Displaying Difference: Curious Count Boruwlaswki and the Staging of Class Identity

On 30 May 1782, the Morning Post bore the advertisement of a duel. This was unusual both because duels were private, illegal, and thus not advertised as general spectacles, and because the opponents were both human curiosities:


We hear that the famous Polish compte Boruwlaski, who is by far the smallest and most elegant living miniature of the human species, agreeable to his extraordinary wit and vivacity, has sent a formal challenge to the no less famous Hibernian Giant; and that the latter, with equal complacency and good humour, has accepted the combat. What adds infinitely to the merits of this affair is, that the heroes have appointed the rendezvous at the masquerade.¹ 


The challenger, Joseph Boruwlaski, was famous throughout Europe during the last half of the eighteenth century. Born in November 1739 in Russian Poland in Pokucia, near Chialiez, he was the son of impoverished and untitled Polish gentry, and the third of six children, three of whom were dwarfs. When he was nine, after his father’s death, he was adopted first by the Starostina de Caorliz, the local governmental representative, and then, when her marriage produced a rival child, by the Countess Humieska.² Under her protection, he traveled to Paris in 1760, where he earned an extensive description by the compte de Tressan in the Encyclopédie, and then he traversed central Europe.


Boruwlaski presented himself to the public in many venues  —  courts, stages, his own home — but most cogently in his autobiography, Mémoires du célèbre nain, Joseph Boruwlaski, gentilhomme polonis (1788), a work strongly flavored by Les Confessions [1781 – 88] of Jean Jacques Rousseau. The book appeared the same year in English, translated by a Mr. Des Carriéres, with a portrait by W. Hincks; again in 1792, with a translation on facing pages by S. Freeman, a different illustration, and twelve pages of subscribers, totaling some 324 people from all over England, including nobility and the bookseller Thomas Davies; and finally in 1820.³ A German edition appeared in 1789. Boruwlaski’s memoirs, written to raise money, record his struggle to reshape the public identity accorded him by his status and stature into a self-definition stressing his sensibility, independence, and manners. The selfhood he constructs, in opposition to the popular idea of him as a freak, establishes his difference from others in terms of both class status and public perception: he is different because others treat him so — and because he is a gentleman. Ironically, nonetheless, this selfhood depends on his being regarded as a freak. By negotiating between his idea of himself and others’ views of him, Boruwlaski redefined the public categories of class and physical normality to fit himself.


The case of “Count” Joseph Boruwlaski exemplifies the shift in the definition of self from a public, socially defined one to a private, self-asserted one in the long eighteenth century. His story is also a long one, for he lived to be ninety-eight years old. It is the story of a human “curiosity” who combined various religious, national, class, and physical characteristics. Whereas he began his life secure in an elite social identity founded in blood ties and cemented by cultural ritual, he ended it as entrepreneur of himself, and citizen of a proud, middle-class community. His identity was shaped through a series of adventures that took him from the laps of kings to the cages of showmen. Boruwlaski is particularly interesting because of the multiple characteristics he represented, which, as the popularity of his autobiography shows, presented spectators with key contemporary issues. What is the definition of humanity? Is class identity malleable or immutable? Where does individual identity depart from social, physical, or cultural conditioning? 


Identity was a chief preoccupation of eighteenth-century culture in novels, autobiographies, histories, travelogues, theater, carnival, and emerging, empirical science.⁴ Although recent scholarship has examined how writers defined the distinctions between creatures and cultures from 1660 to 1820, little has explored the attitudes of Europeans to one another, or the ways in which social ranks inflect other kinds...