The Drawbacks of Philhellenism in mid-Victorian Britain: The Case of the Philhellenic Committee of 1863

The Philhellenic Committee was a body formed in 1863 in London with the explicit objective of promoting the "Greek interest" in Britain. Its short life and limited appeal highlights why modern Greece and the Greeks failed to catch the imagination of the British public in the way the Italians and the Polish managed to do in the same period. In the early 1860s, British philhellenism—that is, interest in the affairs of modern Greece and advocacy of the "Greek cause"—should be accounted for within the framework of liberal concern for freedom and, consequently, in the context of British interest in continental nationalities, which affected and mobilized wider sections of the middle and working classes. In this context, Greece presented drawbacks that made it less attractive to British interests than other continental nations: the Greeks of the independent kingdom did not suffer under foreign oppression and could not provide the public with an emblematic leader, while Greeks in Britain excelled in commercial transactions, not in political agitation.