Letters of Junius

The Letters of Junius are a series of letters that first appeared in the London Public Advertiser from January 21, 1769 to May 12, 1772 under the pseudonym "Junius" .

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In the same way the king, minister, parliament, courts of law and officials of state, the machinations of the Whigs and Tories and their struggles among themselves, were denounced with ruthless satire , but at the same time with spirit, thorough knowledge and eloquence.

Their main attacks were against Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd Duke of Grafton , Lord Frederick North and other ministers as well as against the then opposition leaders John Wilkes , John Horne Tooke and others. a. directed; only a few, such as Charles James Fox , Henry Vassall-Fox, 3rd Baron Holland or William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham , were spared.

Despite their republican cynicism, they breathed the monarchist spirit of the British constitution and were not infrequently guilty of partiality and a lack of liberalism. The style of writing, in which deep bitterness arising from deceived hopes seems to have guided the pen, is compact, often epigrammatic , but always clear, sure and precise in expression, and places the author among the first prose writers in England.

Soon after they were published in the Public Advertiser, the letters were also published in book form by its publisher Henry S. Woodfall (London 1772), for which the author demanded no other fee than a nicely bound and two other copies of his work.

A process that the government in 1770 made the letters pending due to Wood case was crushed and gave to the determination reason that a judgment in criminal proceedings against a libel ( diatribe ) a jury and was not for the courts.

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The most important editions of the letters appeared in London in 1783 and 1812/14, then the edition by Wade (London 1849, 2 vol .; new edition: vol. 1, 1873, vol. 2, 1869). A French translation was published in Paris in 1791, a German by Arnold Ruge (3rd edition, Leipzig 1867).

Presumed authorship

Soon after their publication one exhausted oneself in all kinds of conjectures about the author of the letters; More than 30 different people were suspected to be Junius, including Charles Lee , Edmund Burke , the poet Richard Glover , the Duke of Portland , the Geneva Jean Louis Delolme , the Lord Temple and others. a. The dispute over the authorship of the letters has continued in recent times.

George Coventry ( A critical inquiry regarding the real author of the Letters of Junius, proving them to have been written by Lord Viscount Sackville , London 1825) tried to name Lord Sackville, known from the Seven Years' War, as the author of the letters, and sought this assumption later to support John Jaques in his History of Junius and his works (1843) with new reasons.

Sir David Brewster believed to recognize the author in a certain Laughlin Maclean , who was General War Commissioner in 1773 and died in an accident on his return from the West Indies in 1777; but this opinion found little support.

William Cramp ( Junius and his works , London 1851) declared the well-known Lord Chesterfield , the Quarterly Review 1852 the notorious libertine Lord Thomas Lyttleton (died 1779 by suicide) as the author of the Junius letters.

Furthermore, John Britton ( The authorship of the letters of Junius elucidated , London 1848) spoke out for Colonel Isaac Barré and Jeelinger C. Symons ( William Burke, the author of Junius , 1859) for the brother of the famous Edmund Burke .

From the outset, the view, first issued by John Taylor in 1816 ( The identity of Junius with a distinguished living character established , London. 1816), that Sir Philip Francis is Junius, was more likely than all of these ; Macaulay joined them in 1841 and Sir F. Dwaris in 1850, and they became part of the magnificent work The handwriting through the examination of the letters left by Francis as well as the correspondence between Junius and Woodsall and the proof sheets of the letters of Junius preserved in the British Museum by the writer Charles Chabot of Junius professionally investigated (das. 1873, with a foreword by Edward Twisleton) irrefutably justified. See also Friedrich Brockhaus (1838–1895), Die Briefe des Junius (Leipzig 1876).

Literature (selection)

Tony H. Bowyer: A bibliographical examination of the earliest editions of the letters of Junius . University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, Va. 1957.
John Cannon: The letters of Junius . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1978, ISBN 0-19-812455-4 .
Francesco Cordasco, Gustave Simonson: Junius and his works. A history of the letters of Junius and the authorship controversy . Junius-Vaughn Press, Fairview, NJ 1986.
Francesco Cordasco: Junius. A bibliography of the letters of Junius; with a checklist of Junian scholarship and related studies . Junius-Vaughn Press, Fairview, NJ 1986.
Alvar Ellegård: A statistical method for determining authorship. The Junius letters 1769-1772 . Göteborg, 1962 (Gothenburg studies in English; 13).
Linde Katritzky: Johnson and the letters of Junius. New perspectives on an old enigma . Lang, New York 1996, ISBN 0-8204-3106-0 (Ars interpretandi; Vol. 5).