John Russell (writer)

John Russell (* 1796 in Stirling , † November 30, 1846 in Edinburgh ) was a Scottish lawyer and travel writer. His brother was the lawyer James Russell (1790–1861).

Life

Russell studied for five years at the University of Glasgow , where he won various prizes. He received a gold medal for a paper on the United States Constitution , with which he expressed his interest in a democratic form of government . At the beginning of the 1820s he made an extensive trip through Germany and Austria , about which he wrote a detailed description. It appeared in several editions and was also translated into German. The passages in which he reports on Goethe and Beethoven were particularly cited .

He was admitted to the bar in Scotland in 1824 and gained wide recognition. He and his brother James edited The Annual Register for several years .

Due to his poor health, he died on November 30, 1846, "barely fifty years old".

Works

• A Tour in Germany, and some of the Southern Provinces of the Austrian Empire, in 1820, 1821, 1822 , 2 volumes, Edinburgh 1824 - 2nd edition 1825; 3rd edition 1828
  • Volume 1 ( digitized version )
  • Volume 2 ( digitized version )
• Journey through Germany and some southern provinces of Austria in the years 1820, 1821 and 1822. From the English , 2 volumes, Leipzig: Liebeskind, 1825
  • Volume 1 ( digitized version )
  • Volume 2 ( digitized version )

literature

• Robert Pick, John Russel of Edinburgh and Goethe: An Early Nineteenth-Century Scottish Opinion of German Classicism , in: German Life and Letters , Vol. 1, No. 4 (July 1948), pp. 320–328 ( digitized version )
• William Meredith, “Vienna”: Chapter 5 of the 1828 Edition of John Russell's Tour in Germany , in: The Beethoven Journal , vol. 29, no. 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 66–83 (with facsimile)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical information according to Dictionary of National Biography , ed. by Sidney Leigh, Volume 49, New York 1897, p. 441