BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

the cherished Liberal tenets of representative government and free trade. Moreover, Germany
replaced France as the new “Bonapartist” regime in the center of Europe but lacked the political
affinities felt to exist between the English parliamentary system and the democratic republics of
France and the United States. 17 New Germany increasingly threatened the Victorian anglocentric
world view, a perspective based on the paradigms of providence and the English model which
had been popularized in the historical and fictional works of Thomas Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle,
Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and others. 18
Uncertainties related to technological change and imperial rivalry represented only
surface features of yet another underlying moral and philosophical dilemma facing Victorian
Britons. Along with a fear of war, bloody revolution and recurring economic cycles of boom and
17 Ibid., 166, 169, 172-73. See also Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 39, 44-45, and
G. M. Young, Portrait of an Age, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 75.
British approval of American economic strength and imperial dominance in the Western
Hemisphere, which contrasted sharply with the “Teutophobic” reaction to German economic
rivalry and imperial pretensions, was partly justified by the notion of Anglo-Saxon kinship and
political affinity.
18 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 70-71, 74, treats
cultural imperialism as an integral component of national and social identity especially evident in
nineteenth-century British novels, where the often subtle, but ubiquitous, presence of the empire
incorporated references to the institutions of bourgeois society with a “departmental” view of the
world that placed London and metropolitan culture at the center of a greater, culturally inferior,
Britain. Bernard Porter’s valid critique of cultural imperialism among British working and
middle classes did not rule out a culture of imperialism among civil servants and the politically
influential upper classes. See The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in
Britain (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of
Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell
University Press, 1988), 11-12, 109, dates the origins of British cultural imperialism back to
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), or even William Shakespeare’s Tempest, and the legacy
of pastoral conversion fantasies of settlers civilizing natives. Later, the myth of providential
empire energized adventure tales and other literary forms as a vehicle for manly heroism or
missionary fulfillment.
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