Sarah Austin and the Politics of Translation in the 1830s

Abstract

austin was an early Victorian translator of note, working to supplement the income of her lawyer husband, John Austin, and after his death editing and publishing his famous treatise on jurisprudence. She belonged to that Unitarian circle of intellectual thinkers, writers, and philosophers that included Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, the Grotes, and the Carlyles, and she was related to the Martineaus. Her nephew was Henry Reeve, later an influential and long-term editor of the Whig quarterly, the Edinburgh Review, from i%SS to 189^. As I have noted elsewhere, Austin, Carlyle, and Coleridge spearheaded an industry that introduced German intellectual thought into England (Johnston 124) . Austin had located what we would term today a niche market, in which she offered British readers a range of texts translated, or, to use Andre Lefevere's term, rewritten, from the German.1 Austin's translations from the German in the decade between 1831 and 1841 were especially significant in introducing German intellectual thinking and writing into England.2 One contemporary commentator notes in a review of Fragments from German Prose that Austin has done more, perhaps, than any living writer, to bring the German mind into contact with the (Austin's German Prose Writers £04-06) . Like that of her contemporaries, Austin's engagement with literature and translation characterized the practice of a generation of thinkers whose early work would come to inform the intellectual thrust of the Victorian age. This is especially so with regard to the literary output of women. Across the decade, Austin offered to the English non-professional reader Hermann Puckler-Muskau's Tour in England, Ireland and France, in the Years 1828 and 1829 (1832); Characteristics of Goethe (1833), from the German of Johann Falk and Friedrich von Muller, among others; Friedrich von Raumer 's England in 183^ (1836); and Leopold von Ranke 's The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome (1840) and Fragments from German Prose (1841). While Austin also translated works from the French by Cousin, Sismondi, and Guizot, French was far more established in Britain as the second language of the educated middle classes. Austin's own correspondence reveals the degree to which this was so in her particular case, extensively interlarded as it is with French words and phrases (as are her translations) . The personal correspondence of other British women of the same period and of comparable intellectual and social