"the Marriage of Choice and the Marriage of Convenance": A New England Puritan Views Risorgimento Italy (Section III COMPARATIVE Issues) (Essay‪)‬

American and European social differences are perennial topics of discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Fascination with views from the other shore peaked in the early and mid nineteenth century, as the United States, avowedly demo-cratic and egalitarian, became a bellwether for Old World reform, while Europe reverted to post-revolutionary reaction. During these decades, Alexis de Toc-queville, Fanny Kemble, and Frances Trollope penned classic American pot-traits, and New World writers and painters toured Europe, envying Old World storied scenes yet disgusted by their ancient and enduring infamies. One well-informed and deeply enthralled American observer of Old World ways was Caroline Crane Marsh [hereafter CCM], wife of the newly-appointed American envoy to the new kingdom of Italy. Her Yankee-based reflections on manners and mores in the Savoyard court of Turin between 1861 and 1865 provide comparative perspectives on nineteenth-century social history unique for their topical range and insights. In March 1861 President Abraham Lincoln named as envoy to the fledgling Italian nation the Vermont scholar and Italophile George Perkins Marsh [hereafter GPM], four-time congressman, former envoy to the Ottoman Empire, and staunch anti-slavery Republican. Accompanying Marsh to his new post were his semi-blind and invalid wife Caroline Crane Marsh, translator, poet, and essayist, and her young namesake niece Carrie Crane. They reached the Italian capital of Turin on June 6, three days after the death of prime minister Count Camillo di Cavour, the Piedmontese statesman whose consummate diplomacy, together with the armies of Giuseppe Garibaldi, had brought the Italian state into being. GPM remained American envoy to Italy for more than twenty-one years, a length of service unequaled before or since.