Klaus-Werner Haupt: London kommt! Pückler und Fontane in England. Weimar: Bertuch, 2019.

• Peter James Bowman

The list of German authors who wrote accounts of their travels in the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century abounds in distinguished names, among them Franz Grillparzer, Heinrich Heine, Fanny Lewald and Johanna Schopenhauer. There is no doubt, though, that in terms of sophistication of response to the island nation and enduring readability of their travelogues two writers stand out: Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau and Theodor Fontane. Both men viewed Britain with critical acuity rather than simple curiosity and used their evaluation to reflect on the current state of their own country, as Klaus-Werner Haupt points out in his introduction to the book under review. The idea of comparing the two writers’ British travel books is therefore an interesting one.