This latest offering by John R. Davis on Anglo-German relations is a masterly synthesis on the reception of German ideas in Britain during the long nineteenth century. Where necessary and useful, Davis adds from his own primary research into Anglo-German relations, but the real merit of this book is that it brings together a lot of research on this topic available in widely dispersed articles and edited collections. It ranges widely over many disciplines, such as theology, history, music, science, and education. It takes account of debates on military and social reform. And it notes the increasing interest of the Victorian traveler in Germany. Davis argues that the problematic political history between Britain and Germany in the twentieth century is partly responsible for making historians ignore or forget about the intense reception of German ideas and models during the previous century.

In theology he notes the influence of German biblical criticism which was perceived as a threat to religious orthodoxy by making the Bible no longer a literal authority. The Oxford movement, the Broad Church group, the Catholic milieu, and many Scottish Protestant theologians took a major interest in German theology, which also influenced Victorian literature more generally. The influence of German historism became obvious in “Niebuhr-mania.” The philological approach to historical studies became of paramount importance in British historiography. The English Historical Review was modeled on the Historische Zeitschrift. Ranke was widely admired in Britain. In music, art, and aesthetics, German influence also ruled supreme. The art reform movement's interest in Germany was paralleled by an interest of British architects. The Victorian musical scene was dominated by German music. The professionalization of science in Germany also created an interest in science education in Britain. Educational reformers more generally looked to Germany for models, as did social and military reformers. There were particular “nodes” of interest in things German, such as Oxford, Cambridge, University College London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, and Davis draws attention to some of the key individuals who acted as interlocutors between German and British culture, such as Henry Crabb Robinson or Friedrich Max Müller. Philologists, translators, and journal editors were of particular importance for the reception of German ideas in Britain.

German Idealism and Romanticism proved vital in attracting the attention of the British public. Anti-utilitarians saw in these movements a powerful antidote to the alleged dominance of utilitarianism over British cultural and intellectual life. Ironically, however, the utilitarians were also enamored by Germany, although their interest was predominantly in the rationality of the German Enlightenment and the rational organization of the German state. Germany became increasingly associated with speculative thought, wild Romantic landscapes, and idealistic philosophy on the one hand and with science, scholarship, state-led government, centralization, and dictatorship on the other.

As Davis demonstrates, an interest in things German did not originate with the Victorians. There was significant German intellectual migration to Britain from the late seventeenth century onward, and there were many eighteenth-century promoters of German culture in the British Isles. Hence the nineteenth century “greats,” for whom German culture was so important, such as Walter Scott, George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, could build on interlocutors reaching far back into the previous century.

The unification of Germany resulted in increasing rivalry between Britain and Germany. It also brought to the fore critical voices, in particular those looking askance at Germany's authoritarianism and illiberalism. It confirmed those, such as the Church of England, that had long suspected German influence as the source of moral decline. But, if anything, the “model” of Germany shone more brightly in the first decade of the twentieth century than at any time previously. After 1871 there had not only been concern over Germany's growing national strength, but also explorations of formal alliances between the two countries and much goodwill, often based on assumptions of common religious and ethnic ties (Protestantism, Anglo-Saxonism).

Davis claims that Germany was the one country in Europe and the wider world that the Victorians were most interested in. Germany, he argues compellingly enough, was perceived as leading Europe intellectually from the 1840s onward. To demonstrate this thesis, however, it would need perhaps more than a few pages in the introduction comparing the reception of German ideas with the reception of ideas from France, Italy, and the United States. But this is not really a criticism of Davis. Rather it should be a call on other historians to follow in Davis's footsteps and explore the transnational intercultural linkages between different “national” cultures.

Yet, one weakness of the type of cultural transfer history that Davis presents here is that he concentrates almost exclusively on individuals and their reception of ideas from individuals in Germany. He pays scant attention to institutions in which these individuals were placed, the power they wielded, and the impact of the wider national and regional contexts on the reception of particular ideas. But one arguably needs such institutional contexts to account for why particular transfers were more successful than others and to explode notions of “national” culture rather than reify them. But overall, this book is an important step in the direction of taking seriously the many transnational influences and moments in national history and accounting for the constitution of national stereotypes of self and other in and through contact with “foreign” cultures.