Goethe's letters, especially those of his youth, constitute one of the most significant documentations of the development of his artistic personality and Weltanschauung. The letters in this volume include many of the most important written in his lifetime.
This 1884 edition of Goethe's letters also forms volume XII of Goethe's Works (1848-1890) in the Standard Library that the Bell publishing house took over and continued as part of the Bohn Libraries. Since then the collection has not been duplicated in English: the Edinburgh Letters from Goethe (1957) contains for the pre-Weimar period only 66 letters rather than Bell's 313. The work is thus an indispensible resource for all research libraries and comparative literature collections.