The world of lofty feelings and good manners, or Norwid’s law of inversion

Abstract

First of all, the presented article offers a novel interpretation of Lord Singleworth’s Secret in the context of Norwid’s anthropology on the one hand, and a historical and cultural background on the other. Norwid’s understanding of “cleanliness,” which was inspired in some measure by the Gospels, had interesting connections with the life circumstances of Norwid himself and the main character of his puzzling short story. The reading of Lord Singleworth’s Secret revolves around the image of a balloon flight during which the lord—according to this interpretation, not alien in Norwidology—throws a paper with “physiological content.” This scene is put in the context of other literary balloon flights, and also, due to Lord Singleworth’s eccentric behaviour, confronted with the manifestations of bizareness organized by Baudelaire’s friend Philoxène Boyer in the 19th century. So it seems that Singleworth is one ofthe most interesting weirdos of the 19th-century literature. Nonetheless, he remains one of the characters for whom we may invoke Norwid’s law of inversion—inferred in the article.