The Making of Lord John Carteret’s Landmark Edition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (London, 1738)

Abstract

In the editorial history of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s masterpiece, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), one of its signal events was the landmark edition published in London in 1738. The result of an unusual Anglo-Spanish collaboration commissioned by an English nobleman, the project may have been set in motion by his exchange with a Hanoverian princess newly arrived in Great Britain. This major editorial undertaking and two strong personalities — one directly involved, the other only possibly pertinent — occupy the following pages. The legendary Merlin the sorcerer plays a dual role and links the two, as a personality in the Quixote and as the name of a collection of books of fiction that later became the site of an amusement-park-style spectacle at a royal London residence. These intertwined stories reveal how canonical literature and popular legend can serve the twin pursuits of cultural prestige and historical standing.