STUDI DI ANGLISTICA / 21

Collana diretta da
Francesco Marroni

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Volume pubblicato con il contributo del Dipartimento di Scienze Lingui-
stiche e Letterarie Università degli Studi “G. d'Annunzio" di Chieti–Pescara.
 D.H. LAWRENCE’S
THE RAINBOW
RE-READINGS OF A RADICAL TEXT

Edited by
Renzo D’Agnillo
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1st edition: September 2010

 Contents

Introduction 7

Foreword by John Worthen 13

Peter Preston
The Polish Dimension of The Rainbow 15

Francesco Marroni
D. H. Lawrence’s Ontological Aporias: Ursula and
the Broken Rainbow 39

Renzo D’Agnillo
“Wedding at the Marsh”: Lawrence’s Rhetorical Strategies
in Chapter V of The Rainbow 61

Stefania Michelucci
Uprooting: The Beginning of Existential Crisis in
The Rainbow 85

Tony Dunn
Generation and Education in The Rainbow 109

Carla Comellini
The Rainbow and the Metaphor of Food 125

Raffaella Antinucci
Going “beyond”: Ken Russell’s The Rainbow (1989) 135

Claudia Zilletti
Gardens of Initiation: Experience and Growth in
D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow 155

Notes on the Contributors 171

 Introduction

The Rainbow occupies a special place in D. H. Lawrence’s

fiction. Not only did it signal a crucial transition in his artistic
development, but its thematic preoccupations and critique of
modern Western society would be reiterated, to various degrees,
in all of his future works. Furthermore, the chorus of
disapproval followed by its prosecution (the first of a series for
the writer, culminating in the thirty-two-year ban on Lady
Chatterley’s Lover), led to Lawrence’s life-long rift with his
native country.
It is only too easy for modern readers to overlook the shock
that the publication of The Rainbow produced on its
contemporaries, particularly in the light of post-1914 literary
productions. Yet, it was really without precedent. For
Lawrence, who had no interest in the “art for arts sake”
approach of formal experimentation, was seeking to redefine
the moral scope and function of the novel by confronting areas
of human experience no novelist before him had contemplated,
and was aware that this necessarily entailed a radical re-
conception of linguistic and rhetorical strategies. Consequently,
the compositional process of The Rainbow was lengthy and
laborious. With no recourse to a programmatic ‘agenda’,
Lawrence felt like he was starting afresh and was compelled to
write and re-write the text several times over before he was
satisfied with the end result. As is known, the first draft, titled
“The Sisters” was begun in Italy in 1913, only to be re-written
after his return to England in 1914 and re-titled “The Wedding
Ring”, after which, realising his saga of the Brangwen family
had gone well beyond the original plan he had intended,
becoming, in effect, two very different novels, Lawrence wrote
the first part all over again and published it as The Rainbow in
1915. Its sequel, Women in Love, was finally published 1920.
Although he was profoundly influenced by George Eliot’s
representation of psychological point of view, not to mention
Thomas Hardy’s characterisation of sexual relationships (his
8 Introduction

“Study on Thomas Hardy” dates from the same period), The

Rainbow bears out Lawrence’s complete rejection of nineteenth-
century literary conventions. Like Sons and Lovers, it is a
family saga, but, unlike the former, it deliberately eschews the
methods with which such a convention is traditionally narrated.
Indeed, with no literary model at his disposal, Lawrence was
free to invent his own narrative ‘grammar’ as well as promote
his unique world-view in the hope that it would be understood
by a new generation. Fuelled by an ideological conviction of the
moral function of the novel form and inspired by his newly
discovered conception of character as a field of conflicting
forces, rather than an individual ‘personality’, Lawrence turns
the diegetic dimension of the novel inside out conferring
maximum priority to the internal, pre-conscious states of his
characters at the cost of disregarding external events. This
radically different narrative approach is complementary to his
revolutionary vision of social transformation through the
redefinition of sexual relationships, especially in terms of a re-
evaluation of female experience.
After having rocked the genteel sensibilities and
complacencies of pre-1914 middle-class England, it fell to
future readers to recognise the power of Lawrence’s insights.
Yet, perhaps even more so today, to read The Rainbow one
must bear with the text. It demands a patient and persistent
engagement on the reader’s part. Its narrative moves slowly,
cumulatively, yet overpoweringly; its language is brooding,
obsessively iterative, yet risky and uncanny. That it continues to
challenge and provoke readers’ responses ninety-five years after
its first publication is a sure testimony of its enduring audacity
as a radical text.
The present volume brings together eight new readings on
The Rainbow by British and Italian Lawrentian scholars and its
wide ranges of topic, confronted under a variety of critical
perspectives, are confirmation of the continual relevance and
vitality of Lawrence’s text. It opens with Peter Preston’s essay
“The Polish Dimension of The Rainbow”, which explores the
significant, though critically neglected, aspect of the foreign
 Introduction 9

Other in terms of the representation of the novel’s Polish

characters, as manifested in the complex interrelations between
Brangwens, Lewenskys and Skrebenskys. Preston illustrates
how with “each Brangwen generation an encounter with
Polishness brings some sense of expansion”. Thus, while Tom
Brangwen’s inability to comprehend Lydia’s Polish identity is
overcome by an understanding that transcends the idea of
national difference, Anna’s various encounters with Baron
Skrebensky gives her an insight into the complications of her
Polish identity which conflict with Brangwen “blood-intimacy”.
Subsequently, Ursula’s initial longing to escape the limitations
of the Marsh Farm is stimulated by her grandmother Lydia’s
memories of Poland. Ultimately, the diminishing presence of
Poland in the novel is embodied in Anton Skrebensky, Ursula’s
lover, who has lost all connection with his father-land.
In his reading of the linguistic and discursive strategies of the
novel, Francesco Marroni in “D. H. Lawrence’s Ontological
Aporias: Ursula and the Broken Rainbow”, demonstrates how
Lawrence’s attempt to break away from nineteenth century
realism, leads to an “unresolved linguistic tension” that underlies
its unstable semantic-structural organisation. As a polemical
reflection on English society and eager response to the crisis of
representation, the novel’s discontinuity is reflected in a language
of confusion in which text submerges context. This is not to
detract from the fact that, as Marroni observes: “the evolutionist
model that dominates the diegetic framework of The Rainbow
derives directly from George Eliot’s social vision”. Yet whilst the
novel’s semantic axis points into the future, its formal aspects are
characterised by iterative linguistic and discursive strategies that
deny the idea of progression and reinforce a circularity “that
seems symptomatic of an unresolved linguistic tension”.
The fact that Lawrence himself was not unconscious of this
paradox is the underlying motif of my own essay, “‘Wedding at
the Marsh’: Lawrence’s Rhetorical Strategies in Chapter V of
The Rainbow”, which highlights the stylistic and rhetorical
features of his language in what is, in effect, the most atypical
chapter in the novel. “Wedding at the Marsh” contains an
10 Introduction

autonomous structure (a complete story in itself) which, at the

same time, prefigures its thematic developments as Lawrence
abandons the intense verbal excesses of his ‘analytical’ passages
in favour of a dynamic and humorous description of the wedding
ceremony between Anna and Will Brangwen. Through Tom
Brangwen’s wedding speech, Lawrence establishes an
intratextual dialogue in which the rhetorical strategies of his own
essays are, to a certain extent, parodied to create a complex
interaction between authorial intention and the reliability of the
narrative voice.
Stefania Michelucci in “Uprooting: The Beginning of
Existential Crisis in The Rainbow”, explores the centripetal and
centrifugal processes which mark the characters movements
from “rootedness in an organic, self-sufficient home life, to
total uprooting”. In both The Rainbow and Women in Love can
be seen the tendency “to absorb external space into the home
and the opposite tendency to expand the self in a space free of
predetermined limits”. The problematic search for the Other
place conduces the characters to a process of involution in which
the contraction of the space of the home acquires negative
connotations evoking imprisonment and the loss of values
associated with human cohabitation. Threshold states in both
novels are synonymous of the characters’ uprooting and lead to
such illusory perceptions as Ursula’s vision of rebirth through
her sighting of the rainbow at the end of the novel.
It was initially Lawrence’s concern with female education
and emancipation that gave the initial impetus for the
composition of The Rainbow. Anthony Dunn in “Generation
and Education in The Rainbow” investigates the nature of
education, tracing its social and metaphysical implications in
both male and female characters. The Brangwen women’s
initial dissatisfaction with generation and their aspiration
towards the world of knowledge and education leads to a sense
of the limitations of formal education in the knowledge of self
and other which, for Lawrence, can only be obtained through
sexual relations. Women and marriage in relation to knowledge
is precisely the area of experience with which Lawrence
 Introduction 11

struggles to find a new language. In this respect, as Dunn notes,

with the exception of the influence of Hardy, Lawrence had no
real “anxiety of influence when he came to write his accreting,
mutating saga of the internal and external lives of the Brangwen
generations. His only anxiety was whether his saga would have
a public.”
In “The Rainbow and the Metaphor of Food”, Carla
Comellini focuses on the symbolic function played by food in the
novel. She notes, for example, how the recurrent references to
English food, in particular, become a means of underlining the
novel’s Englishness. But food also has important metaphorical
functions, as with the Brangwen women’s eating of the apple of
knowledge which is a sign of their feminine rebellion. Besides
noting the symbolic valence of such images as the seed and
chestnut, Comellini draws parallels with Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with regard to the
novel’s connection between food and cannibalism and traces the
destructive effects of the relationship between Ursula and
Skrebensky in terms of a symbolic cannibalism which sees a
reversal of gender roles.
Ken Russell’s notorious film adaptation of The Rainbow
appeared twenty years after his critically acclaimed film version
of Women in Love. Raffaella Antinucci in “Going ‘Beyond’: Ken
Russell’s The Rainbow (1989)”, addresses the various levels of
the film’s interpretation of Lawrence’s novel which focuses
exclusively on the second part of the story beginning with
Ursula’s infancy. Antinucci points out how Russell’s ‘return’ to
Lawrence necessarily entailed a new perspective that conditioned
a choice of themes that would appeal to a contemporary
audience, such as Ursula’s sexual education, which Russell
updates in terms of the modern day debate on feminism and
sexual liberation. Antinucci analysis the film techniques through
which Russell solves the problem of rendering the complexities
of Lawrence’s text, including linear narration and recurrent visual
motifs, and discusses the broader question of the “heritage film”
as an attempt to re-create an imaginary identity of Englishness.
Taking the biblical archetype of the Garden of Eden as her
12 Introduction

premise, Claudia Zilletti in the concluding essay in the volume,

“Gardens of Initiation: Experience and Growth in D. H.
Lawrence’s The Rainbow”, analyses the semiotic function of the
garden as a liminal space representing “a threshold marking the
characters’ passage towards a more complete self-knowledge of
crucial vital experiences.” Lawrence’s natural and garden
descriptions form the basis of a dichotomy that generates a series
of thematic preoccupations: “nature vs culture, past vs present,
fertility vs inner death, the rural euphoric world of the Farm vs
the dysphoric hell of the coal-mines”. Zilletti underlines the
ambivalent valence of the Marsh Farm as a place of refuge and a
locus preventing self-realisation as well as illustrating numerous
examples which highlight the symbolic importance of gardens as
a passage in the sentimental and sexual education of the main
characters.
Finally, an expression of gratitude to John Worthen who
had, by the time this collection was conceived, published his
valedictory book on Lawrence. His personal contribution has
been appreciated as a generous exception and bears testimony
to his abiding enthusiasm for an author on whom he has been
such a lively authority.

Renzo D’Agnillo

I would like to give my sincere thanks to Eleonora Sasso for her

precious help with the page-proofing of the volume.
 Foreword
Of all the books I would ever like to have come across in a
second-hand bookshop, unnoticed and costing 10p, perhaps with
a tattered coloured jacket around its blue-green binding, the only
one I dream about is a 1915 copy of The Rainbow by D. H.
Lawrence. Not simply because it would be extremely valuable (a
London dealer had a fine copy in a dust-jacket on sale for
£65,000 in 20021 ) – though I would never want to sell such a
find – but because copies of that edition are, for very good
reason, uncommonly rare and especially worth having. Some
2,500 were printed, of which 1,195 were destroyed after the book
was prosecuted and banned: leaving only some 1,300 copies ‘out
there’ in the world. Fewer than ten copies seem to have dust-
jackets still: awful dust-jackets, it must be admitted, with their
Frank Wright picture of a swooning Lydia on her knees in the
hay, supported by a Tom Brangwen looking rather like the Duke
of Wellington; she raises a trembling left hand to a kind of tea-
towel she wears draped over her head, as if to lift it and thus hear
him better: but he is frozen into eternal silence and immobility.
Nothing could be further from the book’s versions of Tom and
Lydia, who are the occasion of some of the best writing that
Lawrence ever did; if I had to select a single chapter from any of
Lawrence’s novels, it would without doubt be “Wedding at the
Marsh”, chapter V of The Rainbow, written in December 1914,
which Frieda Lawrence told Middleton Murry a few days after it
was written “had Marlowe and Fielding in an account of a
genuine English wedding”2. Marlowe is hard to see but Fielding
is not; Lawrence’s joy in creating drunken Tom Brangwen is
itself a joy, and the very end of the chapter – the men singing in
the darkness outside the honeymoon cottage – one of the most
moving things he ever wrote.

1
See D. H. Lawrence, Simon Finch Catalogue 51, London, Simon Finch
Rare Books, 2002, pp. 7-8.
2
John Middleton Murry, Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence, London,
Jonathan Cape, 1933, p. 48.
14 Foreword

No, the dust jacket’s version of Tom I would waive. I

would be prepared to make do with a ‘colonial’ edition, bound
in red or some other colour3, but it would always seem less
interesting than the 1915 original. Not least because Lawrence
himself admitted in 1924 that the Methuen Rainbow was the
only one of all his own books that he ever kept and travelled
round the world with: “And this is almost my favorite among
my novels: this, and Women in Love. And I should really be
best pleased if it were never re-printed at all, and only those
blue, condemned volumes remained extant”4. Perhaps its travels
and its exposure to the sun of four continents had turned the
blue-green binding of Lawrence’s copy to simple blue. Where it
is now, goodness knows. Waiting for me or some other lucky
person in that second-hand bookshop we all dream about,
perhaps .

John Worthen
30 May 2007

3
See e.g. Warren Roberts and Paul Poplawski, A Bibliography of D. H.
Lawrence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 29.
4
D. H. Lawrence, “The Bad Side of Books”, Introductions and Reviews,
ed. Neil Reeve and John Worthen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2005, 77:30-3.
 Peter Preston

The Polish Dimension of The Rainbow

Introduction

Polish characters play a significant part in the lives of each of the

three Brangwen generations whose experiences are narrated in The
Rainbow. In each successive generation the Polish interventions
become more complex and have different implications for those
members of the Brangwen family who are themselves part-Polish.
English, Polish and part-Polish characters meet and re-meet in
encounters that knit together Brangwens, Lenskys and
Skrebenskys in relationships that are central to the novel’s thematic
concern with identity: rootedness and wandering, separateness and
merging, individuality and duality.
In Lydia, Baron Skrebensky and Anton Skrebensky
Lawrence creates three individuals who derive from the same
phase of Polish history, but who represent different modes of
adaptation to English life on the part of Polish exiles and their
children. Three of the novel’s principal characters – Lydia,
Anna and Baron Skrebensky – are of pure Polish blood; Ursula
is half-Polish, half-English; and Anton Skrebensky is half-
Polish and half English-Italian. By her marriage to Will
Brangwen, Anna binds even more closely her Polish heritage to
her stepfather’s family, and produces a second generation of
children who are part-English and part-Polish.
Lydia Lensky assimilates herself to English life through her
marriage to Tom Brangwen in a connection that exists at the
level of absorption into his family, the sensuality of their
physical relationship and the birth of their children. In the
Skrebensky family, accommodation to English life has taken
place in a different manner. The Baron commits himself to
English culture by becoming a Church of English vicar – thus
subscribing to one of its dominant power structures; but with
his first wife he creates a tiny Polish enclave within England.
16 Peter Preston

Later, he takes a further step towards assimilation by marrying

as his second wife a woman, who although only half-English, is
securely placed within the English class system and can satisfy
his craving for his lost social status. Anton Skrebensky, whose
ethnic heritage is more complex than any other character’s, has
to create for himself an identity that will accommodate both his
aristocratic Polish heritage and his desire to attain a secure place
in English society. By choosing to become an army officer,
enthusiastically serving, defending and justifying British
imperialism, he positions himself, like his father, squarely
within the dominant ideology. The purposes of this essay are to
provide an historical context for the presence of Skrebensky and
the other Polish and part-Polish characters in The Rainbow, to
reflect upon Lawrence’s sources for the creation of their Polish
experiences, and to consider the part played by the Polish
dimension in the narrative development and thematic content of
the novel.

Poland: Partition and nationalism 1772-1918

When D. H. Lawrence published The Rainbow in 1915 no such

country as Poland existed. Or rather, it existed largely in the
minds of the many Polish nationalists who had lived in exile in
Europe since the late eighteenth century. Beginning in 1772 and
finally confirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the old
Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania had suffered “the Partitions” a
gradual process of annexation by its immediate neighbours,
Russia, Austria and Prussia. These greedy and ambitious states,
anxious to maintain the balance of power in central Europe and
to frustrate each other’s territorial and imperial ambitions, were
determined that the name of Poland should disappear from the
map, and achieved their desire in 1815.
For the millions of serfs living in the lands of the old
kingdom national identity was of little concern – they were more
interested in food, freedom from serfdom and the acquisition of
land. To them the oppressors were their immediate masters, the
many landowners (szlachta) and minor aristocrats who owned
 The Polish Dimension Of «The Rainbow» 17

serfs and controlled the use of the land. More distant rulers,
whether they were in Moscow, Berlin or Vienna rather than
Warsaw, made little difference to the day-to-day lives of the
Polish peasantry.
It was among the rural serf-owning class and the intellectuals
in Poland’s towns and cities that opposition to the dismemberment
of their country was to be found. They lamented the demise of a
kingdom with a history and identity that could be traced back to
the country’s adoption of Christianity in 966 CE. Since the
sixteenth century it had been organised as a democratic monarchy,
a system that had both advantages and drawbacks. An elective
monarchy limited dynastic power-seeking, but the absence of a
hereditary royal house deprived Poland of a central point of
identity that could transcend the temporal limits of individual
reigns. Other points of potential vulnerability were the lack of a
standing army and an insistence on unanimity for all decisions
made in the country’s legislative assembly. Such arrangements,
instituted in the interests of democracy and the balance of power,
resulted in social stagnation, especially damaging in the rural
areas, where agricultural practices changed very slowly during a
period of rapid modernisation and mechanisation in other parts of
Europe.
The other major determining feature of Poland’s history in
the nineteenth century was its Catholicism. When in 966 CE
Mieszko I led his people into Christianity, he ignored the Eastern
Orthodox Church and chose to accept the authority of the Pope in
Rome. This decision, as J. M. Roberts points out, “gave the
Polish people a particularly difficult destiny (often heroically and
tragically fulfilled) as a nation Slav by descent and language, but
western European in culture and religion, ground between
aggressive and fearful powers on both sides”1. It was this Poland,
Catholic, democratic and rich in cultural achievement that
Lawrence’s Paul Lensky and others like him died to defend.
Others were driven into an exile that brings Lydia Lensky to
Marsh Farm as Tom Brangwen’s wife.

1
J. M. Roberts, A History of Europe, Oxford, Helicon, 1996, p. 157.
18 Peter Preston

In the first partitions of the 1770s a central Polish kingdom

survived, focused on Warsaw, but the country lost about one-
third of its territory and half of its population, largely in the
east. The French Revolution was welcomed by the irredentist
Polish nobility and intelligentsia who saw it as offering hope of
restoring full Polish sovereignty. In 1791 a coup d’état led to
the adoption of a constitution based on that of post-
revolutionary France, which restored the elective monarchy and
ensured the legal protection of the peasantry. But the electoral
college remained essentially aristocratic and there seemed no
prospect of liberty for the serfs 2 . This constitution alone,
however, afforded no protection against Poland’s powerful
militarised neighbours and further Partitions followed in 1793
and 1796, the principal beneficiary being Imperial Russia,
which added six million to its population.
France had shown little enthusiasm for the Polish cause during
the 1790s but the rise of Napoleon appeared to offer fresh hope
that Poland could regain its autonomy. The Emperor’s interest in
Poland, however, was strategic, as a buffer against Russia.
Napoleon’s creation, in 1807 of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw
under the rule of the King of Saxony ensured Polish support for
Napoleon in his disastrous 1812 campaign against Russia, in
which 600,000 Poles served. Yet when the Poles next came to the
conference table, at Vienna in 1814, no account was taken of the
country’s nationalist aspirations. The divisions of 1795-6 were
confirmed and extended and the name of Poland was effaced
from the map, seemingly for ever.
It was in the period after the fall of Napoleon that Poland
became what David Thomson calls “the centre of aggrieved
nationalisms in eastern Europe”3. The Polish political exile had
been familiar in Western Europe since 1772, when the first

2
For all the democratic claims of the elective monarchy, about ten or a
dozen powerful families were able to act as kingmakers. One of the best-
known of these was the Radziwills, who owned estates half the size of Ireland.
3
David Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon, Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1966, p. 122.
 The Polish Dimension Of «The Rainbow» 19

émigrés arrived in Paris, to be followed by a further wave in

1795. The obliteration of Poland after Vienna fuelled nationalist
fervour among both exiles and those who remained in the
homeland, and after a failed uprising in 1831 the first major
emigration of Polish nationalists occurred. According to
Norman Davies the several thousand Poles who arrived in Paris
that year included almost all the political elite as well as many
of the country’s finest writers and artists4. It is perhaps ironical
that they sought refuge in France, for although the country
continued to represent a democratic ideal for Poles, in 1831, as
on earlier occasions, it had offered the rebels no support.
At this time the myth of the Romantic, idealistic Polish exile
began to emerge. It was the generation of 1831 that, for instance,
created the great literary movement of Polish Romanticism, led
by the poet and activist Adam Mickiewicz, whose national epic,
Conrad Wallenrod, had been published in 1828. Their notion of
revolution was focused on political brotherhoods, such as
“Young Poland”, which became the model for similar
associations elsewhere in Europe. It was what Eric Hobsbawm
calls a “nationalism of the nobility”5 based on an intense feeling
for Polish history, its adherents linked to one another and to the
country by family loyalties and reverence for the land. It was in
no sense an idea of popular revolution because “[i]t did not […]
matter to those who considered ‘the Polish question’ that
probably most Polish-speaking peasants […] did not yet feel
themselves to be nationalist Poles”6.

[…] the idea of a nation of […] Poles could accommodate, without the
slightest difficulty, the fact that a large part of the inhabitants […] were
not […] Poles by any modern national definition. For these plebeians
counted no more than the plebeians who happened to be […] Poles.
They were by definition outside the enclosure of the “political nation”7.

4
Norman Davies, God’s Playground. A History of Poland. Vol. 2. 1795
to the Present, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 276.
5
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme,
Myth, Reality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 73.
6
Ibid, p. 44.
7
Ibid, p. 74.
20 Peter Preston

Only after about 1880 did the mass of the people subscribe to
the same ideals of nationhood as had been created and fought
for by the political minority of earlier decades. Before then the
Polish revolutionary movement lacked “a crucial element of the
romantic revolutionary vision of 1830-48; the barricades, the
masses, the new and desperate proletariat”8.
As a result of the comparative indifference of the peasantry
to the issue of nationality, the uprisings of 1846 and 1863-4
received little support in the countryside. The nobles and
intellectuals who in 1846 led the revolt in Galicia failed to
mobilise the peasants, in spite of promises of freedom for the
serfs; indeed they found themselves at their mercy, since the
Austrians dealt with the uprising by encouraging the peasants to
turn against their masters, the szlachta: they preferred to
“massacre gentlemen and trust to the Emperor’s officials”9, a
trust repaid by brutal suppression. In 1861, however, Tsar
Alexander I liberated the serfs and it was hoped that he might
support Poland’s nationalist aspirations. Alexander displayed
some sympathy, but the Catholic Church was implacably
opposed to closer ties with Orthodox Russia and had the
support of the rural nobility and gentry. During the revolt of
1863-4 the Russians adopted the Austrian strategy of 1846 and
encouraged the peasants – less interested in independence than
in land and power for rural communes – to defy their masters.
The defeat of the 1863-4 uprising brought Polish resistance
to an end for the remainder of the nineteenth century. In the
face of further Russianising of the old kingdom and the
beginnings of industrialisation a more pragmatic strain of Polish
nationalism began to emerge, but the country still stood out as
an exemplary victim of the ambitions of greater powers. “It
would not be too much to say”, writes Hobsbawm, “that, after
1871 – always excepting the slowly disintegrating Ottoman
empire – few people expected any further substantial changes in

8
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848, London, New
English Library, 1962, p. 317.
9
Ibid, p. 169.