Tales of The Dead - Development

Development

Sarah Elizabeth Utterson née Brown (1781–1851), wife of literary antiquary, collector and editor Edward Vernon Utterson (c. 1776–1856), translated the majority of Tales of the Dead from a French collection of ghost stories as "the amusement of an idle hour". Three of the stories from the French she omitted as they "did not appear equally interesting" to her. She also noted she had "considerably curtailed" her translation of "L'Amour Muet", "as it contained much matter relative to the loves of the hero and heroine, which in a compilation of this kind appeared rather misplaced". To these, Utterson added a story of her own, "The Storm" based on an incident told to her by "a female friend of very deserved literary celebrity" as having actually occurred. It was published anonymously in 1813 by White, Cochrane, and Co., replacing the original epigraph "Falsis terroribus implet. — HORAT" (meaning roughly "he fills with imagined terrors") with the following quote from William Shakespeare's The Tempest:

"Graves, at my command,
Have waked their sleepers; oped, and let them forth
By my so potent art."

The French book Utterson translated from was Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d'Histoires d'Apparitions de Spectres, Revenans, Fantomes, etc.; traduit de l'allemand, par un Amateur (its title is derived from Étienne-Gaspard Robert's Phantasmagoria), which had in turn been translated anonymously by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès (1767–1846) from a number of German ghost stories, and published in Paris during 1812. His sources included "Stumme Liebe" ("Silent Love") from Volksmärchen der Deutschen by Johann Karl August Musäus (1735–1787), "Der grau Stube" ("The Grey Room") by Heinrich Clauren (1771–1854), and six stories by Johann August Apel (1771–1816) and Friedrich August Schulze (1770–1849), five of which were from the first two volumes of their ghost story anthology Das Gespensterbuch ("The Ghost Book"); originally published in five volumes in Leipzig between 1811 and 1815 under the pen names A. Apel and F. Laun.

Fantasmagoriana has a significant place in the history of English literature. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron and John William Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva and were visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer", over three days in June the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including Fantasmagoriana (in the French edition), and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's to produce The Vampyre, the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. Some parts of Frankenstein are surprisingly similar to those found in Fantasmagoriana and suggest a direct influence upon Mary Shelley's writing.

Though Tales of the Dead was published anonymously, Utterson became known to be the translator by 1820. The Uttersons' copy was bound in blue straight-grain Morocco leather with gilt edges, inserted with a print by Samuel William Reynolds of a portrait of her by Alfred Edward Chalon and six original water colour drawings. It was sold with the library of Frederick Clarke of Wimbledon in 1904 to B. F. Stevens for £3 3s, acquired into the library of Robert Hoe III by 1905 and eventually passed into the Huntington Library.