A parody only works with that already known; and one only parodies what is well known. Hardly a guarantee, both constraints challenge the parodist, who must excel in the art of faking and spice it up as well. Such science demands requisite zest. A successful parody means mastering both a multi-layer culture and an ironic or critical, even self-critical, distance from the parodied work. In so doing, parody achieves the cultural clout of a double-edged sword. One false move, one verbal slip-up, one skewed graphic, and the author risks failing abysmally. But parody also offers the possibility of revising the initial work’s target and even revealing some of its hidden aspects. That is what stands out in a now nearly forgotten work: Alfred Crowquill’s Faust (London, 1834) and its transformation into a German album (1841).1
To parody Goethe’s Faust (1808) in Great Britain as early as 1834, with an amended version of the English spoof entering the German States in 1841, was no trouble-free operation. If, at his 1832 demise, Goethe was a revered and quasi-untouchable author in his own country, the intricate European reception of his Faust had been strongly dependent on images. Amongst these, Retzsch’s set was, as shown, the darling of town and many a country with seven copied diverse editions in the English-speaking world from 1820 to 1832 (six in London, one in Washington DC), often reissued,2 in addition to standalone prints, copies of select episodes, reproductions in other media, and staged applications. A distinctive feature was the simultaneous presence of text in various forms: a textual synopsis gradually growing into a form of translation of Goethe’s play itself; translated excerpts from it; explanatory introductions; or plain captions. In whatsoever form, text convoyed Retzsch in textual and visual chitchat confronting and supporting each other, always upwelling from Goethe’s Faust.
Alfred Crowquill’s parody naturally targeted Retzsch’s Faust, far better known in Britain than Goethe’s, via images, yet supplemented with Crowquill’s own particular (and much neglected) text. Indeed, his burlesque iconography alone attracted little attention, nor praise in scholarship. Rümann calls it a “travesty (Travestie),” “suitable to mention for the sake of historic rather than artistic interest.”3 More than forty years later, Vaughan caustically adds: “In 1835 A. H. Forrester published a rough parody of the Faust illustrations that served to damage his rather than Retzsch’s reputation.”4 Yet, Crowquill’s parody proved popular enough to run through three editions in two years. Besides ordinary exemplars, a large paper edition with hand-coloured plates and gilt edges for collectors further indicates public appeal and approval (Fig. 8.1a–b).5 If only for this, it integrates Faust readings of the time, albeit through a distorted lens. What may the latter reveal?
Alfred Crowquill, Faust Sees Margaret for the First Time, in Faust: A Serio-Comic Poem with Twelve Outline Illustrations (London: B. B. King, 1834), large paper edition, pl. 5
Courtesy Beinecke, Yale University, Speck Sg8a F6 +834b
Alfred Crowquill, Margaret Refuses to Leave the Prison, in Faust: A Serio-Comic Poem with Twelve Outline Illustrations (London: B. B. King, 1834), large paper edition, pl. 12
Courtesy Beinecke, Yale University, Speck Sg8a F6 +834b
In tackling Goethe’s Faust via Retzsch, Crowquill’s parody evinces Faust’s composite reception. A case of nested reading through the original’s iconographic surrogate, the parody works by deputy thanks to a twofold screen. An anonymous Edinburgh press review stated at the time:
We are not sure that we relish the scoffing and malicious mockery of travesties of this kind. Faust is, however, becoming such a bore to the merely English reader, that one is glad of the relief of seeing him in Harlequin clothes. One may therefore give up Faust, Martha, and Mephistopheles, to the mocking fiend, Caricature;6
More than a weapon violating Retzsch, I argue, a Faust “in Harlequin clothes” proves a refined means of reading Goethe, revealing in the process concealed trends of thought. Crowquill’s dual travesty should also be read as the result of images and text combined. Both art historians, Rümann and Vaughan, evaluate only images (rather crude indeed). Examining the text however discloses unexpected views on the conflict of nations in post-Napoleonic Europe. Furthermore, Crowquill’s parody travelled and metamorphosed in displacement, producing another unexpected reading of Goethe’s Faust in Germanic contexts themselves. It emerges as a complex intermedial and intercultural work testing our capacities to read between the outlines.
Before we turn to it, a brief comparison with Faust-inspired music proves useful from a chronological perspective. In the German-speaking world, Goethe’s text inspired Beethoven’s and Schubert’s lieder, both entitled Margaret at the Spinning Wheel (1803 and 1814). Like Retzsch’s set, they displace the attention from Doctor Faust to the young girl. Though only lieder, this melancholic and touching scene would inspire a high number of them: about fifty.7 Inversely, more sizeable musical creations turned to Goethe much later. Louis Spohr’s opera Faust (1813) is closer to Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s novel Fausts Leben, Thaten und Höllenfahrt (Faust’s Life, Deeds and Journey to Hell, 1791) than to Goethe.8 Analogous large-scale musical compositions in France are all posterior, witness Berlioz’s “dramatic legend” La Damnation de Faust (1845) and especially Faust, Charles Gounod’s opera (1859), a huge success, which also naturalized German under the title Margarete (Darmstadt, 1861). By comparison, between 1824 and 1830, Retzsch’s copies were lithographed or re-engraved six times in France, and Nerval’s 1828 translation, already the third into French, uses a copy after Retzsch as frontispiece (cf. Fig. 6.4). Retzsch was by far a more conspicuous interpreter in reception.
As a result, while a Faust parody may certainly have aimed at mocking Goethe by distorting or violating his play (deemed “a bore”), in the early days of Faust’s European reception, it could only do this at a second level of interpretation and by relying on Retzsch as well-known intermediary. The latter, as basis for the adaptational foundation in the host country, served as the parody’s springboard. The layered process also implied twin-headed arts, prevailing images and contiguous texts. The intermediary, like a cutting grafted onto Goethe’s plant or a shoot sprouting from the Faust tree, was the first to pay the price; the affront would attain the original Faust only later, in a second moment. Yet images, immediately appealing and swiftly diffused from one country to the next by easy copying and widespread use of prints, naturally, yet insufficiently, caught the specialist eyes of Rümann and Vaughan. Moreover, Crowquill’s parody of Faust ended up entering German territory, where its humour hit the mark, all the while laughing up its own sleeve.
In such superposition, the mocking imitation of a major work presupposes an even higher degree of cultivation, creative methods, and parodist ingenuity. Also implied is a degree of ironic or critical distance, including self-deprecation. In the case of Crowquill, who parodied Goethe’s Faust via a British Retzsch copy and an indigenous poetic form, one intended violation became manifold: (a) His spoof is of a play not only transferred from one culture to the next, but also from one medium to another. The parodist more or less uses the same technique as the caricaturist, and the odds are that the text-image association of pen and pencil (or stylus) grant Crowquill great impact in Britain. Conceived for a British audience, his parody originally bears on Retzsch’s imagery, the hyped and most publicized forms of Goethe’s play. Yet, given its transmedial nature, its text and images do not necessarily work together. (b) Since Crowquill added a poem of his own, his spoof also undermines the original register by substituting one genre for another. As a literary form of expression, it deflates the original pitch, all the while commending a great deal of technical dexterity and skill in an exaggerated form of art. (c) The original’s content and form are displaced in a composition laden with cultural connotations, mixed with vernacular references, and based on material previously reworked and already redirected, multiplying the layers of cultural stratification. (d) In addition to the alterations it inflicts on the original, the parody itself takes into consideration several elements: the original’s reception in the country where it is parodied and that parody’s context; the variation in codes of meaning from one culture to the next; and the prior cultural tradition of parody in the country where the new caricatured version is proffered.
In Crowquill’s work, we deal of course with the tongue-in-cheek humour specific to parody, implying a second level of interpretation—the tension between high and low, sublime and grotesque, enthusiasm and mockery, insult and compliment, all blended together. But the multi- layered context provokes a third level of interpretation based on the intermediary (Retzsch), indeed a fourth level involving Crowquill’s text, and ultimately a fifth level when the parodied set penetrated Germany. It thereupon returns to the source of this piled-up chain reaction, directly targeting Goethe’s Faust. In this final stage, the parody’s critical impact ends up by stripping away, like a caustic paint remover, parasitic appended layers of meaning to ultimately reveal the original work in all its vigour.
Subsequently, all media are under tension and cultures confronted. Interpreters show up, more numerous than the target (Goethe) and the parodist (Crowquill). Historical contexts play a role. Last, but not least, the cultural referents in each country are summoned, which process leads to a deeper, yet disguised, reading of the original.
Let us then take things step by step.
8.1 A Crow’s Quill
Alfred Crowquill’s Faust: A Serio-Comic Poem, With Twelve Outline Illustrations was published in London in 1834 by B. B. King, a publisher active between 1835 and 1839 and specializing in engravings (notably mezzotints). It sold for six shillings. Thirty-two pages under a light green (symbolically acid) letterpress cover (26.1 × 17.4 cm) offer twelve short cantos and twelve images, possibly lithographed, albeit the imprint “Drawn and Eng[rave]d by Alf. Crowquill.” Alfred Henry Forrester, artist, humourist and younger brother of the polygraph Charles Robert Forrester, had composed the poem and drawings, which he reputedly also etched. Both brothers shared the pseudonym “Alfred Crowquill” in works pairing Charles’s texts with Alfred’s drawings. Faust, however, was exclusively the work of Alfred, if we are to believe the handwritten note figuring in English and Latin in the Bibliothèque nationale de France exemplar: “This Poem, was written by Mr. Forester [sic], who also designed the drawings and engraved the plates: a fecundity of arts, tria juncta in uno. || Markham Sherwill.”9 According to another manuscript inscription, the exemplar was given by B. B. King, the publisher, to Sherwill himself, who must have had direct information on the techniques employed. The prints however show no indentations (perhaps larger plates had been used), and a press review of the time runs: “Alfred Crowquill has well designed his plates, but the outlines are not sufficiently sharp and clear. They should have been cut in copper, for they really deserve it.”10
Alfred Henry Forrester began his career in the City alongside his brother, a notary, but quickly turned to the illustrated press, the widespread medium of the time. He studied drawing, modelling, wood and steel engraving. A prolific illustrator, he drew for works by his brother and others, was an early contributor to Punch; or, The London Charivari, and often published texts illustrated with his own images in the influential Illustrated London News. In addition, he painted profusely (landscapes, pastoral scenes, interiors), was interested in the applied arts (he is a well-known designer for ceramic and porcelain ornament), and designed theatre posters, backdrops for pantomimes, calling cards, and comic postcards. He conceived numerous hardcovers and dust jackets for yellow-backs—garishly coloured chromolithographed paper covers. He also devised children’s books and stage plays with brio. In short, he cuts a multi-talented figure, also capable of improvising and singing. His work is largely neglected in British criticism, which has instead focused on more popular draughtsmen (Robert Seymour, George Cruikshank, Kenny Meadows, H. K. Browne and so on). Although he did not equal them in draughtsmanship, he excelled in comic depth and conceptualization.11
This shifting artistic shape is reflected in his alias, “Crowquill,” literally a crow’s quill, but also, technically speaking, the steel-tipped pen of his ink drawings, which also references both piquant writing and art, more specifically the fine characteristics of outline. Simon Cooke cleverly observes that in English “Crowquill” sounds similar to croquis, the quickly drawn sketch that instantly captures satirical moments. Let me add that the term refers to failings in need of correcting. The expression to have a crow to pluck with somebody means “to find a fault in someone,” and the verb to crow connotes perceived superiority. Both expressions could be used to describe the satirist, a close observer of humanity’s shortcomings—who could again also be a critical reader of Faust. The “crow” in “Crowquill” also harks back to the extensive tradition of unpleasant and disgraceful animals—deemed unpoetic—often used in parodies. This includes, for example, the frogs and mice in two of the genre’s well-known ancestors, the Batrachomyomachia or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, a mock epic parodying the Iliad, and Aristophanes’s The Frogs, which spoofed the tragic poets. Indeed, just what would such a crow do with Goethe’s Faust?
As Cooke observed, the polysemy of “Crowquill” also offers the reader a useful tool for deciphering Alfred Forrester’s art on three levels: the creation of visual conceits, distortions and elisions; the production of nimble jokes and amusing situations; and an interest in the falsely naive, a humour celebrating awkwardness, while favouring anything disturbing, inconvenient or annoying, according to a coded form (such as “the hook that bites when it is least expected”12). Conscious of these layered meanings, Forrester published tongue-in-cheek A Bundle of Crowquills, dropped by A. Crowquill in his Eccentric Flights over the Fields of Literature in 1854. Similarly, his parody of Faust was a sophisticated exercise and pas de deux.
8.2 Travesties
Trite elements in the twelve images and twelve cantos combine to deliberately make the tragedy dull and vulgar. The plates refer to key episodes in Goethe’s Faust, modified and reinterpreted: the signing of the covenant (not the wager); Auerbach’s tavern (where cognac and rum flow freely); Faust in the witch’s grotto (not the kitchen), where the image of a plump Margaret appears in the mirror; Faust drinking the magic potion; the first encounter between Faust and Margaret (armed with an umbrella, cf. Fig. 8.1a); Margaret admiring the devil’s gift (see below); Margaret showing the gift to the neighbour; “The Decision of the Flower” (a title taken from Retzsch’s English copies of the dual garden scene); the travestied scene in the summerhouse; Faust’s duel with Valentine (now a pugilist); Faust’s confrontation with the devil; and Margaret’s refusal to leave the prison (she menaces Faust with a beer stein, cf. Fig. 8.1b). The images distort twelve of Retzsch’s twenty-six plates and add jarring details.
Other means contribute to the devaluation, such as reflecting on translation, choosing a significant British poetic line, self-commenting on the style employed, and inserting English cultural signifiers.
The preface introduces the work as a spiced-up translation of a poem dulled by canonical renderings: “The fact is, our precursors have, one and all, only done this wild poem into tame English.”13 In order to recover the initial ferocity, the new author systematically inserts material and prosaic marks (food, drink, tobacco) to the intellectual drama. Referred to as “the German in an English dress,” he is promptly drawn at the end of the preface instead of the usual signature: a character in period costume holding an umbrella and smoking a long meerschaum pipe (Fig. 8.2). This is Crowquill himself, as comparisons with extant portraits show. He stands in a circle (perhaps the magic circle of conjuration from the Faustian vulgate or Marlowe’s tragedy, not in Goethe’s work) and has a shadow (perhaps the parodied original). He could well be a modern-day Momus, the god of derision, sarcasm and mockery, the son of Nyx or Night in Greek mythology (who was in turn related to Erebus or Darkness).
Alfred Crowquill, “The German in an English dress,” in Faust: A Serio-Comic Poem with Twelve Outline Illustrations (London: B. B. King, 1834), viii (author’s portrait-signature)
Courtesy Beinecke, Yale University, Speck Sg8a F6 +834b
The textual content plays belittlingly on values and borrows modern details that anchor the universal drama in the most immediate British and German trappings. Crowquill’s Faust is thick-lipped. Besides an umbrella, his short and chubby Madge (Margaret) sports on her chest a prominent cross. The jewels are replaced by sausages, devoured by the priest and coveted by the neighbour (Fig. 8.3a–b). These elements come as no surprise. Retzsch’s plates are Crowquill’s primary victims. The reader faces a steady visual reworking of metaphysics via grub and frippery. What is surprising, however, is the form of the text. Crowquill inserts such elements into a challenging poetic structure, the stanza of eight iambic pentameters rhyming abababcc, derived from the ottava rima used in the Italian epics of Ariosto and Tasso. Edmund Spenser had used the latter to create the Spenserian stanza for his great English epic The Faerie Queene. Without going so far as Spenser’s nine verses, Crowquill’s stanza draws on the scholarly tradition of heroic-comic poetry. It becomes the chamber housing a series of mix-ups, words with dual or triple meaning, clashes between linguistic registers, and dubious associations between noble and trivial. The result is a sharp and strident resonance that drags the tragedy towards the burlesque. Such an overhaul recalls Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663, 1664, 1678). The great seventeenth-century burlesque poem ridiculed courtly poetry through Sir Hudibras, a wandering knight based on Don Quixote, with one major difference: Hudibras was written in rhyming couplets, or flat rhymes, which flattened the form. This is hardly the case here.
Alfred Crowquill, Margaret Admiring the Present Left by the Devil, standard version, in Faust: A Serio-Comic Poem with Twelve Outline Illustrations (London: B. B. King, 1834), pl. 6
Courtesy HAAB, F 3487, Weimar
Alfred Crowquill, Margaret Admiring the Present Left by the Devil, coloured version, in Faust: A Serio-Comic Poem with Twelve Outline Illustrations (London: B. B. King, 1834), pl. 6
Courtesy Beinecke, Yale University, Speck Sg8a F6 +834b
In addition to asides, moments of self-correction, and talking to oneself, Crowquill’s poem includes a number of ironic comments on style and genres, each tested in turn, then discarded. The frequent and conscious display of an ironic stance in the composition itself shows the author fully aware of what he is carrying out. His narrator adopts a meta-literary position, while the reader is invited to consider both the sardonic reworking of the original and the expertise behind its production, as well as the ability of an author-draughtsman conscious of his conceptual skills.
The complex result is to be set in historical and political perspective. Crowquill’s composition was published before the Gründerzeit in the German-speaking lands, the period extending from the 1848 revolutions to the Viennese stock market crash in 1873. During this time, the German bourgeoisie expanded, grew in economic power, and sought cultural strength in foundational myths. Faust would prove one such myth, and Goethe’s tragedy a founding national text. It would end up becoming heavily Germanized via a nationally inspired iconography already developing, produced by Wilhelm von Kaulbach and his disciples in the 1840s or Engelbert Seibertz in the first fully illustrated and luxuriously printed Faust I (1852–54).14 The myth of Faust, the tragedy of universal man for Goethe, would be heavily re-orientated, readjusted, and re-symbolized. Illustrated editions would echo such a strong propensity. By a significant phenomenon of cultural transfer, printed items—especially of major “national” texts—would reflect the rivalry between European nations either fully industrialized or in the process of industrialization.15
In such context, parody assumes an unexpected role, at once poetic and political. Crowquill’s creation is particularly interesting as the early expression of a two-fold inversion: the distortion of Goethe’s play through burlesque excess exorcised in advance the nationalistic appropriation yet to come but already at work in German iconography; the parody also announced the disruptive power of cultural highjack and a violent transfer. Caricaturing Faust for a British readership profoundly revived the original.
Crowquill gives certain German lines a concrete implication, updates and politicizes them. In the tragic climax of the prison cell, a delirious Margaret does not recognize Faust, who has come to free her. She moans that her beloved abandoned her. In Faust, Goethe remains relatively vague: “Far is my friend, who once was nigh” (Nah war der Freund, nun ist er weit, F 4435, trans. W. Arndt). In the parody, the lover who left her has become a soldier: “No! ‘He has gone to fight the French,’” cries Madge. Who could be this Faust who went to war to fight the French? Is it one of the German volunteers who stood up against Napoleon’s troops in 1813? Goethe’s play was published as these wars were taking place (1808). If the play were in the process of becoming nationalized, this Faust would indeed appear to be a brave Teuton soldier resisting the French, ironically viewed through an English lens. Yet Madge jeers the Germans. The stanza ends with the following vehement words: “All Germans spill at once that make ungrateful man.” The final verse has however nothing to do with Goethe. It is taken from King Lear’s curse on the heath, in which he entreats the storm to destroy the earth and all humanity. Crowquill has made a very slight but witty change, quite apparent in the note he has added, Germans having replaced the germens of Shakespeare’s lines: “all germens spill at once | That make ingrateful man.”16 The alteration casts Germans as despicable beings who should disappear from earth, just as Margaret rejects this lover who turns out to be German. The soldier left to fight the French is therefore rather English, or even a “German in an English dress” (such as the author), since she hates the Germans whom she vilifies. Upended and updated, the Elizabethan bard becomes catalyst to acclimatize the perennial Franco-British dispute in a parody of the German Faust. Madge’s lover appears an Englishman who fought the French—at Waterloo, perhaps. A typical spoof-specific characteristic of the burlesque update thus de-Germanizes Faust in a work born of Goethe’s Faust. The minimal adjustment is no less powerful. The “German in an English dress” is a little cosmopolitan Momus who proves very disruptive indeed.
8.3 Mischief in Images
The presentation of Crowquill’s Faust harbours two reading orientations. The engravings, in landscape format like Moses’s copies, fit sideways in the vertically printed book. Two routines and two directions make reading a hybrid exercise, pulling the viewer one way or the other. While the insertion of plates results from technical constraints, the push-me-pull-you effect is an additional distortion stressing rivalry between text and image.
Twelve selected and travestied scenes from Retzsch, mostly in outline, more detailed and smaller than either the originals or Moses’s copies, use frontal layouts, which lend the parody one of the most notable characteristics of Retzsch’s engraved set: theatricality and dramatization. Within this stylistic mould, Crowquill inserts caricatured faces, bodies, and fixtures to grotesque effect. Such are the jewels changed into a chain of sausages, rendering his stocky Margaret a lover of andouillettes (cf. Fig. 8.3). The crow’s quill also focuses on four supernatural episodes (signing the covenant, Auerbach’s tavern, the female apparition in the witch’s mirror, the potion rejuvenating Faust) before devoting (just like Retzsch) most of the storyline to Madge’s tale (plates V–XII). Madge—the commonly used hypocorism of both Magdalene and Margaret in English—is not only a small scale Margaret but could also be a Magdalene, a name commonly associated in Britain at the time with fallen women and even prostitutes.17 Despite perfectly knowing her own story (that of Gretchen) and explicitly admitting the fact, she still ends up its victim. Curtain.
One character emerges unscathed from this treatment, bearing well his English name “Old Nick.” Compared to Retzsch’s devil (Fig. 8.4), he has hardly grown in size (unlike Margaret), and his sharp silhouette, crowned with his long Retzschian feather, leads the dance. Crowquill endows him with yet another trait: a long German pipe, which he dispassionately smokes in plates III and XI (Fig. 8.5), the very accessory that Crowquill had adopted for his double self-portrait as “German in an English dress” at the beginning of the booklet (cf. Fig. 8.2). The meerschaum pipe had signalled a new attempt at translation, meant to restore the true spirit and meaning of the wild poem that had been blunted: “Now we propose, not to give a dull and literal Translation of our Author, but the true spirit and meaning of the Poem in the vernacular.”18 We may then trust that if Faust has been anglicized, and if this dubious Madge defends her virtue using that symbolic British accessory, an umbrella, then the only true German spirit at the heart of the parody is the devil with his meerschaum pipe. As the English saying goes, the devil is in the details—to which the German answers der Teufel sitzt im Detail, much like the French le diable est dans les détails. The fact that he shares his trademark pipe with the author, the “German in an English dress,” suggests that a diabolical German imp lives on in this parody. The latter is both a caricature of the German play via text and image and an Anglo-Germanic hoax. The pipe turns Old Nick into another facet of Momus by association with the author. Or is it the opposite? A review published in the Weekly True Sun, and recited by the publisher on the second edition’s back cover, highlights both the devil’s polymorphic nature and his distinctly German character by playing on the words “germane” (i.e., relevant, appropriate) and “German”:
The many-figured tempter of Faust never took more shapes than Faust himself has assumed, literary and pictorial. Here is another version of his story, quite as “germane to the matter” as the most German of them all.
Moritz Retzsch, Faust blaming Mephistopheles, Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust gezeichnet von Retsch (Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1816), pl. 23
Courtesy HAAB, F 3487, Weimar
Alfred Crowquill, Faust Hears that Margaret is in Prison, in Faust: A Serio-Comic Poem with Twelve Outline Illustrations (London: B. B. King, 1834), pl. 11
Courtesy HAAB, F 3482, Weimar
While it cannot be said that the on-going play on words (germane, germen, German) was an invitation to return to the country of origin, what happened has the flavour of a piquant sequel, inseparable from the spirit of parody.
8.4 Homecoming and “Who Loves a Laugh”
Seven years later, in 1841, a parody of Crowquill emerged in the form of a small landscape album under absinthe-coloured cover (14.7 × 19 cm), reduced to the sole images, entitled Bilder zu Goethe’s Faust, and issued by Carl Friedrich Doerffling (Dörffling) in Leipzig, the heart of German publishing. It is signed Anselmus Lachgern, literally “who loves a laugh,” a pseudonym that several catalogues on the posterity of Goethe’s Faust attribute to Crowquill. Although this is unlikely, the author’s real identity has to date proved impossible to unmask.
In reality, “Lachgern” is simply a German translation of “Philogelos,” or “friend of laughter,” a collection of colloquial jokes or humbugs in ancient Greek, often targeting highbrows. It was first drafted in the third or fourth century CE and has frequently been republished since the seventeenth century. As for the plates, a comparison between Crowquill’s set and the new (probably lithographed) version reveals several varying details. The German album is composed of retouched copies, not strict reproductions of Crowquill’s compositions. The unknown artist who produced it adopted the German Umriss tradition. In several instances, he even referred to Retzsch’s original prints. His line is much more precise than Crowquill’s, and he adds to his drawings several details either simply sketched or roughly depicted in the English booklet. The contents of Faust’s jars are imprecise in Crowquill’s drawing (Fig. 8.6) but they contain a foetus and a heart in Lachgern’s plate of the study (Fig. 8.7). The synecdoche sums up Margaret’s story, as it did in Retzsch’s set. Several other details differ, for instance, Lachgern’s Gothic arch to the back is more pointed, the stove more carefully decorated. Reversing Crowquill’s skeletal left-facing animal, the bones of perhaps a monkey, turned right atop the right-hand bookcase, hovers over a leftward-gazing human skull, again imitating a scene conceived by Retzsch (cf. Fig. 4.3 and 2.21). It is quite possible that the malicious pairing of man and animal reflect the spirit of copy and countertype figuring on the back cover as a final signature (see below). Aping has long been associated with distorted imitation.
Alfred Crowquill, Faust Signs Over his Soul to the Devil, in Faust: A Serio-Comic Poem with Twelve Outline Illustrations (London: B. B. King, 1834), pl. 1
Courtesy HAAB, F 3482, Weimar
Mephistopheles: Nur eins! Um Lebens oder Sterbens willen. Bitt’ich nur ein Paar Zeilen aus, in Bilder zu Goethes Faust von Anselmus Lachgern (Leipzig: C. F. Doerffling, 1841), pl. 1
Courtesy HAAB, F 3467, Weimar
At the time, Doerffling, a Leipzig publisher later in partnership with Franke, published works translated from English,19 and portfolios of prints by region, featuring panoramic views and landscapes (vedute). These medium-sized steel-engraved plates (26 × 31 cm) focused on a central view surrounded by smaller outline images depicting other landscapes, urban prospects, monuments, and typical local scenes. In one of them, entitled Unter-Italien (Southern Italy),20 the main view—a panorama of Naples—is embellished by a series of quaint goings-on. According to Andreas Beck, two of them are end-grain wood engravings by John Jackson, published in the 1833 Penny Magazine and later reprinted in Le Magasin pittoresque and Das Pfennig-Magazin.21 Doerffling’s activities and commercial exchanges with Great Britain support the idea that Lachgern’s album is a lithograph copy of Crowquill’s imported and retouched plates, probably by a German artist.
No specific intention is revealed, yet the components speak for themselves. Both the nickname “Lachgern” and the caricatures copied from Crowquill, who was spoofing Retzsch, form a parody of parody, not only of Retzsch’s set but also of Goethe’s play, achieved by way of new captions and the omission of one plate. Instead of translating Crowquill (whose lettering imitated Boosey’s), the captions are now lines taken straight from Goethe’s own Faust, which serves as first and foremost target. Furthermore, all of the original jeering plates have been used except for the final, the prison cell that Margaret refuses to leave. Thus, the slim German set opens with the covenant (pl. 1) and ends with Faust confronting the devil (pl. 11, cf. Fig. 8.5), in other words, with an unresolved tension. The omission of the prison scene, in which Margaret is redeemed by celestial voices, deprives the German copy of any glimpse of redemption, no matter how caricatured. The item seems to suggest that the story could begin all over again with Faust enslaved to the contract signed in the first plate. This is no less piquant.
Further elements appear to be encoded. The title duplicates Cornelius’s, Bilder zu Goethe’s Faust, while the copied (and enlarged) plates recover the dimensions of Retzsch’s originals (Crowquill’s are smaller). They are enclosed in double frames characteristic of Retzsch’s English copies by Moses, and not the initial thin line. Without insisting on this detail, present after all in Crowquill, and which could simply signal targeting the English popular copies, the plates sport top left an easily recognizable element from Retzsch’s prototype: simple numerals followed by a full stop. Strongly recalling Retzsch, the detail works as a hallmark of authenticity in a clashing context. In other words, Lachgern’s German copy of Crowquill’s plates pours the intentionally inflated English parody into a graphic mould combining the first two German sets (Cornelius and Retzsch) that helped read Goethe’s Faust through iconography.
The German parody tried to pass as a British product, and succeeded, convincing most compilers of Faust catalogues to attribute it to Crowquill. Its lithographed front cover (probably by two different hands as the differing lettering suggests) introduces a new element specifically made to drive home the idea of its English identity: a vignette of grouped Englishmen with features distorted in a style reminiscent of Hogarth or 1830s English satirical drawings (Fig. 8.8). And yet it only parades as English. In truth, it is a “(masked) German in an English dress,” astutely inversing the very process used by Crowquill.
Bilder zu Goethes Faust von Anselmus Lachgern (Leipzig: C. F. Doerffling, 1841), front cover
Courtesy HAAB, F 3467, Weimar
Lachgern’s Germanized copy of Crowquill is to my knowledge the first iconographic set to assail Goethe’s Faust only nine years after Goethe’s demise. While Faust textual parodies (only two earlier than Lachgern, and some illustrated, but later) will flourish in Germany over the years and have attracted copious scholarly attention, the satirical iconography of Goethe’s Faust has been considered only in examples tardier than the complex masked distortion offered by this anonymous Momus.22
Lachgern’s creation is a shrewd and powerful tool. It cleverly uses easily recognizable and standardized scenes (as initially epitomized by Retzsch), and its violent message is driven home unswervingly. The image stocks and supplies a conglomerate distortion of the play’s key scenes that directly clash with Goethe’s Faust excerpts used as captions. In Crowquill’s virulence Rümann had symptomatically discerned “the intention to denigrate” Retzsch, but left it to the reader and his own appreciation of “the German artist” to decide whether Crowquill had succeeded. He took no account of the offense to Goethe.23 What would he have thought of Lachgern? The latter’s parody is also a pioneering attempt. Indeed, the only examples I know of sharp Faust spoofs using disruptive images are not only posterior by at least twenty years, but also miscellaneous. Such is the “humoristic album” by Charles Benoit, Adam West and Roland Weibexahl, Neue Bilder zu deutschen Dichtern (New Images after German Poets), whose range is broader with only its third fascicle aiming at Faust. Lithographed in Leipzig, and published by Adolph Werl in Grimma and Leipzig, it postdates Lachgern by sixteen years (1857). An earlier attempt, still later than Lachgern by eight years, is again an assortment in periodical form, the Humoristich-satirisches Bilder-Album oder Bilder mit und ohne Worte (Album of Humorous-Satirical Images or Images with or without Words), reported to be by “several Rhine artists,” lithographed by David Levy Elkan (1808–65) in Cologne, and published by F. Wengler in Aachen. Its second fascicle (1849) opens on a parody of Faust as Prussian dragon officer tailing a mincing Gretchen. Both the latter use a standard process in heroic-comic poetry, the displacement of well-known original verses to comment on trite, vulgar or hackneyed incidents. Lachgern adopts a similar technique, yet the verses of the original comment scenes, twice perverted and twisted, of Retzsch’s originals via his English copies. The gesture is exceptionally arresting: it amply proves how venerated was the poet Goethe, since the parody adopts such a circuitous and thrice deformed contrivance; yet, it is also because of these twice-warped disguises that its violation is all the more effective.
Indeed, the filching was diabolically complex. It apes an original translated in images (Goethe’s Faust viewed through the dual lens of Retzsch and Cornelius). By further altering, pilfering even, it leads astray an English parody of Retzsch’s plates as had been copied in Britain. Still, it may also be interpreted as the outcome of irreverent humour, of second-degree readings, i.e., drollness and jeering—an offbeat biting spirit integral to Goethe’s Faust. Lachgern’s back cover (Fig. 8.9) reproduces indeed the countertype of “the German in an English dress,” the visual signature of Crowquill’s preface to his Faust parody (cf. Fig. 8.2). Lachgern’s last image is a reverse copy. This English Momus, with his meerschaum pipe, stoically echoes Mephistopheles, also depicted in the penultimate plate of Crowquill’s parody as an unwaveringly evil spirit calmly smoking a similar pipe (cf. Fig. 8.5). The latter is however Lachgern’s last plate, since he had rejected Crowquill’s final, depriving his own Faust of (even mock) redemption. Is this Mephistopheles a malicious critic? A phlegmatic mocking god or demon? The taciturn son of carnival nights is perhaps grafting the poetics of English caricature onto the benchmark German images by Retzsch and Cornelius. These are recognizable beyond bombastic inflation—just like Goethe’s verses quoted beneath them.
Bilder zu Goethes Faust von Anselmus Lachgern (Leipzig: C. F. Doerffling, 1841), back cover
Courtesy HAAB, F 3467, Weimar
8.5 A Mocking Deity with a Meerschaum Pipe
Goethe’s Faust opens with a key introductory scene, a “Prelude on the Stage” in which the Theatre Director converses with a Poet and a Merry Person on plays and genres liable to fill playhouses. Goethe’s Faust itself, with its ample variety of keys, shades, and pitches, could well be an answer to the question. Besides, the successive introductory parts and their chain of spectacles and audiences make of Faust I a play within a play within a play.24 In historicist nineteenth-century Faustian iconography, strongly jingoistic in inspiration, the Poet is frequently given Goethe’s features and the Merry Person those of Mephistopheles, the irreverent cunning spirit that is as much at home in Faust as gravity. Crowquill’s parody reveals this among other things through the meerschaum pipe, as does the set’s homecoming to Germany thanks to the “lover of laughter.”
The several facets of this Faust parody ultimately favour Mephistopheles.25 In Crowquill’s version, the devil embodies an ironic poetic, the burlesque spirit of farce, and the flip side of a solemn composition. Goethe’s Faust— canonized in the nineteenth century by commentary, monumental editions, or excessively heroic and Germanized iconography—will end up becoming a sedate work. Contrariwise, Crowquill brings his composition to an end because, once imprisoned, his Muse grows gloomy—and this is what is unbearable.26
The first-degree mechanism of parody is maybe just that: an externalized display of travesty assaulting its model in excessive spirit. When parody works, the model inevitably suffers under the weight of distortion. Reduced to a mere pattern, it is flaunted precisely to be satirized—and satire may at times sound or seem thin. The case is different for this work, which exploits parody to the fifth degree.
Furthermore, Faust has long been linked to burlesque elements, before even his legend was arranged into a story in the unsigned History of Dr Johann Faust (1587). In 1559 he figures among the characters of a carnival show; and in a 1588 description of the Nuremberg carnival, Gretchen is abducted by Faust.27 According to legend, he dreadfully perishes in Staufen, south of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, with its vivid Alemannic tradition of carnivals, witches’ revels, and fools’ parades. Such forms of expression nonetheless reflect more popular, widespread, and sometimes toned down versions. Conversely, Crowquill’s and Lachgern’s Faust manifest heavily political, social, and ideological cultural confrontations. They are born from and contribute to a widespread phenomenon of relocating, copying and reformulating, characteristics specific to centuries of media-driven modernity among nations in political conflict and commercial rivalry. Crowquill’s burlesque booklet critically re-reads the initial play from over the Channel thanks to a distorting English lens and dual means of expression. But prints and texts travel, and circulation accrues their impact, one outcome being Lachgern’s album.
Revising, thanks to parody, a myth compelled to gradual and excessive national appropriation, ends up revealing an aspect neatly enclosed in Goethe’s very Faust: Mephistopheles’s potential, not so much as a tempting demon, but a sharp and mocking force against national—even nationalistic—canonization. This is what Lachgern achieved in German terrain by importing and reworking Crowquill’s burlesque prints and by labelling them after Goethe’s original Faust. His booklet has been much read since most surviving copies come to us in very poor condition. “The role of burlesque,” wrote Pierre Mac Orlan in relation to Faust, “is the demon’s strength and the secret of his resistance to all the seductions of sentimentality.”28 He could have also added “the seductions of jingoism.”
A first version of this Chapter was published in French online in 2019, https://www.revue-textimage.com/17_blessures_du_livre/stead1.html.
See Appendix 1, nos. 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 21.
Rümann, Das illustrierte Buch, 225.
Vaughan, German Romanticism, 136.
Large paper edition, 37.6 × 27.6 cm. Ordinary exemplars 26.3 × 17.4 cm.
“Faust, a Serio-Comic Poem, with Twelve Outline Illustrations,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 1, no. 11 (Dec 1834): 852b, author’s emphasis.
Reibel, Faust: La musique, 64; Walter Aign, Faust im Lied (Stuttgart: Ausgabe der Stadt Knittlingen / Enzkreis, 1975), 45–47.
Reibel, Faust: La musique, 28–37.
BnF Est.: Tb 58 in-4°. Captain Markham Sherwill (1787?–1845), one of the originators of mountaineering and co-author of Ascent to the Summit of Mont Blanc (trans. into French in 1827), had a keen interest in literature and lived in France for much of his life.
Metropolitan Magazine 12, no. 45 (Jan 1835): 17.
Sarah Dickson, Alfred Crowquill: A Few Words about Pipes, Smoking and Tobacco (New York: New York Public Library, 1947); Simon Cooke, “‘If Not a Genius’? Alfred Crowquill as an Illustrator and Applied Artist,” Victorian Web, last modified 27 May 2017, http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/crowquill/cooke.html.
Cooke, “‘If Not a Genius’?”
Crowquill, Faust: A Serio-Comic Poem with Twelve Outline Illustrations (London: B. B. King, 1834), VII.
Forster-Hahn, “Romantic Tragedy or National Symbol?” 511–36.
Stead, “Monumental German Faust Editions,” 362–94.
King Lear, 3.2.8–9. Crowquill also uses “ungrateful” instead of “ingrateful,” but such variations on spelling are current in Elizabethan tragedies.
Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (London: Harper Collins, 1993), 317–19.
Crowquill, Faust, VII.
For example, Die Frau, nach dem Englischen der Mistress Norton von T. Vockerode (Leipzig: C. F. Dörffling, 1835), one of many works by the feminist and polygraph Caroline Sheridan Norton, or the anthology The English Novelist: A Collection of Tales by the Most Celebrated English Writers (Leipzic: William Engelmann / C. F. Doerffling, 1837 or 1839).
Italien, Neapel: Golf von Baja, etc., c.1844, steel engraving, 26 × 31 cm, Antiquariat Murr, Bamberg.
“Neapolitan Maccaroni-Eaters,” Penny Magazine 2, no. 87 (10 Aug 1833): 305, repr. “Scènes italiennes: le marchand de macaroni,” Le Magasin pittoresque 1, no. 51 (1833): 401, repr. “Die neapolitanischen Maccaroniesser,” Das Pfennig-Magazin, no. 38 (18 Jan 1834): 297; “The Carriages of Naples,” Penny Magazine 2, no. 90 (31 Aug 1833), repr. “Les voitures à Naples,” Le Magasin pittoresque 2, no. 33 (1834): 257, and “Die neapolitanische Kalesche,” Das Pfennig-Magazin, no. 48 (29 Mar 1834): 350. Both comic incidents feature on either side of the Naples panoramic view in Unter-Italien (kindly communicated by Andreas Beck).
Theodor Verweyen and Gunther Witting, Die Parodie in der neueren deutschen Literatur: Eine systematische Einführung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979); Verweyen and Witting, Die Kontrafaktur: Vorlage und Verarbeitung in Literatur, Bildender Kunst, Werbung und politischen Plakat (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1987); Waltraud Wende-Hohenberger and Karl Riha, eds., Faust Parodien: Eine Auswahl satirischer Kontrafakturen, Fort- und Weiterdichtungen mit einem Nachwort (Frankfurt: Insel, 1989); Waltraud Wende, Goethe-Parodien: zur Wirkungsgeschichte eines Klassikers (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1999). See the early textual parodies by Franz Grillparzer (1811–22) and Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1835), in Faust-Parodien, 11–20.
Rümann, Das illustrierte Buch, 98.
See p. 272.
Cf. Helmut Schanze, Faust-Konstellationen: Mythos und Medien (Munich: W. Fink, 1999), 95–97.
Crowquill, Faust, 32.
Wegner, 125.
Mac Orlan, “Daragnès et les livres,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 12, 2, Masques sur mesure, ed. Gilbert Sigaux (Évreux: Cercle du Bibliophile, 1970), 206.