The Risorgimento and English literary history, 1867–1911: the liberal heroism of Trevelyan's Garibaldi

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between Italian heroism and literary history in relation to G.M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi trilogy. It firstly summarises some important features of the Victorian culture of public moralism that shaped Trevelyan's early work. It then discusses the influence of the poet, novelist and man-of-letters, George Meredith, on Trevelyan's Garibaldi books and historical practice. The comparison of Meredith and Trevelyan suggests that Trevelyan's Garibaldi trilogy should be understood as part of a project self-consciously undertaken by Victorian literary and political elites to consolidate, celebrate and, less frequently, to critique British liberal culture and politics. The article concludes that while a Mazzinian notion ofdolcezzamay have influenced Trevelyan's notion of the hero, his interest in the Risorgimento was ultimately motivated by the usefulness of Italy and Garibaldi in promoting what he considered to be a distinctly ‘English’1form of ethical patriotism, whose intellectual antecedents – Whig gradualism, constitutional compromise in the form of parliamentary monarchy and a hierarchy-inflected anti-Republicanism – stood in ambivalent relation to the concept of democratic nationality.