Abstract
In a letter of April 28, 1859, Charles Dickens instructed William Henry Wills, the assistant editor of All The Year Round, to seek contributions from those novelists that Dickens regarded as the most suitable to write for his new journal: Frances and Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, John Ruffini and Elizabeth Gaskell.1 The inclusion of a foreigner among the names of such celebrated Victorian authors is an indication of Ruffini’s literary status in Britain during the years of the Italian Risorgimento. In the mid-nineteenth century Giovanni (John) Ruffini (1807–81) was widely known to the British (and French) reading public as the author of the acclaimed Lorenzo Benoni (1853) and Doctor Antonio (1855), followed by four other novels, all composed in Paris but written in English: The Paragreens (1856), Lavinia (1861), Vincenzo (1863), and A Quiet Nook in the Jura (1869).2 In Italy, his fame was mainly posthumous, peaking in the Fascist period and in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Italian ‘appropriation’ of Ruffini was effectively completed in 1955, when Il dottor Antonio became the first television drama to be broadcast by Rai, the Italian state broadcaster.3
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Notes
Charles Dickens to W.H. Wills, 28 April 1859, in G. Store(ed.) (1997), The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 9 (1859–61) (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 54–5.
Lorenzo Benoni sold well, not only in Britain, but also in Germany and France, where it was translated in 1854 and 1855 respectively. It was reviewed in the major literary journals of the day and — with the exception of the Athenaeum, whose anonymous reviewer lamented the book’s unidi-omatic language and ‘mixed’ genre — was widely praised for the vividness and truthfulness of its depiction of Italian life. Lorenzo Benoni was still popular at the end of the century, as testified by Nietzsche’s enthusiastic reading of the book during his stay in Amalfi in 1877. Doctor Antonio, instead, was not so widely reviewed and despite the favourable criticism of the Athenaeum, which praised Ruffini’s ‘pure and flexible style’, in 1856 its sales had not yet covered the expenses of the publication. Ruffini’s later books, especially the Risorgimento stories of Lavinia and Vincenzo, were almost ignored by both the reading public and critics, mainly because the British interest in the political affairs of Italy rapidly withered after unification. Nevertheless, in the 1860s Ruffini’s novels were popularised in Europe thanks to Tauchnitz, the prestigious German reprint house that included Ruffini’s complete work in its renowned ‘Collection of British and American Authors’, started in 1841. On the reception of Ruffini’s novels in Britain see A. Obertello (1931) ‘L’opera di Giovanni Ruffini in Inghilterra’, in Giovanni Ruffini e i suoi tempi: Studi e ricerche (Genoa: Il Comitato Regionale Ligure della Società Nazionale per la Storia del Risorgimento), pp. 420–81.
On this topic see C. Viazzi (2000) ‘Il dottor Antonio in televisione’, in F. De Nicola (ed.) Giovanni Ruffini, patriota italiano, scrittore europeo (Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Studi, Imperia, 5 dicembre 1998) (Genoa: De Ferrari), pp. 76–82. The first cinematic adaptation of the novel was produced by Manderfilm in 1938 and directed by Enrico Guazzoni.
A. C. Christensen (1996) A European Version of Victorian Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi);
M. Marazzi (1999) Il romanzo risorgimentale di Giovanni Ruffini (Florence: La Nuova Italia).
On Ruffini’s years in England and his relationship with Mazzini see Obertello (1931) ‘L’opera di Giovanni Ruffini in Inghilterra’; M. Wicks (1937) The Italian Exiles in London 1816–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press);
E. Morelli (1990) L’esilio di Mazzini e dei fratelli Ruffini (Rome: Alpha Print);
F. Della Peruta (2000) ‘I fratelli Ruffini e Mazzini: fine di un sodalizio’, in De Nicola (ed.) Giovanni Ruffini. Patriota italiano, scrittore europeo (Genoa: De Ferrari), pp. 25–45.
This was a crucial obstacle to the creation of an Italian identity. On this topic see D. Laven (2006) ‘The Idea of the Nation in the Risorgimento and Liberal Era’, in T. Baycroft and M. Hewitson (eds) What is a Nation? Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 255–71.
On the Victorian debate on gentlemanliness see R. Gilmour (1981) The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen & Unwin);
R. Antinucci (2009) Sulle orme del gentiluomo: percorsi letterari ed episteme vittoriana (Rome: Aracne).
E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds) (2000) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
B. Anderson (1991) Imagined Communities (London: Verso Books).
On this aspect see also M. J. Wiener (1985) English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980 (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
See L. Colley (1992) Britons. Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press);
H. Brocklehurst and R. Phillips (eds) (2003) History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Percy B. Shelley to Leigh Hunt, 20 [?] December 1818, in W. Kemp (1991) The Desire of My Eyes: The Life and Work of John Ruskin (London: Harper Collins), p. 152.
See A. McAllister (2007) John Bull’s Italian Snakes and Ladders. English Attitudes to Italy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), especially pp. 131–159.
On this topic see L. Sponza (1988) Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester: Leicester University Press).
The letter is quoted in C. Cagnacci (ed.) (1893) Giuseppe Mazzini e i fratelli Ruffini: lettere raccolte e annotate (Porto Maurizio: Berio), p. 263. Agostino Ruffini (1810–55) followed his older brother Giovanni and Mazzini first to Switzerland and then to London. Friction with Mazzini, however, led Agostino to move to Edinburgh in 1840. Thanks to letters of introduction from Thomas and Jane Carlyle, he started teaching Italian and was much admired by a group of Scottish intellectuals as ‘one of Italy’s best, finest and gentle’ men
(D. Masson (1911) ‘An Edinburgh Brotherhood — Agostino Ruffini’, in Memories of Two Cities (Edinburgh and London: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier) p. 125). He returned to Italy in 1848 upon his election, together with Giovanni, as representative of Taggia in the Piedmontese Parliament, but soon contracted a paralytic disease and died some years later. Apparently, his figure is adumbrated in the character of ‘Signor Sperano’ who tells the story of The Poor Clare, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Round the Sofa (1859).
See H. K. Bhabha (1994) The Location of Culture (London: Routledge)
and E. W. Said (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
See the seminal studies by H. W. Rudman (1940) Italian Nationalism and English Letters: Figures of the Risorgimento and Victorian Men of Letters (London: Allen & Unwin);
K. Churchill (1980) Italy and English Literature 1764–1930 (London: Macmillan);
J. Pemble (1987) The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Ruffini met Cornelia de Boinville Turner (1795–1874), twelve years his senior, in Paris in 1846 and lived with her until her death. Well-educated, intelligent and pretty, Cornelia was an inspirational muse both to Ruffini and, in her youth, to the Romantic poet P. B. Shelley (on this latter aspect, see A. C. Christensen (1998) ‘Cornelia Turner: un anello di congiunzione tra Shelley e il Risorgimento’, in L. M. Crisafulli Jones (ed.) Shelley e l’Italia (Naples: Liguori), pp. 145–54). Together with Henrietta Jenkin (1807–85), another accomplished Scotswoman and supporter of the Italian liberals, she assisted Ruffini in the revision of his novels. Turner was the author of Angelo Sanmartino (1860), a novel inspired by the figure of Garibaldi, and Charity: A Tale (1862), while Henrietta Jenkin wrote four novels: Who Breaks-Pays (Italian proverb) (1861), Skirmishing (1863), Once and Again (1865), and Within an Ace (1869).
On Ruffini’s relationship and collaboration with both women see I. C. Cozzolino (1937) ‘La donna nella vita di Giovanni Ruffini’, in Giovanni Ruffini e i suoi tempi, pp. 334–418.
On their role in the composition of Doctor Antonio see R. Antinucci (2002) ‘L’officina linguistica di Giovanni Ruffini: alcune varianti di Doctor Antonio’, Merope, XIV, 37, pp. 67–97.
On Cornelia Turner’s Risorgimento fiction see G. Sertoli (2013) ‘I romanzi risorgimentali di Cornelia Turner’, in Q. Marini, G. Sertoli, S. Verdino, L. Cavaglieri (eds) L’officina letteraria e culturale dell’età mazziniana (1815–1870) (Novi Ligure: Città del Silenzio), pp. 129–41.
On Jenkin’s novels see A. C. Christensen (2005) Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: ‘Our feverish contact’ (Abingdon and New York: Routledge).
On the uses that the British liberal classes made of the Italian cause in the process of their own self-fashioning see M. O’Connor (1998) The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press),
and G. Sacerdoti Mariani (2012) ‘Il Risorgimento del dibattito parlamentare inglese’, Anglistica Pisana, IX, 1–2, pp. 3–14.
‘Charles James Fox, Lord Holland, and Earl Grey of the Reform Bill spoke Italian and wrote it passably. So, later, did a succession of prime ministers in office for over thirty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, and this was another remarkable fact that was not without importance in politics’. D. Mack Smith (2000) ‘Britain and the Italian Risorgimento’, in M. McLaughlin (ed.) Britain and England from Romanticism to Modernism (Oxford: Legenda), p. 14.
The figure of Mazzini repeatedly features or is alluded to in several Victorian novels published in Britain up to the beginning of the twentieth century. On this topic see R. Antinucci (2013) ‘“He had the English manner”: Mazzini tra le pagine dei romanzieri vittoriani’, in Q. Marini, G. Sertoli, S. Verdino, L. Cavaglieri et al., L’officina letteraria e culturale dell’età mazziniana, pp. 113–28.
M. Isabella (2009) Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 203.
On the figure of Gallenga see T. Cerutti (1974) Antonio Gallenga: An Italian Writer in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
E. De Amicis (1915) Pagine sparse (Piacenza: Rinfreschi), p. 279.
A. M. Banti (2006) La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Einaudi).
R. Maxwell (2012) ‘The Historical Novel’, in J. Kucick and J. Bourne Taylor (eds) The Oxford History of the Novel in English. Volume 3. The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 60.
On the historical novel in Italy see B. Hammett (2011) The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Representations of Reality in History & Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 147–69.
J. Ruffini (1861) Lavinia (Leipzig: Tauchnitz), I, p. 84;
J. Ruffini (1872) Carlino and Other Stories (Leipzig: Tauchnitz), p. 280.
J. Ruffini (1861) Doctor Antonio: A Tale of Italy (Leipzig: Tauchnitz), p. 112.
For more on the ‘feminisation’ of the Italian male see M. O’Connor (1998) The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination, pp. 13–55;
R. Casillo (2006) The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan);
S. Gundle (2008) ‘“The ‘Bella Italiana” and the “English Rose”: Reflections on Two National Typologies of Feminine Beauty’ in M. Pfister and R. Hertel (eds) Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi), pp. 137–55.
As shown by Lucy Riall, war certainly provided a powerful means of ‘revirilisation’ of the Italian man. L. Riall (2012) ‘Men at War: Masculinity and Military Ideals in the Risorgimento’, in S. Patriarca and L. Riall (eds) The Risorgimento Revisited. Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 152–70.
E. Bottasso (1985) ‘Successo e significato d’un romanzo ottocentesco. Il dottor Antonio’, Accademie e Biblioteche d’Italia, LIII, 2, p. 83.
On this aspect see A. Lombardinilo (2004) ‘Giovanni Ruffini tra ideali patriottici e scrittura letteraria: il Dottor Antonio, romanzo dell’esilio’, in G. Oliva (ed.) Scrittori italiani in Inghilterra: Atti del Convegno internazionale, Chieti, 20–22 ottobre 2003 (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane), pp. 209–34.
The first edition of Settembrini’s Ricordanze della mia vita was published posthumously in Naples in 1879 with a preface by Francesco De Sanctis. See C. Klopp (1999) Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro (Toronto: Toronto University Press), pp. 87–105.
In the speech he gave in the Sardinian Chamber of Deputies on 27th June 1848, however, Ruffini openly advocated the unification of all Italian states with Rome as capital, although he bitterly realised that the idea was almost non-existent in Turin. On Ruffini’s brief political career see A. Linaker (1882) Giovanni Ruffini, pp. 37–49,
and E. Vitale (1931) ‘La missione diplomatica di Giovanni Ruffini a Parigi nel 1849’, in Giovanni Ruffini e i suoi tempi, pp. 221–321.
See D. Beales (1963) ‘L’opinione pubblica inglese di fronte all’Unità Italiana’, in Atti del XL Congresso di Storia del Risorgimento Italiano (Torino, 26–30 ottobre 1961) vol. VIII (Rome: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano), pp. 77–91.
The 1840s and 1850s saw the publication of a number of novels that focused on the anti-Catholic religious controversy, especially after the so-called ‘Papal aggression’. See, for example, Emma Robinson’s Caesar Borgia (1846),
John Richard Digby Beste’s The Pope (1840) and Isidora: Or the Adventures of a Neapolitan (1841),
and Catherine Sinclair’s Beatrice, or the Unknown Relatives (1852). On this wide-ranging topic see, among others,
E. R. Norman (1968) Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London: Allen & Unwin);
S. Griffin (2004) Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
and M. Wheeler (2006) The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Giovanni Ruffini to Agostino Ruffini, 11 April 1848, in Cagnacci, Giuseppe Mazzini e i fratelli Ruffini, pp. 329–30. Ruffini’s view in this respect is similar to the position of Mazzini at the time. See D. Mack Smith (1994) Mazzini (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 57–9.
Ruffini, Doctor Antonio, p. 392. On the figure of the martyr see L. Riall (2010) ‘Martyr Cults in Nineteenth-Century Italy’, Journal of Modern History, 82, 2, pp. 255–87.
J. Ruffini (1861) Lavinia, vol. II, p. 276, my emphasis.
A. Sarchi (1981) Storia di un esule. Giovanni Ruffini, 1807–1881 (Sanremo: Casabianca), p. 84.
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Antinucci, R. (2015). ‘An Italy Independent and One’: Giovanni (John) Ruffini, Britain and the Italian Risorgimento. In: Carter, N. (eds) Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297723_5
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