The Attractions of England, or Albion under German Eyes

Abstract

Anglomania was a well-worn trope in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both in England and abroad. A memorable piece of self-congratulatory prose can be found in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson where the author’s hero is referred to as expanding on English superiority, compared to France notably, in the year 1770: ‘He was of opinion, that the English cultivated both their soil and their reason better than a..ny other people: but admitted that the French, though not the highest, perhaps, in any department of literature, yet in every department were very high.’¹ The allusion to Voltaire’s famous dictum at the end of Candide (‘cultiver son jardin’) is particularly daring, given the Frenchman’s admiration for English culture as expressed in his Lettres philosophiques (1734).² This spirit of cross-Channel competition seems to have lasted until the present day, though a recent example taken from an essay by Julian Barnes tries to make up, at least to a certain extent, for such Anglo-centric condescending: ‘Doubtless there was an element of cultural snobbery in my initial preference for things Gallic: their Romantics seemed more romantic than ours … Rimbaud versus Swinburne was simply no contest; Voltaire seemed just smarter than Dr Johnson’.³ Whatever the case may be, the attractions of England were a common topic of reflection amongst travellers of the Enlightenment and the Victorian age writing within and against that frame of mind. German travel writing of the period is no exception to the rule.