The importance of Goethe in the cultural life of 19th-century America has been so well documented that any further evidence may seem superfluous and all but impossible. Yet a footnote, in the form of a previously underestimated "first", may now be added to the towering superstructure of the bibliography on the subject.

From the time of Edward Everett's return from abroad in 1819, the fame of German literature and philosophy began to spread in this country. The foreign seeds were sowed here by Margaret Fuller, Emerson and others. Carlyle's influence was effective and in time copies of Goethe's writings appeared upon American shelves and articles on Goethe enriched American periodicals. James Freeman Clarke wrote in the Western Messenger (August, 1836): "Five years ago the name of Goethe was hardly known in England and America.… But now a revolution has taken place. Hardly a review or a magazine appears that has not something in it about Goethe". Margaret Fuller planned a biography of the great German poet. At Harvard, at Longfellow's Bowdoin and elsewhere, German lessons and German readings prepared the ground for an understanding of that "restorer of faith and love" whose universality and whose affirmations began to infiltrate American transcendental thought.

Goethe's Werke, published in forty volumes between 1827 and 1830 at Stuttgart and Tubingen, were followed between 1832 and 1834 by fifteen volumes of the Nachgelassene Werke. These fifty-five volumes found their way to Emerson's shelves and when Elizabeth Peabody opened her Foreign Library at 13 West Street, Boston, Items 15-70 consisted of Goethe's Sammtliche Werke in 55 Banden.

Of all Goethe's works, his Faust—that "national poem of the German people"—seemed most meaningful to the American mind. As Margaret Fuller put it in The Dial (July 1841): "Faust contains the great idea of his life, as indeed there is but one great poetic idea possible to man, the progress of a soul through the various forms of existence. All his other works … are mere chapters to this poem". Faust was known to this country both as part of the Werke and in translation. A copy of Lord Francis Leveson-Gower's verse translation of Part I (London: J. Murray, 1823) was in Thomas Dowse's library in Cambridge; Emerson read the Gower translation. Abraham Hayward's prose version, published in London by Edward Moxon in 1833, was the first translation to be published in this country, bearing the 1840 imprint of Lowell: Daniel Bixby; New York: D. Appleton and Company. A copy of that edition "in which Emerson wrote his name, is still in his house, at Concord". The Hayward translation of Faust was also in Elizabeth Peabody's circulating foreign library despite the feeling expressed in The Dial (July 1841) that "All translations of Faust can give no better idea of that wonderful work than a Silhouette of one of Titian's beauties".

Although it appears to have esscaped general notice, Faust in the original German was made available in this country three years before the American edition of the Hayward translation. The Curator of the William A. Speck Collection of Goetheana at Yale cites as the "earliest Faust in German with an American imprint" the 1864 edition published by S. R. Urbino of Boston and F. W. Christern and others of New York. Yet a generation earlier—in 1837—a German Faust was published in this country. Its title-page reads simply: Faust./Eine Tragbdie/von/Goethe./New-York:/ Zu haben in der Verlags-Handlung,/ 471 Pearl-Strasse./1837.

An octavo of 432 pages, it contains both parts of Faust in continuous pagination with a second title-page, no more informative than the first, preceding the "Zweiter Theil".

This edition was actually published by the New York firm of Radde and Paulsen as the second volume of a five-volume set issued between 1837 and 1840 entitled MUSEUM DER DEUTSCHEN KLASSIKER and its appearance as part of a set is probably the reason why it seems to have eluded the bibliographers.

In their own way, Radde and Paulsen were sowing the foreign seeds as actively as Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody. William Radde and George Henry Paulsen were agents of J. G. Wesselhoeft and importers of French and German books. At 471 Pearl Street they offered the works of Jean Paul and Wieland, Schiller and Korner, as well as all the advantages of a German intelligence office and a homeopathic apothecary shop. Indeed in this the Verlags-Handlung resembled the Peabody bookshop where homeopathic remedies were also available along with German literature. Besides the works of Hahnemann, Radde and Paulsen sold tinctures, milk sugar, and homeopathic chocolate.

In 1840, when Elizabeth Peabody published a Catalogue of her Foreign Library, her fourteenth entry was "Faust, Tragedie von Goethe. (See Hayward's Faust.)" One wonders if this was a copy of the edition published in New York by Radde and Paulsen. Its appearance, preceding Miss Peabody's entry for the 55-volume set of Goethe's Sammtliche Werke, seems to indicate that it was indeed a separate edition and if so it may well have been the Radde and Paulsen edition.

At all events, that New York firm merits the distinction of issuing the first German Faust with an American imprint and so of helping to stir up that tempest in the transcendental teapot that has been engaging the attention of scholars ever since.