Garibaldi and the Mille in the British press

Abstract

In June 1882, Thomas Cooper gave a lecture on Charles Darwin, who had died a couple of months before. According to the report in The York Herald for 13 June 1882, The Lecturer said the world seemed of late to be losing its great heroes. America had lost Longfellow and Emerson; Italy had lost Garibaldi; England had lost Carlyle, Disraeli, and Darwin; but we had yet the 'old man eloquent', Mr. Gladstone, who was still struggling with his difficulties. For the former Chartist leader, then, Giuseppe Garibaldi ranked alongside the greatest poets, writers, politicians and scientists of the AngloSaxon world as a hero. That Garibaldi had achieved heroic, even mythical status during his lifetime is hardly a novelty for the student of the Italian Risorgimento; that his high international repute was largely enhanced by the British press is a topic which deserves to be dealt with in detail, as it has only cursorily been mentioned and exemplified in recent research.