27 - The English book on the Continent

Summary

In the history of intellectual exchanges between England and the Continent, the eighteenth century stands out as a period of special significance. In all of the major and many of the minor European countries, the literature of England was absorbed to an extent and with an intensity which only a new word, current in the second half of the century, could describe accurately – Anglomania. The flow of ideas from England to continental Europe began in the last decades of the seventeenth century and continued uninterrupted into the nineteenth. It was not confined to the belles-lettres and humaniora, but included many other, if not all, fields of contemporary knowledge.

There were, of course, political reasons for this interest in English life and letters. The accession of William of Orange to the English throne in 1688 strengthened relations between Holland and England, and the Hanoverian succession in 1714 brought Germany and England closer together, though the English disliked George as much as he did them. Nevertheless, the spell which England cast on the Continent was not primarily due to dynastic affiliations. It originated in a political and cultural pre-eminence, which was widely praised and held up, often in the wake of Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, as an idealized model for other European countries.