James Vigus reads British Romanticism and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia

t least thirty English translations of works by the German dramatist August von Kotzebue appeared in 1799 alone, and were consumed by an eager public.1 That was admittedly a bumper year, but throughout the 1790s and early 1800s copious novels, plays and ballads from Germany, France and even Scandinavia were translated and adapted by more or less successful British writers. The paradox was that this occurred in, to use Peter Mortensen’s anachronistic but apt phrase, an ‘age of europhobia’. As readers devoured the ‘foreign literature of terror and titillation’ (9), so reviewers asserted its immorality and exhorted the nation to defend its island purity; and not only reviewers, but also the influenced writers themselves. The ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads famously complains that ‘The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ (quoted 10). ‘Frantic’ is also a key word in Coleridge’s critique of French comedy, which he deliberately portrays as indistinguishable from Kotzebue-style German tragedy (BL II 184-5). Yet the Lyrical Ballads themselves, despite foregrounding the influence of the English ballad-tradition, are clearly indebted to contemporary continental authors, among them the stereotypically extravagant Bürger. A