The year 1851 marked a turning point in England’s perception of the Italian Risorgimento. Support for Italian unification certainly existed before but was significantly tempered by skepticism toward Continental republicanism and fears that revolutionary violence might spill over into England. In 1851, however, three significant events occurred to turn the tide of English public opinion in favor of the Italian cause: William Gladstone’s Two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen, on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government denounced that government’s incarceration of political opponents; Giuseppe Mazzini founded the Society of the Friends of Italy; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her political poem Casa Guidi Windows. Despite the significant disparity in their political beliefs, ranging from Peelite Conservatism to radical republicanism, Gladstone, Mazzini, and Barrett Browning all sought to bring home the significance of political events in Italy to the everyday lives of English readers. In this essay I examine the emergence of a new language of mid-Victorian liberal cosmopolitanism that sought to situate the radical politics of the Italian Risorgimento within a broader understanding of Europe as a family of nations and embraced the Victorian home as both a crucial political space and a trope for reconciling the threat of revolutionary violence with a love for law, order, and national sovereignty. Analyzing the writings of the three figures named above, each of whom intervened significantly within Italian Risorgimento politics around the time of the failed Italian Revolution of 1848–49, I trace the development of a humanitarian rhetoric sympathetic toward the Italian nationalist cause yet notoriously ambivalent about the manner and means by which an Italian nation ought ultimately to be realized. I do not introduce any new claims about historical causation