Dazzled by the dramatic sequence of military events in the 1860s, which were dominated by the charismatic figure of Garibaldi and by the ‘Machiavellian’ diplomacy of Cavour, historians have overwhelmingly interpreted British responses to Italian unification through the prism of public enthusiasm for the victorious, moderate, monarchical solution, totally obscuring the disappointment of the Victorian philo-Italian ‘losers’ who resented the political side-lining of Mazzini. By modifying some of the underlying assumptions of ‘official’ interpretations, this chapter does two things: it highlights the reactions of Victorian republicans to the achievement of Italian unity under the aegis of a Piedmontese monarch and it focuses on the activities which they supported in liberal Italy.

While John A. Davis has provided a convincing interpretation of the part played by Trevelyan in posthumously inflating the collective memory of Garibaldi's popularity in Britain, it would be unfair to burden Trevelyan with the entire responsibility for the later whiggish reading of ‘Britain's Risorgimento’. In fact, as mid-Victorian Britain has been variously described in the historiography as an ‘age of equipoise’, a period of ‘retrenchment and reform’, and an era when the ‘discourse of popular constitutionalism’ prevailed over that of radicalism, it is not surprising that the disappointment of Victorian republicans with Italy's monarchical turn was given short shrift. Yet Duncan Bell has highlighted the need to balance ‘the view of the mid-Victorian era as an age of equipoise’ with the ‘recognition of the existence of a widespread anxiety over Britain's place in the world’.