The country’s neighbours, Russia and Prussia, fearing that the success of Stanisław’s liberalising revolution might destabilise their respective autocracies, carved the place up between them. In 1788 the Polish king Stanisław II oversaw a new reformist national constitution.

Making Will Polish makes him ‘Romantic’ in more senses than one.ĥ This was because of the status of Poland in the early decades of the nineteenth-century. All we know of Will by the end of Book One is: he’s handsome, artistic, charming and something of an outsider. We can call Will ‘Ladislāw’ or ‘Ladisclăv’ depending on our preferences.Ĥ Eliot does not go out of her way to draw attention to Will’s Polishness, but neither does she conceal it, and in a novel like Middlemarch, which is centrally and persistently about how we ‘read’ other people, how much nuance and insight (or blindness) there can be in such human reading, and how much our insights can be compromised by our prejudices, our inertia or our fantasies-in such a novel these questions are of course much more important than they might be in a different kind of fiction. But we cannot be sure, because Eliot’s novel doesn’t include a pronunciation guide. He has presumably Englished his Christian name, and it is possible the English ‘coleslaw’ pronunciation of ‘Ladislaw’ is the one the book’s characters use: we’re in England after all, not Poland (the novel is Middlemarch, not Centralnynaród ). Cadwallader explains Ladislaw’s relationship to Casaubon: ‘his mother’s sister made a bad match-a Pole, I think-lost herself-at any rate was disowned by her family’) and conclude that Will’s name must actually be ‘Wilhelm Ladisław’. We might assume that it rhymes its final syllable with ‘coleslaw.’ Then again, we could note the clues as to his family provenance that unobtrusively accumulate as the novel proceeds (starting in chapter 8, when Mr. 3 It is up to us, as readers, how we choose to pronounce Will Ladislaw’s surname.

Middlemarch instaling