The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire

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The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Also by Thomas McLean FURTHER LETTERS OF JOANNA BAILLIE (ed.)

The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire Thomas McLean Senior Lecturer, University of Otago, New Zealand

© Thomas McLean 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–29400–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To the Memory of my Grandparents

Benjamin West, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko. 1797

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction: The Other East Imagining other communities Overview

1 2 9

1 ‘That Woman, Lovely Woman! May Have Dominion’: Catherine the Great and Poland Importing Enlightenment Imperial desires Russian harpies, Polish prey Europe in 1794

14 16 22 25 29

2 ‘A Patriot’s Furrow’d Cheek’: British Responses to the 1794 Ko´sciuszko Uprising The Romantic revolutionary Coleridge and the tropes of defeat Revolution in recline Bidding hope farewell Conclusion

41 44 47 50 59 64

3 Hero between Genres: Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw From Tadeusz to Thaddeus Romancing history Thaddeus of London A biographical epilogue

66 70 73 78 85

4 ‘Transform’d, Not Inly Alter’d’: The Resurrection of Ko´sciuszko and the Arrival of Mazeppa Poland in the presses Sonnet wars: Hunt, Wordsworth, Keats Late returns: Landor and Byron

88 91 97 103

5 Climate Change: Britain and Poland, 1830–49 Polar shifts Tennyson and Poland William Aytoun’s ‘Poland’: 1832–49 A musical epilogue

114 117 124 129 132

vii

viii Contents

6 Arms and the Circassian Woman Imagining Circassia Circassia’s Irish voice ‘The Star of Attéghéi’

135 137 141 144

7 Picturing Will: Middlemarch and the Victorian Genealogy of the Polish Hero A family resemblance Will’s father figures The radical romantic in Middlemarch Forward to the past

154 156 159 163 167

Afterword: Conrad’s Poles

170

Notes

173

Bibliography

182

Index

194

List of Illustrations Frontispiece: Benjamin West, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko. 1797. By permission of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio; R.T. Miller Jr. Fund, 1946.46 1.1 Thomas Rowlandson, An Imperial Stride! 12 April 1791. By permission of the British Museum 1.2 James Gillray, Design for the New Gallery of Busts and Pictures, 17 March 1792. By permission of the Library of Congress 1.3 Isaac Cruikshank, The Moment of Reflection or a Tale for Future Times, 26 December 1796. By permission of the Library of Congress 2.1 Detail of Benjamin West, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, 1797. By permission of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio; R.T. Miller Jr. Fund, 1946.46 2.2 Anthony Cardon, after Richard Cosway, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, 1 January 1798. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University 2.3 William Sharp, after Catherine Andras, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, 1 February 1800. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Belinda L. Randall from the collection of John Witt Randall, c President and Fellows of R2605. Photo: Imaging Department Harvard College 2.4 R. Scott, after J. Graham, from Thomas Campbell, The Pleasures of Hope and Other Poems, 1 April 1799. By permission of the de Beer Collection, Special Collections, University of Otago 4.1 George Cruikshank, Monstrosities of 1819, 29 November 1819. By permission of the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library 4.2 William Heath, Making a Lancer, 1830–34. By permission of the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library 5.1 John Leech, ‘Brother, Brother, We’re Both in the Wrong!’ Punch 15 June 1844. By permission of the University of Otago Library

ix

20 21

28

54

55

56

61

89 90 125

Acknowledgements In my first semester as a Master’s student at Boston College, late last century, I had the good fortune to take Alan Richardson’s Romanticism class. Under his guidance I wrote my first essay on the Polish hero Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko. A second essay developed during a course of independent study with James Najarian. Alan and James were excellent advisors, and both of those essays included much material that appears in the present volume. I would also like to thank Kathleen Beres, Beth Bradburn, and Matthew VanWinkle, who were serious and supportive fellow students at Boston College. The University of Iowa was an ideal setting for me to further explore nineteenth-century literature, and I especially thank Judith Pascoe, Florence Boos, Jeffrey L. Cox, Eric Gidal, Mary Lynn Johnson, Teresa Mangum, and Garrett Stewart. Judith was an enthusiastic and thoughtful supervisor, and her comments challenged me to write and research at my highest level. Vickie Larsen, John Pendell, Sean and Dorothy Scanlan, Elyse Myers, and Jerry Harp provided intellectual encouragement to accompany all the late-night coffee and pie Iowa City could offer. A year teaching at Dortmund University in Germany gave me another warm environment for my research and several opportunities to visit Poland. Many thanks to Ed Folsom for helping to organize my year in Germany, and to Walter Grünzweig, Sibylle Klemm, Bernd Essmann, and all their colleagues on the Dortmund Amerikanistik staff. I am grateful to the Huntington Library for awarding me two fellowships while I was still a doctoral student: an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in 2001, and a Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship in 2003. Since then, it has become a favorite place to visit and the perfect stopover between New Zealand and other parts of North America. Among the many scholars whom I have met and learned from at the Huntington, I especially thank Kevin Gilmartin, Saree Makdisi, Dan White, Greg Kucich, Scott Black, John Eglin, Mark Canuel, Darren Dochuk, Roberto Alvarez, Anne Mallek, Frank Mabee, and Emma Peacocke. On the occasional cold, rainy day in Dunedin (Iowa City, Dortmund), I have thought fondly of the friendly staff and beautiful surroundings that make every visit to the Huntington such a rewarding experience. I am also grateful to the Keats-Shelley Association of America for awarding me a 2004 Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grant. The grant enabled me to undertake research on Jane Porter’s unpublished letters, research that produced one of the red threads that carries through much of this book. Equally important, the grant made me feel part of a community of generous and impressive scholars. x

Acknowledgements

xi

Paula Kennedy and Ben Doyle at Palgrave have been a pleasure to work with. I thank my anonymous reader for good advice and close attention to my work. Devoney Looser and Bill Germano gave me encouragement when it was most needed. Christopher Rovee read two chapters and provided thoughtful commentary on short notice. Barbara Slater edited my manuscript with thoroughness and care. At Otago, graphic designer Peter Scott, indexer extraordinaire Lisa Marr, John Hughes and the Reprographics team, and Special Collections Librarian Donald Kerr lent their expertise and made this a better book. A generous University of Otago Humanities Publishing Grant supported production expenses. The collegiality of the University of Otago English Department makes it easy to overlook the chilly days and uninsulated homes that Dunedin is better known for. I thanked many of my colleagues last year in my edition of Joanna Baillie’s letters; I add here special thanks to newer colleagues Liam McIlvanney and Dave Ciccoricco, and to our Head of Department, Lyn Tribble. And cheers to my good friends at Saturday morning coffee, who won’t have to hear any more stories about that Polish general with the unpronounceable name. Most of all, I thank my family for their support. My mother’s father, Joseph Wolski, and my father’s mother, Bessie McLean (née Pondelicek) made me want to learn more about the cultures and histories that made up my own family tree. It was their presences in my life that sparked the beginnings of my research into Great Britain, Ireland, and Eastern Europe. Portions of Chapter 2 first appeared in ‘When Hope Bade the World Farewell: British Responses to the 1794 Kosciuszko Uprising,’ Wordsworth Circle 29.3 (Summer 1998) 178–85. An earlier version of Chapter 4 first appeared in ‘ “Transformed, Not Inly Altered”: Kosciuszko and Poland in Post-Waterloo Britain,’ Keats-Shelley Journal 50 (2001) 56–75. Portions of Chapter 5 first appeared in ‘William Aytoun’s “Poland”: 1832–1849,’ The Legacy of History: English and American Studies and the Significance of the Past. Eds Teresa Bela and Zygmunt Mazur. Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2003, 290–303. An earlier version of Chapter 6 first appeared in ‘Arms and the Circassian Woman: Frances Browne’s The Star of Atteghei,’ Victorian Poetry 41.3 (Fall 2003) 295–318. I am grateful to the editors for granting permission to reprint material here. I am also grateful to the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Huntington Library, and Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries for allowing me to quote from manuscript letters in their collections.

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Introduction: The Other East

Early in her 1980 novel Nuns and Soldiers, Iris Murdoch describes a hero-inwaiting, Peter Szczepanski, the son of Polish refugees who settle in London just before the Second World War. Peter’s schoolmates, finding his last name unpronounceable, christen him the Count, a title that follows him into adulthood. Though his father pines to fight for Poland and rescue his homeland first from Nazis then Communists, Peter refuses to take part: ‘He did not want to hear of those centuries of misery, of “partitions” and betrayals . . . He would not worship Kosciuszko and Mickiewicz or even remember who they were. Worst of all, while his mother was stubbornly refusing to learn English, he was stubbornly refusing to learn Polish’ (14). After the death of his parents, however, lineage (both biological and literary) overtakes the Count. He visits Poland, reads Polish journals, and rediscovers his roots, though he still avoids political activism. ‘Like his father he had, in his own way, interiorised Poland. He was his own Poland, suffering alone . . . He would never die for Poland, as his father would have done . . . But he could avoid any baseness which might demean that memory, and could cultivate a narrow moral stiffness with which to resist the world. Such was his honour’ (17–18). In his moral uprightness, his ‘frustrated fantasy heroism’ (18), and his willingness to sacrifice all for the novel’s heroine, Murdoch’s Count is a recent literary descendant in a line that includes Jane Porter’s Thaddeus Sobieski, Lord Byron’s Mazeppa, George Eliot’s Will Ladislaw, and Joseph Conrad’s Prince Roman.1 The historical sources of this ancestry are the tumultuous events of the 1790s, when Poland disappeared from the map of Europe, its last king exiled, its greatest military leader defeated and imprisoned, and most of its territory absorbed into the Russian Empire. But the eventful history of Poland in the nineteenth century – failed uprisings in 1831, 1846, 1848, and 1863 – ensured that British artists and writers would return to the unhappy legacies of Stanisław II and Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko to produce new yet uncannily familiar Polish characters. 1

2


Little has been written about this strand of literary and cultural history. Despite the recent interest in nationalism, diaspora, exile, and cosmopolitanism, most scholars of nineteenth-century British literature and culture have addressed these global topics by considering either England’s closest geographical neighbors (Scotland, Ireland, France), its imperial predecessors (Italy and Greece) or its colonial conquests in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the South Seas. They have tended to bypass the nations in between, like Poland and Russia. And yet Britain’s relationship with the Russian empire was a major issue throughout the century, and Poles made up one of the most influential immigrant groups in nineteenth-century Britain. Moreover, a remarkable number of British poets and novelists were moved to write about Poland and its greatest hero, Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko. Samuel Taylor Coleridge imagined the ‘loud and fearful shriek’ heard at Ko´sciuszko’s defeat, and Thomas Campbell extended this imagery in a couplet that was quoted, imitated, and parodied for a hundred years: ‘Hope, for a season, bade the world farewell, / And Freedom shriek’d – as Kosciusko fell!’ John Keats celebrated the same hero’s name as ‘a full harvest whence to reap high feeling,’ while Lord Byron heard in the name the ‘sound that crashes in the tyrant’s ear.’ Jane Porter, in her 1803 novel Thaddeus of Warsaw, created a Ko´sciuszko-like hero who won the hearts of readers throughout the century and influenced writers from Mary Shelley to George Eliot. Despite their importance and popularity, few of these works have received sustained scholarly attention. This book begins to address the oversight by examining representations of a selection of Eastern European figures, historical and fictional, in Romantic and Victorian culture. I begin with Catherine the Great and end with the proliferation of ‘mixed-blood’ Eastern Europeans in Victorian literature, but the core of this study concerns what I consider to be the most important manifestation of nineteenth-century British interest in Eastern Europe: the evolving image of the Polish exile. In the following chapters I identify the most significant works in this seam of British culture, analyze the way British writers and artists represented the Polish exile, and consider the implications of such representations for nineteenth-century Britain.

Imagining other communities Benedict Anderson’s useful term ‘imagined communities’ usually refers to the way one imagines oneself as part of a nation. But the same cultural phenomena that encourage belief in one’s own imagined community – novels, newspapers, maps, museums, and exhibition spaces – also encourage belief in other imagined communities, other citizens of other nations with their own shared languages and values that may differ slightly or significantly from one’s own. Critical study of this phenomenon, called ‘imagology’ or image studies, has

Introduction: The Other East 3

been a feature of comparative literature for nearly a century. According to Joep Leerssen, many early studies of imagology, ‘based on a diligent and exhaustive search through the primary literary record,’ retain their bibliographical usefulness, but often ‘they do not problematize the subjectivity of their literary source material’ (‘Rhetoric’ 269). Leerssen notes that image studies research became more nuanced in the second half of the twentieth century, but its significance was overshadowed by the growing influence of the New Criticism, which downplayed the importance of historical constructions. More recently the rise of cultural studies, new historicism, and postcolonial studies, with their emphases on articulations of cultural difference and national identity, has revived image studies and significantly expanded the field of study. Works like Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) have inspired important research on the complicated relationships between Britain and its colonies in Ireland, India, Africa, and the West Indies. Similarly Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1807 (1992) inaugurated a new interest in the way British enmity towards France forged new relationships between England, Wales, and Scotland. Recent years have seen growing interest in Britain’s relationship to East Asia, Australasia, and the Americas. And yet a glance at the indices of, say, The Global Eighteenth Century or Travels, Explorations and Empires, 1770–1835 reveals that these seemingly comprehensive collections retain a considerable blind spot: they ignore the lands of Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire.2 There are several possible explanations for the oversight. Unlike the Americas, Africa, and much of Asia, and despite Napoleon’s best attempts, these lands were never successfully colonized by Western Europe, and they thus fell outside the English/French/Iberian colonial enterprises to which postcolonial theory typically responds. Research on Eastern Europe threatens to re-establish the Eurocentric mindset of previous scholarly study. Perhaps too there was something unpleasant in remembering that the Soviet Union, despite championing the anti-colonial movements in distant continents, never relinquished its own colonial undertakings in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. There have been important exceptions. Anthony Cross has produced an enormous body of historical research exploring the cultural and historical links between Britain and Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I have listed several of his pertinent works in my bibliography. Patrick Waddington’s From The Russian Fugitive to The Ballad of Bulgarie (1994) considers poems by William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Algernon Swinburne that take Russia as a subject. Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997) and Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998) examine representations of the Balkans in European literature and culture. Francis Zapatka and Piotr Drozdowski have collected some of the most interesting work on Poland in British Romantic-era literature. Deborah Epstein

4


Nord and Katie Trumpener have written on British images of the Romany people. And there is a considerable literature on representations of Eastern European Jews in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, with Michael Ragussis’s Figures of Conversion (1995) deserving special note. The most significant and wide-ranging volume in this field must be Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe (1994). Building on the work of Michel Foucault, Martin Bernal, and Edward Said, Wolff argues that a remarkable shift occurred in Europe’s perception of itself in the eighteenth century. Whereas the Northern Kingdoms had long been considered uncivilized (a perception that went back to the Renaissance, and in some ways all the way back to the sack of Rome in 476 by the Goths), the Enlightenment realigned Europe between a civilized West and a barbaric East (4–6). The foundational text for this realignment, according to Wolff, was Voltaire’s enormously popular 1731 History of Charles XII, which ‘followed the Swedish king on a campaign of conquest, describing lands that were only just being recognized as conceptually related, Poland and Russia, the Ukraine and the Crimea . . . these were the lost lands of Eastern Europe, which awaited the discovery of Charles the conqueror and Voltaire the philosopher’ (89, 93). Wolff argues that this epistemological realignment was secured in 1787, when Catherine II made a similar journey from St Petersburg to the recently annexed Crimea, to celebrate her growing empire. By including the ambassadors of England, Austria, and France among her guests, Catherine made certain that the voyage would receive attention across Europe. At Poltawa, the site of Peter the Great’s victory over Charles XII, a re-enactment of the battle was staged for Catherine and her international guests. The French ambassador, Count Louis-Philippe de Ségur, noted in his memoirs that this 1709 battle ‘changed the destiny of the north and the east (l’orient) of Europe’ (quoted in Wolff 141). Wolff writes, With that unobtrusive phrase – ‘the east of Europe’ or ‘the Orient of Europe’ – Ségur consummated the eighteenth-century discovery of Eastern Europe by giving it a name . . . A world-shaking political revolution was ready to begin in France, but in the Crimea and the Ukraine, amid illusions and spectacles, a momentous cultural revolution was completed that would change the map of Europe in the all-powerful ‘gaze’ of the beholder. Western Europe had fixed its civilized attention upon Eastern Europe, and thus defined itself as well. (141) Collecting the accounts of a variety of ‘travelers in the imagination’ (Voltaire, Rousseau, Lessing) and ‘imaginative travelers’ (Ségur, Mozart, Lady Elizabeth Craven), Wolff argues that eighteenth-century Eastern Europe was subjected to a ‘process of discovery, alignment, condescension, and intellectual mastery’


that finally located it ‘between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism’ (15). Wolff’s study is extremely important in reminding us that the most remarkable minds of the Enlightenment were as likely to turn their attention to Poland or Russia as to Britain or America. Voltaire carried on a warm correspondence with Catherine II, and his major works include his History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great. Rousseau responded to the first partition of Poland with his Considerations on the Government of Poland. The significance of Charles XII’s military campaigns is borne out in this study by Lord Byron’s Mazeppa, which was inspired by Voltaire’s history. Furthermore, the ‘exotic,’ non-normative representations of gender evident in these pages – the ‘masculine’ Catherine the Great dismembering King Stanisław’s Poland, leaving a trail of broken, feminized Polish men, from Ko´sciuszko through Count Roman – seems a logical extension of Wolff’s arguments. But Inventing Eastern Europe shares one weakness with other imagological works that have followed in the wake of Said’s Orientalism: a tendency to flatten out all the experiences of travelers, armchair and actual, over a long period of time, and to downplay the importance of historical events in modifying previously established views. While it may be true that Russia was subjected to the same processes of discovery and invention that the rest of Eastern Europe experienced in the eighteenth century, it is also true that, at least from the time of the final partitions of Poland, Russia was identified as a major power (and threat) in the mapping and control of all of Europe. Wolff reminds his readers that Catherine II was German, which made her more acceptable to correspondents like Voltaire: she was an enlightened Western ruler educating a barbaric Eastern people (203, 211). And, as I discuss in Chapter 1, Catherine had many British admirers, especially in the early decades of her reign. But in the 1790s British writers made little distinction between the German-born Catherine and her Russian-born generals, Prince Gregory Potemkin and Alexander Suvorov. Though national caricatures might differ, Catherine and her military leaders were seen as bloodthirsty and calculating as the rulers of Prussia, Austria, or France. Of course, when Russia joined Britain against Napoleon, the same General Suvorov became a hero in Britain, and Catherine’s grandson Tsar Alexander I and his Russian generals were welcomed and feted in 1814 London. Poland perhaps seems a better candidate for an Orientalism-style approach. After all, in the eighteenth century its frontiers almost reached the Black Sea, and until 1793 it shared a border with the Ottoman Empire. Since the time of Charles XII and Peter the Great, it had been the plaything of more powerful European powers. The fact that the anglophone world looked down upon Eastern Europe seems confirmed by the fact that slave is an etymological descendant of slav. But Poland, along with Hungary and Venice, were long considered the bulwark that protected and separated Europe from Asia. In 1683

6


King John Sobieski famously defeated the Ottomans at Vienna, an event that was frequently commemorated in nineteenth-century British prose and poetry. And Poland was an ancient country whose historical presence was equivalent to France or England. Its borders had certainly changed over the centuries, but this could be said for almost every nation in Europe. Furthermore, not all Britons saw the nations of Eastern Europe as unfamiliar, unexplored territory. There was a long history of Scottish soldiers and tradesmen finding work in Poland. According to David Dobson, ‘[b]y the 1640s it was reckoned that there were approximately 30,000 Scots resident in Poland.’3 The seventeenth-century traveler William Lithgow described Poland as a mother who cares more for her adopted child than for her own: And for auspicuousnesse, I may rather tearme it to be a Mother and Nurse, for the youth and younglings of Scotland, who are yearely sent hither in great numbers, than a proper Dame for her owne birth; in cloathing, feeding, and inriching them with the fatnesse of her best things; besides thirty thousand Scots families that live incorporate in her bowells. And certainly Polland may be tearmed in this kind, to be the mother of our Commons, and the first commencement of all our best Merchants wealth, or at the least most part of them. (Quoted in Bosworth 147–8) Robert I. Frost notes that these entrepreneurs varied ‘from wealthy merchants to the thousands of pedlars who ensured that the term szot entered the Polish language as the equivalent of tinker’ (193). Scots found economic opportunity and religious liberty in Poland; like the Jews before them, they filled a socioeconomic gap between peasants and aristocracy. Poland became a less attractive destination after 1650, and Scots turned westward to Ireland and America. But numbers increased again after the Congress of Vienna, when the liberal policies of Tsar Alexander I encouraged many to imagine a bright economic future for Russian Poland. Scotland and Poland were also linked through their most famous royal families, the Stuarts and the Sobieskis. According to Adrienne Hytier, the ‘idea of having the Stuarts as sovereigns in the elective monarchy of Poland . . . had been discussed more or less seriously ever since 1688. The Polish crown had been refused by James II so as not to forgo his claims to the British throne’ (220). The Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, was himself half Polish. Clementina Sobieska, a granddaughter of King John Sobieski, had married the Old Pretender James Edward in Italy in 1719. Though the marriage was not a happy one, Clementina was remembered for her piety and charity. In Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) the narrator notes that Flora Mac-Ivor ‘had a small pension from the Princess Sobieski’ which she used ‘to add to the comforts of the


peasantry’ (170). Many Scots were also aware that King Stanisław II of Poland was the great-grandson of Lady Catherine Gordon. Finally, there was a powerful imaginative connection between the two lands forged by similar histories of oppression. As George Galloway, whose volume of poetry The Tears of Poland was published in Edinburgh in 1795, writes in his introduction, The situation of Poland since 1769, is somewhat similar to Scotland, during the fatal contest between Baliol and Bruce in 1297, when the all-grasping tyranny of Edward I. of England over-run this country; only with this difference, Scotland’s misfortunes happened in a barbarous age; Poland’s partition by Prussia, Austria and Russia, at the end of the 18th century, when refinement of manners and science, and every other thing that should ornament the human mind, had attained the highest degree of perfection. Given this long history of actual and imagined encounters, it seems no accident that the two Romantic-era British writers most often associated with Poland both had Scottish connections: Thomas Campbell, who was born and educated in Scotland, and Jane Porter, who spent much of her youth in Edinburgh. In the aftermath of the 1831 Russo-Polish War, Scottish writers like Campbell, Jacob Jones, and William Aytoun were especially vocal in their support for Polish sovereignty. Though Wolff has much to say about Catherine the Great, he mentions the Polish general Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko only in passing. This is understandable, since Ko´sciuszko comes into prominence at the end of the eighteenth century, where Wolff’s history ends. Yet, as I argue here, Ko´sciuszko’s influence on the British imagination was significant and recognizable throughout the nineteenth century. As a veteran of the American Revolution and leader of the 1794 Polish insurrection that bears his name, Ko´sciuszko provided a focal point for the creation of a new image of the Poles as a courageous yet defeated people, an image solidified by literary and visual works that commemorated the Polish general’s 1797 visit to London. As I show in Chapter 2, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s sonnet ‘Koskiusko’ and Benjamin West’s portrait both suggest the complicated, even paradoxical relationship between Britain and Poland in the 1790s. These works were quickly supplanted by more palatable and popular images of Ko´sciuszko and Poland, in Thomas Campbell’s ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw, and in several engravings that followed West’s portrait. These later images were in turn extended and sometimes mocked over the course of the nineteenth century, as Polish refugees from later failed uprisings followed Ko´sciuszko to Britain. But all of these representations inevitably owed some debt to the Polish general.

8


It was, of course, the defeat of the Ko´sciuszko Uprising in late 1794 that allowed Russia, Prussia, and Austria to undertake the third and final partition of Poland. Few contemporary histories of nationalism make more than a passing reference to the dismemberment of Poland, which began in 1771 and was completed in 1795. But in the nineteenth century, many British commentators saw it as a key event in European history. In his 1862 essay ‘Nationality,’ Lord Acton argued that the third partition of Poland was ‘the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism’ and that it ‘awakened the theory of nationality in Europe’: Thenceforward there was a nation demanding to be united in a State – a soul, as it were, wandering in search of a body in which to begin life over again; and, for the first time, a cry was heard that the arrangement of States was unjust – that their limits were unnatural, and that a whole people was deprived of its right to constitute an independent community. (21) A year later, after another major uprising had taken place in Poland, Benjamin Disraeli identified the partitions of Poland as the starting point of an era of tumult in Europe: All the boundaries of the kingdoms which existed when Poland was partitioned, have been altered; the laws of almost every country in Europe have been remodelled; new codes have been introduced, and new governments called in to being. In short, greater and more numerous changes have occurred in the eighty years since that event than were probably ever before crowded into a similar period of the history of man. (Ewald 514) Acton and Disraeli were iterating concerns that had troubled British writers since the time of Napoleon. Throughout the nineteenth century, but particularly at moments of political turmoil, the fate of Poland reappeared as a symbol of government intrigue and European instability. Its restitution as a sovereign nation offered the only chance of a return to order. During the Congress of Vienna, Henry Brougham in the January 1814 Edinburgh Review insisted that ‘the restoration of European independence [requires] the revival of sound and consistent principle alone . . . and this cannot be thought possible, by any reflecting mind, without the complete reestablishment of Poland’s independent state’ (331). In the November 1822 Edinburgh Review Sir James Mackintosh argued that ‘[t]he partition of Poland was the model of all those acts of rapine which have been committed by monarchs or republicans during the wars excited by the French revolution. No single cause has contributed so much to alienate mankind from ancient institutions, and loosen their respect for


established Government’ (516). In January 1855, during the Crimean War, the Westminster Review published a 40-page article on the Polish Question, concluding that ‘Poland must be resuscitated as a whole, as a country stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea,’ and that ‘it is only by division of the map of Europe into nationalities . . . that Russia can be resisted, and a true balance of power established’ (Neuberg 154). Because Poland finally reappeared as an independent nation after the First World War, scholars forget that its survival was far from certain during the preceding 130 years. But the Polish Question was one of the most familiar concerns of nineteenth-century foreign policy, and it regularly made its way into British fiction and poetry, as the wealth and variety of material discussed in this book makes clear. This book, then, picks up where Wolff’s study leaves off, near the end of the eighteenth century, and finds a rather different perception of Poland and Russia developing in the nineteenth century. Russia was a growing imperial power that threatened to compete with or even overtake Britain and France. At the same time, the partition of Poland created enormous sympathy for the Poles, especially among British writers with revolutionary sympathies such as Coleridge and Helen Maria Williams, American expatriates such as Joel Barlow and Benjamin West who remembered Ko´sciuszko’s contribution to the American Revolution, and Scottish writers who recognized affinities between the two peoples’ histories. Together, Poland and Russia constituted another East in the Romantic and Victorian imagination: one that, thanks in part to the Enlightenment’s idiosyncratic understanding of Eastern Europe, remained culturally and geographically exotic, but whose political and historical importance to Britain evoked a more personal, conflicted response: Russia as England’s imperial double, Poland as an oppressed land that bore comparisons to British India, the Caribbean, Scotland, and Ireland.

Overview The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature moves chronologically from the late eighteenth century, when the partitioning powers removed Poland from the map of Europe, through the nineteenth century, as increasing numbers of Eastern European immigrants and exiles settled in Britain, and ends with a coda in the early twentieth century, shortly before Poland reappeared as a sovereign nation after the First World War. Employing recent scholarship on ethnicity, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, I reveal the various tropes that shaped British opinion as Russia emerged as a military power and imperial threat, and the idealized Polish exile gradually became the ambiguous eastern immigrant. I begin in the early 1790s, when Stanisław II of Poland was Europe’s most admired monarch and Catherine the Great was its most controversial. Political

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thinkers from Edmund Burke to Thomas Paine praised Stanisław’s reforms, but Catherine’s ‘masculine’ appetite for power absorbed the British imagination. In Chapter 1, ‘ “That Woman, Lovely Woman! May Have Dominion”: Catherine the Great and Poland,’ I argue that British sympathy for Poland was inextricably linked to British animosity towards Catherine the Great. Though Catherine’s military and cultural achievements had long concerned British writers, Russophobe engravings and literature proliferated during the final partitions of Poland. Coleridge, John Thelwall, and many others recognized the events of the 1790s as a continental, even global, upheaval, not simply a cross-channel confrontation between Britain and France, and they portrayed Catherine as one of the era’s greatest villains. William Blake’s Europe: A Prophecy engages the continental hostilities and reactionary politics of this era. Just as Catherine convinced the rulers of Prussia and Austria to unite with her against Polish Jacobinism, Enitharmon calls on Rintrah and Palamabron in order to expand her own oppressive empire. Bringing the partition of Poland into our discussions of Romantic-era literature complicates the usual binaries that have limited recent historicist accounts of the era and provides an important, overlooked context for understanding Blake’s Europe. Sustained interest in Poland coalesced around Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko, and in Chapter 2, ‘ “A Patriot’s Furrow’d Cheek”: British Responses to the 1794 Ko´sciuszko Uprising,’ I situate him among those political figures – Lafayette, Washington, Toussaint L’Ouverture – most admired by Romantic writers and artists. Two works best capture Britain’s fraught relationship with Poland. Coleridge’s 1794 sonnet ‘Koskiusko’ employs an intricate syntax to imitate the complexities of contemporary European politics. Benjamin West’s 1797 portrait surrounds the wounded Polish general with metonyms of war and revolution, creating an image that both honors a revolutionary hero and challenges a society that praises a revolutionary only after his defeat. Yet later texts chart a historical shift from revolutionary support to private sympathy. Thomas Campbell’s 1799 ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ distances the fate of Poland by associating it with the African slave trade and the colonization of India. Later engravings follow West’s composition but erase the signs of revolution, leaving instead an exotic-looking dandy reclining on a couch. Burdened by threats of censorship and the rise of Napoleon, British artists transformed the Polish revolutionary into a figure of pathos. This representational shift continues in Jane Porter’s 1803 Thaddeus of Warsaw, an integral work in the development of the historical novel and the key intertext for Poland in anglophone literature. In Chapter 3, ‘Hero between Genres: Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw,’ I show how Porter manipulates both history and romance to create an idealized, unthreatening Polish protagonist. In Porter’s revision, her fictional hero Thaddeus Sobieski appears not as a revolutionary but rather as a supporter of the ancient regimes of Europe,


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fighting beside Ko´sciuszko to restore patrilineality. Sobieski’s post-war flight to Britain allows Porter to indict the self-centeredness and xenophobia of her era: her Polish hero defends the poor and oppressed of London and treats his antagonists with magnanimity. But Porter’s vision offers little hope to those Polish refugees in London who dreamed of restoring the sovereignty of their homeland. Porter’s gallant Pole, a notable extension of eighteenth-century sentimental heroes like Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, became a fixture of nineteenth-century British literature. As I show in later chapters, he reappears in works by Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley, and George Eliot, among others. After Waterloo, Ko´sciuszko again became an important symbol for liberal writers. In Chapter 4, ‘ “Transform’d, Not Inly Alter’d”: The Resurrection of Ko´sciuszko and the Arrival of Mazeppa,’ I argue that Leigh Hunt, more than any other writer, revived public interest in Poland. Hunt’s Examiner essays on Ko´sciuszko and Poland scattered sparks across literary London and inspired responses from William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Southey, and Helen Maria Williams. Yet Lord Byron’s Mazeppa offered a dangerously different vision of Poland’s future, one ignored by other writers. Like Ko´sciuszko, Mazeppa is a Polish exile who rises to fame in a foreign land. Mazeppa’s potent position between Peter the Great and Charles XII brings to mind Ko´sciuszko’s place between Tsar Alexander I and Napoleon. The preference for Hunt’s decent, retired statesman over Byron’s shrewdly formidable soldier mirrors Britain’s turn away from controversial issues in the era of Luddism and the Corn Law riots. In the early 1830s, after Russia crushed another Polish uprising, British sympathy for Poland reached its zenith. Veteran writers like Thomas Campbell and Mary Shelley again took up the cause of Poland, and a generation of younger writers, including Alfred Tennyson, followed their lead. Yet over the next two decades support for Poland declined precipitously, and after 1848 a Polish character was as likely to signal deceit as virtue. This history is examined in Chapter 5, ‘Climate Change: Britain and Poland, 1830–49.’ Drawing on Raymond Williams’s concept of negative identification, I chart the change by examining works by Mary Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, and finally Scottish author William Aytoun, whose first publication ‘Poland’ recapitulated Romantic notions of the Polish freedom fighter, but whose anonymous 1849 articles for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine identified Polish immigrants as a threat to British and European order. Russian imperialism extended southward as well as eastward, and the peoples of the Caucasus, and above all Circassia, became familiar to the British public in the 1830s and 1840s. In the sixth chapter, ‘Arms and the Circassian Woman,’ I examine British representations of the Caucasus and then turn to Irish poet Frances Browne’s ‘The Star of Attéghéi’ (1844), the major poetic response in the

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English language to the war in Circassia. Browne associates Circassia’s battle for independence with contemporary struggles in Ireland and Poland: among the main characters are a Thaddeus of Warsaw-inspired Polish soldier and an Irish minstrel. Browne unites these three nations in their willingness to fight for the freedom of other lands, and in Europe’s unwillingness to return the favor. Linking the Circassians and Poles with the Irish allows Browne to critique British as well as Russian expansionism. While most émigrés avoided British politics, Polish refugees participated in the Chartist movement, and later literary appearances depict a turn from the idealistic Romantic stereotypes of Porter and Campbell to the scheming, avaricious immigrants of Anthony Trollope and Bram Stoker. I explore this phenomenon in the final chapter, ‘Picturing Will: Middlemarch and the Victorian Genealogy of the Polish Hero.’ Reading Middlemarch in this context, I show how George Eliot absorbed and refigured nineteenth-century representations of the Polish hero. Eliot sets her novel in the early 1830s, and Will Ladislaw exhibits many charms associated with his Polish predecessors. But Will’s rebellious streak and the suspicion aroused by his Polish ancestry suggest that Eliot conscientiously superimposes Victorian stereotypes of the radical Pole over the simpler stereotypes of the Romantic era. Avoiding the xenophobic bias of her era, Eliot reimagines Porter’s Polish hero for an 1870s audience. I close this study with a brief afterword on Joseph Conrad’s ‘Amy Foster’ and ‘Prince Roman,’ his only works that feature Polish protagonists. At the start of a new century, Conrad’s Polish stories question the romance of immigration and patriotism in distinct and different ways. ‘Amy Foster’ offers a dark vision of exile, while ‘Prince Roman’ presents a nineteenth-century Polish hero who, unlike the majority of Conrad’s protagonists, does not spend a lifetime regretting the choices of his youth. As this outline suggests, I have limited the scope of my study in several ways. First, I consider mainly British literary and visual works, partly because studies of American, French, and German representations of Poland already exist, but mostly because of the enormous amount of unfamiliar material in nineteenthcentury British literature relating to Poland and Russia.4 I hope my research serves as groundwork for broader scholarly studies that consider anglophone or Western European representations of Poland, Russia, and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. I hope too that it encourages other scholars with greater knowledge of Polish literature and culture to explore the ways in which nineteenth-century Britain was represented in Poland and the Russian empire. Second, this book only occasionally addresses issues of religion. This is mostly a result of the time period I discuss. Though Poland was certainly known as a country with large Catholic and Jewish populations, most British writers of the Romantic and early Victorian eras downplayed religion, perhaps fearing that any emphasis on religious difference would make Protestant Britons less


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sympathetic towards the Poles. Religious belief became an overtly important topic in the later nineteenth century, especially after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, when large numbers of Russian and Polish Jews came to Britain to escape lives of poverty and fear of pogroms. This leads to a third limitation of my study, its time frame. Though I briefly discuss a few later works, for example, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Conrad’s short stories, my book mainly concerns the period from the 1790s to the 1870s. Certainly Polish characters continue to appear in British literature, but the particular character I focus on here, the Ko´sciuszko-inspired, gallant exile, is no longer present in quite the way he was previously. To suggest that he altogether disappears with the death of Prince Roman at the close of the nineteenth century is not quite accurate. He can still be successfully resurrected, as Murdoch’s Nuns and Soldiers proves. But he is no longer integral to the British representation of Poland. In the early twentieth century, the Thaddeus Sobieskis and Will Ladislaws of British literature vie for space with the Polish-Jewish families of Israel Zangwill’s fiction, the remarkable Polish women of George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance and D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love, and the unsavory men of Jean Rhys’s Quartet and G.K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday. Indeed, the modern era offers a rich array of Eastern European fictional characters whose significance deserves scholarly attention. I hope The Other East inspires work in this area as well.

1 ‘That Woman, Lovely Woman! May Have Dominion’: Catherine the Great and Poland

In a 7 July 1792 letter to his sister-in-law Lady Ossory, Horace Walpole makes a provocative comparison between Britain’s latest military success in India and Russia’s contemporaneous invasions of Turkey and Poland. So we are forced to rejoice at Lord Cornwallis’s victory over Tippoo! – for we have usurped India till it is become part of our vitals, and we can no more afford to part with it, than with a great artery – and yet one has the assurance to rail at the Grand Usurpress, who would sluice all the veins of Europe and Asia to add another chapter to her murderous history – Well! if she dies soon, she will find the river Styx turned to a torrent of blood of her shedding! (34: 146) Walpole was among the first to see the hypocrisy in Britain’s opposition to Russian expansionism, coinciding as it did with English imperial enterprises in Scotland, Ireland, and India. Yet Walpole also makes an interesting distinction between Britain’s collective guilt – India ‘is become part of our vitals’ – and the particular blame he assigns to Russia’s ruler, Catherine II. Even Britain’s geographical cannibalism – one nation devouring another – cannot compare to ‘the Grand Usurpress,’ who sluices the veins of whole continents.1 The cataclysmic events of 1792 would inspire other British writers to describe the colossal abilities of Catherine II, but Walpole was already an experienced disparager of the Russian ruler. Bitter epithets to Catherine II lace his letters: ‘Alecto of the North,’ ‘Catherine Slayczar,’ ‘Northern Fury,’ ‘Thalestris,’ ‘imperial vulture of Russia.’2 Walpole also castigates the rulers of Prussia and Austria, but he reserves his greatest outrage for Catherine, drawing parallels between her invasion of Poland and the Jacobins’ overthrow of the French monarchy: I almost hate the Kings of Hungary and Prussia as much as the detestable Jacobins do, for not being already at the gates of Paris – aye, and while they 14

Catherine the Great and Poland

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suffer those wretches to exist, for conniving at the Tisiphone of the North! They tolerate a diabolic anarchy, and countenance the destruction of the most amiable and most noble of all revolutions that ever took place – how can one make an option between monarchs and mobs? (Walpole to Lady Ossory, 27 June 1792; 34: 145) For Walpole, the ‘most noble of all revolutions that ever took place’ occurred not in England or France but in Poland. Indeed, many Britons saw in Stanisław II of Poland – though a former lover of Catherine – all the honorable characteristics that Catherine lacked. Their reputations had been building for almost three decades. Initially, both rulers had been praised for drawing their nations westward into Enlightenment Europe. But Catherine’s continuous territorial expansion worried British political and commercial interests, while her purchase of Robert Walpole’s Houghton collection for the Hermitage (Horace Walpole’s earliest reason for despising Catherine) seemed to threaten Britain’s cultural heritage. Pro-Polish and anti-Russian feelings solidified after 1791, when Stanisław enacted major reforms to the Polish constitution, and Russia, Prussia, and Austria responded by partitioning Poland off the map of Europe. Though one of the remarkable figures of the late eighteenth century, Catherine the Great rarely gets the attention that British literary scholars give to, say, Marie Antoinette. Catherine’s most conspicuous appearance in British literature occurs in Lord Byron’s Don Juan, a work that appeared more than 20 years after her death. James Chandler has suggested that Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels inspired the Juan-Catherine episode, and that Byron imagines Catherine’s court in an earlier stage of history (380–1). Without disagreeing with Chandler, I would note that the idea that Catherine belongs in a Romantic-era historical novel shows how distant she seems from the sociopolitical events regularly addressed in recent Romantic scholarship. One goal of this chapter is to bring together some of the most significant visual and literary representations of Catherine produced in eighteenth-century Britain, to prove that she was a powerful presence throughout the era. But I also want to argue that her presence is felt in works that never mention Russia or the partition of Poland, for instance in the art and poetry of William Blake. I begin this chapter by examining the evolution of British representations of Catherine and Russia in the eighteenth century, then counter those representations with contemporaneous images of Stanisław and Poland. Catherine appears as a figure of monstrous ‘masculine’ energy, a femme fatale as well as a devouring harpy, while Stanisław and his country become figures of impotence and victims of deceit. After Catherine’s invasion of Poland, one might have expected British leaders to actively support the Polish king; but European politics in the 1790s were rarely so simple. Though many in Britain were sympathetic to the plight of the Poles, Russia was Britain’s ally against the spread of

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French Jacobinism. What might have been a clear political and moral issue to the British public – the empire-building of Russia at the cost of weaker neighbors – became hopelessly clouded by Britain’s own imperial efforts and the immediate military and social threat from France. Liberal and radical writers exploited the ambiguity of Britain’s political position. In a widely-read series of letters, Benjamin Vaughan argued that the greatest threat to Britain’s welfare came from Russia, not France. John Thelwall and Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw Britain’s alliance with the partitioning powers as evidence of a conspiracy against change by the corrupt rulers of Europe. This historical context – wholly ignored by literary scholars – sets the framework for a new reading of William Blake’s 1794 Europe: A Prophecy. Most historicist readings of Europe limit their focus to events in Britain and France, and a number of scholars specifically identify Enitharmon with either Queen Charlotte or Marie Antoinette. But in 1794 revolutionary upheaval was occurring throughout the continent, and Catherine, far more than the deceased Marie Antoinette, appeared as the mastermind behind Europe’s reactionary response. Thus she seems the likeliest inspiration for the central figure in Europe. Imitating the tripartite powers united against Polish Jacobinism, Enitharmon rouses Rintrah and Palamabron to expand her northern empire of oppression as Albion’s Angel watches helplessly. Addressing Blake’s vision of the eastern movement of revolution (America-France-Poland), this reading corrects the Britain/France fixation of much Romantic scholarship and introduces a truly European reading of Europe.

Importing Enlightenment In 1744, the Russian tsarina Elizabeth Petrovna selected Sophia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst, the daughter of a minor German prince, to marry her nephew.3 Baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church under the name Ekaterina, she married Grand Duke Peter in 1745. In 1762 her husband became Tsar Peter III and soon after threatened to divorce Catherine and marry a mistress. In June of that year Catherine seized power from her husband, who died under mysterious circumstances within a month. Peter III had been extremely unpopular among the Russian elite, and his demise was little lamented. Unlike her husband, Catherine had learned Russian and made great efforts to understand Russian custom and culture. As the Annual Register for 1762 reported, Catherine ‘assiduously cultivated the affections of the Russian nation, and paid a respect to their manners and religion, in the same degree that her husband seemed to contemn them’ (19). But her reign was long haunted by her German birth, and calls for her overthrow were not uncommon. Catherine’s opponents rallied around an imprisoned great-grandson of Peter the Great who had briefly reigned in 1740–41 as Ivan VI. When in July 1764 a group of Russian soldiers


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attempted to free Ivan, his prison guards – following government orders – murdered the former ruler. Thus in just over two years, Catherine had successfully consolidated her power in Russia, but in doing so she had become closely associated with the deaths of two tsars, one of them her husband. As early as 1763, in his poem ‘The Temple of Venus,’ Edward Thompson pointed to Catherine as the most recent incarnation of feminine mayhem: From bad examples mighty evils spring, Virtue’s the brightest jewel in a King. A thousand proofs the Poet might advance, From Troy and Hellen, to the Whore of France: Start! at the Scene upon the Baltic shore; An Empress wading in her husband’s gore; What’s Tullia’s murder, or Lucretia’s rape, To Russia’s Devil, in a female shape . . . (99–106)4 Despite these dark beginnings, Catherine’s reign brought significant reform to Russia. She established elementary schools and hospitals throughout the country and encouraged Russians to study abroad. She introduced important sanitary measures, including inoculation for smallpox, for which she served, quite remarkably, as test subject.5 An accomplished writer, she was deeply influenced by the Enlightenment and formed long epistolary relationships with Voltaire, Diderot, and Melchior von Grimm.6 As noted in David Garrick’s prologue to Hannah More’s popular tragedy Percy (1777), Catherine and the Empress Maria Theresa were rapidly confirming the abilities of women in the public sphere: Are we unfit to rule? – a poor suggestion! Austria and Russia answer well that question. (37–8) Such praise would have pleased Catherine, since it came from the nation of Elizabeth I, one of her heroes. Throughout her reign she relied on British taste to ‘enlighten’ her kingdom. Josiah Wedgwood produced his remarkable 900piece ‘frog service’ for the empress, while the aptly-named British gardener John Bush used Wilton and Stowe as models for the royal gardens at Tsarskoe Selo. Catherine read and admired Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, and works by Frances Burney, Edward Young, and Elizabeth Inchbald (among others) appeared in Russian translation during her reign (Allen and Dukel’skaya 21, 30). Her interest in British art inspired purchases of works by Joseph Wright

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of Derby, Thomas Jones, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, who offered to dedicate a later volume of his Discourses to the empress. But Catherine also disturbed Britons by her controversial purchase of the Houghton collection. Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), had gathered significant works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, and other Old Masters in Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Two years after his death, his third son Horace published Aedes Walpolianae, a description of Sir Robert’s picture collection. Sir Robert left his estate in enormous debt, however, and the situation was improved neither by his eldest son nor his spendthrift grandson, George Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford, who inherited Houghton Hall in 1751. After a visit in 1773, Horace lamented to Lady Ossory that Houghton was ‘half a ruin, though the pictures, the glorious pictures, and furniture are in general admirably well preserved. All the rest is destruction and desolation! The two great staircases exposed to all weathers; every room in the wings rotting with wet’ (32: 140–1). Efforts by Horace Walpole and others to sell the collection to either Parliament (for the British Museum) or George II failed, and in late 1779 the collection left England for St Petersburg. Hearing of ‘the approaching fate of the Houghton collection,’ Josiah Wedgwood – rather ironically, considering his own dealings with Catherine – lamented the loss to Britain: ‘Everything shows we have past our meridian, and we have only to pray that our decline may be gentle . . . Russia is sacking our palaces and museums, France and Spain are conquering our outposts, and braving us to our very doors at home’ (239). A February 1782 letter from ‘C.D.’ (Isaac Reed) to the European Magazine echoed Wedgwood’s concerns: ‘The removal of the Houghton Collection of Pictures to Russia is, perhaps, one of the most striking instances that can be produced of the decline of the empire of Great Britain, and the advancement of our powerful ally in the North’ (quoted in Allen and Dukel’skaya 52). The sale was most galling to Horace Walpole, who retained a fervent loathing of Catherine for the rest of his life. Ten years later, when fire destroyed the picture gallery at Houghton, he took little pleasure in the happy fate of his father’s collection: ‘As the gallery is burnt, the glorious pictures have escaped – or are reserved, to be consumed in a wooden palace on the first revolution at Petersburg’ (34: 88).7 Of course Catherine’s interests were not limited to cultural conquests; she also desired to expand her power geographically and spiritually. The greatest victims were Turkey and Poland. As early as 1768, Catherine led Russia into war against the Turks, declaring herself the defender of oppressed Christians living under Ottoman rule. The Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji in 1774 granted Catherine ‘a vague protectorate over all Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire’ (Zamoyski Madness 120). The Crimea was taken by Russia in 1783. In 1792 the Treaty of Jassy between Russia and the Ottoman Empire confirmed Catherine’s annexation of the Crimea and made certain Russia’s hold on the northern coast of the Black Sea. Catherine made no secret of her desires


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for a Greek empire; she even named her grandsons Alexander (b. 1777) and Constantine (b. 1779). Britain and Russia got along uneasily in the 1770s and 1780s. In 1775, George III attempted to hire 20,000 Cossacks from Russia to fight against the Americans, but Catherine refused. In February 1780 she formed the Armed Neutrality with Sweden, Denmark, and Holland, spoiling George’s hopes of bringing those nations into the American Revolution on Britain’s side. In a 5 March 1781 letter to John Newton, the poet William Cowper blamed Catherine for Britain’s diplomatic difficulties. And as to the Neutralities, I really think the Russian virago an impertinent Puss for meddling with us, and engaging half a score Kittens of her acquaintance to scratch the poor Old Lion, who if he has been insolent in his day, has probably acted no otherwise than they themselves would have acted in his Circumstances, & with his power to embolden them. (Letters 1: 455) The two nations almost went to war in the early 1790s over Russia’s capture of the Black Sea fortress at Ochakov. Pitt had argued that only military combat would restore a balance of power in Europe, but his position received tepid support. ‘Tell the Minister I can’t afford to go to war, especially for the sake of an airy nothing call’d the Balance of Europe,’ Cowper wrote his cousin Lady Hesketh. ‘God is able to save us, even though the Russians should eat up the Turk to morrow’ (Letters 3: 502). The Whig opposition, uncomfortable both with Pitt’s growing influence over George III and with a possible Turkish alliance against a ‘Christian’ nation, forced Pitt to back off. In thanks to the Whig party, Catherine ordered from Joseph Nollekens a bust of Charles James Fox. Engravings of this encounter between Catherine, two Sultans, Fox, and Pitt inevitably refer to Catherine’s insatiable appetites, both sexual and geographical.8 In The Christian Amazon, with her Invincible Target (published anonymously 24 October 1787), Catherine appears as an Amazon warrior, ready to strike at Sultan Abdul Hamid, who aims his bayonet at Catherine’s exposed loins. Joseph II of Austria cowers behind her, while the King of Spain and an apish Louis XVI look on. James Gillray’s The Balance of Power (21 April 1791) presents Pitt as a performer on the high wire, balancing Sultan Selim and Catherine on opposite ends of a pole. The Sultan encourages Pitt, ‘My dear Billy do help me to make another push, & I’ll give you half of my Seraglio,’ but Pitt – often mocked for his apparent indifference to women – responds, ‘I have nothing to do with those matters – my Pole will always remain level.’ Catherine, clutching a document that reads ‘New Russian Conquests,’ is unimpressed: ‘Both Billy the Flat & yourself may do your worst you circumcised dog! get

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Figure 1.1

Thomas Rowlandson, An Imperial Stride! 12 April 1791

me down if you can! I’ll match you all, & swallow Thousands more!’ In Thomas Rowlandson’s An Imperial Stride! (12 April 1791), the colossal figure of Catherine fills the page as she steps from Russia to Constantinople (Figure 1.1). Beneath her, and peering up her skirt, are seven miniature European rulers. George III exclaims ‘What! What! What! What a prodigious expansion!’ while Pope Pius VI confesses ‘I shall never forget it,’ and the Sultan admits ‘The whole Turkish Army wouldn’t satisfy her.’ Though a caricature, the image offers grudging respect to Catherine and mockery of her royal peers, especially in light of the Shakespearean inspiration. Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonourable graves. (Julius Caesar I.ii.135–8) Gillray’s Design for the New Gallery of Busts and Pictures (17 March 1792) is more sinister (Figure 1.2). Playing off Catherine’s desire for cultural treasures, the bust of Fox stands visibly uncomfortable between busts of Cicero and Demosthenes. A picture titled ‘Justice’ shows Catherine stabbing the Sultan; another titled


Figure 1.2

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James Gillray, Design for the New Gallery of Busts and Pictures, 17 March 1792

‘Moderation’ shows her grasping greedily at a map labeled ‘Moldavia Bassarabia Wallachia.’ Between these pictures a plaque titled ‘Conjugal Love’ shows a hanging rope, a reminder of Peter III’s fate. Contemporary literary references to Catherine and the Ochakov crisis are less common, probably due to the relative brevity of the crisis and the simultaneous occurrence of other remarkable events in Europe. In Hannah Cowley’s 1791 play, A Day in Turkey; or the Russian Slaves, a Russian noblewoman named Alexina, just married to Orloff, is captured by Turkish soldiers and taken to the harem of Bassa Ibrahim. Through the machinations of the Italian Lauretta, the Bassa marries a Russian peasant, and Alexina and Orloff regain their freedom. As Daniel O’Quinn notes, Cowley was a supporter of the anti-Jacobin forces. Perhaps she intended Alexina as a positive revision of liberal representations of Tsarina Ekaterina, but her heroine seems to embody all the modesty and honor that (at least to most Britons) seemed lacking in Russia’s ruler. Indeed, some of Cowley’s audience would have known that one of Catherine’s military advisors was Gregory Orlov (often written Orloff), a former lover who may have been responsible for the death of Peter III.9 Significantly, A Day in Turkey received its

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final performance on 25 May 1792, one week after Russia had invaded Poland. A farce built around a distant war between Russia and Turkey might entertain a London audience, but Catherine’s aggressions against Poland and her movements westward were no laughing matter.

Imperial desires In the same years that British artists and writers transformed Catherine from the enlightened ruler of a backward country into a growing threat to European stability, they found a new figure of admiration in the man Catherine had raised to power in Poland. In October 1763 Augustus III had died; and, as Poland did not have a hereditary monarchy, it was necessary to elect a new king. Catherine forced the election of a former lover, Stanisław Poniatowski, upon the Polish Seym (Parliament). In the mid-1750s Poniatowski had worked in St Petersburg and carried on a torrid affair with the then-grand duchess. On 25 November 1764 (St Catherine’s day), with Russian troops surrounding Warsaw, he became Stanisław II. Fourth son of a famous soldier – Stanisław Poniatowski the father had fought beside Charles XII at Poltawa – young Poniatowski was, like Catherine, a product of Enlightenment ideals. As a young man he spent six months in Paris, where he became a favorite of Madame Geoffrin, and four months in London, where he met various political leaders. Like Catherine, Stanisław had a particular fondness for Britain: partly because his great-grandmother was Lady Catherine Gordon;10 but mostly through his friendship with Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, whom Poniatowski first met in Dresden. Known for his acidic wit – Horace Walpole described him as ‘a bright genius, dangerously great’ – Williams was co-founder of the Society of Dilettanti and the Hell-Fire Club (Walpole 30: 159). After serving as Ambassador to the Court of Saxony, Williams was transferred to St Petersburg in 1755. He invited Poniatowski to join him as secretary, introduced Poniatowski to Grand-Duchess Catherine, and encouraged their romantic affair. By 1764 the relationship was history, though Stanisław may well have hoped to marry Catherine and thereby unite their nations. At the least he probably expected Catherine to support his rule. But he was seriously mistaken. Time and again her ministers aided the king’s enemies and opposed Stanisław when the king attempted reform. When civil war broke out in Poland in the late 1760s, Catherine and Frederick II of Prussia orchestrated the first partition, claiming it as a necessary self-defense against the forces of anarchy. After surrendering one-third of his land and two-thirds of his population, Stanisław hoped that his neighbors finally would leave him in peace. Edmund Burke, with remarkable prescience, saw it as prologue. ‘Pray dear Sir, what is next?’ Burke wrote a Prussian acquaintance. ‘Poland was but a breakfast; and there


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are not many Polands to be found – Where will they dine’ (Correspondence 2: 54).11 Despite numerous debacles, Stanisław was remarkably persistent in attempting to introduce reform in Poland. His greatest achievement was the constitution of 3 May 1791. The shortcomings of the Polish government – particularly the liberum veto and the tradition of elected rather than hereditary kings – were familiar enough to British readers that the satirist Anthony Pasquin could use them in a simile on the fickleness of British theatrical tastes: The sceptre of Drury has known many masters Like the throne of Warsaw, it seems fraught with disasters; In all points of government weak and defective; But that realm must decay where the crown is elective. (‘The Children of Thespis,’ Part Two, 175–8) The reforming 1791 constitution made the crown hereditary (though not through the Poniatowskis) and limited parliamentary powers, thus also limiting the likelihood for foreign influence. Though the reforms did not go as far as Stanisław had wished – his models were the English and American constitutions – they were a remarkable victory. Ironically, Polish reform received only faint praise in France, though one revolutionary was pleased to see the French example ‘imitated at the extremity of Europe’ (Wolff 280). The American diplomat and poet Joel Barlow was more impressed. He sent the king copies of his epic poem Vision of Columbus and wrote Stanisław, ‘you have acted like Solon, & given your country, if not the best law that you could frame, at least the best that circumstances would admit’ (quoted in Butterwick 141). The Times first reported on the passage of the constitution in mid-May, and on 31 May declared ‘[t]he Revolution so happily begun will, according to all appearance, be completely consolidated, without violence or tumult.’ Franciszek Bukaty, the Polish minister in London, quickly produced an English translation of the constitution, which was widely quoted in the British press. Horace Walpole warmly praised Stanisław’s reforms. He wrote Lady Ossory on 22 August 1791, ‘Our own Revolution and that in Poland, show that a country may be saved and a very bad government corrected, by wise and good men, without turning the rights of men into general injustice and ruin’ (34: 120). Perhaps Walpole had been reading (along with Thomas Paine’s 1791 Rights of Man) Edmund Burke’s An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, published that same month, which contains the most memorable praise in English for the 1791 reforms. The central purposes of Burke’s pamphlet were to restate his opposition to the French Revolution and to criticize ‘new Whigs’ like Charles James Fox, whose endorsement of the French Revolution had recently forced Burke’s

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retirement from Parliament. Near the end of the Appeal Burke considers the reactions of the new Whigs to the two revolutions recently witnessed in Europe. Before reform Poland ‘was itself a state of confusion’: But in what manner was this chaos brought into order? The means were as striking to the imagination, as satisfactory to the reason, and soothing to the moral sentiments . . . We have seen anarchy and servitude at once removed; a throne strengthened for the protection of the people, without trenching on their liberties; all foreign cabal banished, by changing the Crown from elective to hereditary. All this was enacted through the toil of ‘a reigning king, from an heroick love to his country.’ Just as it was natural to feel moved at the fate of Marie Antoinette and the King of France, for Burke it was equally natural to celebrate Poland’s reform: ‘Happy people, if they know how to proceed as they have begun! Happy prince, worthy to begin with splendour, or to close with glory, a race of patriots and of kings.’ By contrast the new Whigs viewed Poland in a ‘cold and subordinate light,’ while ‘[a]ll their enthusiasm is kept for the French Revolution’ (122–4).12 In fact, liberals and radicals also welcomed the revolutionary changes in Poland. As early as January 1790 Thomas Paine had written to Burke with pleasure at the ‘contagion’ of revolution spreading through Europe: ‘Here are reports of matters beginning to work in Bohemia, and in Rome . . . Something is beginning in Poland, just enough to make the people begin to think’ (quoted in Hawke 216). After the 3 May reforms, he told Thomas Christie that ‘though an adversary of monarchy, he would be prepared to strip all monarchs of their powers and transfer them to Stanislaw II Augustus’ (John Keane 447). Liberal newspapers gave regular reports on events in Poland, and a lengthy ‘Ode on Liberty’ in the 17 July 1792 Morning Chronicle, commemorating the third anniversary of the French Revolution, closed by suggesting that Liberty was more likely to be found in Poland than in England (Scrivener 38–9). Stanisław’s reforms – and their rhetorical usefulness to British propagandists on either side – were extremely short-lived. Fearing how her Russian subjects would react to the empowerment of their Polish neighbors, Catherine ordered 100,000 soldiers into Poland, and in July 1792 Stanisław capitulated. He did so hoping at least to secure the territorial integrity of his country, but the second partition in 1793 gave both Russia and Prussia large sections of Poland, all in the name of stamping out revolutionary Jacobinism. The Whig party raised money for the Polish resistance, which was led by Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko, a veteran of the American Revolution. But the resistance collapsed before any aid could be forwarded. Even Burke declared in June 1793, ‘with respect to us, Poland might be, in fact, considered as a country in the moon’ (Speeches 4: 148).


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Russian harpies, Polish prey Though British writers and artists responded sympathetically to the fall of Stanisław, they were far more interested in castigating Catherine and accusing the Pitt government of either foolishness or collusion. Ann Yearsley reflected on Stanisław’s fall in her poem ‘On the Last Interview between the King of Poland, and Loraski,’ published in 1794 with ‘An Elegy on Marie Antoinette of Austria, Ci-Devant Queen of France.’ One suspects the influence of Burke in Yearsley’s decision to pair these royal figures. Echoing Burke in the final lines of the ‘Elegy,’ she writes that Nature, opposing ‘Treason, Murder, all the Soul abhors,’ will forever be seen over Antoinette’s grave, ‘if soft Reflection may avail, / To soothe the gentle Mind at this sad Scene’ (67, 69–70). In ‘Last Interview,’ Yearsley imagines a conversation between the deposed king and a loyal soldier. Stanisław recalls his final days in Poland: Whilst I, the Father of my Subjects lay, On gorgeous Pillows, weeping Night away, I heard the Chains forging by Russia, saw Her hoary Statesmen wrest each human Law, Observ’d her weigh my Crown, nor could redeem My long-loved Poles, – Injustice held the Beam (47–52) Poland is helpless before the might of Russia, which ‘daunts e’en PITT, on Albion’s rocky Shore’ (62). As I note in Chapter 3, Stanisław also appears as an admirable, minor character in Jane Porter’s 1803 Thaddeus of Warsaw; yet at least the 1804 Annual Review critic was unimpressed: ‘Far is it from us to insult the misfortunes of a fallen man, but we cannot think the unhappy Stanislaus deserves all the encomium which Miss Porter bestows on his character’ (604). After the third partition, Stanisław left Warsaw and spent his last years a prisoner in the Marble Palace outside St Petersburg. He seems to have faded from British memory as quickly as he had risen to fame. As I will show in succeeding chapters, the Polish general Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko was a far more appealing and memorable figure to British sympathizers, and he soon took the place of Stanisław II as the public personification of Poland. Writers instead focused on the growing power of Catherine. Benjamin Vaughan, writing anonymously in the Morning Chronicle, presented a series of Letters, on the Subject of the Concert of Princes, and the Dismemberment of Poland and France, which appeared from July 1792 until June 1793. The letters were widely noticed and appeared in book form in 1793, though they have been overlooked by recent scholars of the British pamphlet wars.13 Vaughan, who offered his opinions as ‘a medium between those of Mr. Burke and Mr. Paine’

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(xix), was among the first to promulgate the idea that the partitioning powers posed a threat to Europe more serious than French Jacobinism: ‘As the ruin of Rome was accomplished by a triumvirate, so Austria, Russia, and Prussia, taking advantage of the momentary prejudices of Europe against France, are formed into a triumvirate, infinitely more formidable than those of the two Caesars’ (65). Vaughan warned of an epochal shift in power that would divide Europe and isolate Britain. The first prey marked out by this triple headed monster is Poland . . . The next attempt forming is upon France, which, if it succeeds, as it may do, (though God forbid) their tremendous coalition will rise to above ninety millions of the most military people in the universe (making almost three fourths of our whole European population) commanding a large navy; and stretching in a broad, continued, and impenetrable zone across the whole middle of Europe, dividing the north of it from the south. (65–6) Like Blake, Vaughan sees the threat of oppression as coming from the north, moving westward and southward against the forces of change, and finally threatening Britain as well: ‘Let Britain then lend an ear to a word in season. . . . If our measures are not as instantaneous as vigorous, our only chance will be to be the last devoured’ (75). Noting Russia’s ‘plunder of Turkey’ and ‘the wellknown anxiety of Russia to have a Greek empire, (as well as a Greek church)’ (43), he personally blames Catherine for the overthrow of Polish reform: And, will you then, great Catharine, you, who already possess far more of the globe than any other power upon the face of it; will you spoil this fair work of human hands? will you, a lover of science, replunge a large district of the earth into the cruel barbarism, in which it has been held, by means of government, for centuries, not omitting the period when you presided over it? (50) Most writers sympathetic to the French and Polish revolutions had no interest in appealing to Catherine’s enlightened interests. In Charlotte Smith’s epistolary novel Desmond (1792), Bethel disparages ‘all the despots of Europe, from those dealers in human blood, the petty princes of Germany, to the sanguinary witch of all the Russias’ (179). In his bawdy commentary on the rulers of Europe, ‘Why should na poor folk mowe,’ composed in December 1792, Robert Burns included a stanza on Catherine and Stanisław: Auld Kate laid her claws on poor Stanislaus And Poland has bent like a bow: May the deil in her ass ram a huge prick o’ brass! And damn her to hell with a mowe!14


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After the final partition of Poland in early 1795, John Thelwall castigated the Pitt government for allying itself to Russia and Prussia: ‘the Hyaena of the North, and the vultures of Germany, have torn its mangled limbs; have feasted on its gore; and have been supplied, by British gold, with the means of this destruction and inhuman partition’ (160). Samuel Taylor Coleridge followed suit in ‘Religious Musings,’ condemning Austria, Prussia, and ‘that foul Woman of the North, / The lustful murderess of her wedded lord!’ (171–2). His attack on the various states of Germany even intimates a connection with the House of Hanover: Each petty German princeling, nursed in gore! Soul-hardened barterers of human blood! Death’s prime slave-merchants! Scorpion-whips of Fate! Nor least in savagery of holy zeal, Apt for the yoke, the race degenerate, Whom Britain erst had blushed to call her sons! (179–84) Coleridge’s longest passage on Catherine appears in his ‘Ode to the Departing Year,’ written soon after her death on 17 November 1796. The passage could serve as commentary on (or inspiration for) Isaac Cruikshank’s contemporaneous The Moment of Reflection or a Tale for Future Times (26 December 1796), which shows a dying Catherine backing away from a vision of offended spirits (including Stanisław and Ko´sciuszko) and revealing her devilishness in an uncovered hoof (Figure 1.3). The remarkably similar visions in Cruikshank and Coleridge prove how consistent this representation of Catherine had become at the end of her life. Stunn’d by Death’s twice mortal mace, No more on Murder’s lurid face The insatiate Hag shall gloat with drunken eye! Manes of the unnumber’d slain! Ye that gasp’d on Warsaw’s plain! Ye that erst at Ismail’s tower, When human ruin choked the streams, Fell in Conquest’s glutted hour, Mid women’s shrieks and infants’ screams! Spirits of the uncoffin’d slain, Sudden blasts of triumph swelling, Oft, at night, in misty train, Rush around her narrow dwelling! The exterminating Fiend is fled – (Foul her life, and dark her doom)

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Mighty armies of the dead Dance, like death-fires, round her tomb! Then with prophetic song relate, Each some Tyrant-Murderer’s fate! (43–61) It is tempting to attribute these extreme descriptions – like the contemporaneous attacks on Marie Antoinette – to the misogynist fears of British male writers. Undoubtedly there was something unnerving about a foreign female ruler who manipulated her neighbors so successfully, whose empire grew substantially with each decade of her rule, and whose promulgated pleasures – though neither as shocking as posterity would like us to believe, nor exceeding the appetites of some of her peers – included younger lovers and grand transvestite balls. The fact that Catherine II was both a woman and a warrior figure made available to her critics a host of unsavory historical/mythological associations: Medusa, harpy, Whore of Babylon. Still, as the aforementioned engravings make clear, England’s own leaders – Pitt, Fox, and the House of Hanover – were never spared in print by their opponents. And in the 1790s Catherine was a remarkably ruthless ruler, publicly celebrating the bloodbaths at Ismael and Warsaw. Catherine had encouraged an alliance of rulers against

Figure 1.3 Isaac Cruikshank, The Moment of Reflection or a Tale for Future Times, 26 December 1796


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the Jacobins in France and led the attack against a second revolutionary front in Poland. Thus radical writers must have seen Catherine’s machinations in very personal terms: her active opposition to the French Revolution and her military invasions of Poland were destroying the political dreams of Vaughan, Smith, Coleridge, and Thelwall.

Europe in 1794 I now want to turn to William Blake’s 1794 Europe: A Prophecy, a work whose meaning has frustrated readers since its publication, more so than any other work Blake published in the 1790s. Harold Bloom considers Europe ‘the subtlest and most difficult of Blake’s poems outside of the three epics’ (903), and David Erdman notes that nowhere ‘is Blake’s symbolism more cryptic’ (211). More recently Helen P. Bruder, in a reading that sees Blake as a proto-feminist, finally admits that ‘it is still extremely hard to interpret, with any degree of certainty, Blake’s attitude to masculinist revolution and its abuse of women’ (176). While I would agree with many Blake scholars that there is (thankfully) no single social/historical context that will clarify all the ambiguities of Europe, I do believe that historically-informed readings of the poem can be useful in uncovering Blake’s inspirations and sometimes his intentions. I also think that historicist scholars have severely limited themselves by focusing solely on revolutionary events in France and Britain. The poem’s title is Europe, after all; as Blake put it in Jerusalem, Europe includes France Spain Italy Germany Poland Russia Sweden Turkey (72: 38; E 227)15 In the preceding pages I have presented a variety of British representations of Catherine and Stanisław to prove that they and their countries were actively accessed by British writers and artists in the 1790s, and that Russia’s southward and westward expansion and the fate of Poland were issues of considerable national interest. Thus any vision of circa-1794 Europe would include not only events in France but also the eastward movement of the revolutionary spirit to Poland, and the overwhelming efforts of Austria, Prussia, and especially Russia to halt that movement. A reading of Europe that takes into account events occurring throughout Europe in the early 1790s opens up portions of the text that previously have been considered fantastic or obscure. Such a reading situates England with Russia, Prussia, and Austria as fellow oppressors against the revolutions in the United States, Santo Domingo, France, the Austrian Netherlands, and Poland. It also clarifies Blake’s belief in the eastward movement of revolutionary change: not simply from America to England and France but on to Poland and Russia. Finally it allows for a truly European reading of

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Europe, which in most historicist interpretations gets limited to cross-channel concerns. These earlier approaches simplify a situation that would have been painfully complex to any newspaper reader of the 1790s. Blake was associated with both the intellectual and artistic circles most preoccupied with events in Poland. I have quoted above from Paine, Barlow, Coleridge, and Thelwall; Mary Wollstonecraft and James Mackintosh also expressed their outrage at the partition of Poland.16 Catherine was a popular print subject and, as I discuss in the next chapter, Benjamin West, Richard Cosway, and William Sharp each produced images of the Polish patriot Ko´sciuszko. Benjamin Vaughan’s Letters appeared first in the Morning Chronicle and then were published together, reaching a fourth edition in 1794. Vaughan’s popularity – his letters were also published on the continent in French and German translations – makes clear that Russian power was a real concern to liberals and radicals. Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review regularly made mention of events in central Europe, quoting long excerpts from Vaughan’s Letters and commenting at length on the new Polish constitution. And, though it may seem superfluous, Blake and his wife Catherine lived on London’s Poland Street for five years, from 1785 till 1790. The street had been given the name earlier in the century in honor of King John III Sobieski’s 1683 victory over the Ottomans at Vienna, and from 1786 to 1788 the Polish ambassador resided there. Of course, Catherine was a name of great significance for Blake: his mother, his sister, and his wife were all named Catherine. Blake produced several images of ‘Queen Katherine’s Dream’ from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, a literary reference that was used by others to mock Catherine the Great.17 Bruder notes that Enitharmon is ‘the poem’s central character and a female universally despised by Blake critics as either an “insidiously repressive mother” or a “domineering spouse” ’ (159). In a 22 November 1802 letter-poem to Thomas Butts, Blake writes ‘Here is Enitharmon’s bower,’ encouraging S. Foster Damon to identify the mythical figure with Blake’s wife (124). ‘Enitharmon’ even resembles a sort of jumbled re-writing of ‘Catherine,’ while her looms in Jerusalem (Cathedron) and the name of Rintrah’s bride (Ocalythron) also approximate Catherine.18 Though the three Catherine Blakes, and particularly Blake’s wife, probably influenced the later, more sympathetic representations of Enitharmon, I argue that Enitharmon’s overtly political role in Europe suggests the influence of another, better known Catherine. The precise date of Europe remains uncertain. Blake dates the work 1794; the plates for Europe were executed on the versos of the 1793 America plates. According to Joseph Viscomi, ‘The first copies of Urizen and Europe were probably produced by the fall of 1794, before Blake began to engrave the eight plates for Cumberland’s Thoughts on Outline, six of which are dated 5 November 1794’ (286). Poland was in open warfare with its neighbors from March to November 1794, and, as I will show in the following chapter, its fate was of enormous


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interest to writers and artists in Britain. But even if Blake began imagining his Europe in, say, late 1793, he still would have known about the Ochakov crisis, Stanisław’s May 1791 constitution, Catherine’s 1792 invasion, and the controversial second partition of Poland in early 1793. Blake’s readers have been understandably reticent in identifying Enitharmon with a single historical figure. ‘In the mythical envelope of Europe,’ writes Erdman, ‘she is the Queen of Heaven.’ But in ‘the temporal world’ Erdman suggests both Queen Charlotte and Marie Antoinette (220–2). The former is a curious choice, given Blake’s willingness a decade later to dedicate his illustrations of Robert Blair’s The Grave to Queen Charlotte. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant have noted that Enitharmon’s ‘characterization as charming tyrant bears considerable resemblance to Wollstonecraft’s contemporaneous portrait of Marie Antoinette . . . in her History and Moral View of the French Revolution’ (96). Bruder has elaborated a more nuanced identification between Marie Antoinette and Enitharmon. While there are perhaps aspects of Marie Antoinette in Blake’s description of Enitharmon, she also seems an odd choice for Blake’s voracious and violent feminine force in 1794: by then her power was long gone. On 21 January 1793 her husband Louis XVI was put to death. The queen herself had been imprisoned in August 1792, put on trial during the summer of 1793, found guilty, and decapitated on 16 October 1793. As Bruder notes, the image in Europe that most powerfully brings to mind Marie Antoinette’s last days is the winged young woman hovering between the title words and opening lines of the prophecy proper, who pulls back her hair and reveals her neck in seeming preparation for decapitation (163). Immediately below her head is an infant encircled by flames, the angry spirit of Orc that will burst forth in 1793. If this melancholy image was inspired by Marie Antoinette, it certainly suggests a connection between her death and the eruption of continental violence in 1793. But it does not suggest that the late Queen of France engineered or even condoned the violence. During this same era Catherine the Great was actively participating in the realpolitik of eighteenth-century Europe, making deals with other European rulers to consolidate her power, and expanding her empire towards the south and west. Europe opens with one of Blake’s most famous images: a crouching, god-like figure who wields his compasses over a dark abyss, which is divided into three parts by the length of the compasses. Though we usually identify compasses with the work of the artist or mathematician, they are also used for measuring distances on maps. Given the tumultuous events of 1794 and the image’s position opposite the title page’s menacing serpent – a figure often associated with rebellion – Blake’s frontispiece suggests the reactionary rulers of Europe, and most obviously the three partitioners of Poland, who were vigorously altering national borders in the 1790s. ‘The first prey marked out by this triple-headed monster is Poland,’ wrote Vaughan in July 1792. ‘The next attempt forming is

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upon France’ (66). A recent discovery, described by Robert Essick and Rosamund Paice, reinforces the notion that Blake was thinking about continental events as he prepared this image. On the verso of ‘the only known first-state proof of plate 1,’ which survives in the British Library, there are drawings of two heads in profile that ‘exhibit the physiognomic characteristics famously associated with the European ruling family, the Hapsburgs.’ Significantly, Essick and Paice compare Blake’s sketches with a May 1791 engraving, An English Hobby Horse; or, Who Pays the Piper, where both Emperor Leopold and Catherine II exhibit the ‘Hapsburgian features’ (91). The same profile appears in Rowlandson’s An Imperial Stride!, discussed above. Europe’s prophecy begins in the ‘deep of winter’ with Enitharmon and ‘her sons & daughters’ meeting ‘together in the crystal house’ (3: 1, 6; E 61). With its northern, wintry setting, this gathering at Enitharmon’s crystal house brings to mind the secret efforts of the ‘Northern Courts’ to plan war against France and Poland. In The Four Zoas Blake would offer a similar description of the reactionary forces: Sound the shrill fife serpents of war. I hear the northern drum Awake, I hear the flappings of the folding banners The dragons of the North put on their armour Upon the Eastern sea direct they take their course (VIIb 148–51; E 364) Enitharmon’s crystal house also brings to mind the St Petersburg ice palace of the Russian empress Anna, built in 1740 and described at length in William Cowper’s 1785 The Task (5: 127–76). Coleridge also refers to the palace, and Carl Woodring has suggested it and Cowper’s description as inspirations for Kubla Khan’s ‘sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice’ (Coleridge 50).19 According to James Sambrook, ‘The whole structure was devised by the empress for the elaborate torture of a courtier and his bride, who were compelled, after a great feast, to lie naked on the ice bed all night’ (Cowper Task 170n). Cowper’s narrator thinks of the ice palace as he watches ‘chrystal drops / That trickle down the branches, fast congeal’d / Shoot into pillars of pelucid length’ (113–15). Blake’s admiration for Cowper is well known. In its reverie of congealing and conjoining, Cowper’s description of the palace brings to mind Blake’s own style. Silently as a dream the fabric rose. No sound of hammer or of saw was there. Ice upon ice, the well-adjusted parts Were soon conjoin’d, nor other cement ask’d Than water interfus’d to make them one. (144–8)


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Cowper does not name Anna, but calls her ‘Imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ!’ inviting the reader to think of more recent Russian rulers known for their cruelty.20 From her wintry headquarters Enitharmon, believing that the rebellious child Orc is safely bound, summons forth her other children: Now comes the night of Enitharmon’s joy Who shall I call? Who shall I send? That Woman, lovely Woman! may have dominion? Arise O Rintrah thee I call! & Palamabron thee! Go! tell the human race that Womans love is Sin! That an Eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters In an allegorical abode where existence hath never come: Forbid all Joy, & from her childhood shall the little female Spread nets in every secret path. My weary eyelids draw towards the evening my bliss is yet but new. (5: 1–10; E 62) Critics have struggled to explain the seeming misogynistic implications of the passage. If the speaker represents Marie Antoinette, then Blake is blaming Europe’s cataclysms on a dead young woman whom he may have portrayed sympathetically a few pages earlier. If she represents Queen Charlotte, then Blake’s later dedication to the queen is an act of staggering hypocrisy. Interpreting Blake’s target as his wife or mother requires psychological readings where the evidence is extremely thin. Among all the military campaigns of 1790s Europe, only Catherine’s operations in Turkey and Poland would give a woman ‘dominion.’ Enitharmon’s inversion of Christian belief – she offers ‘an Eternal life’ in a place ‘where existence hath never come’ – brings to mind Catherine’s use of Christianity as an excuse to invade her weaker neighbors. As commentary, Blake accompanies Enitharmon’s speech with some of his bleakest images of human suffering, a powerful response to the immense pleasure Enitharmon seems to take in calling her forces to battle. And yet Enitharmon remains in the background, sending Rintrah and Palamabron to do her dirty work just before she slips off to sleep: Arise O Rintrah eldest born: second to none but Orc: O lion Rintrah raise thy fury from thy forests black: Bring Palamabron horned priest, skipping upon the mountains: And silent Elynittria the silver bowed queen: Rintrah where hast thou hid thy bride! Weeps she in desart shades? Alas my Rintrah! bring the lovely jealous Ocalythron.

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Arise my son! bring all thy brethren O thou king of fire. Prince of the sun I see thee with thy innumerable race: Thick as the summer stars: But each ramping his golden mane shakes, And thine eyes rejoice because of strength O Rintrah furious king. (8: 1–12; E 62) Erdman identifies Rintrah as Pitt and Palamabron as Burke and Parliament, following the orders of Queen Charlotte or Marie Antoinette. He carries this reading on to Blake’s image of the scaly warrior between two angelic figures. But considering Pitt’s ridiculous image in popular prints as a bony knighterrant, this seems highly unlikely. If, however, Enitharmon is Catherine/Russia, then Rintrah and Palamabron can be identified as her generals (Suvorov and Potemkin were often mentioned in British papers) or, even better, Frederick William II of Prussia (‘O lion Rintrah raise thy fury from thy forests black’) and Holy Roman Emperor Francis II of alpine Austria (‘horned priest, skipping upon the mountains’), joined by ‘all thy brethren,’ the many German princes who aided the reactionary forces. Enitharmon’s call thus brings together the powers that partitioned Poland and that initially opposed the French Revolution. The first part of the prophecy closes Enitharmon slept, Eighteen hundred years: Man was a Dream! The night of Nature and their harps unstrung: She slept in middle of her nightly song, Eighteen hundred years, a female dream! (9: 1–5; E 63) Many scholars have commented on the eighteen hundred years separating Christ’s birth and the American and French (and Polish) revolutions. But Enitharmon’s sleep after calling Rintrah and Palamabron to arms may have historical significance as well. Catherine encouraged Austria, Prussia, and the German princes to take up arms against revolutionary France, but she herself did not take part. Instead she focused her nation’s military energies on expanding her empire into Turkey and Poland. As Benjamin Vaughan wrote in March 1793, ‘Russia has cunningly engaged the rest of them to plunge into troubled waters, while she herself (according to the proverb) takes the sure part of holding the clothes of the swimmers’ (193). The prophecy’s second section moves from continental to British concerns, but here too Blake makes clear the close connection between events in Poland and London. This section’s opening lines bring to mind both Europe’s image of


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the Ancient with his compasses and Europe’s rulers, who were dismembering nations in the continental battles of 1794: ‘Shadows of men in fleeting bands upon the winds: / Divide the heavens of Europe’ (9: 6–7; E 63). David Erdman glosses this second section quite convincingly as referring to Britain and the American Revolution, yet one detail in the closing passage of the ‘Albion’ section of Europe also underlines Britain’s closeness to continental concerns. Above the rest the howl was heard from Westminster louder & louder: The Guardian of the secret codes forsook his ancient mansion, Driven out by the flames of Orc; his furr’d robes & false locks Adhered and grew one with his flesh, and nerves & veins shot thro’ them With dismal torment sick hanging upon the wind: he fled Groveling along Great George Street thro’ the Park gate; all the soldiers Fled from his sight: he drag’d his torments to the wilderness. (12: 14–20; E 64) As Erdman explains, the passage was almost certainly inspired by Lord Thurlow’s dismissal from Pitt’s cabinet. Described by Thelwall as a man ‘with the Norman conquest in his eyebrow and the feudal system in every feature of his face,’ Thurlow had most recently stalled a resolution against the Slave Trade in the House of Lords (quoted in Erdman 216). Pitt saw him as a threat to his own power and convinced George III to dismiss him in June 1792. My particular interest is the very graphic description of the Guardian’s ‘false locks’ adhering to his flesh. David Fuller suggests that the Guardian is a person ‘so deeply imbued with the conventions of his office that those conventions have become his identity’ (56). But this affliction comes upon him only after the appearance of Orc, the spirit of revolution. Without disagreeing with either Erdman or Fuller, I would argue that both miss the source of the Guardian’s ‘dismal torment,’ which bears striking similarities to a disease known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as plica polonica, the Polish plait. Almost every British visitor to Poland made some reference to this lice-inflicted condition, which foreigners considered endemic to Eastern Europe and especially Poland. N.W. Wraxall gives this frightening (if false) description of the disease: During my stay here I have made many enquiries relative to the ‘Plica Polonica,’ a distemper not only extraordinary in itself, but asserted to be peculiar to this country; and almost, if not absolutely irremediable. It is, I believe, unnecessary to add that the seat of the disorder is in the hair, which entangles, and by degrees forms into a solid mass resembling a mat: every separate hair becomes a blood-vessel, or tube of putrid matter. I have seen them stand out from the head, or hang in ropes from it; and nothing

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can be more loathsome, as well as disgusting. All attempts to shave the part, or to cut the hair, in however early a stage of the disease such operations are tried, produce either blindness, or maladies still more fatal; at least I am so assured by every body with whom I have conversed on the subject. (124–5)

Wraxall’s Memoirs were an important source of information on Poland in the late eighteenth century, and such a harrowing description could not help but be noticed. But Blake didn’t have to read Polish travelogues to learn about plica polonica: two separate works on the subject were discussed in the Analytical Review, in March and December 1792. As Saree Makdisi has argued, Blake’s inimitable use of human organs forces the reader ‘to move between – and link together – different discourses: physiology, psychology, economics, religion, politics’ (83). The likelihood that the English Guardian is inflicted with a ‘Polish’ disease brought upon him after a violent encounter with Orc suggests the contagious spread of revolution from France to Poland and emphasizes how closely intertwined were political events at home and abroad. The third part of the prophecy returns the reader to the continent, with the armies of Prussia and Austria attacking revolutionary France and Poland.

Thus was the howl thro Europe! For Orc rejoiced to hear the howling shadows But Palamabron shot his lightnings trenching down his wide back And Rintrah hung with all his legions in the nether deep (12: 21–4; E 64) Erdman argues that ‘Palamabron’s thunderbolts against Orc might signify any of Burke’s Antijacobin speeches’ (218). But even Burke’s speeches would hardly cause a ‘howl thro Europe.’ There was, however, such a howl when the partitioners invaded Poland. In an anonymous poem ‘To the Continental Despots,’ printed in the Cambridge Intelligencer in October 1793, the narrator cries, ‘Hark! o’er their prey, oppression’s furies howl! / Ravenous and fell! – and will not Europe hear?’ Coleridge’s sonnet ‘Koskiusko,’ written in reaction to the 10 October 1794 capture of Ko´sciuszko, begins, ‘O what a loud and fearful shriek was there / As if a thousand souls one death-groan pour’d!’ Coleridge’s sonnet first appeared on 16 December, probably too late to influence Blake. But perhaps both Coleridge and Blake were picking up on earlier descriptions like the furies’ howl in ‘To the Continental Despots.’21 Enitharmon reacts to the devastation of war with the kind of sadistic pleasure formerly attributed to Marie Antoinette, but in 1794 more often ascribed to Catherine II.


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Enitharmon laugh’d in her sleep to see (O womans triumph) Every house a den, every man bound; the shadows are filld With spectres, and the windows wove over with curses of iron: Over the doors Thou shalt not: & over the chimneys Fear is written: With bands of iron round their necks, fasten’d into the walls The citizens: in leaden gyves the inhabitants of suburbs Walk heavy: soft and bent are the bones of villagers (12: 25–31; E 64)

Physical slavery is a central theme of Europe’s precursors Visions of the Daughters of Albion and America, but critics rarely extend the theme to Europe. And yet even in the opening lines Blake uses the language of slavery to describe the relationship between Enitharmon and the nameless shadowy female, whose ‘snaky hair’ is ‘brandishing in the wind of Enitharmon,’ and whose ‘roots are brandish’d in the heavens’ (1: 2, 8; E 60). The shadowy female complains that after she brings forth offspring, Enitharmon ‘dost stamp them with a signet, then they roam abroad / And leave me void as death’ (2: 10–11; E 61). Blake returns to the language of slavery in the passage quoted above. But it would be wrong to limit his meaning to a mental enslavement. Physical enslavement was a reality of eighteenth-century Russia and Poland: one’s wealth was determined in part by how many serfs one owned. Furthermore, many Polish revolutionaries were sent into Siberian and Caucasian exile, and the rights of Polish people, ‘inhabitants of suburbs’ and ‘villagers,’ were severely limited throughout the 1790s, as they inevitably are in any war.22 At ‘the enormous blast’ from Newton, Enitharmon finally awakes and calls ‘her sons & daughters / To the sports of night, / Within her crystal house’ (13: 5, 12–14; E 65). Scholars have been nonplussed by Enitharmon’s song to her nine children. Some, like Theotormon and Oothoon, have already appeared in earlier works, and their reappearance reinforces the interrelatedness of Blake’s 1790s poems. Others, I would suggest, bring to mind Coleridge’s ‘petty German princeling[s]’ who joined with Prussia and Austria, or perhaps the various territories of central and southern Europe Catherine desired: the ‘Moldavia Bassarabia Wallachia’ of James Gillray’s 1792 print, described above. The name Ethinthus ‘queen of waters,’ is particularly suggestive, considering Catherine’s wish for an empire on the Black (Euxine) and Mediterranean seas. As Vaughan wrote in May 1793, Russia’s ‘ambition is amphibious; she must be great by land and by sea, and shine both as an European and an Asiatic power’ (292). Enitharmon’s description of Ethinthus suggests the pleasure Catherine received in her victory over Pitt regarding the Black Sea port of Ochakov:

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Ethinthus queen of waters, how thou shinest in the sky: My daughter how do I rejoice! for thy children flock around Like the gay fishes on the wave, when the cold moon drinks the dew, Ethinthus! thou art sweet as comforts to my fainting soul: For now thy waters warble round the feet of Enitharmon. (14: 1–5; E 65) Enitharmon next calls on Manathu-Vorcyon, ‘certainly one of the strangest among Blake’s strange invented names,’ according to D.W. Dörrbecker (278). That strangeness centers on Blake’s use of the hyphen; and yet German territories were often hyphenated, like Mecklenberg-Schwerin (Queen Charlotte’s birthplace), Schleswig-Holstein, Courland-Zemgale, or Catherine’s homeland, Anhalt-Zerbst. They were of course also used in the titles of dukes and counts. Manathu-Vorcyon parodies those smaller territories that joined Prussia and Austria against France and Poland, and perhaps refers to the Duke of BrunswickLüneburg, who commanded the Austrian-Prussian forces against France. The ‘seven churches of Leutha’ bring to mind the seven churches of Asia in Revelation and Catherine’s desire for a Greek empire (14: 20; E 66). Enitharmon’s night ends with the rising of ‘morning in the east’ and the simultaneous rising of Orc ‘in the vineyards of red France’ (14: 35; 15: 2; E 66). Revolution has come to Europe, in France but also in the Austrian Netherlands and Poland. In response ‘Enitharmon groans & cries in anguish and dismay’ (15: 8; E 66). But five years after the Bastille’s fall, it was impossible to believe that revolutionary change would come easily. Anarchy in France, the return of the Netherlands to Austria, and the second partition of Poland left Europe a bleak landscape. Then Los arose his head he reard in snaky thunders clad: And with a cry that shook all nature to the utmost pole, Call’d all his sons to the strife of blood. (15: 9–11; E 66) Blake’s ‘utmost pole’ is surely a cartographical reference, suggesting that revolution will reach even Enitharmon’s northern empire. But in 1794 it also points to the eastern edge of revolution, Poland. As David Worrall notes, the ‘poles represent the seat of reactionary power and hence are the target of revolutionary desire’ (283–4). So, I would add, do the Poles. Far from comforting the reader, Blake’s final page, with its illustration of a family attempting to escape the flames of war, accentuates the desperation felt throughout the continent.


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My reading of Europe: A Prophecy brings into play events happening all over Europe in the early 1790s, events that were common knowledge at the time but have been overlooked in recent discussions of Blake’s textual responses to the French Revolution and its aftermath. I have argued that the imperial ambitions of Russia and the partitions of Poland were of considerable interest to liberal writers and artists in 1790s Britain and that contemporary representations of Catherine II widely available in London informed Blake’s construction of Enitharmon. This reading may not exonerate Blake from charges of misogyny, but it offers a more plausible explanation for his presentation of Enitharmon as a conniving female ruler, since Catherine, unlike Marie Antoinette or Queen Charlotte, was an architect of the reactionary response to revolutionary events in France, the Austrian Netherlands, and Poland. I have said little, however, about the presence of Poland in the poem. This is in part because there was no figure in Poland, like Catherine in Russia, who captured the imagination of British writers and artists before 1794. Stanisław II, for all his efforts and accomplishments, was always a figure more pitied than admired. Moreover, those British writers who did admire Stanisław often saw him as separate from Poland, as a leader worthy of a better nation. As Charles Lee, an ‘aid du camp to his Polish majesty, with the rank of major general,’ wrote a friend from Warsaw, ‘This country is the reverse of ours; they have an honest, patriot k—g, but a vicious nation’ (418, 307). Given the tone of hopelessness that pervades Blake’s Europe, the voice that comes closest to Poland’s is the ‘nameless shadowy female’ who is raped by Orc in the praeludium of America. In Europe she rises ‘from out the breast of Orc’ to plead with Enitharmon: O mother Enitharmon wilt thou bring forth other sons? To cause my name to vanish, that my place may not be found. For I am faint with travel! Like the dark cloud disburdened in the day of dismal thunder. (1: 4–7; E 60) The name of Poland was vanishing in 1794, despite its much-publicized efforts. As Bruder notes, the shadowy female is capable of ‘vigorous efforts at selfamelioration’ (158). But these efforts only cause anger among the rulers of Europe: she seizes the ‘burning power’ of the stars but brings forth only ‘howling terrors, all devouring fiery kings’ (2: 3–4; E 61). Orc’s revolutionary fires in France may have inspired the Poles to war, but the French were offering no aid. In the praeludium to Europe, the nameless female warns that Enitharmon’s efforts will only produce more pain, more revolt:

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Devouring & devoured roaming on dark and desolate mountains In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees. Ah mother Enitharmon! Stamp not with solid form this vig’rous progeny of fires. (2: 5–8; E 61) Bruder argues that, ‘[t]hough Enitharmon stamps the “myriads of flames” with a Bromion-like “signet” this at least gives them enough definition to “roam around”’ (159). Yet in an era when banished men and foreign exiles crowded the streets of London, Paris, and Vienna, this ability/necessity to ‘roam around’ should certainly be read as a sign of displacement and suffering. Finally the shadowy female gains a vision of a savior and disappears: ‘She ceast & rolld her shady clouds / Into the secret place’ (2: 17–18; E 61). That savior ‘who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band’ has been read as a religious and as a revolutionary figure (2: 13; E 61). In 1794 a Polish military leader would take his place in the Romantic imagination beside Washington and Lafayette as revolution broke out once more.

2 ‘A Patriot’s Furrow’d Cheek’: British Responses to the 1794 Ko´sciuszko Uprising

. . . to have seen Kosciusco would have been something to talk of all the rest of one’s life. Robert Southey, June 1797 (Collected Letters)

In an 1831 article of reminiscences, the poet and novelist Amelia Opie described a remarkable 1802 encounter with Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko. While enjoying an evening at the Paris home of an Irish countess, Opie and her husband, the painter John Opie, spotted the celebrity: ‘I took my husband’s arm,’ she writes, ‘and accompanied him to get a nearer view of the Polish patriot, so long the object to me of interest and admiration’ (Memorials 105). For the Opies, as for any other Britons attending the soirée, the meeting had been preceded by numerous literary and visual substitutes. Since the mid-1790s, Ko´sciuszko’s unsuccessful insurrection against the partitioners of Poland had been the subject of newspaper articles, poetry, and engravings. Opie herself lamented the fate of Poland in her early poem, ‘Ode on the Present Times, 27th January 1795’: Whence yonder groans? O wretched land! Poland, from thee, alas! they came, A despot speaks, and lo! a band, Blaspheming pure Religion’s name, Bid cold deliberate murder live, And death’s dread stroke to helpless thousands give. (19–24) In her memoir she quotes a line from Thomas Campbell, ‘While Freedom shriek’d as Kosciusko fell,’ and mentions owning an image of the patriot: ‘I had so often contemplated a print of him in his Polish dress, which hung in my room, that I thought I should have known him anywhere’ (105–6). 41

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But reality rarely lives up to art. Though Opie praises Ko´sciuszko’s fluent English, his ‘intellectual’ countenance and ‘dignified’ carriage, what is most striking about her description is how unlike the well-known representations the real man seemed to her: whether it was owing to the difference of dress, I know not, but I saw little or no resemblance in him to the picture. He was not much above the middle height, had high cheek bones, and his features were not of a distinguished cast; with the exception of his eyes, which were fine and expressive . . . His forehead was covered by a curled auburn wig, much to my vexation, as I should have liked to have seen its honourable scar . . . The tone of his voice was peculiar, and not pleasing; however, it was Kosciusko who spoke, and we listened with interest and pleasure; though, at this distance of time, I am unable to say on what subject we conversed. (106) Opie’s description pulls simultaneously in opposite directions. Fascinated and influenced by earlier representations of her hero, she seems disheartened to find his actual appearance to be commonplace, even unattractive. Opie’s frankness is actually quite remarkable; most writers would have ignored their subject’s physical failings. And yet she reminds the reader that, despite the peculiar voice and auburn wig, ‘it was Kosciusko,’ the man Campbell extolled as ‘Warsaw’s last Champion,’ the melancholy subject of paintings and engravings. Later, however, it is Ko´sciuszko who approaches Amelia Opie: During the course of the evening, while I was standing at some distance, but looking earnestly at him, and speaking to some one in his praise, contrasting, as I believe, his unspotted patriotism with the then suspected integrity of Buonaparte, he suddenly crossed the room, and coming up to me, said, ‘I am sure you were speaking of me, and I wish to know what you were saying.’ ‘I dare not tell you,’ replied I. ‘Was it so severe then?’ I bade him ask my companion. And on hearing her answer he thanked me, in a tone of deep feeling. ‘I have a favour to beg of you,’ said he, ‘I am told that you are a writer, pray do write some verses on me; a quatrain will be sufficient, will you oblige me?’ I told him I could rarely write extempore verses, and certainly not on such a subject, as I should wish to do it all the justice possible. ‘Well then,’ said he, ‘I will await your pleasure.’ (106) It is fascinating that, in one of his few recorded meetings with a British writer, Ko´sciuszko’s only words are a request to be described in verse. Aware that he is

British Responses to the 1794 Ko´sciuszko Uprising 43

the subject of another’s gaze – Opie is ‘looking earnestly at him’ – he interrogates, even flirts with his viewer; and, discovering that she was quietly praising him, begs her to make those private sentiments public in the form of a poem. Is this attributable to simple egotism? Should we read the request more generously, as a wish that writers would continue to sing the fate of Poland so it would not be forgotten? Did Ko´sciuszko see in Opie the artist who might finally represent him as a human being, failings and all? Or was he all too aware of his failings, and rather saw in her a writer who would perpetuate the far more memorable myth? A remarkable if ambiguous moment of Romantic collaboration, Opie’s anecdote suggests that agency belongs not only to the writer or reader but often also to the subject.1 But it also suggests the power of imaginative representation. If Ko´sciuszko remained a potent symbol through much of the nineteenth century, it was due in no small part to the writers and artists who were inspired (and sometimes personally invited) to turn a man into a myth. Most poets and writers did not need a personal request to record Ko´sciuszko’s life. There is an impressive body of Romantic-era literature dedicated to Ko´sciuszko and his homeland. And little wonder: few contemporary figures were as universally respected as the Polish general was, and few lives were as varied or as inspiring. As a hero of the American Revolution, Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko opposed the politics of the country whose poets and leaders would later praise him; as a freedom fighter he vainly defended his nation’s claim to sovereignty; as a diplomat he faced both Napoleon and Tsar Alexander. Opposed to slavery, he liberated his serfs and left money in his American will to free and educate African-American slaves. In 1920 the British literary critic John Collings Squire wrote, ‘a century ago Poland was one of the favorite subjects of our poets, and no alien before or since has been more belauded by our writers than Kosciusko’ (126). Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Landor, and Hunt were among those who praised him in verse or prose, and he was a central figure in two of the era’s most popular works, Thomas Campbell’s 1799 ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ and Jane Porter’s 1803 Thaddeus of Warsaw.2 Recent scholarship has overlooked the significance of Ko´sciuszko in British Romantic literature. In this chapter I argue for his place among the small group of contemporary figures – Toussaint L’Ouverture, Joseph Priestley, the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington – most admired by British Romantic writers. As Opie’s anecdote suggests, however, British admiration for the Polish patriot had as much to do with contemporary representations of the man as with his political beliefs or military prowess. In the following pages I examine a variety of literary and visual works related to Poland and Ko´sciuszko produced in Britain near the turn of the nineteenth century to better understand British interest in the fate of Poland. Many of the literary tropes associated with Ko´sciuszko first appeared in an early anonymous poem and in a sonnet by Coleridge, though they were extended and altered in later works, especially

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by Campbell. Similarly, all the essential visual tropes of Ko´sciuszko appear in a fascinating, intimate portrait by Benjamin West (reproduced as the frontispiece to this book), though that image is transformed in a series of later engravings (one of which Opie apparently owned). The changes, I argue, reflect the oppressive atmosphere of late 1790s British politics. In an era of naval mutinies and treason trials at home and warfare abroad, it became impossible to represent Ko´sciuszko as a revolutionary; instead British artists imaged the freedom fighter as a defeated dreamer, a conservative supporter of monarchical rule, or as a weak, rather effeminate figure who failed to achieve his life’s work: the sovereignty of his native land. The span of Ko´sciuszko’s influence, which extended from the 1794 uprising until long after his death in Switzerland in 1817, is particularly remarkable. In part I believe this long-lasting interest among artists and poets came from a national guilt or unease over the fate of Poland. British writers repeatedly questioned their nation’s inaction as Poland, one of Europe’s oldest nations, dismembered by the supposed allies of Britain, disappeared from the map; and no single figure embodied the tragedy of Poland more powerfully than did the scarred, exiled Polish general. After his defeat and imprisonment, and well into the nineteenth century, Ko´sciuszko stood as the symbol of Poland, a long-suffering subject, sometimes seen as courageous, more often seen as defeated and colonized, but always potentially undermining the heroic myths of Romantic Britain.

The Romantic revolutionary Ko´sciuszko’s name was already familiar to British newspaper readers when on 19 June 1794 The Times ran a three-hundred word formal introduction. KOSCIUSKO, the Chief of the Polish Revolution, is 42 years of age. He was a gentleman of small fortune, educated in the school of Cadets . . . His figure is by no means striking or commanding; but this is abundantly compensated by a great share of wit and talents. Having inspired with a tender passion a young lady of very high birth, and not being able to obtain the consent of her parents to marry her, he carried her off from the house of her father; who, accompanied by several gentlemen, pursued the fugitives, overtook them, and struck Kosciusko several blows. The latter, thus dishonoured, disappeared; and a little time afterwards it was announced in the public prints that he was Adjutant to General Washington. Such romantic beginnings led to distinguished service during the American Revolution, particularly at West Point and the Battle of Saratoga. In 1783 the United States Congress awarded Ko´sciuszko citizenship, a land grant in Ohio,


and the position of brigadier general in the US Army (Gardner 49). Ko´sciuszko returned to Europe the following year, accompanying his friend and fellow veteran Lafayette.3 Ko´sciuszko’s support for King Stanisław’s 1791 reforms and his courage in the ensuing battle against the Russians gained him increased celebrity at home and abroad. In early 1793, as Russia and Prussia finalized the second partition, he journeyed to Paris seeking financial and military support for a Polish war of independence and instead witnessed the fall of Louis XVI and the rise of Robespierre. A few months earlier, the Girondin-dominated National Assembly had elected Ko´sciuszko (along with Schiller, Paine, Washington, and others) an honorary French citizen, but the succeeding Jacobin rulers responded coolly to his requests for aid. News of Ko´sciuszko’s heroism was also reaching British shores. Helen Maria Williams described his gallant attempt to save a Polish princess from the Paris guillotine (Eye-Witness 173–4), and Charlotte Smith used him as the inspiration for the Polish soldier Carlowitz in her seventh novel, The Banished Man (1794). According to Chris Jones, ‘the disgust of Carlowicz [sic] with the French leadership and the marriage of his daughter to an Englishman who has consistently supported the initial stages of the [French] Revolution’ suggest a hope that Britain may prove firmer ground ‘for those whose extensive views of liberty are not bounded by national prejudice’ (175). Ko´sciuszko canceled his own plans to visit Britain in 1793, however, when he received word that his presence ‘would be both unwelcome to George III and profitless to the Polish cause’ (Gardner 92). He returned to Poland to lead the uprising that began in March 1794. The Times was initially sympathetic to the Ko´sciuszko Uprising, criticizing ‘the scandalous conduct of these Northern Courts’ (6 April 1794), and rejoicing ‘that the two Monarchs of the North are not left in the peaceable possession of their new conquests, which they have acquired after the true principles of Jacobinism’ (14 April). As the uprising succeeded, however, The Times began to associate Poland’s new government with Jacobin principles. On 15 April, it described the establishment of a Revolutionary Tribunal in Cracow; on 27 April, readers learned that ‘while the oath [to the new constitution] was administered, the populace exclaimed: – the guillotine is necessary; we will have a guillotine. To this General Wodzicki replied: – it does not as yet become you to employ these foreign terms, and to ask for newly invented instruments for the extermination of traitors.’ A Times article of 3 May again described the episode but removed Józef Wodzicki’s tempered response. Finally, on 8 May, The Times took a position clearly against the Ko´sciuszko Uprising. Under any other circumstances than the immediate ones, all Europe would have applauded the efforts made by the POLES, to shake off the yoke of the two Powers . . . The Jacobinism, however, which the insurgents have

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evinced in their proclamations, considerably diminishes the interest their cause would otherwise have excited . . . On the one hand, we foresee with pain the approaching subjugation of the Polish insurgents, incapable to withstand the formidable numbers of the ambitious CATHERINE and the power of PRUSSIA; and on the other hand, we cannot avoid expressing our wish, that the scandalous propagation of Jacobinical principles may be speedily repressed. This turn against the Poles coincided with a more general opposition to radical activity in Britain: the government had recently seized the papers of the London Corresponding Society, and on 17 May the House of Commons had voted a suspension of Habeas Corpus. The violence in Poland could thus be read as part of a much greater threat to European order. Though The Times described Ko´sciuszko as ‘extremely affable’ (27 April) and as a man of ‘intelligence and capacity’ (19 June), his countrymen were harshly criticized, particularly after a Warsaw mob publicly hanged several suspected traitors. Despite Ko´sciuszko’s immediate call to arrest the mob’s leaders, The Times saw ‘new proof of the dangers attendant on every insurrection of the populace,’ and compared the Poles to ‘those useful animals which till and fertilize our fields, they misuse their strength so soon as they are freed from the yoke that kept them in subjection . . . they fall, sooner or later, victims to their own rage’ (22 July). ‘Poor Poland!’ wrote Samuel Coleridge to Robert Southey in July 1794. ‘They go on sadly there’ (Collected Letters 1: 86). In June William Wordsworth had written William Matthews of the need to give ‘an accurate account of the Polish Revolution, and purify it from those infamous representations which ministerial hirelings have thrown over it’ (Letters 1: 128). As late as 12 October Southey wrote his brother, ‘the allies are every where defeated. the French every where victorious – the cause of Liberty every where gaining ground. the Poles are successful & the tyrant of Prussia totters upon his blood-cemented throne’ (Collected Letters). Ko´sciuszko had won his greatest victory over the Russians in April 1794, leading an army of scythe-bearing peasants at Racławice. Several defeats followed, however, and Ko´sciuszko’s remarkable defense of Warsaw (the cause of Southey’s elation) left his soldiers exhausted. On 10 October, Russian and Polish forces met on a rain-soaked field at Maciejowice; Ko´sciuszko, seriously wounded, was taken prisoner. Less than a month later, after the slaughter of 9000 soldiers and 7000 civilians at the Warsaw suburb of Praga by Russian forces under General Suvorov, King Stanisław surrendered his nation. Russia, Prussia, and Austria shared in the third and final partition; and in early 1795, in what Lord Acton later called ‘the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism,’ Poland disappeared from the map of Europe (21).


Coleridge and the tropes of defeat A steady stream of pro-Poland poetry appeared in British liberal newspapers from the second partition in early 1793 until after Ko´sciuszko’s final defeat. The sonnet, ‘To the Continental Despots,’ printed in the 12 October 1793 Cambridge Intelligencer, is typical in its tone and imagery: Alas! for Poland! – her dismember’d plain, Deeply laments the Tyrant’s horrid arm; In vain she wakes the impotent alarm, Her pleading senate supplicate in vain. Hark! o’er their prey, oppression’s furies howl! Ravenous and fell! – and will not Europe hear? O Justice! Justice! where reclines thy spear? Where is the great, the brave, the generous soul? Abhorr’d Ambition – thy insensate heart Feels not the burthen of another’s woes. Thine is the task to vex the world’s repose, And bid the tears of suffering nature start; ’Midst carnage vast, thy conquests to proclaim, And grasp, with goary hand, the wreath of mournful Fame. (Bennett 91) The octave’s anthropomorphic trope reappears throughout the nineteenth century: Poland as human form, ‘dismember’d’ and made ‘impotent’ by war and partition.4 If the demise of Poland brings to mind the relative health of Britain’s own social body, it also reminds the reader that, if one country can be dismembered, so can another. ‘If our measures are not as instantaneous as vigorous,’ wrote Benjamin Vaughan only a few months earlier, ‘our only chance will be to be the last devoured’ (75). ‘Oppression’s furies’ – the rulers of the partitioning powers, in particular Catherine – howl in pleasure over the sacrifice, while the rest of Europe, most significantly Britain, does nothing in response. The sestet is more general, but it is prophetic of Britain’s later response to the final partition of Poland. Sympathy, it suggests, breeds apathy, even complicity. Poland becomes a victim of ‘Abhorr’d Ambition’ which vexes ‘the world’s repose,’ and encourages ‘the tears of suffering nature.’ In Britain, too, Ambition allowed for discomfort and pity but not action. Britain’s financial concerns (Russia was a major trading partner), along with its fear of epidemic Jacobinism, made actual involvement impossible. By the end of 1794 it was generally assumed that Ko´sciuszko was dead. British newspapers reported his murder in a Russian prison; Coleridge apparently thought Ko´sciuszko had died on the battlefield. His sonnet ‘Koskiusko’ – among

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the first of many Romantic-era misspellings – appeared on 16 December 1794, one of the eleven Sonnets on Eminent Characters printed in the Morning Chronicle, a series that also included sonnets on Joseph Priestley, who had recently emigrated to the United States, and Lafayette, then imprisoned in Olmutz by Austrian forces. Coleridge writes, O what a loud and fearful shriek was there, As though a thousand souls one death-groan pour’d! Ah me! they saw beneath a Hireling’s sword Their KOSKIUSKO fall! Through the swart air (As pauses the tir’d Cossac’s barbarous yell Of Triumph) on the chill and midnight gale Rises with frantic burst or sadder swell The dirge of murder’d Hope! while Freedom pale Bends in such anguish o’er her destin’d bier, As if from eldest time some Spirit meek Had gather’d in a mystic urn each tear That ever on a Patriot’s furrow’d cheek Fit channel found; and she had drain’d the bowl In the mere wilfulness, and sick despair of soul!

Though ‘Koskiusko’ is clearly an early work, it has remained among the best known of the Sonnets on Eminent Characters; Coleridge himself thought enough of the poem to send a slightly altered version to Robert Southey the day after publication. As Damian Walford Davies notes, the sonnet also occasioned Coleridge’s ‘introduction to two major radical figures of the 1790s,’ Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin (110). Coleridge recalled that Holcroft first approached him with a copy of the latest Morning Chronicle in his hand: ‘Sir! I apprehend, that you are the Author of this Sonnet on Koskiusko?’5 Previous poems on Poland had appeared in the Morning Chronicle as well as the Cambridge Intelligencer; Carl Woodring suggests their probable influence on the sonnet’s ‘baroque involutions’ and ‘grotesque originality’ (Coleridge 92–3). Jonathan Bate notes the opening line’s similarity to the first line of Hamlet’s soliloquy, ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’ ‘in a play during which an army goes to fight for Poland’ (44).6 The significance of Coleridge’s literary echo should be taken further: Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, is granted permission to pass through Denmark on his way to wage war with ‘the Polack.’ Returning from his victory Fortinbras takes advantage of the deaths of Hamlet and Laertes and immediately seizes control of Denmark itself – while English ambassadors look on. Britain’s tacit permission allowing the ‘Northern Courts’ to invade Poland would have echoed ominously through Hamlet for any reader or viewer in the 1790s.


Coleridge packs the octave with sounds of pain and despair: ‘loud and fearful shriek,’ ‘death groan,’ ‘barbarous yell,’ ‘frantic burst,’ ‘sadder swell,’ ‘midnight gale,’ all describing the ‘dirge of murder’d Hope.’ He furthers the tension by employing an almost German syntax, restraining the verb until the end of each phrase. There is a great heaviness to the lines, emphasized by the repeated ‘r’ and ‘k’ sounds and Slavic sibilances that echo through ‘shriek,’ ‘Koskiusko,’ and ‘Cossac’s,’ oddly juxtaposed with the urgency of four exclamation marks which end four breathless sentences. The parenthetical remark seems like language spoken under such strain that grammatical accuracy gets lost. The combination effectively brings to mind the madness of men slogging their way through a drenched field of battle. The action of the sestet is contemporaneous, but its mood is silent and mournful, almost suicidal, in reaction to the preceding description. Commas and semicolons replace the exclamation marks; the vowels soften; ‘s’ and ‘f’ sounds replace the hard consonants. Coleridge exchanges the German syntax of the octave for a syntax almost French, at least in the inverted adjectives of ‘Spirit meek’ and ‘Freedom pale,’ suggesting a continental division within the sonnet between Prussian/Russian aggression and French (or English) mourning. The tears that are implicit in the octave, in prescient words like ‘pour’d,’ ‘burst,’ and ‘swell,’ appear in a bizarre eternal ritual that signals the end of Freedom. Unlike the Cambridge Intelligencer sonnet, where the sustained present tense actually flattens out the poem’s sense of immediacy, ‘Koskiusko’ opens in the recent past (‘was there’) but describes Hope as dying at the moment of reading, with Freedom soon to follow. Ko´sciuszko’s fall becomes apocalyptic, the deathblow prophesied ‘from eldest time.’ Coleridge’s sonnet sustains the bitterness of earlier poems like ‘To the Continental Despots’ but employs a more intricate syntax to imitate the complexities of 1790s European politics. Had he known that Ko´sciuszko still lived, Coleridge might have adopted a less mournful tone, something closer to his description of the imprisoned Lafayette, ‘who didst wake with startling voice / Life’s better Sun from that long wintry night’ (‘La Fayette,’ lines 9–10). Unlike Lafayette, whose country still existed without him, the fall of Ko´sciuszko paralleled the fall of Poland, now ruled by foreign ‘Hirelings’ and ‘Cossacs.’ Though historically inaccurate, Coleridge’s epitaph, premature for Ko´sciuszko if not for Poland, popularized certain tropes – the horrifying ‘shriek,’ the hero’s fall, the loss of Hope – which reappear consistently in later descriptions of the Ko´sciuszko Uprising.7 Though Coleridge remained interested in the fate of Poland, later references in his works reflect the Hope-lessness of the situation: Ko´sciuszko and Poland simply become a rhetorical tool for liberal criticism of British alliances with Russia and Prussia. A sympathetic biography of Ko´sciuszko appeared on 13 May 1796 in the final issue of Coleridge’s short-lived journal The Watchman, and

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two poems from 1796, ‘On Observing a Blossom on the First of February 1796’ and ‘Ode to the Departing Year,’ referred to the Ko´sciuszko Uprising, ‘Bright flower of hope killed in the opening bud’ (‘Blossom,’ line 17). Such sentiments echoed the position of Foxite Whigs who, by 1795, were questioning not only Britain’s alliance with Russia, Prussia, and Austria but also the argument that the third partition was necessary ‘to crush Jacobin principles in Poland’ (Fox 541). The war against France was going badly for Britain, in part because the Polish campaign had drawn off allied resources, in part because the British were expending their own resources battling Toussaint L’Ouverture in the Caribbean. Charles James Fox spoke angrily in March 1795 of ‘the overthrow of Kosciusko – who by his character gave credit to the cause of liberty’ and of the advancement by the British government of ‘twelve thousand pounds to the King of Prussia, to enable him to subdue Poland’ (541–2). More than a year later Fox’s message remained the same: Will any man believe that the avowed object of the partition, the destruction of Jacobinism in Poland, was the real cause of dividing that unfortunate country? And will any man contend that England and France united, might not have prevented that transaction, and by that means preserved the balance of power of Europe? But Poland was abandoned to its fate, suffered to be sacrificed, annihilated, destroyed, for the sake of those absurd and vicious principles which govern the policy of Ministers, and which have involved us in the present war. (594–5) Mary Wollstonecraft recorded similar feelings on a less formal 1795 summer evening in Norway when ‘one of our party sung a song, ridiculing the powers coalesced against France, and the company drank confusion to those who had dismembered Poland’ (6: 297). Liberals and radicals continued to use the example of Poland to warn Britons against any alliances with its oppressors, but the cause of Poland faded from the headlines as Russia and Prussia joined Great Britain in the battle against France.

Revolution in recline When Ko´sciuszko was freed in December 1796, not long after the death of Catherine the Great, many newspapers in Britain and America praised the new tsar Paul’s gestures towards liberalism, though William Cobbett in Porcupine’s Gazette chided Paul for ‘very inadvisedly’ releasing the Polish general (5: 118). Ko´sciuszko planned an extended convalescence in America, after brief visits to Sweden and England. After his arrival at Gravesend on 29 May 1797, he spent a fortnight in London and almost a week in Bristol before departing


for Philadelphia on 19 June. ‘Did you seize the grand opportunity of seeing Kosciusko while he was at Bristol?’ Lamb wrote to Coleridge. ‘I never saw a hero; I wonder how they look’ (Letters 1: 112). Coleridge was spending June in Racedown with two new friends, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and apparently missed the visit. Lamb would have been disappointed, even shocked, to see how the hero looked. The July 1797 Gentleman’s Magazine reported that Ko´sciuszko ‘is incurably wounded in the head, has three bayonet-wounds in his back, and part of his thigh is carried away by a cannon-shot; and with the excruciating torments those wounds occasion, as he cannot move himself, he amuses his hours with drawing landscapes’ (‘Domestic Occurrences’ 609). Ko´sciuszko arrived in London at a particularly tense moment. Mutinies by British sailors at Spithead and Nore increased fears that revolution might still make its way across the Channel. Nevertheless, many notable figures, including Fox, the Duchess of Devonshire, and Richard Sheridan, visited him at Sabloniere’s Hotel in Leicester Fields and were eager to associate the visitor’s popularity with their own political beliefs. On 9 June The Times found it ironic that the Whig Club selected General Banastre Tarleton, ‘who fought against American independence, and who is the professed defender of the Slave-trade,’ to present Ko´sciuszko with a sword of honor. Cobbett’s response to Tarleton was characteristically acidic and personal: ‘you present the Polander with a sword, as a token of your approbation of his labours in the cause of what you call liberty, when it is well known that you owe your present rank and pay to your having fought against him, having sought his destruction, when he was engaged in that very cause!’ (7: 5). A different kind of political irony surrounded the visit of poet and satirist John Wolcot, better known by his nom de plume, Peter Pindar. According to Wolcot’s biographer, Ko´sciuszko had received a volume of Peter Pindar’s works during his imprisonment. ‘[H]e had been so impressed by the freedom with which the Great were treated in England and by the spirit of fearless Liberty that Peter Pindar represented’ that he personally requested Wolcot to visit him, apologizing for his own inability to travel (Girtin 181). Later Wolcot referred to the event in his poem ‘To Miss Hannah More’: Me KOTSCIUSCO deems a BARD DIVINE! My works illum’d his dungeon of affright: ’Twas there the HERO read my Lyric line, Yea read my lucubrations with delight. (37–40) Apparently Ko´sciuszko did not know that Wolcot had recently accepted an annual pension of £300 in exchange for an end to his attacks on the Pitt administration.

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Benjamin West met Ko´sciuszko in London and produced an image that, like Coleridge’s sonnet, introduced a set of tropes that shaped British thinking about Ko´sciuszko and Poland well into the nineteenth century. The painter Joseph Farington recorded their 7 June meeting in his diary. West saw General Koscioscou yesterday . . . The Genl. was laid on a Couch – had a black silk band round his head – & was drawing Landscapes, which is his principal amusement. – He speaks English, appears to be abt. 45 yrs. of age; and abt. 5 feet 8 Inches high. One side of him is paralytic – the effect of a cannon shot passing over him – He had two stabbs in his back – one cut in his head . . . West shewed me a small picture which He yesterday began to paint from memory of Koscioscow on a Couch. (3: 852). Though West was President of the Royal Academy, Ko´sciuszko was apparently uncomfortable posing so soon after release from prison. He had refused a portrait request in Sweden, and another British artist, Richard Cosway, was only able to sketch the General’s image through a keyhole (Chloe Hamilton 87–9).8 West’s painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1798, shows Ko´sciuszko reclining on a couch, one hand against his head, a crutch behind him and papers spread about. A Polish military cap and a sword, perhaps the sword given by the Whig Club, lie before him on a stool. Through the window, St Paul’s Cathedral dominates the scenery. Chloe Hamilton notes that the small painting (12 21 by 17 12 inches) ‘is a portrait of the room as much as of the man,’ and compares it to a Dutch still life (81). But Ko´sciuszko’s pose is equally interesting. The figure in West’s oeuvre that most resembles the Ko´sciuszko portrait is one of the Grace Air, painted in 1780 for the Council Chamber of the Royal Academy in Somerset House, a female nude whose positioning is quite similar to that of the Polish general (reproduced in Erffa and Staley 407). This is not to draw an actual connection between the works but rather to suggest that the Ko´sciuszko portrait contains few of the tropes of power or masculinity one usually finds in West’s portraits of public men. It is difficult to imagine one of Ko´sciuszko’s military peers – Napoleon, Arthur Wellesley, Lafayette – tolerating an image that presents its subject in such a private, vulnerable pose. The composition of West’s portrait has precedents in British art. Joseph Wright of Derby exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1781 a ‘Portrait of a Gentleman’ that West probably knew, since he was also exhibiting paintings at the Academy by then. Wright’s subject was Brooke Boothby, a writer whose greatest contribution to letters was his publishing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dialogues in London – the first publication of that work anywhere. In Wright’s painting, Boothby appears in idyllic surroundings, absently folding a volume of Rousseau as he looks off in a reverie that carries his eyes just beyond the viewer.9 Judy


Egerton describes the subject as melancholic, signifying ‘not low spirits, but rather the capacity to muse on subjects other than the petty preoccupations of this world’ (117). But the association of the Rousseau volume with an outdoor setting is particularly important here. Erich Schön has examined eighteenthcentury German art and described the way reading transports the represented reader into a psychic space beyond his or her material surroundings (discussed in Stewart 76–8). It seems unlikely that Wright actually painted Boothby in the open air; the subject’s access to Rousseau allows him to escape his everyday surroundings and surround himself instead with the delights of nature. Schön’s ideas seem equally applicable to West’s portrait, particularly if we add Michael Fried’s notion of absorption in eighteenth-century French painting. Fried notes the recurrence of images that seem self-contained. In Chardin’s paintings of children building card castles, or in David’s image of the blind Belisarius, there is a focus of attention within the painting that attracts the gaze of other figures but leaves the viewer separate from the scene. Boothby’s absorption in the volume of Rousseau makes him appear oblivious of the fact that we are gazing at him. Like Boothby, Ko´sciuszko stares just beyond the viewer, but the focus of his attention, the cause of his absorption – Poland – is impossible to picture, because it no longer exists. It is only present in scraps and pieces: a crutch, a sword, a cap, some papers strewn about the room. And what is on those scraps of paper? One scrap on the far left, and tellingly placed just below the crutch, seems to contain the name of West’s subject. The name however is partially hidden behind an inkstand in the shape of a ship. Perhaps West was thinking of the ship that carried the broken Ko´sciuszko to London. Or perhaps he was thinking of the recent mutinies at Spithead and Nore. West told Farington that Ko´sciuszko ‘asked abt. the meeting at the Nore – is agitated by the thoughts of revolutions and wishes to proceed to America where He expects to find peace’ (3: 852). In any case, the indistinct letters become a powerful metonym for the wounded Ko´sciuszko, himself a symbol for his dismembered nation. All that appears from behind the inkstand is ‘Genl Co / osko, Lond;’ General Ko´sciuszko in London is divided, incomplete, miswritten (Figure 2.1). Farington writes that drawing landscapes was Ko´sciuszko’s ‘principal amusement;’ perhaps the other scraps contain landscapes of Poland. But as that landscape would never again be accessible to Ko´sciuszko, the general’s scriptural musings might have turned towards the view of London seen through the open lattice. Like Boothby’s idyllic landscape, England becomes available to the Polish exile and amateur artist as an alternative ‘promised land.’ Considering England’s refusal to interfere in the partition of Poland, however, there is a certain irony in this image. The presence of St Paul’s reminds us that Ko´sciuszko is a displaced person, a foreigner who would prefer not to be in London. Even the figure itself seems aware of the dangers of those deceptive promises emanating

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Figure 2.1

Detail of Benjamin West, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, 1797

from hazy St Paul’s, an easy metonym for a distant and vague English morality that sympathized with the fallen leader but failed to help him. His left hand – touching a black cloth that hides war wounds – keeps that London light from brightening his countenance. While West was an important figure in London and on friendly terms with the king, he was also American and would have been aware of his young country’s debt to the Polish general. Before the French Revolution, West was acquainted with Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow; in 1802 he would journey to Paris with the radical engraver William Sharp, annoying their fellow traveler Farington ‘by comparing the improved lot of the French since the Revolution to the condition of the London poor’ (Staley 91). This need to balance British, American, and continental sympathies may help explain West’s ability to produce what biographer Robert C. Alberts calls ‘an astonishing picture for the year 1797, an obvious anachronism, a precocious anticipation of Byronic melancholy and mood laden Weltschmerz’ (222). West produces an aesthetically and politically complicated image that simultaneously honors a revolutionary hero and challenges the hypocritical society that only honors a revolutionary after his defeat. Two related engravings do not sustain this delicate balance. On 1 January 1798, Anthony Cardon published for the Whig Club an image of Ko´sciuszko (Figure 2.2) based on Richard Cosway’s surreptitiously produced drawing; in 1800 West’s traveling companion William Sharp produced a similar image (Figure 2.3). Perhaps these are the images that Leigh Hunt described in the


Figure 2.2 Anthony Cardon, after Richard Cosway, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, 1 January 1798

Examiner seventeen years later, the image of Ko´sciuszko ‘as it appears in pictures in this country, – a man reduced almost to helplessness, and reclining on a couch with that pale and painful countenance, through which the eagerness of his noble character still looked out’ (3 July 1814, 428). If Hunt was referring to the engravings of Cardon and Sharp, his remarks seem far too generous. These images reinforce John Berger’s challenge in Ways of Seeing at the end of a chapter on the female nude: ‘Choose from this book an image of a traditional nude. Transform the woman into a man . . . Then notice the violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer’ (64). General Ko´sciuszko is put on display, not like a military hero, but like a female nude, a man from an exotic land, or even a strange animal. Ko´sciuszko appears noticeably younger in the Cardon image, more like a newly enlisted man than a wounded veteran. There is still a black band around his head, but the bandage around his thigh has disappeared, as has the crutch. Cardon replaces West’s orchestrated disorder – loose papers on three sides of the subject, dramatic red curtain in contrast to the smooth cool fabric on which the subject reclines – with unnatural order. Compared to West’s

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Figure 2.3

William Sharp, after Catherine Andras, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, 1 February 1800

image of a worn, crumpled Polish cap, Cardon exhibits its angular shape as a curiosity. Cardon’s sword is honorary, decorative – a scroll from the Whig Club assures the viewer of this (Cardon even gets the name right). West probably painted the same sword, but he displays it without ceremony and in front of Ko´sciuszko, making it accessible to him (unlike the crutch, tucked behind the sofa) and reminding viewers that Ko´sciuszko was a soldier and a revolutionary. As a substitute for these details Cardon offers a quatrain by Anna Maria Porter printed below the image. Porter was a published poet and author from a gifted family: her older sister Jane Porter wrote the bestsellers Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803), based in part on the life of Ko´sciuszko, and The Scottish Chiefs (1810), while her brother Robert Ker Porter was a successful historical painter, eventually (and ironically) becoming court painter to the tsar. Anna Maria Porter’s quatrain echoes Coleridge’s sonnet of three years before: O! Freedom! Valour! Resignation! Here Pay to your godlike son the sacred tear; Weave the proud laurel for his suffering brow, And in a world’s wide pity steep the bough.


The first line neatly sums up Ko´sciuszko’s life journey – from hero of independence on two continents through courageous warrior in battle to resigned figure in defeat. Porter apostrophizes these values, calling them to offer Ko´sciuszko a consolatory laurel wreath steeped in a Coleridgean overflow of tears. But Coleridge was writing an epitaph for a man he believed died in battle; Porter uses similar images for a man who would live for 20 more years. In Cardon’s image Ko´sciuszko seems to have turned from his reading – the source of his absorption can be imaged as a book here – as if to reflect on the words just read. In a sort of mise en abyme we too are invited to read Porter’s quatrain, examine the effeminate pose of the subject and reflect on the fate of revolution. The window – for Schön a reminder of that imaginary world made accessible by reading – shows not London, but the tops of clouds; an impossibility, considering Ko´sciuszko’s Leicester Fields quarters. The shut lattice makes even this dream world above the clouds inaccessible. The power of words and images – particularly words and images produced by the ‘most obliged and humble Servant’ of a political party – dissipates, becoming empty like the ‘O!’ that opens Porter’s quatrain. My goal is not to question the depth of Porter’s emotional response. Clearly the sight of a defeated hero was moving to many. There is a touching and charming anecdote in Robert Southey’s Letters from England (1808) based on an actual letter Southey wrote 11 July 1797, soon after Ko´sciuszko’s departure for America. In Bristol an ‘honest gingerbread-baker’ decided to give Ko´sciuszko ‘a noble plum cake’ and managed to deliver the gift in person to the house of the American consul, where Ko´sciuszko was staying. Southey writes, ‘When however he saw the great man . . . lying on the couch, his countenance pale painful and emaciated, yet full of benevolence, the sight overpowered him; he put down his cake, burst into tears like a child, and ran out of the room without speaking a single word’ (481–2). The Anglican minister Richard Warner wrote in his memoirs that he ‘never contemplated a more interesting human figure, than Kosciuszko, stretched upon his couch.’ At the close of their Bristol meeting, writes Warner, ‘I offered him my hand: he took it. My eye filled with tears: and he gave it a warmer grasp’ (2: 135).10 But while individuals were deeply moved by personal contact with the Polish hero, it is equally clear that neither political party in England intended more than public sympathy for Poland. Unlike Coleridge’s dense sonnet, or West’s portrait, Porter’s quatrain and the image it informs invite a sentimental response from the public – inspiring readers to meditate on the fate of Poland or, like Southey’s baker, to ‘burst into tears’ over its fallen leader – but they do not encourage political action. More likely such poetry and portraits legitimized the partition of Poland. A nation whose leader could so easily be portrayed in almost womanly fashion hardly seemed worth defending.

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In William Sharp’s 1800 engraving, Ko´sciuszko, now transported to a peaceful countryside, looks younger still.11 Considering his radical background, Sharp’s decision to portray Ko´sciuszko as dreamer seems surprising. A contemporary anecdote suggests one interpretation. On several occasions Sharp was called before the Privy Council to explain his revolutionary sympathies. ‘At one of these examinations,’ writes Chloe Hamilton, ‘after being long annoyed by questions which he thought irrelevant, he deliberately pulled out of his pocket a subscription list for the portrait [of Ko´sciuszko], handed it to Pitt and Dundas, requesting them . . . to put their names to it as subscribers . . . The audacity of the proposal . . . set them laughing, and he was soon liberated’ (88). In an alternate version of the story, Sharp shows the Council a prospectus for a new work from the radical politician John Horne Tooke, an indication of the company Ko´sciuszko kept in the minds of British politicians, and a reminder that, despite his defeat, Ko´sciuszko remained a potent symbol (Hamilton 88). Perhaps Sharp felt the name and image were enough; in any case the anecdote, despite its light tone, suggests the threat of political censorship that hung over British artists in the 1790s. While the desk, curtain, sofa, and most significantly the pose remain from West’s painting, all those metonyms that made the pose necessary have disappeared: the crutch (injury), the sword and military cap (war), St Paul’s (hypocritical England unwilling to aid the Poles). Furthermore Sharp gives the image a staged look. The curtain could well be a theatrical backdrop; the landscape could be a painting. Reading or sketching is again present as providing access to imagination, but any political content seems sapped from the image. The figure might well be Brooke Boothby. Or John Keats, who near the close of ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (1816) describes a visit to ‘a poet’s house,’ the home of Leigh Hunt (354). He surveys the paintings and objets d’art from his exalted vantage, ‘upon a couch at ease,’ and among those objects notes a bust of the Polish general: ‘Kosciusko’s [countenance] worn / By horrid suffrance – mightily forlorn’ (353, 387–8). In his sonnet ‘To Kosciusko,’ written at the same time, Keats declares that the Polish general’s ‘great name alone / Is a full harvest whence to reap high feeling.’ Ko´sciuszko died the following year, having failed to convince the powers at Vienna to reestablish an independent Poland. A name or an image emptied of their content could still ‘reap high feeling,’ but not political change.12 In Farewell to an Idea T.J. Clark proposes the inaugural moment of modernism as the day David completed his image of Marat, because ‘the detail of politics is what David’s Marat is made out of’ (21). While earlier artists were expected ‘to transmute the political, to clean it of the dross of contingency, to raise it up to the realm of allegory,’ modernism ‘turns on the impossibility of transcendence’ (22). I would argue that a similar moment of ‘disenchantment’ occurs in West’s portrait. Only in the later engravings by Cardon and Sharp do the tropes of political disillusionment become altered and emptied, cleaned ‘of the


dross of contingency.’ We too easily forget that Ko´sciuszko was a military and revolutionary figure, not a dandy or an artist. To rewrite Shelley, the radical legislator becomes the unacknowledged poet of the world. Henry Wallis completed the transformation of politician into poet in 1856, with his immensely popular image of Chatterton in a strikingly similar room, using a similar pose and view (St Paul’s again). Wallis’s Chatterton becomes forger in more ways than one: forger of ancient manuscripts and imitator of West’s Ko´sciuszko. Representations like Cardon’s and Sharp’s made the British public more sympathetic towards Poland and, as I suggest in Chapter 3, perhaps made the transition to British life easier for Polish refugees who followed Ko´sciuszko. But they also allowed Britons to wash their hands of any guilt connected with the fate of Poland.

Bidding hope farewell While visual images were erasing the political contexts of Ko´sciuszko’s life, literary representations were altering its geographical and historical contexts. In contrast to the righteous indignation of the anonymous Cambridge Intelligencer sonnet or the linguistic complexities of Coleridge’s poem, later representations made Ko´sciuszko and his homeland more distant and exotic. Among the many works that addressed the cause of Poland, Thomas Campbell’s 1799 ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ was by far the most popular.13 Campbell is remembered today for his friendship with Lord Byron, his occasional war-songs (‘Ye Mariners of England,’ ‘The Battle of Hohenlinden’), or as a founder of the University of London. But throughout his own lifetime he was best known as ‘The Bard of Hope.’ ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ Campbell’s first published poem, went through nine editions in seven years and was translated into several foreign languages. Exploring the consolation brought to mankind by hope, it depicts such individual situations as a prisoner’s solitude and a mother’s anxiety before abruptly shifting to the ‘wide field that is yet open for the progress of humanizing arts among uncivilized nations’ (Campbell’s introductory note). This segment in particular shows the influence of Campbell’s engagement with the concepts of stadial or conjectural history, developed by the Scottish Enlightenment. As a student at Glasgow University, Campbell often attended the lectures of John Millar, later claiming that Millar ‘made investigations into the principles of justice, and the rights and interests of society, so captivating to me, that I formed opinions for myself, and became an emancipated lover of truth.’ His admiration for Millar did not stop him from disagreeing with his arguments: I remember something like astonishment at so acute a man as Miller [sic] holding forth upon the necessary progress of man, from the savage to the pastoral, and from that to the agricultural state, as well as the sacred

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usefulness of hereditary aristocracy. But John Miller had the magic secret of making you so curious in inquiry, and so much in love with truth, as to be independent of his specific tenets. (Beattie 1: 144) Perhaps this was written later in life, and Campbell was downplaying the impact of stadial history on his early poetry; but the influence is pervasive in ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’ After a brief visit to ‘Erie’s banks, where tygers steal along, / And the dread Indian chants a dismal song,’ Campbell focuses on three suffering lands: Poland, Africa, and India (325–6).14 In the Poland passage he describes Ko´sciuszko’s defense of Warsaw, his defeat, and Suvorov’s massacre at Praga. Like Coleridge before him, Campbell makes a historical error, since Ko´sciuszko was taken prisoner at Maciejowice and was not present at the fall of Warsaw. Still the lines have a momentum that made this passage one of Campbell’s most memorable. In vain, alas! in vain, ye gallant few! From rank to rank your volley’d thunder flew: – Oh, bloodiest picture in the book of Time, Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime; Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe, Strength in her arms, nor mercy in her woe! Dropp’d from her nerveless grasp the shatter’d spear Closed her bright eye, and curb’d her high career; – HOPE, for a season, bade the world farewell, And Freedom shriek’d – as Kosciusko fell! (373–82) Campbell recycles the imagery from Coleridge’s earlier sonnet – Ko´sciuszko’s fall, the twinning of Hope and Freedom, the ‘shriek’ – and produces a passage that British and American schoolboys would memorize throughout the nineteenth century.15 Though his description is entirely sympathetic towards Poland, it seems ironic that Campbell’s most popular couplet – the lines Amelia Opie thinks of when she meets Ko´sciuszko in Paris – describes the Polish general’s final defeat. Furthermore, an engraving that accompanied these lines in the earliest printings of Campbell’s poem returns Ko´sciuszko to the pose memorialized by West two years earlier: the general lies upon the ground, while personified Freedom (rather awkwardly) grieves his fallen state (Figure 2.4). After a diatribe against the ‘self-interested enemies of human improvement,’ Campbell’s poet calls upon the spirits of heroes past, including William Tell and Robert the Bruce, to aid men in their battles against tyranny.


Figure 2.4 R. Scott, after J. Graham, from Thomas Campbell, The Pleasures of Hope and Other Poems, 1 April 1799

Departed spirits of the mighty dead! Ye that at Marathon and Leuctra bled! Friends of the world! Restore your swords to man, Fight in his sacred cause, and lead the van! Yet for Sarmatia’s tears of blood atone, And make her arm puissant as your own! Oh! once again to Freedom’s cause return The patriot Tell – the Bruce of Bannockburn! (403–10)

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Considering the poem’s earlier praise for ‘Newton, priest of nature’ (127) and the ‘Swedish sage’ Linnaeus (135), this turn to spiritual assistance from medieval warriors seems particularly suspect. While Britons gain hope from the latest scientific discoveries, the Poles must conjure ‘spirits of the mighty dead’ and wait for heroes who ‘slumber yet in uncreated dust’ (466). If Campbell intended the Poland passage as an actual call to arms, subsequent and related passages on Africa and India lessen its polemical force. Leaving Poland, Campbell’s narrator turns to the injustices of the slave trade. Trade, wealth, and fashion, ask you still to bleed, And holy men give Scripture for the deed; Scourged and debased, no Briton stoops to save A wretch, a coward; yes, because a slave! (485–8) Significantly the poet does not call on any spirits to ‘burst the Libyan’s adamantine bands’ (478). Unlike the Poles before or the Indians who follow, the slaves live beyond the realm of hope. They are linked rhetorically to the Poles a few lines later, however, when Campbell describes a Congo chieftain with ‘strength in his arm, and lightning in his eye’ (506) a description that borrows from line 378 (quoted above). That strength fails to aid the chief or his people, ‘For ever fallen! no son of Nature now, / With Freedom chartered on his manly brow!’ (513–14). The poet moves next to Europe’s colonial enterprise in India. The ‘bold route of Europe’s guilt,’ with its pun on culpability and cash, displaces Timour’s rule of India, an injustice that inspires the ‘guardian spirits’ of Hinduism to rise in vengeance (559, 573). He comes! Dread Brama shakes the sunless sky With murmuring wrath, and thunders from on high; Heaven’s fiery horse, beneath his warrior form, Paws the light clouds, and gallops on the storm! (587–90) These ‘guardian spirits’ bring to mind the ‘departed spirits’ of Bruce and Tell who will one day aid the Poles. Yet they also suggest that both India and Poland remain beyond the benefits of European Enlightenment. Altogether Campbell devotes almost three hundred lines to the partition of Poland, the enslavement of Africa, and the colonization of India. To Campbell these were the salient injustices of the era, though his poem clearly differentiates between the British, enlightened by science and hope, and the ‘barbarous


hordes on Scythian mountains’ (335), who must rely on various spirits for their own liberation. By moving contemporary political realities beyond immediate solutions and into the ambiguous realm of hope, Campbell invites feelings of sympathy rather than action. As Campbell notes in the poem’s famous opening passage, ‘’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view’ (7). Like the engravings of Ko´sciuszko as enfeebled leader, Campbell’s representation encourages an emotional response from the public, but it also encourages the idea that Poland is a distant, unfamiliar land beyond the help of Great Britain. Furthermore, ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ equates Russia’s savagery in Poland with Britain’s savagery in Africa and India, and it is difficult to believe that the British reading public would accept this. History would soon give Campbell’s vision an ironic spin: not in Africa or India, but in the Caribbean. After the third partition, many of Ko´sciuszko’s former soldiers joined the French forces, hoping to be rewarded after the war with the sovereignty of their nation. Instead some 6000 were sent to the Caribbean in 1802 to restore French control. William Stanley Roscoe captured the irony in his poem ‘On the Last Regiment of Polish Patriots Being Ordered by the French Government to Serve in the Island of St. Domingo’: Condemn’d to stem the western wave, And crush the pale and struggling slave, Who dar’d like us to clothe his breast In Freedom’s red and martial vest. To scorn the tyrant’s scowling eye, And snatch the wreath of liberty! (9–14) On 28 January 1804, after the proclamation of Haitian independence, The Times suggested ‘the nations of Europe be taught an example of resistance, even from the sooty African!’ and lamented ‘the unhappy Poles,’ misled by Napoleon’s promises, who ‘ended lives, distinguished by combating for their native soil and their King, in fighting the desperate and wicked battles of his [Napoleon’s] perfidious ambition.’ The Times chose to ignore Britain’s own ‘desperate and wicked battles’ in the Caribbean, which had coincided with Russia’s invasion of Poland. Napoleon eventually created a Duchy of Warsaw in 1807, but for many Poles it was a reward short lived. Only one-fifth of the 90,000 Polish troops who followed Napoleon into Russia returned to their homeland alive (Schama 47–8). Such later debacles probably reassured a British public which, by the late 1790s, were learning to read Poland and Ko´sciuszko as symbols of bravery that led not to freedom but to defeat, exile, and colonization. Like the enslavement

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of Africa or the occupation of India, the partition of Poland became a reality, something detestable but ultimately tolerated. Political and economic necessity determined Poland’s fate; the British saw a greater danger in opposing Russia’s imperialist tendencies, particularly in light of Napoleon’s continued belligerence. Imaging Poland as colonized, imaging its leader as effeminate and feeble, only made this supposed necessity more convincing.

Conclusion It is easy to see why Ko´sciuszko – veteran of the American Revolution, national freedom fighter, disabled but stoic visitor to London – appealed to early Romantic-era writers. Poland’s 1791 constitutional reform and the Ko´sciuszko Uprising had clear associations with the French Revolution. Thus those sympathetic towards France – Charlotte Smith, the young Coleridge and Wordsworth – felt similarly towards Poland. In some sense the mere mention of the word Poland gained radical force after 1794, because it stood for a signifier whose signified had been swallowed up by the allies of Britain, allies who might otherwise have assisted in the war with France. By continuing to call for a sovereign Polish nation, politicians like Fox and writers like Coleridge and Campbell reminded the British public of the hypocrisy of the British government, which honored revolutions as long as they did not succeed. But there remains something troubling about these artists’ willingness to honor the suffering of another. In an 1824 article on ‘Landor’s Imaginary Conversations’ – a work which, coincidentally, included an imagined conversation between Ko´sciuszko and his comrade Józef Poniatowski – William Hazlitt suggests that the Lake Poets’ disdain of Napoleon resulted from a jealousy of his success: The power he wielded, the situation he occupied, excited their envy, much more than the stand he made against the common enemy, their gratitude. They were ready enough at times to pull down kings, but they hated him worse who trampled, by his own might on their necks – as more rivals to themselves, as running in the same race, and going further in it. (10: 245) Simon Bainbridge expands on Hazlitt’s idea in Napoleon and English Romanticism, showing the sense of competition poets like Byron and Wordsworth felt towards Napoleon. No such spirited rivalry could have existed with a man in prison or living in exile. The fact that Wordsworth wrote his sonnet to Toussaint only after his subject’s defeat, or that Coleridge wrote his to Lafayette only after the French general’s imprisonment, suggests an interesting insight into the relation of Romantic poet and Romantic hero. Perhaps it was Ko´sciuszko’s failure,


his inability to go further in the race, that made him most sympathetic to the Romantics. Elsewhere Hazlitt writes that Edmund Burke ‘extols the Polish Revolution as a monument of wisdom and virtue (I suppose because it had not succeeded)’ (3: 32). The Times, not long after Ko´sciuszko’s defeat (and apparent death), gave this ironic account: ‘Poor Kosciusko was lugged in by the head and shoulders at the last meeting of the Whig Club, and the HEALTH of the dead Patriot given, with great gravity, by an Irish Member. Was not this something like the exclamation of a Knight of the POLE in the garden, “Arrah, long life to you, honey, after you’re dead!!”’ (14 November 1794). While British writers and politicians were pleased to voice their general support for liberty, more difficult and specific questions persisted: would Ko´sciuszko’s success have helped Britain? Or would it have simply added another uncertainty to an already uncertain world? Romantic-era writers and artists lived at a time when other peoples and other cultures could be written down without first-hand experience, or as Carl Woodring described it, with ‘a sense . . . of imagination as the sympathetic movement from self into others’ (English 330). Many of the most remarkable artists of the Romantic era took up the cause of Poland and helped make Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko a household name in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Occasionally, as in the works of West and Coleridge, these artists captured the ambiguities and complexities of 1790s Europe. Other works, like the engravings of Sharp and Cardon and Campbell’s poem, left a favorable impression of Polish refugees that perhaps inspired the generosity of later Britons. But during the first decades of the nineteenth century, their words and images also made Ko´sciuszko and his homeland familiar symbols of exile, suffering, and defeat.

3 Hero between Genres: Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw

As an early experiment in historical fiction, Jane Porter’s 1803 Thaddeus of Warsaw caused some confusion among its first readers. Impressed by Porter’s detailed descriptions of the 1794 Ko´sciuszko Uprising and her use of historical personages like Ko´sciuszko and King Stanisław as supporting characters, readers were not sure whether to treat the work as fact or fiction. Jane wrote her sister Anna Maria that one friend of the family ‘has read it twice thro’ – and concluded that all the military Scenes, & Speeches were copied from some other work.’1 General William Gardiner, a former British minister to the Polish court, was surprised that he had never met Porter in Warsaw, for he assumed (incorrectly) that only an eyewitness could describe the uprising so realistically.2 Even the naval hero Sir Sidney Smith, to whom Porter dedicated the first edition, requested clarification from the author. After reading the preface and first chapter, he wrote Porter for ‘some key to judge how much is fiction & how much reality – Surely much fiction cannot have been required to render the History of Koskiusko romantic & interesting!’3 Smith’s error is occasionally repeated by contemporary scholars who assume that Thaddeus of Warsaw is a fictionalized biography of Ko´sciuszko, just as Porter’s next novel, The Scottish Chiefs, adapts the story of Scottish national hero William Wallace. In fact Porter did something else in the opening volume of Thaddeus of Warsaw: she created a youthful fictional hero, Thaddeus Sobieski, and placed him in the midst of an epoch-making military campaign, surrounded by historical figures. Eleven years before the publication of Waverley, Porter introduced the fundamental form of the historical novel to British readers. Porter was a confident innovator. ‘[P]referring a series of incidents, which are true and interesting, before a legend of war fabricated by my own hand, I have made no hesitation to accept truth as the helpmate of fiction,’ she explained in the first edition’s preface. Porter’s confidence no doubt resulted from her previous and varied experiences as a writer. Though she rarely admitted it in later years, Thaddeus of Warsaw was her third published fiction, following 66

Hero between Genres: Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw 67

her anonymous 1799 Gothic novel The Spirit of the Elbe and an 1801 work for young people, The Two Princes of Persia. With her brother and sister she had contributed to a short-lived periodical called The Quiz (1796–97), and in 1800 she authored (or co-authored, with Anna Maria) a 42-page pamphlet entitled A Defense of the Profession of an Actor. Her letters from the 1790s mention the occasional publications of poems or stories, and she helped compose the descriptive pamphlets that accompanied her brother Robert Ker Porter’s earliest military panoramas.4 As a veteran of the London publishing world, then, Porter recognized that the first volume of Thaddeus of Warsaw was breaking new ground and deserved careful attention. Her preface nearly chides the prospective reader for peeking ahead: should the Reader be so candid as to wish to proceed, I must beg him to peruse the whole of the first volume. Aware that war and politics are not promising subjects of amusement, it is requisite to assure him that he needs not to be alarmed at its battles; they are neither frequent, nor do they last long; and, I request him not to pass over any scene as extraneous, which, though it begin like a state-paper or a sermon, always terminates by casting some new light on the portrait of the hero. As a reward for her reader’s diligence, Porter promised that the rest of her novel would take place on more familiar terrain: ‘As the three remaining volumes are totally confined to domestic events, [readers] have none of these prejudices to encounter’ (xx). But Porter’s escape from one generic hybrid only leads to a second. Though it is true that her narrative moves from the Polish battlefields of volume one to the English drawing rooms of volumes two through four, these later volumes produced a different though related discomfort among readers about Porter’s mixture of reality and fiction. For the eponymous hero of Thaddeus of Warsaw brings to high-society London all the gallantry and sentimentality previously endemic to the romance genre. Thaddeus defends women from bullies, rescues children from fires, cares for the sick and impoverished, avoids the temptations of a married woman, and finally marries a virtuous Englishwoman. In short, he acts the chivalric hero far better than any Englishman in the novel. What happens when you transplant the protagonist of a continental romance into an English domestic novel? It depends on the reader. Thomas Campbell, a friend of the Porters, wrote to Jane, ‘I have none but Thaddeus for my companion & I assure you I love him sincerely – We are inseparable friends – What a pity that such a man does not exist – but he does exist – I see him & hold dialogues with him.’5 Though Campbell’s final qualifying phrases do honor to Porter’s creative genius, his uncertainty about the existence of a man as

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remarkable as Thaddeus Sobieski suggests his discomfort with Porter’s mingling of history and romance. A less subtle response to Porter’s hero appeared in Prodigious!!! or, Childe Paddie in London (1818), where the anonymous author complained ‘Thaddeus, that elegant Pole, is a monster, being unnaturally perfect; There’s no such thing in nature; and you draw / A faultless monster which the world ne’er saw’ (1: 127). Thomas Hood lamented that gallant heroes like Thaddeus Sobieski and William Wallace caused their readers to live in a dream world: Would I had never drunk so deep Of dear Miss Porter’s vat; I only turn to life, and weep – There’s no Romance in that! (228) If at least some male readers felt threatened because Thaddeus Sobieski was a gentleman beyond competition, many female readers were ready to embrace (literally and figuratively) Porter’s Polish hero. In Scottish author Mary Brunton’s 1810 novel Self-Control, Laura describes her favorite literary figure: ‘I prefer the hero of Miss Porter’s new publication – Thaddeus of Warsaw. Truly generous, and inflexibly upright, his very tenderness has in it something manly and respectable; and the whole combination has an air of nature that interests one as for a real friend’ (136). Later female writers, more so than their male counterparts, followed Porter by including remarkable Polish exiles in their fiction. As I argue in later chapters, the brave and beautiful hero of Claire Clairmont’s short story ‘The Pole,’ the honorable Casimir of Mary Shelley’s Lodore, and Will Ladislaw of George Eliot’s Middlemarch all owe a debt to Thaddeus Sobieski. In Thaddeus of Warsaw itself, almost every female character falls in love with Thaddeus. This displeased Thomas Carlyle, who otherwise admired Porter’s novel: ‘Why does she delight in unfolding the forward weakness of the female heart, and making even [the respectable heroine] Mary Beaufort love first?’ (42). Carlyle’s discomfort points to one of Porter’s central successes: she created a hero as beloved by female characters in the novel as by female (and some male) readers in the real world. But Carlyle misses a certain subtlety in Porter’s moral message. For Porter, there are right and wrong reasons to fall in love with a manly yet tender Polish exile, just as there are right and wrong reasons for reading a novel. Mary Beaufort reads and falls for the right reasons: not simply romance, but also history. Those characters in the novel who insist on seeing Thaddeus solely as a hero of romance and not a victim of history receive far less favorable outcomes. Jane Porter was one of the most popular novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century; her fame extended throughout Europe and across the


Atlantic. Three of her novels were republished repeatedly during her lifetime, and throughout her career she produced short stories, poetry, articles, and a remarkable quantity of correspondence, much of which has survived. At age 65 Porter wrote with pride of her and her sister’s life together, spent ‘in happy seclusion, publishing, in succession, those works which the British public, and indeed the rest of the reading parts of the World, have stamped with a repeated approbation of their undeviating blameless, and virtuous tendency.’6 Given the sustained interest in women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is surprising that contemporary literary scholars have taken so long to consider Porter’s work. Only her fourth novel, The Scottish Chiefs, has received substantial critical notice,7 although it was Thaddeus of Warsaw that first gained her national and international acclaim. Revisionary studies of the 1990s like Ina Ferris’s Achievement of Literary Authority and Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism made clear that the ‘National Tales’ and regional novels of Lady Morgan and Maria Edgeworth were important precursors to Scott’s cross-cultural narratives. Far from being the only Romantic-era novelist to explore historical change, Scott in fact drew on a host of earlier and contemporary writers. Still, neither Lady Morgan nor Maria Edgeworth attempted to describe the central narrative concern of Scott’s most influential novels: the meeting of feudal and modern cultures in an era of war. Porter alone anticipates Scott in placing her protagonists in the midst of military upheaval. Though fictional hero Thaddeus Sobieski clearly owes much to the historical hero Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko, he is buffeted by the forces of history in ways that anticipate Scott’s protagonists. As with Scott’s novels, there is also a pedagogical purpose to Porter’s opening volume: as representatives of a disappearing feudal paradise, Thaddeus and his countrymen serve as models of chivalric behavior to a visiting Englishman, Pembroke Somerset, who records his discoveries in letters sent back to England. When the setting shifts from romantic Poland to contemporary London, Porter seems to abandon the historical romance for a more familiar domestic narrative. But this is not exactly the case. In fact the struggle between romance and history enacted at the generic level in the first volume is supplanted in succeeding volumes by a struggle between romance and history at the narrative level. If Pembroke Somerset reads into the Polish landscape a history of feudal gallantry, then Thaddeus’s acquaintances in London read into him a history of fictional romance. Having barely survived being the plaything of continental change, Porter’s magnanimous hero must now survive being the plaything of spoiled British women, who insist on seeing him not as a struggling refugee but as their own Werther or Romeo. If Porter’s readers were not sure whether to read the first volume of Thaddeus of Warsaw as history or romance, Porter’s female characters face a similar challenge in determining how to read Thaddeus Sobieski. Porter rewards sensitive readers like Mary Beaufort, who love Thaddeus as a man rather than as a national hero. Paradoxically,

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however, Mary’s reward comes at the cost of historical memory: for Thaddeus, living happily ever after in England means forgetting Poland.

From Tadeusz to Thaddeus Porter never mentions Ko´sciuszko in the first edition preface of Thaddeus of Warsaw, but his influence on her conception of Thaddeus Sobieski is beyond debate. For Porter, as for so many of her contemporaries, Ko´sciuszko embodied a remarkable nexus of Romanticism and Sensibility: the moment when the sublime military hero falls, and accepts his fall with humility and concern for others. This is why Robert Southey’s baker ‘burst into tears,’ why Richard Warner’s ‘eye filled with tears’ at the sight of Ko´sciuszko. And this was the condition that Porter undertook to describe in Thaddeus of Warsaw. ‘Wishing to pourtray a character which Prosperity could not intoxicate, nor Adversity depress, I chose Magnanimity as the subject of my story,’ she wrote in the preface (viii). ‘Poland seemed the country best calculated to promote my intention. Her struggles for independence, and her misfortunes, afforded me situations exactly fitted to my plan’ (ix–x). Porter had good reason to be well informed about Ko´sciuszko. Though originally from Durham, the Porters were living in Leicester Square at the time of Ko´sciuszko’s 1797 London visit. Jane’s brother Robert met Ko´sciuszko, perhaps accompanying his teacher Benjamin West, who was also a friend of the Porter family.8 As discussed in Chapter 2, her sister Anna Maria composed the quatrain that appears on the Cosway/Cardon engraving, for which Ko´sciuszko wrote her a letter of thanks.9 The Porters admired Coleridge and knew Campbell, and both poets are quoted in Thaddeus of Warsaw. In 1819 Porter dedicated the tenth edition of Thaddeus of Warsaw to the memory of Ko´sciuszko, whose character, she wrote, offered the ‘completest exemplar’ of the ‘radical difference between the hero and the mere soldier of fortune.’ Porter’s decision to create a magnanimous fictional hero modeled on Ko´sciuszko must have seemed the logical step after the many prose descriptions that had already given his public and private life mythic proportions, always mixing his greatness with defeat. His romantic but unsuccessful elopement, which led to his leaving Poland for the American Revolution, was highlighted in most biographical sketches. In her 1795 Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, Helen Maria Williams added to the myth by narrating Ko´sciuszko’s gallant attempt in Paris to save the pregnant Polish Princess Lubomirska from the guillotine. . . . friends gave information of her danger to Kosciusko, the Polish general, and desired his interposition in her behalf. Kosciusko instantly dispatched a letter to Robespierre, declaring that the Princess Lubomirska had ever shown


the most devoted attachment to the principles of liberty, and conjuring Robespierre to spare the life of a zealous friend to the common cause in which France and Poland were engaged. Robespierre, after reading the letter, exclaimed, ‘Quoi! Grace pour une princess! – Ah, Kosciusko – qu’on la guillotine.’ The unhappy princess, having miscarried, was immediately sent to execution. (Williams, Eye-Witness 174–5) Williams’s anecdote offers a striking and oft-repeated contrast between the bloodthirsty French and the decent Poles, who maintain both their republican ideals and their honor. Ko´sciuszko’s defense of a noblewoman intimates that he has retained that chivalrous disposition which Burke had recently declared dead. But it is also significant that his plea for mercy fails. Williams was describing events from 1793, but she published them in 1795, after the final partition of Poland. Ko´sciuszko’s inability to rescue a noble countrywoman and soon-tobe mother suggests an allegory for a much greater failure, his inability to save his motherland. But if Williams nudges the story of Ko´sciuszko towards fiction, it was Charlotte Smith who first manipulated aspects of Ko´sciuszko’s life in order to create a fictional character. In The Banished Man (1794), an early description of the old Polish soldier Carlowitz with his daughter Alexina uncannily anticipates the visual images of Ko´sciuszko from a few years later: ‘they found him risen from his miserable couch, and sitting on its side, but too weak to support himself, he leaned against his daughter, who hung over him with the tenderest solicitude’ (2: 48). Though Carlowitz expresses republican values, he also admires beneficent nobility: his ‘eyes flashed fire as he uttered the eulogium of the king of Poland’ (2: 57). Like Williams in her anecdote of Ko´sciuszko, Smith stresses Carlowitz’s disappointment with the French: during a visit to Paris, Carlowitz ‘saw and heard actions and language more inimical to the cause of the real liberty and happiness of mankind, than could have proceeded from the united efforts of every despot that had ever insulted the patience of the world’ (4: 59–60). At the novel’s conclusion his daughter Alexina marries the Englishman Ellesmere, offering an earlier if more conventional (because the husband is English) Anglo-Polish marriage. Like Thaddeus of Warsaw, The Banished Man mixes history with romance by placing its chivalric heroes in the realistically portrayed aftermath of the French Revolution. But Smith’s novel was only a minor success, barely reaching a second edition. The popularity and influence of Porter’s novel was on a completely different scale. ‘On the publication of “Thaddeus of Warsaw,”’ wrote Robert Gillies, ‘I remember that our exemplary world, owlish and obtuse as it usually is in detecting the finer shades of excellence, was yet undeniably struck’ (2: 213). Henry Crabb Robinson declared Thaddeus ‘a novel of very great

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merit . . . Thaddeus is a truly magnanimous hero.’ Though Porter lacked the comic skills of Maria Edgeworth or Frances Burney, she was ‘infinitely superior’ to Edgeworth ‘in her conception of a story’ (1: 146–7). According to William Maginn, Thaddeus ‘had the honour of being proscribed by the first Napoleon; – made its way by translations into nearly every country in Europe; – and gained for its authoress, her election, at the instance of the Grand Duke of Wurtemburg, as lady-canoness of the Teutonic Order of St. Joachim’ (quoted in Bates 310). Percy Shelley was said to have chosen to live on London’s Poland Street in 1811 because ‘it reminded him of Thaddeus of Warsaw and of freedom’ (Hogg 1: 297). In 1815 a 20-year-old Thomas Carlyle thanked a friend for suggesting Porter’s novel: ‘You recommended Thaddeus of Warsaw long ago you may remember – and the work in my judgement fully deserves it’ (42). Remembering his adolescent reading tastes, William Makepeace Thackeray wrote to a friend in 1848, ‘Why, we used to admire the Scottish chiefs once and cry over Thaddeus of Warsaw. Fond follies of youth!’ (Letters 2: 429). In The Newcomes (1854), Thackeray transferred his own feelings to the young artist John James: ‘How he has blistered Thaddeus of Warsaw with his tears, and drawn him in his Polish cap, and tights, and Hessians!’ (159). In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), the aptly-named Miss Pole compares the traveling conjurer Signor Brunoni to the heroes of Jane and Anna Maria Porter’s novels: ‘He spoke such pretty broken English, I could not help thinking of Thaddeus of Warsaw, and the Hungarian Brothers, and Santo Sebastiani; and while I was busy picturing his past life to myself, he had bowed me out of the room’ (130). The popularity of Porter’s novel was even greater in the United States. In the nineteenth century, many American children were named Thaddeus, after Porter’s hero, the most prominent being the Civil War veterans Theodore Thaddeus Sobieski Laidley (1822–86) and Thaddeus Sobieski Lowe (1832– 1913).10 The towns of Warsaw, Kentucky and Warsaw, North Carolina took their common name not from a preponderance of Polish settlers but rather from Porter’s novel.11 The popular writers N.P. Willis and Theodore Fay were admirers and correspondents of Porter, and the book appears in the libraries of Herman Melville and William Faulkner. Ambrose Bierce makes an irreverent reference to it in The Devil’s Dictionary.12 It may seem surprising that a Polish exile should become a British fictional favorite in 1803, just as the Treaty of Amiens was disintegrating and war with France renewed. Though Ko´sciuszko had retired to the French countryside and refused to support Napoleon, many of his former comrades fought for the French, a fact well documented in contemporary British newspapers. Porter succeeded in creating an idealized, unthreatening image of the Polish exile by manipulating both history and romance. In the 1790s, Williams and Smith acknowledged the philosophical connections between Polish and French revolutionaries but made strong distinctions between the actions of their leaders.


By contrast, Porter hardly mentions the French Revolution at all. Instead she subtly associates the Ko´sciuszko Uprising with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and strongly suggests that Poland has more in common with Plantagenet England than with revolutionary France. In doing so Porter moves closer to the mature form of the British historical novel, which typically requires a temporal setting before the author’s lifetime. But this time shift also allows her to suppress the contemporary, revolutionary sources of the Ko´sciuszko Uprising. Chronotopically situated beyond the influence of the French Revolution, Porter’s Polish hero becomes a supporter of the ancient regimes of Europe, defending a good king from Russian invaders. Thus in Porter’s retelling, the failure of the Ko´sciuszko Uprising becomes a failure of old British rather than new French ideals. Once the narrative moves to London, Porter must necessarily employ different strategies of political suppression. Fortunately for her, British artists and writers (including her sister) had already provided a blueprint. Porter builds her characterization of Thaddeus Sobieski upon the visual and poetic representations of Ko´sciuszko discussed in the previous chapter, furthering the feminization and domestication of the Polish exile by placing Thaddeus at the beck and call of an assortment of English women, who see him as a figure of continental romance rather than a penniless refugee. By placing her romantic hero in a narrative borrowed from Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney, Porter effectively restricts the trope of revolution to private purposes. All the chivalric signifiers of Poland celebrated in the first volume are focused onto Thaddeus, who becomes an initiator of personal rather than political change. Just as the opening volume of Thaddeus of Warsaw pushes the romance genre into uncharted historical territory, these later volumes extend the domestic novel into unfamiliar ethnic territory, indicting the xenophobia of Porter’s era by suggesting that the perfect British gentleman might well be (half) Polish. But they offer little hope to those Polish refugees in London who dreamed of restoring the sovereignty of their homeland.

Romancing history Porter’s willingness to ‘accept truth as the helpmate of fiction’ is evident on the first page of Thaddeus of Warsaw. The novel opens in early 1792, at the ‘large and magnificent palace of Villanow’ outside Warsaw (1: 1). Built a century earlier for King John III Sobieski, this historical palace is home to three generations of fictional descendants: the Palatine Constantine (‘the first Polish nobleman, who granted freedom to his peasants’), his daughter Therese, and his grandson Thaddeus (1: 2). As Thaddeus prepares to depart Villanow in order to join Ko´sciuszko’s army, his mother gives him a long letter relating the story of Thaddeus’s unknown father, an English gentleman named Sackville,

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whom Therese had secretly married during a visit to Italy. Fittingly for a work that plays between history and romance, this unhappy union echoes James Edward Stuart’s 1719 Italian marriage to Clementina Sobieska – a real descendant of John III – as well as an earlier fictional rendition of this historical match, and one much admired by Porter: the Italian encounter of Sir Charles Grandison and Clementina della Poretta.13 In Porter’s retelling, however, the Briton must shoulder all blame. Not long after the secret marriage, Sackville disappears, imploring Therese in a letter to ‘[f]orget the ceremony which has passed between us . . . I am going where all search will be vain’ (1: 19). By making Sackville the villain of this tale, Porter subverts her readers’ Gothic expectations: the danger comes not from a German prince or an Italian monk but from a British gentleman, who disrupts the political and social order of another nation. Significantly, these events – and thus also Thaddeus’s conception and birth – occur in the early 1770s, precisely the moment of the first partition of Poland and the era of a new wave of Polish nationalism. Through Sackville’s domestic failure to provide for his Polish wife and son, Porter suggests a concomitant national failure: having fathered the independent spirit of Poland, England abandons its offspring. As Constantine, Thaddeus, and General Butzou travel towards Ko´sciuszko’s camp, the Palatine edifies his melancholy grandson with the story of the September 1771 kidnapping of Stanisław II. The story allows Porter to introduce more historical material to her tale, and it foreshadows the hardships Thaddeus will face as his tale proceeds. But it also clarifies Porter’s monarchist views. Stanisław appears as a model of royal behavior, showing magnanimity to his would-be captor and kindness to his people. ‘To preserve the life of such a sovereign,’ says the Palatine, ‘who is there that would not sacrifice his own?’ (1: 47). Thus a characteristic that had been significant but secondary in Williams and Smith – the Polish hero’s respect for responsible nobility – becomes central to Porter’s vision. As Nicola Watson notes, the contemporary threat from Napoleon forces a shift in representation: Ko´sciuszko and his followers become supporters of the ancient regimes of Europe, against the Jacobins, and revolutionary only in the Jacobitical sense: fighting a revolution in order to preserve or restore patrilineality (122–3). Given the historical links between the Stuarts and Sobieskis as well as Porter’s personal interest in Scottish history, Watson is right to highlight the similarities between the Jacobite movement and Porter’s portrayal of the Ko´sciuszko Uprising. But this passage also subtly links Poland with an earlier moment in British history. When General Butzou praises Stanisław for ‘the happy tendency of the glorious constitution of ninety-one,’ Porter’s use of the adjective ‘glorious’ is no accident (1: 48). Here she follows Horace Walpole and Edmund Burke in comparing 1791 Poland with 1688 England.14 The comparison sets Poland at least a century behind Britain – for Porter, not a bad place to be, as we shall see – and it introduces a positive


association between the two countries that offsets the negative influence of the Englishman Sackville. That association is soon made manifest on the battlefield, when Thaddeus discovers a young Englishman named Pembroke Somerset among the Russian prisoners. Moved by Sobieski’s generosity and gallantry, Pembroke realizes that he has been led astray by his Russophile tutor, who has taught him that the Poles are barbarians deserving of colonization. Thaddeus returns home with his new English friend, who writes long letters to his mother in Britain describing ‘the domestic felicity’ of Villanow (1: 86). These letters make evident what the narrative had previously only implied: that Poland has retained the honor and gallantry that the youth of both France and England have lost. Pembroke praises the Palatine in terms more evangelical than Godwinian, reinforcing the distinction between Polish and French reform: ‘The understandings of his peasants are awakened to all useful knowledge: he does not put books of science and speculation into their hands vainly to consume their time in idleness. He gives them the Bible, and implements of industry, to afford them the means of knowing, and of practicing their duty’ (1: 90). Moreover, his letters follow Thomas Campbell’s verse in locating Poland in an earlier, feudal stage of history. Pembroke feels ‘all the ancient pride of a Briton distend his breast, when he thought, that such men as these are, his ancestors were’ (1: 87). For Porter, however, this is a stage of history that may well be preferable to the present. It certainly alters Pembroke’s world view: ‘I found myself all at once carried back into the fifteenth century; and might have fancied myself within the courtly halls of our Tudors and Plantagenets’ (1: 97). Comparing his own education to that of Thaddeus, he writes, ‘Whilst I abused the indulgence of my parents, and wasted my days in riding, shooting, and walking the streets, he was learning to act, as a man of rank ought to act’ (1: 99). A visit to the rooms of John Sobieski inspires Pembroke to meditate on an irony of European history that would preoccupy supporters of Poland throughout the nineteenth century: ‘here, are suspended the arms, with which he saved those kingdoms, which are now coalescing to the destruction of Poland’ (1: 98). These passages complicate Peter Garside’s contention that ‘it was Lady Morgan who first established the motif of the alien English visitor, whose fiction most strikingly embodied the clash of opposing national cultures, and who most palpably held out the need for reconciliation as a national panacea’ (51). Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale appeared in 1806, and she may well have been influenced by Pembroke’s Polish education in Thaddeus of Warsaw. But these passages also clarify Porter’s pedagogical agenda. Pembroke has come to Villanow not to defend Poland but rather to learn from it, and then to carry that learning back to Britain. Poland in the 1790s, Porter suggests, was a fifteenth-century time capsule where the chivalrous gentleman, a species rarer than the Lithuanian bison, had survived; but whose time, like

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the bison’s, was running out. ‘The noble dead appear to address me from their graves,’ Pembroke tells his mother, ‘and I blush, at the inglorious life I might have pursued, had I never visited this house, and its inhabitants’ (1: 98–9). Porter’s first readers knew that Pembroke arrived just in time: within a year of his visit, Poland would disappear as a sovereign state. While Pembroke has discovered old England at Villanow, his tutor Mr Loftus has fallen under the sensual spell of St Petersburg. He is pursuing the Baroness Surowkoff, who in name approximates the Russian General Suvorov (or Suwarrow, as Porter has it) but in Loftus’s description resembles Catherine the Great: ‘The Baroness, I need not observe, is as handsome as she is ingenious; her understanding is as masculine, as her person is lovely’ (1: 109–10). Loftus, like Britain’s leaders, has fallen prey to Russian intrigues. Fearing that Pembroke’s unplanned visit to Poland will upset his parents, Loftus even manages to intercept Pembroke’s letters, thus making sure that his sympathetic descriptions of Villanow never reach England. Somerset may be attracted to his feudal paradise; but, unlike Edward Waverley, he does not stay to fight for it. In fact he cannot stay to fight for it, for doing so would dilute the moral message of Porter’s narrative. The underlying contention of Porter’s first volume is that Britain failed in its moral responsibility to aid Poland against the partitioning powers. If Pembroke stays and fights, the novel becomes an insincere fantasy of British heroism. Having absorbed the noble lessons of Villanow, Pembroke departs for Britain just as King Stanisław annuls the 3 May Constitution and Thaddeus returns to battle. As the narrative shifts from historical romance to romantic history, the closeness in Porter’s mind between her fictional hero and his historical inspiration becomes most apparent. Porter places Thaddeus beside Ko´sciuszko at several battles and at the first, successful defense of Warsaw. Thaddeus is also present at Maciejowice when Ko´sciuszko falls, hearing the Coleridgean/Campbellian ‘piercing shrieks’ that echo ‘from rank to rank’ when the Polish soldiers believe their leader dead (1: 152). Ko´sciuszko is literally in Thaddeus’s arms, bleeding on him, when the two are struck simultaneously. Ko´sciuszko is taken prisoner; Thaddeus escapes by crossing a river, only to discover the lifeless body of his grandfather on the other side. Later, as Suvorov’s forces take Warsaw, Thaddeus races back to Villanow, where he finds his mother on her deathbed. ‘Should Poland become the property of other nations,’ she implores him, ‘go that very hour to England: That is a free country; and I have been told, the people are kind to the unfortunate’ (1: 181–2). As Devoney Looser has pointed out, ‘the military and the domestic fold together’ in these last pages of the first volume, as Thaddeus loses both nation and family (241). Learning that King Stanisław will soon surrender his people to ‘the power of Suwarrow, and that “foul woman of the North,” ’ (another quotation from Coleridge), Thaddeus departs for England (1: 196).15


In this opening volume, Porter anticipates several key aspects of the historical novel as employed by Walter Scott and elaborated by Georg Lukács. Porter introduces a degree of historical detail much admired by her early readers (among them General Gardiner). Furthermore, her story describes a critical historical moment, the final partition of Poland, when a feudal society is overrun by its militarily advanced neighbors. The historical moment is recent, but Pembroke’s epistolary descriptions of the feudal manners and surroundings of 1790s Warsaw compel readers to position Polish society at an earlier stage of history. As in Scott, historical figures (Ko´sciuszko, King Stanisław, Suvorov) appear in the background; the major characters are fictional. Though a victim of larger historical forces, Thaddeus Sobieski is not exactly a prototype for Scott’s ‘middle of the road’ protagonists; as an imaginary veteran of the Ko´sciuszko Uprising whose celebrity almost exceeds Ko´sciuszko’s, he might strike Waverley admirers as a strange hybrid of fame and fiction. But Pembroke Somerset, his British double, certainly fits Scott’s model. Like Waverley, Pembroke is an Englishman in an unfamiliar land at a moment of military crisis. Though associated with the apparent forces of modernity (in this case both England and Catherine’s Russia), he is captured by the enemy and falls in love with its feudal customs. Pembroke’s tutor, Mr Loftus, has encouraged his student’s Russian fantasy, just as Waverley’s tutor, the aptly named Mr Pembroke, encourages his student’s interest in English morality. While I am suggesting that the development of the British historical novel owes a considerable debt to Thaddeus of Warsaw that has long been overlooked, my goal here is not simply to shoehorn Porter’s Polish narrative into a Lukácsian interpretation of Scott. Porter herself did something like that in later years, adding long introductions and footnotes to her novels in imitation of the Waverley phenomenon. Porter’s representation of Poland occasionally refers to the different economic strata of 1790s Poland, but unlike Scott’s fiction, its overall focus remains on heroic nobility and military leaders. Her narrator never questions Pembroke Somerset’s romantic notions of Poland, the way a Scott narrator almost certainly would. But Porter was writing at a different moment from Scott, when traditional Europe was under threat. Boundaries were changing, countries were disappearing, kings and queens were vulnerable, and British soldiers – some of them friends of the Porters – were dying in distant lands. Scott, creating most of his novels after Waterloo, could write with less emotional investment, but he could do so because Porter had already cleared a space between historical and romantic writing in Thaddeus of Warsaw. In many ways, Porter’s novel becomes more interesting when she absorbs aspects of the historical romance into a more familiar domestic narrative. In these later volumes Porter investigates an important figure of British history that Scott neglects: the foreign exile who makes Britain his adopted home. In Britain Porter’s protagonist encounters a wider, more varied spectrum of

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society, and he becomes the lens through which Porter’s readers see the corruption and dishonesty of their homeland. As the representative of the historical romance carried over to the domestic novel, he also interrogates the romantic assumptions of Porter’s characters and her readers.

Thaddeus of London By the end of the first volume of Thaddeus of Warsaw, Thaddeus has suffered an enormous accumulation of personal loss: the myth of his father, his romanticizing of war; his namesake Ko´sciuszko; his grandfather; his mother; his motherland. Yet his escape to an unknown father’s land brings no immediate security. In Britain, Thaddeus struggles to survive, finding himself, in the words of Nicola Watson, ‘in a similar position to Frances Burney’s heroines’ (120). Watson’s comparison is telling: having introduced the form of the historical novel in volume one, Porter, like her protagonist, retreats to apparently safer territory: as promised in the preface, Porter ‘totally confine[s]’ her hero to those ‘domestic events’ that early nineteenth-century readers understood and expected from a novel. Since there is no longer a Poland to defend, Thaddeus’s quest turns inward. He finds a home, searches for Pembroke Somerset, falls in love, and eventually discovers the father who abandoned him. Along the way he serves as a model of virtue and magnanimity to practically everyone he meets. If it seems strange that an exiled Polish soldier could slip so easily into the storyline of a Burney heroine, it shouldn’t. British artists had already provided the model. Porter’s novel becomes a literary extension of the Cosway/Cardon engraving described in Chapter 2 for which her sister had recently composed the quatrain. Just as the engraving places Ko´sciuszko in a posture usually reserved for women, Porter transplants Thaddeus Sobieski from wartorn Poland into a narrative usually reserved for female characters. Such role reversals come naturally to comic novels – one thinks immediately of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones – but it is difficult to imagine the British soldier-hero of a serious novel placed in such conditions. It is Thaddeus’s nationality, I would argue, that permits this reversal. While narratives like Pamela and Clarissa revolve around fear of the violation of a female body by more powerful men, Thaddeus represents a country whose political body had already been violated by a powerful woman: Catherine the Great. The gender ambiguity of Porter’s hero appears even in the novel’s title, which hovers between the stand-alone first name typical of eponymous heroines (Pamela, Clarissa, Evelina, Emma) and the family or full name of eponymous heroes (Sir Charles Grandison, Joseph Andrews, Desmond, Frankenstein). Lady Morgan was no doubt cashing in on Porter’s success when she subtitled her 1809 novel of Greek independence Ida of Athens.


Thaddeus arrives in London stripped of all the wealth, power, and prestige that had previously surrounded him in Poland. Yet there are pedagogical advantages for a character coming from a perceived site of weakness. As Nancy Armstrong notes, ‘the explicitly female narrators of Pamela, Evelina, or The Mysteries of Udolpho are more effective [than their male counterparts] in launching a political critique because their gender identifies them as having no claim to political power’ (29). Thaddeus’s condition as a penniless exile allows him to come into contact with and influence a wide range of Londoners. In Poland Thaddeus’s skills as a role model were limited to men (like Pembroke), but in England the majority of his students are women. Count Sobieski’s introduction to London is far from welcoming. Hotel workers guess he is ‘one of the emigrant kings’ or ‘some Russian nobleman’ and subsequently bleed him of the few coins he has brought with him from Poland (1: 216); a Jewish cloth vendor buys a pelisse from Thaddeus for a sum ‘not above half what he wanted’ (2: 25); a picture dealer pretends the sketches Thaddeus offers him are worthless, hoping to get a better deal; British soldiers on leave mock him; and a doctor hesitates to treat him, assuming Thaddeus is one of the penniless French immigrants who (according to the doctor) ‘have covered our land, and destroyed its produce, like a swarm of filthy locusts’ (2: 10). Worst of all, he receives no response to the letters dispatched to his friend Pembroke Somerset. Not all of London is so selfish or insensitive: Porter is careful also to include a thoughtful landlady, a generous (but not Jewish) pawnbroker, a fair print-shop owner, and a humane doctor. But compared to feudal Poland, modern Britain is a dangerous, dishonest place, where a foreigner without wealth seems destined for prison. For many Britons, the narrator notes, ‘riches were a splendid and thick robe that concealed all blemishes’ (2: 13). Taking up residence in a modest house, Thaddeus adopts the pseudonym Mr Constantine, in memory of his grandfather. Exactly why Thaddeus hides his identity is unclear; but his dissimulation fittingly brings to mind the disguised knight of medieval romance who wanders the countryside in search of chivalric deeds. He is soon joined by his former comrade in arms, General Butzou, whom he discovers one day begging in the street. As the general convalesces, Thaddeus learns the importance of capital in 1790s Britain, paying the bills by producing (à la Ko´sciuszko) sketches of once-familiar continental landscapes. An act of gallantry brings him to the attention of Lady Tinemouth, who introduces Thaddeus to her friends, the clever Maria Egerton and the flirtatious Lady Sara Roos, and finds him employment, teaching German to the Dundas sisters. From this point Thaddeus lives a double life in London: when he is not caring for his sickly friend Butzou (and in doing so experiencing the trauma of his Polish past), he is gallantly chaperoning his female friends about town. If the opening volume of Thaddeus of Warsaw brought 1790s Poland to life with references to Ko´sciuszko, King Stanisław and historical battles, Porter peppers

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the second and third volumes with character cameos from London’s contemporary art culture. These include an (offstage) visit to Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestockings; an invitation to the Haymarket Theatre from its manager, George Coleman; a recital by the English opera sensation John Braham; and attendance at a performance by Charles Kemble in Kotzebue’s Sighs. This is the historical London that Thaddeus must make his way through. One could almost forget that throughout this period Britain was at war. Thaddeus’s varied experiences in London clarify the narrative’s move from public to private first signaled on the generic level by the shift from historical to domestic romance. While the historical romance encourages national fantasies, Porter’s version of the domestic romance privatizes the fantasy by focusing on a single national representative. Though Thaddeus remains sublimely courageous, his courage comes out in selfless attempts to alleviate the suffering of others: caring for Butzou, protecting Lady Tinemouth from an assailant, rescuing a child from a burning building. No longer capable of changing the fates of nations, he now changes the fates of individuals. Similarly, Thaddeus’s female acquaintances find in him exactly what Pembroke found in Poland: a desired narrative of chivalry. But while Porter’s narratorial silence suggests approval of Pembroke’s fantasy – she never critiques the romance of Pembroke’s lengthy letters – her narrator mocks or laments those women who indulge a similar fantasy in Thaddeus. One of Thaddeus’s German students, Euphemia Dundas, provides the most amusing example of this development. Euphemia is the product of an unbalanced literary diet: ‘Not content with devouring the elegant pages of Burney, Smith, and Gunning, she has flown with voracious appetite to sate herself on the “garbage” of any circulating library that fell in her way’ (2: 166).16 Unable to differentiate between fiction and reality, she asks Thaddeus if he ever met Werther and Charlotte in Germany. ‘No, Madam,’ he responds with a metatextual wink, ‘this lamentable story happened before I was born’ (2: 181). Thaddeus becomes the object of Euphemia’s literary fantasies, allowing her to imagine herself and Thaddeus as a variety of fictional couples: Eloisa and Abelard, Romeo and Juliet, Werther and Charlotte, Camilla and Edgar Mandelbert. Caught up in the world of London high society, the Dundases forget to pay Thaddeus for his lessons, an oversight that indirectly leads to Thaddeus’s imprisonment for debt. That the Dundas family wealth comes from ‘East Indian’ colonial interests only adds to the irony. A more complicated response to Thaddeus comes from Lady Sara Roos. Abandoned by a young marquis, Sara gets her revenge by marrying Captain Harry Roos, ‘a grandson of the Duke of Lincoln’ (2: 121). She soon realizes that her precipitate marriage was a mistake – here her narrative clearly echoes that of Thaddeus’s father – and, after Captain Roos leaves for the war, she fills her days ‘by amusing herself with the hearts of every man that came in her way’ (2: 122).


Lady Sara’s flirtations are thus an attack on British nobility but, more important for Porter, who was the daughter of a career army surgeon, a crime against Britain’s military. When Maria Egerton praises Thaddeus for his new British clothes (‘Now, you look like a Christian [sic]’), Lady Sara rather shockingly suggests that Thaddeus bears ‘a striking resemblance to George Barnwell’ (2: 148). Barnwell was the subject of George Lillo’s popular 1731 play The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell, in which a young man commits theft and murder in order to please a prostitute named Sarah.17 Thaddeus even fascinates (much to Thomas Carlyle’s chagrin) Mary Beaufort, the orphan daughter of an admiral and obvious foil to Lady Sara and Euphemia. In an interesting (but no longer surprising) role reversal, the narrator compares Mary to Petrarch: ‘Though separated far from this idol of her memory, thus was the impression which he had stamped on her heart, ever present. The shade of Laura visited the solitude of Vaucluse; the image of Constantine haunted the walks of Somerset’ (4: 75). Petrarch is perhaps one male role model that a woman may safely follow in Thaddeus of Warsaw. Unlike the flighty Euphemia or aggressive Sara, Mary admires Thaddeus at a distance, waiting for him to come to her. This contest between romance and reality is most memorably enacted at a performance of Kotzebue’s Sighs. Unaware of the play’s subject matter, Thaddeus accompanies Lady Sara, Maria Egerton, and Mary Beaufort to the Haymarket Theatre, where Charles Kemble – in reality a close acquaintance of the Porters – is playing the gallant Adelbert, a Swedish character in Kotzebue’s original but altered to a Pole in Prince Hoare’s 1799 English translation.18 Hoare’s invention was undoubtedly inspired by recent events in Poland and the 1797 visit of Ko´sciuszko. Indeed, Adelbert is yet another honorable Pole who still mourns his homeland: ‘To Poland,’ he declares, ‘to my struggling country, I sacrificed my wealth as I would have sacrificed my life, if she had required it. – My country is no more, and we are wanderers on a burthened earth, finding no refuge but in the hearts of the humane and virtuous’ (37). Though impoverished, he refuses an opportunity to make a fortune in the slave trade: ‘the bread I earn shall never force a tear from the helpless, nor bring remorse to my repast’ (41). Adelbert clearly influenced Porter as she created Thaddeus, and this episode presents another striking metatextual moment, as the most popular Polish exile of Romantic-era fiction sees himself in the most popular Polish exile of Romantic-era theater. As soon as Adelbert appears on stage, Thaddeus becomes disturbed ‘at the probability of seeing something to recall recollections he strove to banish.’ But Maria Egerton finds Adelbert an amusing confirmation that Thaddeus is more fiction than reality: ‘ “There, Constantine!” cried she, “look at Adelbert! Now, that is exactly the figure you cut in your Polish trumpery two months ago” ’ (3: 55). As the play adumbrates Adelbert’s exile and poverty – like

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Thaddeus, he is mocked for his poverty, and forced to pawn his mementos of Poland – Thaddeus is moved by the ‘passion and force’ of the story (3: 56). When Adelbert encounters ‘the innocent Rose,’ Sara, who has been watching Thaddeus, pours out her feelings to him. ‘ “Why?” asked her ladyship, in a tremulous and low tone; “why should we seek ideal sorrows, when those of our own hearts are beyond alleviation? Happy Rose!” sighed her ladyship. “Mr. Constantine,” continued she, “do not you think Adelbert consoled at least by the affection of that lovely woman?” ’ (3: 57–9). Sara abandons playing Sarah Millwood to Thaddeus’s George Barnwell if she can play Rose to his Adelbert – a new ruse for Lady Roos. Rather than suggesting a significant change in Lady Sara’s moral outlook, the scene more powerfully suggests Lady Sara’s inability to imagine Thaddeus beyond a melodramatic subtext and confirms her unsuitability as a romantic interest. The theater offers Thaddeus no similar escape from reality; in fact it heightens his sense of loss: ‘I am not very well. I wish I had not seen this play!’ (3: 59). While the stage allows each woman to indulge her romance of the continental exile, it forces Thaddeus to confront his own and his nation’s painful histories. Both Maria Egerton and Lady Sara are, like Euphemia Dundas, bad readers, unable to differentiate between reality and fiction. Mary Beaufort, by contrast, gazes on Thaddeus in anguish as he watches the stage, wishing to say ‘something of sympathy, of consolation,’ but too modest to do so (3: 57). She alone accurately reads Thaddeus’s suffering. The real object of Thaddeus’s own affections – besides his motherland, which cannot be restored – is Pembroke Somerset. Soon after arriving in London, Thaddeus tries to contact his old friend, but his letters go unanswered. He sees Pembroke enter a theater, waits outside all evening but is unable to find him after the performance. As several of Thaddeus’s friends know Pembroke, he appears in the narrative from time to time, but Thaddeus refuses to confront him with his apparent disregard. When the two are finally reunited, a new difficulty arises: Pembroke’s father refuses his son’s request that Thaddeus stay in their home. When Pembroke confronts Thaddeus with the news, their dialogue brings to mind the aftermath of a parent’s marriage refusal. . . . Pembroke observed his amazement which sat in his eyes, and laying his hand on his arm, ‘My dear, dear Sobieski!’ said he, ‘what do I not owe to you? Good Heaven, how humbled do I feel myself in your sight! But, there is a Power above, who knows how intimately you are woven with every artery of this heart.’ ‘I believe it, my kind Pembroke,’ cried Thaddeus, yet more alarmed than before; ‘Tell me what it is that distresses you? If my counsel, or my sympathy, can offer any thing to comfort or assist you, you know I am your own.’ Pembroke burst into tears, and covering his streaming eyes with his handkerchief, exclaimed, ‘I am indeed distressed; distressed even beyond your


comfort. Oh! how can I speak it! You will despise my father, Thaddeus! You will spurn me!’ (4: 127) Generous Robert Somerset, like Falkland in Caleb Williams, has been haunted for years by one secret, and Thaddeus’s arrival threatens to uncover it. When providence intervenes and forces an encounter between them, Somerset finally confesses to being the notorious Sackville, Thaddeus’s father. Somerset pleads that his denial had to do with inheritance: Thaddeus, as the elder son, now takes Pembroke’s place as the rightful heir. But Thaddeus, having promised his grandfather to retain the name Sobieski, will keep his new relation a secret, thus allowing Pembroke to remain sole inheritor. Gaining a father also means gaining a brother. The revealed blood ties between Pembroke and Thaddeus give a ‘rational’ explanation for their passionate relationship and also allow Thaddeus to marry. If he can’t have Pembroke, he can still have Pembroke’s wealthy cousin, Mary Beaufort, who has proved her worth by avoiding the romantic notions that overwhelm Euphemia Dundas and Lady Sara. Their eventual marriage brings peace to Robert Somerset’s guilt-ridden mind: ‘Mistress of immense wealth, her hand would put the injured Thaddeus in possession, not only of those pure delights dependent alone on mutual sympathy of soul, but again empower his munificent spirit to exert itself in the disposal of an almost princely fortune’ (4: 220–1). Thaddeus’s willingness to distribute his wife’s wealth among the needy again demonstrates how Thaddeus of Warsaw reverses the gender roles that had governed the domestic novel since Pamela. As Nancy Armstrong notes, Samuel Richardson’s ‘notion of charity filters the economic power of the male through the sympathy of the female’ (127). Yet here Mary provides the wealth and Thaddeus provides at least part of the sympathy. As Thaddeus and Mary prepare to wed, Pembroke falls in love with one Lady Albina, whose name intimates her moral and racial purity as well as the ancient name of England, Albion. On a symbolic level, this is all rather troubling. Robert Somerset’s unwillingness to accept freedom fighter Thaddeus as his offspring re-enacts his abandonment of Therese Sobieski and imitates Britain’s unwillingness to embrace Poland as inheritor of the Glorious Revolution. Finally accepting his role, Somerset eventually convinces Thaddeus to take, not his name, but a slice of his property and his orphaned niece. Pembroke retains most of his father’s land and wealth, ensuring that the Somerset family – despite Robert Somerset’s enormous crimes against the Sobieskis – remain dominant. Porter’s novel suggests that Britain can continue to believe in its own goodness and purity, just as long as it makes some material restitution to those who have suffered from its negligence. Meanwhile Mary Beaufort’s reward for not treating Thaddeus like a chivalric hero is to discover that he is a chivalric hero. Since Thaddeus has kept

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his identity hidden behind the pseudonym Constantine, Mary is amazed to learn that she is about to marry Count Thaddeus Sobieski, the famed defender of Poland. To be sure, Porter goes farther than most of her contemporaries in sanctioning an Anglo-Polish marriage in England and allowing her characters to live happily there. A decade earlier, in Charlotte Smith’s The Banished Man, Ellesmere and Alexina were forced to abandon Britain altogether for northern Italy. But the romantic turn her novel takes in its final pages suggests that Porter was less interested in persuading her readers of the quiet satisfactions that come from a magnanimous life than in recompensing her protagonist’s magnanimity with unbelievable wealth and fame. Few early readers seem to have noticed the moral slippage at the end of Porter’s tale. Instead they must have been pleased that Thaddeus’s modesty and sacrifice are finally rewarded. By the conclusion of Thaddeus of Warsaw, the hero, Job-like, has had all that was taken from him returned: a father, a best friend and brother, a home, and a country.19 Thaddeus’s relationship with England is not perfect. ‘I am resolved, not at this period, to enter the British army,’ he tells Pembroke; ‘rather would I toil for subsistence by the sweat of my brow, than be subjected to the necessity of acting in concert with those ravagers who destroyed my country! I can not fight by the side of the Russians!’ (4: 62). Unlike the fictional Carlowitz, or the historical Ko´sciuszko, however, Thaddeus does not dream of a future in Poland. In the exile of General Butzou, Porter offers her readers a bleak narrative of those who do. Once a courageous defender of King Stanisław, Butzou now obsesses over his failed battle plans and rapidly deteriorates into a childlike dependent. [Thaddeus] listened with pain to the fond dreams which had taken possession of the old man, who delighted in saying that much might yet be done in Poland, when he should be recovered, and they be enabled to return together to Warsaw, and stimulate the people to revolt. Thaddeus at first attempted to prove the emptiness of these schemes; but seeing that contradiction on this head threw the General back into deeper despondency, he thought it better to affect the same sentiments; too well perceiving, that death would soon terminate these visions with his life. (2: 128–9) Butzou’s death forces Thaddeus to relive the trauma of his last months in Poland (‘my grandfather, my mother, my country! I lose them all again in thee!’ 3: 174). But it also marks a final break with his motherland. The first edition of Thaddeus of Warsaw closed with a visit from Thaddeus and his wife to the newly restored grave of Butzou, a synecdochic endpoint for all his connections to Poland. From the third edition (1805), Porter added an encounter with


Ko´sciuszko on his way to America. The meeting perhaps aids the novel’s formal unity, reuniting the historical and fictional heroes who had been divided at Maciejowice. But it adds little to the polemical force of the first volume. That Ko´sciuszko and Sobieski reunite not in their homeland but in Britain reinforces the apparent hopelessness of the Polish cause in 1805. Ko´sciuszko’s pathetic appearance brings to mind those newspaper descriptions that preceded his actual visit six years earlier – a man near death. As they embrace, Sobieski tells his teary-eyed former general, ‘I have all that remains of my country pressing upon my heart! all its valour, virtue, and heroism is now within my arms!’ But none of its revolutionary spirit. By 1805 Napoleon had lost the support of liberal England and was a serious concern to British security. The fact that Napoleon was promising to restore Poland as a sovereign nation only made it more necessary to insist that Poland was beyond all hope. Like the imprisoned Toussaint in Wordsworth’s sonnet, Ko´sciuszko is therefore recast as the good, failed soldier, not the threatening, flourishing one. Just as Porter moves her narrative from the wide expanses of the historical romance to the personal complications of the domestic novel, Thaddeus’s own desires to change the world have shifted from the public to the private. Lady Sara’s encounter with Thaddeus ‘caused a total revolution in her mind and conduct’ (3: 37). Mary Beaufort ‘reflected on the revolution which had taken place in her mind’ when she fears she has lost Thaddeus (4: 24). Political revolutions, however, were now out of the question. Thaddeus of Warsaw remains remarkable for its early scenes of the war in Poland, its critical view of British society through foreign eyes, its embrace of a Polish refugee as the ideal gentleman, and its uniting in marriage a Polish man and English woman at the conclusion. Indeed, it is difficult to think of another major British novel of either the Romantic or Victorian era that offers such a sympathetic portrait of the continental refugee. Its generous descriptions of Poland and Polish refugees perhaps encouraged later readers to welcome exiles who arrived in Britain after failed Polish uprisings in 1831, 1846, and 1848. In its final move from the historical to the romantic, however, Porter’s nostalgic vision belied the heroism she so evidently admired.

A biographical epilogue Throughout her life Porter was justly proud of her Polish novel. Unlike Thomas Campbell, however, who remained a vocal supporter of Polish independence, Porter’s public efforts on behalf of Poland were more subdued. In 1828 she translated (from the French) Count Alexander Orchowski’s ‘Narrative of the Siege of Vienna,’ and in the 1830s she was thrilled to receive several visits from Prince Adam Czartoryski and Julian Niemcewicz, leaders of the Polish government in exile: ‘they both told me, that they owed to my pen, that Europe in our

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own times, knew anything of the history of Poland, as my work had excited the general interest among the young readers, to know more about the country.’20 She authored a number of articles on Ko´sciuszko or Poland, but most were published anonymously.21 Porter’s decision to restrain her political beliefs was directly related to family concerns. Her younger brother Robert Ker Porter had studied under Benjamin West at the Royal Academy and achieved some success for his large-scale historical paintings. In 1804 his Defeat of the French, at the Passage of Mount St. Gothard, by General Suwarrow was exhibited at the Lyceum, and Jane wrote the accompanying descriptive pamphlet. Suvorov had fought against the Poles, but perhaps one must respect even the Butcher of Warsaw in 1804, when Napoleon posed such a threat. The painting apparently caught the attention of Tsar Alexander I, who commissioned Robert to decorate the walls of the Admiralty in St Petersburg with images from the life of Peter the Great. There Robert met Princess Maria Shcherbatova and fell in love. They married in 1809 and accompanied the Russian delegation in London during the post-Waterloo celebrations. An accomplished writer and traveler, Robert hoped powerful acquaintances in London and St Petersburg would find him a diplomatic position in Russia. Having the author of Thaddeus of Warsaw for a sister was unlikely to aid matters; and Jane did what she could to help the situation. In 1824 Robert bade farewell to his wife, child, mother, and siblings, and sailed from Portsmouth to take up the position of Consul General in Caracas, Venezuela, believing it would eventually lead to a posting in Russia. Jane reacted with great enthusiasm to the November Uprising of 1830. Poland, she wrote her brother, has risen, to recover the National Constitution of 1791 – namely, King – Senate – and Deputies! – (which is just like our own – King, Lords, & Commons!) . . . It began the 29th of last Novr. – about forty-years after the first proclamation of the Constitution – which the Partition of the Country, four years after, utterly destroyed. – It will be Glorious, if [Tsar] Nicholas, grants it to them; & so spare bloodshed – and makes so many thousands free, & happy. Jane also had economic reasons to be pleased: the new Colburn and Bentley Standard Novels edition of her Polish novel was due out soon: ‘These new events, are now making my old Thaddeus being read every where afresh; and therefore much talked of, &c. – I am glad of that effect, (as its author,) for by burnishing up my name in the Republic of Letters, when ever I write again, I may be the more ardently welcomed; and so my price be advantaged.’22 As the year progressed, it became clear that Tsar Nicholas had no plans to appease the Poles. Jane expressed her dismay to friends and family, but avoided


public expressions. Robert’s wife Maria had passed away some years earlier, but their daughter remained in Russia, and Robert still hoped for a transfer. ‘You may be sure that I was as careful as you would desire, in writing any new excitements on the old subject of Thaddeus,’ she wrote her brother in September 1831. ‘No body can represent me, as having come forward in any way in the subscriptions, &c, that have been set on foot; so my name does not blaze forth in that way – Indeed I have ever remembered the Goodness of Russia to my Beloved Brother, and so my Gratitude is silence.’23

4 ‘Transform’d, Not Inly Alter’d’: The Resurrection of Ko´sciuszko and the Arrival of Mazeppa

In early 1816 the Prince Regent altered the uniform of some British light dragoon units. The elaborate new costume was based on Polish cavalry who had served at Waterloo as Napoleon’s Lancers of the Imperial Guard. British forces also adopted the uniforms of certain French divisions during the post-war occupation of France, and interest in military dress quickly reached British fashion. In George Cruikshank’s ‘Monstrosities of 1819,’ the visiting Persian Ambassador and his entourage (who will reappear in Chapter 6) are barely visible, riding in the distance, while a lancer joins the latest human oddities in the forefront, his hourglass waist echoing his elaborate czapka (Figure 4.1). A cartoon from the early 1830s – the moment of yet another uprising in Poland – shows a woman being fitted into a stylish variation of the Polish lancer uniform while actual soldiers look on with amusement (Figure 4.2). The Prince Regent’s decision could be interpreted in several ways. Perhaps it was done in praise of the veteran Polish soldiers who had fought so bravely, first against Russian and Prussian forces, and later, in a desperate attempt to secure the sovereignty of their homeland, against the British. Certainly the success of the Polish cavalry under Napoleon encouraged the British to adopt the lance, which they had not previously used. But perhaps it was also a visual reminder that all spoils go to the victor. Britain, suddenly the greatest power in Europe, could appropriate any image of strength (or fashion) it liked.1 A similar ambivalence surrounds the various representations of Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko created in Great Britain after the victory at Waterloo. As if anticipating the Prince Regent’s sartorial preferences, articles on Ko´sciuszko and his troubled homeland began to reappear in the British press just before Napoleon’s initial defeat in 1814 – an appropriate moment to consider the fate of a nation so transfigured in the tumultuous era following the French Revolution. After he left Bristol for Philadelphia – where cheering crowds welcomed his return – Ko´sciuszko, like his country, all but disappeared from sight. There were, of course, other international concerns: warfare in the Caribbean, unrest 88

The Resurrection of Ko´sciuszko and the Arrival of Mazeppa 89

Figure 4.1

George Cruikshank, Monstrosities of 1819, 29 November 1819

in Ireland, the rise of Napoleon. Still, as a character in Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw put it, ‘every thing has its fashion. The ruin of Poland was the fashionable topic for a month after it happened; and now nobody minds it; it is extinct; it is forgotten’ (3: 184). Many of Ko´sciuszko’s British admirers must have felt that the general, who was 51 years old at the time of his visit, would never return from his planned convalescence in America. Certainly no one could have predicted that 20 years later he would again become an important symbol to both liberal and Tory writers. Most critics have read the later Ko´sciuszko sonnets by Leigh Hunt and John Keats as either nostalgic mementos or as celebrations of a forgotten hero whose philosophy of life still had value in the particular historical moment. But there were other, more immediate reasons for Ko´sciuszko’s resurrection. The subject of Poland had been revived recently in the British press, and Ko´sciuszko himself had reappeared as a potential figure of political importance. Wordsworth, Southey, Landor, and Byron all found Ko´sciuszko and his homeland a useful resource in the following years, but it was Leigh Hunt’s Examiner representations of Ko´sciuszko as a model of liberal individualism that informed almost all of these later depictions. By tracing the events that brought Ko´sciuszko and Poland back into the British public eye after 1814, I hope to show how various writers, and in particular Leigh Hunt, used an aged and almost forgotten foreign revolutionary to advance their own political agendas.

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Figure 4.2

William Heath, Making a Lancer, 1830–34

Leigh Hunt’s significance to the second generation of Romantic era writers has been explored recently by a number of critics. Nicholas Roe has examined the influence of Hunt’s liberal ideas and politics on Keats throughout his brief life; Duncan Wu has noted the importance for Keats of working among the group of practicing writers at John and Leigh Hunt’s journal; and Jeffrey Cox


has argued for the need to place ‘not just Keats but also Shelley and even Byron’ within the context of other Examiner writers and writing (27). Hunt’s influence and popularity were never greater than during the years of his trial and imprisonment for libeling the Prince Regent, from 1812 to 1815 (Blainey 41–2, 61). Examiner sales rose, and celebrities like Byron and Jeremy Bentham visited Hunt in his ornately decorated prison cell. These were also among the most important years in modern European history, encompassing not only the downfall of Napoleon but also the Congress of Vienna, which reorganized the continent on a conservative model, much to the disappointment of Hunt and his liberal readers. Some lands, like Norway and Finland, were freed from one power only to be given to another, while others, including Italy, Saxony, and Poland, were sliced up and shared between the ruling families of Europe. Despotic rulers like Ferdinand VII of Spain, favorite targets of the liberal press, were back in power. At the beginning of a new yet uncannily familiar era in European history Hunt could promulgate his opinions to the largest audience of his career; and while many British writers pinned their hopes on the heroes of Waterloo, Hunt found new inspiration in the reappearance of Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko. Yet if Hunt’s writings shaped the immediate image of Poland in post-Waterloo Britain, Byron’s writings shaped that image for the rest of the continent and for decades to come. While Byron admired and wrote of Ko´sciuszko, his greatest contribution to the question of Poland makes no mention of the Polish general. I close this chapter with a new reading of Mazeppa, a poem that remained enormously popular throughout the nineteenth century. Byron resurrects an earlier figure from Polish history and proposes a dangerously different vision of Poland’s future, one ignored by Hunt and Keats. Like Ko´sciuszko, Mazeppa is a Polish exile who rises to fame in a foreign land. Mazeppa’s potent position between Peter the Great and Charles XII reimagines Ko´sciuszko’s place between Tsar Alexander and Napoleon. If Hunt’s honorable statesman inspired Keats, Byron’s shrewdly formidable soldier inspired Hugo, Pushkin, Liszt, and Tchaikovsky.

Poland in the presses Ko´sciuszko’s return was foreshadowed by the tragedy of another Polish general. Józef Poniatowski was a nephew of Stanisław II. He had retired from military service after the failure of the Ko´sciuszko Uprising in 1794 but later served as Minister of War in the Duchy of Warsaw, eventually joining Napoleon with 20,000 Polish soldiers in the march eastwards. After the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, Napoleon attempted to reassert his power in battle across the plains of Saxony. On 16 October 1813, at the Battle of Nations near Leipzig, Poniatowski’s forces stopped the Austrian army at the Pleisse river, and Napoleon named him Marshall of France – the only non-French officer

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to receive such honors. But two days later, Napoleon’s army was in retreat. On 19 October, as he tried to withdraw his remaining Polish soldiers, the thricewounded Poniatowski fell from his horse into the Elster River and drowned. British papers gave stirring eyewitness accounts of the Polish general’s last hours.2 ‘In him,’ William Hazlitt later wrote, ‘it might be said, perished the last of the Poles’ (15: 148). Napoleon crossed the Rhine in early November. As the allied armies trailed him westward, plans for post-war Europe took shape. In early 1814 an anonymous, 66-page pamphlet entitled An Appeal to the Allies, and the English Nation, in Behalf of Poland appeared in London and quickly inspired lengthy responses in both the Edinburgh Review and the Examiner. Their interest is less surprising when one learns that the anonymous author was Henry Brougham, a founding editor of the Edinburgh Review and one of the few British spokespersons for Polish sovereignty in the years immediately before 1814.3 Brougham had met Felicjan Biernacki, the secretary of Prince Adam Czartoryski, in late 1813, and through him gained Czartoryski’s political views (and written notes). To ensure widespread notice, ‘at a cost of £1000 provided by Czartoryski, sixty thousand copies of the pamphlet were distributed, while a French translation also appeared later in Paris’ (Zawadzki 220). ‘The astonishing successes of the Allied Arms [sic],’ the pamphlet begins, ‘have placed Europe in such a position, that those who formerly viewed negotiation with the enemy, and submission to his power, as the same thing, are prepared for a treaty of peace’ (Appeal 1). Yet any peace that does not include the restoration of Poland will be ‘a deed of rashness,’ and ‘new wars shall speedily grow out of a hollow truce’ (2). The anonymous writer occasionally draws unflattering parallels between Britain and the continental powers: Whatever blame may be cast upon the conduct of the partitioning powers, (and assuredly, it would be difficult to speak too harshly of them) the fault lies with the dead, and their descendants are no more to be reprobated than the Rulers of England now are for the cruelties which, in former times, have been committed in the Eastern and Western worlds. (3–4) He even catalogues some of these actions – ‘the folly of the American contest, the employment of the Indians against our countrymen of the colonies, the use of blood hounds against our revolted negroes, the Rohilla war’ – thus suggesting that those British ‘cruelties’ of ‘former times’ were not so long ago (4). He defends the Poles’ allegiance to Napoleon by reminding his readers that, only two years before, ‘Prussian and Austrian troops formed part of the army, poured by France into Russia,’ and that only Britain’s geography has protected it from the worst of the war: ‘Happy in their insular situation, they [Britons] have never been assailed by the awful tempest, before which the most sturdy independence in every nation, has, in its turn, for a season been obliged to bend’ (6).


But the writer also draws sympathetic parallels between Poland and Britain when he argues that the Poles ‘could not honestly have acted otherwise than they did – that they, the people of England, would in the same situation have acted in the self-same way’ (7). He describes an imaginary scenario: Britain, ‘seized by the lawless hands of Frenchmen and Italians,’ is offered the chance of freedom by the arrival of a Russian army ‘upon our coasts’ (7–9): Now this is the question – Shall we acknowledge the French, because they are our rulers de facto; shall we remain quietly subject to them; shall we take their part in the contest for our own liberation about to be fought on our own ground . . .? The Englishman who blames the Poles for being deceived by France into a share in the late wars against Russia, must be prepared to maintain that he would himself in the case now put join his French tyrant against the Russians. (9) He goes even further in praising the Poles, calling them a gallant people, second only to her [Britain’s] own children in love of liberty, equal even to them in devoted enthusiastic attachment to their native land – nay, let us acknowledge it, superior to ourselves in patriotism, because far more heavy sacrifices have been demanded by their unhappy country, than it ever entered into the mind of an Englishman that patriotism could require. (10) The writer then turns from compassion to arguments based on ‘strict justice and general expediency’ (10). After a brief history of the first partition and a eulogium to the 3 May Constitution, he notes that Poland ‘was seized in 1793 and 1794, at the very time when France was seizing Savoy, Belgium, and Holland’ (23). To restore the former nations but not Poland puts into doubt the consistency of the allied powers. Russia, Prussia, and Austria clearly expect economic gain from the partition; but the Poles’ support of Napoleon seems proof that Poland will never give up its desire for independence. After an extended panegyric to ‘[i]ll-fated Poniatowski,’ ‘ever most unfortunate when his cause was purest,’ the writer adds that ‘surely it needs no argument to prove that the system, which at any moment gives France the disposal of an army of Poles, under leaders like Poniatowski, is little calculated to secure the tranquillity of those who occupy Poland’ (46–7). The restoration of Poland thus will add to the security of its neighbors, since ‘it would be the foundation stone of a tranquillity and security which they [the Poles] have never known’ (60). Brougham’s lengthy analysis of his own pamphlet appeared in the January 1814 Edinburgh Review and seemingly added another voice in favor of the Poles.

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According to Brougham, the ‘wrongs of Africa, the oppression of Spain, the sufferings and subsequent liberation of Holland, occupy every tongue; while not a whisper is heard, in behalf of Poland. – Whence this extraordinary diversity?’ (‘Article III’ 295). His 38-page ‘review’ – one of the longest of his editorship – reproduces most of the pamphlet’s arguments, reprinting long passages and paraphrasing others. But he adds a more detailed history of the Ko´sciuszko Uprising and a long passage comparing the merits of Spanish and Polish autonomy. British feeling for Spain had increased because of the Peninsular Campaign, but Brougham argues that Poland’s case for independence is even stronger than Spain’s. He notes the respect paid by the British to Poniatowski and reads it as tacit guilt: ‘not a word has ever been whispered against him by the Allies; a plain indication that, confident as they are, and well may be, in their cause against France, they feel what a weak part it has towards Poland’ (328). He concludes by insisting that the ‘restoration of European independence [requires] the revival of sound and consistent principle alone . . . and this cannot be thought possible, by any reflecting mind, without the complete reestablishment of Poland’s independent state’ (331). On 30 January 1814 the Examiner gave first-page coverage to the same pamphlet, praising the anonymous author as ‘a true observer’ and quoting at length from the text (66). Brougham had served as counsel to the Hunt brothers during their libel suit in December 1812, and Hunt was perhaps returning the favor. But Hunt adopts a sharper tone than Brougham, arguing that the anonymous writer does not go far enough in warning the allies of the dire risks the continued division of Poland afford: ‘In our opinion, they will not only be insecure from future attacks of the enemy, and from the intrigues which harass monarchs in general, but all that has happened in Europe for the last thirty years will not save them and their subjects from the danger of fresh revolutions’ (68). He reiterated these arguments with even greater force after Napoleon’s first abdication a few months later, when it became clear that many lands would not be restored to their pre-war status. ‘Can any reasonable being contemplate such doings without apprehension and disgust? Is there a man weak enough to imagine, that such proceedings can tend to the establishment of a lasting peace? No; if the Definitive Treaty thus surrenders up Italy, and Saxony, and Poland, to dependence and foreign sway, the seeds of future and speedy wars will be scattered all over Europe’ (22 May 1814, 330). Hunt referred to Poland occasionally in the following weeks, at one point confessing that ‘next to the universal system of Education, and the strangely revived labours in behalf of Africa, this subject of Poland is the one nearest our hearts’ (26 June 1814, 403). But his interest only caught fire again when he was able to attach a familiar name to the cause of Polish nationhood with the surprising announcement that


the glorious patriot, KOSCIUSKO , has appeared on the scene again, and is mentioned in the Paris Papers as about to return to his native country with the Polish troops . . . We thought that he had been living in America, covered with wounds that disabled him from action. In presenting to our minds the truly gallant and patriotic men who have appeared in modern times, his image always rose upon us, as it appears in pictures in this country, – a man reduced almost to helplessness, and reclining on a couch with that pale and painful countenance, through which the eagerness of his noble character still looked out. Indeed he may still be in a condition resembling this, though able to bear removal, and furnished, by the new course of events, with fresh spirits to attempt something for his unhappy country. The very mention of the name of KOSCIUSKO , after having been compelled to ring the changes so often upon the BONAPARTES and the FERDINANDS , – the mighty tyrants and the mean, – is like a new music, coming to us in a summer wind. (3 July 1814, 428–9) The passage – which, I will argue below, inspired the imagery of Keats’s sonnet to the Polish general – is remarkable for its extraordinary praise of Ko´sciuszko and his reinvigorating name but also as evidence of the lasting impact of the earlier engraved images. After seventeen years, Hunt expects – almost hopes – to see Ko´sciuszko in the attitude first captured in 1797 (one is tempted to imagine a reclining Ko´sciuszko and a squadron of couch-carriers leading the Poles back to Warsaw). Hunt had a personal connection to Ko´sciuszko via Benjamin West, who was his uncle by marriage. West remained an important and influential figure until his death in 1820 and perhaps spoke to Hunt about his encounter with the Polish general. Hunt later recorded a story of the Duke of Bedford kissing Ko´sciuszko’s hand while West was painting the portrait.4 Hunt also held Thomas Campbell’s work in high regard; an 1832 revision of ‘The Feast of the Poets’ includes the couplet, ‘But glad look’d the God at the next who appear’d, / For ’twas Campbell, by Poland’s pale blessing endear’d.’5 Actually Ko´sciuszko returned from America in 1798; he had settled in Fontainebleau, meeting French officials and hoping to influence France’s Poland policy. Hunt was either trying to encourage public interest or was poorly informed. In each succeeding week’s column Hunt looks forward to the expected return, until 14 August when he reports that it is now said that there appears no symptom of such return at present. That illustrious man, we understand, leads a life, under all the circumstances, accordant with the noble simplicity of his character, and cultivates a farm in the neighborhood of Paris. The severe wounds which he received in fighting

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the battles of his countrymen, have at length healed up, and left only their truly glorious scars. (518) Still Hunt believed that the ‘affairs of Poland continue to look promising, and nobody has a doubt on the Continent that the kingdom will be restored’ (25 September 1814, 617). His enthusiasm must have been infectious, for a number of journals and newspapers followed his (and Brougham’s) lead. Even William Cobbett’s Political Register for 17 September 1814 included a sympathetic description of recent Polish history and concluded that the continental powers would restore sovereignty to Poland: ‘If [Tsar] Alexander of Russia wishes to present to posterity a memorable example of magnanimity, he will, in good earnest, set about the emancipation of a people who were treated in so merciless a manner by his country’ (‘Poland’ 368). Napoleon’s return from Elba and the coincident London riots in response to the 1815 Corn Law brought more pressing concerns to the front pages of the Examiner and its competitors. Still the inability of the powers gathered in Vienna to come to agreement or to keep Napoleon out of France encouraged Hunt to disparage both sides: ‘A pretty choice we have truly between these legitimate and illegitimate Personages!’ (11 June 1815, 379). An alternative was needed; and on 12 November 1815 the Examiner carried an article by Helen Maria Williams that must have inspired Leigh Hunt and probably one other avid reader of the Examiner, John Keats. Williams reported that a ‘Polish regiment forming part of the advanced guard of the Russian army,’ was marching upon Fontainebleau and preparing to ‘commit disorders.’ A ‘person in the dress of the upper class of peasants’ reprimanded the soldiers in their own language: the oldest among their own soldiers, anxiously gazing on the features of the stranger, were seized with a kind of involuntary trembling. Conjured more peremptorily, though respectfully, to disclose his quality and his name, the peasant, drawing his hand across his eyes to wipe off a starting tear, exclaimed, with an half stifled voice, ‘I am Kosciusko!’ – The movement was electric. The soldiers threw down their arms, and falling prostrate on the ground, according to the custom of their country, covered their heads with sand. It was the prostration of the heart. (734) Williams explained that ‘Kosciusko had withdrawn some years since from the guilty world of Bonaparte, to cultivate a little farm, rejecting every offer which was made him by Napoleon, who had learnt to appreciate his worth. Kosciusko knew him well’ (734). Hunt excerpted the anecdote from Williams’s Narrative of the Events which have taken place in France, her penultimate collection of epistolary accounts.


The volume must have been hot off the presses, as the last letter is dated October 1815. Williams introduces the Ko´sciuszko anecdote as proof that even the ‘authorized plunderers’ of Paris ‘were often found capable of lenient measures, and sometimes even of sentiment’ (Narrative 148). Her remark and the incident itself bring to mind Williams’s earlier narrative of Ko´sciuszko requesting but not receiving leniency for Princess Lubomirska (Eye-Witness 173–4). Just as that narrative predicted Poland’s fate – to be used by French leaders, whether Robespierre or Napoleon, to their own ends – Williams’s description of Ko´sciuszko’s magnanimity towards his French neighbors intimates an extraordinary (given Poland’s losses under Napoleon) sense of justice. But Williams’s desire to forward the canonization of Ko´sciuszko is not so surprising. He certainly was an extraordinary figure, but more importantly he was an old friend and a regular guest at Williams’s peacetime soirées, frequently sighted and cited by British literary visitors (see Woodward 143–52). In the final sentences of the Ko´sciuszko passage, Williams herself enters the story, an intervention that allows her to disclose another side of Ko´sciuszko’s character. I called on him one day to bid him farewell, having read in the official paper of the morning his address to the Poles on the subject of recovering his freedom,6 being named to the command of the Polish army by Bonaparte. Kosciusko heard me with a smile at my credulity; but on my shewing him the address with his signature, he exclaimed, ‘This is all a forgery; Bonaparte knew me too well to insult me with any offer in this predatory expedition; he has adopted this mode, which I can neither answer nor resent, and which he attempts to colour with the pretext of liberty.’ (Examiner 12 November 1815, 734) The uncanny ghost who appears among his former soldiers in peasant dress is replaced by the canny politician, smiling at his old friend’s gullibility. Here it is Williams’s turn to be generous, both for the sake of Ko´sciuszko and for her story. Her probably feigned naivety adds to the effectiveness of the passage, inviting the British reader to share her surprise, and allowing a more nuanced image of Ko´sciuszko to appear: the exotic exile is also worldly-wise. Perhaps even Ko´sciuszko picks up on Williams’s performance: ‘This is all a forgery.’

Sonnet wars: Hunt, Wordsworth, Keats Hunt would later rewrite Williams’s article and include the anecdote (unattributed) in his 1851 Table-Talk (106–7). But Williams’s story also bore immediate rhetorical fruit: the following week Hunt’s sonnet appeared in the Examiner, dated as written 12 November 1815.

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TO KOSCIUSKO WHO TOOK PART NEITHER WITH BONAPARTE IN THE HEIGHT OF HIS POWER, NOR WITH THE ALLIES IN THE HEIGHT OF THEIRS . ’Tis like thy patient valour thus to keep, Great KOSCIUSKO , to thy rural shade, While Freedom’s ill-found amulet still is made Pretence for old aggression, and a heap Of selfish mockeries. There, as in the sweep Of stormier fields, thou earnest with thy blade, Transform’d, not inly alter’d, to the spade, Thy never-yielding right to a calm sleep. Nature, ’twould seem, would leave to man’s worse wit, The small and noisier parts of this world’s frame, And keep the calm, green amplitudes of it Sacred from the fopperies and inconstant blame. Cities may change, and sovereigns, but ’tis fit, Thou, and the country old, be still the same. (19 November 1815, 746)

Hunt presents the Polish general as the liberal model of honorable behavior in a world where such characteristics are lacking – a meaningful alternative to the Bonapartes and the Ferdinands. Like Cincinnatus and Washington, Ko´sciuszko exchanges his sword for a ploughshare, his ‘blade’ for a ‘spade,’ without surrendering the ideals that first led him to challenge the inconsistencies of sovereigns. Ko´sciuszko’s rustic constancy is celebrated throughout the sonnet: he is ‘patient,’ ‘never-yielding,’ ‘calm,’ ‘still the same.’ He is at home in the ‘rural shade,’ where the ‘green amplitudes’ of his mind will allow him ‘a calm sleep,’ knowing that posterity will honor him. Yet he is also a voice of reason in the year of Napoleon’s return and the Corn Law riots. As Kevin Gilmartin has shown, the middle-class Examiner clearly separated itself from the violent response to rising corn prices (195–226). In Williams’s article Ko´sciuszko stops a mob from ‘commit[ting] disorders’ – the same sort of disorders occurring in England at that time – and such a response must have appealed to Hunt. Thus, in an unexpected turn, the liberal publisher and the radical revolutionary become conservative forces linked to rural society; they leave the unpredictability of city life and the ‘stormier fields’ of war to selfish sovereigns, who are constant only in their ‘fopperies’ and their revivals of ‘old aggression.’ It is significant that Hunt’s sonnet should appear in the same year as William Wordsworth’s Excursion, a poem William Hazlitt had reviewed at length in


the Examiner some months before. There are notable similarities between Wordsworth’s Solitary and Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko: both are about 70 years old, both experience the excitement of the French Revolution, both spend time in American exile before retiring to the European countryside. Wordsworth’s description of the Solitary’s first appearance could have served as a fitting epigraph to Williams’s article or Hunt’s sonnet: For full in view, approaching through a gate That opened from the enclosure of green fields Into the rough uncultivated ground, Behold the Man whom he had fancied dead! (494–7)7 As a young man Wordsworth had noted the Polish Uprising with interest,8 but there is no evidence he had Ko´sciuszko in mind for his Solitary. Nor is Ko´sciuszko’s lifestyle represented in Hunt’s sonnet as a failure of misguided hopes but rather as the only acceptable response to those who saw freedom as something to be bartered – a response to the realpolitik practiced by all parties at the Congress of Vienna. Perhaps we can best read Hunt’s sonnet as a conscious response to Williams’s article and an unconscious response to Wordsworth and other poets of that earlier generation who had turned away from their youthful dreams. Wordsworth had met Hunt in 1815, and two of his sonnets appeared in Hunt’s journal in early 1816. When Robert Gillies wrote to inquire about one of those sonnets, Wordsworth responded, ‘It is not worth while to tell you, by what circuitous channel it found its way into the Examiner; a journal which I never see; though I have great respect for the Talents of its Editor. In the Champion another weekly journal, have appeared not long since, five sonnets of mine, all of them much superior to the one you have sent me’ (Middle Years 299). John Scott’s Champion was one of the Examiner’s liberal competitors, and one of the Wordsworth sonnets published there (along with a paean to Waterloo, ‘Inscription for a National Monument’) was ‘February 1816,’ also known as ‘Siege of Vienna Raised by John Sobieski.’ Wordsworth takes up the theme of Poland but for very different political ends. Oh, for a kindling touch of that pure flame Which taught the offering of song to rise From thy lone bower, beneath Italian skies, Great Filicaia! – With celestial aim It rose, – thy saintly rapture to proclaim, Then, when the imperial city stood released From bondage threatened by the embattled East,

100 The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature

And Christendom respired; from guilt and shame Redeemed, – from miserable fear set free By one day’s feat – one mighty victory. – Chant the Deliverer’s praise in every tongue! The cross shall spread – the crescent hath waxed dim, – He conquering – as in joyful Heaven is sung – He conquering through God, and God by him!

Carl Ketcham dates ‘Siege’ as written ‘after November 17, 1815, and before January 18, 1816’ (Wordsworth Shorter Poems 173). The metonymic relationship in the letter between Leigh Hunt and the poems published in the Champion suggests that ‘Siege’ was some kind of response to Hunt’s political opinions on Poland and liberty. This context invites a richly layered reading of the sonnet, which showcases Wordsworth at his most continental. The narrator yearns for the same kind of inspiration that allowed the seventeenth-century Italian poet Vincenzo da Filicaia to praise the Polish king John III Sobieski, whose 1683 victory over the Ottoman Empire at (of all places) Vienna becomes a precedent for the allies’ victory at Waterloo. No peoples outside France had followed Napoleon like the Italians and the Poles, and several Polish legions fought for Napoleon in Italy, facts that add levels of irony to the sonnet. Later writers would regularly use Sobieski’s victory as evidence of the unpaid debt Europe owed Poland, but this early appearance focuses on the victory of the ‘cross’ over the ‘crescent.’ Atheistic France replaces Turkey as the ‘embattled East,’ while London becomes the ‘imperial city’ redeemed ‘from guilt and shame.’ Still, the international character of the narrator’s apostrophe invites a more generous reading. By celebrating the ‘mighty victory’ of a Polish hero from the distant past to memorialize Britain’s equally epoch-making achievement at Waterloo, Wordsworth perhaps questions the praise lavished on less successful leaders like Ko´sciuszko and Poniatowski, but he also reminds readers of Poland’s significance in European history. Wordsworth’s general interest in Poland and Russia seems spotty, but for Hunt the question of Poland would remain a liberal rallying cry. By late 1816 he had brought a bust of Ko´sciuszko into his Vale of Health cottage, described by Keats in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ as wearing a countenance ‘worn / By horrid suffrance – mightily forlorn,’ and he refers to Ko´sciuszko in the Examiner throughout 1816, and as late as 12 January 1817 calls him one of the ‘old lovers of freedom,’ in particular admiring the ‘consistency’ of his beliefs (18). Hunt’s fixation on a single personality – unlike Brougham’s interest with the state of Poland as a whole – also seems central to John Keats’s sonnet to Ko´sciuszko, which would appear in the Examiner the following month.


Though Keats was some ten years younger than Hunt – he was born while Ko´sciuszko languished in a St Petersburg prison – one unusual experience associates him with the Polish general. Among Keats’s teachers at the United Hospitals in London was Astley Cooper, a professor of anatomy and physiology with professed liberal leanings. Perhaps Cooper had noted the Examiner’s recent articles on Poland, for in Keats’s class notes from the autumn of 1815, one finds Cooper’s description of the division of the sciatic nerve in a wound suffered by Ko´sciuszko some 20 years before (Ward 52). Damian Walford Davies argues that Cooper’s description ‘would have radically humanized for Keats an archetypal Kosciusko who had by 1816 been elevated by two generations of Romantic writers to the status of myth’ (121). Keats had probably read Coleridge’s 1794 sonnet to Ko´sciuszko; certainly he would have been aware of Thomas Campbell’s poem; and his familiarity with Jane Porter’s work is confirmed by a correspondence in which Porter tells a friend of her admiration for Endymion, praise that Keats dismisses as coming from a ‘Lady Romancer’ (Letters 2: 9–10). When one first notices ‘To Kosciusko’ among Keats’s works its subject may seem an odd choice, but it actually seems more surprising he would want to return to a subject that so many had explored already. GOOD KOSCIUSKO! thy great name alone Is a full harvest whence to reap high feeling; It comes upon us like the glorious pealing Of the wide spheres – an everlasting tone. And now it tells me, that in worlds unknown, The names of Heroes, burst from clouds concealing, Are changed to harmonies, for ever stealing Through cloudless blue, around each silver throne. It tells me too, that on a happy day, When some good spirit walks upon the earth, Thy name with ALFRED’ S, and the great of yore Gently commingling, gives tremendous birth To a loud hymn, that sounds far, far away To where the great GOD lives for evermore. (Examiner 16 February 1817, 107) ‘To Kosciusko’ was Keats’s third published poem, also his third printed in the Examiner, following ‘O Solitude!’ and ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.’ It appeared 16 February 1817, dated as written in December 1816. Though no other critic has formerly noted it, Keats’s inspiration and source here is clearly Leigh Hunt; not simply Hunt’s sonnet to Ko´sciuszko, which


Keats no doubt knew, but Hunt’s 3 July 1814 column, printed in part above. Hunt’s ringing of old tyrant’s names becomes a ‘glorious pealing’ in Keats’s poem. Hunt hears ‘new music, coming to us like a summer wind’ when he hears Ko´sciuszko’s name; Keats expands on this idea throughout the octave. The reference to ‘a full harvest’ echoes Hunt’s poetic description of Ko´sciuszko’s rural existence; and, in imitation of Hunt’s Ko´sciuszko, who is ‘transform’d, not inly alter’d,’ Keats describes a transformation from the spoken name of a hero to celestial music while emphasizing the timelessness of such heroes: the name is ‘an everlasting tone’ that creates ‘harmonies, for ever stealing,’ sounding ‘for ever more.’ Keats’s interest in the political and social has become a familiar element of recent Romantic scholarship, yet as Carl Woodring wrote more than 40 years ago, ‘politics has an integral place in Keats’s canon’ (English 78). ‘To Kosciusko’ may not prove that Keats’s interest in Polish sovereignty rivaled Hunt’s, let alone Brougham’s. His sonnet clearly valorizes the ‘great name’ over the ‘good’ man, who disappears after the opening invocation. Indeed, Ko´sciuszko’s name – not Ko´sciuszko himself – is the grammatical subject of every sentence in the poem. Except for the significant but subtle allusions to Hunt’s writings, the poem makes no mention of any of Ko´sciuszko’s actions on behalf of liberty. Still, for Hunt and Keats to glorify an aged Polish patriot and revolutionary when the victory at Waterloo might have suggested so many other subjects, and for Keats to reach all the way back to Alfred the Great in order to find a Briton’s name worthy of ‘commingling’ with Ko´sciuszko’s must have left Tory critics uneasy. The poem would prove a seedbed for later imagery, most notably the ‘bursting forth’ from the clouds of Saturn’s usurpers in Hyperion: A Fragment (line 104). In ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne,’ Percy Shelley would borrow Keats’s subversive image of righteous names which ‘burst from clouds’ and are ‘for ever stealing . . . round each silver throne’ in praising the language of another rebellious nation, Spain: The language of a land which now is free, And winged with thoughts of truth and majesty Flits round the tyrant’s sceptre like a cloud, And bursts the peopled prisons – cries aloud, ‘My name is Legion!’ (176–80) It is also significant that Keats would praise a man much honored by a generation of poets who, according to the Hunt circle, had later lost their way. Keats celebrating Ko´sciuszko is not unlike Shelley’s response in Alastor to the same poets – a criticism of the current politics, a wish to recapture earlier ideals.


As John Kandl has noted, one of those less consistent believers, Robert Southey, may have been responding to the jibes of the Examiner in his own January 1817 article for the Quarterly Review, ‘The Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection.’ Southey, expressing his generation’s disillusionment with reform, free speech, and revolutionary fervor, relates the anecdote of the American officer, David Humphreys, who traveled to Europe with Lafayette and Ko´sciuszko in 1784. Humphreys asks Ko´sciuszko, ‘ “I suppose you are going to see what can be done in your own country?” The Pole shook his head, and replied, that the people were not in a fit state for such a revolution. Well had it been for France if La Fayette had had the same wisdom!’ (Southey, ‘Rise’, 534). As mentioned in Chapter 2, Southey had responded with enthusiasm to the 1794 uprising in Poland and included a sympathetic portrait of Ko´sciuszko’s visit to Bristol in his 1808 Letters from England, ‘lying on the couch, with his countenance pale, painful and emaciated’ (481–2). In his attempt to reappropriate Ko´sciuszko for conservative policies Southey ignores the fact that Ko´sciuszko had indeed led ‘the people’ in revolution, ten years after his conversation with Humphreys.9 Southey tries to return to a representation of Ko´sciuszko that was popular in the 1790s, to recast Ko´sciuszko in the mold of the heroic but defeated soldier, and in the process further shows the valorizing of Ko´sciuszko that had taken place since 1814.

Late returns: Landor and Byron The Polish general never returned to his homeland. The 1815 Congress of Vienna left a much reduced Poland with limited rights but still under Russian dominance. Ko´sciuszko’s birthplace, Lithuania, would remain a part of Russia. Bitterly disappointed, Ko´sciuszko moved to Switzerland, where he died 15 October 1817. News of his decease was overshadowed in Britain by the unexpected death in early November of the young Princess Charlotte. Hunt in the Examiner promised to honor him at a later date, but no articles to Ko´sciuszko seem to appear after this promise. Still, Hunt’s representation of Ko´sciuszko – the solitary figure whose name alone has almost transcendent force – influenced later writers, most significantly Walter Savage Landor and Lord Byron. Landor’s interest in Poland continued throughout his long life. In 1797 he met Ko´sciuszko, an event Landor occasionally recalled in letters and in print. An 1860 description of the meeting evinces a boisterous tone and miraculous effect: Ko´sciuszko seems to leap from his engraved state in order to meet the young poet: I have seen some famous people in my time, and not the least among them was Kosciusko. A young girl who had heard him say he would like to see me brought me to his door. She knocked and said, ‘General Kosciusko, I have


brought a friend to see you.’ ‘I am sorry, my dear,’ he answered, ‘but I can see no one.’ ‘I knew you wished to meet Mr Landor’ – ‘What, Landor?’ – and in one instant he started from his couch and came forward to embrace me. He had been severely wounded in the head, and his pale face, bound about with broad black bands, gave him a look of deathly whiteness. He was reading, as he lay, a volume of my poems, and called attention to the coincidence. (Fields 71) If Landor’s 1795 Poems really did fall into Ko´sciuszko’s hands, he would have been interested to read ‘Apology for Satire,’ a fierce attack on the partition of Poland, the imprisonment of Stanisław (‘best of fathers’), and Britain’s inaction. Thou too, O Pole! with reverence obey The lawful dictates of a triple sway. Fate has commanded it, and see thou must, The best of fathers humbled in the dust. O no – resent it! struggling passions rise, Honor calls loud and spurns the thin disguise. Oh! bear no longer! Longer canst thou bear Three royal ruffians thus thy rights to tear? (142–9; Works 16: 259) In the 1840s and 1850s Landor wrote open letters to the Examiner on behalf of Polish independence and composed verse honoring Prince Adam Czartoryski. His major imaginative work on the subject, however, was a dialogue between Ko´sciuszko and Józef Poniatowski, awkwardly included in the ‘German’ section of his 1824 Imaginary Conversations. In Landor’s dialogue Poniatowski has traveled to Switzerland hoping to inspire Ko´sciuszko to return to his homeland.10 Ko´sciuszko greets his former comrade but warns him to take care where he sits: ‘not upon that chair; the rushes are cut through in the middle – the boys and girls come in when I am reading in the window or working in the garden, and play their old captain these tricks.’ Poniatowski is delighted by Ko´sciuszko’s gentleness, musing that even the stars locate Ko´sciuszko between masculine and feminine extremes: ‘I must embrace you again, my general! Always the same kind tender heart, the same simplicity and modesty. There is little of poverty or ingenuity in the idea that your nativity was between the Lion and the Virgin’ (8: 67). But after Poniatowski asks his former leader to ‘[r]eturn among us and command us,’ Ko´sciuszko shifts from the simple rustic to the political realist: ‘Where is Poland?’ Ko´sciuszko asks his old comrade. ‘Poniatowski! her blood flows for strangers, and her heroism is but an interlude in the drama of Ambition. She is intoxicated from the cup of


Glory, to be dismembered with the less feeling of her loss. When she recovers her senses, in vain will she look around for compassion or for gratitude.’ Poniatowski praises the Polish contingent under Napoleon, which ‘in every battle . . . performs the most distinguished part’ (8: 68). But Ko´sciuszko has only derision for Napoleon: ‘History hath given us no example of a man whose errors are so manifold and so destructive . . . Fortunate! (if usurpers ever are) to spring up in a season of rankness and rottenness, when every principle of vitality had been extinguished in the state, either by pestilence of despotism or by the tempests of democracy’ (8: 69–70). Landor’s Ko´sciuszko seems an extension of the Examiner’s: moderate and dignified in solitude, mercilessly critical of Europe’s leaders, but accepting of his fate. Landor’s probably unintentional addition is to make him somewhat stuffy and verbose. William Hazlitt called this imagined conversation ‘a subject capable of better things’ (10: 250).11 Lord Byron never met Ko´sciuszko, though he did meet the princes Radziwiłł and Czartoryski in London in June 1814. Byron’s touching lyric of 1815, ‘From the French’ (‘Must thou go, my glorious Chief’) gives voice to a Polish officer who, according to the prefatory note (taken from a letter of John Cam Hobhouse), was refused permission to accompany Napoleon into exile. The poem honors the loyalty of the heartbroken soldier, who nevertheless sees himself as equal to his commander. My chief, my king, my friend, adieu! Never did I droop before; Never to my sovereign sue, As his foes I now implore. All I ask is to divide Every peril he must brave; Sharing by the hero’s side His fall, his exile, and his grave. (33–40) Byron does refer to Ko´sciuszko in two works from 1823, Canto X of Don Juan and The Age of Bronze. Both references follow Hunt and Keats in glorifying the power of Ko´sciuszko’s name. In Canto X, verses 58 and 59, Juan passes through Poland, ‘famous for mines of salt and yokes of iron,’ on his way to England. The narrator refers to Napoleon’s retreat through this land in the dead of winter: Alas! that glory should be chilled by snow! But should we wish to warm us on our way Through Poland, there is Kosciusko’s name Might scatter fire through ice, like Hecla’s flame. (X. 59, 469–72)


Jerome McGann notes the date of events being narrated – mid-1791 – but does not clearly explain its significance. The 3 May Constitutional Reform would have just taken place in Poland, the ‘Jacobinical’ act that allowed Russia to invade the following year. That Don Juan is traveling to Britain on Catherine’s behalf is also significant: according to McGann, Britain and Russia were negotiating secretly at the time, and such economic concerns may have lessened Britain’s interest in aiding Poland during the Ko´sciuszko Uprising – further evidence of the vested interests on all sides (McGann in Byron, Works 5: 745). The Age of Bronze, a satire on the Congress of Verona, includes a passing reference to Tsar Alexander’s treatment of Poland after the Congress of Vienna: How nobly gave he back the Poles their Diet Then told pugnacious Poland to be quiet (446–7) and, earlier, an extended epitaph to the nation that ‘the avenging angel’ Napoleon promised but failed to restore: ye who dwell Where Kosciusko dwelt, remembering yet The unpaid amount of Catherine’s bloody debt! Poland! o’er which the avenging angel past, But left thee as he found thee, still a waste; Forgetting all thy still enduring claim, Thy lotted people and extinguished name; Thy sigh for freedom, thy long-flowing tear, That sound that crashes in the tyrant’s ear; Kosciusko! (158–67) Though Byron must have been familiar with Hunt’s writings on Ko´sciuszko, another source of inspiration is found in a journal entry for 30 January 1821. While conversing with some Italian soldiers, ‘we spoke of Kosciusko. Count R.G. told me that he has seen the Polish officers in the Italian war burst into tears on hearing his name’ (Letters 8: 40). The Age of Bronze is perhaps the last time in British Romantic poetry that Ko´sciuszko’s name in itself is a source of agency, but it may be the first time that the name is pronounced as Ko´sciuszko would have said it: with three syllables rather than four. Such passages attest to the literary success of Hunt’s representations of Ko´sciuszko and, by extension, Poland. But an earlier and often overlooked poem by Byron suggests a more empowering approach that might have been


explored. Mazeppa, begun in April 1817 – shortly after the appearance of Keats’s poem and Southey’s article, six months before Ko´sciuszko’s death – and completed in 1818, was inspired by an episode in Voltaire’s 1731 Histoire de Charles XII. Retreating from a disastrous campaign against Peter the Great, Charles XII of Sweden bivouacs his forces for the night and requests the old warrior Mazeppa to tell a story to help him fall asleep. Mazeppa describes his service as a young page in the court of the Polish king John Casimir. When it was discovered that the youth was having an affair with the wife of a lord, the lord and his companions captured Mazeppa, tied him to a horse, and sent the horse on a mad ride into the steppes. Cossack peasants rescue Mazeppa, and he eventually rises to become their leader, the Hetman of the Ukraine, and takes his revenge on the Polish lord who punished him. Critics often see Mazeppa as an important precursor to Don Juan, or note the autobiographical sources of his clandestine love affair with a woman named Theresa. Yet Mazeppa’s national origins are almost always ignored.12 Though the historical Mazeppa (?1639–1709) may have been Ukrainian, Voltaire describes him as un gentilhomme Polonais in a passage quoted by Byron in the advertisement to Mazeppa. The poem inspired countless imaginative works in the nineteenth century: paintings by Delacroix, Géricault, Chassériau, and Vernet, music by Liszt and Tchaikovsky, poems by Pushkin and Hugo. But its popularity faded in the twentieth century. Had Mazeppa been Greek or Italian, I suspect there would be a much larger body of scholarship devoted to this fine poem. Restoring the significance of Mazeppa’s historical and geographical context extends our understanding of Byron’s geopolitical interests and invites a more serious and complex reading of the work, which I take to be Byron’s most significant statement specifically on the fate of Poland and more generally on the rights of oppressed nations and peoples in a reactionary age. As McGann and others have noted, Mazeppa’s opening sonnet stanza draws an unmistakable parallel between Charles’s defeat at Pultawa and Napoleon’s disaster in Russia. ’Twas after dread Pultowa’s day, When fortune left the royal Swede, Around a slaughter’d army lay, No more to combat and to bleed. The power and glory of the war, Faithless as their vain votaries, men, Had pass’d to the triumphant Czar, And Moscow’s walls were safe again, Until a day more dark and drear, And a more memorable year, Should give to slaughter and to shame


A mightier host and haughtier name; A greater wreck, a deeper fall, A shock to one – a thunderbolt to all. (1–14) One need not have read Voltaire’s Histoire to notice similarities between Charles XII and Napoleon; they were obvious and in the air. Hunt himself had made the comparison in the 26 March 1815 Examiner (193); Byron would make it again in The Age of Bronze, almost immediately after his reference to Ko´sciuszko and Poland (lines 171–8). But an informed reader like Byron would have noticed other remarkable parallels between the two historical moments. Voltaire’s Histoire is a study of two rulers, Charles XII and Peter the Great, but it is equally a history of Poland’s fate as the playground of belligerent neighbors. When Charles came to power, Poland was ruled by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony. As Augustus and Peter prepare for war against Sweden, Voltaire describes the mood in Poland in words strikingly similar to British descriptions of Poland in Byron’s lifetime. Accustomed in his hereditary dominions to absolute power, he [Augustus] too readily supposed he could govern Poland like Saxony . . . The Poles murmured to see their towns filled with Saxon garrisons and their frontiers with troops. This nation, far more jealous of maintaining their own liberty than solicitous to disturb their neighbors, did not look upon the war of King Augustus with Sweden . . . as an enterprise advantageous to the republic. A free nation is not easily deceived in regard to its true interests . . . They looked upon the Saxons and Moscovites as the instruments of their chains. (118–19) Voltaire praises the Poles in passages that would have appealed to Byron’s republicanism and that anticipate the strengths Byron gives Mazeppa. Of the armies of the Polish nobility, Voltaire comments they want discipline, subordination, and experience; but the love of liberty, by which they are animated, makes them always formidable . . . They may be conquered, or dispersed, or even held for a time in bondage, but they soon shake off the yoke; they compare themselves to reeds, which a storm bends to the ground, and which rise again as soon as it is calm. (115) ´ Charles defeated Saxony and Russia and placed Stanisław Leszczinski on the Polish throne, much as Napoleon set up the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 under his own rule. Though separated by a century, both states lasted about five years,


and both ended after crushing defeats in Russia. Byron’s second stanza picks up the narrative immediately after Charles’s frantic escape from Poltawa. Such was the hazard of the die; The wounded Charles was taught to fly By day and night through field and flood, Stain’d with his own and subjects’ blood; For thousands fell that flight to aid: And not a voice was heard t’upbraid Ambition in his humbled hour, When truth had nought to dread from power. (15–22) Readers often miss the levels of meaning Byron intends here. Charles’s flight ‘through field and flood’ imitates/anticipates the wild ride Mazeppa will narrate in the body of the poem. That Byron wants his reader to make this connection is announced in three excerpts from Voltaire included in the advertisement.13 The first quote tells in brief the story of Mazeppa, the seed that Byron cultivates into Mazeppa’s narrative. But the second quote describes Charles’s escape from Poltawa: ‘The king, pursued in his flight, had his horse killed under him: colonel Gieta, though wounded, and his blood flowing fast, gave him his. Thus this conqueror, who could not ride during the battle, was twice placed on horseback in his flight’ (Voltaire 256). Byron’s third quotation describes the last moments of that flight: ‘there, his courage not being able any longer to supply his exhausted spirits, the pain of his wound becoming more insupportable by fatigue, and his horse falling under him from excessive weariness, he rested himself some hours at the foot of a tree, in danger of being surprised, every moment, by the conquerors, who were seeking him on all sides’ (Voltaire 257–8). This is the necessary prologue that explains why Mazeppa chooses to narrate the wild ride of his own youth: having survived a disaster strikingly similar to Charles’s own, he offers the tale as instruction. The repeated adventure presents an irony that Voltaire ignores but Byron exploits. But those same opening lines of the second stanza also sustain the first stanza’s leap into contemporary events. Napoleon, too, was ‘[s]tain’d with his own and subjects’ blood,’ and ‘thousands fell’ on his behalf, many of them Poles. Those followers who refuse ‘t’upbraid / Ambition in his humbled hour’ bring to mind the loyal Polish soldier in ‘From the French,’ but they also evoke another Polish link between Charles XII and Napoleon that probably influenced Byron. One of the Poles who accompanied Charles in his retreat from Poltawa was none other than Stanisław Poniatowski. Voltaire describes him as ‘a person of uncommon merit, whom his attachment to the person of Charles


had engaged to follow him into Ukraine, without any post in the army’ (255). In Voltaire’s account, Poniatowski rescues Charles from capture at Poltawa and remains a loyal supporter during the king’s Turkish exile. Voltaire could not have guessed that Poniatowski’s son would become Stanisław II, the last king of Poland and a victim of Voltaire’s later writings; or that his grand nephew, Józef Poniatowski, would have played a similar role in Napoleon’s retreat from Russia, perishing at Leipzig and becoming the most celebrated of the ‘thousands’ who fell during the French Emperor’s retreat. Byron mentions neither descendant by name, though he no doubt heard accounts of Poniatowski’s death. And Mazeppa, in a long passage on the court at Warsaw, praises an earlier king of Poland, John Casimir, in language that could have brought to mind Stanisław II, whose support for the 3 May 1791 reform and former attachment to Catherine the Great caused his downfall. A learned monarch, faith! was he, And most unlike your majesty: He made no wars, and did not gain New realms to lose them back again: And (save debates in Warsaw’s diet) He reign’d in most unseemly quiet; Not that he had no cares to vex, He loved the muses and the sex; And sometimes these so froward are, They made him wish himself at war; But soon his wrath being o’er, he took Another mistress, or new book (131–42) Significantly, Byron would employ the same subject and couplet rhyme (quiet/diet) in the lines from The Age of Bronze quoted above, and thus forge another link between Poland’s past and present. Mazeppa’s description of Theresa highlights Poland’s historical and imaginative associations with the East, but it also offers an early tribute to Polish feminine beauty. The heroines of Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and the Polish aviatrix Lina Szczepanowska from Shaw’s Misalliance (1910) are later examples of British literature’s fascination with Polish women. Byron, not surprisingly, was ahead of his time. She had the Asiatic eye, Such as our Turkish neighborhood, Hath mingled with our Polish blood, Dark as above us is the sky (208–11)


Mazeppa’s affair with Theresa has a personal significance for Byron that commentators since Thomas Moore have noticed. But there are also good reasons to link Mazeppa’s banishment to the life of Ko´sciuszko. There was a story often quoted in the British press that Ko´sciuszko had attempted to elope with a young woman of higher birth, only to be caught and beaten by the young woman’s father and his companions, then to have disappeared from Poland and reappeared some time later as an assistant to George Washington.14 Thus like Ko´sciuszko, Mazeppa rises to fame in another land after a failed forbidden love affair. At the same time, Mazeppa’s great age – 70 years – distances him from the author. But this was precisely Ko´sciuszko’s age in 1817. Mazeppa’s position of power between two giants of history, Peter the Great and Charles XII, echoes Ko´sciuszko’s position between Napoleon and the allies, as promulgated by Leigh Hunt. And Byron’s many references to Hunt and the Examiner in his letters from 1815 and 1816 make it certain that he would have known of Ko´sciuszko’s return to literary and political prominence. But Mazeppa is a more empowering figure than those created by Hunt or Keats because he narrates his own story, and narrates it with a confidence alien to most of Byron’s pre-Don Juan characters. What need of more? – I will not tire With long recital of the rest, Since I became the Cossacks’ guest: They found me senseless on the plain – They bore me to the nearest hut – They brought me into life again – Me – one day o’er their realm to reign! (841–7) In his 1794 sonnet ‘Koskiusko,’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge had described ‘the tir’d Cossac’s barbarous yell / Of Triumph’ on seeing Ko´sciuszko fall. Mazeppa, a Pole, marvels at his own rise to power over these same people. Such a possibility was unlikely after the Congress of Vienna. Resorting to the goodness of Tsar Alexander seemed the only way for British writers to imagine the return of Poland. In the January 1814 Edinburgh Review Henry Brougham wrote that Ko´sciuszko’s ‘virtues and misfortunes are said to have melted the rude nature of the Cossacks’ after his defeat and capture (‘Article III’ 315). In Leigh Hunt’s Descent of Liberty, Liberty rewards the Genius of Russia with a crown of laurel then requests him to make the laurel ‘nobler still’ by restoring Poland, a land ‘heap’d with ill . . . [w]hose repentant pains implore you’ (Poetical Works 299). But Mazeppa offers a different approach: not to beg before a king or tsar, but to remember the past, to learn from it, to await a time when personal resolve and


good fortune allow even a peasant – or, like Ko´sciuszko and Mazeppa, a minor noble in peasant’s dress – to confound the lord whose punishment does not fit the crime, or the leader who cannot stay awake to hear and learn from the tale. Thus the vain fool who strove to glut His rage, refining on my pain, Sent me forth to the wilderness, Bound, naked, bleeding, and alone, To pass the desert to a throne, – What mortal his own doom may guess? – Let none despond, let none despair! (848–54) I have elaborated the intertextual associations of Mazeppa to strengthen my claim that this is Byron’s Polish poem, and that it offers a very different collection of tropes to associate with Polish nationalism. It should also remind us of the political risks that Byron, like few others in the 1810s, was willing to take in his poetry. Byron’s more empowering approach failed to catch on in Britain; but perhaps this would be too much to expect in the politically sensitive post-Waterloo period, when liberals like Hunt were distancing themselves from the violence of Luddism and the Corn Law riots. Certainly Hunt and his circle found much to admire about the figure most often associated with Poland’s fate, and many would have agreed with Henry Brougham in acknowledging the importance of Leigh Hunt’s advocacy for Poland at a time when the subject was ‘obstinately avoided by those who used to speak most about liberty’ (quoted in Hunt Correspondence 1: 56). For Hunt and Landor, Ko´sciuszko is the exemplary figure of his era, showing up the pettiness of both the allies and France. For Keats he is a hero whose only equal in British history is Alfred the Great. For Byron he opposes all the excesses of Catherine and the selfish, small-minded machinations of Britain and Russia. And yet there remains something troubling about these writers’ appropriation of a 70-year-old foreigner for their political ends. As noted in Chapter 2 and above, Keats, in ‘Sleep and Poetry,’ describes himself as ‘upon a couch at ease’ as he lists the decorations of Leigh Hunt’s home, including the bust of Ko´sciuszko. Keats celebrates the same posture that made Ko´sciuszko in 1797 appear defeated and effeminate.15 Here it becomes a position of power, as the young poet surveys the acquired treasures around him. ‘We may expect him to speak and act again’ wrote Hunt in the Examiner, ‘if the world go on as it promises’ (12 January 1817, 18). But the one who speaks most is Hunt, in his unacknowledged revisions of Williams’s article, in his weekly columns, in the influence of his Ko´sciuszko on other writers. Literary scholars often speak of the


appropriation of one culture by another, but this also seems the appropriation of age by youth. Ko´sciuszko is rarely allowed to speak; younger British writers speak for him. His body, his human suffering, so central to earlier representations, disappears, replaced by a powerful, ghostly, and guilt-creating name. The same thing, of course, had happened to his nation: dismembered, in the language of the era, wiped off the map of Europe only to return as a ghost of its former self. One wonders if Ko´sciuszko knew how his soldiers’ uniform had become the latest fad of London fashion, or how his name and his nation were being used in the British presses to support a spectrum of political agendas. And yet he would have known, better than almost anyone, the rarity of words transformed into action.

5 Climate Change: Britain and Poland, 1830–49

Unlike most notable figures of the British Romantic era, Claire Clairmont had first-hand experience of Russia: she lived there from 1824 to 1828, working as a governess. Clairmont’s journals and letters suggest that her experiences ran the gamut from sublime (‘Moscow is the most beautiful city in the world in Summer,’ Correspondence 245) to historically remarkable (she comments on the Decembrist revolt, Journals 393–4), to utterly despairing (‘To stay here is certain death in a year or two,’ Correspondence 248). Her letters and journals tell us almost nothing of her opinion of Poland, though her single foray into fiction suggests a thorough acquaintance with the now-familiar tropes of the Polish exile. In Clairmont’s short story of 1832, ‘The Pole,’ finished by Mary Shelley, the narrator describes the features of her hero Ladislas, a Polish military spy: ‘His countenance, had you taken from it its deep thoughtfulness and its expression of calm intrepid bravery, might have belonged to the most lovely woman, so transparently blooming was his complexion, so regular his features, so blond and luxuriant his hair’ (347). The sign of Ko´sciuszko – between the Lion and Virgin, as Landor had it – clearly remained in the ascendant in the early 1830s. As if to emphasize the point, Clairmont creates a conniving Russian princess named Dashkoff to serve as one of the story’s villains – Princess Catherine Dashkoff, or Dashkova (1743–1810), was a well-known friend of Ko´sciuszko’s nemesis, Catherine the Great. Ladislas is even rewarded with marriage to Idalie, ‘a daughter of one of Kosciusko’s unfortunate followers’ (354). Clairmont had sent the story to Mary Shelley with a request to ‘correct it’ and ‘write the last scene of it . . . I think in your hands it might get into the Keepsake for it is about a Pole and that is the topic of the day’ (Correspondence 287). The 1831 Russo-Polish War had brought Poland into the headlines again. Shelley herself commented excitedly in December 1830 on the continental events: ‘The fire is spreading from one end of Europe to the other – Russia & Prussia would assault enfranchised Belgium, but Poland rises in their path . . . Will not our Children live to see a new birth for the world!’ (Letters 2: 124). Jane Porter, too, 114

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was pleased, both as Polonophile and author. Thaddeus of Warsaw reappeared in a revised 1831 edition for Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley’s new Standard Novels series – the series that would also include Shelley’s revised Frankenstein later that year. According to Emily Sunstein, Shelley met Jane Porter while she was working on Lodore (319). This perhaps accounts for a subplot adapted from Thaddeus of Warsaw. Like Thaddeus Sobieski’s English father Sir Robert Somerset, Lord Lodore ‘spent his youth in passion, and exhausted his better nature in a struggle for, and in the enjoyment of, pleasure’ (119). During his continental wanderings, Lodore becomes obsessed with a ‘mysterious fair one . . . in some unattainable district of northern Germany, Poland, or Courland’ (88). He finally breaks away from this foreign lover and returns to Britain, where he decides ‘to marry one whom his judgment, rather than his love, should select’ (90). Shortly after his marriage to Cornelia, he receives a letter from his former lover, Countess Lyzinski, who is visiting London with their son, Casimir. Like his Polish/British precursor Thaddeus, Casimir appears as a distinguished and honorable gentleman, ‘a youth inheriting all his mother’s beauty’ (108). Like Thaddeus Sobieski too, Casimir Lyzinski’s names suggest Polish royalty: Casimir was the name of many Polish kings (including John Casimir, praised in Byron’s Mazeppa), while his surname recalls Stanisław Lesczynski, or Stanisław I, who briefly ruled Poland before war forced him into French exile. While Therese Sobieski tells Thaddeus of his British father, Theodora Lyzinski keeps her affair a secret from Casimir. Thus, when Lord Lodore strikes Casimir in public, Casimir has no idea that he is challenging his own father to a duel. Lodore, with his daughter Ethel, immediately departs Britain for America; he asks Cornelia to join them, but she refuses. But neither he nor Robert Somerset can escape their Polish pasts. In Porter’s novel, fate draws Somerset and his illegitimate son together, allowing them a final reconciliation. Fate is less kind to Lodore and Casimir: on the point of returning to Britain, Lodore encounters an American ‘who had sat opposite to him at the memorable dinner’ when Casimir challenged his father (157). When the American mocks Lodore’s cowardliness, Lodore challenges him to a duel. Lodore is killed. Just before the encounter with the American, as Lodore and Ethel prepare for their return to Britain, the narrator tells us that ‘Lodore had forgotten Theodora and her son . . . A strange distortion of vision blinded this unfortunate man to the truth, which experience so perpetually teaches us, that the consequences of our actions never die . . . though we shut our eyes, they are still beside us’ (156). The American’s fortuitous presence and the duel that follows force Lodore to revisit his dishonorable behavior, and death is his penalty for past sins. But as Lisa Vargo notes, the narrator’s observation also introduces a central concern of the rest of the novel: ‘the implications of Lodore’s legacy as it is represented by his daughter and by his wife’ (Shelley Lodore 23). Vargo


argues convincingly that, though the title character only appears in the first of Lodore’s three volumes, his power endures to the novel’s conclusion, through legacies both destructive (his will) and productive (his conscientious education of Ethel). But what about his legacy to his son? Near the novel’s conclusion, the narrator reads a similar question in the thoughts of Cornelia: And where was Casimir? She had never heard of him again, she had scarcely ever thought of him; he had grown older too – change, the effects of passion or of destiny, must have visited him also – they were all embarked on one mighty stream – Lodore had gained a haven; but the living were still at the mercy of the vast torrent – whither would it hurry them? There was a charm in these melancholy and speculative thoughts to the beautiful exile – for we may be as easily exiled by a few roods of ground, as by mountains and sea. (439–40) After Lodore’s death, the Lyzinskis disappear from Shelley’s narrative. Cornelia’s sentimental ruminations, and the narrator’s gentle approval of them, suggest the changes in public interests that occurred between the novel’s 1831 inception and its 1835 publication. During the first half of 1831, the RussoPolish War made regular headlines in the British papers. Many British writers, most prominently Thomas Campbell, drew literary inspiration from events in Poland. Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley were clearly influenced by these events and the renewed literary interest in Poland among Britons while writing ‘The Pole’ and the opening chapters of Lodore. It is ironic, then, that the characters who inspire the narrator’s announcement that ‘the consequences of our actions never die,’ are abandoned by the narrator as much as they are by Lodore and Cornelia. They reappear just for a moment, after Cornelia, in her solitude, realizes ‘that her lover, her husband, the father of her child, the forsaken, dead Lodore, was indeed no part of the tissue of life, action, and feeling to which she belonged’ (439). With the end of Lodore’s power, the Polish mother and son fade away. Shelley’s narratorial amnesia is symptomatic of a greater turn in British representations of Poland in the 1830s and 1840s. At the start of this era Poland was once again, as Clairmont puts it, ‘the topic of the day,’ and pro-Poland/antiRussian sentiments were everywhere evident. But this widespread sympathy for Poland faded in the mid-1830s, replaced by an exhaustion of sympathy in some British writers, and outright aversion in others. Raymond Williams has identified this behavioral turn as ‘negative identification.’ ‘The rebel,’ writes Williams, ‘finds available to him an apparent cause, on behalf of the outcast of society. He identifies himself with this, often passionately.’ But this identification will


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eventually require ‘an actual relationship’ with the outcast, and ‘he will normally be reluctant to accept the discipline of the cause’: ‘it is also, and more essentially, that the outcast class, whom he has thought of as noble . . . are in fact nothing of the kind, but are very mixed in character, containing very good and very bad, and in any case living in ways that differ from his own’ (Culture 176). Williams’s primary interest is the response of Victorian writers to the working class, but his insight seems equally applicable to the way Britons responded to the appearance of actual Polish exiles, who arrived in Britain in increasing numbers in the 1830s and 1840s. In order to clarify this attitudinal change, I offer here a brief survey of British literary responses to the Russo-Polish War, showing how the literary imagery popularized by older writers like Jane Porter and Thomas Campbell continued to influence and inspire younger writers. Richard Cronin has argued that the ‘early Victorians established relations with their predecessors that were peculiarly fraught, and one of the reasons is that their predecessors were dead’ (5). But this was simply not the case. Indeed, the early 1830s produced a burst of creative production from some of the best-selling writers of the Romantic era, and it is equally important and interesting to think about these older Romantic writers writing beside, and sometimes sharing journal columns with, their younger colleagues. This late Romantic return, inspired in part by events in Russia and Poland, has not been thoroughly investigated by literary scholars. In the chapter’s latter pages I turn to two writers, Alfred Tennyson and William Aytoun, whose pro-Poland verse suggests that Romanticism was alive and well in the early 1830s; it was just waiting for an appropriate cause. But their subsequent changing views represent two intellectual journeys away from Poland and more generally away from a Romantic aesthetic. In the case of Tennyson, the move is more subtle and ambivalent; in the case of Aytoun, it is violent and reactionary.

Polar shifts In 1815 the Congress of Vienna had created a ‘Kingdom of Poland’ under the rule of Russia. Tsar Alexander added King of Poland to his titles, and his brother, Grand Duke Constantine, became Poland’s Commander in Chief. Though ‘Congress’ Poland was much smaller than the Poland of 50 years earlier – it was similar in size to the United Netherlands also created by the Congress of Vienna, and excluded important cities like Cracow and Poznan – Poles received limited though significant control in its government and military. But even this degree of leniency faded after the death in 1825 of Alexander I and the accession of a younger brother, Nicholas (Constantine had renounced his right of succession). Shaken by the 1825 Decembrist revolt, a Polish-backed attempt by members of the Russian military to form a constitutional monarchy, Nicholas


cracked down on secret societies in Poland and further limited the powers of the Polish army and parliamentary Seym. Thus tensions were already high at the start of 1830, when the European map stitched together in Vienna began to unravel. Greece was declared an autonomous state, the Bourbons were overthrown in France, unrest grew in Italy and Germany, and Belgium declared itself independent of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Harriet Martineau described the events in Warsaw that precipitated the 1830–31 uprising: Some students of the military school had drunk to the memory of Kosciuszko and other heroes . . . the grand-duke took the affair into his own hands, and, without warrant of law, ordered some of the youths to be flogged and others imprisoned. The young men rose; the Polish part of the garrison joined them; and then the townspeople began to act. They helped themselves with arms from the arsenal, and aided in driving out the Russian soldiery, amidst fearful bloodshed, from the streets of Warsaw. It was on the 29th of November that the students rose; and on the 3rd of December, Constantine was travelling towards the frontier, having recommended all establishments, persons, and property, to the protection of the Polish nation. (126) The uprising was poorly planned, and moderate Polish leaders, supporting change but unprepared for war, attempted to appease the tsar. But Nicholas now had reason to punish the Poles and remove their fledgling constitutional government. In the Russo-Polish War that followed, the Poles won a number of significant victories, but by June 1831 the Russians had wiped out their best infantry. Prince Adam Czartoryski, a former minister of foreign affairs to Tsar Alexander and the most admired Polish statesman of the time, appealed to the European powers without effect. On 8 September 1831 the Russians took Warsaw and abolished all democratic institutions. There were occasional voices who opposed British involvement; the iconoclastic William Cobbett argued that the Russo-Polish War ‘is too distant, too out of the way of our affairs, that we would take one single meal from a weaver or ploughman for the sake of doing good to the Poles’ (Dyck 43). But in general the Polish cause found supporters on the political left and right. According to Harriet Martineau, ‘sympathy was almost all on one side,’ against the Russians. Along with the liberals, the ‘highest conservatives might and did sympathize with the Polish Rebels’ (128). Indeed, John Howes Gleason sees the Russo-Polish War as a turning point in British representations of Russia: in the years before the war, the British press usually adopted a tone of ‘friendly curiosity’ towards Russia, and Nicholas’s ‘advent to the throne had been greeted with gracious interest.’ Russia, after all, had been Britain’s ally against Napoleon. But after


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1831, ‘[e]ven the most innocent Russian actions came to be regarded with suspicion,’ while ‘a howl of indignation and abuse greeted any move which seemed to demonstrate ambitious intent’ (133–4). Like his predecessor Ko´sciuszko, Czartoryski had visited London and met many of its leading political figures. His most active supporter was Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart, MP for Arundel and later Marylebone, who helped organize the London Literary Association of the Friends of Poland in 1832 and was instrumental in obtaining an 1835 parliamentary grant of £10, 000 for the relief of Polish émigrés in England, a grant renewed annually for seventeen years (Gossman 232–3).1 In 1833, after the Poles’ defeat, the Duke of Sussex served as patron to a Vauxhall Gardens fundraising party ‘to which nine thousand people paid a four-shilling admission fee’ (Gleason 130). Publications on Poland increased significantly. In the April 1832 Edinburgh Review Henry Rich described four recent works on Poland and gave readers a 50-page record of the ‘History, Present Wrongs, and Claims of Poland.’ Two new journals appeared, Polonia (founded by the Literary Association) and the Hull Polish Record, which published poetry, essays, parliamentary debates, and the latest news related to Poland. Though both journals disappeared within two years, the rather more successful British and Foreign Review appeared in 1835 as an ‘offshoot of the Literary Association’ and regularly published pro-Poland articles over the next nine years (Wellesley Index 3: 62).2 In the July 1830 New Monthly Magazine (‘Anecdotes of Russia’) and the November 1831 Metropolitan Review (‘Adam Mickiewicz and his Poetry’), British readers first encountered translations of Poland’s greatest nineteenth-century poet, Adam Mickiewicz. Well-known British literary figures engaged with the Polish cause in a variety of ways. Jane Porter avoided a public role during and after the Russo-Polish War: her brother Robert’s Russian wife had died of typhus in 1826, but their daughter remained in St Petersburg, and Porter was reticent to show much public support. But Thaddeus of Warsaw again became a bestseller, and Porter did produce at least two pro-Poland essays, though both appeared as works by ‘The Author of Thaddeus of Warsaw’ rather than Jane Porter. The first was ‘Precis of the Constitution of Poland of 1791,’ which appeared in the February 1831 United Service Journal; the second was a pamphlet entitled A Fragment of Poland, written at the behest of Leicester and Elizabeth Stanhope, leading members of the Friends of Poland. ‘I trust, dearest Brother,’ she sheepishly wrote Robert, ‘that you will not blame what I have done.’3 Thomas Campbell, by contrast, was the most visible literary figure in the proPoland movement. Besides being president of the Literary Association and a regular contributor to Polonia, the ‘Bard of Hope’ was also editing the Metropolitan Review and including pro-Poland poetry and prose in its pages. ‘I know that my zeal for Poland has put me half mad,’ Campbell wrote a friend in 1831. ‘I am offended with my country for its tameness at this crisis’ (Beattie 2: 244).


In the Literary Association’s first publication, a pamphlet entitled Address of the Literary Polish Association to the People of Great Britain (1832), Campbell praised the courage of the Poles while chastising the European powers that failed to aid the uprising. Generous as Britons are, it seems as if Poland were fated to experience their generosity only in fond words and fits of recollection . . . is this people, that produced Casimir, Copernicus, Sobieski, and Kosciuszko – this people, once the deliverers of Christendom, and to this day the models of modern heroism – is this people to be the theme of the day, and then to be dropt into oblivion, and annihilated? Enlightened England, avert the doom! (18–19) Campbell elaborated his aversion to Britain’s ‘fond words’ in his contemporary ‘Lines on Poland’: Well can ye mouth fair Freedom’s classic line, And talk of Constitutions o’er your wine; But all your vows to break the tyrant’s yoke Expire in Bacchanalian song and smoke. Heavens! can no ray of foresight pierce the leads And mystic metaphysics of your heads, To show the self-same grave Oppression delves For Poland’s rights is yawning for yourselves? (65–72) Here the mouthing of ‘Freedom’s classic line’ – perhaps Campbell’s own oftquoted couplet on Ko´sciuszko? – and the empty pronouncement of ‘vows’ on behalf of Polish sovereignty accompany the equally unproductive oral excesses of drinking, singing, and smoking. Such indulgences produce unhealthy ‘Constitutions,’ bodily and political, and lead to a ‘yawning’ grave, a pun twinning the inaction of Britons in the face of Polish defeat with a tomb whose capacious appetite awaits its next course. Romantic poets like Keats, Coleridge, and the young Campbell had focused their pro-Poland verse on the figure of Ko´sciuszko. But after 1830 writers broadened their themes to consider great figures throughout Polish history as well as Poland’s place in European history. Campbell’s own poems mainly focus on Ko´sciuszko’s contemporaries: Prince Józef Poniatowski, who had led Napoleon’s Polish forces against the Russians; the poet/soldier Julian Niemcewicz; and Czartoryski, an acquaintance of Campbell. But he also refers to King John Sobieski, who in 1683 defeated a much larger Ottoman army at Vienna, thus ending the threat of a Muslim conquest of Europe.


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The Polish Eagle’s fall is big with fate to man. Proud bird of old! Mohammed’s moon recoiled Before thy swoop: had we been timely bold, That swoop, still free, had stunned the Russ, and foiled Earth’s new oppressors as it foiled her old. (‘The Power of Russia’ 72–6) British writers considered Sobieski’s victory of great historical importance but also as heavily symbolic: Poland had rescued Europe from foreign domination, but Europe had failed to rescue Poland from Russia, Prussia, and Austria. According to the April 1832 Edinburgh Review, Sobieski’s ‘victories yet live in the memory, though not in the gratitude, of Europe’ (Rich 232). ‘What was Austria to Poland that Poland should be generous to her in her time of need?’ asked the Westminster Review in January 1855. ‘But Sobieski,’ unlike the supposed great powers of Europe, ‘was magnanimous’ (Neuberg 139). Campbell closes ‘Lines on Poland’ with a call of his own to other poets: Her praise upon my faltering lips expires – Resume it younger bards, and nobler lyres! (156–7) If the cause of Polish sovereignty did not generate a steady flow of poetic works, it did inspire a surprising number of writers to briefly take up the cause. Many of these writers were Scottish. Perhaps they were responding to certain similarities between their readings of Poland’s recent history and what they had read or been told of British history. Indeed, Poland might be considered a kind of testing ground for some Scottish writers, allowing them to investigate the tragedies of a distant land before digging into the ruins of their own national history. Though born in Durham, Jane Porter spent much of her youth in Edinburgh, and her follow-up to Thaddeus of Warsaw was the equally successful 1810 novel The Scottish Chiefs. Thomas Campbell turned to Scottish history for much poetry after ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ as did William Aytoun, who began his career with the poem ‘Poland’ (discussed below) but gained greater fame for his Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers (1849). Jacob Jones, a contributor to Polonia, dedicated his 1836 collection The AngloPolish Harp to Campbell. One poem begins A bright day shone for Poland, She girded on the sword; From Highland, and from Lowland Her brave Confederates pour’d – (‘A Bright Day Shone for Poland!’)


Jones adds a note: ‘The “peculiarity” of this description, as far as The Poland of Diplomatists is concerned, must be placed, by the reader, to the account of Poetic license’ (37). Poland was known for its plains; Jones apparently felt justified in transposing a Scottish landscape onto his subject. Similar themes and influences are taken up in contemporary poems by John Walker Ord (‘Poland, Affectionately Inscribed to My Dear Friend, Thomas Campbell’), Charles Mackay (‘On the Capitulation of Warsaw, September 1831’), and Janet Hamilton (‘Poland,’ which opens with a line from Campbell). In all these works the poets seem to be working through earlier Romantic models to portray a nation with a long history of freedom-fighting trampled by a heathen tsar and his merciless army while the British government looks away.4 But change was in the air. By the mid-1830s the number of pro-Poland works had slowed considerably, and in the 1840s interest in Poland among the general public faded. A number of developments were responsible for the change. Thomas Campbell’s death in June 1844 lost the Polish cause its most famous voice. Indeed, the numerous eulogies that associated Campbell with Poland were probably the last concentrated outpouring of sympathy for Poland in mainstream Victorian literature.5 Czartoryski remained an admired statesman, and British journals sympathetically described the failed Polish revolts of 1846 and 1848, but the British public apparently grew tired of Russian victories and Polish refugees. As William Thackeray’s narrator in The Newcomes (1853) records, ‘Polish chieftains were at this time so common in London, that nobody (except one noble member for Marylebone [that is, Lord Stuart], and, once a year, the Lord Mayor) took any interest in them’ (97). Polish nobility seemed to be everywhere but in Poland: Czartoryski famously lived and entertained on the Ile St Louis in Paris; in Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s fictional Prince Polonia holds court in Rome. At the same time, Polish exiles became known for their participation in various national uprisings, especially in France, Hungary, and Italy. As Eric Hobsbawm notes, ‘No rising or war of liberation anywhere in Europe between 1831 and 1871 was to be without its contingent of Polish military experts or fighters’ (Age 130). It was difficult to focus attention on the cause of Poland, when the Poles themselves were putting their energies everywhere else.6 The image of the Pole was changing at another level as well. As Peter Brock notes, it was ‘the cause of Poland more than that of any other country that stimulated the earliest manifestations in England of radical and working-class internationalism’ (139). This interest in Poland was one of Chartism’s obvious but underappreciated inheritances from Romanticism. Radicals like Ernest Jones, William J. Linton, and George Julian Harvey actively supported Polish independence, while Polish émigrés took part in the Chartist and Positivist movements in Britain (see Brock, Finn, and F.B. Smith). As early as January 1831, the Westminster Review drew a striking parallel between Polish sovereignty


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and British radicalism: ‘If the Russians are driven over the Nieman, we shall have the Ballot; if they cross the Dnieper, we shall be rid of the Corn Laws . . . Poland has its liberation to win, and so have we’ (T.P. Thompson 250–2). One Chartist pamphlet from around 1838, The Working Men’s Association, to the Working Classes of Europe, and Especially to the Polish People, published ‘[i]n reply to the Polish Democrats who recently addressed us,’ surveys the poor state of European democracy and hopes that Poles living in Britain ‘may gather such seeds of democracy in their exile, as at no distant period may be planted in their cherished country, to produce the fruits of national freedom and enlightened brotherhood’ (Claeys 1: 139–40). The People’s International League was founded in 1847 in response to the suppression of the Cracow Republic the year before (Claeys 4: 263). In a speech to the Fraternal Democrats in London that year, Karl Marx argued that ‘the victory of the English proletariat over the English bourgeoisie is of decisive importance for the victory of all oppressed peoples over their oppressors. Poland, therefore, must be freed, not in Poland, but in England’ (505). Chartists had no patience for the balls and fundraisers of Czartoryski, Campbell, and Lord Stuart. According to Henry Weisser, ‘As Polonophilism matured, it became increasingly class conscious, leading Chartists and some Polish groups to find their mutual support heightened by the intense dislike of other groups of Polish exiles. . . . The Czartoryski Poles had little or nothing to do with the British working class, except to serve as targets for joint attacks by British workers and left-wing Poles’ (119). In his 1854 novel of the Russo-Polish War, The Maid of Warsaw, Ernest Jones attacked the Polish upper class whom he believed had failed the 1831 uprising, but he also mocked British upper-class activities on behalf of Poland: committees were formed, subscriptions raised, and lofty names were advertised in the papers, as bestowing donatives towards the Polish fund (although what became of the fund itself was never exactly understood); balls were given in behalf of the suffering exiles (although most of the proceeds were spent in the arrangements of the festival) . . . It is true the government never gave an open support . . . But they did say, (in secret, however,) if we bestir ourselves for Poland, then Russia may cry, ‘Ireland!’ to our teeth; and as we have tyrannised over the latter country, we had best not say a word about the former. (60–1) As the last sentence suggests, the change in class orientation also invited an adjustment in geographical association. In the 1840s the once-common associations between Poland and India or Poland and Scotland faded away, replaced by a growing and dangerous rhetorical association between Poland


and Ireland. Scotland and Poland shared associations historical, monarchical (Stuart/Sobieski) and heroic (Wallace/Ko´sciuszko), but these were temporally distant associations. As I argued in Chapter 2, the India association distanced Poland geographically. By contrast, the Poland-Ireland connection was troubling because it was both contemporary and near. An innocent-looking Punch cartoon from 15 June 1844 neatly sums up the situation. Tsar Nicholas (who visited England that year, much to Punch’s dismay) and Queen Victoria sit across a table while maps of Poland and Ireland appear above them. Victoria seems to enlighten the tsar with the confession, ‘Brother, Brother, we’re both in the wrong!’ (Figure 5.1). Knowledge that the line is spoken by Peachum to Lockit in The Beggar’s Opera suggests two rulers more interested in preserving their profits than in freeing their oppressed neighbors. It seems fitting, then, that the only Pole to conquer Victorian Britain – besides Thaddeus Sobieski, who appeared yet again in a newly revised and illustrated edition in 1844 – did so on the opera stage, in a work composed by an Irishman. Michael Balfe’s enormously popular 1843 opera The Bohemian Girl features a dashing Polish military hero named (what else?) Thaddeus who rescues a Hungarian princess from gypsies and comes nowhere near British shores. The opera ran for 50 nights at Drury Lane and was performed regularly in Europe and the United States through the rest of the century. One could cheer unequivocally for a Polish hero in antiquated novels and in the fantasy world of the opera stage, but elsewhere he was persona non grata.

Tennyson and Poland Alfred Tennyson’s poetry is indicative of a trajectory followed by many Britons. It begins with a Romantic-inspired interest in Poland and contempt for Russia, and ends with ambivalence for Poland and even more contempt for Russia. Two early sonnets express the author’s initial enthusiasm for Poland as well as his youthful outrage at both Russia’s belligerence and Britain’s inaction. ‘Sonnet: Written on Hearing of the Outbreak of the Polish Insurrection’ sweeps through Polish history, from the founding of Poland and the Piast dynasty a millennium ago by Boleslas I, through the heroism of the sixteenth-century Zamoysky and the seventeenth-century Sobieski, thus presenting the 1831 rebels as inheritors of a thousand years of courage and glory. Blow ye the trumpet, gather from afar The hosts to battle: be not bought and sold. Arise, brave Poles, the boldest of the bold; Break through your iron shackles – fling them far. O for those days of Piast, ere the Czar Grew to this strength among his deserts cold;


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When even to Moscow’s cupolas were rolled The growing murmurs of the Polish war! Now must your noble anger blaze out more Than when from Sobieski, clan by clan, The Moslem myriads fell, and fled before – Than when Zamoysky smote the tartar Khan, Than earlier, when on the Baltic shore Boleslas drove the Pomeranian.

Figure 5.1

John Leech, ‘Brother, Brother, We’re Both in the Wrong!’ Punch 15 June 1844


Like many young writers at the time, Tennyson was moved by the persecution of the Poles, perhaps even before the Russo-Polish War. He later told his friend William Allingham, ‘when I was 22 I wrote a beautiful poem on Poland, hundreds of lines long, and the housemaid lit the fire with it. I never could recover it’ (Allingham 303). His first sonnet on Poland exhibits a youthful exuberance and clear debt to Scripture (Joel 2:1) and to his Romantic predecessors; there may even be an echo in the fifth line of William Wordsworth’s 1816 sonnet to John Sobieski, which begins, ‘Oh, for a kindling touch from that pure flame.’ It also has the unfortunate effect of pushing its subject back in time, leaving the Poles stranded on the shores of tenth-century Europe, their great leader quite possibly herding a small fluffy dog. Tennyson’s second sonnet, now called ‘Poland,’ appeared (together with the first) in his 1832 collection as ‘Sonnet: On the Result of the Late Russian Invasion of Poland,’ and reflects the disillusionment that runs through so much British poetry on Poland. It is not the Russians who require forgiveness – Nicholas I, the ‘icy-hearted Muscovite’ and ‘Barbarian in the East,’ seems beyond redemption – but rather the British who refuse to aid the Poles. How long, O God, shall men be ridden down, And trampled under by the last and least Of men? The heart of Poland hath not ceased To quiver, tho’ her sacred blood doth drown The fields, and out of every smouldering town Cries to thee, lest brute Power be increased, Till that o’er grown Barbarian in the East Transgress his ample bound to some new crown: – Cries to Thee, ‘Lord, how long shall these things be? How long this icy-hearted Muscovite Oppress the region?’ Us, O Just and Good, Forgive, who smiled when she was torn in three; Us, who stand now, when we should aid the right – A matter to be wept with tears of blood! Christopher Ricks noted Tennyson’s debt to Revelation 6:10 in the opening line (‘How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge’) and to Percy Shelley’s Prologue to Hellas in the last (Tennyson 1: 498). A contemporary influence could have been an article on Poland in The Times of 20 July 1831: ‘How long will Russia be permitted, with impunity, to make war upon the ancient and noble nation of the Poles, . . . the tried and victorious protectors of civilized Europe against the Turkish and Muscovite barbarians?’ Though ‘Poland’ is a better poem than its predecessor, neither shows the abilities of the author who also composed ‘The Lotos Eaters’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in the same period. Both,


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however, suggest Tennyson’s familiarity with Romantic-era representations of Poland. Tennyson presents a more complicated, albeit conservative, response to Poland at the close of ‘Hail Briton!’ a work of over two hundred lines and among his first to use the In Memoriam stanza. Probably written soon after the Poland poems, ‘Hail Briton!’ praises the British right to free speech but is critical of the atmosphere surrounding the 1832 Reform Bill. For babbling voices vex the days We live in, teaching hate of laws, And teaching lose their own applause To win a shallow journal’s praise – (45–8) Tennyson praises great figures from the past who ‘worshipt Freedom for her sake’ (85) and chides those who cleave their nation ‘[i]n two great halves, when each one leaves / The middle road of sober thought’ (111–12). He describes a savior-figure for Britain, one marked by moderation. He cares, if ancient usage fade, To shape, to settle, to repair With seasonable changes fair And innovation grade by grade. (149–52) But in the final stanzas Tennyson makes a surprising move, comparing those in Britain who ‘[w]ould make unsheathed the civil sword’ to ‘[t]he Cossack curst of god and man / To whom the Polish virgin cries’ (184, 191–2). They are like Nicholas I, Who rules a savage land where meet The coarse extremes of Power and Fear – A land where knowledge dreads to hear Her footsteps falling in the street – (197–200) Those who support extensive reform in 1832 are compared to foreigners violently forcing their views on a peace-loving people – a reminder that supporters of Poland in 1830s Britain were not always pro-Reform Bill. Clearly the connection between continental uprisings and British reform was not as apparent as it had been in the years after the French Revolution, or as it would become


during the Chartist period. Tennyson and his friend Richard Chenevix Trench (who also composed several pro-Poland poems) struggled to match their desire for revolution abroad with their more conservative views at home (Cronin 155). They would have found an ally, somewhat surprisingly, in Jane Porter, who had preceded A Fragment of Poland with an anonymous, anti-Reform Bill pamphlet, On the Laws and Liberties of Englishmen (McLean, ‘Jane Porter’s Later Works’ 56). Tennyson’s last words on Poland appear in Maud: A Monodrama. Both Poland and Hungary had risen in revolt in the late 1840s; both had been defeated through the help of Tsar Nicholas; and supporters of both oppressed nations saw the Crimean War as another opportunity to gain sovereignty. As Patrick Waddington has shown (60–121), there is much evidence in Tennyson’s writings that confirms his sustained repugnance for the ‘iron tyranny’ of the ‘giant liar’ Nicholas (Maud Part 3: 20, 45). As Tennyson told William Allingham in 1878, ‘I’ve hated Russia ever since I was born, and I’ll hate her till I die!’ (Allingham 265). But evidence of Tennyson’s later opinion of Poland or Hungary is harder to find. Of his two Poland sonnets, the former was never republished, and the latter only appeared in later collected editions as ‘juvenilia.’ In Maud, the narrator refers briefly to Hungary and Poland in an early passage of doubt and uncertainty: For the drift of the Maker is dark, and Isis hid by the veil. Who knows the ways of the world, how God will bring them about? Our planet is one, the suns are many, the world is wide. Shall I weep if a Poland fall? Shall I shriek if a Hungary fail? Or an infant civilization be ruled with rod or with knout? I have not made the world, and He that made it will guide. (Part 1: 143–8) Tennyson’s debt to Campbell’s famous line ‘And Freedom shriek’d – as Kosciusko fell’ seems beyond debate, yet it is interesting to note how rarely (if ever) the source has been cited. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it must have been so obvious as to make a footnote unnecessary; perhaps more recent editors have forgotten (or never knew) the famous passage from Campbell’s ‘Pleasures of Hope.’ In any case, Tennyson’s decision to put Campbell’s key words into the mouth of an unstable young man suggests an ambivalence towards Poland and Hungary that was widespread in 1850s Britain. As W.H. Zawadzki notes, ‘allied objectives’ in the Crimean War ‘were limited to the defence of Turkey . . . Despite some intimations to the contrary by Palmerston and Napoleon III, the Polish Question did not appear on the agenda of the peace conference that met in Paris in 1856’ (333).


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William Aytoun’s ‘Poland’: 1832–49 The Scottish poet William Edmondstoune Aytoun gained notoriety in the 1840s for his ballads and Bon Gaultier parodies, and in the 1850s for Firmilian, or the Student of Badajoz, which satirized George Gilfillan and the Spasmodic school of poets. But his career began with an anonymous collection of poetry entitled Poland, Homer and Other Poems. Aytoun dedicated the collection to Prince Czartoryski, whom he probably met in Edinburgh (Weinstein 9). The coupling of Poland and Homer in the title suggests a link between ancient Athens or Troy and contemporary Poland that Aytoun clearly intends as enobling to the Poles, whom he describes as ‘martyrs in the last Thermopylae’ (6).7 The kind of military heroism that once moved Homer and Herodotus was last glimpsed on Polish battlefields and now inspires British poets to describe the epic tragedy of the nineteenth century. Mark A. Weinstein suggests that Aytoun’s ‘chief models’ were Byron and Shelley, arguing that Shelley’s presence ‘is continually felt, both in the general movement of the poem from misery and wrong to redemption on earth and in various expressions and turns of thought’ (11–12). One of the shorter works in Aytoun’s first collection is ‘A Lament for Percy Bysshe Shelley.’ But Weinstein overlooks the influence of ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ which not only anticipates by 20 years the structure Weinstein claims for Shelley but also famously takes a Polish uprising as one of its subjects. Furthermore, as noted above, Campbell was a living and influential presence in the literary scene, very publicly putting all his energy into the Polish cause. Composed, like the earlier work, in heroic couplets, Aytoun’s narrator calls upon the ‘Spirit of Freedom’ – Campbell’s Hope – to ‘[a]venge us by a second Marathon!’ (5–6). Specific lines echo Campbell; whereas Campbell writes Oh, bloodiest picture in the book of Time Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime (Part 1: 375–6) Aytoun writes Ne’er shalt thou feel the envious tread of time, Unscared by treason, and unstain’d by crime (17) And, near the close, Then would we purge the world of all the crime That stains and blurs the latest page of time (46)


Campbell’s famous description of Freedom’s shriek reappears in Aytoun’s description of an idyllic Polish village, where ‘shriek on shriek arose’ upon the arrival of Cossak lancers (27). Unlike Campbell, however, Aytoun focuses on the crimes of Nicholas I. The narrator, imagining what sorts of dreams haunt the tsar, wonders ‘How doth a tyrant dare his eyelids close?’ (23). A series of dream images ensues: the massacre of Polish peasants, Russian soldiers killed by cholera, a single Polish soldier lamenting his widowed wife and children in the moments before he dies, even an image of Nicholas’s brother, imprisoned and murdered so Nicholas can take the throne. This representation of Poland through Russian eyes in fact threatens to engulf the poem, thus implicating Aytoun in the very condition he condemns. Indeed, Aytoun’s poem reminds us how much nineteenth-century British poetry on Poland is actually anti-Russian poetry in disguise, reinforcing the image of the Poles as a people unable to create or support their own nation. However in the final section the narrator proposes a new version of Polish history, praising the ‘transcendent name’ of ‘Great Czartoryski’ and predicting continued honor for Poland’s exiled leader. when ages yet unborn Shall brand the tyrant with the stamp of scorn, Those deeds of thine shall win thee more renown, Than clings around the best and greatest crown (53) Echoing the Poland passage in ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ Aytoun closes with a call to Britain to take action and a vision of peace and justice for Poland’s future. Like Tennyson, Mary Shelley, and so many other British writers, Aytoun’s interest in Poland waned in the years after the Russo-Polish War. Like Tennyson too, Aytoun seems to have avoided any association between the Poles abroad and reform at home. According to Theodore Martin, Aytoun’s experiences during the Reform era ‘cured him of any tendency he might ever have had towards Radicalism, by showing him the extreme perils of . . . revolutionary agitation’ (33). Martin furthermore noted Aytoun’s later discomfort over his first publication. ‘On a copy of it which he gave me – most reluctantly – in 1844, he inscribed: “To Theodore Martin, with tears and penitence” ’ (33–4). In the 1840s, Aytoun was firmly established as a regular contributor to the conservative Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and his occasional references to Poland suggest a personal change in opinion but also a wider national disenchantment with Polish independence and European affairs more generally. In a February 1849 review of James Beattie’s biography of Thomas Campbell, Aytoun speaks respectfully if briefly of ‘the Polish cause’ and ‘the unfortunate exiles


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who sought refuge in Britain’ (230). But he also states that Campbell ‘watched the progress of the revolution with an anxiety amounting to fanaticism . . . Day and night his thoughts were of Poland only: in his correspondence he hardly touched upon another theme; and, carried away by his zeal to serve the exiles, he neglected his usual avocations’ (230). Here Aytoun suggests that poetry and politics do not belong together: Campbell’s political involvement stifled his creative work, while it apparently did little to aid the Poles. If this was guilt by association – Poland brings out the worst in British poets – Aytoun’s contribution for the November 1849 Blackwood’s, entitled ‘Peace and War Agitators,’ was explicit in its condemnations. In reference to the 1848 uprising in Hungary against the Habsburgs, Aytoun notes that ‘[t]hose active revolutionists, the Poles, whose presence behind every barricade has been conspicuously marked and unblushingly avowed, showed themselves foremost in all the disturbances which threatened the dismemberment of Austria’ (589). Aytoun employs a word closely associated with the crimes of the 1790s committed against Poland and turns it into a Polish crime against its neighbor. Regarding the past injustices done to Poland, Aytoun argues that [w]e cannot go back upon matters of ancient right and occupation; were we to do so, the peace of every nation in Europe must necessarily be disturbed, and no alternative would remain, save the Utopian one of parcelling out territory according to the language of the inhabitants. Boundaries must be settled somehow. They were so settled, by the consent of all the nations, at the treaty of Vienna; and our duty, as well as our interest, is to adhere to that arrangement. (592) Aytoun then turns to Russia; and while admitting an abhorrence of Russian ‘despotism’ and ‘serfism,’ he states that ‘since the days of Peter the Czar, its strides towards civilization have been most rapid’ (592). After a brief summary of Russia’s recent accomplishments, he asks the reader, ‘who would predict . . . with certainty’ greater success in Poland, ‘were that dismembered kingdom restored? It is notorious that Poland went to pieces under the weight of its elective monarchy, and the perpetual feuds, turbulence, and tyranny of a lawless and fierce aristocracy’ (592). Challenging the rhetoric of Scottish writers in the 1830s, he then compares the contemporary state of Poland with that of Scotland after Culloden: ‘A century ago, the Highlanders would have fought to the death for clanship, chieftainship, heritable jurisdictions, and the right of foray and of feud; but will any man now raise up his voice in favour of the old patriarchal constitution?’ (592). Such sentiments seem remarkable coming from the author of both ‘Poland’ and Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers. Though cloaked in anonymity, Aytoun


apparently felt the need to explain how Britons could support Poland in 1831 but not in 1849; and he puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of Polish émigrés. Though he admits that many have become useful and esteemed citizens, . . . there were others, and the larger number, who utterly misinterpreted [British] sympathy, and never would abandon their dreams of Polish restoration. . . . They took undue advantage of their situation, and preferred living in idleness, though certainly not in affluence, upon eleemosynary aid, to gaining their bread honourably by active industry and exertion. This was certainly not the best way of securing the affection of a practical people like the British to them and their cause; and the result has been, that the moral prestige of the Poles has greatly declined in this country. . . . the Poles have altogether forfeited the esteem of the friends of order, by coming forward as the most active agents and instigators of revolution all over the continent of Europe. . . . It is time that they should learn that the British public has no sympathy with unprincipled condottieri. (601) Aytoun criticizes lazy Poles in Britain and politically active Poles on the continent, but he fails to identify the problem that probably concerned him most: the impact of politically-active Poles in Britain. This ‘Poland’ was not the fallen paradise Aytoun and other British writers envisioned in 1832; and unable to sustain his myths, Aytoun turned against them. He was not alone. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it is difficult to find an honorable Polish character in mainstream British literature. As I show in Chapter 7, the dashing, Ko´sciuszko-inspired freedom fighters of Jane Porter’s fiction and Thomas Campbell’s verse were replaced by worldly, corrupt aristocracy or treacherous, working-class anarchists. Though uprisings in Poland continued, and new refugees arrived in considerable numbers, Britain’s love affair with Poland was finished.

A musical epilogue ‘The Thaddeus of Warsaw pose is dead in literature, but it has survived in all its native pulchritude in the biographies of Chopin’ (221). James Huneker, writing in 1899, was close enough to hear all the now-overlooked echoes of Ko´sciuszko, Porter, and Campbell that accent English-language accounts of Poland’s greatest composer. Like his contemporaries Tennyson and Aytoun, Fryderyk Szopen (1810–49) was deeply affected by the Russo-Polish War. In November 1830, just a few weeks before the cadets rose up in Warsaw, Szopen had departed Poland for a planned tour of Italy and France. His travelling companion returned home to assist the uprising, but Chopin stayed away, never to return. He settled in


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Paris in September 1831, the same month that Warsaw fell. While Tennyson and Aytoun were singing Poland’s sorrows, Chopin was writing (among many other works) his ‘Revolutionary’ Etude. Chopin visited Britain twice. The first was a two-week excursion to London in July 1837. He may have stayed at the Sabloniere Hotel, where Ko´sciuszko himself stayed almost exactly 40 years before (Gordon and Gordon 150). Chopin went to London to forget romantic disappointments both personal (his inability to marry Maria Wodzinska) and patriotic (the failure of the uprising, his inability to return to Poland). Like Porter’s hero Thaddeus Sobieski, he even took a pseudonym to avoid attention: he was introduced as ‘Monsieur Fritz’ to the piano manufacturer James Broadwood, and probably blew his cover when he tested Broadwood’s piano. The previous year, Chopin had met George Sand. It must have seemed fitting that a delicate Polish artist and a strong woman would be drawn to each other. As a descendant of August the Strong, Sand was even related to a previous foreign ruler of Poland. Huneker repeats the familiar imagery: ‘Androgenous creature that she was, she filled her masculine maw with the most delicate bonnes bouches that chance vouchsafed her. Can’t you see her, with the gaze of a sibyl, crunching such a genius as Chopin, he exhaling his melodious sigh as he expired?’ (160). Chopin’s ‘delicacy’ – in his playing and his health – was regularly highlighted by British writers. In Paris, noted the April 1839 Westminster Review, Chopin ‘gained his reputation as a chamber-player – his touch being too delicate, and his physical power too far behind the warmth of his conceptions, to make him eminent in an orchestra’ (Chorley 348). Chopin’s works were often performed in recitals in 1840s Britain, so his second visit – he arrived in April 1848 and stayed for seven months – was widely noted in the papers. While there he was under the watchful eyes of his Scottish student Jane Stirling. He encountered Dickens, Emerson, the Carlyles, and Lady Byron (Zamoyski Chopin 267). And he performed for another very powerful woman, Queen Victoria. Chopin was pleased with the royal performance, but the queen seems to have been less impressed: she only noted in her diary that ‘several pianists’ were among the evening’s entertainment (Eisler 181). His last public performance in England – in fact the last public performance of his life – was at the annual ball organized by Lord Stuart and Prince Czartoryski to raise funds for Polish refugees. His performance was not easily heard above the noise of the crowded Guildhall. According to the Examiner of 18 November 1848, ‘The attraction of Mons. Chopin with the majority of the audience on Thursday night, lay in his name alone; by a judicious few, including some of the most distinguished persons in the musical world, he was appreciated and applauded’ (745). A year later, after Chopin’s death, the Glasgow Herald of 12 November 1849 even suggested that the performance – another instance of the harmful mixing of art and politics? – might have hurried his demise: ‘he was got out of


his bed, at the instance of ill-judged solicitation, to perform at the Polish Concert in Guildhall in November last . . . and the gossip of the indifferent guests drowned his beautiful playing at his last public performance.’ Chopin died in Paris in October 1849, and an article printed in both the 14 November Morning Post and the 19 November Glasgow Herald purported to describe his last hours. In a scene that might have brought to mind Ko´sciuszko’s visit to London, readers were told that the ‘attendance in his sick chamber, and the anxiety felt by his state, had become an occupation amongst our fashionables, who, for the last three months, had pressed in such numbers about his bed that he might be said to have literally kept open house until his dying hour.’ Chopin burned the last of his personal papers, then ‘begged’ the Countess Potocka ‘to sing the national air of their beloved country, Teszeez [sic] Polska nie zginela, “No – Poland is not lost.” ’ The other Poles present joined in. When the song was finished, the ‘pause was broken by a shriek from the lips of the Countess. She had been the first to perceive the change in the countenance of Chopin. He had died during the utterance of that strain – before it was concluded his soul had passed away.’ Never mind that the reality was not nearly so dramatic and romantic. It was inevitable that the nation would be briefly resurrected before another dying hero, and that the same sound so identified with Ko´sciuszko’s and Poland’s fall in 1794 would receive an encore with the death of Chopin.

6 Arms and the Circassian Woman

In the late 1830s, Jane Porter became acquainted with the writer and diplomat David Urquhart. Born in the Scottish Highlands, Urquhart travelled widely in his youth, gained the acquaintance and support of Jeremy Bentham and Sir Herbert Taylor (George IV’s private secretary), and eventually attained a diplomatic post in Constantinople. Though his assigned mission was the extension of British trade into Turkey and its neighbors – and, indeed, Urquhart became a leading British authority on Turkish customs and history – his interests turned to the fate of the people of the Caucasus, especially the Circassians, and the threat of Russia’s expanding empire. Porter seems to have first met Urquhart in 1835, but their encounters became more regular in 1838. The chance of getting to know Urquhart must have intrigued Porter, for a number of reasons related to her brother, Sir Robert Ker Porter. As noted in Chapter 3, Porter, in deference to Robert, carefully avoided the anti-Russian rhetoric that usually accompanied calls for Polish sovereignty. Urquhart, in contrast, was an outspoken Russophobe. Furthermore, Robert was considered something of an expert on the Caucasus, the same region Urquhart was now claiming as his own. Robert’s Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia, 1817–1820 was published in 1821, and Porter was anxious to defend her brother’s position of authority. In March 1838 Porter described to Robert (since 1825 a diplomat in Venezuela) an extended conversation with Urquhart, whom she considered ‘something of the Quixote caste.’ Urquhart had related one of his early encounters with the people of Circassia, who received him ‘as a Hermes come down from the Gods – and as proof of his mission, by the effect, it seems he mounted a mountain-top . . . and surrounded by the whole nation of Circassia – he made a speech – Against the encroachment of the Russian Power – and laying down a law, how it might be rolled back upon itself.’ Informed of the need for a centralized power to unite them, the people offer Urquhart that very position: ‘We will have no other Ruler – Leader – Lawgiver – King!’ A victory over the 135


Russians a few days later secured Urquhart’s place in their hearts, and ‘he, the Great Atchiever [sic] – was honoured by the assembled nation, with all kinds of regal & warlike distinctions.’ In short, Achilles himself, was never so bestowed. – And he brought all these royal inaugurating robes of military renown, and legislating wisdom, to England last winter – and in the month of the January succeeding, they had the honour of being worn at – Mrs Skinner’s Fancy Ball!! Porter assured her brother ‘it smells vastly like the la Manchean knight’s dream of the bottom of the well of Montesinos!’1 But if in 1838 Urquhart struck Porter as more quixotic than kingly, she herself fell under the speaker’s spell seventeen months later. While standing near ‘a large Map of the East,’ Porter asked Urquhart ‘some question about the relative situation of Circassia on the Coast of the Black Sea’: He did indeed ‘take up the parable’ – proceeding on with so clear, satisfactory, and luminous an account of the Circassian nation – its position – its history, or rather movements, from the remotest periods, to the present – its integral character – unchanging manners – indomitable courage – and simplicity of purpose – from Age to Age – who ever were the beleagurers [sic] of the Caucasus – that I was quite delighted – clapping my hands with pleasure, when he ended – as I would have done to a noble representation of the Promethean Prophet of cloud-capped Elborus, had he stood before me.2 Porter was not alone in falling under the spell of the various writers and diplomats who focused Britain’s interests on the fate of Circassia in the 1830s and 1840s. That land and those writers are the subject of this chapter, which turns from the western frontiers of Russia’s nineteenth-century empire to its southern borders. In the first section, I examine Romantic and Victorian representations of Circassia, in particular considering the prevalent image of the ‘fair Circassian.’ I also introduce the works of Urquhart and others and suggest how these writers made the Circassian familiar to Britons via connections with other oppressed peoples, from Scotland to Poland. Then I consider the work of a single poet, Frances Brown (or Browne, as it is more often written), once known widely as ‘the blind poetess of Ulster.’ Browne’s long poem of 1844, ‘The Star of Attéghéi,’ is the major poetic response in the English language to a conflict that resulted in the forced removal of more than one million Circassians and Turkic Caucasians from their homeland, a conflict directly related to Russia’s ongoing struggles in the Caucasus. Browne draws inspiration from Porter’s novel Thaddeus of Warsaw, Lord Byron’s Eastern Tales, and from the psychologicallycharged portraits of women crafted in the decades following these by Felicia

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Hemans and Letitia Landon; but she extends her predecessors’ work by situating her mysterious and courageous heroine in a narrative based on recent historical events. Thus her poem is also an intriguing expression of nineteenth-century concepts of nationalism, bringing together three nations whose struggles for independence and national identity were well known in the early Victorian era: Circassia, Poland, and Ireland. In doing so it also associates Russia and England as fellow oppressors. Despite her perceived economic, physical, and geographical limitations, ‘the blind poetess of Ulster’ recognized in the Caucasus war a struggle with striking similarities to the situation in Poland and troubling associations with the recent history of her homeland.

Imagining Circassia In 1833, the Encyclopedia Britannica described the ‘national characteristics and manners’ of the Circassians, warning that ‘these must now be regarded as in great measure things of the past.’3 The Circassians, inhabitants of the western Caucasus, were known for ‘the patriarchal simplicity of their manners, the mental qualities with which they were endowed, the beauty of form and regularity of feature by which they were distinguished.’ This last quality was familiar enough in the 1790s that Samuel Taylor Coleridge could take it as the subject of his ballad ‘Lewti or the Circassian Love-Chaunt’: So shines my Lewti’s forehead fair, Gleaming through her sable hair. Image of Lewti! from my mind Depart; for Lewti is not kind. (11–14)4 Leila, the abused heroine of Lord Byron’s 1813 The Giaour, is similarly praised: The cygnet nobly walks the water; So moved on earth Circassia’s daughter, The loveliest bird of Franguestan! (504–6)5 European fascination with the beauty of the ‘Fair Circassian’ was almost inseparable from its fascination with a peculiar ‘custom’ of the people: The greatest stain upon the Circassian character was the custom of selling their children, the Circassian father being always willing to part with his daughters, many of whom were bought by Turkish merchants for the harems


of Eastern monarchs. But no degradation was implied in this transaction, and the young women themselves were generally willing partners in it. One questions the Britannica writer’s faith in Circassian ‘patriarchal simplicity’ when he continues this paragraph with the sentence, ‘Herds of cattle and sheep constituted the chief riches of the inhabitants.’ British commentators often ignored the probable cause of Circassian slavery – poverty, exacerbated by geography and war – in order to make an exception of Circassia, the one instance where Europeans were allowed publicly to indulge their Orientalist fantasies. A February 1849 Blackwood’s article on the Caucasus, for example, slips rapidly from principled disdain into the pleasures of exotic imaginings: In a moral point of view, all slave traffic is of course odious and reprehensible, but that of Circassia differed from other commerce of the kind, in so far that all parties were benefited by, and consenting to, the contract. The Turks obtained from Caucasus handsomer and healthier wives than those born in the harem; and the Circassian beauties were delighted to exchange the poverty and toil of their father’s mountain huts for the luxurious farniente of the seraglio, of whose wonders and delights their ears were regaled, from childhood upwards, with the most glowing descriptions. (Hardman 137)6 Circassian subjects were often represented by British and French Orientalist artists of the period. The Scottish painter William Allan spent ten years in Russia and the Caucasus, and upon his return decorated his Edinburgh studio ‘with Turkish scimitars, Circassian bows and arrows, Caucasian armour and other similar trophies of his travels.’ In his studio the artist was often ‘attired in a quilted Circassian jacket the numerous pockets of which, originally intended for concealing small weapons, were stuffed with paint brushes.’ His Sale of Circassian Captives to a Turkish Bashaw – one of many paintings of the subject – was described by Sir Walter Scott as ‘a beautiful and highly poetical picture’ (Irwin and Irwin 207–8). Occasional references to Circassia or Circassian women appear in nineteenthcentury literary texts, though rarely are they the subject of a poem. One of the few is Thomas Haynes Bayly’s ‘The Circassian,’ which describes ‘the Sultan’s chosen slave’ who ‘spurns the chain of jewels’ he gives her because her ‘young heart’s first affection’ – her homeland, ‘sweet Circassia’ – ‘still holds her with no chain.’ Bayly was perhaps inspired by the April 1819 arrival in Dover of ‘the Persian Ambassador and the Fair Circassian,’ an event extensively covered in contemporary papers. According to The Times of 27 April, ‘curiosity had been raised to the highest pitch by the different accounts of the beauty of the fair


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Circassian.’ This ‘Circassian beauty,’ accompanied by ‘two black eunuchs,’ was unfortunately scarcely seen; for the instant she landed she was put into a coach, which conveyed her to the inn. She had on a hood, which covered the upper part of her head, and a large silk shawl screened the lower part of her face, across the nose, from observation; therefore her eyes, which are truly beautiful, and part of her forehead, were the only parts of her beauties that could be seen. The British public had to wait more than two weeks before getting a more complete description. ‘The fair Circassian turns out to be a brunette,’ proclaimed The Times on 13 May. ‘She is of the middle stature, of exquisite symmetry, rather lusty, complexion of a brownish cast, hair jet black, handsome black penetrating eyes, with beautiful arched eye-brows, and strikingly handsome.’ Satirists took advantage of the visit to poke fun at the aging Prince Regent’s still-amorous nature. The Ambassador at Court; or George and the Fair Circassian describes the ridiculous attempts of the Prince Regent and Lord Castlereagh to seduce the satrap’s mistress. The two are eventually discovered hiding in the young woman’s bedroom, but they manage to talk their way out of trouble with the ambassador. The Circassian maiden herself makes only a passing appearance.7 The people of the Caucasus also fascinated contemporary British travelers. On 3 September 1827 The Times reprinted a passage from the New Monthly Magazine on Circassian women. ‘It appeared to me an inconceivable caprice of nature,’ wrote one traveler, ‘to have produced such prodigies of perfection amidst such a rude and barbarous people, who value their women less than their stirrups.’ His companion noted the remarkable beauty of a fifteen-yearold girl, suggesting ‘what celebrity a woman so transcendently beautiful . . . would acquire in any of the capitals of Europe, had she but received the benefits of a suitable education.’ Visitors in the 1830s were similarly impressed. Edmund Spencer, whose Travels in Circassia appeared in 1837, described the Circassian countenance as ‘perfectly classical, exhibiting, in the profile, that exquisite gently curving line, considered by connoisseurs to be the ideal of beauty’ (2: 321). But by the late 1830s there were more complicated political reasons for British interest in Circassia, and two major travelogues of the period, Spencer’s Travels and James Stanislaus Bell’s Journal of a Residence in Circassia During the Years 1837, 1838 and 1839, reflect the change. By then Russia had annexed the eastern coast of the Black Sea, including Circassia, a right never recognized by the British government and seemingly denied by the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople. According to M.S. Anderson, Russia ‘seemed once more, as in Poland, to be crushing a people struggling to be free. In the process it appeared


to be strengthening dangerously its position in the Caucasus and thus its ability to move against the Ottoman Empire, Persia or even India’ (91). David Urquhart visited Circassia in 1834 and afterwards encouraged British and European support for the Circassians. He started the journal Portfolio and gained widespread attention by publishing sensitive Russian documents taken from Warsaw during the 1831 Russo-Polish War – documents given him by Prince Adam Czartoryski, who saw Urquhart as a potential ally. When he ran out of Polish material, Urquhart used his experiences in the Caucasus as evidence of Russia’s expansionist intentions. Russophobe feelings in Britain intensified in late 1836 when Russian authorities seized the British schooner Vixen as it attempted to dock at the Circassian port of Soudjouk-Kalé. Urquhart, who came up with the Vixen scheme, along with J.A. Longworth, a Times correspondent whose A Year among the Circassians appeared in 1840, and Bell, who owned the schooner, used the incident to promote official British support for the Circassian cause (Hopkirk 153–62; Gleason 164–204). Moreover Bell and Spencer ‘encouraged the Circassians to resist Russian penetration, promised them British intervention and supplied them with smuggled weapons and ammunition’ (Gammer 117). Bell was particularly forthright about his activities: ‘we therefore freely took part in the councils of the natives, and gave them the benefit of such knowledge as our experience and reading had afforded us, I counselling them as to the particular species of warfare which seemed best suited for the troops they could bring into the field’ (viii).8 His pride is not surprising, for in early 1840 all seemed to be going well in the Caucasus. In February the Circassians stormed Fort Lazarev, a Russian outpost on the Black Sea. They had caught the Russians unprepared and were able to take a number of forts along the coast before the Russians finally sent reinforcements. By December, however, these victories were reversed; ‘all the forts were re-established and fortified even more strongly than before’ (Gammer 117). The Circassian successes did encourage other peoples of the Caucasus to oppose Russian expansion, particularly the Chechens, whose military leader Shamil became a familiar and heroic figure to the British public in the late 1840s and 1850s. ‘Of a mob of scattered tribes, divided by innumerable feuds, he has made a nation capable of the most complete unity of action, and animated by one faith; and his genius as a lawgiver is as pre-eminent as his religious enthusiasm,’ wrote T.H. Huxley in 1854 (511).9 The different peoples of the Caucasus were often confused in the British press: though Shamil (himself Daghestani) led the Chechen forces of the eastern Caucasus, he was quickly labeled ‘Chief of the Circassians.’ While Circassians and Chechens did sometimes fight together, Shamil’s inability to unite the Caucasus against their common enemy was one of his great failures, particularly during the Crimean War, when many in the British government, including Prime Minister Palmerston, ‘were even ready to


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establish an independent Circassian state’ headed by the Daghestani general (Gammer 272). After the Crimean War Russia concentrated its efforts on destroying resistance in the Caucasus. In the 1860s Russian forces drove the West Caucasians into Ottoman territories and replaced them with ‘Russian, Cossack, Georgian, and to a lesser extent Armenian settlers. . . . The Chechens and Daghestanis, now separated from potential Turkish aid by a broad band of secure Russian territory, presented no such strategic threat, and could be left in relative peace’ – at least until the 1990s, when the results of these nineteenth-century policies returned to haunt Russia (Lieven 315).10

Circassia’s Irish voice The most significant poetic work in English inspired by the Circassians’ struggles was written by the blind Irish poet Frances Browne. Born in Stranorlar, County Donegal, in 1816, Browne suffered a severe attack of smallpox at the age of eighteen months and became permanently blind. But her love for literature, including Byron and Scott, and ‘the far more wonderful Romance of History,’ eventually led her to an active literary life in Edinburgh and London (Browne Star xiv). Her first collection, The Star of Attéghéi; The Vision of Schwartz; and Other Poems, was published in London in 1844. It was followed by a steady stream of tales, poems, novels, and children’s stories.11 In her literary reminiscences of 1893, the writer Camilla Crosland (Mrs Newton Crosland) described a London encounter with Frances Browne. She moved with such ease that it was difficult at first – and until some little incident was evidence of it – to believe in her infirmity. . . . When we consider the touching and graceful verses of Frances Brown – not to mention her prose works – we can but vaguely conjecture what she might have done under happier circumstances. (242–3) The handful of other nineteenth-century references to Browne similarly dwell on her admittedly extraordinary biography at the expense of her literary accomplishments. Browne’s situation was not unique; as Susan Brown notes, the ‘biocritical method’ of Victorian commentators ‘meant that there was little basis for aesthetic judgment of poetesses’ work but their lives were scrutinized for conformity to perceived womanly and poetic standards, however conflicting those might be’ (184). Critics scrutinized Browne’s poetry not so much for clues to an unhappy private life, but rather for evidence of her blindness. A remarkable example of this is a 43-page article by George Crolly in the December


1844 Dublin Review, purportedly on Browne’s first collection. Crolly eventually quotes at length from Browne’s work, but only after 30 pages comparing Browne’s history to a number of contemporary case studies of children born deaf and dumb. When he turns to the poetry, Browne’s blindness – not Ireland, nor her sensitivity to contemporary nationalism – remains the defining influence on her work. He particularly admires Browne’s ‘exquisite’ shorter works and notes ‘the frequent allusion which is made to the “music of streams.”’ Readers should expect the poet to cherish this idea ‘with peculiar fondness,’ since it ‘is an idea which she has not picked up second-hand from others, but which she has immediately derived from the impressions made upon her own senses’ (549–50). Crolly has an oddly conflicted response to ‘The Star of Attéghéi.’ Though it is ‘perfectly wonderful when we consider that it is the production of a self-taught blind girl of twenty eight’ and ‘by far the best poem which has been published for some time,’ the poem ‘is on the whole weak,’ and Browne uses ‘decidedly the worst metre in the language for such a tale [iambic tetrameter, that used by Byron in The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos]’ (555). More serious, however, is Browne’s decision to model her poem after Homer and Byron: ‘It is no slur on Miss Brown’s genius that she did not succeed where there were two such illustrious competitors; but it is a slur upon her judgment that she entered the field with them at all’ (556). Even Browne’s own editor, in the preface to The Star of Attéghéi, laments that the poet would have been better served if her friends had ‘warned her off this particular ground’ but hopes that readers ‘who prefer her lyrics to her lengthened poem’ will not hold their preference against one ‘who has done so much for, and by, herself’ (xxii). Yet the themes of exile, national identity, and gender, all central to ‘The Star of Attéghéi,’ are equally present in her short verse. Titles such as ‘The Removal of the Cherokees,’ ‘The Lonely Mother,’ and ‘The Australian Emigrant’ suggest Browne’s interest in outsiders and those forgotten by ruling classes. One of the more interesting of Browne’s short poems is ‘The Last of the Jagellons,’ which appears in her 1848 volume, Lyrics and Miscellaneous Poems. The poem’s title probably owes a debt to James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1827), though its opening lines bring to mind those lyrics of Scottish legend by Aytoun or Scott. A speaker calls on the minstrel to ‘wake thy harp once more’ and play the ‘songs that in my land were heard / While yet that land was free!’ In the second stanza we learn the speaker is not some Scottish rustic but a ‘noble matron’ living in exile from ‘Poland’s pleasant plains.’ The minstrel grants her request and sings of Sigismund, the last king of Poland’s Jagellon Dynasty. Sigismund had married a woman of humble birth before his election to the throne, and the nobles demanded he divorce her and either ‘reign alone’ or ‘choose a royal bride.’ Sigismund speaks proudly of the Polish tradition of elective monarchy:


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My land hath seen her ancient crown Bestow’d for many an age – While other nations have bow’d down To kingly heritage.

He then offers to give up the crown: ‘For, if unshared by her I love, / It shines no more for me.’ The Polish senators remove their objections and immediately consent to Sigismund’s demands, convinced (according to Browne’s note) ‘that so true a husband must make a worthy King.’ The poem closes with the listener’s own reflections on this tale: The Minstrel ceased, and with a sigh That noble matron said – ‘Alas, for Europe’s chivalry – How hath its glory fled! Perchance in silvan grove or glen Such faithful love is known – But when will earth behold again Its truth so near a throne.’ One can see why critics responded positively to Browne’s ‘imagery, her diction and her depiction of what they saw as universal sentiments’ while overlooking the political aspects of her work (DeVoto 73). One can read ‘Last of the Jagellons’ as a timeless tale of love and faithfulness, but that would require ignoring its critique of an aristocratic society that encourages a king to divorce his wife because of her class. It would also mean overlooking the date of publication, 1848, a year of political upheaval not just in Poland, where citizens fought unsuccessfully to end Russian rule, and in Ireland, where William Smith O’Brien’s inchoate rising in Munster foreshadowed future rebellion, but throughout continental Europe. Moreover Browne’s choice of a wise older woman to express a suspicion of lineal monarchy may be unique to the period. In another poem from Lyrics, ‘On the Death of Thomas Campbell,’ Browne recounts the moment at Campbell’s interment when a Polish exile threw upon the coffin ‘some earth he had brought as a relic from the tomb of Kosciusko’: For thus shall Poland’s heart through ages twine The memory of her brightest stars with thine! (31–2) As discussed below, Poland also plays an important role in ‘The Star of Attéghéi.’ It is significant that Browne would access Polish history for her poetry, linking


Poland’s misfortunes with Ireland’s. As Joep Leerssen notes, Poland probably offers the ‘closest European parallel’ to Ireland’s ‘violent and disruptive historical development’ (Remembrance 224–5). Later in the century, writers as different as Ernest Jones, John Stuart Mill, and Anthony Trollope followed Browne, affirming or debating the image of Ireland as ‘England’s Poland.’12 Of course, a number of Browne’s poems directly concern Ireland, including ‘The Last Friends,’ inspired by a United Irishman’s return from exile, and the popular ‘Songs of Our Land’; and their nationalistic tone links Browne with Irish forerunners like Thomas Moore and William Drennan as well as with contemporaries in the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s.13 Many of these poets also address the rights of other European nations like France and Poland. But Browne is almost alone in taking up the cause of the Circassians.

‘The Star of Attéghéi’ Frances Browne must have followed events in Circassia with great interest. Many of her footnotes refer to Spencer’s Travels, and the travelogues by Bell and Longworth both appeared in 1840. Excerpts from Bell’s work appeared in The Times as well as the Dublin Review; Longworth wrote regularly on Circassia for The Times. In the preface Browne writes that her tale has no better foundation than a newspaper story, which, a few years ago, appeared in many of the British journals, and was said to have been copied from a Russian paper: – but it took a strong hold on my mind, at the time; and nothing but the want of information prevented me from attempting the subject long ago. For any errors and mistakes I can only plead that the land is new to me – and comparatively little known, I believe, to all. (xxii) I have not located this newspaper story, so it is difficult to know how much of the plot is Browne’s own invention.14 But the two aspects of ‘The Star of Attéghéi’ that I want to explore here – Browne’s representations of nationalism and gender roles – certainly reflect her own concerns with these issues. The action of ‘The Star of Attéghéi’ takes place over two days at the ruins of Soudjouk-Kalé, the same port where the Vixen incident occurred and an actual battle site visited by Spencer. The leaders of the Circassian forces – some of them well-known historical figures – have assembled to meet a Russian envoy who hopes to make peace with the rebels. Among the Circassians there are two mysterious youths, one a Pole, the other of unknown origin. They are brave, inseparable friends who keep to themselves, even ignoring the advances of Circassian maidens. An Irish minstrel named Cuzali first recognizes the true


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identity of the mysterious warrior known only as the Star of Attéghéi – Attéghéi being the local word for Circassia. When the Russian envoy arrives, the Irish minstrel relates a story to entertain and edify the gathering. He tells of a Circassian ruler who desired his daughter Dizila to marry a Russian prince named Paschoff. The daughter refused, and one night cut off her long hair, leaving it as an offering at the grave of her French mother, and disappeared. The same night a Polish soldier who had been nursed back to health by Dizila also disappeared; neither had been heard from since. The minstrel, once an admirer of Dizila’s mother and tutor to Dizila herself, now searches for her. As Cuzali ends his story and the Russian prepares to depart, the Irish minstrel reveals the envoy to be Paschoff. That night, as the two mysterious friends consider escaping to Poland, it becomes evident that they are the two described in Cuzali’s story. The Star of Attéghéi is Dizila in disguise, defending her homeland from the Russians. The following day in battle Paschoff lunges at the Pole, but Dizila steps in the way. Thus the Russian fulfills a gypsy maiden’s prophecy that he would kill the thing he most loves. The Pole survives the battle but dies of heartbreak. Dizila and her Polish lover are buried together on a hillside nearby. In the memorable opening lines Browne’s narrator calls upon the Irish muse to help her sing of ‘love’ and ‘freedom’s fire,’ the two themes of her poem. She recalls the ancient battles of Irish history and finds a precursor in the blind Ossian, but she also notes Ireland’s colonial history (‘stranger feet’). Her lament for ‘blighted springs’ is disconcertingly prophetic: the potato blight appeared in September 1845. Muse of my country! thou hast sung Of many sorrows; yet thy lyre Is sweet, as when by Ossian strung, To breathe of love or freedom’s fire. Though stranger feet have trodden down Both Tara’s towers and Brian’s crown, – Yet still, through all her blighted springs, The ancient harp of Erin rings, With numbers mighty as, of old, O’er battle-field and banquet rolled, When rose upon the western clime The glory of its early prime. (1)15 The narrator praises the Irish bard whose music fills not only ‘his native hills’ but also many distant lands, from ‘Columbia’s western plains’ to ‘the rosecrowned Bendemere,’ thus preparing the reader both for her poem’s unfamiliar


setting and for Cuzali’s appearance. But she begs off singing of the ‘glorious dead’ of her homeland, for ‘Erin’s fame is poured / In loftier strains, by mightier hands’ (2). Instead she will speak of ‘a land unknown / To Europe’s minstrelsy, – though strown / With wrecks and relics of her fame’ (3). Throughout the poem Browne alludes to these ‘wrecks and relics,’ the physical remains of past civilizations based in Circassia, as well as the remembered stories describing those civilizations; taken together they constitute three myths of nationhood which form the basis for Browne’s historical conception of Circassian national identity. Browne first refers to the founding of Circassia by refugees of Troy, ‘the last of Ilion’s line,’ an assertion supported by the legendary courage and ferocity of Circassians in battle (3). But these descendants of Troy ‘Who to the minstrel might recal [sic] / The flower of Ilion’s proudest spears’ are inspired by ‘a nobler cause,’ the defense of their homeland (21). Elsewhere Browne connects the Circassians with another famous people of antiquity when her narrator describes the shouts of gladness that accompany the first unfurling of Circassia’s flag: ‘the sound that told / The Spartan warrior’s joy, of old!’ (18; see also 87). Circassian women, too, become part of this myth of an ancient Greek world preserved in the Caucasus. Foreshadowing the surprise identity of the Star of Attéghéi, the narrator writes that fear of Russian invaders ‘awoke / The fires that slumbered’ within the ‘mountain maids’ who were descended from another race associated with the Caucasus, ‘The long remembered Amazons’ (13). A second myth of origin associates Circassia with the beginnings of the human race. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century anthropologists described the Caucasus as the birthplace of the European peoples; hence the term Caucasian.16 This remained a popular theory at the time Browne wrote, and she often portrays Circassia as a paradise destined to be lost. The Irish minstrel, standing amid ‘such flowers / As might have bloomed in Eden’s bowers’ (16), calls the land Bright mother of a matchless race, That seem the last of Adam’s line, – In whom the wanderer’s eye may trace The early glory, left to tell This withered world how far it fell! (14) The third myth Browne employs is more surprising. In a footnote she explains that the ‘Circassians were Christians, before their conversion to Mohammedanism; and Christianity is said to have been planted among them by some Crusaders, who found their way into that country’ (105). Indeed, nineteenth-century commentators sometimes used these Christian roots (along with the supposed ‘fairness’ of the people) to argue that Circassians were more


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advanced than other peoples of the Caucasus. But Browne suggests that the Circassians were united as a people against the Crusades. Her narrator speaks critically of the Crusaders, connecting them and Christianity directly with the Russian invaders: once The cross waived [sic] o’er thee; – from the steep Of Elbrûz, yet, it tells thy sons Where low the last Crusaders sleep; And now, the same bright banner leads Thy spoiler to his darkest deeds! (5) Later, as the Irish minstrel begins his tale, he speaks of ‘the old and stately towers’ of the Crusaders, which cost our country years of woe And war, before she laid them low: – So ever perish freedom’s foe! (35) Conversely, Islam becomes a religion of mercy. At the death of the Pole, the narrator herself announces that ‘Allah sent a better fate / For faith so pure and love so great!’ (94). One sees a similar respect for Islam in Byron’s The Giaour, one of the Eastern Tales that probably inspired Browne. But Byron’s fragmented narrative is a found manuscript, supposedly written long ago by a Muslim author. Browne’s narrator identifies herself as Irish, and her subject is contemporary. Browne’s narrator also exhibits a surprising respect for pagan beliefs. Cuzali praises ‘Immortal Merem,’ ‘Queen of the world,’ a goddess Browne notes to be ‘identical with the Virgin Mary’ (54, 108), while a gypsy maiden correctly predicts the tragic fate of Paschoff (65, 91). The presence of these female divinities and prophetesses – Browne also mentions (less admiringly) Vinon, ‘a warlike princess of Imeretia; who is said to have converted the Caucasian tribes to Christianity’ (55, 109) – challenges Western stereotypes of the ‘Fair Circassian’ and anticipates the surprising reversal of gender roles between Dizila and her Polish lover, discussed below. There are moments in the text – moments clearly related to these myths of origin – when Browne seems to describe Circassia as some kind of historical relic; as in a footnote where readers learn that ‘Circassian warriors wear a kind of armour, which is said to resemble that worn by the knights of the Middle Ages’ (106). There is, however, another rhetoric of nationality intersecting


these myths of origin that situates the events of ‘Star of Attéghéi’ clearly in the nineteenth century. Numerous passages associate Circassia’s battle for independence with contemporary struggles in Ireland and Poland. Browne unites these three lands in their willingness to fight for the freedom of others, and in Europe’s unwillingness to return the favor. But who shall gather from the grave, In Syria’s waste or Tigris’ wave, Circassia’s early-perished brave? – Who shall reclaim, from Europe’s fields, Sarmatia’s bright but broken shields, – Or give my country back the hearts That led the world in arms and arts? Ah! such hath ever been her lot, The faithful but the still forgot! (6) The inhabitants of these three lands meet on the pages of Browne’s narrative. Dizila’s lover is a Polish soldier who has abandoned the Russian army to fight for Circassia, though the narrator suggests the presence of other Poles in the rebel forces: The Pole, scarce deemed a stranger there, – For, oft, his distant country’s song Arose upon the mountain air (19) Cuzali represents an Irish presence in the Caucasus, while the narrator links Ireland and Circassia metaphorically on the poem’s final page: Land of Attéghéi! Thou bearest A banner of that verdant hue Which to my country’s hills is dearest (103) Such depictions may strike some twenty-first century readers as extremely romantic; actually the presence of Polish soldiers in Circassia was well documented. Spencer notes the existence of ‘hundreds of Poles’ and writes that ‘many of their national songs have been translated into the Circassian language, and are now sung with as much enthusiasm as their own war songs’ (2: 417–18). This was a result of ‘the Caucasus being considered in Russia as a second Siberia’ where political enemies were sent ‘to serve as private soldiers’


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(1: 270). The presence of an Irishman seems more of a stretch, though Scotsman William Allan spent years there, and Spencer compares the Circassian to ‘Scott’s Highland Chieftain’ (1: 291). Spencer also reports that the rebels were ‘said to be commanded by an English officer, who had served in India’ (1: 253), and describes one ‘Mr. Marr, an enterprising son of Caledonia’ living in Circassia with his Europe-educated sons, who had ‘completely assimilated themselves to the manners of the natives’ (1: 311). Linking the Circassians with these other peoples allows Browne to broaden her critique. Clearly Russian expansionism is the poem’s primary target, and the fate of Poland reminds readers that the war in Circassia is not an isolated incident but part of a pattern already lamented by British commentators. ‘Shall this gallant people be suffered to sink, another sacrifice to Russian ambition?’ asked a reviewer of Spencer’s Travels in the April 1838 Edinburgh Review. ‘Before the dying shriek of Poland has ceased to vibrate on the ear of Europe, shall another nation be swallowed up?’ (Fraser 140). Of course such rhetoric is a notso-subtle critique of British foreign policy. But the many references in Browne’s poem to Ireland, ‘England’s Poland,’ claim a more direct association between Britain and Russia as fellow oppressors. Early in the poem a Circassian leader speaks of Victoria: the queen Whose sceptered rule the ocean owns: The farthest Indian shores have seen Her banner; and the utmost isle That sees the dying sunset smile Beholds her ever wandering sails; – The Moscovite before them quails! – And there, perchance, some sword may wake, If not for yours, for freedom’s sake? (28) The Star of Attéghéi responds by reminding the others of the fates of Poland and Greece, given ‘not freedom, but the name’ (29). Likewise when the envoy Paschoff offers payment to the Irish minstrel for his song, Cuzali responds with an indictment of both Russian and British expansionist policies: The Moscov need not now be told How well my wearied country knows The power that dwells in strangers’ gold (69) Freedom will not come to the Caucasus via British arms or Russian wealth. Rather Browne imagines a more radical solution: a coalition of oppressed


peoples, united against the greatest imperial powers of the era. Here she builds on the transnational heroines and plots of novelists like Frances Burney, Lady Morgan, and Germaine de Staël, works described by Deidre Lynch as presenting ‘now unimaginable communities that drew differently and disorientingly on the cultural flows of Europe’ (64).17 She also avoids the inconsistencies of her travelogue sources. While Spencer documents the presence of Poles, Georgians, even Scots among the Circassians, he is quick to praise ‘a race the most beautiful upon the face of the globe, and who have never been contaminated by a mixture with the blood of foreigners’ (1: 284). Apparently Spencer did not consider those Circassian women he saw at a Constantinople ‘bazaar for the sale of female slaves’ as members of the race (1: 149–52). Conversely, Browne seems to revel in the many peoples who come together in defense of Circassia. Student of a much-traveled Irish minstrel and teacher to a Polish soldier, her heroine Dizila ‘had pored upon the pages / That make the Christians wise’ but also absorbed the ‘ancient wisdom’ of the Caucasus (47).18 Dizila has other important literary predecessors. George Crolly noted Browne’s debt to Lara, in which Byron’s heroine takes on the guise of a male page to assist the title character, and Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, where Tancred unknowingly kills the warlike Clorinda (554–5). One thinks too of Queen Medb in the Táin Bó Cualgne, Britomart in Spencer’s Faerie Queene, and, closer to Browne’s time, Felicia Hemans’s ‘Joan of Arc in Rheims,’ ‘The Widow of Crescentius,’ and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Romaunt of the Page.’19 As Angela Leighton notes, ‘Byronism evidently offered many of these women writers, not so much the cheap ideal of a dark, handsome husband, but the prospect of a transvestite emancipation from the restricting dress of femininity’ (82). But Browne is alone among her contemporaries in creating a woman warrior not resurrected from ancient or medieval history but of the present day, and one whose lover follows her into battle. Dizila’s iconoclasm begins at home, with her refusal to be sold to the highest bidder. Early in the poem Browne’s narrator makes reference to the sale of women, one of the few facts her British readers might know of Circassia: ‘Alas! that e’er those free-born flowers / Should bloom for Othman’s slavish bowers!’ (9). Her father Zaphor does not promise Dizila to a Persian ambassador but rather a Russian prince, warning her that ‘Submission best becomes thy sex, / And scruples serve but to perplex / The young’ (59–60). Such a fate seems particularly galling, considering the story of Dizila’s French mother. Raised in the Napoleonic era, she followed her first husband on the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, where ‘she became a Cossack’s slave.’ She was found much later, ‘sad and worn,’ by Zaphor, who comforted and married her (39). Dizila, who had earlier encouraged her father to rejoin the battle against Russia – a battle he had given up after the death of his wife – escapes a similar fate by leaving home in a passage that clearly echoes the wild ride of Byron’s Polish hero Mazeppa,


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another character who was forced from his homeland only to transform himself into a great military figure: Two warrior youths were seen to speed, As swift as flies the Tartar steed, By winter’s hungry wolves pursued Through Ukraine’s boundless solitude (61) In striking contrast, the Pole had arrived in Circassia a consenting member of the Russian army, completely ignorant of Russian aggression against Poland: ‘Too young to feel his sword was drawn / For Poland’s spoilers.’ Dizila must tell him ‘Of all his distant country’s tears, / Beneath the conqueror’s iron hand’ and convinces him to help her escape (53). Indeed, she seems to take the ‘masculine’ role in all parts of their relationship. The night before battle, she implores him to break his word of eternal faithfulness and return home: Thy father’s hearth awaits thee yet, – Thy mother’s heart can ne’er forget – Oh! fly the terrors of our shore, And find that peaceful home, once more (82) He does not refuse, but begs her to join him: Then, wilt thou share my Polish home, And bless my kindred with the light Of thy bright presence? Dearest, come, – And leave the fields of fear and fight! (82) This is almost stereotypical romantic ardor, save that the gender roles are reversed. Dizila refuses, so her faithful lover remains as well: ‘In good or ill, whate’er betide, / My chosen path is by thy side!’ (84). In battle Dizila saves her lover’s life by receiving the stroke intended for him. Her lover is not even able to avenge her death; the Circassian leader Hassan must do so, while the Pole, bearing the Circassian flag, dies in his lover’s arms. It should be no surprise that this feminized male lover is Polish. Along with Dizila’s French mother he is one of the two unnamed characters in the poem, which is perhaps fitting for an exile whose homeland is ruled by foreigners, a country erased from nineteenth-century maps of Europe. He seems an obvious


literary descendant of Ko´sciuszko and the popular British image of the Pole as courageous and loyal but finally defeated and exiled. But it is fascinating to note how Browne reimagines the Romantic-era tropes of the Pole. Here he is transplanted to a foreign land, fighting for another oppressed people. The role that so distressed William Aytoun – the Poles were the ‘the most active agents and instigators of revolution all over the continent of Europe’ – becomes honorable in Browne’s narrative. But Browne does something even more remarkable in her portrayal of gender. Rather than being destroyed by a perversely masculine woman – the role played by Catherine the Great in Chapters 1 and 2 – the Polish gentle man becomes, in Browne’s revision, the ideal companion to a strong woman. The represented reversal in gender roles that made Catherine perversely masculine, Ko´sciuszko perversely weak, and British women in lancer’s uniforms objects of humor, is transformed by Browne into a model relationship. In contrast to Dizila’s Russian suitor and her power-hungry father, the Pole is the only character (save perhaps the Irish minstrel) who understands the Star of Attéghéi. The two die clasped in each other’s arms and are buried together in one grave. For all her rhetorical innovation, not even Browne could break one rule of Romantic/early Victorian literature: the life of a heroine as transgressive as Dizila must end tragically. She thus also avoids explaining the paradox of what exactly Dizila is fighting for, since a return to traditional life in Circassia would suggest a continuation of the Circassian slave trade. While it is true a happy ending would have been misleading – Browne here is limited by historical realities – one could imagine Dizila escaping to fight another day. But this was not to be. Nevertheless, in her final image of Cuzali and Hassan joined in contemplation before the tomb of Dizila and her lover, Browne exploits a favorite trope of Felicia Hemans in order to bring home her international vision. As Tricia Lootens has argued, Hemans’s ‘emphasis on reverence for patriot’s graves’ was ‘one of the greatest sources of her power as a Victorian patriotic poet . . . heroes’ graves not only unified distinct national folk communities but also bound those communities to the rest of the world by evoking the universal love and sorrows of liberty’ (247). For Browne, her heroes’ tomb unites the opponents of British and Russian imperialism, under Erin’s familiar shade:

For, since they laid that beauteous pair To rest, beneath the mountain mould, Have Hassan and Cuzali been As brothers; – days and years have rolled Away, and left their friendship green. (101)


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In the final lines the narrator declares her song ‘more sad than sweet’ and tells the Irish muse ‘to thee it owes / At least its sorrow’ (102). She calls on Europe once more to aid the Circassians and wishes ‘better fortune smile / On them than ever blessed the isle!’ (103). The famine would soon wreak havoc throughout Ireland, causing a million and a half citizens to leave their country, adding tremendously to an emigration rate that was already growing rapidly in the 1830s and early 1840s. Browne herself would leave Ulster for Britain in 1847, where she continued her prolific writing career but preferred prose to poetry. Though the ‘wonderful Romance of History’ remained a favorite theme, she never again attempted any poetic work as ambitious as ‘The Star of Attéghéi.’ Still it would be wrong to follow Browne’s earliest critics in ignoring her longest, most politically complex poem. In an era when the popularity of annuals and anthologies encouraged writers to produce lyric poetry, Browne challenged her readers by reviving and transforming the Eastern Tale. Unlike her Romantic precursors, she dared to imagine a Byronic heroine for her tale and used the form to comment overtly on international politics. Unlike contemporary British travelers, who admired the racial ‘purity’ of the Circassians, Browne imagined a national movement united in its toleration of different languages, ethnicities, and religions. It would also be wrong to consider the poem unconnected with contemporary political events in her homeland. It seems significant that Browne’s beginnings as a writer coincided with the Young Ireland movement, a group which ‘attempted to bridge sectarian and class lines’ in the early 1840s and ‘produced immensely popular patriotic poetry and ballads’ (Grubgeld 400–1). Edmund Curtis notes that the Young Irelanders ‘were full of the romantic liberal nationalism of the time which animated men like Garibaldi and Kosciusko’ (366). Indeed, the movement took its name from radical predecessors of the 1830s, Young Italy and Young Poland. Browne may not have had actual links with Young Ireland, but her poetry – and certainly not least ‘The Star of Attéghéi,’ which relates the tragic tale of an oppressed nation and culture with affinities to Ireland itself – deserves to be read beside the work of other contemporary Irish and European poets who were trying to give voice to the unheard. For all her modesty at the outset of ‘The Star of Attéghéi,’ Browne makes the tragedy of contemporary Ireland almost as much a subject of her poem as the tragedies of Poland and Circassia.

7 Picturing Will: Middlemarch and the Victorian Genealogy of the Polish Hero

In George Eliot’s first published fiction, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton,’ there is a sly detail which strongly suggests her familiarity with the writings of Jane Porter. Eliot wrote ‘Amos Barton’ in late 1856, hot on the heels of her notorious essay ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.’ Porter is not mentioned in the essay, which focuses on recent publications, but her surname appears most suspiciously in the fiction that followed it. The Reverend Barton comes under the spell of the mysterious and beautiful Countess Czerlaski, but he is also taken by the countess’s romantic tales of her recently deceased husband. According to his neighbor Mr Farquhar, Barton ‘believth the whole thtory about her Polish huthband and hith wonderful ethcapeth; and ath for her – why, he thinkth her perfection’ (38). In a demystifying passage (as if we needed it after Farquhar’s lispy description), we learn that the countess was born lowly Caroline Bridmain, and that she met Czerlaski when she served as governess – and he as dance-instructor – to the daughters of one Lady Porter. Her seven-year marriage to Czerlaski leaves Caroline with ‘not, indeed, any very ripe and comprehensive wisdom, but much external polish,’ the last phrase a near-perfect pun on the measurable depth of Caroline’s nobility in exile (41). Amos Barton falls for the same romantic notions that no doubt charmed the daughters of Lady Porter and the literary daughters of Jane Porter.1 One of those literary daughters – or better, granddaughters – was George Eliot herself. Eliot’s debt to Porter comes out most clearly in Will Ladislaw, the charming young man of Polish descent in Middlemarch. Larry Wolff and Margaret Doody have both noticed the striking similarities between Will’s grandfather, ‘a Polish refugee who gave lessons for his bread,’ and Porter’s hero Thaddeus Sobieski (Wolff 99; Doody 277). As Will tells Dorothea, ‘my grandfather was a patriot – a bright fellow – could speak many languages – musical – got his bread by teaching all sorts of things’ (365). Will’s physical appearance and his sentimental nature iterate images of the Polish hero prevalent in Britain from the 1803 publication of Thaddeus of Warsaw until at least 1831, when the 154

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Russo-Polish War inspired imitation Sobieskis in works like Claire Clairmont’s ‘The Pole’ and Mary Shelley’s Lodore. But Will’s lineage is more complicated. One of the mysteries to be solved in Middlemarch concerns just who were the parents and grandparents of Will Ladislaw. A similar mystery surrounds his textual ancestors. One strand of this literary heritage – the one that accounts for Will’s talented grandfather – goes back to Thaddeus Sobieski. But other aspects of Will’s character do not fit the Thaddeus of Warsaw mold: his radical views and his cosmopolitan ease, for instance; or the way other characters regard him – ‘a sort of gypsy,’ ‘a Polish emissary,’ ‘an Italian with white mice.’ These aspects are Will’s inheritance from his ‘parents’: the ambiguous images of Poles that developed in Victorian culture. During these decades, as radical thinkers like Ernest Jones and Karl Marx took up the cause of Poland, the tropes of the Polish exile changed dramatically. The Ko´sciuszko-inspired, courageous yet sentimental soldier persisted, but he was often superseded by a range of morally and ethnically ambiguous figures. In George Julian Harney’s newspaper The Red Republican, the Polish exile became the celebrated bulwark of all European revolutions and therefore a serious threat to political and ethnic order. In the fiction of William Thackeray, Charles Lever, and especially Anthony Trollope he became the conniving, worldly aristocrat on the prowl for rich, naive Englishwomen. Will Ladislaw is certainly the best known and most contested Polish figure in Victorian literature, but little has been written about his Polish background or his literary progenitors.2 Indeed, the most spirited debates around Will’s ethnicity have focused not on what he is but on what he isn’t: Jewish.3 This debate makes sense insofar as Will anticipates Eliot’s next hero, Daniel Deronda, but it has allowed scholars to overlook the multivalence of Will’s Polishness. In this chapter, I chart the literary and historical developments that connect Thaddeus Sobieski to Will. Eliot sets her novel in the early 1830s, and Will exhibits many charms associated with his Romantic predecessors. But Will’s radical streak and the suspicion aroused by his affection for Dorothea suggest that Eliot superimposes Victorian stereotypes over the simpler, positive stereotypes of the Romantic era. Avoiding both the xenophobic tendencies of her contemporaries and the most simplistic character attributes bequeathed by British Romanticism, Eliot reimagines Jane Porter’s Polish hero for an 1870s British public. This extended reading of Will Ladislaw contributes to the growing body of scholarship on George Eliot’s engagement with history.4 Though Will is often considered one of the less successful characters in Middlemarch, an ‘eminent failure’ according to Henry James, I will argue that Will’s complexity arises in the ways that Eliot brings both national and literary history to bear on his character (Haight 23). Since neither the history of the Polish exile in Britain nor the history of the Polish exile in British literature is familiar to most scholars, this


context has been overlooked. In his family genealogy, Will sums up a century of continental immigration; in his own personality and in the persona created by his neighbors in Middlemarch, Will also sums up a century of British representations of the Polish exile.

A family resemblance Before the reader and the Brookes first encounter Will Ladislaw amid the yew trees at Lowick, they encounter him via his grandmother: her portrait appears among a group of family miniatures in Mr Casaubon’s home. Celia finds the image ‘pretty,’ but Dorothea’s more discerning eye is struck by the details: ‘Those deep grey eyes rather near together – and the delicate irregular nose with a sort of ripple in it – and all the powdered curls hanging backward’ (76). These features come to life when the party meets Ladislaw, who lifts his hat to reveal a familiar physiognomic trope for the Pole in nineteenth-century Britain. Later descriptions reinforce these initial impressions: Celia repeats that Will ‘is just like a miniature of Mr Casaubon’s aunt,’ Mrs Cadwallader calls him a ‘very pretty sprig,’ and Dorothea notices his ‘bright curls’ and his ‘delicate but rather petulant profile’ (329–30, 363). The dominance of the feminine in Will’s features connects him with the effeminate images of Ko´sciuszko on a couch and the sentimental character of curly-haired Thaddeus Sobieski, who loves no one more than his mother. As I argued in Chapter 5, this idea of the beautiful Polish male gained new momentum in the early 1830s. Claire Clairmont’s Polish hero – named Ladislas – exhibits a similar mixture of masculine and feminine, offering a countenance that ‘might have belonged to the most lovely woman,’ (‘The Pole’ 161–2), while Mary Shelley’s Casimir Lyzinski is the offspring of yet another unhappy British-Polish encounter and ‘a youth inheriting all his mother’s beauty’ (Lodore 108). It is worth mentioning that all these predecessors – Ko´sciuszko, Thaddeus, Ladislas, Casimir – are either military figures or prepared to defend themselves from the insults of others. To a certain degree, Will carries on the tradition: late in the novel, Raffles encounters ‘Ladislaw’s threatening air. The slim young fellow with his girl’s complexion looked like a tiger-cat ready to spring on him’ (610). So Will looks the part of the Romantic Polish exile; but does he act it? Will departs Lowick for the continent and reappears one hundred pages later among the Vatican Museum masterpieces. His earnest if amateur interest in sketching, first exhibited at Lowick and continued in Italy, connects him to Thaddeus Sobieski, who supported himself in London by selling sketches of continental landscapes, and to Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko, who, as Joseph Farington noted, ‘was drawing Landscapes, which is his principal amusement’ when Benjamin West met him (3: 852). His familiarity with German – Will studied in Heidelberg, and his companion in Rome is the German artist Naumann – associate him


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with Thaddeus, who teaches German to the Dundas daughters. While Thaddeus becomes a figure of romance for Euphemia Dundas and Lady Sarah Roos, the similarly romantic Rosamond expects Will to be ‘always at her command, and have an understood though never fully expressed passion for her, which would be sending out lambent flames every now and then in interesting scenes’ (753). Will also imitates his predecessors by reuniting with Dorothea in Italy, that ur-setting for British-Polish encounters. In Rome James Edward Stuart married Clementina Sobieska; in Florence Sir Robert Somerset married then abandoned Therese Sobieski; in ‘The Pole,’ Ladislas meets and marries his Polish lover in Naples. Dorothea is of course already and unhappily married to Casaubon, but it is her reacquaintance with Will in Rome that awakens the mutual affection that leads to her second marriage. Both Will and Thaddeus share a distinctly compassionate streak. In London, Thaddeus lives among the poor; similarly, Will tells Dorothea and Casaubon about his experiences wandering ‘among the poor people in Rome,’ a habit he later continues in Middlemarch (212, 463). Will has ‘a fondness, half artistic, half affectionate, for little children,’ and becomes a favorite among the elderly women in Middlemarch (463, 785). Thaddeus develops similar if more serious interests, caring for children and elderly friends. Dorothea describes Will as ‘a creature who entered into every one’s feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance’ (496). Porter says much the same about her protagonist: ‘No eye looked wistfully on him to turn away disappointed; his smiles cheered the disconsolate, and his protecting arms warded off, when possible, the approach of new sorrows’ (440).5 Of course Will is a second-generation Briton, not a continental refugee, so he lacks the amor patriae that burns in the hearts of his precursors. But certain linguistic turns in his thoughts about Rome bring to mind his grandfather’s dismembered homeland: ‘the very miscellaneousness of Rome . . . saved you from seeing the world’s ages as a set of box-like partitions without vital connection.’ Ladislaw wants to reassemble what has been partitioned: ‘the fragments stimulated his imagination and made him constructive’ (212). It is significant, too, that Ladislaw takes Dorothea and Casaubon to visit the studio of the celebrated Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen (213). In the early 1820s Thorwaldsen had created a sculpture of Copernicus for the city of Warsaw, and at the time of their visit he was working on one of the most celebrated masterpieces of nineteenthcentury sculpture, his monumental equestrian statue of the Polish hero Józef Poniatowski.6 And then there is his name. Ladislaw, like Sobieski and Ko´sciuszko, has great significance in Polish history. Eliot would have had to look no further than the January 1855 Westminster Review to read this description of the marriage of Casimir the Great’s daughter Hedvige to the Lithuanian Jagellon, later Ladislaw:


Casimir, dying in 1370, left no issue but a daughter, named Hedvige; and the Crown of Poland passed to his nephew Louis of Anjou . . . He became excessively unpopular among the Poles; and, after his death in 1384, they proclaimed Hedvige Queen of Poland. In 1386, a marriage was arranged between this princess and Jagellon, Duke of Lithuania – Jagellon agreeing to be baptized and to establish Christianity among his hitherto heathen subjects. Thus Poland and Lithuania were united; and a new dynasty of Polish kings was founded. (Neuberg 120–1) Jagellon ‘took the name Uladisav II,’ and the writer fancies him ‘a sort of rough half-heathen by the side of the beautiful Polish Hedvige.’ But their marriage began ‘the flourishing epoch of Polish history, to which at the present day the Poles look fondly back when they would exalt the glory and greatness of their country’ (121). Like Dorothea, too, Hedvige (or Jadwiga) was known for her life of charity and kindness towards the poor (Davies God’s Playground 1: 118). Dorothea’s marriage to the outsider Ladislaw is perhaps less likely to begin a similar golden age in Middlemarch, but one suspects that the Review’s version of Polish history would have appealed to Eliot. All these literary and historical references make clear that, consciously or unconsciously, George Eliot was building on received notions of the Polish exile in British culture when she created Will Ladislaw, especially those notions emanating from representations of the Polish hero Ko´sciuszko and popularized by Jane Porter. But even in these similarities, there is much that separates Will from his literary ancestors, especially from Thaddeus Sobieski. Will wanders the continent, lives among the poor, entertains spoiled women, sketches landscapes, and learns German because these acts give him pleasure; Thaddeus Sobieski does the same out of necessity. Will can celebrate the ‘miscellaneousness of Rome’ and make jokes about the ‘migrations of races’ because his exile is, unlike Ko´sciuszko’s, voluntary (212, 214). He dreams of performing some act of kindness to Dorothea, but he worries about ‘the fanaticism of sympathy’ and fears that she has ‘some false belief in the virtues of misery,’ that she wants to make a ‘martyrdom’ of her life (219–20). The closest Will comes to the military life – a hallmark of the Romantic Polish exile – is when he pulls together ‘a troop of droll children’ and takes them on a nutting expedition (463). The distinction is nicely summed up in another of Will’s ‘oddities’: ‘in houses where he got friendly, he was given to stretch himself at full length on the rug while he talked, and was apt to be discovered in this attitude by occasional callers for whom such an irregularity was likely to confirm the notions of his dangerously mixed blood and general laxity’ (463; see also 628–9). Eliot’s parody of the Ko´sciuszko engravings so familiar in the Romantic era clarifies the change: those who saw Ko´sciuszko on the couch saw a courageous if defeated


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patriot who suffered for his country; those who saw Will on the floor saw a lazy, dodgy young man from an unidentifiable homeland. These are all sentiments quite foreign to the Polish exile as imagined by Porter, Campbell, West, Byron, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont: the generation that created and admired patriots like Will’s grandfather. In order to understand the shift that, long before 1872, had taken place in British culture, one must move forward a generation and consider Will’s more immediate literary forebears.

Will’s father figures It is well known that the action of Middlemarch takes place between September 1829 and May 1831, an era of considerable change in Britain, bracketed by the Catholic Emancipation and the First Reform Bill. But this was also a period of enormous continental unrest, when the map of Europe created at the Congress of Vienna began to fall apart. As Mr Brooke says, ‘they’re in the next century, you know, on the other side of the water’ (382). In Chapter 5, I sketched out the shift in representations between 1830 and 1848 that turned the Pole from beloved exile to foreign troublemaker. Will’s debt to this later generation of Polish representations, like his debt to Thaddeus of Warsaw, is written on his face. In that first encounter with Will at Lowick, Dorothea initially notes the striking similarities between grandmother and grandson, but she also notes other, less welcoming features. Accompanying the familiar grey eyes, the rippled nose and curly hair, ‘there was a mouth and chin of a more prominent, threatening aspect than belonged to the type of the grandmother’s miniature’ (79). These are the features Will has inherited from the Polish side of his family, the result of his grandmother’s ‘bad match’: her marriage to a Polish refugee (69). Significantly, when Raffles confronts Will, he is struck by Will’s likeness to his father: ‘It was at Boulogne I saw your father – a most uncommon likeness you are to him, by Jove! mouth – nose – eyes – hair turned off your brow just like this – a little in the foreign style. John Bull doesn’t do much of that’ (610). Raffles does not realize that at least some of these features are not ‘foreign’ at all: they are the features Will’s father inherited from his English mother, Julia. Raffles, like most residents of Middlemarch, can only identify Will’s idiosyncratic character with the Polish part of his family tree. If the Romantic era produced the dashing, Ko´sciuszko-inspired freedom fighters of Jane Porter’s fiction and Thomas Campbell’s verse, the changing political landscape of the mid-nineteenth century created two separate literary representations of the Polish exile. On the one hand, the once-admired Czartoryski circle of displaced nobility was beginning to look aged, ineffectual, and corrupt: more interested in their own pleasures than in the restoration of their homeland. On the other, radical groups were co-opting the Polish cause, producing


images of international solidarity that perhaps appealed to working-class and radical readers but frightened everyone else. Both of these later representations also mark Will. Examples of the latter representation appear most commonly in radical papers. In the 22 June 1850 Red Republican, for example, Gerald Massey expounds on a famous sentiment of Napoleon: ‘day by day, and hour by hour, are the Peoples of Europe forming into two grand armies, Cossack and Republican. . . . There can be no compromise . . . There is a gulf between, which will be filled with blood and bridged with corpses. The question for us is whose blood? whose corpses?’ (1: 5). An unsigned column from the following week – probably the work of editor George Julian Harney – praises the internationalism of the British worker: As regards the British Proletarians, the best passport to their affections and applause is, the announcement that the individual introduced to them is a Frenchman, who shouldered a musket in the glorious days of February . . . a German who stood by Robert Blum at Vienna . . . an Italian who, when Mazzini commanded, rallied to the side of Garibaldi . . . a Magyar who went forth at the bidding of Kossuth . . . or, lastly, a Pole, whether a veteran who (nearly) twenty years ago unsheathed his sword against Russia, or a more youthful warrior with newer scars, won on the battle-fields of Posen, or those other (almost innumerable) scenes of conflict between Right and Might, in which the chivalric Poles have ever acted as the ‘forlorn hope’ of the European Democracy. (1: 12) Each passage subordinates ethnic identity to revolutionary commitment: one must be either Cossack or Republican. Massey and Harney had good reason to make such claims: Polish, Hungarian, and Italian exile organizations often held joint fund-raising events in England, and the names of Ko´sciuszko, Lajos Kossuth, and Giuseppe Mazzini were regularly invoked together. But what is sacrificed is a differentiation in causes. A Briton can no longer support Polish sovereignty unless he also supports continental change. Not surprisingly, this image of the Pole as international revolutionary rarely appears in mainstream Victorian fiction; though, as we shall see, it shows its influence on Will Ladislaw. But the other representation – the degenerating worldly noble of Eastern European descent – became a familiar Victorian figure. Charles Lever’s The Dodd Family Abroad (1854) includes a minor Polish villain, Count Ladislaus Koratinsky,7 who in 1831 ‘commanded the cavalry at Ostrolenca, and, it is said, rode down the Russian Guard, and sabred the Imperial Cuirassiers to a man.’ Sounding like a certain Transylvanian Count, Koratinsky brags that he ‘has the blood of three monarchies in his veins [and]


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has twice touched the crown of his native land’ (17). But Koratinsky is more a simple figure of ridicule: he makes off with James Dodd’s umbrella and cloak and disappears from the plot, inspiring the following diatribe from James’s father against Polish exiles and their British supporters, specifically Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart. We hear a great deal of talk about the partition of Poland, and there is an English Lord keeps the subject for his own especial holdings forth; but I am convinced that the greatest evil of that nefarious act lies in having thrown all these Polish fellows broadcast over Europe. I wish it was a kingdom tomorrow, if they’d only consent to stay there. To be well rid of them and their sympathisers, whom I own I like even less, would be a great blessing just now. (61–2) Anthony Trollope’s 1867 novel The Claverings features two foreign villains, the ‘Franco-Poles’ Count Pateroff and his sister Sophie Gordeloup. Written at the same time as Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, two works that scholars sometimes point to as evidence against claims of Trollope’s narrow mindedness, The Claverings presents the novelist in a more typically xenophobic temperament. The Franco-Poles are friends of Julia Brabazon, who jilts Harry Clavering for the aged Lord Ongar. Julia’s moral failings are thoroughly linked to foreignness, and more specifically to all the familiar locales of continental revolutionary unrest. She becomes Lady Ongar, uncomfortably close as it is to the German Ungar, Hungarian. They honeymoon in Italy, where (of course) they encounter the Franco-Poles. Lord Ongar first met Count Pateroff in St Petersburg, and Sophie, married to a Frenchman she has not seen for ten years, is working as a Russian spy. The ‘Asiatic’ beauty of Polish women, celebrated in Byron’s Mazeppa, disappears with Sophie, replaced by a physiognomy of frugal unpleasantness: ‘A little, dry, bright woman she was, with quick eyes, and thin lips, and small nose, and mean forehead, and scanty hair drawn back quite tightly from her face and head’ (126). Sophie’s foreignness is unmistakable but ambiguous: ‘No human being could have taken Madame Gordeloup for an Englishwoman, though it might be difficult to judge, either from her language or her appearance, of the nationality to which she belonged. She spoke English with great fluency, but every word uttered declared her not to be English’ (132). Sophie may be Polish, but her French husband has bestowed on her a last name only lacking a few letters to spell out her predatory character: gorge du loup. Count Pateroff is first introduced as Julia’s savior: ‘through it all I had but one friend,’ she tells Harry. ‘His name is Pateroff. He is a Pole, but he speaks English like an Englishman. In my presence he told Lord Ongar that he was false


and brutal’ (73). Readers expecting another Thaddeus of Warsaw are thrown off when Pateroff finally appears in London. Harry had expected to see a handsome foreigner, with black hair, polished whiskers, and probably a hook nose . . . But his guest was by no means a man of that stamp . . . He was a fair man, with a broad fair face, and very light blue eyes; his forehead was low, but broad; he wore no whiskers, but bore on his lip a heavy moustache, which was not grey, but perfectly white . . . But for a certain ease of manner which he possessed, accompanied by something of restlessness in his eye, anyone would have taken him for an Englishman. And his speech hardly betrayed that he was not English. (127–8) Harry’s confusion is appropriate in an era of shifting ethnic and geographic boundaries. In Victorian fiction, foreigners are almost always troublemakers if not outright villains, but identifying them as foreigners (and therefore villains) becomes more difficult as the century moves forward. While Sophie can still be safely identified by her accent, Pateroff’s English is almost perfect. Pateroff ushers in the most memorable and most ethnically-mixed villains of Trollope’s mature fiction: Joseph Emilius of The Eustace Diamonds and Phineas Redux, the Bohemian Jew of Polish origins who murders with a French-made bludgeon; and the even less identifiable Augustus Melmotte of The Way We Live Now and Ferdinand Lopez of The Prime Minister. Pateroff’s desire for British women also anticipates the fin-de-siècle arrival of Count Dracula.8 As Stephen Arata notes, what is initially unusual about Dracula is that he does not conform to stereotypes of the East (123). He is well read, cultured, and reliable, attributes that connect him with earlier, aristocratic immigrants. What is less often remarked is that Dracula is also a warrior who has defended Western Europe from Turkish invaders. For this reason he has much more in common with those Polish and Hungarian soldiers who came to Britain and whose nations were celebrated for being the bulwark of Europe, than with British colonial immigrants. Dracula can succeed only by total assimilation into his newly adopted culture, even down to the accent: ‘a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not – and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he see me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say, “Ha, ha! A stranger!” ’ (31–2). Arata points to this passage as evidence of the most alarming aspect of Dracula’s journey to England: ‘The truly disturbing notion is not that Dracula impersonates Harker, but that he does it so well. Here indeed is the nub: Dracula can “pass”’ (124). At century’s end, the visible distinctions between Count Thaddeus and Count Dracula have disappeared: both have learned to be British.


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The radical romantic in Middlemarch Unlike many of their literary contemporaries, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes were well connected with both émigré organizations and reform movements.9 Eliot edited the Westminster Review in the 1850s, a journal that published regularly on the situation in Hungary, Poland, and other troubled lands.10 Lewes co-founded with Thornton Hunt the Leader, which became ‘an important mouthpiece in England for several European revolutionaries, including the French Socialist Louis Blanc and the Italian Joseph Mazzini’ (Andrew Thompson 34). Lewes and Eliot traveled extensively on the continent, visiting Germany, France, and Italy, and in April 1870 they ‘were favorably impressed by a Polish journalist and patriot named Julian Klaczko,’ whom they met in Vienna (David L. Smith 61). Both Lewes and Eliot had included minor Polish characters in their previous writing: Eliot in her short story ‘Amos Barton’ and Lewes in a one-act farce from 1855 called Buckstone’s Adventure with a Polish Princess. But their thoughts on Poland grew more serious in 1863, when another insurrection occurred. Lewes wrote in his journal for 22 August 1863 that his nineteenyear-old son Thornie had ‘set his mind on going out to Poland to fight the Russians. The idea of his enlisting in a guerilla band, and in such a cause was too preposterous, and afflicted us greatly. But for some time we feared that he would set us at defiance and start’ (Eliot Letters 102). George Eliot also described Thornie’s romantic ambitions in a letter later that year (117). Thornie’s desire for adventure brought him instead to Natal, but in 1869 he returned home with tuberculosis of the spine. He died after six months in the care of Eliot and Lewes. It was in the wake of this tragedy that Eliot created Will Ladislaw. A passage concerning Julius Klesmer in Daniel Deronda (1876) confirms Eliot’s awareness of the ambiguous image of Poles in the 1860s and 1870s. The narrator describes the composer as ‘a felicitous combination of the German, the Sclave, and the Semite’ whose ‘English had little foreignness except its fluency’ (47). At dinner with the Arrowpoints and the ‘expectant peer’ Mr Bult, Klesmer laments ‘the lack of idealism in English politics.’ Bult, a representative of contemporary British upper class principles, accounts for Klesmer’s opinions ‘by his being a Pole, or a Czech, or something of that fermenting sort, in a state of political refugeeism which had obliged him to make a profession of his music’ (241). When Bult suggests that Klesmer must be a Panslavist, Klesmer answers, ‘No; my name is Elijah. I am a Wandering Jew,’ then suddenly makes ‘a mysterious wind-like rush backwards and forwards on the piano. Mr Bult felt this buffoonery rather offensive and Polish’ (242). Catherine Arrowpoint attempts to defend the composer by claiming that Klesmer ‘looks forward to a fusion of races’ (242).11


But whereas Daniel Deronda takes place in the 1870s, an era in which fear of the ‘fusion of races’ was epidemic, Middlemarch takes place in an era of widespread admiration for the Poles. If contemporary press reports are an accurate reflection of middle and upper-class opinion, at least some Middlemarchers would have found much to admire in Ladislaw’s Polish heritage. The rampant dislike of Will’s ‘blood’ suggests not so much a slip on Eliot’s part as a reminder that, for all its historical fidelity, Middlemarch is also a commentary on Britain at the time of the Second Reform Act. As Raymond Williams argues, Will is ‘a thread to the future,’ an opportunity for Eliot to think and feel beyond ‘the restrictions and the limitations she has so finely recorded’ (English Novel 93). Williams suggests that Will points to a more free-thinking world of the twentieth century, but Will also points to the four decades separating the setting from the writing of Middlemarch. Will may be a thread to a world beyond 1872, but he incites his neighbors to expressions and concerns more prevalent in the 1870s than in the 1830s. Both strands of Victorian culture I have isolated above – the Pole as radical reformer and as conniving voluptuary – are present in Will Ladislaw, but Eliot deploys these stereotypes in thoughtful and discrete ways. It is fitting that Will writes for a paper called the Pioneer, since his reforming fervor coupled with his ‘exotic’ last name associate him with a later generation of revolutionary writers who lived in Britain as exiles: Alexander Herzen, Louis Blanc, Michael Bakunin. Britain ‘wants to have a House of Commons which is not weighted with nominees of the landed class,’ he tells Brooke, ‘but with representatives of the other interests. And as to contending for a reform short of that, it is like asking for a bit of an avalanche which has already begun to thunder’ (460). He goes further with Lydgate: ‘Wait for wisdom and conscience in public agents – fiddlestick! The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims’ (465). But there is an important distinction. Unlike Mazzini and Herzen (or Harney), Will’s political concerns remain solely with Britain. Though he may look the part of a Mazzini or a Herzen, and his family name stands out prominently among the Garths, Brookes, and Chettams of Middlemarch, Will never concerns himself with contemporary events across the channel, let alone across the Baltic. That work is left to Will’s enemies, who conflate his foreign background with his pro-reform editorials, calling him ‘a quill-driving alien, a foreign emissary’ (379), ‘a Polish emissary’ who speaks at Reform meetings with ‘the violence of an energumen’ (462). The connection arises most memorably during Mr Brooke’s election speech to the people of Middlemarch, when Brooke begins to ramble about the importance of global relations: ‘I’ve been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go – and then, again, in the Baltic. The Baltic, now.’ Brooke’s enemies have set up an effigy of the speaker who


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echoes his words: ‘By the time it said, “The Baltic, now,” the laughter which had been running through the audience became a general shout’ (504). The episode is evidence of what Jerome Beaty calls ‘the subtlety and indirectness with which George Eliot introduces and uses historical dates, issues, and events’ (177). Brooke makes his speech on ‘a fine May morning’ in 1831 (502). The turning point of the Russo-Polish War occurred on 26 May 1831, when the Poles were defeated at Ostrolenka. Brooke misses the irony of his reference to a site of political and military oppression, and one that was often linked to British reform movements in the nineteenth century. ‘Now’ threatens to turn from a rhetorical space holder in Brooke’s sentence to a declaration of the present moment. No wonder, then, that the unhappy electorate moves immediately from ‘the Baltic’ to ‘the Bill’ (505). But Eliot’s geographical choice points most immediately to his ‘Polish emissary’ Ladislaw, whose grandfather would have traveled to Britain from Poland via the Baltic, and who has been puffing Brooke in the pages of the Pioneer and ‘coaching’ him in preparation for this speech (464, 502). As Henry Staten notes, the mocking echo from the crowd is ‘a mirror or representation en abyme of the narrative voice, since it repeats the main device the narration uses to satirize Brook: his tic of repeating phrases from the end of one sentence as a vague transition to the next’ (995). The effigy’s mimicry of Brooke at this key moment is surely also an attack on Brooke’s dependence on Ladislaw, who, puppeteer-like, is present at the speech, standing ‘at the window behind the speaker’ (503). Only a few pages after the ‘Baltic’ episode, Brooke and Ladislaw part political ways. Will is a victim of his own ‘external polish’: almost in spite of his silence on the topic, even the slightest references to revolutionary events on the continent attach themselves to him. Similarly, Will exhibits certain characteristics that associate him with the other Victorian stereotype, the continental voluptuary of obscure origin. Will’s perceived ethnic ambiguity, his ‘mixed blood,’ associate him with Trollope’s villains, though the narrator never refers to Will’s physiology disparagingly: this is left to the people of Middlemarch, who seem well versed in Victorian xenophobia avant la lettre. One of their most telling epithets is ‘an Italian with white mice’ (490, 492, 496, 772). The description iterates the Poland-Italy link that became commonplace in the nineteenth century, but it also associates Will with the most famous Italian with white mice in Victorian literature, The Woman in White’s Count Fosco. Though an anachronistic literary reference for 1830 – Wilkie Collins’s novel appeared in 1860 – it makes perfect sense as an emblem of what Middlemarch expects Will to be: not the Polish hero of the 1830s, but the immigrant scoundrel of later decades. Indeed, critics often overlook the virulence and consistency with which Middlemarchers attack Will’s foreign lineage. Dorothea alone believes that Will’s difficulties come from economic disadvantage; everyone else sees the


problem as a question of blood. He is ‘of foreign extraction’ (358), ‘a quill-driving alien, a foreign emissary’ (379), ‘a sort of gypsy’ (436, 461), ‘a Polish emissary’ (462), ‘an Italian with white mice,’ ‘a sort of Daphnis’ (496), ‘Mr Orlando Ladislaw’ (628), ‘[a]ny cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy’ (719), ‘Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker’ (772), an individual of ‘a bad origin’ (816) whose ‘blood is a frightful mixture’ (819). His grandfather’s homeland is even associated with fatal disease when a Middlemarch gossip announces ‘is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic?’ (444).12 At least one contemporary reviewer felt similarly annoyed with Ladislaw. According to the Saturday Review

There is quite enough of the vagabond in Ladislaw, in spite of his remote kinship to Mr Casaubon, to make Mrs Cadwallader’s judgement stick by one, that Dorothea might as well marry an Italian with white mice; for the author spares us nothing, and allows his enemies to sum up his genealogy – ‘the son of a Polish fiddler, and grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker.’ It is the man, not his antecedents, that the ideal woman cares for. (Holmstrom and Lerner 90)

Yet there is wonderful irony in the way the plot actually turns. The few descriptions given of Will’s Polish grandfather are quite positive, and we learn almost nothing about the character of Will’s Anglo-Polish father, who died when Will was very young. Will recalls only his musical talents, ‘his slow walk and his long thin hands’ (365). Among the other characters only Raffles met him, and Mr Ladislaw was ‘very ill’ at the time (610). Aside from noting ‘a most uncommon likeness’ between father and son, Raffles gives us no other information about Will’s father. In fact the thieving pawnbroker in Will’s family tree is not his Polish grandfather but his English grandfather: the dissenting father of Will’s English mother, Sarah Dunkirk. The Saturday Review writer misunderstands the plot and misses the point. Though we expect Will’s father to be another Count Pateroff or Count Koratinsky, this role is actually taken by two Englishmen: Mr Dunkirk, and Dunkirk’s successor, Nicholas Bulstrode (and no surprise that the villain of this Polish subplot is a Nicholas). Will’s mother leaves her family in order to avoid the disgrace of her father’s work, and Will takes pride in his mother’s act: ‘His mother had braved hardship in order to separate herself from it . . . let them suspect what they pleased, they would find themselves in the wrong. They would find out that the blood in his veins was as free from the taint of meanness as theirs’ (611).


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Will’s link to the Count Pateroffs of Victorian fiction comes out most overtly in his relations with the women of Middlemarch. Yet here, too, this association has little to do with Will’s actions but much to do with Middlemarch rumor. ‘Mr Orlando Ladislaw is making a sad dark-blue scandal by warbling continually with your Mr Lydgate’s wife,’ Mrs Cadwallader informs Dorothea (628). Responses intensify when it becomes clear that Dorothea plans to marry Will. ‘Nobody thinks Mr Ladislaw a proper husband for you,’ Celia tells her (821). Sir James says, ‘If Ladislaw had had a spark of honour he would have gone out of the country at once, and never shown his face in it again’ (816). In the ‘Finale’ the narrator notes that most Middlemarchers still consider the marriage as a ‘mistake’ and believe that Dorothea ‘could not have been “a nice woman” ’ (837–8). The Middlemarch public desperately wants to see Will as a Pateroff, even though the Victorian villain’s usual reason for marrying an English widow – her wealth – cannot be Will’s motivation. The narrator even mocks these expectations by noting several times Will’s fondness for one of Middlemarch’s more eligible women, the elderly Miss Noble. One of Will’s ‘oddities’ is to escort Miss Noble ‘when he met her in the street with her little basket, giving her his arm in the eyes of the town’ (463). While such behavior amuses or disgusts various Middlemarchers, Will’s kindness to Miss Noble should short-circuit any readers’ expectations of bad behavior on Will’s part. Will subverts Victorian expectations of the Pole in a final and crucial way: though he looks and acts and is treated like an outsider, in fact he’s an insider, related to both Bulstrode and Casaubon. Count Pateroff must marry to get his hands on British wealth, but Will shouldn’t have to, it should be his birthright. His cousin Casaubon refuses Dorothea’s requests to give Will part of the family wealth; his step-grandfather Nicholas Bulstrode acknowledges Will’s relation and offers him financial aid only when he fears public disgrace. Will refuses both offers and thus derails any logical attempts to read his character as anything but oppositional to the Victorian villain, whose raisons d’être are wealth and public standing.

Forward to the past To sum up: George Eliot builds her Polish hero Will Ladislaw out of three distinct representations. At the core is the Romantic representation of the gallant, exiled Pole, first inspired by Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko, fully fictionalized in Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw, and resuscitated in a variety of works produced during and after the Russo-Polish War of 1831. This is the image of the Pole contemporary with events described in Middlemarch, and many of Will’s characteristics and habits fit this earliest representation. But other aspects of Will’s


personality come from the more ambiguous representations of the continental foreigner that only became prevalent in George Eliot’s own time. Will’s occupation as a newspaper writer links him to a later generation of radical journalists: Britons like Gerald Massey and Ernest Jones as well as exiles like Mazzini and Herzen, all of whom wrote long after 1832. The concerns aroused in Middlemarch by his flirtations with Rosamunde and especially his marriage to Dorothea associate him with the ethnically ambiguous villains of Anthony Trollope’s novels. But Eliot’s vision of a Europe without borders avoids the xenophobia of most Victorian fiction. The success of Will and Dorothea’s marriage offers a more tolerant future for England, if not for Middlemarch. Even the slippage suggested by their son, who ‘might have represented Middlemarch, but declined,’ preferring life as a country gentleman, can be read in a positive light: the idea of a British MP or country gentleman with a Polish name like Ladislaw no longer concerns anyone (837). And yet it would be incorrect to argue that, at the conclusion of Middlemarch, Will is only ‘a thread to the future,’ a vision of what a more enlightened Great Britain might bring. For he is just as certainly a thread to the past. A pretty, Anglo-Polish hero, an only child who was raised by his mother without a father’s help and whose Polish grandfather was an honorable man; an AngloPolish hero disgraced by the English side of his family, deprived of his rightful English inheritance, who through fantastic coincidence is put in touch with that English family, who only then offer reparation, reparation that is gallantly rejected by the hero before he marries his English love, an orphan who has become connected to that same English family. Haven’t we heard this story before?13 Just as Dorothea re-enacts the stories of her free-thinking, Romanticera predecessors Aunt Julia and Sarah Dunkirk by marrying a Ladislaw, all of Will’s later victories over Victorian expectations come via a reclamation of Romantic expectations: a return of the repressed Jane Porter narrative, which first came to light when Dorothea noticed the feminine features in Will’s countenance. ‘It is the man, not his antecedents, that the ideal woman cares for’ (Holmstrom and Lerner 90). By now it should be clear that George Eliot does care for her character’s antecedents, fictional and historical. Will’s story starts and ends with the story of his Polish predecessor, Thaddeus Sobieski. In between it recapitulates the nineteenth-century history of the continental exile in Britain, and in doing so critiques British society for refusing to see itself as an amalgam of numerous and varied cultures. At the moment Eliot was writing Middlemarch, Poland remained, in the words of Lord Acton, ‘a soul, as it were, wandering in search of a body in which to begin life over again’ (21). Ladislaw’s appearance and background seem all the more fitting and ironic in a work which concerns the arrival of new and foreign ideas in a small British town. The cast of Middlemarch offers a transcontinental collection of influences


169

and experiences. Eliot chooses as her guiding spirit the Spanish St Theresa of Avila; the Brooke sisters are educated in Switzerland; Dorothea, Ladislaw, and Casaubon travel to Rome; Lydgate studies medicine in Scotland and France; Casaubon is unable to complete his research in part because he lacks German. In choosing Will Ladislaw as one of her protagonists, George Eliot reminds readers of the century of bloodshed and suffering experienced in Poland, of the tens of thousands of Poles who relocated to various parts of the continent, and of their descendants who enriched those nations with ideas of reform and change.

Afterword: Conrad’s Poles

It seems inadequate to write a book on the Polish hero in nineteenth-century British literature and not include the work of Jósef Konrad Korzeniowski. But this is not such an easy task. Joseph Conrad’s Polishness is central to many excellent studies of his work, and countless critics have already identified the influence of Polish history on Conrad’s heroes, most notably Lord Jim. More important to the focus of this study is the fact that, in a lifetime of writing about exiles and foreign lands, Conrad rarely included a Polish character in his work. There are two exceptions: the short stories ‘Amy Foster’ (1901) and ‘Prince Roman’ (1911). Both suggest an author familiar with many of the Romantic and Victorian representations of Poland discussed in this book and attempting, at century’s end, to offer darker, realistic revisions. The Polish protagonist of ‘Amy Foster,’ Yanko Goorall, is no military leader or aristocrat but rather ‘a mountaineer of the eastern range of the Carpathians,’ who has been tricked into selling his family’s modest assets for passage to the United States (193). The ship that carries him from Hamburg, the Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea, foreshadows his unforeseen destination (Sophia-Dorothea was wife of George I), but perhaps also nods to the heroine of Middlemarch and her own Polish connection. Conrad describes Yanko’s sea journey in all its unpleasant detail: the confusion, the loneliness, and the coffin-like ‘wooden boxes where people had to sleep one above another’ (188). Yanko is sole survivor of the shipwreck that follows, but no Britons come to his aid. Instead he is beaten, abused, and finally imprisoned while the locals decide what to do with him. By comparison, the rude treatment experienced by Thaddeus Sobieski in London and Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch seems positively tame. But if Yanko’s journey to England suggests a broad, revisionist parody of the melancholy travels of the fictional Romantic outsider, it is interesting how closely his character echoes his Polish predecessors. Over and over again the narrator declares that Yanko is a good-hearted, rather delicate man, a ‘soft and passionate adventurer’ with ‘a highly sensitive nature’ who ‘put his trust in 170

Afterword: Conrad’s Poles 171

God’ (190–1, 186). He is also attractive: ‘very good looking’ and ‘gallant of bearing,’ with a ‘lithe and striding figure’ (203, 208). As in Thaddeus of Warsaw, a turning point comes for Yanko when he rescues a child (200). And yet he remains an outsider: ‘his foreigness had a peculiar and indelible stamp’ (201). He even assumes the familiar Ko´sciuszko/Ladislaw attitude, much to his British neighbors’ dismay: ‘They wouldn’t in their dinner hour lie flat on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky.’ His musical skills – his ‘dismal tunes’ and his ‘light and soaring’ voice – gain few admirers (201). Like her forebears Mary Beaufort and Dorothea Casaubon, Amy Foster sees beyond the differences. But this Anglo-Polish union ends in tragedy and misunderstanding. Yanko is unwilling to surrender his Catholicism or his language, and his wife, the story suggests, cannot come to terms with these practices – especially since he hopes to bequeath them to their son. Yanko becomes seriously ill, and the narrator last sees him in full Ko´sciuszko mode, ‘lying half dressed on a couch downstairs’ (206). When he turns delirious from illness, Amy escapes the house with their child. In the morning Yanko is dead. Conrad’s story is a nightmare of exile, and perhaps also a critique of the British response to Polish refugees: despite Yanko’s good intentions and hard work, his indifferent British neighbors make few efforts to assist him. If he lives on in his child Johnny, the telling repetition of a metaphor between father and son – both resemble birds caught ‘in a snare’ (196, 209) – suggests that sensitive Poles are not long for the British world. Conrad addressed the Polish stereotype from another angle ten years later in ‘Prince Roman.’ Critics have been rather unsympathetic to this story, for the simple reason that, unlike Lord Jim, the eponymous character does not jump ship. But the story is significant to the cultural history I have been exploring here, for it offers one last glimpse, at the close of the nineteenth century, of the defeated yet gallant Polish hero. The story is told in 1900, Marlow-style, by an unnamed narrator who recalls a youthful meeting with the aged Prince Roman. Though the prince is clearly supposed to be a distinguished visitor, ‘what concerned me most was the failure of the fairy tale glamour. It was shocking to discover a prince who was deaf, bald, meagre, and so prodigiously old. It never occurred to me that this imposing and disappointing man had been young, rich, beautiful’ (149). For that story, the narrator must return his readers to the Russo-Polish War of 70 years before. Prince Roman, mourning the unexpected death of his wife, learns of the coming engagement between Polish and Russian forces. Rather than escaping to Paris or London and then spending a guilty lifetime looking for a chance at redemption – the usual Conradian response – Roman decides to join the Polish insurgents. He takes a pseudonym, enlists as a common soldier, and fights with bravery until his capture. Identified as a member of the nobility, the prince is given the opportunity to explain away his actions as ‘a moment


of blind recklessness.’ Instead he writes a terse note to his Russian examiners: ‘I joined the national rising from conviction’ (161). The Russians have no choice but to send Roman into Siberian hard labor, followed by military service in the Caucasus. ‘It was twenty-five years before Prince Roman, stone deaf, his health broken, was permitted to return to Poland,’ the narrator tells us, but even after all this suffering Roman remains committed to his country: ‘It was well said that his days did not belong to himself but to his fellow citizens. And especially he was the particular friend of all returned exiles, helping them with purse and advice, arranging affairs and finding them means of livelihood’ (162). The narrator never mentions Roman’s last name, though he comes up after a discussion of ‘the highest, the great families of Europe,’ and his last name begins with an S (145). Though Ludwik Krzyzanowski has identified Conrad’s historical inspiration as Roman Sanguszko, the fact that his father’s name is John encourages the anglophone reader to think of Sobieski. Roman, too, shares with Thaddeus Sobieski military courage, physical beauty, an orphaned wife, and a fondness for children. Unlike Thaddeus, however, he does not leave Poland. Conrad takes the same character that has dominated British literature on Poland since the fall of Ko´sciuszko, but he imagines him staying in Poland and suffering the consequences. And yet the physical ruin suffered by Prince Roman is nothing like the mental ruin of the usual Conradian protagonist. Roman is deaf like Razumov in Under Western Eyes; like Marlow in Heart of Darkness he is given the opportunity to dissemble. But the similarities end there. For once Conrad’s hero makes the honorable choices, and for once Conrad’s hero is Polish. And yet to criticize Conrad for excessive amor patriae seems itself excessive. This is, after all, a single short story in an extensive fictional oeuvre. And the honor it bequeaths to an earlier generation of Poles does not extend to Conrad’s contemporaries. As Roman confesses in the story’s final lines, his daughter and son-in-law, who move ‘in the cosmopolitan sphere of the highest European aristocracy,’ ‘don’t believe me to be a good judge of men. They think that I let myself be guided too much by mere sentiment’ (162–3). If men like Prince Roman once existed, they no longer do. And whether they ever did remains an open question. Prince Roman’s name brings to mind heroes of antiquity, but in its shared spelling with the French roman, it also suggests that such heroes, like Thaddeus of Warsaw, only exist in fiction.

Notes Introduction: The Other East 1. That lineage continues into the twenty-first century. For a very recent example, see the hero Lev of Rose Tremain’s 2007 novel The Road Home. London: Vintage, 2008. 2. The Global Eighteenth Century. Ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003; Travels, Explorations and Empires, 1770–1835: Travel Writings on North America, the Far East, North and South Poles and the Middle East. Eds. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson. 8 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001. 3. The quote comes from Dobson’s brief introduction, which is not paginated. For industrial and economic links between Poland and Scotland in the nineteenth century, see McLeod. 4. Thomas Gladsky, Princes, Peasants and Other Polish Selves. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992; Francois Rosset, L’Arbre de Cracovie: Le mythe polonais dans la littérature française. Paris: Imago, 1996; Hubert Orlowski, Polnische Wirtschaft: Zum deutschen Polendiskurs der Neuzeit. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1996. As I note above, several useful studies focusing on British representations of Russia already exist.

1 ‘That Woman, Lovely Woman! May Have Dominion’: Catherine the Great and Poland 1. Walpole does not clear the Russian people of responsibility. His letter continues, ‘What! are there no poissardes at Petersburg? are they afraid of a greater fury than themselves? – or, don’t they venerate her, because she is a Mirabeau in petticoats, and execrable enough to be a queen to their taste?’ While individual Britons (like Walpole) may note the hypocrisy of their own leaders, the same is not possible in Russia, where Catherine’s followers differ from her only in their degree of baseness. 2. See the indices to volumes 31 and 34 of Walpole’s Correspondence under ‘Catherine II’ for these and other epithets. 3. My biographical sketches of Catherine and Stanisław are especially indebted to works in the bibliography by Alexander, Butterwick, and Zamoyski. 4. In an 1829 ‘Imaginary Conversation’ between Catherine and ‘Princess Dashkof’ [sic], Walter Savage Landor even places her at the scene of the murder: Catherine’s first words are ‘Into his heart! into his heart!’ Landor also has her already planning Ivan’s death: ‘Ivan must follow next: he is heir to the throne’ (7: 106–12). 5. ‘She has now inoculated her son – I wonder she did not, out of magnanimity, try the experiment on him first,’ quipped Horace Walpole (23: 444). 6. Catherine’s play The Deceiver, an attack on freemasonry that includes a caricature of Count Cagliostro, was performed in Russia and Germany during her own lifetime. 7. Walpole was right about revolution but wrong about the pictures’ fate. They remain in the Hermitage. 8. For further images and discussions of British engravings of Catherine II, see Bolton, Caretta, Cross (Catherine 29–44), Komisaruk, O’Quinn, and Schmidt. Bolton and O’Quinn also consider their relationship to Hannah Cowley’s A Day in Turkey; Schmidt adds an interesting discussion of Suvorov. 173

174 Notes

9. Horace Walpole refers to Orlov repeatedly in his letters, for example, ‘it appears that the revolution in Peterberg [sic] has only been in the bedchamber, and that Count Gregory Orlow retains all his other posts as yet’ (23: 444; see also 22: 64–5 and 24: 114). 10. ‘The Polish Prince you mention is our cousin. His Grand Mother, or great Grand Mother, was a daughter of the Marquis of Argyll’s. The King of Poland is the same relation to us.’ The Journal of Lady Mary Coke, 2: 361. Walpole records an amusing anecdote of Stanisław’s visit to the Gordons (35: 82). 11. The former lovers only met once. In 1787, as Catherine sailed down the Dnieper on a six-month journey to survey her new southern empire, she briefly met Stanisław at Kanev. According to John T. Alexander, Stanisław ‘staged a magnificent reception replete with grandiose fireworks – an imitation of Mt. Vesuvius erupting – and asked her to stay several days,’ hoping the meeting would strengthen ties between the two rulers and their nations. But one evening was enough for Catherine. ‘As the Prince de Ligne mordantly summarized Poniatowski’s fiasco: three months and three millions expended for three hours of empty conversation with the Empress’ (259). 12. Burke’s comments were translated into Polish and appeared in Warsaw newspapers. Stanisław awarded him a ‘Merentibus’ medal, making him a member of a private order of the King. Burke responded with ‘a magnificent letter of thanks’ (Butterwick 143; see Burke Correspondence 6: 426–8; 7: 76–9). 13. Edmund Burke critiques Vaughan’s arguments in a 29 July 1792 letter to his son Richard Burke (Correspondence 7: 159). As noted below, Vaughan’s letters were described at length in the Analytical Review. 14. For an extended reading of ‘Why Should Na Poor Folk Mowe’ (which was published after Burns’s death), see McIlvanney 173–7. 15. Here and throughout Chapter 1, ‘E’ stands for David Erdman’s edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. 16. For Wollstonecraft, see Chapter 2. Mackintosh refers to Poland in a number of works, including his famous speech in defense of Jean-Gabriel Peltier. See The Trial of John Peltier, Esq. for a libel against Napoleon Buonaparte. London: Cox, Son, and Baylis, 1803, 162–7. 17. An engraving sometimes attributed to Gillray, Queen Catherine’s Dream (published 4 November 1794 by W. Holland), shows the devil offering Warsaw and Constantinople to Catherine II. The same theatrical reference perhaps inspired Isaac Cruikshank’s 26 December 1796 The Moment of Reflection or A Tale for Future Times (here Figure 1.3). 18. For the centrality of Enitharmon among Blake’s names, see Essick 216. 19. Woodring’s suggestion is bolstered by Thomas Moore’s parody of ‘Kubla Khan,’ ‘A Dream,’ where the setting is Russia: ‘Methought, upon the Neva’s flood / A beautiful Ice Palace stood, / A dome of frost-work, on the plan / Of that once built by Empress Anne’ (7–10). ‘A Dream’ opens Moore’s Fables for The Holy Alliance, Rhymes on the Road, &c. &c. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823. 20. And indeed, years later, Leigh Hunt mistakenly attributed the palace to Catherine. Leigh Hunt’s London Journal 44 (28 January 1835): 25. 21. I discuss ‘To the Continental Despots’ and Coleridge’s ‘Koskiusko’ at greater length in Chapter 2. 22. Depending on the exact date of Blake’s composing this page of Europe, it is possible that his description of the suffering ‘inhabitants of suburbs’ refers specifically to the much-reported November 1794 massacre at Prague, a suburb of Warsaw, which signaled the end of organized Polish resistance to Russian forces.

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2 ‘A Patriot’s Furrow’d Cheek’: British Responses to the 1794 Ko´sciuszko Uprising 1. Opie adds that ‘the next time that his birthday was commemorated in Paris, I wrote some verses on the occasion, and sent them to him by a private hand’ (Memorials 107). If this suggests that Ko´sciuszko’s desire for publicity went unfulfilled, one should remember that his request also inspired the 1831 anecdote, and perhaps another poem Opie published in 1831, ‘Aux Polonais Qui Partent’ (Collected Poems 343). 2. Two writers have collected some of the best-known British poems and prose on Ko´sciuszko: see Zapatka and Drozdowski. For useful biographies of Ko´sciuszko, see Gardner, Haiman, and Storozynski. 3. David Humphreys, who served with Ko´sciuszko at West Point and Saratoga, was also on board, and he commemorated the voyage in the poem ‘An Epistle to Dr. Dwight. On board the Courier de l’Europe, July 30, 1784’: ‘Such my companions, – such the muse shall tell, / Him first, whom once you knew in war full well, / Our Polish friend, whose name still sounds so hard, / To make it rhyme would puzzle any bard’ (73–6). David Humphreys. ‘An Epistle to Dr. Dwight. On board the Courier de l’Europe, July 30, 1784.’ The Miscellaneous Works of David Humphreys. New York: T. and J. Swords, 1804, 211–15. 4. See, for instance, William Aytoun’s 1832 ‘Poland’ (‘Was it so very pleasant to thy heart / To see her blood upon thy garments start’ [71–2]), Janet Hamilton’s 1865 ‘Poland’ (‘None / Will take her by the hand: alone, / Before broad Europe, lost, forlorn, / She lies dismembered, bleeding, torn’) or Algernon Swinburne’s 1878 sonnet ‘Rizpah,’ where Poland is described as a nation that ‘couldst not even scare off with hand or groan / Those carrion birds devouring bone by bone.’ 5. Coleridge’s amusing description deserves to be printed at length: ‘I shall never forget, or recall without a smile . . . the impression which the stranger whom I found in the room before dinner, made on me. A striking countenance – poring on the Paper of that day and occasionally turned towards me – At last, he rose, advanced to me with the paper in his hand, & began – “Sir! I apprehend, that you are the Author of this Sonnet on Koskiusko?” I bowed assent. “Sir! it is a very bad composition – a very wretched performance, I assure you.” I again bowed: and with a smile that expressed a little surprize at the oddness, but no offence at the harshness, of this volunteer Address, made some modest reply admitting the too probable appropriateness of the Criticism. “Nay, but, Sir! do not misunderstand me – It is a poem of genius – a proof of great Genius, Sir! You are certainly a man of Genius, Sir! My name is Holcroft – and I should be glad to see you at my House next Sunday, to dine with me – & meet with Mr Porson and Mr Godwin” ’ (4: 830). 6. Another significant echo would be Old Hamlet’s ghost, ‘Oh Hamlet, what a falling off was there,’ considering the ghostly presence in the poem of both Ko´sciuszko and his homeland. Still a third is Gertrude’s first response to Hamlet after the murder of Polonius: ‘Oh what a rash and bloody deed is this.’ 7. Coleridge published a reworked version of ‘Koskiusko’ in his 1796 Poems on Various Subjects, much to Charles Lamb’s dismay. ‘Time nor nothing can reconcile me to the concluding 5 lines of Kosciusko,’ he wrote Coleridge, ‘call it any thing you will but sublime’ (Letters 1: 20). 8. A watercolor of Ko´sciuszko by Cosway is in the collection of the Fondazione Cosway, Lodi. This was the basis for the Cardon engraving, discussed below. In addition, three large paintings based on Cosway’s image are today found in Polish collections, ´ though which if any is the work of Cosway remains uncertain. See Zmuda-Liszewska.

176 Notes

9. Wright’s painting is now in the Tate Britain. A source for Wright’s composition is Nicholas Hilliard’s circa-1595 miniature of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, today in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. 10. Leigh Hunt describes a similar response in his sonnet ‘To Kosciusko’: ‘There came a wanderer, borne from land to land / Upon a couch, pale, many-wounded, mild, / His brow with patient pain dulcetly sour. / Men stoop’d, with awful sweetness, on his hand, / And kissed it; and collected Virtue smiled, / To think how sovereign her enduring hour’ (Poetical Works 176). These lines are an 1832 revision of the sonnet ‘To Kosciusko,’ which originally appeared in the Examiner in 1816. Regarding the visual images, Josef Fischer, court engraver to the Emperor of Austria, apparently used Cardon’s image to prepare his own 1798 engraving ‘Self-portrait with an injured foot,’ which shows the artist in a similar pose, having suffered an injury fighting against Napoleon in north Italy (Griffiths 94–5). 11. In fairness to Sharp, Ko´sciuszko was living in the French countryside in 1800; however this does not explain the need to imitate the pose and mise en scene of 1797. 12. I discuss Hunt’s and Keats’s engagement with Ko´sciuszko in Chapter 4. Lady Morgan offers further if satirical evidence of Ko´sciuszko’s changing fortunes in Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale (4 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1818), when Lady Dunore praises the military hero Fitzwalter’s storytelling abilities: ‘ “you have no idea how you remind me of Kosiusko [sic], lying wounded upon a sofa. You raconter so like him . . . I must say, after all, that patriotism and freedom and things always sound delightfully” ’ (3: 123). 13. Bristol bookseller Joseph Cottle, who later published Lyrical Ballads, published his own ‘War, A Fragment’ in 1795. An extended passage ruminates on the fate of Poland, ending with an encomium to Ko´sciuszko: ‘For thee shall sound Compassion’s softest dirge, / Thy name descend to Time’s remotest verge / With growing honors crown’d, and, o’er thy grave / The Bay shall bloom, the drooping Willow wave’ (Joseph Cottle. Poems. Bristol: J. Cottle, 1795, 237–40). Henry Francis Cary, later a friend of Lamb and Coleridge and a translator of The Divine Comedy (1805–14), apparently hoped to cash in on the excitement surrounding Ko´sciuszko’s 1797 visit. He wrote his 130-line Ode to General Kosciusko in three days in early June, then printed 250 copies within two weeks. By that time Ko´sciuszko was gone, and the poem, according to Cary’s biographer, ‘does more credit to Cary’s enthusiasm for liberty and self-government than to his poetic gifts’ (King 79). Like Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw six years later, Cary’s Ode presents Ko´sciuszko not as a revolutionary but rather as a ‘dauntless hero’ who tries to defend King Stanisław, ‘the monarch of his love,’ against Russian and Prussian tyranny (Henry Francis Cary. Ode to General Kosciusko. London: Cadell and Davies, 1797, lines 70, 74). Cary also uses the poem to criticize Britain’s colonization of India and involvement in the slave trade, drawing a connection between Poles, Indians, and Africans that would reappear in Campbell’s ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’ 14. All lines quoted appear in Part One of ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’ 15. It is surprising that Coleridge criticized Campbell for stealing from ‘a much ridiculed piece by [John] Dennis, a Pindaric on William III,’ unless he too had been influenced by Dennis. John Payne Collier recorded Coleridge’s criticism in his diary for 1 November 1811 (quoted in Richard W. Armour and Raymond F. Howes, eds. Coleridge the Talker: A Series of Contemporary Descriptions and Comments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940, 175–6). Carl Woodring believes Coleridge ‘furtively’ improved Dennis’s line, ‘Fair Liberty shriek’d out loud, aloud Religion groaned’ (Coleridge 102). The Coleridgean/Campbellian shriek became almost ubiquitous in references to Poland; see Chapters 5 and 6 for further examples. See also Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, under F: ‘Freedom, as every schoolboy knows / Once shrieked as Kosciusko fell’ (available online).

Notes

3

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Hero between Genres: Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw

1. Jane Porter to Anna Maria Porter, 19 July 1803. Huntington Library, Papers of Jane Porter (hereafter cited as POR) 1480. 2. This anecdote appears in Porter’s 1831 introduction to Thaddeus of Warsaw (xiv). 3. Sir Sidney Smith to Jane Porter, 12 April 1803. Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas (hereafter cited as Kansas) Ph 14627:3. 4. Jane Porter to Anna Maria Porter, 3 April 1795: ‘Courtier was here yesterday – he brought the two Magazines for me to look at – your Despair and Nightingale are both in the Ladies, as also is my Peace.’ Huntington Library POR 1423. Her sister’s accomplishments were even more impressive. By 1803, Anna Maria Porter had produced two volumes of tales, a volume of poetry, two novels, and a work for Drury Lane. For connections between Robert Ker Porter’s historical panoramas and Jane Porter’s historical romances, see McLean, ‘Jane Porter’s Portrait of Benjamin West.’ 5. Thomas Campbell to Jane Porter, n.d. [circa 1803]. National Library of Scotland, MS 9818 ff. 111–12. 6. Jane Porter to Sir Robert Peel, 10 June 1842. British Library, Add. 40510 f. 75. 7. See Dennis, Angela Keane, Kelly, and Wood (138, 149–50). 8. A copy of an undated letter from Robert Ker Porter to Ko´sciuszko requesting the honor of a meeting is in the Huntington Library (POR 2212). 9. Jane Porter to Anna Maria Porter, 14 May 1805. Huntington Library POR 1561. 10. An internet search of ‘Thaddeus Sobieski’ and ‘Thaddeus Constantine’ (Constantine being the pseudonym Thaddeus takes while living in London) provides numerous family trees that include the names. 11. The town of Pembroke, Kentucky takes its name from Thaddeus’s friend Pembroke Somerset. 12. ‘LEVIATHAN, n. An enormous aquatic animal mentioned by Job. Some suppose it to have been the whale, but that distinguished ichthyologer, Dr. Jordan, of Stanford University, maintains with considerable heat that it was a species of gigantic Tadpole (Thaddeus Polandensis) or Polliwig – Maria pseudo-hirsuta. For an exhaustive description and history of the Tadpole consult the famous monograph of Jane Potter [sic], Thaddeus of Warsaw.’ 13. For more on the connections between James Edward Stuart and Sir Charles Grandison, see Brückmann. 14. See discussion of Walpole and Burke in Chapter 1. 15. Porter quotes from Coleridge’s ‘Religious Musings,’ a work noted in Chapter 2. In the 1831 edition of Thaddeus of Warsaw, Catherine the Great became ‘that proud woman of the North’ (92), evidence of Porter’s changing relationship with Russia (see this chapter’s epilogue). 16. In the 1831 edition, this list of admired writers became ‘Mackenzie, Radcliffe, and Lee’ (194). 17. A seventeenth-century ballad version of the story appears in Percy’s Reliques. In Lillo’s version both Barnwell and Sarah die in London; in the ballad, Barnwell’s death occurs on the continent: ‘For murder in Polonia, / Was Barnwell hang’d in chains’ (175–6). The story also inspired T.S. Surr’s novel George Barnwell (London: H.D. Symonds, 1798). 18. Porter manipulates history here, since the first Haymarket performance of Sighs took place on 30 July 1799, five years after the action of Thaddeus of Warsaw. 19. In later editions, even the horse he was forced to abandon in Poland is returned to him! 20. Jane Porter to Robert Ker Porter, 31 January–1 February 1832. Kansas MS 28, Ph 14664: 3.

178 Notes

21. See McLean, ‘Jane Porter’s Later Works’ and Chapter 5. 22. Jane Porter to Robert Ker Porter, 5 January 1831. Kansas MS 28, Ph 14663: 2. 23. Jane Porter to Robert Ker Porter, 7 September 1831. Kansas MS 28, Ph 14663 (2): 13.

4 ‘Transform’d, Not Inly Alter’d’: The Resurrection of Ko´sciuszko and the Arrival of Mazeppa 1. See Myerly. See also Carman (109) and Veve (40–1). 2. The Times, 6 January 1814, 2; Annual Register, 1813, 96. Later visitors to the site of Poniatowski’s death included Washington Irving and Mary Shelley. 3. Brougham’s previous comments on Poland appear in at least two Edinburgh Review articles: ‘Gentz on the State of Europe,’ 9 (January 1807): 253–78; and ‘Rulhiere – Anarchie de Pologne,’ 28 (July 1809): 388–406. 4. Something is amiss here since West painted the portrait after their meeting. Hunt also worked this anecdote into the 1832 version of ‘To Kosciusko’ (Poetical Works 176). See also Chapter 2, note 10. 5. Leigh Hunt Poetical Works 83. It seems important that both of these examples were later additions to early works; Ko´sciuszko probably had little significance for Hunt before July 1814. 6. In Williams’s published version, this appears as ‘their freedom’ (Narrative 151). 7. William Wordsworth, The Excursion in Wordsworth’s Poetical Works. Eds E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. 5: 59. 8. See Chapter 2. See also The Convention of Cintra: ‘The stir of emancipation may again be felt at the mouths as well as at the sources of the Rhine. Poland perhaps will not be insensible; Kosciusko and his compeers may not have bled in vain’ (Prose Works 1: 341). Damian Walford Davies argues for ‘an inscription’ of Ko´sciuszko ‘in “Tintern Abbey” in a mode other than that of direct, or even self-conscious, invocation,’ and a somewhat stronger presence of the Polish general in Wordsworth’s ‘Discharged Soldier’ (127–30). 9. Humphreys wrote George Washington during the 1794 uprising of his cautious hopes for the rebels: ‘If they hold out this Campaign, I trust the Insurrection will terminate in Independence’ (Haiman 28). For Humphreys’s poem on the voyage to Europe, see Chapter 2, note 3. 10. The dialogue appears in Landor The Complete Works, Vol. 8. Poniatowski died at Leipzig in October 1813, three years before Ko´sciuszko moved to Switzerland, thus making this conversation not only imaginary but also impossible. 11. Another reader felt very differently: the Chartist shoemaker and MP Thomas Cooper included an extended passage from the dialogue in his Eight Letters to the Young Men of the Working-Class (1850), declaring ‘[t]here is not nobler eloquence in the whole compass of the language’ (Claeys 5: 445). 12. For a detailed history of the various versions of Mazeppa’s story, see Babinski. For a Ukrainian reading of the poem, see Voss. 13. Byron prints Voltaire’s French; I have provided the appropriate passages from a contemporary English translation. 14. In addition to The Times article of 19 June 1794 quoted in Chapter 2, this anecdote appeared in Stephen Jones’s 1796 History of Poland and in the 13 May 1796 issue of Coleridge’s short-lived journal the Watchman. 15. Hunt’s probable reference to the engraving in the 3 July 1814 Examiner suggests that it too was among his personal belongings.

Notes

5

179


1. The Association remained active through most of the century and attracted many public figures, including Lord Stuart’s friend, Charles Dickens. See Gluchowski. 2. Its supporters included Lord Stuart, Lord Brougham, the Scottish judge advocategeneral Robert Cutlar Fergusson, and Thomas Wentworth Beaumont, a wealthy MP for Northumberland. David Urquhart, who features prominently in Chapter 6, was a frequent contributor (Wellesley Index 3: 62–5). 3. Jane Porter to Robert Ker Porter, 5 August 1833. Kansas MS 28, Ph 14665: 10. See McLean, ‘Jane Porter’s Later Works’ for further information on these publications. 4. In addition to the many Scottish poets who followed Campbell’s lead, many Scottish artists were also affected by the war in Poland. See David Scott’s 1831–32 ‘Russians Burying their Dead’ at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow; and William Allan’s 1834 ‘Polish Exiles on their way to Siberia,’ described in Howard et al. (72–3). 5. Interestingly, Campbell’s death coincided with Tsar Nicholas’s visit to London. On 3 July, his remains were buried in Westminster Abbey, and a group of Polish exiles sprinkled earth taken from the tomb of Ko´sciuszko over the grave. The act brought fitting closure to a poetic life that had first gained public prominence through its representation of Ko´sciuszko’s fall, and practically every poetic eulogy to Campbell refers to the act. In ‘Lines on the Death of Campbell,’ John Walker Ord proclaimed Campbell ‘more immortal yet / When Kosciusko’s dust was mixed with thine’ (69–70) and in his oft-reprinted ‘Campbell’s Funeral,’ Horace Smith recalled how ‘earth from Kosciusko’s grave / Fell on his coffin plate with freedom-shrieking sound’ (34–5). See also Frances Browne’s poem to Campbell, quoted in Chapter 6. 6. Thackeray also mocks British soldiers who involve themselves in continental unrest. In Pendennis, Captain Ned Strong has fought for (among others) the Hungarians, the Poles (at Ostrolenka) and the Greeks, and he entertains company with his tales of ‘Greek captives, Polish beauties and Spanish nuns’ (267). But a contemporary reader would note that Strong fights on the losing side of every army he joins. 7. Because of the length of Aytoun’s poem, I identify passages by page number.

6


1. Jane Porter to Robert Ker Porter, 23–28 March 1838. Kansas MS 28, Ph 14670: 5. 2. Jane Porter to Robert Ker Porter, 29 August 1839. Kansas MS 28, Ph 14671: 13. 3. Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th edn, ‘Circassia.’ This same entry appears throughout the Victorian era. 4. See also William Collins’s ‘Eclogue the Fourth: Agib and Secander; or, the Fugitives,’ from Persian Eclogues (London: J. Roberts, 1742), which begins, ‘In fair Circassia, where to Love inclin’d / Each Swain was blest, for ev’ry Maid was kind!’ 5. A description of a Circassian girl in the Constantinople slave market appears in Canto IV verse 114 of Byron’s Don Juan. 6. See also Erdem (48–52, 113–24). While the Ottoman government – under pressure from Britain and France – prohibited the African slave trade in 1857, the Circassian slave trade actually increased in the second half of the nineteenth century. The increase was mostly due to the mass immigration to the Ottoman Empire that occurred in the mid-1860s, when Russia finally secured control of Circassia. 7. Peter Pindar [pseud.; ?C.F. Lawler], The Ambassador at Court; or, George and the Fair Circassian. A Poem. London, 1819. See also A. Moor [pseud.], The British Seraglio! Or the Fair Circassian, a Poem. London: J. Sidebethem, 1819. Numerous caricatures also memorialized the visit of the Persian ambassador and fair Circassian.

180 Notes

8. It seems significant that, though Browne clearly learned much from these travelogues, she excludes the assisting British from her story, thus emphasizing that this is a battle between oppressors (Russia/Britain) and oppressed (Circassia/Poland/ Ireland). 9. For other representations of Shamil, see Hardman (139–43); Thomas Peckett Prest, Schamyl; or, the Wild Woman of Circassia. An Original Historical Romance. London, 1856; Francis Fitzhugh, The Curse of Schamyl, and Other Poems. Edinburgh and London, 1857. 10. Of course, the haunting started much earlier in Russian literature. See Layton. 11. For additional biographical information see my article ‘Arms and the Circassian Woman: Frances Browne’s The Star of Atteghei,’ Victorian Poetry 41.3 (2003) 295–318. 12. Ernest Jones 61; John Stuart Mill, John Stuart Mill on Ireland. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979, 24; Anthony Trollope, ‘What does Ireland want?’ Saint Paul’s: A Monthly Magazine 5 (December 1869): 286, 290. 13. Browne stands apart from many contemporary Irish women poets who, according to Gregory A. Schirmer, sacrificed ‘personal identity to political commitment’: ‘Issues of gender, like many questions of difference that were obscured by nationalist ideology because they could not be readily assimilated to its political and cultural agenda, were rarely explored in the verse of these women poets’ (150). 14. Browne’s story is undoubtedly linked to William H.G. Kingston’s first novel, The Circassian Chief. A Romance of Russia. London: Richard Bentley, 1843. Kingston’s narrative is remarkably similar to Browne’s: it includes a Pole (named Thaddeus, of course) who deserts the Russians to fight for Circassia, and a cross-dressing heroine named Azila who is killed mistakenly by a Russian commander. Either both authors were working from the same original text, or Kingston (or a review of Kingston’s novel) was Browne’s forgotten source. 15. Because of the length of Browne’s poem, I identify passages by page number. 16. This false though influential notion originated in the writings of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. See N. Davies Europe (734–5). 17. The Spanish-Irish and Italian-Irish heroines of Lady Morgan’s later novels are particularly significant precursors of Dizila; see Ferris ‘Writing.’ 18. Many nineteenth-century writers on nationality, including J.S. Mill and Giuseppe Mazzini, accepted the necessary linguistic and ethnic heterogeneity of most European nations. Still, as E.J. Hobsbawm notes, ‘the national heterogeneity of nation-states was accepted, above all, because it seemed clear that small, and especially small and backward, nationalities had everything to gain by merging into greater nations.’ Mazzini did not even support an independent Ireland (Hobsbawm Nations 34, 31). Browne opposes such thinking by advocating the autonomy of a small Circassian nation-state against the expansion of its larger neighbor. 19. The tale of the disguised woman who follows her lover into battle was a favorite of eighteenth-century balladeers; see Dugaw. For a comprehensive study of Byron’s heroines, see Franklin. Browne also may have heard stories of women who fought in the European revolutions of the previous 50 years, like Antoinette Tomaszewska, whose bravery in battle was described by Robin Carver in Stories about Poland (London: Thomas Tegg and Son, 1835).

7 Picturing Will: Middlemarch and the Victorian Genealogy of the Polish Hero 1. It is worth noting that Eliot describes Count Czerlaski as a decent if uninspiring man. When Edith Wharton revised Eliot’s narrative in The Age of Innocence, she followed

Notes

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

181

late-Victorian expectations by making the Polish Count Olenski a far more suspicious figure. Two scholars have addressed Will’s Polish background. David Malcolm briefly notes British responses to the 1863 uprising, in particular how ‘the Polish cause developed working-class associations . . . especially in the 1860s’ (67). David L. Smith sees the marriage of Dorothea and Will as ‘a merger of English duty and reason with Polish feeling and imagination’ and suggests that Will’s Polish ancestry ‘stem[s] in part, at least, from Thornton Lewes’ plan to fight for Poland and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes’ enjoyable evening in Vienna with Julian Klaczko,’ a well-known Polish journalist and patriot (61). Neither refer to the 1831 uprising in any detail nor suggest the influence of Thaddeus of Warsaw on Eliot. The debate began with Jerome Beaty, ‘The Forgotten Past of Will Ladislaw,’ NineteenthCentury Fiction 13.2 (September 1958): 159–63. See Staten for earlier contributions to this discussion. Porter added this sentence after the first edition. My page reference comes from the 1831 edition. Another Thorwaldsen work dating from 1829–33 is a bust of Count Artur Potocki, today in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art. The villain’s first name appears as ‘Ladislaas’ in the 1854 edition but is corrected in later editions. For an extended reading of Dracula in the context of nineteenth-century continental exiles, see Thomas McLean, ‘Dracula’s Blood of Many Brave Races,’ Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia. Eds Maria K. Bachman, Heidi Kaufman, Marlene Tromp. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, forthcoming. Italian, Hungarian, and especially Polish exile groups continued and extended their associations with reform movements in the 1850s and 1860s. After the Polish revolt of 1863 the Central Committee of Friends of Poland ‘united W.J. Linton, James Watson, and W.E. Adams with Francis Newman, Joseph Cowen, James Stansfield, P.A. Taylor and John Stuart Mill in efforts to raise funds for the Polish revolutionaries’ (Finn 214). Another organization formed in the 1860s, the National League for the Independence of Poland, ‘attracted middle-class radicals, labour leaders and radical artisans’ (Belchem 111). The NLIP helped lay the groundwork for the International Working Men’s Association, an organization that also supported political intervention on behalf of Poland. Frederick Engels told members of the First International that ‘the working men of Europe unanimously proclaim the restoration of Poland as part and parcel of their political programme’ and supported ‘war with Russia while Russia meddles with Poland’ (quoted in Finn 231). Articles on Poland appear in the Westminster Review for January 1855, July 1863, October 1863, and January 1865. Gleason states that the Westminster Review ‘was the most notable collaborator’ with pro-Polish forces in Britain (131). In this same chapter Eliot tellingly calls the announced engagement of Klesmer and Catherine Arrowpoint ‘an insurrection against the established order of things’ (237). This remark echoes an allegation in The Times of 29 July 1831 that ‘the invasion of Russia against the unhappy Poles has been the channel through which pestilence invades the whole continent and threatens these sea-encircled islands.’ If you haven’t, please see Chapter 3.

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Index Abdul Hamid I, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, 19 Acton, Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalberg), 8, 46, 168 Alberts, Robert C., 54 Alexander, John T., 174n11 Alexander I, Tsar, 5, 11, 19, 43, 86 his treatment of Poland, 6, 96, 106, 111, 117 Allan, William, 138, 149, 179n4 Analytical Review, 30, 36, 174n13 Anderson, Benedict, 3 Anderson, M.S., 139–40 Arata, Stephen, 162 Armstrong, Nancy, 79, 83 Augustus II (the Strong), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, 108 Aytoun, William, 7, 117, 121, 129, 142, 152 his articles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 11, 130–2 ‘Poland,’ 11, 129–30, 175n4 Bainbridge, Simon, 64 Balfe, Michael, The Bohemian Girl, 124 Barlow, Joel, 9, 23, 30, 54 Barnwell, George, 81, 177n17 Bate, Jonathan, 48 Bayly, Thomas Haynes, 138 Beaty, Jerome, 165 Bedford, Francis Russell, Duke of, 95 Bell, James Stanislaus, 139, 140, 144 Berger, John, 55 Bierce, Ambrose, 72, 176n15, 177n12 Biernacki, Felicjan, 92 Blake, Catherine, 30, 33 Blake, William America: A Prophecy, 30, 37, 39 Europe: A Prophecy, 10, 16, 29–40, 174n22: Enitharmon, 10, 16, 30–4, 36–40; Orc, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39; Rintrah and Palamabron, 10, 16,

33–4, 36; the crystal house, 32; the language of slavery in, 37 The Four Zoas, 32 Jerusalem, 29, 30 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 37 Blanc, Louis, 163, 164 Bloom, Harold, 29 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 180n16 Boleslas I, King of Poland, 124, 125 Boothby, Brooke, 52–3, 58 Britain anti-Russian feelings in, 10, 15, 116, 124, 128, 130, 135, 140 Britain’s alliance with Russia, 5, 15–16, 28–9, 44, 49–50, 64, 112, 118 British hypocrisy, 14, 54, 58, 64 British inaction and guilt over Poland, 44, 47, 53, 57, 59, 94, 104, 113, 120, 124 British interest in Poland, 10, 11, 29, 30–1, 39, 43–4, 94–6, 106, 116, 122 British savagery, 10, 14, 62–4, 92, 176n13 British sympathy for Poland, 9, 10, 11, 15, 57, 59, 63, 116, 118, 122, 132 Poland’s cause and English radicalism and internationalism, 12, 16, 24, 46, 50, 122–3, 130–1, 155, 159–60, 181n9 pro-Poland writing, 47, 116–17, 119–21, 122, 128, 181n10 see also Ireland; Polish question British and Foreign Review, 119, 179n2 Brock, Peter, 122 Brougham, Lord Henry, 8, 92–4, 96, 100, 111, 112, 178n3 Brown, Susan, 141 Browne, Frances, 136, 141–4, 153, 180n13 ‘The Last of the Jagellons,’ 142–3 ‘On the Death of Thomas Campbell,’ 143, 179n5 ‘The Star of Attéghéi,’ 11–12, 136–7, 141, 142, 143, 144–53, 180n14: editor’s comments, 142; its critique

194

Index

of Russian and British expansionism, 12, 137, 148–50, 152, 153, 180n8, 180n18; gender in, 144, 146, 147, 150–2, 180n13, 180n19; nationhood in, 12, 137, 144, 145–50, 152–3, 180n18 Bruder, Helen P., 29, 30, 31, 39, 40 Brunswick-Lüneburg, Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of, 38 Brunton, Mary, 68 Bukaty, Franciszek, 23 Burke, Edmund, 10, 22–4, 25, 34, 36, 65, 71, 74, 174n12, 174n13 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 23–4 Burney, Frances, 17, 73, 78, 150 Burns, Robert, ‘Why should na poor folk mowe,’ 26, 174n14 Bush, John, 17 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 91, 112, 150, 159 The Age of Bronze, 105–6, 108, 110 Don Juan, 15, 105–6, 107, 179n5 ‘From the French,’ 105, 109 The Giaour, 137, 142, 147 and Ko´sciuszko, 2, 11, 43, 89, 91, 105–6 Mazeppa, 1, 5, 11, 91, 106–12, 150–1, 161 Campbell, Thomas, 7, 42, 43–4, 64, 67–8, 70, 85, 95, 130–1 his influence and pro-Poland efforts in the early 1830s, 11, 116, 119–22 ‘Lines on Poland,’ 120–1 ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ 2, 7, 10, 41, 43, 59–63, 65, 101, 128, 129–30, 176n13, 176n15 ‘The Power of Russia,’ 120–1 responses to his death, 122, 143, 179n5 Cardon, Anthony, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, 54–9, 65, 78, 175n8, 176n10 Carlyle, Thomas, 68, 72, 81 Carver, Robin, 180n19 Cary, Henry Francis, 176n13 Catherine II (the Great), Empress of Russia, 2, 17, 29, 47, 76, 78, 112, 173n1, 173n4, 177n15

195

as Enitharmon in Blake’s Europe, 10, 16, 30, 31, 32, 33–4, 36–8, 39–40 as enlightened Western ruler, 5, 15, 16–22, 173n6 her Imperial desires, 4, 10, 14–15, 18–20, 22–4, 29, 34, 37–8, 39, 46 literary representations of, 15, 16, 17, 21–2, 26–8, 29–40, 106 as a monstrous, ‘masculine’ figure, 5, 9–10, 15, 17, 25–9, 152 her response to Jacobinism, 10, 15–16, 24, 26, 28–9, 50, 106 and Stanisław II, 15, 22–3, 26, 27, 110, 174n11 visual representations of, 15, 17, 19–21, 27–8, 29, 30, 32, 39, 174n17 see also partitions of Poland Caucasus, 135, 138, 146, 148–9, 150, 180n16 its people, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140–1 Russian expansionism in, 3, 11–12, 135, 136, 137, 139–41, 149–50, 180n18 see also Circassia Central Committee of Friends of Poland, 181n9 Champion, 99–100 Chandler, James, 15 Charles III, King of Spain, 19 Charles XII, King of Sweden, 4, 5, 107–10 Charlotte, Queen of England, 16, 31, 33, 34 Chartism, 12, 122–3, 127–8 Chatterton, Thomas, 59 Chechens, 140–1 Chopin, Frédéric, 132–4 Chorley, H.F., 133 Circassia, 11–12, 135–6, 139–40, 146, 179n3 Circassian slavery, 138, 150, 179n5, 179n6 conflict in, 11–12, 135–7, 139–41, 149 the exotic and ‘fair Circassian,’ 136, 137–9, 146–7, 150, 153, 179n4, 179n7 Polish, Irish, and Scottish connections, 12, 136, 137, 138, 148–9, 150, 153 see also Browne (‘The Star of Attéghéi’)

196 Index

Clairmont, Claire, 114, 116 ‘The Pole,’ 11, 68, 114, 116, 155, 156, 159 Clark, T.J., 58–9 Cobbett, William, 50, 51, 118 Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 96 Coke, Lady Mary, 174n10 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10, 16, 32, 37, 49–50, 51, 64, 175n5, 176n15 ‘Koskiusko,’ 7, 10, 36, 43, 47–9, 56, 60, 76, 101, 111, 175n7 ‘La Fayette,’ 49, 64 ‘Lewti or the Circassian Love-Chaunt,’ 137 ‘Ode to the Departing Year,’ 27–8, 50 ‘Religious Musings,’ 27, 177n15 his sympathy for the Poles, 9, 43, 46, 64 and the tropes of defeat, 2, 36, 43, 47–50 Colley, Linda, 3 Collier, John Payne, 176n15 Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in White, 165 Collins, William, 179n4 Congress of Vienna, 8, 91, 103, 106, 111, 117–18, 159 Conrad, Joseph, 12, 170–2 ‘Amy Foster,’ 12, 170–1 ‘Prince Roman,’ 1, 12, 171–2 Constantine, Grand Duke, 19, 117, 118 Cooper, Astley, 101 Cooper, James Fenimore, 142 Cooper, Thomas, 178n11 Cossacks, 19, 107, 111, 127, 141, 160 Cosway, Richard, 30, 52, 54, 175n8 Cottle, Joseph, 176n13 Cowley, Hannah, 21, 173n8 Cowper, William, 19, 32–3 Cox, Jeffrey N., 90–1 Crimea, 4, 18 Crimean War, 128, 140–1 Crolly, George, 141–2, 150 Cronin, Richard, 117 Crosland, Camilla, 141 Cross, Anthony, 3 Cruikshank, George, 88–9 Cruikshank, Isaac, 27–8, 174n17 Curtis, Edmund, 153

Czartoryski, Prince Adam Jerzy, 85–6, 105, 119, 122, 140, 159 in British writing, 104, 120, 129, 130 his efforts in behalf of Poland, 92, 118, 123, 133 Damon, S. Foster, 30 David, Jacques-Louis, 53, 58 Davies, Damian Walford, 48, 101, 178n8 Dennis, John, 176n15 DeVoto, Marya, 143 Disraeli, Benjamin, 8 Dobson, David, 6 Doody, Margaret, 154 Dörrbecker, D.W., 38 Drozdowski, Piotr, 3 east of Europe (‘the Orient of Europe’), 4–6, 9, 12, 110, 126 see also Caucasus; Circassia; Poland; Russia Eastern Europeans, 2, 4, 9, 13, 160–2 see also Catherine the Great; Ko´sciuszko; Polish exile Edgeworth, Maria, 69, 72 Edinburgh Review, 8–9, 92, 93–4, 111, 119, 121, 149, 178n3 Egerton, Judy, 52–3 Eliot, George, 2, 155–6, 163, 181n2, 181n11 Daniel Deronda, 155, 163–4 Middlemarch, 1, 12, 13, 68, 154–9, 164–9, 170, 181n2 ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton,’ 154, 163, 180n1 Engels, Frederick, 181n9 Enlightenment, 4, 5, 9, 15, 17, 22, 59, 62 Erdman, David, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36 Essick, Robert N., 32 Examiner, 91, 92, 94, 96–9, 100–3, 104, 111, 133 Farington, Joseph, 52, 53, 156 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 91, 95, 98 Filicaia, Vincenzo de, 99–100 Finn, Margot, 181n9 Fischer, Josef, 176n10 Fox, Charles James, 19, 20, 23–4, 28, 50, 51, 64 Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, 34

Index

Fraser, J.B., 149 Frederick II (the Great), King of Prussia, 22 Frederick William II, King of Prussia, 34 French Revolution, 4, 8, 29, 31, 34, 88 British responses to, 23–4, 39, 45, 54, 64, 72–3, 127 Fried, Michael, 53 Frost, Robert I., 6 Fulford, Tim, 3 Fuller, David, 35 Galloway, George, 7 Gammer, M., 140–1 Gardiner, General William, 66, 77 Garrick, David, 17 Garside, Peter, 75 Gaskell, Elizabeth, Cranford, 72 gendered representations ‘feminized’ Polish men, 5, 44, 57, 64, 73, 78–9, 104, 112, 151–2, 156, 168 gender role reversal, 78–9, 83, 144, 147, 150–2, 180n13, 180n19 ‘masculine’ Catherine, 5, 10, 15, 76, 78, 152 Gentleman’s Magazine, 51 George III, King of England, 19, 20, 35, 45 German princes, 26, 27, 34, 37, 74 Gillies, Robert, 71, 99 Gillray, James, 19–21, 37, 174n17 Gilmartin, Kevin, 98 Girtin, Tom, 51 Gleason, John Howes, 118–19, 181n10 Godwin, William, 48, 75, 175n5 Caleb Williams, 83 Goldsworthy, Vesna, 3 Gordon, Lady Catherine, 7, 22 Grant, John E., 31 Grubgeld, Elizabeth, 153 Guiccioli, Teresa, 107, 111 Hamilton, Chloe, 52, 58 Hamilton, Janet, 122 Hanover, House of, 27, 28 Hapsburgs, 32 Hardman, Frederick, 138 Harney, George Julian, 160, 164 Hazlitt, William, 64, 65, 92, 98–9, 105 Hedvige (Jadwiga), Queen of Poland, 157–8 Hemans, Felicia, 136–7, 150, 152

197

Herzen, Alexander, 164, 168 Hilliard, Nicholas, 176n9 Hoare, Prince, 81 Hobhouse, John Cam, 105 Hobsbawm, Eric J., 122, 180n18 Holcroft, Thomas, 48, 175n5 Hood, Thomas, 68 Humphreys, David, 103, 175n3, 178n9 Huneker, James, 132, 133 Hunt, Leigh, 43, 95, 100, 103, 111, 112, 174n20, 178n5, 178n15 Descent of Liberty, 111 Examiner essays, 11, 54–5, 89, 94–6, 100, 102, 108, 112, 178n15 ‘The Feast of the Poets,’ 95 influence on Romantic-era writers, 11, 58, 89–91, 100, 101–2, 103, 105, 106 Table-Talk, 97 ‘To Kosciusko,’ 89, 97–8, 99, 102, 176n10, 178n4 Huxley, T.H., 140 Hytier, Adrienne, 6 ‘imagined communities,’ 2 ‘imagology’ (or image studies), 2–3 International Working Men’s Association, 181n9 Ireland, 145–6, 148, 153 as ‘England’s Poland,’ 14, 123, 124, 137, 144, 149–50 the Poland–Ireland connection, 9, 12, 123–4, 137, 143–4, 148, 153, 180n8 see also Young Ireland movement Italy, 91, 94, 100, 118, 122, 153, 165 as setting for British-Polish encounters, 6, 73–4, 157 Ivan VI, Tsar, 16–17 Jacobinism British responses to, 15–16, 21, 36, 45–6, 47, 50 James, Henry, 155 James II, King of England, 6 John Casimir, King of Poland, 107, 110, 120 Johnson, Mary Lynn, 31 Jones, Chris, 45 Jones, Ernest, 122, 144, 155, 168 The Maid of Warsaw, 123

198 Index

Jones, Jacob, 7, 121–2 Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, 19

Kotzebue, August von, Sighs, 80, 81–2 Krzyzanowski, Ludwik, 172

Kandl, John, 103 Keats, John, 11, 43, 90–1, 96, 100–2, 111, 112, 120 Endymion, 101 Hyperion: A Fragment, 102 ‘Sleep and Poetry,’ 58, 100, 112 ‘To Kosciusko,’ 2, 58, 89, 95, 100, 101–2, 105, 107 Ketcham, Carl, 100 King, R.W., 176n13 Kingston, William H.G., 180n14 Kitson, Peter J., 3 Klaczko, Julian, 163, 181n2 Korzeniowski, Jósef Konrad, see Conrad Ko´sciuszko, General Tadeusz, 1, 2, 7, 10, 27, 41–4, 99, 118, 120, 156 and the American Revolution, 7, 9, 43, 44–5, 70 attempt to save Princess Lubomirska, 45, 70–1 attempted elopement, 44, 70, 111, 178n14 bidding hope farewell, 59–64 as the embodiment of Poland, 25, 44, 53, 63–4, 65 and France, 45, 95–6, 97, 176n11 his great and powerful name, 2, 58, 94–5, 96, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 113, 160, 176n13 honoured in London and Bristol, 50–1, 52, 54, 56, 57, 65, 176n13 and Napoleon, 11, 43, 72, 96–7, 98, 105, 111 his reappearance in writing (after 1814), 11, 88–9, 91, 95–7, 98–9, 100–6, 111–13 the Romantic hero in defeat, 10, 44, 47–9, 51–2, 53–7, 58–9, 60, 112 the Romantic revolutionary, 2, 10, 40, 43, 44–6, 50, 57, 69, 70, 103, 176n13 as a supporter of monarchical rule, 11, 44, 74, 176n13 as a weak, effeminate figure, 44, 52, 55, 57, 64, 71, 104, 112, 152 Kossuth, Lajos, 160

Lafayette, Marquis de, 10, 40, 43, 45, 48, 49, 64, 103, 175n3 Lamb, Charles, 51, 175n7 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 137 Landor, Walter Savage, 43, 89, 103–4, 112, 173n4, 178n10 ‘Apology for Satire,’ 104 Imaginary Conversations, 64, 104–5, 114 Lawrence, D.H., The Rainbow, 110 Leader, 163 Lee, Charles, 39 Leech, John, 124–5 Leerssen, Joep, 3, 144 Leighton, Angela, 150 Leopold II, Emperor of Austria, 32 Lever, Charles, 155 The Dodd Family Abroad, 160–1, 181n7 Lewes, George Henry, 163, 181n2 Lewes, Thornton, 163, 181n2 Lieven, Anatol, 141 Lillo, George, 81, 177n17 Lithgow, William, 6 London Literary Association of the Friends of Poland, 119–20, 179n1 Longworth, J.A., 140, 144 Looser, Devoney, 76 Lootens, Tricia, 152 Louis XVI, King of France, 19 Lukács, Georg, 77 Lynch, Deidre, 150 Maciejowice, battle of, 46, 60 Mackay, Charles, 122 Mackintosh, Sir James, 8–9, 30, 174n16 Maginn, William, 72 Makdisi, Saree, 36 Malcolm, David, 181n2 Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, 17 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 16, 24, 25, 28, 31, 33, 36 Marr, Mr, 149 Martin, Theodore, 130 Martineau, Harriet, 118 Marx, Karl, 123, 155 Massey, Gerald, 160, 168

Index

Mazeppa, 107, 109–10, 178n12 see also Byron (Mazeppa) Mazzini, Giuseppe, 160, 163, 164, 168, 180n18 McGann, Jerome, 106, 107 McIlvanney, Liam, 174n14 Mickiewicz, Adam, 119 Mill, John Stuart, 144, 181n9 Millar, John, 59–60 Moore, Thomas, 111, 144, 174n19 Morgan, Lady (Sydney Owenson), 69, 75, 150, 180n17 Florence Macarthy, 176n12 The Wild Irish Girl, 75 Woman; or, Ida of Athens, 78 Murdoch, Iris, Nuns and Soldiers, 1, 13 Napoleon Bonaparte, 3, 63, 85, 94, 96, 106, 107–9, 160 and Ko´sciuszko, 11, 43, 72, 96–7, 98, 105, 111 British view of, 5, 10, 64, 74, 85, 88–9 Polish soldiers fighting for, 63, 72, 88, 91–3, 100, 105, 109, 110, 120 National League for the Independence of Poland, 181n9 ‘negative identification,’ 11, 116–17 Nicholas I, Tsar, 86, 117–19, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130, 166, 179n5 Niemcewicz, Julian, 85–6, 120 Nord, Deborah Epstein, 3–4 Nussbaum, Felicity A., 3 O’Quinn, Daniel, 21 Ochakov crisis, 19–21, 31, 37–8 ‘Ode on Liberty,’ 24 Opie, Amelia, 41–3, 44, 60, 175n1 Ord, John Walker, 122, 179n5 Orlov, Count Gregory, 21, 174n9 Ostrolenka, battle of, 160, 165, 179n6 Paice, Rosamund, 32 Paine, Thomas, 10, 23, 24, 45 partitioning powers, 16 Russia and Prussia, 22–3, 24, 27, 45, 47, 114 Russia, Prussia, and Austria, 7, 8, 10, 15, 26, 27, 29, 31–2, 34, 41, 46, 92, 93

199

partitions of Poland, 5, 7, 8–9, 10, 15, 39, 57 responses to partition, 5, 9, 10, 30, 36, 47, 62, 64, 76–7 the first partition, 5, 22, 93 the second partition (1793), 24, 31, 38, 45, 47 the third partition (1795), 1, 8, 9, 25, 27, 46, 47, 50, 63: responses to, 27, 47, 50, 77, 86, 104 Pasquin, Anthony, 23 Paul I, Tsar, 50 Peter I (the Great), Tsar, 4, 5, 86, 108 Peter III, Tsar, 16, 21 Pindar, Peter, see Wolcot Pitt, William, 19, 28, 34, 35, 37, 51, 58 Pitt government, 25, 27 Pius VI, Pope, 20 Poland, 108 the 1791 Constitution, 15, 23–4, 31, 45, 64, 74–5, 86, 106, 110, 119 associated with Jacobinism, 10, 16, 24, 45–6, 50, 106 British sympathy for, 9, 10, 11, 15, 57, 59, 63, 116, 118, 122, 132 dismembered, 5, 8, 44, 47, 50, 53, 104–5, 113, 131, 157, 175n4 as a feudal paradise, 69, 75–6, 77, 79 hopes for restoring Polish sovereignty, 7, 11, 63, 85, 88, 92–3, 94, 96, 111, 132, 181n9 the Polish cause, 45, 85, 104, 118, 119, 122, 129, 130–1, 159, 181n2 Russia’s invasion of, 14–15, 22, 24, 25, 29, 31, 33, 36, 48, 106, 181n12 the tradition of elective monarchy in, 6, 22, 23, 24, 131, 142–3 Poland Street (London), 30, 72 Polish exile, 2, 9, 13, 37, 53, 117, 122, 123, 130–1, 155, 161 the beauty of the Polish hero, 68, 115, 116, 156, 172 British responses to Polish immigrants, 2, 7, 9, 11, 12, 59, 65, 85, 122, 132, 171 and ethnic ambiguity, 9, 155, 161, 162, 163, 165, 168 ‘feminized’ Polish men, 5, 44, 57, 64, 73, 78–9, 104, 112, 151–2, 156, 168

200 Index

Polish exile – continued as freedom fighters, 11, 12, 43, 44, 64, 122, 132, 148, 149–50 and radicalism, 12, 122–3, 130, 153, 155, 159–60, 163, 164–5, 168, 169, 181n9 representations of, 2, 11, 12, 13, 93, 114, 116, 152, 155–6, 158, 159–60, 170–1, 172 worldly, corrupt aristocrats, 12, 132, 155, 159, 160–2, 164, 167, 180n1 see also Eliot (Middlemarch); Ko´sciuszko; Mazeppa; Porter (Thaddeus of Warsaw) Polish military uniform, 88–90, 113, 152 Polish plait (plica polonica), 35–6 Polish question, 9, 91, 100, 128 Polish–Scottish connection, 6, 9, 14, 123–4, 131, 179n4 the link between their royal families, 6–7, 74, 124 Scottish writers for the Polish cause, 7, 9, 121–2, 131 see also Aytoun; Brunton; Campbell; Jones, Jacob; Porter, Jane Polonia, 119, 121 Poltawa, 4, 110 Poniatowski, Prince Józef, 91–2, 100, 110, 120, 157, 178n2, 178n10 Brougham’s response to, 93, 94 Landor’s response to, 64, 104–5, 178n10 Poniatowski, Stanisław, see Stanisław II Poniatowski, Stanisław (father of Stanisław II), 109–10 Porter, Anna Maria, 56–7, 67, 69, 70, 72, 177n4 Porter, Jane, 7, 56, 66–7, 68–9, 70, 71, 81, 101, 121, 128, 132, 135–6 and the historical novel, 10, 66, 67–8, 69, 73, 77, 78 and Ko´sciuszko, 70, 86 her public and private support of Poland, 85–7, 114–15, 119 The Scottish Chiefs, 66, 69, 121 Thaddeus of Warsaw, 10–11, 56, 66–87, 89, 115, 119, 132, 177n12: and later representations, 12, 13, 68, 115, 117, 136, 154–5, 156–7, 158, 167, 168; Britain’s failures in, 76, 78, 79,

83, 85; gender role reversal in, 73, 78–9, 83; history and romance in, 10–11, 66, 67–8, 69, 72–8, 80, 81, 85; its popularity in America, 72, 177n10, 177n11; Ko´sciuszko and the 1794 Uprising in, 7, 43, 56, 66, 69, 70, 73–4, 76, 77, 84–5, 176n13; Porter’s representation of Poland in, 7, 69, 70, 73, 74–6, 77, 79, 81, 83, 84–5; references to contemporary art culture in, 79–80, 81–2, 177n18; responses to, 66, 67–8, 71–2; Stanisław II and Porter’s monarchist views in, 25, 66, 73, 74–5, 76, 77, 79; Thaddeus Sobieski, 1, 66, 67–8, 69–70, 72, 73–4, 75, 76, 77–85, 170; the Ko´sciuszko-like hero, 2, 10–11, 69, 70–3, 76, 78, 79, 81, 167, 172 Thaddeus of Warsaw (1805), 84–5 Thaddeus of Warsaw (1831), 66, 157, 177n2, 177n15, 177n16 Porter, Robert Ker, 56, 67, 70, 86–7, 119, 135, 177n8 Potemkin, Prince Gregory, 5, 34 Priestley, Joseph, 43, 48 Prodigious!!! or, Childe Paddie in London, 68 Ragussis, Michael, 4 Red Republican, 155, 160 Reed, Isaac, 18 Reform Bill (1832), 127–8, 159 Reform Bill (1867), 164 revolution the contagious spread of, 16, 23–4, 29, 35, 36, 38, 39, 51 see also French Revolution Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 18 Rich, Henry, 119, 121 Richardson, Samuel, 11, 17, 73, 78, 79, 83 Ricks, Christopher, 126 Robert the Bruce, 7, 60–1, 62 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 71–2 Roe, Nicholas, 90 Roscoe, William Stanley, 63 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 52–3 Rowlandson, Thomas, 20, 32 Russia, 3, 5, 12, 15, 27, 37, 38, 112, 117–19, 131

Index

as a military and imperial threat, 5, 9, 15, 16, 22, 26, 39, 135 and the Ottoman Empire, 18, 140, 141 Russia’s alliance with Britain, 5, 15–16, 28–9, 44, 49–50, 64, 112, 118 see also Britain (anti-Russian feelings); Catherine II; German princes; partitioning powers; partitions of Poland Russian expansionism and imperialism, 16, 18, 31, 32, 135 in the Caucasus, 3, 11–12, 135, 136, 137, 139–41, 149–50, 180n18 the invasion of Poland, 14–15, 22, 24, 25, 29, 31, 33, 36, 48, 106, 181n12 the invasion of Turkey, 14, 18, 20, 22, 26, 33, 34 Russo-Polish War (1831), 114, 116, 118, 140, 165 responses to, 7, 117, 118–20, 122, 123, 154–5, 167, 171–2 Said, Edward, 3, 5 Sambrook, James, 32 Sand, George, 133 Saturday Review, 166, 168 Schön, Erich, 53, 57 Scotland, see Polish–Scottish connection Scott, David, 179n4 Scott, R., 60–1 Scott, Sir Walter, 6–7, 15, 69, 77, 138, 142, 149 Ségur, Count Louis-Philippe de, 4 Selim III, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, 19–20 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 48, 175n6 Henry VIII, 30 Julius Caesar, 20 Shamil, Imam, 140–1 Sharp, William, 54 Thaddeus Kosciuszko, 30, 54–6, 58–9, 65, 176n11 Shaw, George Bernard Misalliance, 110 Shcherbatova, Princess Maria, 86, 87, 119 Shelley, Mary, 2, 11, 114–15, 130, 159, 178n2 Lodore, 68, 115–16, 155, 156

201

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 59, 72, 91, 102, 126, 129 ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne,’ 102 Schirmer, Gregory A., 180n13 Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland, 142 slav–slave, 5 Smith, Charlotte, 26, 29, 64, 72, 74 The Banished Man, 45, 71, 84 Desmond, 26, 78 Smith, David L., 163, 181n2 Smith, Horace, 179n5 Smith, Sir Sidney, 66 Sobieska, Clementina, 6, 74, 157 Sobieski, John III, King of Poland, 6, 30, 73, 74, 100, 120, 121 responses to his victory over the Ottomans, 99–100, 120–1, 124–5, 126, 172 Soudjouk-Kalé, 140, 144 Southey, Robert, 11, 41, 46, 89, 103, 107 Letters from England, 57, 70, 103 Spain, 94, 102 Spencer, Edmund, 139, 140, 144, 148–9, 150 Squire, John Collings, 43 Stanisław II, King of Poland, 1, 7, 22–3, 25, 46, 110, 174n10, 174n12 and Catherine II, 15, 22–3, 26, 27, 110, 174n11 his constitutional reforms, 9–10, 15, 23, 24, 31, 45 responses to, 9–10, 15, 23–4, 25, 29, 39, 104 Staten, Henry, 165 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 12, 13, 160, 162, 181n8 Stuart, Charles Edward, 6 Stuart, James Edward, 6, 74, 157 Stuart, Lord Dudley Coutts, 119, 122, 123, 133, 161, 179n1, 179n2 Sunstein, Emily, 115 Sussex, Duke of (Prince Augustus Frederick), 119 Suvorov, General Alexander, 5, 34, 46, 60, 76, 77, 86 Swinburne, Algernon, 3, 175n4 Szopen, Fryderyk, see Chopin

202 Index

Tarleton, General Banastre, 51 Tasso, Torquato, 150 Tell, William, 60–1, 62 Tennyson, Alfred, 3, 11, 117, 124–8 ‘Hail Briton!’ 127 Maud, 128 ‘Poland,’ 126–7 ‘Sonnet: Written on Hearing of the Outbreak of the Polish Insurrection,’ 124–6 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 72, 122, 155, 179n6 Thelwall, John, 10, 16, 27, 29, 35 Thompson, Andrew, 163 Thompson, Edward, 17 Thompson, T.P., 123 Thorwaldsen, Bertel, 157, 181n6 Thurlow, Lord Edward, 35 ‘To the Continental Despots,’ 36, 47, 49, 59 Todorova, Maria, 3 Tomaszewska, Antoinette, 180n19 Toussaint L’Ouverture, 10, 43, 50 Tremain, Rose, The Road Home, 173n1 Trollope, Anthony, 12, 144, 155, 165, 168 The Claverings, 161–2, 167 tropes of defeat, 43–4, 47–50, 52 dismembering, 47, 50, 53, 113, 131, 175n4 the hero’s fall, 48, 49, 60, 70, 76, 111, 179n5 the loss of Hope and Freedom, 2, 41, 48, 49, 60–1, 120, 128, 129–30 the ‘shriek,’ 2, 36, 41, 48, 49, 60, 76, 128, 130, 134, 149, 176n15, 179n5 Trumpener, Katie, 4, 69 Uladislaw II, King of Poland, 157–8 uprisings (Polish), 1, 8, 30, 45–6, 85, 118, 174n22 responses to: the 1794 Ko´sciuszko Uprising, 41, 45–6, 49–50, 64, 66, 73, 74, 77, 94, 103, 106, 178n9; the 1830–31 uprising, 11, 86, 114–15, 120, 123; the 1863 uprising, 8, 163, 181n2, 181n9 Urquhart, David, 135–6, 140, 179n2

Vargo, Lisa, 115–16 Vaughan, Benjamin, 29 Letters, on the Subject of the Concert of Princes, 16, 25–6, 30, 31–2, 34, 37, 47, 174n13 Victoria, Queen, 124, 133, 149 Viscomi, Joseph, 30 Voltaire, 4–5, 17 Histoire de Charles XII, 4, 107, 108, 109–10, 178n13 Waddington, Patrick, 128 Wallis, Henry, Chatterton, 59 Walpole, Horace, 22, 23, 74, 173n7, 174n10 on Catherine II, 14–15, 18, 173n1, 173n5, 174n9 Walpole, Sir Robert, 15, 18 Warner, Richard, 57, 70 Warsaw, defence of, 28, 46, 60, 76, 118, 174n22 Waterloo, responses to, 91, 99, 100 Watson, Nicola, 74, 78 Wedgwood, Josiah, 17, 18 Weinstein, Mark A., 129 Weisser, Henry, 123 West, Benjamin, 9, 52, 54, 70, 86, 95, 156 General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, 7, 10, 30, 44, 52–9, 60, 178n4 Westminster Review, 9, 121, 122–3, 157–8, 163, 181n10 Wharton, Edith, 180n1 Williams, Helen Maria, 9, 11, 72, 74 her 1815 Examiner article, 96, 98, 99, 112 Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, 45, 70–1, 97 A Narrative of the Events, 96–7, 178n6 Williams, Raymond, 11, 116–17, 164 Williams, Sir Charles Hanbury, 22 Wodzicki, Józef, 45 Wolcot, John, 51 Wolff, Larry, 4–5, 7, 23, 154 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 30, 31, 50 Woodring, Carl, 32, 48, 65, 102, 176n15

Index

Wordsworth, William, 3, 11, 46, 51, 64, 85, 89, 178n8 The Excursion, 98–9 ‘February 1816,’ 99–100, 126 Worrall, David, 38 Wraxall, N.W., 35–6 Wright, Joseph, of Derby, 17–18 Sir Brooke Boothby, 52–3, 176n9 Wu, Duncan, 90

Yearsley, Ann, ‘On the Last Interview between the King of Poland, and Loraski,’ 25 Young Ireland movement, 144, 153 Zamoyski, Jan, 124–5 Zapatka, Francis, 3 Zawadzki, W.H., 92, 128

203

The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire

Ireland and the British Empire

Slavery and the British Empire

Media and the British Empire

The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire

And Other Russian Fantasies

and Other Russian Fantasies

The Barmy British Empire

The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire

Imagining and the Image

The British Empire and Tibet 1900-1922

The British Empire and Tibet 1900-1922

George Eliot and the British Empire

British Empire and the Second World War

The Other Empire: British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays

The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays

Literature and Nation in the Middle East

Environment and Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion)

Empire: A History of the British Empire

Imagining Objects and Imagining Experiences

Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature)

Intercultural Voices in Contemporary British Literature: The Implosion of Empire

Libertinage in Russian Culture and Literature (Russian History and Culture)

Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire

Imagining Iraq: Literature in English and the Iraq Invasion

Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist And Modernist Literature

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997

The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire

Ireland and the British Empire

Slavery and the British Empire

Media and the British Empire

The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire

And Other Russian Fantasies

and Other Russian Fantasies

The Barmy British Empire

The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire

Imagining and the Image

The British Empire and Tibet 1900-1922

The British Empire and Tibet 1900-1922

George Eliot and the British Empire

British Empire and the Second World War

The Other Empire: British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays

The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays

Literature and Nation in the Middle East

Environment and Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion)

Empire: A History of the British Empire

Imagining Objects and Imagining Experiences

Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature)

Intercultural Voices in Contemporary British Literature: The Implosion of Empire

Libertinage in Russian Culture and Literature (Russian History and Culture)

Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire

Imagining Iraq: Literature in English and the Iraq Invasion

Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist And Modernist Literature

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997

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