL; ancestry.com 26 Apr. 2025; findmypast.com 4 May 2025; ODNB [Blackie] 4 May 2025) HJ
Other Names:
- Goethe
- J. W. Goethe
- J. W. von Goethe