BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

of the self-inflicted death of a woman under whose pillow a copy of the novel had been found. 79
Schiller, deemed a revolutionary like Goethe, was denounced for making criminals heroes and
advocating overthrow of the social order in a play that to one critic covered “the natural
deformity of criminal actions with the veil of high sentiment and virtuous feeling.” 80 The Rovers,
an extremely popular parody of Schiller’s Robbers and Goethe’s Stella published in 1798 by the
Anti-Jacobin Review, caricatured some of the worst tendencies in German drama and
successfully initiated a wave of ridicule that stunted early enthusiasm for German literature. 81
The Rovers dealt as much with the character of Germans and German writers as with any specific
literary abuses, and it precipitated a wholesale condemnation of German society, the literati
themselves being labeled “men of profligate lives and abandoned characters.” 82 English writer
and moralist, Hannah More, promoting the nineteenth-century stereotype of women as the
guardians of public virtue, called “loudly” upon the women of Germany to oppose:
79 Suicide having been popularly known as the “Englishman’s malady,” one indignant
reviewer hoped to “blot out this foul national reproach.” See European Magazine 19 (1791):
184, quoted in Stockley, German Literature, 24.
80 Frank Woodyer Stockoe, German Influences in the English Romantic Period 1788-1818
(Cambridge: The University Press, 1926), 16, 29, noted the uneven mixture of effusive praise
with stern warnings against the social implications of Schiller’s work in Henry Mackenzie’s
influential lecture, published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1790 and
reprinted in the Edinburgh Magazine that same year.
81 Morgan, British Magazines, 45, 84. The complete title of the satire, The Rovers; or the
Double Arrangement, referred to the original version of Goethe’s Stella, published in 1776,
which involved a ménage a trois between a man and two women. Goethe revised the work in
1816 to end tragically, but this version never reached the British public.
82 Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 4 (1799): VI ff., quoted in Morgan, British
Magazines, 45. See also Stockley, German Literature, 2-3, and Stockoe, German Influences, 20.
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