Foreword

Bartłomiej Beniowski has long been a footnote to British labour history, as the only foreign refugee to play an identifiable role in early Chartism. But for British historians he has remained within the confines of that footnote, which refers at most to two of the thirty one years that he spent in London, energetically forwarding political ideas, social schemes and entrepreneurial endeavours. Nor has his life and work been of much interest to Polish historians, although for many years he was a prominent democratic member of the Great Emigration that followed the failed Polish Revolution of November 1830. In the 1930s, the historian, librarian and archivist Adam Lewak wrote an entry on Beniowski in the new Dictionary of National Biography, referring to his “very active role in the Chartist movement which was working for radical constitutional and social change in England,” and outlining his early affiliations within Polish émigré politics, as well as his championing in London of mnemonics and printing innovations (“which won support and help from English capitalists”). Thereafter, Beniowski was largely ignored. Even during the period from 1945 to 1989, when the Polish People’s Republic foregrounded labour history, historians tended to focus on London Poles like Ludwik Oborski who were more evidently central to movements on the route to the First International. While the 20th-century émigré historians of Polish socialism, Adam and Lidia Ciołkosz, paid serious attention to some aspects of Beniowski’s contribution, he inevitably appears only en passant in their wide-ranging study. And in the background to the general lack of interest was the lingering echo of the reputation bestowed on him in London in the 1830s by the Polish conservative émigrés associated with Prince Adam Czartoryski, who in retaliation for his outspoken political stance stigmatised him as a non-Pole and a spy. The term “real Pole” was already being used by the right wing in the 1830s to describe the Roman Catholic, mythically “Sarmatian,” landed gentleman who supported