Introduction: Italian Unity and International Alliances

Although many historical narratives of the Risorgimento and early Italian constitutional monarchy view Italy as a nation-state unable to consolidate itself against political division and regional diversity, Italian political culture’s cultivation of a sense of internal fragmentation and powerlessness also constituted part of the Risorgimento’s ideological content and Italy’s national identity. Risorgimento culture’s oppositionalism also infiltrated British reaction to Italian politics. Theodosia Garrow Trollope’s eyewitness Athenaeum correspondence, collected as Social Aspects of the Italian Revolution (1861), develops politicised familial metaphors for unification and international alliance that empower and transform Italy through political solidarity. By contrast, texts by D. G. Rossetti, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Jenkin and Arthur Hugh Clough propose more sceptical familial and romantic metaphors for Risorgimento Italy, revealing disillusioned and hesitant attitudes toward Italy in relation to its neighbouring powers, including France, Austria and Great Britain.