Bartłomiej Beniowski, 1800-1867. Cosmopolitical Chartist and Revolutionary Refugee – EBOOK

This is the first reconstruction in either Britain or Poland of the life of Bartłomiej Beniowski, a Polish post-1831 émigré who was the only foreign refugee to play an identifiable role in early London Chartism.

It places Beniowski’s Chartist record in the context of his earlier political affiliations, and explores his post-Chartist political allegiances. It investigates his success in 1840s London as a mnemonist who developed a system that he called “Phrenotypics,” and his invention in the 1850s of printing techniques which were taken up for commercial exploitation by a group of entrepreneurial Liberal M.P.s.

It is the biography of an exceptional and colourful individual, acted out against a vast multi-cultural backdrop, from tsarist Russia to Liberal England via Orléanist France and Muhammad Ali’s Egypt. It reveals a life-long commitment to the cause of Polish independence, along with consistent advocacy of democracy and championship of the oppressed, including vocal campaigns for Jewish civil rights. It provides the narrative of a life that illustrates contemporary European political and social movements and their bearing on 19th-century British labour history.

Keywords: Bartłomiej Beniowski, Polish post-1831 émigrés, Polish democrats, Chartism, Phrenotypics.

Emma Harris – after a doctorate in Economic History at the University of Edinburgh with a thesis on the economic consequences of the first world war in Polish territories, Emma Harris has taught British social and cultural history in the Institute of English Studies of the University of Warsaw since the late 1970s. She was the director of the Institute from 1990 to 2014 and dean of the Faculty of Modern Languages from 1999-2005.
Over this period, her research interests have shifted towards 19th-century social and political history, and in particular international contacts, including the ideas, adjustments and practices of political refugees, especially the refugee democrats who left Poland for Western Europe in 1831 after the unsuccessful November Uprising against Russian rule.