In Ideas. The Book of LeGrand Heine had announced his intention of visiting England through the mouth of a spokesman who professed some apprehension about English culinary tastes and practices; these, he felt, might send him scurrying back to the fleshpots of his native Germany. Implicit in the biblical allusion (Exodus 16.3) is the suggestion that to go from Germany to England was equivalent to release from Egyptian bondage. A letter to Friedrich Merckel (1 January 1827) shows him reading up on John of Gaunt. To Rosa Maria Assing Heine spoke of his journey in more positive terms than those used by his spokesman in The Book of LeGrand; she noted in her diary, on 26 March 1827, that the poet was eagerly anticipating the ‘grandiose impressions’ (‘die grossartigen Eindrücke’) he was bound to receive when he arrived at his destination. He practised his English on one of his Anglophile Hamburg relatives, C. M. Oppenheimer, to whom he presented a volume of Pictures of Travel with the English inscription:

That was early in April; on the twelfth of that month he boarded a steamer to London, glad to be out of the way when the second volume of Pictures of Travel, which was bound to give offence to the Hanoverian nobility and other Germans favoured by Heine's satiric attentions, hit the German bookshops.