Christoph Friedrich Nicolai

Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (18 March 1733 – 11 January 1811) was a German writer, bookseller, critic, and regional historian, who authored satirical novels and travelogues.

Between 1788 and 1796, Nicolai published in twelve volumes a Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz, which bears witness to the conservatism of his views in later life.

[2] The sober narrow-mindedness and grumpy stubbornness of the aging writer, who willingly pretended to be Lessing's spiritual heir, eventually led to the fact that his true merits were forgotten.

[citation needed] Nicolai also offered an early account of visual hallucinosis with preservation of insight and unrelated to madness:[3] "suddenly I observed, at the distance of ten paces, the figure of a deceased person.

[4] In a short story by Wilkie Collins entitled "Mrs. Zant and the Ghost," the narrator compares the main character to the "celebrated case of the bookseller, Nicolai, of Berlin" in regards to illusions "without being accompanied by derangement of the intellectual powers.