Literature and Politics

There is a long literary history of Eastern European immigrants and exiles turning to the United Kingdom for support or safety. Most scholars will think of Will Ladislaw in George Eliot’s Middlemarch or the later, darker tales of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster.” But this trope actually dates back to the 1797 visit of Tadeusz Kosciuszko and the immense popularity of Jane Porter’s 1803 novel, Thaddeus of Warsaw, a work that remained in print throughout the nineteenth century. This largely forgotten literary history is significant today, as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the expansion of the European Union have encouraged a remarkable new wave of Eastern European immigration to the United Kingdom and Ireland. While the newspapers and BBC have covered this story in detail, only occasionally has it entered British fiction. The most prominent example is The Road Home by Rose Tremain, which won the 2008 Orange Broadband prize for fiction and is to be made into a BBC film this year. Tremain’s sympathetic portrayal of Lev, the melancholy, solitary Eastern European in Britain, connects her protagonist to many of his nineteenth-century ancestors. But his post-Berlin Wall status means that, from a British perspective, his national background is less important than it previously was (Lev’s homeland is never mentioned, leading some critics to assume he is Polish, others Russian). For earlier literary immigrants, oppressive Eastern European governments meant that return was impossible. But for Lev, there is the knowledge of family and responsibilities left behind, and the question of return.

Thomas McLean is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Otago. He has edited the Further Letters of Joanna Baillie (FDUP, forthcoming) and is completing a monograph on British Romanticism and Eastern Europe. His scholarly work appears in Keats-Shelley Journal and Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.