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It happened that Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens were traveling to Florence at exactly the same time the Thomases set off in the opposite direction, and a letter by Collins to a friend has left us a snapshot picture of travel by diligence along those dangerous roads of northern Italy. He explains how strings were tied to the trunks and luggage riding on the roof and each passenger sat with the loose end in his hand. The intention—no matter that the coach was in motion—was to prevent theft. “It was like sitting in a shower bath and waiting to pull the string—or rather, like fishing in the sea, when one waits to feel a bite by the tug of the line round one’s finger.”

The tedium of the journey, the bad inns and low cunning of the peasants met along the way, the occasional interrogations by unpleasantly brusque Austrian patrols, all conspired to produce in Morgan the conviction that he was at last leaving the shadows and coming back into the light. Let others take what they could from Italy: he was free of it. He was not as rich as he would like, and he was no longer young. However, Louisa’s inheritance was clear of entail at last: he could throw out the agricultural laborers who were now in disgraceful occupation of Gate House and set about making himself a landed proprietor. That had a ring to it. He had enough money to send both his sons to Eton; and sprawling next to Louisa as the coach rattled along, its canvas window coverings clattering, sat the petulant girl on which the last and he hoped best phase of his life depended. Somewhere, perhaps even on this very road, returning home to some noble house in a carriage emblazoned with arms, was the man to marry Georgina and, by so doing, elevate the whole family.

The diarist Charles Cavendish Greville had summed it up in 1843: “This year is distinguished by many marriages in the great world, the last, and the one exciting the greatest sensation being that of March to my niece. A wonderful elevation for a girl without beauty, talents, accomplishments or charm of any kind, an enormous prize to draw in the lottery of life. All the mothers in London consider it a robbery as each loses her chance of such a prize.”

Morgan understood well enough that his stake in this market was slender. But he also knew, or thought he knew, that nobody got what he wanted by chance. There was a campaign to be fought. That was how it had been in his own day, and that was how he imagined it to be now. His firsthand knowledge of English society was nearly fifteen years out of date, yet he supposed that what went in the days of his youth, went on still. It had better, for he knew of nothing else.

He was to be proved wrong. Even leaving aside his wife’s eccentric taste in clothes—her high color and preference for red shawls led Georgina once to describe her mother as looking like a macaw—there was something fusty and old-fashioned about the whole family. Though they were English to the people they met along the way, there was an ignorance in them that surprised their fellow countrymen. A significant example of this was found whenever Louisa mentioned her daughter’s wonderfully clear soprano voice. Anyone who asked out of courtesy to whom they had sent her in Florence for lessons—to Signor Giulio Uberti perhaps?—was met with a studied silence. She had received no lessons. The same was true of the art and literature of the day. Morgan knew that his bête noire Watts was back in England but not that he was recently engaged on enormous historical and allegorical paintings in which his social conscience wrestled with the ills of society. (They were sometimes called muffin paintings, after Thackeray’s satirization of a “George Rumbold” painting in which Rumbold—his name for Watts—had painted such a huge canvas that a mere muffin had a diameter of two feet three inches.) Meanwhile, what was this absurd thing called the March of Intellect—whence to where? The Great Exhibition had been and gone—what had been the attraction of looking at a lot of farm machinery and the like, displayed in a building made of glass by a man who was gardener to the Duke of Devonshire?

For Georgina, going home was the adventure of her young life. She was about to rejoin what was the greatest nation on earth at its most prosperous. Everyone knew that Britain was best. Even her father believed that. Surreptitious study of fashion plates showed her that a ball gown was now worn off both shoulders and that hair was curled only at the back to fall lightly on the neck. In calling on others, it was de rigueur to wear a long fringed shawl over a demure dress, the whole set off by a beaded reticule, dangled, it would seem, by the middle fingers of the left hand. There was much to ponder here, but the imaginative leap was to picture the man who would capture her.

The year that Morgan left England, Thackeray wrote the potboiling FitzBoodle Papers. Its story begins farcically with the remark by his hero “I have always been considered the third-best whist player in Europe . . .” FitzBoodle, we discover, is the second son to a title stretching back to Henry II; his absurd opinions and brief adventures first entertained the readers of Frazer’s Magazine. To the modern taste the empty vanities of FitzBoodle and his redoubtable stepmother, Lady Flintskinner, are too easy a target. In the early Thackeray there is cleverness, but also a faintly studied quality. FitzBoodle and the other works like it were slight, not because they were too cruel, but because they were too cautious. There were plenty of readers ready to discover in Thackeray a kind of social anxiety, an insecurity. They saw, or thought they saw, in his own phrase, the flunky that hid behind the gentleman. But, unlike Morgan Thomas, Thackeray grew up with the new age and learned from it. His vision deepened and darkened. In a letter written when his eldest daughter was in the same situation as Georgina, young and beautiful and eligible, he strikes a much more somber note. Speaking of a society to which he was now himself an adornment, he wrote:

They never feel love, but directly it’s born they throttle it and fling it under the sewer as poor girls do their unlawful children—they make up money marriages and are content—then the father goes to the House of Commons or the Counting House, the mother to her balls and visits—the children lurk upstairs with their governess, and when their turn comes are bought and sold, as respectable and heartless as their parents before them.

This was new and beyond the comprehension of a man like Morgan. Even more to the point, it was not a thing Georgina herself could understand. At the time she left Florence, an American girl her own age had come to Europe with the sole intention of being heard by Rossini. Genevieve Ward, young though she was, knew what she wanted and headed straight to Florence to get it. She had been told she had a good voice and was determined to make herself famous. Rossini was encouraging. He found her distinguished local teachers (one of whom was Uberti), and two years later she opened at La Scala. That kind of dedication was way beyond anything Georgina possessed, then or ever. She had the voice, but not the vision.