It is one of poetry's happier stories that, some fifty years after it had fallen dead from the press on its first publication in 1859, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám had become one of the most famous translations of all time. It has been generally assumed that the fortunes of the poem did not pick up until after the third edition of 1872 and that the name of its author was not known beyond a small circle until two or three years after that. Little or no attention has been paid to the 1862 Madras pirate edition of the Rubáiyát which was the next to be published after the failed 1859 first edition. A look at the story of the Madras pirate, and the key figures behind it, leads us to question the conventional view of Rubáiyát history and sheds light on an early part of the Rubáiyát story that has been untold until now.

1861

Everyone familiar with the story of the Rubáiyát knows that a literary figure named Whitley Stokes, stopping by the bookshop owned by FitzGerald's publisher Bernard Quaritch one day early in July 1861, salvaged a copy of the poem from the penny box outside, at once recognised its value, bought further copies and gave away at least one of them to his good friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet, who in turn alerted Swinburne and others among the Pre-Raphaelites, who also acclaimed the poem.

This is a book about writing and change – about changes affecting everyday life in Second Empire France, about the extraordinarily diverse and creative responses of writers to those changes, and about ways in which writing itself evolved during this period. It raises questions about how the material world impinges upon literature, and how writers, in turn, use that world as a way of negotiating change.

France had been rocked by momentous changes for more than half a century before the Second Empire came into being in December1852. After the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, the country had gone through a series of revolutions, lurching from Republic to Empire to Monarchy and back to Republic again with the revolution of 1848, when the monarchy was finally abolished. But the failure of that short-lived Second Republic was seen by many as a particular betrayal. On 2 December 1851 Parisians woke to find that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, President of the Second Republic, had dissolved the Legislative Assembly and proclaimed martial law. Over the next few days several hundred protestors and a number of innocent bystanders were killed by troops, and many thousands were subsequently deported to North Africa or exiled elsewhere. Although a plebiscite indicated that a majority of Frenchmen approved the move, for many the violence of Louis Napoleon's coup d'état and his overthrow of the 1848 constitution he had sworn to uphold was to be a long-lasting and bitter source of resentment.

When Luigi Einaudi—eminent economist, bibliophile, winemaker, and future President of the Italian Republic—first entered the house of the philosopher Benedetto Croce in Naples, it was to ask him a question of the utmost importance. The year was 1931, Benito Mussolini was in power, and, like all university professors, Einaudi was faced with a vexing predicament: should he swear loyalty to fascism, or resign from academia? Curiously, their subsequent correspondence gives no indication of what Croce advised, though one can surmise that he feared a Diaspora of the righteous would leave the field free for fascism. In fact, for various reasons, only fifteen or so of more than twelve hundred academics stepped down, and Einaudi was among those remaining to fight the regime from within. But the Einaudi-Croce correspondence is nonetheless interesting. Rather than ruminating on the ruinous state of affairs, their letters were devoted to a centuries-old economic treatise. Croce admitted he had been too absorbed by the political argument at hand during their meeting to take notice, but his daughter Elena perceived the ‘admiration and desire’ in Einaudi's eyes upon seeing a redoubtable little volume by the Calabrian Antonio Serra in the family library. Croce immediately and characteristically asked the historian Fausto Nicolini's son Benedetto to send his personal copy, which Einaudi joyfully accepted as ‘a sign of comfort and absolution’ for the difficult choice he felt forced to make.

Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát attracted many parodies. One of the first to receive wide publication was Rudyard Kipling's ‘Rupaiyat of Omar Kal'vin’, which appeared in his collection Departmental Ditties (1886) and uses FitzGerald's form to complain about a salary cut imposed upon colonial administrators. These British beginnings notwithstanding, parodists of the Rubáiyát were especially numerous and voluble in the USA. Given the prominence of the Rubáiyát as a text in late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century America – a bibliography in the New York Times in June 1899 lists 31 Rubáiyát editions centred on FitzGerald's translation and 14 editions by other translators – the existence of parodies would perhaps seem unsurprising. With its distinctive stanza form and its memorable aphorisms, the poem was a highly visible target. Yet even allowing for the poem's popularity and wide availability, and for the idiosyncrasies that might seem to invite parody, the number of American parodies, and their persistence across time, seem disproportionate and intriguing. An anthology of parodies, for example, edited by Carolyn Wells (1904), who herself parodied the Rubáiyát, begins with a section of poems ‘after Omar Khayyam’ that includes ‘The Golfer's Rubaiyat’, ‘An Omar for Ladies’, ‘The Modern Rubaiyat’ and ‘The Baby's Omar’, by various authors. The large collection of parodies spanning about thirty years (with the most being created in the decade after 1900) demonstrates, moreover, an interesting range in tone and approach.

Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was for a while the most famous verse translation ever made into English, and its extraordinary popular success – which lasted for perhaps a century, from about the 1860s to the 1960s – has ensured that it has been much picked over, carped at, imitated, admired and condescended to. If I had to decide I would put myself in the admiring and imitating camp, and I have at one time or another harboured quite a lot of irritation against those who have thought themselves superior enough to condescend to FitzGerald and his achievement. But rather than either simply carp or admire I want to start by considering the very peculiar nature of what FitzGerald did in the Rubáiyát.

To begin with, the impetus behind his translation, what prompted him to do it as it were, seems to be only partly comparable to what prompted most of his predecessors as verse translators into English to do what they did. In the middle years of the eighteenth century Thomas Gray noted in one of his letters that a history of English verse could easily be written showing how its two chief models had, since the time of Chaucer, been verse in French and Italian, and that these two models had tended to alternate in their hold on the English poetic imagination from one century to the next.

In the legendry, literature, art and popular cultures of the English-speaking peoples, Robin Hood has become the iconic outlaw hero. But the tradition of the robber who fights on the side of the poor against injustice and oppression is powerful around the world, in many cases long predating the earliest mention of the forest archer. Some of these traditions were in existence before any known contact between the countries that sustain them. Whether they developed in one place and were spread through the networks of oral storytelling along trade and migration routes, or whether they arose independently as broadly similar human responses to similar social, economic and political circumstances is not known. Perhaps we never will know. But it is possible to trace the earliest known expressions of the outlaw hero and the tradition that sustains such figures in the Roman Empire, in China's Northern Song Dynasty and throughout Europe since the Dark Ages.

Outlaws of Empire

In ancient Greece, banditry was originally considered to be just another way of earning a living. By the time of the Roman Empire however, it had become an especially heinous crime and those who followed the calling were nonpersons, denied all legal rights and liable to be crucified or thrown to the beasts in the gladiatorial arena for the grisly pleasure of the spectators.

The “Things” That Happened “Over There”

On October 13, 1947, the prominent Weimar cultural critic and Nazi-era émigré living in New York, Siegfried Kracauer, composed the following letter to Wolfgang Weyrauch in Germany, whom he'd encouraged years earlier, when Weyrauch was a beginning journalist and author in Frankfurt who had treated Kracauer as his chosen mentor:

Six days later, he rewrote the as yet unmailed letter. In the revision, Kracauer replaced the colloquial suggestion that contact might resume after a while with a more personal and concrete—but also less companionable—choice of language, telescoping two of his earlier thoughts, by turning directly to the “things” whose occurrence had made it “infinitely difficult to regain trust in people from over there from whom I have not heard in such a long time.”

In addressing the exile studies of one of Karl Mannheim's students, our topic is the ambiguous conjunction of autobiography and sociological theory. In other words, we are interested in self-reflection on exile as a constituent of scientific clarification and innovation in its study. Reflexivity and selfdistantiation were central motifs of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and, quite apart from his well-known call to self-knowledge among those he classified as intellectuals, he repeatedly applied the concept not only to the position of women, but also to the situation of the exile. Writing about himself in the early 1920s as an exile in Germany from Horthy's authoritarian regime in his native Hungary and again in 1944 as a ‘refugee’ in England from Hitler's Germany, he claimed that persons in that marginal situation could bring unique insight to their hosts but only if they first became fully aware of who and where they themselves had come to be. Understanding presupposes a measure of distance from oneself as well as from the external contextures to be understood. There is an attractive self-evidence in such a claim, familiar to sociologists from Georg Simmel's seminal work on “the stranger,” but in this paper my aims are not only to secularize the concept of productive reflexivity, to ask what remains if we do not imagine (with Mannheim's early mentor, Georg Lukács) that the insights to which it refers operate in the manner of a dialectical Aufhebung, but also to raise some questions about situational and psychological limits on such reflexivity.

Many of the farthest-reaching changes that took place during the Second Empire derived, directly or indirectly, from France's new railway network, and indeed the universal exhibitions could not have taken place on such a scale if it had not been for steam transport. The first French passenger line had opened under the July Monarchy, but the real expansion occurred between 1852 and 1870 in a great surge of growth that added 15,000 kilometres to the system. A line from Paris to the German border was completed in 1853 and another linked the capital with the Mediterranean during the Crimean War; by 1860 the network had reached Italy and Spain; and by the end of the Second Empire the modern pattern of the French railway was already in place. Its impact was immense. Production of iron and steel soared, and speculators made and lost fortunes as the railways transformed trade and commerce. City centres were rebuilt to accommodate stations and equipment yards, and the French landscape changed dramatically as new lines and tunnels and cuttings sliced through it.

But the railway's effects were not merely physical or financial, for the expansion of the rail network brought with it a broadening of social and mental horizons. Goods and passengers could now move from one end of the country to the other with unprecedented ease as the railways brought people and produce from different parts of the country – or indeed from different countries – together as never before.

The study of outlaw heroes provides an opportunity to observe the interplay between history and folklore that motivates many mythologies. While there is no shortage of historical outlaws who have received ongoing celebration, many cultures also include mythical equivalents. Robin Hood is the most familiar example, perhaps, but certainly not the only one. It is not difficult to locate representative specimens from traditions as widespread as those of Java, America, Ireland, Australia, Denmark, Cyprus and southern Italy. Different though the histories and cultures of these places may be, we can discern the same ambivalent dynamic between history and myth operating in the construction of their respective noble robbers, both real and fictional. In some of these examples, historical events become the subject of contemporary and subsequent mythologising, as with the celebrity criminals of Depression America. In other cases, countertraditions may evolve among opposing groups, as with the Hassanpoulia of Cyprus. In the case of ‘the little angel’ of eighteenth-century Italy, the historical details of Angelo Duca's life and crimes provide a perfect template of the outlawed hero and friend of the poor.

Outlaws of Myth

So powerful is the cultural need for outlaw heroes that the supply of historical figures has to be supplemented with those that never existed at all. Examples can be found in many cultures and from many periods.

It may seem incongruous to end this book with a chapter on ruins. The preceding chapters explored writers' responses to aspects of Second Empire France and examined the relationship between the period's social and technological innovations and its literature, but being neither new nor of recent interest, ruins hardly seem to fit this pattern. Yet each chapter has shown evidence of Second Empire writers' preoccupation with the idea of ruin in its broadest sense as they attempted to negotiate the changes taking place around them. The breakdown of order underlies many descriptions of display as writers dismantled the confident assurance of exhibition rhetoric, and that imagery of collapse is present throughout: in the recurrent evocations of disintegrating railway tracks and shattered carriages, in the frequent depiction of culinary confections destroyed not just by consumption but by acts of violence, in photographers' concern to record crumbling monuments in an attempt to preserve them from the ravages of time, and in the persistent association of fashionable costume with the idea of moral and financial ruin and social disintegration.

French writers' interest in the subject of ruins dates back at least as far as the Renaissance, when Du Bellay imported the Italian humanists' melancholy reflections on ruins into French culture. For Romantic writers, ruins had inspired sombre musings on the transience of existence and human endeavour.

Outlaw Heroes in Myth and History continues and broadens the arguments presented in my earlier book, The Outlaw Legend: A Cultural Tradition in Britain, America and Australia (1996). That was based largely on primary sources from the relevant Anglophone traditions. This present work is much broader in scope and necessarily depends on the research of other scholars from many times, places and cultures. I have needed to revisit some of the material included in The Outlaw Legend to provide necessary continuity and context to the arguments presented here, and occasionally to refine those former arguments in the light of further information and/or my own better understanding. But generally it has been possible to keep references to those figures discussed earlier to a minimum in favour of newly researched material from many other parts of the world. Readers interested in the texts and sources of the English-language ballads and other items cited briefly here will find these in more detail in The Outlaw Legend.

What more is there to say about outlaw heroes? A great deal, it turns out. While many might consider the tradition of the outlawed hero to have died out, as this book argues, it has not only endured but has evolved into viable new forms. While the archetypal outlaw of Sherwood Forest continues to proliferate media representations of all kinds, the Robin Hood principle has also embraced aspects of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, the rise of the celebrity criminal and various other Robin Hood-like activities in real and digital life.

INTRODUCTION

When the mind mistakes a false concept for a true one, and either reflects no further or continues to reflect but bases all its arguments on the false premise which it has established, anything that depends on that premise is likely to be false; and any measures that are taken on the assumption that it is true are likely to fail. This, it seems to me, is what happened in the case of Marco Antonio de Santis's Discourse on the effect of the exchange rate in the Kingdom. Having taken as a sound premise the proposition that a low exchange rate is the only cause which makes a Kingdom abound in money and a high one the only cause which makes it poor, he deployed various arguments to prove that it was true. The result was that a decree was passed to lower the exchange rate [49] in the expectation that this would make the Kingdom abound in money, as he promises at such length in his Discourse.

Since I have promised to examine his theory and the arguments that he adduces in support of it, in this second part I will not refer to the actual course of events, which has proved him wrong, but will examine from a purely logical point of view the truth of the arguments and proofs presented in the Discourse.