'This extraordinary apathy' : Wilkie Collins, Italy and the contradictions of the Risorgimento

Abstract

As is well known, Italy was a cultural magnet for the Victorians. Its language, lore and society became objects of growing intellectual curiosity during the nineteenth century, while the political debates over the Risorgimento directly involved the English public. Traditionally conceived as a setting for Gothic fantasies and a main destination of the Grand Tour, Italy also came to be perceived as a source of political and ideological contention in the age of Victoria, when the ideas of radical thinkers and political exiles stirred both English sympathies and fears. The convergence of different meanings turned Italy into a fluid, semantically unstable trope. As Annemarie McAllister observes, 'the Italian' was specifically constructed as a ' multifaceted and multivalent cultural object'. This semantic complexity was due to the merging of two main concepts.