A Sketch of Anglo-German Relations in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The year 1819 saw the birth of many a famous Briton, among them John Ruskin, the architectural historian and social prophet, and Joseph Bazalgette, the brilliant engineer who built the Thames Embankment and the tunnels underneath to take away London’s sewage. Two of the most important and enduring subjects of our British bicentenary celebrations not only share the distinction of being influential women, but also represent in their very different ways a pioneering relationship with German life and culture. I mean, of course, Queen Victoria, born on 24 May 1819, and George Eliot, born Mary Anne Evans, on 22 November 1819. Joining these two – the monarch who reigned over Britain’s greatest period as a world power and the writer of wonderful works of fiction, including the novel thought by many to be the greatest in the English language, namely Middlemarch – are two Germans, also born in 1819, and deserving of our attention in Britain. In 1840, at the age of twenty, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, born on 26 August 1819, left for good his small town in rural Germany, “his little native Coburg”, as Britain’s foremost enthusiast for German culture, Thomas Carlyle, described it in a letter to his mother on the royal wedding day, 11 February 1840.1 Albert came to London to marry his cousin Victoria and attempt the near-impossible task of being Prince Consort to his beloved but willful young wife and at the same time become accepted by a suspicious and superior British political class and a general public not inclined to look favourably on another foreign intruder into the royal family. Finally, Theodor Fontane, born on 30 December 1819, made his contribution to Anglo-German relations through his newspaper articles as London correspondent of the Berlin newspaper, the Neue Preussische Zeitung, and a series of books describing his time in Britain in the 1850s. As it happened, Fontane went on later in life to become Germany’s greatest nineteenth-century author of novels of psychological realism, as George Eliot was Britain’s.