ABSTRACT
Anne Thackeray Ritchie's German discourse takes account of the kinship contemporary Germans felt with one another 'so weit die deutsche Zunge klingt', 'wherever German is spoken'. Most striking of all is the large German population people have watched strolling through Thackeray's field full of folk, ranging from bourgeois saints like the Saxon pressed into Prussian military service to aristocratic villains like Lutterloh and Galgenstein. A sense of humour and continual alertness is essential for an appreciation of the tone of his German discourse and of the degree of seriousness one must detect in any given passage or piece. Though Thackeray never progressed very far beyond his starting-point in the practice of the visual arts, his German discourse is greatly enriched by the drawings and engravings that supplement its verbal dimension. Accurate English translations of representative extracts from German books reviewed constitute a welcome feature of Thackeray's contributions to The Times and the Foreign Quarterly Review.
