INTRODUCTION

Charles P. Moritz’s “Travels, chiefly on foot, through several parts of England in 1782, described in Letters to a Friend,” were translated from the German by a lady, and published in 1795.  John Pinkerton included them in the second volume of his Collection of Voyages and Travels.

The writer of this account of England as it was about a hundred years ago, and seven years before the French Revolution, was a young Prussian clergyman, simply religious, calmly enthusiastic for the freer forms of citizenship, which he found in England and contrasted with the military system of Berlin.  The touch of his times was upon him, with some of the feeling that caused Frenchmen, after the first outbreak of the Revolution, to hail Englishmen as “their forerunners in the glorious race.”  He had learnt English at home, and read Milton, whose name was inscribed then in German literature on the banners of the free.

In 1782 Charles Moritz came to England with little in his purse and “Paradise Lost” in his pocket, which he meant to read in the Land of Milton.  He came ready to admire, and enthusiasm adds some colour to his earliest impressions; but when they were coloured again by hard experience, the quiet living sympathy remained.  There is nothing small in the young Pastor Moritz, we feel a noble nature in his true simplicity of character.

He stayed seven weeks with us, three of them in London.  He travelled on foot to Richmond, Windsor, Oxford, Birmingham, and Matlock, with some experience of a stage coach on the way back; and when, in dread of being hurled from his perch on the top as the coach flew down hill, he tried a safer berth among the luggage in the basket, he had further experience.  It was like that of Hood’s old lady, in the same place of inviting shelter, who, when she crept out, had only breath enough left to murmur, “Oh, them boxes!”

Pastor Moritz’s experience of inns was such as he hardly could pick up in these days of the free use of the feet.  But in those days everybody who was anybody rode.  And even now, there might be cold welcome to a shabby-looking pedestrian without a knapsack.  Pastor Moritz had his Milton in one pocket and his change of linen in the other.  From some inns he was turned away as a tramp, and in others he found cold comfort.  Yet he could be proud of a bit of practical wisdom drawn by himself out of the “Vicar of Wakefield,” that taught him to conciliate the innkeeper by drinking with him; and the more the innkeeper drank of the ale ordered the better, because Pastor Moritz did not like it, and it did not like him.  He also felt experienced in the ways of the world when, having taken example from the manners of a bar-maid, if he drank in a full room he did not omit to say, “Your healths, gentlemen all.”