For the British, ‘Europe’ in general and continental Romanticism in particular approached an enigma. This chapter examines how British intellectuals and artists perceived and engaged with continental aspects of the literature, music, and visual arts in this period. It focuses on lesser-known examples, which includes the specificity of German Gothicism and De Quincey’s fictitious biographical essay The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, but also Thomas L. Peacock’s critiquing of this English preoccupation with German thought. This chapter asks whether, in aesthetic terms, British engagements with ‘Europe’ cannot but ‘romanticize’ the continent, thus maintaining a paradoxical attitude of ‘remote proximity’, which might also apply to subsequent eras.

This chapter deals with the development and increasing prevalence of steam-powered technology in the life and culture of the 1830s. It discusses the vexed question of the relationship between liberalism and empire and the contribution of liberal progressives and technological radicals, such as Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Babington Macaulay, to the process of empire. It argues that a war begun in 1839 between the British and the Qing empires acts as a summation of the progress in the decade towards a new form of steam-powered colonialism. The ‘Steam Romanticism’ of the 1830s had a strongly imperialist dimension. This chapter discusses the crucial contribution of the Romantic period satirical novelist and essayist to this process. As a leading administrator of the East India Company, Peacock was intimately involved with the commissioning, design, and construction of new, steam-powered vessels for use by the Company, notably the iron-hulled warship the Nemesis, the presence of which proved crucial in the First Opium War with China.

The second chapter explores how literary writing in the Romantic period denies and decries caricature. I describe a ’caricature talk’, dominated by anti-caricature rhetoric, that seeks to establish the quality, verisimilitude and representational justice of textual characterisations; and I explore how caricature talk constitutes formal realism in the literary criticism of the Romantic period. The second part of the chapter positions imaginative literary caricature in relation to anxiety about prospographic and personal caricature describing real people, providing essential context for Chapter 3’s discussion of character originality and realism.