The Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi was one of the key revolutionary figures of the 19th century. A member of the Young Italy movement, he became the leading figure of the ‘Risorgimento’, the post-1815 ‘resurgence’ of Italian nationalism against foreign occupation.
Garibaldi’s mission became immensely popular in Britain, and the British government aided his Sicilian campaign in 1860. He visited England in March 1864 to express his gratitude to the British people. Garibaldi fever was everywhere in Britain: the Russian exile Alexander Herzen described it as ‘Carlyle’s hero-worship being performed before our eyes’ Two rare dissenters were Queen Victoria, who described the reception as ‘such follies’, and Karl Marx, who called the Garibaldi craze ‘a miserable spectacle of imbecility’.
Garibaldi was greeted with great enthusiasm by two packs of Garibaldi lovers: on the one hand, were the upper classes, led by various Dukes and Lords, who wanted him in their homes and at elaborate banquets, while the rival team was led by assorted progressives who wanted Garibaldi to speak at radical demonstrations.
Possibly in search of more neutral ground, Garibaldi went to the Isle of Wight to visit the poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, who had written in praise of the great Italian hero. Tennyson was not disappointed when he met him: ‘a noble human being’. Lady Tennyson also admired him greatly: ‘A most striking figure in his picturesque white poncho lined with red, his embroidered red shirt and coloured tie over it. His face very noble, powerful, and sweet, his fore- head high and square. Altogether he looked one of the great men of our Elizabethan age. His manner was simple and kind’.
Garibaldi planted a Wellingtonia tree in the Tennyson’s garden (tree-planting had become one of his customs when visiting English people). Tennyson mentions the tree in his poem ‘To Ulysses’: ‘Or watch the waving pine which here/ The warrior of Caprera set, / A name that earth will not forget/Till earth has roll’d her latest year’, and records in a melancholy footnote characteristic of both men: ‘Garibaldi said to me, alluding to his barren island, “I wish I had your trees”‘.
At the Tennysons, Garibaldi also met the great photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Cameron – entering into the theatricality of the occasion – went down on her knees to ask Garibaldi for permission to take his portrait. Lady Tennyson was worried that Garibaldi might have thought Cameron was begging for money, but Garibaldi, before whom whole villages of Italian women had kneeled, was well used to such tributes, and accepted the gesture with aplomb (Cameron got her sitting).
What Happened Next
A whole range of products were branded ‘Garibaldi’ in Britain, from Garibaldi blouses to the still-popular Garibaldi biscuits. The emotional outpouring that greeted Garibaldi, uniting all classes apart, of course, from the likes of Victoria and Marx, was unusual in Britain, one of the few comparable occasions being Princess Diana’s death in 1997. The man himself engaged in a few more campaigns before retiring to his treeless island of Caprera, where he cultivated his fields until his death in 1882.