Crabb Robinson, Blake, and Perthes's Vaterländisches Museum (1810–1811)

Abstract

This essay focuses on Anglo-German relations and explores the cultural and political context in which Henry Crabb Robinson's 1811 article on William Blake was published. Addressing issues of Romantic cosmopolitanism and nationalism, it investigates some of the mechanisms at work, and at stake, in the circulation of ideas between England and Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In particular, this article shows the important role played by the German publisher Friedrich Christoph Perthes, a man whose political stance and professional activism as a bookseller and publishing entrepreneur led to the publication of the Vaterländisches Museum (1810–1811), the periodical in which Crabb Robinson's essay on Blake appeared. At the same time, this essay casts a new light on the role of Crabb Robinson as mediator of English literature to Germany, as opposed to his much better-known and multifaceted role as mediator of German literary and intellectual culture to England.