Tales of the Dead
First edition title page
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| Author | Johann August Apel, Friedrich Laun, Johann Karl August Musäus, Sarah Elizabeth Utterson |
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| Translator | Sarah Elizabeth Utterson |
| Genre | Gothic fiction |
| Published | 1813 (White, Cochrane and Co.) |
| Media type | Print, Octavo |
| Pages | 248 |
| OCLC | 222188552 |
| Text | at |
Tales of the Dead was an English anthology of horror fiction, abridged from the French book Fantasmagoriana and translated anonymously by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson, who also added one story of her own. It was published in 1813 by White, Cochrane and Co..
Sarah Elizabeth Utterson née Brown (1781–1851), wife of literary antiquary, collector and editor Edward Vernon Utterson (c. 1776–1856), translated the majority of Tales of the Dead from a French collection of ghost stories as "the amusement of an idle hour". Three of the stories from the French she omitted as they "did not appear equally interesting" to her. She also noted she had "considerably curtailed" her translation of "L'Amour Muet", "as it contained much matter relative to the loves of the hero and heroine, which in a compilation of this kind appeared rather misplaced". To these, Utterson added a story of her own, "The Storm" based on an incident told to her by "a female friend of very deserved literary celebrity" as having actually occurred. It was published anonymously in 1813 by White, Cochrane, and Co., replacing the original epigraph "Falsis terroribus implet. — HORAT" (meaning roughly "he fills [his breast] with imagined terrors") with the following quote from William Shakespeare's The Tempest:
Graves, at my command,
Have waked their sleepers; oped, and let them forth
By my so potent art.
The French book Utterson translated from was Fantasmagoriana; ou Recueil d'Histoires, d'Apparitions, de Spectres, Revenans, Fantomes, etc., traduit de l'allemand, par un amateur (its title is derived from Étienne-Gaspard Robert's Phantasmagoria), which had in turn been translated anonymously by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès (1767–1846) from a number of German ghost stories, and published in Paris during 1812. His sources included "Stumme Liebe" ("Silent Love") from Volksmärchen der Deutschen by Johann Karl August Musäus (1735–1787), "Der grau Stube" ("The Grey Room") by Heinrich Clauren (1771–1854), and six stories by Johann August Apel (1771–1816) and Friedrich Laun (1770–1849), five of which were from the first two volumes of their ghost story anthology Das Gespensterbuch ("The Ghost Book"); originally published in five volumes by G. J. Göschen in Leipzig between 1811 and 1815 under the pen names A. Apel and F. Laun.
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