‘We are now the first people in Hungary - ’ Count Andrássy’s Family and Friends through the Eyes of an English Governess (Mary E. Stevens)
‘We are now the first people in Hungary - ’ Count Andrássy’s Family and Friends through the Eyes of an English Governess (Mary E. Stevens)

Summary/Abstract: “… for there is scarcely a European country in which the Anglomania rages more fiercely than in that slighted land. […] there is scarcely an event of English life, a folly of London fashion, or an invention of British industry, which does not find admirers and commentators and imitators, among the Hungarians of respectable degree,” declared Catherine Grace Frances Gore, an English writer in one of the stories set in Hungary that she published in 1829, at the very beginning of what that country calls its Reform Age. It was indeed true that a growing interest in English culture, economic progress, technological innovations and political institutions was manifest among the élite of Hungarian society roughly from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. For the Liberals of the Reform Age, in no small measure due to the example set by Count István Széchenyi, a grand tour of Europe’s developed countries—above all England—was considered almost mandatory. These tours provided an inexhaustible fund of personal experiences and the received cultural impressions were integrated into plans about how social betterment and progress could be achieved in Hungary.[...]

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