A political romance: The English middle class and Italy, 1815 to 186

My dissertation explores why the English middle class was so fascinated with Italy during the nineteenth century and how that interest manifested itself culturally and politically. Essentially it sets out to analyze the cultural and political meaning behind middle-class support for Italian liberation by first understanding how and why the middle class constructed a new view of Italy in the nineteenth century. It argues that middle-class fascination with Italy at first had less to do with issues of national identity, free trade, or freedom from foreign intervention. The Italian cause did eventually represent these values and ideals for its audience, and this dissertation does analyze the political consequences of the middle-class view of Italy. But what made middle-class support uniquely popular was its tendency to play to both the English imagination and English political conscience where Italy was concerned. Unlike the Hungarian and Polish causes which also galvanized considerable middle-class support among radicals and liberals in the mid-Victorian period, the Italian cause was viewed through a Romantic lens. This new vision, a departure from the older classical tradition, was extraordinarily attractive and had the unique ability, to appeal above class and party interests by becoming highly aestheticized and romanticized. I show how in their romantic and idealized portraits of Italy in travel literature, in their eye-witness accounts of the atrocities committed in Neapolitan prisons, in their hero worship of Garibaldi, and in their attitudes to foreign policy, the men and women of the English middle class not only chronicled their visions and expectations for a free and united Italy, but their visions and expectations for their own nation; a nation that in many ways, they felt newly a part of politically and culturally. In the end, my dissertation aims to understand the political culture of the Victorian middle class by examining how they projected that culture onto a foreign stage.