Karl Klingemann

The Mendelssohn Family (1729-1847), From Letters and Journals

Sebastian Hensel. Trans. Carl Klingemann and an American collaborator. Sampson Low & Co., 1881. 2 vols.

London. December 7, 1827...I only wish I were less near-sighted, especially for the sake of the English ladies. They do not know how to bake a pancake, and are mostly occupied with useless things, but they look desperately pretty. A peripatetic girls' school, dozens of which you see daily in Regent's Park, where they come for fresh air, appears to me like as many pathetic Peris, one more beautiful than the other, marching two and two, the grown-up ones together and conscious enough of their victorious gifts; the severe ayah in their rear looking daggers at every male person

From a letter to the Mendelssohn family in Berlin. The writer was the animating spirit of the Mendelssohn family's circle of friends, and greatly missed when he was posted to the Hanoverian Legation in London. But it meant he was able to take the 20-year-old Felix under his wing two years later when the composer arrived for a series of concerts. Felix wrote to his family on 25th April 1829 that he was to be shown around Regent's Park that day, but there is no record of the visit here.

there live three sisters, unmarried, probably very rich, at any rate well off, highly fashionable,

Four years later Felix visited London again, this time with his father. In a letter dated 1st August 1833 Abraham Mendelssohn described a visit to a house in Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park, and added, 'Felix has known them before, but never mentioned them to me'.