Impressions of Garrick
John Nowell introduces and translates a contemporary portrait of the eighteenth-century actor at work, originally penned by G.C. Lichtenberg.
Respected by contemporaries as ‘one of the finest minds of his day’, Lichtenberg, Professor of Natural Science at the University of Gottingen, was a fervent anglophile. His Letters from England describe his impressions during the eighteen month she spent there, ‘living sometimes like a lord and sometimes like a tramp', in 1774 and 1775. Hogarth and Garrick were among his greatest heroes. This composite portrait of David Garrick has been extracted from the Letters.
To HEINRICH CHRISTIAN BOIE
London, October 1st, 1775
I hope, my dear B., that I am now in a better position to comply with your request, to write and tell you something about Mr Garrick, than I was when you first made it. At that time I had seen this extraordinary man exactly twice, and this was too little to enable me to observe him calmly and not far enough in the past to enable me to write to a friend calmly about it.
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