‘We all know that it has become fashionable to talk of Cosmos. Not to have read it is to be a boor,’ declared a reviewer for the Literary Gazette in March 1849. But as this critic also recognised, Humboldt's Cosmos could hardly be referred to in the singular ‘it’. Three different, competing, translations of the opening volumes of Humboldt's Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung were now out on the British book market, and their appearance heralded the start of a publishing war that would last the best part of a decade. The first volume of ΚΟΣΜΟΣ: A General Survey of the Physical Phenomena of the Universe, translated by the Bristol eye-surgeon Augustin Prichard, had already appeared in 1845 with the Regent Street publisher Hippolyte Baillière. The second volume came out in 1848 and corresponded to the second part of the German original, which had itself reached booksellers’ shelves in autumn the previous year. Just behind Baillière in the race to publish Cosmos were Longman and associates and Murray, who had brought out their first volume of Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe in 1846 and the second in 1848, both translated under Edward Sabine's superintendence, but primarily the work of his wife Elizabeth. Although these two different editions occupied the market concurrently, the real threat came from the translation made by Otté for Bohn's ‘Scientific Library’ series, similarly titled Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, which entered on to the market in 1849.

The reviewer for the Literary Gazette marshalled an extract from Kosmos and its three English translations into four columns covering two full pages of the journal (Figure 6.1). Readers were explicitly invited to compare the different versions, identify their stylistic and linguistic vari¬ations and judge which best rendered Humboldt's original German. As Bohn and his rivals Longman and Murray jostled for a greater market share in the work, each laid claim to providing the most authoritative, comprehensive and accurate translation. In the Translator's Preface to the first volume of the Bohn edition, Otté asserted that her version was superior to that of the Sabines by dint of it being a full account of the original: ‘I have not conceived myself justified in omitting passages, sometimes amounting to pages, simply because they might be deemed slightly obnoxious to our national prejudices’ (CO I, viii).