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This is the first account of Dante’s reception in English to address the full chronological span of that process. Responses by individual authors and in certain periods have been studied before, but Dante’s British Public takes a wider and longer view, using a selection of vivid and detailed case- studies to explore some of the conversations about and appropriations of Dante that developed in Britain across more than six centuries, as access to his work extended and diversified. Much of the evidence is drawn from previously unpublished material in (for example) letters, journals, annotations, and inventories and derives from archives in the UK and across the world, from Milan to Mumbai and from Berlin to Cape Town. Throughout, the role of Anglo-Italian cultural contacts and intermediaries in shaping the public understanding of Dante in Britain is given prominence. The book thus shows how, over the centuries, many classes of English and Italian readers and writers become involved in this process—from clerics and merchants around Chaucer’s time, through itinerant students, collectors, translators, and tourists in the early modern period, to the expatriates, scholars, artists, and popularizers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The final chapter brings the story up to the present, showing how the poet’s work has been seen (from the fourteenth century onwards) as accessible to ‘the many’, and demonstrating some of the means by which Dante has reached a yet wider British public over the past century.
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