From April 1800, when he arrived by merchant ship in Hamburg, to October 1802, when he matriculated at the University of Jena, his place of residence until 1805, Henry Crabb Robinson walked through, stayed in, and commented on almost every Romantic locality in the country. To say that he ‘probably knew Germany better than any other Englishman of his day’ is, if anything, to understate his remarkably ‘personal, lively and immediate relationship to the German literature and culture of the time’. Both via translations and informal conversations, Robinson mediated many German literary works to the Anglophone world. Above all, he achieved a precise and intimate understanding of the ‘new school’ of (post-)Kantian philosophy and aesthetics. When Madame de Staël arrived in Weimar in late 1803 and requested a tutor to assist her research for the book that would eventually be published as De l'Allemagne, it was ‘der Engländer’ who was summoned to the task from the neighbouring town of Jena. The private lectures he presented to Staël and her circle built on the ‘Letters on the Philosophy of Kant’ that he had recently published, providing an insider's account of the ongoing revolution in philosophy.