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Hammer-Purgstall, Hajji Baba, and the Moriers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

George Krotkoff
George Krotkoff
Affiliation:
Department of near eastern studiesThe Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

None of the editions of Hajji Baba of Isfahan nor the monographs and articles on its author, James Morier, that have come to my attention so far has made any comments on the introduction to this book. This introduction is couched in the form of a letter to the Reverend Doctor Fundgruben, Chaplain to the Swedish Embassy at the Ottoman Porte, and is dated London, 1st December, 1823. Doctor Fundgruben is characterized as being preoccupied with “hieroglyphic lore” and as the author of the book The Biography of Celebrated Mummies.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , February 1987 , pp. 103 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 The Persian translator of Haiji Baba had taken the story literally and found the work worthy of being presented to the Persian public. Only when Morier's authorship later became known was the book denounced as the malicious fabrication of a foreigner for the purpose of ridiculing the Persians (see The Adventures of Hail Baba of Ispahan, translated from English into Persian by Kirmani, Haji Shaikh Ahmad-i and edited with notes by Phillott, Major D. C. [Calcutta 1905], p. ix).Google Scholar

2 A feat of true literary detective work, this discovery is reported by Bouteron, Marcel in “L'inscription de la ‘Peau de Chagrin’ et l'orientaliste Joseph de Hammer,” Revue des Conferences Françaises en Orient, 14, II (11 1950), 499–503. This article also quotes from the memoirs of princess Pauline de Metternich, wherein Hammer is described as a terrible bore who could lecture for hours on the expressions for camel in Arabic. He did in fact publish a monograph on this subject.Google Scholar

3 The idea had been conceived in 1811, but it did not materialize until 1847 due mainly to Metternich's resistance.

4 Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (1774–1852), Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Historische Kommission, Fontes rerum austriacarum, Bd. 70 (Vienna 1940). The original of the memoirs, together with other memorabilia, is preserved in the family archives in Schloβ Hainfeld in Styria.

5 Their short biographies from the pen of Stanley Lane-Poole are listed in The Dictionary of National Biography.

6 Famous for the acquisition of the “Elgin Marbles.”

7 Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, pp. 58, 64–68, 433.

8 Unpublished transcript V, II (section, page), quoted below in my translation.

9 The Dictionary of National Biography, V. xiii, 949.

10 It should be noted that Hammer left Istanbul in 1806 and thus could not have met James Morier in 1807. Morier's pretended exactness (“an English traveller, who (forgive my precision) sixteen years ago”) is to be taken with a grain of salt.

11 The permission to study and photograph this letter at the castle is gratefully acknowledged. The letter is rendered exactly as it is written. A few uncertain readings and illegible words are indicated by question marks.

12 Stratford Canning (cf.Lane-Poole, Stanley, The life of the Right Honorable Stratford Canning, viscount Stratford de Redcliffe [London-New York 1888]).Google Scholar

13 Sir Sidney Smith.

14 It is true that Hammer had many detractors due to his sometimes sloppy, though prolific, scholarship. The unforgiving H. L. Fleischer pointed out his weakness in Arabic, and most of his works are now outdated. Yet these facts do not diminish Hammer's merits as a pioneer of Oriental studies or his stature in the social and literary circles of the day, nor should they obscure the enormous influence he had on some contemporaries, such as J. W. Goethe (cf. Solbrig, Ingeborg H., Hammer-Purgstall und Goethe: “Dem Zaubermeister das Werkzeug.” Stanford German Studies, v. 1 [Bern, 1973]Google Scholar). As to his contributions to Ottoman history, they remain useful and quotable to this very day. In spite of this, British scholars of the latter part of the nineteenth century seem no longer to have remembered Hammer-Purgstall, which must account for Browne, E. G.'s reference to Sir Redhouse, James as “the first Turkish scholar in Europe probably” (A Year Amongst the Persians [London 1893], p. 10).Google Scholar