"Italy for the Italians": Jessie White, il Risorgimento e la costruzione dell'identità vittoriana

The article centres on the work of Jessie Meriton White (1832-1906), an English writer and philanthropist who, after having met Garibaldi and Mazzini, in 1854 and 1856 respectively, devoted her whole life to the cause of Italian liberation. Today Jessie White is mostly remembered as “hurricane Jessie”, wife of the Italian patriot Alberto Mario and unwavering supporter of the Italian Risorgimento in both UK and US. Besides following Garibaldi and the Redshirts as a field nurse in four different wars, she also contributed hundreds of articles to English, American and Italian newspapers on the Italian political events and social conditions. She later became the biographer of Garibaldi, Nicotera and Mazzini, among others, and was the author of impassioned and well-documented essays on social and educational issues of post-Unity Italy (La miseria di Napoli, The Birth of Modern Italy, …). The article aims at highlighting the role she played as a cultural “mediator” between Italy and England in the late Fifties, when she toured the provinces of the Kingdom with Aurelio Saffi, the ex-triumvir of Rome, to lecture on Italy and collect money for the ill-fated expedition of Pisacane. In particular, my analysis takes into consideration the series of articles White penned in the same period for the Daily News, entitled “Italy for the Italians”, in which she expounded the views and aspirations of the National Party. While spreading the Mazzinian credo, the articles testify to contemporary discourses on the Italians and more importantly shed light on the concurrent process of Victorian identity construction whose discussion intensified in the central years of the century. The fact that the peak of English enthusiasm for the Italian liberation coincided with the heyday of the debate on Englishness further confirms not only England’s political contribution to the Risorgimento, but the crucial place that Italy and Italians held in Victorian self-fashioning