Author: Wieland, Christoph Martin
Biography:
WIELAND, Christoph Martin (1733-1813: NBG)
Wieland was a long-lived, prolific, and popular author in various genres. For the purposes of the bibliography, this headnote concentrates on the different phases of his career and on his reception in Britain. He was born on 5 Sept. 1733 in Oberholzheim, near Biberach in present-day Germany, the son of a Protestant pastor. He attended the local school in Biberach followed by a gymnasium in Klosterberg and law studies at the university of Tūbingen (1750). A literary prodigy, he attracted attention for early poetical works of a pious and decorous nature, and in 1752 left Tūbingen for Switzerland, where he was employed as a private tutor in Zurich and Bern and composed the first of many plays, poems, and prose works. During this period he broke off one engagement and contracted another, which was likewise broken off after his return to Biberach as town clerk in 1760. In 1765 he married Dorothea von Hildebrand, with whom he had eleven children. Under a different patron he adopted a more worldly, rationalist style, epitomised in the Bildungsroman Die Geschichte des Agathon (1766-7). The family moved to Erfurt in 1769 and Wieland took up a professorship there, but moved once more in 1772 on the invitation of the dowager duchess Anna Amalia of Sachsen-Weimar, who made Wieland her sons’ tutor and gave him access to the court and literary circles. In Weimar he translated 22 of Shakespeare’s plays into German prose (8 vols. 1772-6), founded the successful literary periodical Der teutche Merkur (1773), published Oberon (1780), and produced translations of Horace (1786), Lucian (1788-9), and Cicero (1808). He oversaw the publication of the first collected edition of his works in 45 vols. (1794-1802). It was during the Weimar period that his works began to appear in English translations, mainly philosophical works and novels (Agathon in 1773), and he acquired the reputation of “the German Voltaire” (Champion). Wieland died at Weimar on 20 Jan. 1813. The translation of Oberon by William Sotheby (q.v.) had multiple editions and proved influential despite the sour comment reported in the Champion disparaging its “paltry collection of Fairy Tales.” (NBG 46 cols 722-7; Encyclopedia Britannica [1911] 28: 621-2; ancestry.com 3 June 2024; Champion [London] 27 June 1813, reprinting notice from the Examiner) HJ
Other Names:
- Christopher Martin Wieland
- Wieland