ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the most part on the Pckler-Muskau translation. John Austin's decision may also, of course, have been influenced by the notoriety of Pcklers German publication which would have ensured her translation significant pre-publicity and equally significant earnings. Sarah Austin was an early Victorian translator of note, working to supplement her lawyer husband John Austin's income and, after his death, editing and publishing his famous treatise on Jurisprudence. Like her contemporaries, Austin's engagement with literature and translation characterized the practice of a generation of thinkers whose early work would come to inform the intellectual thrust of the Victorian age. For Austin, a self-declared radical and certainly a Whig, the politics of the issue of national identity in the great reform year of 1832 would have been a topic hotly debated in the circles in which she moved and one in which she would have participated with relish.
