When you come upon an eight-hundred-page book the size of an unabridged dictionary weighing eight and one-half pounds—meaning that it cannot be read in bed or in an easy chair—you are not inclined to pick it up. But Linda Parshall’s masterful English translation of the intriguingly titled Briefe eines Verstorbenen (Letters of a Dead Man)—an unsuccessful ploy to preserve the author’s anonymity—is a page-turner.1 Although it must be propped on a reading stand or placed on a table, you will find yourself immersed in an engaging and informative travelogue that paints a perceptive portrait of Regency England during the years 1826–1829, a period of unprecedented British prosperity.
The not-so-mysterious and then very much alive author, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871), was a minor nobleman who is remembered in Germany primarily for a popular dessert known as a Pückler Eis, a confection layering chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream. But Pückler is far more than a gastronomically memorialized aristocrat, or even an observant sightseer and chronicler of British behavior and mores; along with Frederick Law Olmsted he ranks as one of the two most significant figures in nineteenth-century landscape-design history. And, just as Olmsted’s social commentaries on Southern slavery in Journey in the Seaboard Slave States are interlaced with descriptions of the scenery through which he traveled, so too does Pückler’s Letters from a Dead Man paint the natural and manmade beauty of the English countryside.
Pückler ranks as one
