Raspe was born in
Hanover, and baptised on 28 March 1736. He studied law and jurisprudence at
Göttingen and
Leipzig and worked as a librarian for the university of Göttingen. In 1762, he became a clerk in the university library at Hanover, and in 1764 secretary to the university library at Göttingen. He had become known as a versatile scholar and a student of
natural history and
antiquities, and he published some original poems and also translations of
Ossian's poems. In 1765 he published the first collection of
Leibniz's philosophical works. He also wrote a treatise on
Thomas Percy's
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. In 1767, he was appointed professor in
Cassel, and subsequently librarian. He contributed in 1769 a zoological paper to the 59th volume of the
Philosophical Transactions, which led to his being elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and he wrote voluminously on all sorts of subjects. In 1774, he started a periodical called the
Cassel Spectator. In London, he employed his knowledge of English and his learning to secure a living by publishing and translating books on various subjects. Besides helping translate
Georg Forster's
A Voyage Round the World into German, he also translated German works into English, and there are allusions to him as "a Dutch savant" in 1780 in the writings of
Horace Walpole, who gave him money and helped him to publish an
Essay on the Origin of Oil-painting (1781). But Raspe remained poor, and the Royal Society expunged his name from its list. From 1782 to 1788, he was employed by
Matthew Boulton as
assay-master and storekeeper in the
Dolcoath mine in
Cornwall. Memories of his ingenuity remained to the middle of the 19th century. While in Cornwall, he seems to have written the original version of Munchausen; whether he also wrote the several continuations that appeared until 1792 is still debated.) He also worked for the famous publisher
John Nichols on several projects, among which was a descriptive catalogue he compiled of
James Tassie's collection of pastes and casts of gems, in two quarto volumes (1791) of laborious industry and bibliographical rarity. Raspe then went to Scotland, and in
Caithness found a patron in Sir John Sinclair of
Ulbster, whose mineralogical proclivities he proceeded to impose upon by pretending to discover valuable and workable veins on his estates. Raspe had "salted" the ground himself, and on the verge of exposure, he absconded. It was not till 1824 that the biographer of Bürger revealed the truth about the book. ==References==