The First English Period (1816-1821)

Foscolo left Switzerland with his secretary Andrea Calbo in August 1816, passed through Germany and the Netherlands and embarked from Ostend for England, where he arrived on September 11; in London he stayed at the Hôtel Sablonière in Leicester Square and subsequently moved to Soho.

Preceded by his fame as an independent, esteemed writer and a patriot committed to the defence of liberty, Foscolo was welcomed favourably by London society;  shortly after his arrival he was introduced, via an exile from Lucca, Giuseppe Binda, to the salon of Lord Holland, one of the English intellectual environment's most prestigious gatherings that was frequented by a cosmopolitan society. The favourable welcome received from English society was helped by his acquaintance with  William Stuart Rose, a poet and translator (he translated Orlando Furioso into English, among other things) with whom Foscolo had had relations before his arrival in London. In the meantime, his mother died in April 1817.

With no regular income and living a life beyond his means, the writer was helped in the first years of his stay in England by various patrons, although he also earned money via collaborations with newspapers as a literary critic and essayist; in the spring of 1817 he started to write Lettere scritte dall’Inghilterra, which he never completed; in 1818 he published a series of articles on Dante for the Edinburgh Review; in the same year he was invited by John Hobhouse, a statesman and friend of Lord Byron, to write Essays on the present literature in Italy which caused great scandal in Italy. In London's salons he met Caroline Russell, with whom he fell in love and read Petrarch.