Jonathan Birch

Jonathan Birch (1783–1847) was an English author, best known as the translator of Goethe's Faust dramas.

Life He was born in Holborn, London, on 4 July 1783, the son of John Birch (1738–1815) and his wife Charlotte Henrietta Johnson Willdon. His elder sister Eunice Birch married Samuel Bagster the Elder; John Birch had known George Bagster (1739–1819), Samuel's father, from a group of evangelical young men to which they both belonged. Jonathan's younger brother Augustus Birch (1786–1840) was a British Army Commissariat Officer who settled in New South Wales in the late 1820s.

When Birch was young, he wished to become a sculptor, but in October 1798 he was apprenticed to an uncle in the city.

In 1803 Birch entered the house of Johann Gottfried Argelander, a timber-merchant at Memel and the father of Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander. Birch remained there until Argelander's death in 1812; much of his time was spent travelling in Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. In 1807 the three eldest sons of Frederick William III of Prussia took refuge with Argelander for 18 months. They struck up a friendship with Birch. Birch wrote to August Wilhelm Schlegel in 1840, from Henrietta Street, Brunswick Square, presenting him with the first part of the translation. From the German of Rulemann Friedrich Eylert, two translated works on Frederick William III. An English translation of the Nibelungen Lied, Berlin, 1848. There were further editions at Munich. Birch was assisted by Carl Lachmann, whose text he mainly followed, and the Grimm brothers. Another translation, by William Nanson Lettsom, appeared shortly afterwards.

Family In 1823 Birch married Esther Brooke, of Lancaster. They had five children, of whom a son Charles Bell Birch A.R.A. and a daughter survived him.