M. E. Braddon’s Literary Apprenticeship: Heroism, Madness and Sensation in “Garibaldi” and Three Times Dead

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on M. E. Braddon’s epic poem “Garibaldi” and her first published novel Three Times Dead. While they are different in topic and genre, they contain thematic and stylistic parallels that demonstrate Braddon’s literary experimentation at the onset of her publishing career in 1860. Both works reveal Braddon’s responses to contemporary issues, her literary tastes and her market-oriented attitude. This article first examines Braddon’s contribution to the “Garibaldimania” that gripped England in the 1860s, discussing how Braddon’s heroicization of Garibaldi bears evidence of a widespread tendency to use the Southern fighter as a trigger of self-criticism and as a valorous alternative to Victorian sceptic materialism. Attention is then paid to the unconventional villains featured in both texts, which represent deviance and power relations in ways that would go on to define sensation fiction as a genre. This article also scrutinizes the particular idea of madness around which the two works pivot. The links they establish between insanity and freedom anticipate late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories, such as those developed by Nietzsche, Bataille and Foucault. On a metaliterary plane, finally, these 1860 works bear witness to Braddon’s contribution to the mid-Victorian aesthetic debate on what constituted proper literature.