ABSTRACT
For years, tourists visiting the lobby of the town-hall building in the British town of Durham have been intrigued by a sculpture depicting an elderly gentleman of charming appearance, wearing elegant early 19th-century garb, bent over a guitar. One might think that this monument to Joseph Boruwłaski, depicting him dressed to attend an audience with King George IV in 1820, would not be all that extraordinary: Boruwłaski was, after all, one of Durham’s most famous residents ever. He was mentioned at considerable length in Diderot’s great Encyclopédie in the eighteenth century and later in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and many other lexicons, the press followed the events of his life as they unfolded, and when he died in 1837 reports were carried by nearly every English daily and then by newspapers on the continent. But Boruwłaski’s fame was indeed of quite an unusual sort. The encyclopaedia entries about him cannot be found in the conventional way, since they are not listed under his own name, and the above sculpture might indeed not catch the eyes of passers-by at all if it were not for the fact that this smallish, 99-centimetre figure is in fact life-sized. It was Boruwłaski’s extraordinary smallness that determined his life story and was the main source of his fame – he was the most famous dwarf in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, and it was as such that he figured on the pages of various encyclopaedias and dictionaries (where he should be sought under the entries for dwarf in English, nain in French, or zwerg in German).
