The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire by Thomas Mclean (review)

Thomas McLean’s felicitously titled The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire takes its cue from a critical blind spot in the reading of empire and nineteenth-century British culture. As McLean points out, scholarly concentration on the far-flung “oriental” empire on the one hand and the “home” empire on the other has meant that a whole dimension of imperial relations—the problem of the “other East”—has tended to drop out of the story. Russia’s imperial ambitions threatened Britain for most of the nineteenth century, a persistent foreign policy concern that was importantly mediated for British readers by tropes that emerged out of the partitioning of Poland (orchestrated by Catherine the Great) at the end of the eighteenth century. These form the subject of the book. Out of Polish partition, which literally wiped the country off the map, there emerged a British narrative stimulated in part by an uneasy British conscience at its government’s having stood by, being itself caught in the complicated global politics of the revolutionary wars (the final partition took place in 1795). More particularly, the Polish Question threw up in the period’s print and visual culture the Romantic figure of the Polish exile. Modelled on the liberal general, Tadeusz Kościuszko, whose uprising and defeat in 1794 generated widespread sympathy in Britain, as did the evidence of his wounded body on a much reported 1797 visit to England, the image of the Polish exile represents for McLean “the most important manifestation of nineteenth-century British interest in Eastern Europe” (p. 2). Accordingly this exile serves as the primary index in the book of the changing attitudes to Eastern Europe, as the figure of the Polish stranger shifted over the course of the century from gallant but defeated freedom fighter to suspect immigrant.

In restoring to visibility the story of the “other East,” the study fills in a largely (if not completely) blank space in the political-geographical map of nineteenth-century Britain. Chapters move chronologically from the 1770s through to the 1870s, opening with an account of Catherine the Great and the partition debate and concluding with an analysis of George Eliot’s construction of Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch (there is also a brief afterword on two tales by Conrad). The strongest chapters (also the most pertinent for Romanticists) are those dealing with the period 1790–1830, which place some well-known texts and writers in fresh contexts but, more importantly, re-read the period as a whole from an unfamiliar angle. With an excellent eye for the lively anecdote and telling epistolary phrase, McLean deals not only with strictly literary “imaginings” (poems, novels) but also with pamphlets, periodical essays, visual representations, and musical compositions. Deftly handling the problem of introducing material with which many readers may not be acquainted, his book develops a clear argument about the pressure exerted on British writing by the Polish Question. Chapter 1, for example, succinctly lays out the tangled geo-political threads that doomed Poland, keeping firmly in view at the same time the fierce British hostility to Catherine the Great that fuelled sympathy for Poland. This context then launches a compelling new reading of Blake’s Europe as a response to the Polish Question, seeing it as encoding Blake’s vision of “the eastward movement of revolution.” In contrast to the French-English axis of most readings of this poem, McLean offers (as he puts it) “a truly European reading of Europe” (p. 16).

The most extensive attention, however, is directed to the trope of the Polish exile and the figure of Kościuszko, as the first half of the book tracks the changing constructions of the defeated revolutionary (Kościuszko was also a hero of the American Revolution). Thus where Coleridge and Benjamin West mobilized the image of the defeated patriot to critique Britain...