Johann Timotheus Hermes was born in Petznick, a small village near Stargard in Western Pomerania. His father was a Protestant pastor. His mother, Lukrezia, was the daughter of another Protestant pastor, Heinrich Becker from Rostock.[2]
He had an elder brother, Hermann Daniel Hermes (1734–1807), who would attain a certain level of notability as a theologian.[3]
Manch Hermäon im eigentlichen Sinn des Wortes (1788)
Für Eltern und Ehelustige (1789)
Zween literarische Märtyrer und deren Frauen (1789)
Lieder für die besten bekannten Kirchenmelodien nebst 12 Kommunion-Andachten (1800)
Anne Winterfeld (1801)
Verheimlichung und Eil oder Lottchens und ihrer Nachbarn Geschichte (1802)
Mutter, Amme und Kind in der Geschichte Herrn Leopold Kerkers (1809)
Hermes has become known, above all, for his novels "Geschichte der Miss Fanny Wilkes" ("The Story of Miss Fanny Wilkes" 1766)[4] and "Sophiens Reise von Memel nach Sachsen" ("Sophie's Journey from Memel to Saxony" 1769–1773 in five volumes)[5] which were very successful at the time, and translated into several languages. The second of these became one of the most read novel in German during the eighteenth century. The author gained the popular soubriquet "Sophien-Hermes" from it: its continuing importance two centuries later is based on its real-life descriptions concerning the cultural history of its time. The book also adumbrates aspects of the psychological novels which would flourish in the nineteenth century. "Sophie's Journey" is nevertheless characteristic of its own epoch. It is one of the most important Empathy novels: Hermes consciously imported the style of his exemplar Samuel Richardson, whose own novels had been translated into German a few years earlier.
Despite his success or because of it, Hermes was the butt of much ridicule from the "literary greats" among his contemporaries. He was ridiculed in Xenien, a collection of Couplets published jointly by Goethe and Schiller.[6]