The year 1828 came toward the end of a decade that, under largely conservative rule, had remained remarkably quiet in most of Europe. In Greece the long Wars of Independence against the Ottoman Empire came to a successful conclusion, thanks to the assistance of English, French, and Russian fleets. Elsewhere political tensions were building that would soon lead to major turmoil—in 1830 the July Revolution in France would force out the reactionary Charles X, who would be replaced by a constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe—an occasion that would be commemorated by Delacroix's famous painting of Liberty Leading the People (1830). Liberal opposition would also bring about changes to reactionary governments in Germany, Belgium, and Poland.

The most striking socioeconomic development of the decade, following the Luddite battles of the 1810s, was probably the founding of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in England in 1825, the first public railway to use steam engines. Initially it transported goods, mainly coal; but by 1833 it began conveying passengers, marking the beginning of an enterprise that was soon to transform Europe as the Industrial Revolution gained in force.

The new sense of history that, as noted in the introduction to chapter 3, began in the universities after the founding of the University of Berlin, now spread to the population at large—the necessary precondition for the growth and popularity of the historical novel as practiced by Walter Scott and his followers. As Georg Lukács observed in his study of the historical novel, “the tendencies towards a conscious historicism reach their peak after the fall of Napoleon, at the time of the Restoration and the Holy Alliance.” A related factor was the growing secularization of religion resulting from the higher criticism of the Bible and the humanization of biblical figures, as in David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (1835; Life of Jesus as translated by George Eliot).

The year 1828, which witnessed the deaths of Goya and Schubert, could be said to mark the end of early Romanticism in Europe. Hoffmann and Shelley had already passed away in 1822, Byron two years later, and Beethoven and Blake followed in 1827. In 1829 Friedrich Schlegel died, followed a year later by William Waiblinger. A new generation began to dominate the cultural scene.