The Dutch book trade provided the major channel through which English books were distributed on the Continent in the early eighteenth century. In the second half of the century, the Dutch trade retained its leading position, but it appears to have gradually lost its key function as distributor of English books to the Continent. In the total corpus of continental translations, literary works constituted the central element. The literature of travel and geographical exploration was of great interest on the Continent not only were the reports of James Cook and other individual works translated, but large new collections of travel accounts were also compiled. In some fields such as classical and oriental studies, the intellectual exchanges between England and scholarly centres on the Continent were particularly intense. Many details of this traffic in ideas across the Channel are also of interest to the book historian.

John Stuart Mill, in his essays on Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, observes that 'these two men', though 'they agreed in being closet-students'. Mill's account helps to bring out certain similarities in their projects. Both were crucial participants in a massive change in the understanding of representation that occurred within their lives and those of their Romantic contemporaries. The various different kinds of attention to representation, essayistic evaluation, the contribution of acceptance by an audience, and detailed analysis of the differences between one use of language and another, help to indicate the extent to which the Romantics restructured representation. Didacticism, conceived as the effort to promulgate particular beliefs in literary works, came to seem less like an unpleasant option and more like an unavailable one. While Bentham sought to evaluate individual actions in relation to systematic social action, Shelley repeatedly described poetry as lending 'systematic form' to social imagination.