The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen eBook

Rudolf Erich Raspe
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 185 pages of information about The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen eBook

Rudolf Erich Raspe
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 185 pages of information about The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Apart from Bruce, however, the sequel, like the previous continuation, contains a great variety of political, literary, and other allusions of the most purely topical character—­Dr. Johnson’s Tour in the Hebrides, Mr. Pitt, Burke’s famous pamphlet upon the French Revolution, Captain Cook, Tippoo Sahib (who had been brought to bay by Lord Cornwallis between 1790 and 1792).  The revolutionary pandemonium in Paris, and the royal flight to Varennes in June 1791, and the loss of the “Royal George” in 1782, all form the subjects of quizzical comments, and there are many other allusions the interest of which is quite as ephemeral as those of a Drury Lane pantomime or a Gaiety Burlesque.

Nevertheless the accretions have proved powerless to spoil “Munchausen.”  The nucleus supplied by Raspe was instinct with so much energy that it has succeeded in vitalising the whole mass of extraneous extravagance.

Although, like “Gulliver’s Travels,” “Munchausen” might at first sight appear to be ill-suited, in more than one respect, for the nursery, yet it has proved the delight of children of all ages; and there are probably few, in the background of whose childish imagination the astonishing Munchausen has not at one time or another, together with Robinson Crusoe, Jack-the-Giant-Killer, and the Pied Piper of Hamelyn, assumed proportions at once gigantic and seductively picturesque.

The work, as has been shown, assumed its final form before the close of the eighteenth century; with the nineteenth it commenced its triumphant progress over the civilised world.  Some of the subsequent transformations and migrations of the book are worthy of brief record.

A voluminous German continuation was published at Stendhal in three volumes between 1794 and 1800.  There was also a continuation comprising exploits at Walcheren, the Dardanelles, Talavera, Cintra, and elsewhere, published in London in 1811.  An elaborate French translation, with embellishments in the French manner, appeared at Paris in 1862.  Immerman’s celebrated novel entitled “Munchausen” was published in four volumes at Dusseldorf in 1841, and a very free rendering of the Baron’s exploits, styled “Munchausen’s Lugenabenteuer,” at Leipsic in 1846.  The work has also been translated into Dutch, Danish, Magyar (Bard de Manx), Russian, Portuguese, Spanish (El Conde de las Maravillas), and many other tongues, and an estimate that over one hundred editions have appeared in England, Germany, and America alone, is probably rather under than above the mark.

The book has, moreover, at the same time provided illustrations to writers and orators, and the richest and most ample material for illustrations to artists.  The original rough woodcuts are anonymous, but the possibilities of the work were discovered as early as 1809, by Thomas Rowlandson, who illustrated the edition published in that year.  The edition of 1859 owed embellishments to Crowquill, while Cruikshank

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Project Gutenberg
The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.