ABSTRACT
This chapter shows Thackeray's German discourse taking ever more concrete shape, extending into politics (the Rhine frontier dispute), philosophy, religion, music, the visual arts, craftsmanship, learning and teaching and literature. Juliet McMaster and Micael M. Clarke have sensitively explored the sado-masochistic relationship, based on Thackeray's recognition, in Clarke's words, 'that it is not women's "nature" but social attitudes that make people slavish'. French women of fashion, however, divine other potentialities in this 'romantic young nobleman of Westphalia'; and the provincial German innocent, Michael Angelo Titmarsh's account suggests, is ultimately bound to be corrupted by his contacts with 'la creme de la creme de la haute volee. Surely, Michael Angelo Titmarsh concludes, 'the negatives of the old days were far less dangerous than the [Messianic] assertions of the present'; the lives of many of the French 'prophets and expounders of new revelations' are anything but edifying.
