Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw As Evidence of Polish–British
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Maciej Laskowski Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw as evidence of Polish-British relationships Praca doktorska napisana w Instytucie Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza pod kierunkiem prof. dr hab. Wojciecha Lipońskiego Poznań, 2012 OŚWIADCZENIE Ja, niżej podpisany Maciej Laskowski oświadczam, że przedkładaną pracę doktorską pt. „Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw as evidence of Polish-British relation- ships” napisałem samodzielnie. Oznacza to, że przy pisaniu pracy, poza niezbędnymi konsultacjami, nie korzy- stałem z pomocy innych osób, a w szczególności nie zlecałem opracowania roz- prawy lub jej istotnych części innym osobom, ani nie odpisywałem tej rozprawy lub jej istotnych części od innych osób. Jednocześnie przyjmuję do wiadomości, że gdyby powyższe oświadczenie oka- zało się nieprawdziwe, decyzja o wydaniu mi dyplomu zostanie cofnięta. (miejscowość, data) (czytelny podpis) 2 Table of contents TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………………....3 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................ 5 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 1: "SHE HAS NOT LIVED IN VAIN": BIOGRAPHY OF JANE PORTER ........................................................................................................................ 20 1.1. JANE PORTER AND HER FAMILY ............................................................................ 20 1.2. JANE PORTER AND HER WORKS ............................................................................. 26 CHAPTER 2: BRITISH HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE NOVEL .......................................................................................................................... 34 CHAPTER 3: UNDER THE SPELL OF POLAND: FACTORS INFLUENCING THE CREATION OF THADDEUS OF WARSAW .................................................. 58 CHAPTER 4: VIRTUE AND GLORY OR WRONGDOING AND SHAME? POLAND IN THE EYES OF JANE PORTER.......................................................... 81 4.1. THE POLISH ARE VIRTUOUS ................................................................................... 81 4.2. THE POLISH AND THE ALMIGHTY ........................................................................ 112 4.3. THE ATTIRE OF THE POLES AND THEIR PHYSICAL APPEARANCE ........................... 133 4.4. THE POLISH AND THEIR SHORTCOMINGS ............................................................. 142 CHAPTER 5: "WORK OF A GENIUS": THE RECEPTION AND HISTORIC IMPORTANCE OF THADDEUS OF WARSAW IN GREAT BRITAIN .............. 169 5.1. THADDEUS OF WARSAW AS A (PRE-)ROMANTIC WORK OF LITERATURE ................ 170 3 5.2. OPINIONS ABOUT THE STYLE AND VALUE OF THADDEUS OF WARSAW .................. 175 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 188 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................ 197 SUMMARY IN POLISH............................................................................................218 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................. 220 APPENDIX 1: SYNOPSIS OF THADDEUS OF WARSAW ... ................................................. 221 APPENDIX 2: THE LIFE OF TADEUSZ KOŚCIUSZKO AS A PERSON INSPIRING PORTER’S NOVEL ........................................................................................................................ 225 APPENDIX 3: PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THADDEUS OF WARSAW (FRAGMENTS) .................................................................................................................................. 236 APPENDIX 4: PREFACE TO THE 1831 EDITION OF THADDEUS OF WARSAW (FRAGMENTS)..... ........................................................................................................ 239 APPENDIX 5: APPENDIX FROM THE 1845 EDITION OF THADDEUS OF WARSAW (FRAGMENTS)........... .................................................................................................. 246 APPENDIX 6: FIGURES ................................................................................................ 257 APPENDIX 7: ADVERTISEMENT FOR THADDEUS OF WARSAW ....................................... 266 4 List of abbreviations BMGCPB – British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books CCBR – The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism DEL – A Dictionary of English Literature DNB – The Dictionary of National Biography EB – The Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information GDS – Gesamtverzeichnis des Deutschsprachigen Schrifttums (GV) 1700 – 1910 [A Total Register of German Bibliographies (GV) 1700 – 1910] NAEL – The Norton Anthology of English Literature NEB – The New Encyclopaedia Britannica OCEL – The Oxford Companion to English Literature OED – The Oxford English Dictionary PDLTLT – The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory TW – Thaddeus of Warsaw WD – Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language WEP – Wielka Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN [The Great Popular Encyclopaedia PWN] 5 Introduction The following dissertation has been written for a number of reasons. In the first place, it is to present the cultural links between Great Britain and Poland towards the end of the 18th century on the basis of Jane Porter’s novel titled Thaddeus of Warsaw, which pro- vides an excellent illustration of these links. It has been more than 200 years since she wrote four volumes with hundreds of pages treating of Poland and its citizens, and yet it seems that there has not appeared a thorough work dealing with the theme of this inter- est or a biography focusing on her life.1 The author of Thaddeus of Warsaw highlighted a significant number of Polish-British connections, which, in fact, trace back over a thousand years. Obviously, it is hardly possible to produce in one work a detailed syn- opsis of cultural and literary relationships covering a period from a millennium ago to the times of the writing of Thaddeus of Warsaw, but a telegraphic treatment with se- lected facts that provides a sketch of such links could be formulated the following way: according to Wojciech Lipoński (2000a: 440), the first mention of Poland-to-be in Old English poetry dates from the 6th/7th-century poem Widsith, where the name of the Vis- tula (Pol. Wisła) River appears (Wistla in the poem). Moreover, in the 11th century, for the first time in history, Polish and Anglo-Danish bloodlines mix to link the royal mi- lieus of the two kingdoms. Canute the Great, the King of England and Denmark, was the nephew of the Polish King Boleslaus the Brave (Pol. Bolesław Chrobry) and the son of Świętosława – Mieszko I and Dobrawa’s daughter – and Swein Forkbeard (Pol. Wid- łobrody) (Lipoński 1994: 89; Wielka Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN (henceforth 1 No satisfactory biography of Jane Porter exists. Brief accounts occur in Elwood’s Literary Ladies of England, vol. 2, Allibone’s Dictionary of English Literature, vol. 2 (1645), or Hall’s Book of Memories. The Ker Porter Correspondence, sold by Sotheby in 1852 (cf. Catalogue in the British Museum) con- tained materials for a biography and was purchased by Sir Thomas Phillipps of Middle Hill (The Diction- ary of National Biography, 1968: 184). 6 WEP), 1968: 351).2 One may even say that Canute (sometimes called Cnut or Knut) spent part of his life in Poland, because of the fact that he was taught soldiery on the Island of Wolin, off the coast of Pomerania (Pol. Pomorze) (“Canute the Great”, 2011).3 Moreover, the Viking Swein Forkbeard was reinforced by 300 Polish cavalrymen and infantry when attacking London. If we take a leap to the 15th century, we see that the connections between Poland and England grew closer after the battle of Grunwald. The reasons were rather prosaic: Henry V no longer had to pay off the debt he owed to the Teutonic Order, and he wanted to recruit Polish mercenaries to fight on England’s side in the Hundred Years’ War (Lipoński 2000a: 440). In the 16th and 17th centuries some 30,000 Scottish craftsmen, traders, and religious refugees settled down in Poland, par- ticularly in Leszno, Great Poland (Pol. Wielkopolska). During the reign of Mary Stuart, due to hunger and religious persecution, many Puritans left the British Isles and arrived in Poland, and when Elisabeth I was in power, Catholics did the same. Poland’s impov- erishment in the 18th century meant that these settlers were less visible; many of them had melted into Polish society in places such as Lublin, Zamość, or Kraków (Brückner 1939, 1: 584). In his Trilogy (Pol. Trylogia), Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846 – 1916) com- memorated the favourite Scottish soldier of Ladislav (Pol. Władysław) IV (lived 1595 – 1648, reigned 1632 – 1648), who dies at the battle of Chocim, known in English histo- riography as Khotyn. In Sienkiewicz’s novel Fire in the Steppe (the Polish title Pan Wołodyjowski), a fictitious Scot appears named Hassling Ketling (Lipoński 2000b: 460). The 17th century brought a cooling of mutual relations, as Puritans, who were growing more and more powerful in England, disliked any form of Catholicism. The status quo worsened after the beheading of Charles I (lived 1600 – 1649, reigned 1625 – 1649), when the Polish Sejm decided to subsidise the members of his family who had gone to live in exile in France. The situation