BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

“depending in a material degree on the number of supporters, prudence forbid [sic] us to comply
any longer with the wishes of a small, though respectable and chosen, host of friends and
compels us to give way to imperious necessity.” 76
British receptivity to German literature followed a generally predictable pattern, with the
lion’s share of attention and acclaim eventually going to the works of Goethe and Schiller. This
broad perspective, however, minimizes some dramatic and curious anomalies that delayed a
widespread appreciation of Germany’s late eighteenth-century literary renaissance until
Victoria’s reign. 77 German traveler, C. A. G. Goede, after debunking the idea that English
readers were well-versed in German literature, aptly summarized the situation in England at the
beginning of the nineteenth century: “Many English consider German literature immoral and
dangerous, but they have formed this hasty opinion on some trifling German novels, which too
easily find their way from circulating libraries to the toilet of beauty.” 78 The lapse in appreciation
depended on more than just scanty knowledge of German and bad translations; it was also a
function of popular tastes and sentiments. Hysterical reactions followed translations of Goethe’s
novel, The Sorrows of Werther, and Schiller’s play, The Robbers, the chief objections to these
works revolving around questions of moral character and fears of their effect on society. Werther
drew blame as an apology for suicide, its baleful influence suspected in an often-repeated account
76 Morgan, British Magazines, 47-48. The publication’s complete title was The German
Museum or Monthly Repository of the Literature of Germany, the North and the Continent in
General.
77 Morgan, British Magazines, 64.
78 A Foreigner’s Opinion of England, vol. 2, chap. 7 (London: n.p., 1802) quoted in
Stockley, German Literature, 8.
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