The Suicide of Young Werther

It may be said with impunity that Goethe's short novel The Sorrows of Young Werther made an impact upon the reading public greater and more unforgettable than any made by any work of literature upon any reading public before or since. “The sensation,” writes Hume-Brown, was “instantaneous, profound, and general.” Indeed, “No book ever given to the world” has created a comparable stir.5 Werther's manner of dress, “blue coat, yellow vest, yellow hose, and topboots,” became the fashion of European capitals; a perfume called “eau de Werther” soon appeared in the shops; in the home, pictures of Werther and his beloved Charlotte were apt to be found in the kitchen on bread boxes, in the closet on fans, in the dining room on porcelain, and in the boudoir on jewelry. Mantlepieces were frequently decorated with Werther and Charlotte figurines, or with miniatures of the two enclosed in ornamented frames.5a But it was not only in the commercial and domestic spheres that the influence of the book was felt; on the contrary, The Sorrows of Young Werther, unprotected by copyright, immediately fell victim to all sorts of writers working in every conceivable genre, from stage plays to diaries; and the imitations, dubbed by Atkins “the testament of Werther,”1 continued for decades in a variety of languages. Thinking upon these remarkable facts, one is not surprised to learn that Goethe's novel played some kind of role in the suicidal conduct of numerous Europeans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

I say some kind of role simply because we cannot attribute an individual's suicide to the influence of a book, unless, of course, we