Victoria was not the only woman to be charmed by a country that – despite the emergence in 1838 of the first of the raffishly elegant gambling casinos where a sharp-eyed George Eliot found a model for Gwendolen Harleth in Byron’s great-niece, staking her future on the tables at Bad Homburg – offered quieter travellers the chance to stroll through the riverside meadows at Baden-Baden or ride a pony up into the softly wooded surrounding hills.
Some visitors settled for a restorative spa visit; others, travelling along the Rhine, identified with the enchanting ‘thou’ whose absence Byron had lamented in his famous fourth canto of Childe Harold as he gazed upon those same Rhine castles ‘alone’. That the ‘thou’ had been the half-sister whose intimacy with the poet had caused his wife to leave home was an issue that a Victorian lady travelling to Germany preferred to overlook.
There were other options. English women who wished to combine a German holiday with self-improvement could emulate Anna Jameson, a sharp-tongued and formidably clever Irish art historian who, besides enjoying conversational skirmishes with A. W. Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck (described by Jameson with uncustomary reverence as ‘the literary colossus of Dresden’), had herself been escorted around the new Munich palace of Ludwig I by the King’s favourite architect, Leo von Klenze. Mrs Jameson’s enthusiastic impressions of the massive images drawn from an inspirational past with which Ludwig was adorning the city of Munich were the first to reach England.
Mrs Jameson, travelling through Germany in the 1830s, appointed herself as a go-between ambassador for culture. Having decided that both England and Germany were woefully underinformed about one another’s art, she set out to improve matters. In England, she acted almost as an agent for the brilliant Dresden-born illustrator Moritz Retzsch; in Germany, she raised awareness of the work of William Blake. The German art historian Gustav Waagen was Mrs Jameson’s admiring ally in these gallant enterprises; a young John Ruskin was among those who benefited from her pioneering comparisons between the Germanic approach to art (broad, expansive, myth-loving), and the English (detailed, figurative, socially nuanced).
Anna Jameson and the intrepid Elizabeth Fry were exceptions to the rule. Women visiting the Rhine and its neighbouring spas in the mid-nineteenth century were more often of the conventional kind addressed by Mary Shelley in a travel book that was published in 1844.
Mary’s only previous encounter with Germany had been in 1814, when she, Shelley and her step-sister Claire Clairmont had run away to Switzerland before, running out of money, they limped home again by way of the Rhine. Returning as a middle-aged widow who had buried her disreputable past (both as the lover of a married man and the author of that shocking novel Frankenstein), Mary was eager to sound respectable. Demurely, she dwelt upon the charms of Heidelberg and the prettily painted tobacco pipes that she privately detested; sincerely, she praised the German practice of granting free access for all to such glorious galleries as the one that she had visited at Dresden. Inevitably, writing for an audience of sketchbook-carrying lady travellers, her finest phrases were lavished upon the glories of the Rhine and ‘the diorama . . . of tower-crowned crag and vine-clad hills – of ruined castle, fallen abbey, and time-honoured battlements’.
Gushing though the language sounds, Mary was writing from her heart. She had grumbled, along the way, about dowdy locals, suffocating feather beds and unsatisfactory washing facilities. Revisiting the scenes of her young and bolder self – while reading familiar lines from Childe Harold (especially familiar to Mary, who had transcribed large chunks of the original poem for their author) – she was carried back to the extraordinary summer that she and Shelley had spent in Byron’s company, captivated by his charm and enthralled by his friendship. Idly, she promised herself to return, and to spend a whole long summer tarrying beside the Rhine, long enough ‘to penetrate the ravines, to scale the heights, to linger among the ruins, to hear still more of its legends, and visit every romantic spot’.1
A perfect candidate for the Mary Shelley type of travel book was Miss Mary Wescomb, visiting Germany with her sister Kitty and their widowed mother in 1843, and trailing just behind a similar party. Mrs Wescomb’s friend and fellow widow, Lady Byron (she had married the poet’s cousin and successor) was conducting her two very handsome and very bored sons on a tour of the picturesque scenes enshrined in their famous relation’s verse. The Wescomb girls had made friends with the Byron boys back in England; the constant hope of an encounter with young George and Fred glints like silver through the pages of Mary’s neatly penned journal.
Aged seventeen and eager for romance – ‘who knows who I may meet abroad’ – Miss Mary was less impressed by the Rhine scenery (‘really frightful . . . I expected it all to be much wilder’) and the aggravations of a country where ‘natives are stupid and can’t understand their mother tongue’ than by the excitement of running away from two saucy German officers who had laughingly pursued her at full speed along the narrow passages of a Rhineside inn.2
Meeting up with the Byrons at last, at Lake Geneva, poor Mary could hardly believe her ears when George and Fred announced that they thought Byron’s celebrated lakeside residence, the Villa Diodati, was terribly dull. ‘The Byrons have hated their tour,’ Mary dolefully recorded. ‘[They] say they mean to return to England on Monday.’
The story does not, however, end quite there. Mary Wescomb’s older sister, Lucy, married George Byron the following year, while Mary herself, aged twenty-five, married Fred. Two strong-willed, wealthy sisters for two impoverished brothers: Shakespeare might have approved the neat resolution to an improbable English comedy.
Few Germans were rich enough to take leisurely holidays in England in the mid-nineteenth century. Britain offered herself, rather, as a refuge for exiles and as a model for Germany’s future as a nation state, to be led – as every Prussian confidently imagined – by mighty Prussia herself.
Theodor Fontane, a 25-year-old Prussian apothecary, made his first visit in 1844. A personable young man with curling hair and a heart-shaped face, Fontane had no trouble in making friends in England; soon, he was invited to spend a day out of London in the home of one Mr Burford, a kind-hearted stranger whose evening of family entertainments inspired one of the most delightful scenes in Fontane’s Ein Sommer in London.
First (as Fontane told it) there had come a waltz, briskly plunked out on the Burfords’ square piano by the lady of the house, and followed by Mr Burford’s tuneful rendering of ‘Black Eyed Susan’ and ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’. Fontane, invited to respond with a German song, made one up on the spot and, following it up by a dramatic German rendering of the dagger speech from Macbeth, was greeted by an explosive torrent of giggles. Stepping forward to recite Shakespeare in the correct and English fashion, the Burfords’ eldest boy accompanied his own speech with fierce looks and ‘terrible gestures . . . [but] the family looked very proud and said that this was the style of Macready’. Fontane, courteously applauding, decided that he preferred his own performance.
Bed beckoned, but not before the honoured guest had been invited to pen a few suitable lines (his quotations from Byron and Young were well received) in the family album. Bidding Mr Burford goodnight, Fontane described his host as fulfilling his own concept of the perfect English gentleman: kind, hospitable and modest, his face marked ‘with an expression of inexhaustible benevolence’.
Fontane’s account of his second visit, in 1852, is written in such an easy, natural style – ‘Scarcely two hours and already I was sitting in my favourite spot, up next to the bus driver’ – that it’s hard to distinguish artistic contrivance from pure spontaneity. The charm of the writer’s descriptions – whether of snugly curling up beside a sea-coal fire with a kettle whistling on the hob or taking a day trip down the Thames – softens his harsh observation of a tougher and more mercantile climate than he had encountered eight years earlier. All exiles and emigrants are unwelcome in England now, Fontane warns his Prussian readers, since all present a threat to the overworked and underpaid English working class. Back in Prussia, a man is innocent until proven guilty; in England, in 1852, every foreigner is treated as a potential suspect.
Seeking an example of the exile’s fate, Fontane describes his visit to the home of a formerly prosperous German businessman, now fallen on hard times and living with a daughter, Miss Jane, who has been reduced to taking work as a governess. Standing in for the host of cultured German women who have been forced to take what work they can find in straitened times, Miss Jane describes her new life. At dawn, she crosses the sleeping city by bus, to suffer the mockery of the pampered children of London’s prosperous merchant class, before trekking home after dark. Tears fill her tired blue eyes as Fontane reminisces with her father about the old Germany she still remembers, a kindlier land, one of ease and courtesy. ‘We could go there ourselves,’ Miss Jane whispers to her father; saddened, Fontane joins in the pretence.
Irresistibly animated in his English prose-sketches from daily life, Fontane always had to remember that the press agency for whom he was working had required him to take notes on England’s strength. How deep did national loyalty within such a country run? How well would her people protect her against invasion?
Fontane himself felt torn. Visiting Battle Abbey and imagining himself to stand on the very spot at which William, Duke of Normandy, had won his famous victory, he decided that England could never win a battle against Prussia. ‘She is like the ancient Teutons. Her lances look threatening, but a man has only to puncture once the defended ring to find her vulnerable.’ Just for a moment, Fontane’s prose rings out cold as Prussian steel: ‘Like Samson, England can be shorn.’ But then, looking out across the evening fields to glimpse – with an artist’s eyes – a circling flock of doves, the writer changes his tone. Here, cattle are lowing in the meadows; there, a fish starts up from a quiet pond: how could anybody wish for bloodshed in this land?3
Fontane’s employers were satisfied with his investigations. In 1857, he was despatched to England yet again, to act as a semi-official informant to the Prussian government. Germany had united herself as an empire by the time that Fontane, aged fifty-seven in 1878, finally gave up journalism to commence on the series of novels for which he is best known – although not in England, where few of his fictions have yet been translated and only one is widely known: the haunting masterpiece Effi Briest.
English women became nervous about visiting Germany after the widespread uprisings of 1848. Most of the British travellers who did visit Germany during the 1850s were sturdy males: George Meredith (whose fictional hero Harry Richmond attends a German university); Charles Kingsley, who rewarded himself after ecstatic daily rambles with generous amounts of Rhenish hock (a bargain, he thought, at 9d. a bottle); and Thomas Carlyle, who paid his first visit to Germany in 1852 to tour the battlefields of his prodigious hero, Frederick the Great.
The publishers John Murray, keen to peddle their new series of guides to travellers on the Continent, did their best to reassure and allure. The Germans, they noted in an 1849 Handbook to Northern Germany, ‘are a people who may be called our first cousins (cousins-German) whose character, manners and language more nearly approach our own than those of any other nation . . .’4 Truth was stretched further still in 1858: English visitors to Germany had no need to study a language so closely linked to their own, Murray’s announced. They could expect, moreover, to be greeted as persons of rank: ‘Mr Count’, perhaps, or even ‘Your Grace’.
Charles Dickens, at whose London door Fontane observed his German compatriots queuing up for a chance to shake the great man’s hand, never visited their country himself. His enthusiasm for German habits shines forth, however, in the words of Mr Bendigo Buster, addressing readers of the fortieth issue of Dickens’s in-house magazine, Household Words. ‘Look how well they educate their children,’ Mr Buster declares, ‘while in England forty-five out of a hundred of ’em can’t read and write. That’s what I call being practical.’*
Dickens made use of a whole platoon of keen amateurs to provide contributory sketches to his magazine. When a young goldsmith named William Duthie announced that he was planning to work his way across Germany while making nightly use of the guild hostels (Herbergen), a commission was promptly given. Duthie was presumably warned how the arrangement would work: he would supply the raw material from which Dickens himself would shape the piece.
Duthie was not the sort of traveller who was going to mind whether he was addressed as a gentleman of rank. In place of the familiar story of fashionable tourists visiting spas, museums and palaces, Duthie planned to describe the street-life realm of a journeyman.
William Duthie crossed to Hamburg on a trading schooner. Sauntering through narrow cobbled lanes that stank of river mud, he seemed to have entered the world of folk stories and myth. A stout farmer strutted past him in buckled shoes and a silver-buttoned jacket; a smiling country girl marched along in a short petticoat, her long blonde plaits braided up with scarlet bows that matched her knitted red stockings. It felt as if he had stepped back a century, and Duthie was frankly charmed.
Attending an evening performance of Hamlet at Hamburg’s Stadt Theatre, Duthie relished Hamlet’s meditation on the ease of killing his hated step-father (‘Now might I do it pat . . .’), a scene that English censors considered too distressing for the stage. The curtain came down at 9.30 p.m.; by 10 p.m., an officious night-watch had cleared the streets. Tracking down the nearest Herbergen, an astonished Duthie tumbled into a hot cellar bursting with dancers of both sexes: ‘such a scene of shuffling, whirling, shouting and pipe-smoking could scarcely be seen elsewhere’.5 This was delightful: Duthie prolonged his stay in Hamburg for three months and announced himself in love with a country that provided operas and plays every night of the week, that allowed dancing and gambling on a Sunday and that, moreover, always offered a welcome in some snug nocturnal cavern for a song, a kiss and ‘an abominable medley of waltz, smoke, wine and lotto . . .’
Duthie’s account of Germany was not all so favourable. Apprentices were forced to travel for a prescribed number of years and the Herbergen, which were were seldom so jolly as in Hamburg, kept guildworkers apart from other men as efficiently as a system of apartheid. In contrast to England, no educational institutes served the needs of a German workman. ‘His Guild is his state.’
One fact was inescapably apparent: Prussia, by 1858, the year of Duthie’s journey, had become a force with which to reckon – and she knew it. Visiting Berlin, Duthie noted how the great military statue of Field Marshal Blücher on the Unter den Linden was lavishly ‘crowned with laurels on every returning anniversary of the well remembered day, the 18th of June’. An ominous appetite for war hung in the air and the swaggering Prussian soldiers with whom Duthie spoke were in no doubt about who would win it. ‘Prussia’, he wrote in an uneasy sentence that Dickens chose not to censor, ‘has progressed like a giant . . .’
The Prince Consort, preparing in 1858 to bestow Vicky, his favourite and most highly educated child, upon Prussia’s future king, harboured no such fears. Albert’s dream was of a progressive Germany, unified under Prussia, protected by constitutional law and allied to a powerful England. With the combination of England’s invincible navy and Prussia’s mighty army, there was no reason to suppose that the two great Protestant tribes of German cousins could not unite their interests. Albert’s vision was to be embodied in the marriage of England’s Princess Royal to the handsome, soldierly and devoted Fritz Hohenzollern.
Footnote
* England’s literacy rate in 1850 was 52 per cent. Prussia’s was 85 per cent.