Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

English for Germans, German for the English 

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WILLLIAMS, Thomas Sidney. MODERN ENGLISH AND GERMAN DIALOGUES AND ELEMENTARY PHRASES for the use of the two nations. By T.S. Williams. The German revised and corrected by C. Crüger, Director of the Commercial Academy in Hamburg. The Second Edition.... Hamburg: bei Herold junior, 1826. £325

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Second Edition. 12mo, pp. [ii], viii, [iv], 249, [5] publisher’s catalogue; printed largely in two columns in roman and Fraktur; some light foxing and offsetting but otherwise clean and fresh; from the Donaueschingen library with its stamp on title-page and a manuscript shelfmark in ink; in contemporary blue boards, yellow paper spine, largely perished, with handwritten paper labels.

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Second edition, after the similarly rare first of 1823, of this collection of dialogues designed both for German speakers learning English and for anglophone learners of German, by Thomas Sidney Williams (1786-1869).

In his preface to this edition, Williams notes that ‘The rapid sale of the first edition of this elementary work, having rendered a second impression necessary, I have spared no pains, in giving it a careful revision’. To that end, he enlisted Carl Crüger, director of the commercial academy in Hamburg, to remodel the German of the previous edition. Crüger also provides his own, rather longer, preface, opening with his opinion that there is no language easier to learn than English. The first part of the book is really a phrase book, covering food and drink, clothing, numbers, social situations, and more, although it is sometimes hard to discern much of an organising principle, with page 31 (taken at random) moving from ‘All is not gold that glitters’, through ‘Don’t you like my dog?’ to ‘I have a bad bowel-complaint’, ‘Her brother is very handsome’ and ‘Can you find my thimble?’. Later sections seem more coherent, giving multiple examples of verbs and the prepositions they govern, and the use of prepositions and adverbs, before a collection of 36 dialogues, concluding with templates for calling cards and invitations.

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Williams went on to publish a similar work covering English and Dutch, as well as a guide to commercial correspondence. Born in Gosport, he moved to Hamburg in 1818 as a corresponding clerk, and remained there until the late 1850s. 

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OCLC records copies at Stanford, Alabama, Chicago, and the British Library, with only digital copies recorded of the first edition. 

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