Evening Tales for the Winter
Evening Tales for the Winter is an 1856 anthology of supernatural and gothic tales, compiled by Henry St. Clair. The first two volumes were originally published as Tales of Terror, or the Mysteries of Magic (1833). Its subtitle is "Wonderful & Supernatural Stories Translated from the Chinese, Turkish and German." Neither the translators nor the original authors/sources are credited.
Not all the pieces are actually translations, and none of them are from the Chinese or Turkish. Several are from German, two of them translated by Thomas de Quincey.
And some are historically interesting, too. Early on in this project, I found the first English translation of a story from The Thousand and One Nights. Later, I discovered the first English translation of (part of) an infamous German gothic novel. Pretty cool!
The anthology is in three volumes, and I set up a separate Table of Contents plus attributions for each volume. Each Table of Contents links to a post about the individual stories, where I discuss my research and sometimes include a PDF transcription of the story.
- Table of Contents and Attributions, Volume 1
- Table of Contents and Attributions, Volume 2
- Table of Contents and Attributions, Volume 3
You can find a (rather dirty) scan of Evening Tales for the Winter at the Internet Archive. The original of that scanned volume came from the library of Sarah Orne Jewett, who like her contemporary Mary Wilkins Freeman wrote New England regional fiction, often with traces of the weird or supernatural.
Image: From The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century, which also features a reprinting of a story that appears in Volume Two of Evening Tales for the Winter.