London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1779. First English language edition. 2 vols. in 1. 1st edition in English, translated by Daniel Malthus, father of the celebrated economist. 19th century 3/4 calf, no half–titles, sides a little rubbed else a nearly fine, clean copy of a very scarce book. The auction record shows 2 copies sold in the last 40 years, 1 of them twice.

First edition in English of Goethe's sensational novel, one of the foundational texts of European Romanticism. The novel was first published in German in 1774, when its author was 24. This English translation, by Daniel Malthus, is based on one of three early French translations of Goethe's original text. Malthus (1730-1800) was a friend of Rousseau and the father to the economist Thomas. His translation was praised by Goethe in 1783 as having "good feeling, good sense, and good taste" (Lewisohn), and it was reprinted several times, with six further English versions following in the 30 years after its publication.

As well as contemporary German philosophy and music, the novel was influenced by Goethe's readings of English literature: he responded to and admired Samuel Richardson's epistolary novels and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, and he was, like Werther, a passionate reader of James Macpherson's Ossian. The novel also serves as an important precursor to British Romanticism, though Goethe's rich and strange evocations of the relationship between nature and the imagination would be unmatched by anything in English for another 20 years.

Ludwig Lewisohn, Goethe: The Story of A Man, 1949; Charles Ryskamp, "Boswell and Walter James, Goethe and Daniel Malthus", Eighteenth-Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, 1970, esp. pp. 224-9. Near Fine (Item #5762)