Richard Phillips, Seume’s first English publisher

Kindred minds: Johann Gottfried Seume and the Sheriff of London

The Enlightenment is the clear, complete, and definite understanding of our nature, our faculties, and our circumstances—a lucid grasp of our rights and duties and of how these are bound together. Whoever seeks to hinder such enlightenment is most certainly either a scoundrel or a fool—often both; only now and then is the one more pronounced than the other.
— Johann Gottfried Seume

In 1807, a London publisher who’d once done time for selling Thomas Paine’s revolutionary tract, Rights of Man, published the first English Seume. Why would a radical English bookseller care about a German who liked to walk and tell the truth? I think it’s because they recognised the same moral ground under their feet, Phillips from a cell in Leicestershire, Seume as a press‑ganged conscript bound for North America.

Phillips, the publisher and Seume, the walker.

In May 1793, the Leicester bookseller Richard Phillips, aged twenty‑five, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for selling Paine. He kept editing his Leicester Herald from his cell under the indulgent eye of the famously enormous gaoler Daniel Lambert¹. A later fire at his property drove him to London, where he started over as a bookseller and printer.

Within two years he launched the Monthly Magazine, a periodical devoted to moral and intellectual improvement. By 1807 he was Sheriff of London. Phillips established the Sheriff’s Fund and implemented new sanitary measures at the notorious Newgate Prison. In 1808 George III knighted him, an ironic flourish for a man once jailed for Paine.

He was a man of reforming habits and moral experiments, a lifelong vegetarian after finding his favourite cow served for dinner. A believer in learning by questions - his “interrogative system.” He churned out cheap, useful books, wrote philosophical essays, and paid his authors well. One acquaintance called him “rosy‑faced and healthful, a vegetable man among carnivores.”

He liked German thought for its rigour and moral seriousness, and his catalogues show it. So when he assembled his Collection of Modern and Contemporary Voyages and Travels, a multi‑volume “library of modern travels” meant to educate people who’d never leave home, Seume’s Mein Sommer 1805 was an easy fit.

The English version, by an uncredited translator, appeared as A Tour through Part of Germany, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, etc., during the Summer of 1805². As Professor B. Q. Morgan noted in 1930, the translation was “free but not unfaithful.”³ It was Seume’s first English outing, and was not soon repeated in English.⁴

Inside page of Phillip’s translation

Phillips’s choice wasn’t accidental. Seume’s calm moral independence and allergy to pretence echoed his own values. Both men distrusted abstract systems and sentimental display; they preferred to test ideas against experience. Seume’s sober mix of politics, manners, and practical observation was exactly the “useful” literature Phillips loved. As Phillips put it, the “great objects of knowledge and virtue” rest on “the assertion of the rights of man” and “the establishment of a spirit of free enquiry.”⁵

Mein Sommer 1805 made sense for his audience. The northern loop through Poland and Scandinavia was less charged than the Syracuse walk but carried the same ethical weight: travel as moral discipline.

As Seume put it, “To ride is a sign of impotence; to walk is strength.”⁶ Others travelled to be delighted; Seume travelled to observe and learn. Phillips recognised a kindred spirit.

There’s no sign they ever wrote to each other, or that Seume even knew about the London edition. Still, the kinship is there: Enlightenment reason without the frills; plain speech; curiosity; conscience over creed.

Seume Project updates

1. I’ve applied to join the International Seume Society; I expect I’ll be the first English member of this august organisation!

2. I’ve heard there’s a day-long Seume conference in December. I was tempted to go, but at such short notice Ryanair flights are expensive, £450 or more for a return, and that, plus the other costs of the jolly, would be beyond my means. Ah well, there’s always next year.

3. I’m off to Berlin on Monday for a short break, which will include a day in Leipzig to see Seume’s home city. I’ll also be meeting in Berlin with the excellent Eric Pawlitzky, who walked to Syracuse in 2022.

4. I’ve had some cards printed to hand out when on my travels, what do you think?

   

   

1. An enormous goaler

2. You can find a copy at the Haithi Trust website.

3. B. Q. Morgan (1930), quoted in Robert L. Kahn, Seume’s Reception in England and America.

4. A Stroll to Syracuse - trans. Alexander and Elizabeth Henderson (1964).

5. A Morning’s Walk from London to Kew (1817).

6. Mein Sommer 1805. The full quote is: “I am of the opinion that everything would go better if people walked more… The moment one sits in a carriage, one is already a few degrees removed from original humanity… To ride is a sign of impotence; to walk is strength.”