PESTALOZZI Johann Heinrich Lienhard und Gertrud. Ein Buch für das Volk

Cohen, 793 (for the French edition with the engravings of the original).

First edition of this novel by the pioneer of modern pedagogy.

Pestalozzi’s name is associated with all the educational reform movements of the 19th century. In the history of pedagogy, he remains the promoter of popular education. His New Education methods were concrete and direct, based on the progressive development of all faculties.

Lienhard und Gertrud is the perfect combination of a novel, a philosophical work and an educational treatise. In it, the social and educational ideas of the Swiss pedagogue are perfectly set out.

This text combines the idea of the apprenticeship novel inherited from the Enlightenment with a conception of utopia by focusing on the feelings of the characters. In this sense, it foreshadows nineteenth-century Romanticism.

The novel focuses on the poor bricklayer Lienhard and his wife Gertrud, who are trying to escape degradation in the corrupt village of Bonnal. They succeed thanks to the Junker ruler Carl Arner von Arnheim, who instils morality, education and grandeur into the village.

The first part of this work is highly romantic, with the opening scene focusing on the misery suffered by Leihard and Gertrud. As the pages turn, the principles of the Enlightenment emerge, in particular the ambition to elevate one’s soul through learning.

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi used fiction to set out his ideas on education. He saw it as closely linked to progress and social advances. He saw it as a tool for the emancipation of the poor. Education must be able to make people masters of their own lives.  So, in a didactic way, he presents the situation of a village infected by poverty and develops solutions to remedy it.

Education is his spearhead, and it is embodied by three characters: the sovereign, the agent of change; the priest, the guarantor of morality; and the educator, who spreads his knowledge.

The novel was a huge success and spawned other works such as Heinrich Zschokke’s Das Goldmacherdorf (1817). What’s more, the sovereign benefactor, concerned about the misery of the people, is reminiscent of the main character in Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris. Rodolphe embodies the values developed by Pestalozzi. His farm in Bouqueval is a reinterpretation of the village of Bonnal. Rodolphe encouraged hard work, bravery and education. This is where he takes poor Fleur-De-Marie, who learns to read and write under the care of the parish priest and Madame Georges.

Lienhard und Gertrud. Ein Buch für das Volk (A Book for the Nation) is a comprehensive and ambitious work which, while building on the achievements of the seventeenth century, establishes a new idea of pedagogy that will have a lasting impact on literature.

Alfred Berchtold described it as ‘the first European rustic novel’ (Berchtold, La Suisse romande au cap du XXe siècle: portrait littéraire et moral, Payot, 1963, p.385).

A very fine copy in a very fresh contemporary German binding.

A stain on p. 59 of volume I affecting the text, leaves 6 and 7 of volume III showing a trace of restoration in the lower part of the pages with damage to the text, page 7 incorrectly numbered 9 for volume IV.