Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T02:39:11.021Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2016

Lucy Turner Voakes
Lucy Turner Voakes*
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki, Finland
*
∗ Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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 of dolcezza may 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’1 form 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.

Keywords

G.M. TrevelyanGiuseppe GaribaldiGeorge MeredithRisorgimentoliterary historyliberalismmanliness
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , November 2010 , pp. 433 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arnold, G. 1980. Held fast for England: G.A. Henty, imperialist boy's writer. London: H. Hamilton.Google Scholar
Arnold, M. 1993. Culture and anarchy and other writings, ed. Collini, S.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Banti, A., and Ginsborg, P., eds. 2007. Il Risorgimento. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Berselli, A. 1970. L'italia dall'età giolittiana all'avvento del fascismo. Bologna: Patron.Google Scholar
Biagini, E. 1992. Liberty, retrenchment and reform: Popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone, 1860–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bonsanti, M. 2007. Amore familiare, amore romantico e amor di patria. In Storia d'Italia. Il Risorgimento, ed. Banti, A. and Ginsborg, P., 127–52. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Bullen, J. 1994. The myth of the Renaissance in nineteenth-century writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burrow, J. 1981. A liberal descent: Victorian historians and the English past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cannadine, D. 1992. G.M. Trevelyan: A life in history. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Collini, S. 1991. Public moralists: Political thought and intellectual life in Victorian Britain, 1850–1930. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawford, E. 2001. The women's suffrage movement: A reference guide, 1866–1928. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Feske, V. 1996. George Macaulay Trevelyan, the insider as outsider. In From Belloc to Churchill: Private scholars, public culture and the crisis of British Liberalism, 1900–1939, ed. Feske, V., 137–85. Chapel Hill–London: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Finn, M. 1993. After Chartism: Class and nation in English radical politics, 1848–1874. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Forbes, C. 1861. The campaign of Garibaldi in the two Sicilies: A personal narrative. London: W. Blackwood & Sons.Google Scholar
Francis, M. 2002. The domestication of the male? Recent research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British masculinity. The Historical Journal 45, no. 3: 637–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, H. 1992. The Victorians and Renaissance Italy. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Ginsborg, P. 2007. L'io, l'amore, la nazione. In Storia d'Italia. Il Risorgimento, ed. Banti, A. and Ginsborg, P., 5–67. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Hall, C. 1996. At home with history: Macaulay and the history of England. In At home with the Empire: Metropolitan culture and the imperial world, ed. Hall, C. and Rose, S., 32–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hamnett, B. 2006. Fictitious histories: The dilemma of fact and imagination in the nineteenth-century historical novel. European History Quarterly 36, no. 1: 31–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, M. 2004. George Meredith. Oxford dictionary of national biography 37. 861–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Henderson, M. 2004 [1907]. George Meredith: Novelist, poet, reformer. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Henty, G.A. 1901. Out with Garibaldi: A story of the liberation of Italy. London: Blackie & Son.Google Scholar
Hernon, J. 1976. The last Whig historian and consensus history: George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1876–1962. American Historical Review 81, no. 1: 66–97.Google Scholar
Heyck, T. 1982. The transformation of intellectual life in Victorian England. Chicago: Lyceum Books.Google Scholar
Huzzard, John A. 1959. George Meredith and the Risorgimento. Italica 36, no. 4: 241–250.Google Scholar
Irwin, R. 1997. Saladin and the third crusade: A case study in historiography and the historical novel. In Companion to historiography, ed. Bentley, M., 139–52. London–New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Isabella, M. 2009. Risorgimento in exile: Italian émigrés and the Liberal International in the post-Napoleonic era. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jewsbury, G. 1867. Review of Vittoria. The Athenaeum, no. 2052, 23 February 1867.Google Scholar
Jones, H. 2006. The idea of the national in Victorian political thought. European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 1: 12–21.Google Scholar
Kelvin, N. 1961. A troubled Eden: Nature and society in the works of George Meredith. Edinburgh–London: Oliver & Boyd.Google Scholar
Law, J. and Østermark-Johansen, L., eds. 2005. Victorian and Edwardian responses to the Italian Renaissance. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Mack Smith, D. 1994. Mazzini. New Haven, CT–London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Mandler, P. 2006. The English national character: The history of an idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair. New Haven, CT–London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Mazzini, G. 1864–1870. The life and writings of Joseph Mazzini. London: Smith Elder.Google Scholar
Mazzini, G. 1891. The life and writings of Joseph Mazzini, vol. IV, Critical and Literary. New ed. London: Smith, Elder.Google Scholar
M'Carthy, J. 1971. Novels with a purpose. In Meredith: The critical heritage, ed. Williams, I., 124–35. London: Routledge. [Originally published in the Westminster Review xxvi, July 1864].Google Scholar
McIntire, C. 1983. England against the Papacy, 1858–1861: Tories, Liberals and the overthrow of papal temporal power during the Italian Risorgimento. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meredith, G. 1909. Vittoria. London: Constable.Google Scholar
Meredith, G. 1912. Letters of George Meredith, collected and edited by his son. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: Constable.Google Scholar
Moorman, M. 1980. George Macaulay Trevelyan: A memoir. London: H. Hamilton.Google Scholar
Newbolt, P. 2004. George Alfred Henty. Oxford dictionary of national biography 26. 619–21. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
O'Connor, M. 1998. The romance of Italy and the English political imagination. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Parry, J. 2001. The impact of Napoleon III on British politics, 1851–1880. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11, sixth series: 147–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parry, J. 2006. The politics of patriotism: English liberalism, national identity and Europe, 1830–1866. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pemble, J. 1988. The Mediterranean passion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Powell, D. 1986. The new Liberalism and the rise of Labour, 1886–1906. Historical Journal 29, no. 2: 369–93.Google Scholar
Riall, L. 2006. Rappresentazioni del Quarantotto italiano nella storiografia inglese. In Memoria, rappresentazioni e protagonisti del 1848 italiano, ed. Camurri, R., 21–37. Verona: Cierre edizioni.Google Scholar
Riall, L. 2007. Garibaldi: Invention of a hero. New Haven, CT–London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Richards, J., ed. 1989. Imperialism and juvenile literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, W. 1995. Mazzini's thought in the development of British culture, politics and society. In Il mazzinianesimo nel mondo I: 1–76. Pisa: Istituto Domus Mazziniana.Google Scholar
Romani, R. 2002. National character and public spirit in Britain and France 1750–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Schreuder, D. 1970. Gladstone and Italian Unification, 1848–70: The making of a Liberal? English Historical Review 85, no. 336: 475–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, G. 2001. The Liberal Party: Triumph and disintegration, 1886–1929. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Tasato Mellone, J. 2005. An Edwardian's search for meaning: Trevelyan's Garibaldi. Journal of the Historical Society 5, no. 2: 119–53.Google Scholar
Tosh, J. 2002. Gentlemanly politeness and manly simplicity in Victorian England. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12, sixth series: 455–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tosh, J. 2005. Manliness, masculinities and the New Imperialism, 1880–1900. Manliness and masculinities in nineteenth-century Britain, ed. Tosh, John. 173–91. Harlow: Pearson.Google Scholar
Trevelyan, G.M. 1906a. The Meredith pocket book. London: Archibald, Constable.Google Scholar
Trevelyan, G.M. 1906b. The poetry and philosophy of George Meredith. London: Archibald, Constable.Google Scholar
Trevelyan, G.M. 1907a. Garibaldi's defence of the Roman Republic. London: Longmans Green.Google Scholar
Trevelyan, G.M. 1907b (reprint of 1901 edition). Past and future. In Heart of the empire: Problems of city life in England, C.F.G. Masterman (and others), 401–17. London: Unwin.Google Scholar
Trevelyan, G.M. 1909. Garibaldi and the Thousand. London: Longmans, Green.Google Scholar
Trevelyan, G.M. 1911a. English songs of Italian freedom. London: Longmans, Green.Google Scholar
Trevelyan, G.M. 1911b. Garibaldi and the making of Italy. London: Longmans, Green.Google Scholar
Trevelyan, G.M. 1913. Clio a muse, and other essays literary and pedestrian. London: Longmans, Green.Google Scholar
Vance, N. 1997. The Victorians and Ancient Rome. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Varouxakis, G. 2006a. Patriotism and nationhood in 19th-century European political thought. European Journal of Political Theory 5: 7–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Varouxakis, G. 2006b. ‘Patriotism’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘jumanity’ in Victorian political thought. European Journal of Political Theory 5: 100–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar