ABSTRACT
Thanks to either a quirk of fate or a self-regarding whim on the part of his mother, none of the letters which Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in England in 1803 has survived. Given that he wrote to his father, mother and sister, and to at least two school friends in Hamburg, the loss is as surprising as it is regrettable. Judging by the return letters, it will have been his letters to his mother that contained his clearest — and bitterest — comments on Mr Lancaster’s; those letters Johanna Schopenhauer almost certainly destroyed (cf. her remarks on her son’s outspokenness). We are, however, fortunate in being able to produce a reasonably complete sequence of letters addressed to young Schopenhauer at this time. These letters are both interesting and revealing; they tell us a good deal both about Arthur Schopenhauer at the age of 15 and about his time at Wimbledon, and fill in the necessary background. The loss of his own letters is compensated not only by these return letters, but by an account of Mr Lancaster’s academy written by his mother, an account which can only have been based on those missing letters. We also have Mr Lancaster’s own account of his aims and methods.
