BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

German works by British critics, contradicted the longer term reality of a Francophobic motive
for the appreciation of German literature discussed by Elie Halevy:
The French Revolution placed an abyss between the literature of England and France.
Meanwhile German literature was coming to birth, a literature of sentiment, romance and
unbridled fancy. To put the imagination to school in Germany and to compose Gothic
romances was to collaborate with the anti-Gallican and anti-Jacobin movement. 73
While Francophobia did encourage receptivity to German literature during the Napoleonic Wars,
turn-of-the-century literary critics, aligned with the conservative anti-Jacobin movement in
Britain, placed the German literati squarely in the camp of the enemy. In 1799 the Anti-Jacobin
Review and Magazine launched a vicious and highly politicized crusade against the initial
popularity of German works, deploring:
. . . a glaring depravity of taste, as displayed in the extreme eagerness for foreign productions,
and a systematic design to extend such depravity by a regular importation of exotic
poison from the envenomed crucibles of the literary and political alchemists of the new
German school. . . . Even an act of despotism when exercised for the purpose of rescuing
mankind from the worse species of oppression—the subjugation of the mind to the
degrading tyranny of Philosophism—would be entitled to applause . . . 74
Such extreme reactions from ultra-conservative journals wrought a noticeable change even in
some mainstream periodicals previously friendly to German literature. 75 The tenor of the times
proved so unfavorable that one early Germanophile’s literary venture, James Bereford’s German
Museum, begun in 1800, folded after the third volume amid a barrage of scathing attacks from
the Anti-Jacobin Review. In the preface to his final volume Beresford discreetly explained that,
73 Halevy, A History of the English People, 446.
74 Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 4 (1799): VI ff., quoted in Morgan, British
Magazines, 45.
75 Both the Monthly Mirror and the Critical Review belong in this latter category. See
Morgan, British Magazines, 46.
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