ABSTRACT
The Moravian family into which Sigmund Freud was born grew an English branch when Emanuel and Philipp Freud, sons of his father’s previous marriage, emigrated to Manchester, where they established lucrative businesses. They did not, however, lose touch with their father and his second family, which in its turn moved permanently to Vienna. Emanuel had two daughters slightly younger than Sigmund, and the families thought that he might marry one of these and settle into the family business in England. Sigmund was an Anglophile from the first. Using a medical metaphor he wrote to his friend Eduard Silberstein on 6 August 1873 that he was in danger of catching ‘the English disease’ (‘die englische Krankheit’): ‘I read English history, write English letters, declaim English verses, listen to descriptions of England, yearn to attract English eyes’.1 Alongside Goethe, Heine, the Book of Job, Herodotus, Ovid, and Cervantes, the same letter alludes to Robert Burns’s ‘My heart’s in the Highlands’ — suggesting that his declamation of ‘English’ verses may have included some of the Scottish ones Ferdinand Freiligrath had made familiar in German translation. His one regret, he told Silberstein, was that nothing had so far come of his plans to visit England. Two years later, however, he had his wish: he crossed the Channel, stayed with his Manchester family, made excursions to St Anne’s on Sea, decided against marriage and the wool trade, but thought that ‘despite rain, drunkenness and conservatism’ England was more pleasant to live in than Austria-Hungary.2 He had been delighted to find that one of his Manchester nephews bore the first name Samuel, which Dickens had bestowed on both Mr Pickwick and his man Sam Weller. The English books, however, which most inspired him at this time were not novels or collections of poetry, but works by scientists who wrote in a style accessible to the common reader: Darwin, John Tyndall, Thomas Huxley, Charles Lyell, and Norman Lockyer. In the years that followed he acquired representative books by such writers, which became a permanent part of his library; they helped to wean him away from a heavily specialized scientific and philosophical style, reinforcing lessons he had already absorbed from Lessing and Heine. They also helped to hone his command of the English language, which enabled him to treat, or address lectures to, Britons and Americans who sought him out in quest of help or instruction.
