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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sandra Vlasta | Enlightening report versus enlightened traveller 31 and the formation and transformation of ideas. Moritz’s travelogue(s) — the written evidence of his journey(s) — can ultimately be read as the fruit of this complex process of reading, walking, contemplating, and developing new ideas.14 In fact, in his later novel Anton Reiser (published 1785–90), the book Moritz is best known for today, he seems to recall his own travel experiences in England when he writes: Seine Spaziergänge wurden ihm nun immer interessanter; er ging mit Ideen, die er aus der Lek- türe gesammelt hatte, hinaus, und kehrte mit neuen Ideen, die er aus der Betrachtung der Natur geschöpft hatte, wieder herein. [His walks now became increasingly more interesting to him; he left with ideas gleaned from his reading and returned with new ideas that had come to him through contemplating nature. (Moritz 1998: 287; translation mine)] The novel is a Bildungsroman about the coming of age of Anton Reiser, and we know that the book is largely autobiographical: Moritz, like Reiser, was a bookworm even as a child, despite being raised in a poor and pious family in which neither education nor literature and books were highly valued. Like the protagonist in his novel, Moritz himself was very fond of the theatre in his adolescence and wanted to become an actor. The author never succeeded in the latter, but he became an important writer, teacher (not least of English), and art theoreti- cian, eventually teaching at the Königliche Akademie der Künste (the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin), with Ludwig Tieck, an important German writer of the Romantic period, and Alexander von Humboldt among his students. Like his major novel, Moritz’s travelogue on England centres on an enlightened subject and accompanies that subject along his journey — both literal and figurative. What is more, the journey and its written account are heavily characterized by images. The most prominent of these is the image of the Peak Cavern (used as the cover image in the first edition) and the frontispiece (added to the second edition of the book by the renowned engraver Daniel Chodo- wiecki) depicting Moritz in discussion with a group of Oxford clerics. There are no other actual pictures in the text, however. By means of words, Moritz introduces many new and ingenious motifs in the text, such as that of the reading traveller/travelling reader, which contribute to the original character of the travelogue and help to position Moritz as an insider and cultural mediator.15 As Alison Martin observes, the second engraving showing the debate ‘reaffirmed the strong human interest element of Moritz’s account’ (Martin 2008a: 25) and depicted a central scene in the travelogue. In what follows, I will focus on the cover image of the first edition. In particular, I will consider how it is used to characterize the travelogue, how it refers to the climax of the book, and how it relates to its intertextual elements, and thus to the above-mentioned process of walking, reading, observing nature, and the formation and transformation of ideas. The image is again to be understood as a paratext that exerts great influence on the reader.16 14 See Robert Macfarlane, who reminds us of the common etymology of walking and learning: liznojan in proto- Germanic ‘has a base sense of “to follow or to find a track”’ (2013: 31). 15 Furthermore, Alexander Košenina has shown that the author reproduced contemporary landscape painting in his travelogue (2006: 84–86). Moritz did this so well that critics have called him a ‘literary landscapist’ (Hollmer and Meier 2001: 264). 16 For a detailed analysis of cover images in travel writing, see Rhian Waller’s article on the Penguin edition book covers of Paul Theroux’s travel writing in this issue of Mobile Culture Studies Journal (Waller 2020).