Abstract
Polish characters appear in nineteenth-century British literature with surprising regularity, most famously in Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872). Little has been written about Walter Besant and James Rice’s By Celia’s Arbour: A Tale of Portsmouth Town (1878). The narrator, Ladislas Pulaski, is the orphaned, hunchbacked son of a famous Polish freedom fighter. Raised in Portsmouth’s Polish community, Pulaski sees himself as English but is haunted by his responsibilities to Poland. This chapter examines the novel’s various war contexts—Poland, the Crimea, and Bulgaria—and the recurring representation of Russia as Poland’s oppressor and Britain’s enemy. It also considers Ladislas Pulaski in relation to other Anglo-Polish characters in fiction, in particular Will Ladislaw.