Crispi’s anglophone biographers

Christopher Duggan’s Francesco Crispi, 1818–1901: From Nation to Nationalism was published by Oxford University Press in 2002. The Italian version – Creare la nazione. La vita di Francesco Crispi – had appeared two years earlier (Duggan Reference Duggan2000). In the introduction to this exhaustive and brilliant political biography, Christopher emphasised the degree to which Francesco Crispi had been neglected in the historiography, remarking that ‘even in Italy there has been no thorough full-length study of his life in the hundred years that have elapsed since his death’ (Duggan Reference Duggan2002, 1). But Christopher’s biography was not the first English-language life of the Mazzinian, garibaldino, and two-time prime minister, who – with the possible exception of Giovanni Giolitti – was the most significant political figure of Italy’s liberal era. As Christopher made clear, his study had precedent in William James Stillman’s Francesco Crispi. Insurgent, Exile, Revolutionist, and Statesman, published in 1899, just over a century earlier, shortly before the deaths of both author and subject in the summer of 1901.

Born in Schenectady, New York, in 1828, Stillman spent most of his adult life in Europe, between England, Switzerland, Greece, and Italy (Dyson Reference Dyson2014; Stillman Reference Stillman1901). Among historians of Italy he is best known as the Rome correspondent of The Times, but he was blessed with a wide range of talents. He was the author of many books, of which the best known was his study of the Cretan rising against Ottoman rule (Stillman Reference Stillman1874); as a journalist and essayist, he wrote widely for many periodicals besides The Times; he was a pioneering photographer especially of ancient sites,Footnote ¹ and an amateur archaeologist and sometime diplomat (Georgi, Reference Georgi2013).Footnote ² He was additionally a not especially distinguished member of the Hudson River School, who became friendly in England with the leading Pre-Raphaelites, knew Turner in the great artist’s old age, and was an acquaintance of that painter’s great advocate, Ruskin; among other famous men, Stillman was friendly with Browning, Kossuth, and Gladstone. It was, however, while working for the Times in Rome that Stillman came to know Crispi well – probably better than any other foreign journalist – and henceforth often wrote about him in his articles and in his private and business correspondence, notably in letters to the famous Russianist and fellow-Times foreign correspondent, Donald Mackenzie Wallace (1841–1919) (Dyson, Reference Dyson2014; Morren, Reference Morren1967). Christopher made extensive use of Stillman’s letters to Wallace to cast light on Crispi’s personality and career in the 1880s and 1890s. As Christopher remarked, Stillman was ‘intelligent and highly regarded’, and it is clear that in writing his exhaustive study of Crispi, Christopher judged the polymath journalist to be an astute and valuable observer of both Italian affairs and of the Sicilian statesman in particular. But Christopher did not make significant use of Stillman’s biography of Crispi, of The Times, or of the several other published works in which the journalist dealt with him beyond the pages of England’s most famous newspaper. It is on these writings that this article will focus, to see what they tell us about anglophone attitudes to Crispi and more generally about Italy in the final years of the nineteenth century.

Besides his 1899 biography of the Italian prime minister, Stillman wrote two books in which Crispi featured heavily: The Union of Italy, 1815–1895, published in 1898, and The Autobiography of a Journalist of 1901; the last fifty pages of the latter are incredibly rich in their treatment of Crispi, including some sections dedicated solely to the Italian prime minister. Although Stillman had come to know many powerful and influential individuals in the course of his varied and exciting life, Crispi was perhaps the single person to whom he attached the greatest significance. Indeed, Stillman’s intense admiration for Crispi appears to have stemmed both from the journalist’s disillusionment with Italy, and from his being seduced by his unusual degree of access to a statesman, who understood the power of the press but who was often suspicious of journalists. In addition to the three books in which Crispi played a significant, even dominant, rôle, in 1894 Stillman also published a substantial article simply entitled ‘Francesco Crispi’ in the influential Century Magazine – the highly successful New York journal and more popular successor to Scribner’s Monthly (Stillman, Reference Stillman1894), edited by the poet Richard Watson Gilder (Smith, Reference Smith1970; John, Reference John1981). In this piece Stillman summarised most of what he had implied in his journalism for The Times and would articulate in his later and fuller writings on the statesman. There is not space here to deal with Stillman’s writing for The Times in any detail, but it is important to note the degree that his contributions were invariably parti pris in their support for Crispi. Thus, for example, when Crispi was effectively forced into resignation early in 1891, Stillman confidently (and wrongly) predicted that he would be back at the helm of a new ministry within a matter of months, notwithstanding the vicious and ill-justified hostility of the Italian press, which, according to the American, unjustly persecuted and falsely attacked the most outstanding individual in Italian politics.

When a new ministry was formed, not under Crispi but under another Sicilian, Antonio Starabba Marchese di Rudinì, Stillman’s response was to ridicule its divisions, taking the opportunity to compare Crispi favourably with the fractious mediocrities who made up his political rivals.

Highly partisan support for Crispi characterised pretty much everything that Stillman wrote about Italy in the pages of The Times after he became its permanent Rome correspondent in 1886, following the death of the previous resident Times journalist and the effective retirement of Antonio Gallenga (1810–1895), The Times’s special Italian correspondent (Dyson Reference Dyson2014, 247). That no one within the hierarchy of The Times sought to moderate Stillman’s wholehearted, even aggressive, backing for Crispi is noteworthy given the degree to which the editors sought to position it as an impartial and authoritative journal of record. Nevertheless, neither George Earle Buckle, the editor from 1884, nor Charles Frederic Moberly Bell, who from 1890 was its managing director, seem ever to have tried to curb Stillman’s enthusiastic endorsement of Crispi. Instead, Stillman continued the favourable relations he had enjoyed, when he was still just a casual reporter, with their predecessors, Thomas Chenery and John Cameron MacDonald, (Dyson Reference Dyson2014, 248; Stillman Reference Stillman1901, 663, 688): he wrote with complete freedom.

Stillman’s fierce loyalty to and admiration for Crispi also featured in other shorter pieces not written for The Times. Sometimes he could not help himself from including laudatory allusions to Crispi, even when the subject matter scarcely called for them. One example of this is to be found in his collection of essays, The Old Rome and the New, a volume drawn from articles previously published in a variety of literary journals. The eponymous opening essay consists principally of Stillman’s musings on the Hellenic influences on the ancient city, on the beauty of the surrounding countryside, on the enduring nature of Rome’s ‘charm’, and of the author’s inveighing against the horrible and tawdry transformation of the city since it had become the capital of united Italy: ‘The transformation of Rome during the past twenty years is unique in the history of civilisation for barbarism, extravagance, and corruption: never since the world began was so much money spent to do so much evil’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1897, 15). Such statements hint at Stillman’s scant respect for the post-unification political status quo. Yet he singled out just one coeval politician by name, and mentioned him only in positive terms: the reader learned that deaths from malaria around Rome had declined as a direct result of the ‘amelioration in the condition of public health’ effected ‘under the government of Crispi’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1897, 21). These remarks encapsulate Stillman’s position on liberal Italy as it was expressed in his other writings: he argued from his own rich, first-hand experience to establish his position of authority and privilege with regard to the reader, before juxtaposing his distaste for the state of Italy, against his praise for the great Crispi.

Crispi’s creature?

As both his biography of Crispi and his autobiography underline, Stillman came to know Crispi well during the latter’s first ministry. Yet Stillman always stressed in his writings that he was not in any sense Crispi’s creature, that he had neither come under the politician’s influence nor been seduced by his charisma; that Crispi had neither favoured him nor sought to influence his writing; that a distance was always maintained. In his autobiography, Stillman remarked:

Did Stillman protest too much? Given that many contemporaries clearly did believe that Stillman had become little more than Crispi’s unofficial mouthpiece,Footnote ³ it is worth reflecting in greater detail on Stillman’s own narrative of his relationship with Italy’s most well-known politician. At the very beginning of Francesco Crispi, Stillman describes how his first meeting with the prime minister had not gone well. On the instructions of his editor, Stillman had sought an audience with Crispi in the Palazzo della Consulta shortly after the formation of his first ministry in the summer of 1887, with the intention ‘to learn the Mediterranean policy of the new ministry in order that we [The Times] might support it.’ Crispi had greeted the Times correspondent first with silence and ‘the expression of a suspicious watch-dog’, and then with the curt response ‘“The Government has no need of the support (appoggio) of the Press’” (Stillman Reference Stillman1899, 2). Within a few weeks Crispi realised that ‘his independence from the press was not as absolute as he supposed’; he soon made himself more accessible and did all ‘that his always brusque manner permitted to remove the impression of our former interview’ (Stillman Reference Stillman1899, 2). According to Stillman’s published accounts the relationship between the two men changed again later in the ministry. This transformation occurred during the course of negotiations between the British and Italians over Kassala, which opened in Naples in September 1890 and led, in April 1894, to a protocol that would result in the Italian occupation of the Sudanese city (Gooch Reference Gooch1998, 135–136). Stillman explained that, as the sometimes difficult negotiations progressed, Crispi altered his opinion of him, although here too – as in his autobiography – he dismissed the notion that they were close:

Stillman underlined this story in his autobiography, explaining how Crispi ceased to treat him as he did most journalists, merely with ‘a distant civility’, and came to recognise someone who genuinely cared for the peninsula’s domestic welfare and stability, as well as for Italy’s international status (Stillman Reference Stillman1901, 698). At the same time the journalist was determined to quash the widespread opinion that Crispi did him special favours and that he was a privileged advocate. Despite his energetic attempts to affirm that he and Crispi maintained an appropriately professional distance, the sense that Stillman was essentially a propagandist for the Italian statesman remained widespread.

The far from indulgent reviews given to Stillman’s work in British and American periodicals suggest that his contemporaries generally thought that he was too close to Crispi, too much under the politician’s influence, and unable to make a fair assessment of Italy and its inhabitants because he saw matters invariably from Crispi’s perspective. Stillman was sufficiently respected as a journalist and widely-esteemed as a writer for colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic to see merits in his work, but even the most positive reviews tended to come with a note of caution. One piece, dating from July 1899 and published in the middlebrow literary journal The Bookman, identified some laudable aspects in the approach of the Times journalist (The Bookman, 1899). Nevertheless, it also condemned him for overstating his case and for vilifying just about every other leading political figure including Cavour, ‘whom he pursues with relentless animosity’, and Mazzini. Above all the reviewer criticised Stillman, the ‘old and devoted lover of Italy’, for his total pessimism about the country and its inhabitants, ‘too poverty-stricken in strength and ideas’. Stillman, the conclusion of the article implied, seemed unaware of or wilfully ignored ‘faint signs that sleepers in Italy are stirring with nobler dreams than Crispi’s’ (The Bookman, 1899). Significantly less indulgent to the author – and to Italians – was a review in The Academy, published the following month.

The piece in The Academy began by stressing that the book was overwhelmingly biased in favour of Crispi: ‘Mr. Stillman’s biography is partisan. Apologia pro Vita Crispi it might have been called, without the least exaggeration of its contents.’ The review then continued by attacking Crispi for being ‘a vulgared [sic] Bismarck’, as unscrupulous as the Prussian, but additionally tarnished by a ‘revolutionist’ past: Crispi was an instigator of terror and assassination who hypocritically ‘rallied to the support of the new Italian monarchy and constitutional opposition’ (The Academy, 1899, 154–155). Meanwhile, The Athenæum review of Francesco Crispi deemed Stillman ‘somewhat too friendly to its hero to be entirely trustworthy’, for while Crispi was undoubtedly possessed of ‘talent, vigour, and resource’, he was also given to ‘Rhadamanthine severity’: ‘deserved as may be the panegyric on his [Crispi’s] ability, the book before us is to his demerits somewhat blind’ (The Athenæum, 1899).

Although some reviewers noted Stillman’s exceptional qualification to write about the Italian statesman – The Observer’s comment was that Stillman had ‘probably the best claim to write of Crispi’ and that his ‘critical disposition and personal sympathies were fairly balanced’ (The Observer, 9 July 1899, 7) –, the general trend was to question Stillman’s impartiality and judgement, while taking the opportunity offered by a review to attack an authoritarian, vain, and headstrong politician. Richard Davey was typical: reviewing The Autobiography of a Journalist for The Speaker, he saw Stillman as guilty of having ‘converted the great organ he served into a somewhat too pronounced reflection of the views of one who had undoubted talent and force of character, but whose influence on Italian policy was rather baneful than otherwise’: ‘Verily Mr. Stillman’s idol had feet of clay.’Footnote ⁴ Despite courting critical reviews, Stillman’s position on Crispi remained remarkably consistent: there is little sign in his writing that he ever questioned for a moment the great worth and abilities that he identified in the statesman.

It is important in assessing Stillman’s views of Crispi to recognise that until 1860 the future prime minister was almost entirely unknown in Britain. In the pages of The Times, for example, his name appears just twice before the dramatic events of 1860: once in 1848 in a brief allusion to his role in unrest in Sicily (The Times, 7 February 1848), and again in 1855 when he was expelled from Malta and boarded a ship for Portsmouth (The Times, 8 January 1855).Footnote ⁵ In 1860 Crispi suddenly sprang to prominence on account of his place alongside Garibaldi in the conquest, administration, and eventual annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. During 1860, The Times tended to portray Crispi as a dangerous and disruptive force, his name linked closely with that of the radical physician Agostino Bertani, who in 1866 worked with Crispi to found the latter’s political mouthpiece, La Riforma (Duggan Reference Duggan2002, 292–295). For example, in an article in late September the paper stressed Crispi as a bad influence on Garibaldi (The Times, 25 September 1860); another a week later warned of ‘an immense amount of mischief’ Bertani and Crispi might cause even without the declaration of a republic (The Times, 2 October 1860). The Times was by no means alone among British and Irish newspapers in viewing Crispi negatively during the course of the annus mirabilis of Italian unification.Footnote ⁶ Much of the press deemed Crispi’s Mazzinian republicanism the biggest threat to the smooth transition of the peninsula to constitutional rule under the House of Savoy. In January 1861, The Times suggested that it was more or less impossible to cooperate ‘with Bertani, Crispi, or the other leaders of the Mazzinian faction’ on account of ‘their grievous errors and extreme subversive political views’ (The Times, 19 January 1861).

Perceptions of Crispi began to change in the British press after the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy. According to an article published in June 1862 Crispi and his parliamentary opposition were still problematic as ‘hot-headed partisans of the Left’, albeit no match for Rattazzi in parliamentary duels, but, at least, they now compared favourably with the ‘single-minded, thoroughpaced, perhaps, dull-witted worthies of the Right’ (The Times, 10 June 1862). By the mid-1860s, The Times was still portraying Crispi – not inaccurately – as fiery, but no longer did the paper label him a dangerous radical. Indeed, by the late 1860s, Times journalists began to attach more positive adjectives to his name – in one article he was ‘the astute Crispi’ – and the policies he advocated began to be assessed on their merits rather than simply on the basis of prejudice against his perceived republicanism and former revolutionary ardour. As the 1870s progressed Crispi came to feature with ever more regularity in articles on Italian politics but also increasingly, at least within the columns of the newspaper (for which Stillman became a regular correspondent in 1877 [Dyson, Reference Dyson2014, 247]),Footnote ⁷ as a talented parliamentarian, a determined player in international affairs, and as a potential leader of a government, although on occasion he was clearly seen as intractable and possibly dangerous.Footnote ⁸ As we shall see, Crispi continued to excite debate, and this had not diminished when Stillman made that first visit to him in the Consulta. But whatever Crispi’s shortcomings and virtues, whether of character or politics, by the time he assumed office as prime minister, no one doubted his stature. This stature Stillman emphasised repeatedly not only in the articles that he wrote for The Times but in his longer works.

Stillman’s Crispi and Italian decadence

Stillman’s Reference Stillman1894 article for The Century Magazine runs to just six pages, rich in biographical detail and praise for Crispi. Despite its brevity, it is an important piece, not only because it laid down the essentials of Stillman’s interpretation of his Italian hero, but also because it appears to have been a sketch of the biography, which was largely written on holiday in Switzerland during the summer of 1895 (Dyson, Reference Dyson2014, 269). The article’s overwhelmingly positive assessment was, needless to say, more persuasive over a year before the disaster of Adowa in March 1896, a decisive defeat for Italy in Ethiopia, discredited Crispi’s second ministry, and led to the prime minister’s resignation. For Stillman himself the date was less important: he always refused to attribute any blame to Crispi for Italy’s greatest humiliation since Lissa.Footnote ⁹

Stillman’s article was accompanied by an engraving of Crispi based on a photograph taken by Stillman himself. The inclusion of the portrait, an imposing profile, characterised by Crispi’s heavy walrus moustache, is significant because the journalist made much of the statesman’s physiognomy. Crispi’s mien was often compared with that of Bismarck. In his article, Stillman used the physical similarities between the two to rebuff arguments that Crispi might be ‘aping’ the Prussian.

Stillman’s article provided a lively narrative, which traced Crispi’s education and sentimental life, his ideological evolution, and, above all, his role in the unification of Italy and subsequent Italian politics. The author left no doubt about the importance of Crispi. It was Crispi rather than Garibaldi who deserved credit for directing i mille to Sicily;Footnote ¹¹ it was Crispi who had the local knowledge of the island necessary for victory, and was the ‘factotum’ of the expedition; it was Crispi and not Garibaldi who was responsible for the victory at Monreale, proving more tactically astute than the great general; it was ‘his three years’ tenure of the premiership [that] was the most fruitful period in effective legislation during many years […]’; and it was not Crispi who should be blamed for escalating government expenditure on military expenses and desperate state finances, but Quintino Sella (1827–1884) – ‘the father of megalomania’ – who had served three times as Minister of Finance in the 1860s. Crispi was, in Stillman’s view never ‘dictatorial’ but was rather a model of sound government, respect for the crown, ‘scrupulous […] adherence to the letter of constitutional law’, effective retrenchment and sensible management of the national finances, and intelligent foreign policy based not on his ‘close friendship’ with Bismarck but on building on the work of his predecessors. Any negative views of Crispi that ran counter to Stillman’s hagiographic portrait, the journalist attributed to misrepresentation by the Sicilian’s enemies, ‘the trivial insolence of radicalism and the grave malignity of conservative hatred’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1894, 207–208). For Stillman, Crispi’s ‘self-reliance [was] phenomenal,’ and his character and determination unique.

If what really set him Crispi apart from other Italian politicians was his character, what determined this was his ethnic origins. While Bismarck’s character was dictated by the ‘overweening masterliness of his Prussian stock’, Crispi was in essence neither Sicilian nor Italian: while he was born in Ribera near Selinunte, and educated in Palermo,

The ‘fidelity and the individuality’ that marked out Crispi from the decadent and, to Stillman’s eyes, largely contemptible modern Italians was because Crispi was racially distinct. Running through Stillman’s writing on Italy was the idea that Crispi – almost alone among modern Italians – offered hope. Like many anglophone ‘friends’ or ‘lovers’ of Italy in the post-unification period, the American polymath entertained an extremely low opinion of Italians – and especially of Italy’s ruling elites – and in reality was neither friendly nor loving towards them. In his autobiography, for example, immediately after a passage that asserted that ‘while generally credited with a good deal of meddling’, he had only once ever sought to advise Crispi, Stillman viciously attacked the nature and conduct of Italian political life:

If Stillman lacked optimism about the future of Greece, he believed that at least

This contrasted starkly with Italy, where the key problem was the Catholic Church, a ‘great human machine organized, disciplined like an army, for a war of shadows and formalities’ and ‘employed in the conquest of political influence’ (Stillman Reference Stillman1901, 713). While protesting that he admired the pope, as ‘an amiable, excellent ecclesiastic’ (Stillman Reference Stillman1901, 714), and had no argument with Catholic teaching or dogma, had many Catholic friends, and would not ‘join in the indiscriminate denunciation which is common among Protestants’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1901, 715), Stillman made it clear that

For all his hostility to the Vatican, Stillman believed that ‘The suppression of the Roman Catholic religion in Italy, if possible, would be only to leave its place vacant for unreason and anarchy, for the intellectual status of the common people does not admit of a more abstract belief’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1901, 715). Elsewhere in his autobiography, Stillman took aim at almost all elements of Italian society for the failings of the post-unification nation. Thus, for example, the disaster of Adowa had nothing to do with his adored Crispi, but was ‘morally if not technically divided between Baratieri [the Italian commander] and certain parties in the court and army cliques more desirous of overthrowing Crispi than of securing a victory’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1901, 723); meanwhile, King Umberto was ‘more than any other person, the cause of the decline and anarchy in parliamentary government in Italy’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1901, 724). It was, in his narrative, the growing conviction that ‘Nothing less than the courage and abilities of a Cromwell could reform government in Italy, and, in the opinion of some of the wisest and most patriotic Italians I know the task is hopeless and the decay inevitable’ that led Stillman to decide that he could no longer write on Italy for The Times, and led to his return to live in England (Stillman, Reference Stillman1901, 726).

In Francesco Crispi, Stillman displayed a similar level of admiration for the completely honourable and self-sacrificing statesman, who was always totally committed to Italy but never interested in personal gain or ambitious for his own glory, only for that of the nation. Summing up Crispi at the end of the volume, Stillman emphasised that, despite the scandals that had dogged his career, the Sicilian was simply ‘incapable of using his official position for his pecuniary advantage’ and ‘refused advancement and competence under Cavour’ rather than compromise his principles (Stillman, Reference Stillman1899, 222). In short, Crispi was the last remnant of a heroic era, the ‘solitary survival of an epoch when there were giants in the land’, in an Italy in which, forty years after the establishment of the new kingdom, ‘only respectable and inoffensive mediocrity can be permitted to survive’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1899, 223). What was clear to Stillman was that while ‘Amongst the masses at large he is the only man in politics who is capable of exciting any enthusiasm’, Italian ‘public opinion’ in general, and the political elites in particular, had little stomach for Crispi’s vision of ‘a living and growing Italy […] with ambitions for the assignment of a rôle amongst the powers, such as a nation with a population of thirty millions has a right to take’. If there were many in the population as a whole – these ‘good and docile people’ – who were happy to see Crispi exercise ‘a strong authority able to correct abuses’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1899, 223), Crispi’s yearning for great power status fell on deaf ears.

Stillman’s high regard for Crispi and disillusionment with the Italian nation also underpinned his Union of Italy (1898). But while in this account of recent Italian history the part played by Crispi in the process of unification was as exaggerated as elsewhere in Stillman’s writings, his judgment on the new Italy was, if anything, even more vicious than in either autobiography or biography. Although the Union was the first to be published of Stillman’s three books that deal with Crispi, its more general subject matter meant it was the one that endured longest on the shelves. A posthumous second edition was published in 1909, with an epilogue by the great Whig historian G.M. Trevelyan (Stillman, Reference Stillman1909, 394–398). In the Union, Stillman’s final assessment of unification and its legacy is damning. ‘The premature annexation of Naples, and the unfortunate necessity for the transfer of the capital of the capital to Rome, have introduced elements of discord into the kingdom that menace gravely, if not invincibly, the existing political system.’ Rather than the ‘enlarged Piedmont’ modelled on England that had been desired by Cavour, the united Italy had become instead ‘an enlarged Naples, without the vigorous, if treacherous, internal rule, and the consistent and uniform foreign policy of the Bourbons’. Stillman ended his book by quoting the maxim of contemporary Italian naysayers that ‘Too quickly and too easily was Italy made’ (Stillman Reference Stillman1898, 393).

When Trevelyan – fresh from publishing the first of his Garibaldi trilogy, and in the process of writing Garibaldi and the Thousand (Trevelyan Reference Trevelyan1907 and Reference Trevelyan1909) – added an epilogue to the second edition of The Union of Italy, he did his best to mitigate what Stillman himself had in his preface described as his ‘somewhat pessimistic judgment’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1898, v), and which Trevelyan characterised as the author’s ‘note of extreme pessimism’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1909, 394). Trevelyan sought to be positive about the more democratic and constitutional outlook of the new king, about the Vatican’s having ‘accepted the fact of the Italian Kingdom’, about the country’s status as ‘thoroughly constitutional […] a nation bound together by a common feeling of patriotism embracing all classes’, and about a rapid progress in ‘both finance and commerce’, including cooperative banks, hydroelectricity, and silk and cotton industries to rival those ‘at Lyons and even in Lancashire’. Dismissive of the idea that ‘any federative system could have been worked’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1909, 394–397), Trevelyan rejected Stillman’s assessment that Italy had been united too swiftly and with too much facility:

Despite his defence of the process and timing of the Risorgimento, in Trevelyan’s commentary on Stillman and the legacy of unification, there is much that echoes the opinions of the late Times journalist: the social problems of the country remained ‘acute’, ‘aggravated by the weight of a most unscientific system of taxation’ (designed to pay in large part for ‘armaments which are held, rightly or wrongly to be the condition of Italy’s independence as a nation’), as well as ‘by primitive methods of agriculture’; the Church was still ‘opposed to all intellectual advance’; progress is ‘confined too much to the north’; ‘Sicily, even before the earthquake [of 1908] was in a terrible condition’; ‘No one can deny the corruption and incompetence of too many branches and grades of the civil service’; ‘No one can pretend that a great statesman has arisen in our day’; Giolitti, Trevelyan judges as no more than ‘a very skilful manipulator of elections’; ‘No doubt the south and to some extent Rome herself, have dragged down the standard of Italian politics and administration below what it would be if “Italy” only meant North Italy’ (Stillman, Reference Stillman1909, 395–397). Trevelyan’s view was not quite as dark as Stillman’s, but it is hard not to get the sense that the optimism of Garibaldi’s biographer was rather shallow.

The British press and the failure of liberal Italy

That even Trevelyan, seeking to attenuate Stillman’s negative assessment of Italy’s state in the years after unification, was forced to endorse so many of the late journalist’s negative judgments is indicative of the low opinion in which liberal Italy was generally held. The initial enthusiasm for unification had soon evaporated, and, among British (and, indeed, American) commentators there was a widespread sense of disillusionment. Stillman had emphasised that his own pessimism did not reflect a negative attitude to Italians as a whole.

But such protestations hid an essential exasperation about the failings of the Italian national character, which had increasingly become the norm in the anglophone world in the aftermath of unification. In one sense this simply echoed the sentiments of Italians themselves. The notion that the Italian nation needed regeneration – a radical change in morals and manners, a recovery of virtue, a renewal of education, a process of militarisation – was a longstanding one that could be traced back to Machiavelli and beyond (Patriarca Reference Patriarca2005 and Reference Patriarca2010). Any negative view Stillman entertained of Italian national shortcomings probably came in large part from the likes of Crispi himself – ever swift to inveigh against the shortcomings of his compatriots – and the sometime minister and historian Pasquale Villari. Stillman described Villari as ‘one of the most devoted, honest and patriotic of living Italians and for years one of my best friends in Italy’ (Stillman Reference Stillman1899, 703), but he was also the author of the savage indictment of the failings of Italian state and society that had resulted in the fiasco of 1866: ‘Di chi è la colpa?’ (Villari Reference Villari1866 and Reference Villari1868).

Negative views of contemporary Italy were regularly fed to the reading public in North America and the British Isles by Italian writers: as a long review article of works by the American political scientist and future president of Harvard, Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856–1943) (Adcock Reference Adcock2017, 189–190), Pasquale Villari, and Villari’s fellow Neapolitan Pasquale Turiello in the Edinburgh Review of 1897 pointed out, unfavourable views of the state of Italy were ‘not the mere fancies of a splenetic traveller’ but rather a product of Italian writing: ‘The whole tone of social and political literature in Italy is desperately pessimistic’ (Edinburgh Review, 3).

To British observers in the 1890s, the question was not whether Italy needed radical change. Very few would have disagreed with the notion that dramatic reform was essential. Rather it focused on whether Crispi or someone like him was an appropriate means of effecting such reform. As can be seen from some of the hostile reviews of Stillman’s work, by no means all commentators writing for British (or American) audiences agreed with the journalist’s assessment either of Crispi or with his diagnosis of how to address the problems of modern Italy. Nevertheless, anglophone supporters of Crispi were by no means rare. Possibly the only one to be even more vociferous in defending the great Sicilian was another Europeanised American, William Livingstone Alden (1837–1908). Like Stillman, Alden had been a US consul in Rome, and, again like Stillman, he sought to exculpate Crispi entirely from mistakes, especially those in Africa. In an article for the Contemporary Review of January 1897, Alden argued that Crispi had not only presciently warned of dangers in Italy’s African policy, but ‘was in no way responsible for Adowa’ (Alden, Reference Alden1897, 117–122). Two years earlier, Alden had written an article for The Nineteenth Century, the title of which made his position vis-à-vis Crispi absolutely clear: ‘Francesco Crispi. An appreciation’. Here he argued that Crispi’s greatness was ‘due to the force and subtlety of his intellect, rather than to his [undoubted] courage and determination’ (Alden, Reference Alden1895, 165):

There were other writers who showed a similar readiness to endorse Crispi: G.M. James, writing for The Review of Reviews remarked in the regular ‘Character Sketch’ – a feature in William Thomas Stead’s journal, which occasionally dealt not with an individual but with a rival publication, the events of a whole year, or, on one occasion, the entire Liberal Cabinet – that:

Plenty of commentators were not so ready to heap lavish praise upon Crispi, variously seeing him as a symptom of the shortcomings of liberal Italy, and even their principal cause. The popular Victorian novelist Maria Louise Ramé, who published under the pen name Ouida (1839–1908) and who had taken up permanent residence in Tuscany in the early 1870s, became a scathing critic of iberal Italy’s institutions and politics. In an article, which was in effect a review of Guglielmo Ferrero’s La Reazione (Turin: Olivetti, 1895), the dog-obsessed, antisemitic, and prolific author of novels and children’s stories, described the Italian statesman as ‘something of the mattoide, of the monomaniac’, a former ‘regicide’ who in his old age had become ‘a liberticide’:

From Ouida’s perspective it was clear that any prolongation of Crispi’s influence would mean ‘unlicensed persecution and prosecution’ (Ouida Reference Ouida1895, 254). As she wrote in another article shortly after the battle of Adowa:

Ouida was often attacked for her slapdash attitude to the Italian language, and her cavalier inaccuracies (significantly she called Guglielmo Ferrero ‘Giovanni’ in her review), but she was genuinely passionate in her opposition to the damage wrought on the lives of ordinary Italians by the misguided policies of the liberal state (Ambrosini 2013, 165), especially heavy taxation and conscription, which she rightly attributed to Italy’s attempt to maintain overly large armed forces due to its aspiration to great power status. Rather than seeing Crispi as the means of addressing the shortcomings of united Italy, Ouida argued that he not only aggravated them but also frequently caused them. Similar, if more moderately expressed views were entertained by Mazzini’s biographer Bolton King and his collaborator, Cambridge’s first Serena Professor of Italian, the former basket-maker and autodidact Thomas Okey. They recognised Crispi as an able parliamentarian, but censured him for much else: for the ‘great disaster of Adowa’; for his ‘wild, unscrupulous ambitions [that] had brought the great humiliation’; for his recourse to ‘coercion’ that ‘created a feeling of disgust and indignation’; for his ‘barren imperialism’ (designed to distract from his domestic policies), which ‘singularly failed’, ‘soon lost its glamour’, and generated ‘wrath and panic’ (King and Okey Reference King and Okey1901, 6, 86–87, 307).

Amid the American and British voices for and against Crispi, Italians managed to have their say in the anglophone world. The British press remained happy to print translations from Italian (including the prose of Crispi himself [Crispi, Reference Crispi1898]), and articles commissioned from prominent Italian journalists, academics, and public figures. It is perhaps predictable, that Italian commentators often appeared both better-informed and more judicious in their assessments of Crispi. Sometimes, too, they could be quite severe in their analysis of British policy towards and perceptions of the peninsula. The Italian economist, radical, and future anti-Fascist Antonio de Viti de Marco, saw self-interest in British friendliness towards Crispi, explaining it in terms of the degree or equilibrium he brought to the Mediterranean and the relative stability he promised on the domestic front: ‘It is easy, then, to understand the preference shown by the leading English papers for Signor Crispi, expansionist abroad, high-handed and despotic at home’ (De Viti de Marco, Reference de Viti de Marco1895, 548).

Giuseppe Fiamingo, one of the founders of sociology as a discipline in Italy (Cipriani Reference Cipriani2013), offered an assessment of Crispi, shortly after his death in August 1901, to the readers of Macmillan’s Magazine. Fiamingo’s judgement of Crispi emphasised that his character was ‘not an Italian type’ but distinctively Sicilian: the two-time prime minister had possessed an ‘exaggerated sentiment of individuality […] very common in Sicily’: ‘In the Sicilian what prevails is the worship of force which is suggested by his surroundings, by nature, by legend, by history itself’ (Fiamingo Reference Fiamingo1901, 25–26). For Fiamingo, Crispi was totally devoted to the Italian cause and without question ‘one of the greatest political figures of the past century’. And yet his legacy was far from positive: ‘the only vestige of his work is the financial exhaustion brought about by his government’ (Fiamingo, Reference Fiamingo1901, 29).