The Art of Sharing: Reading in the Romantic Miscellany

Abstract

‘Sharing is more difficult than you think.’¹ This was the advice offered to the Major by his friend in Goethe’s novella, ‘The Man of Fifty’, and it concerned the difficulties of transmitting the Verjngungskunst, the art of rejuvenation, that the Major required in order to remain vital and youthful for his niece who, in a typical Goethean fantasy, had fallen in love with him. ‘The Man of Fifty’ had initially appeared in part in 1817 in Cotta’sLadies’ Pocket-Book, and it was a story that was in fact largely concerned with the problem of the part – with the parting, imparting, and parting with things. It would later be included in Goethe’s last novel,Wilhelm Meister’s Travels (1821/29), where it would achieve its fame as one of his most important prose works, and yet its initial placement within Cotta’s miscellany disclosed an important fact about the culture of nineteenth-century miscellanies in which it first appeared: that the question of the part, imparting and parting with — in a word, sharing — was integral to the miscellanies’ success as a literary format in the nineteenth century.