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Though virtually unread today, Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) was one of the first British historical novels. As Porter suggested in her preface to the Standard Edition (1831) of the novel, in Waverley (1814) Sir Walter Scott did her "the honour to adopt the style or class of novel of which 'Thaddeus of Warsaw' was the first:--a class which, uniting the personages of and facts of real history or biography, with a combining and illustrative machinery of the imagination, found a new species of writing in that day." Besides exerting this influence, Porter was immensely popular throughout the nineteenth century, both in Britain and in the United States. Thaddeus went through at least eighty-four nineteenth-century editions and printings, The Scottish Chiefs (1810) through roughly seventy-five. Harry E. Shaw writes that Scott superseded Porter because he "convince[d] his readers ... that a novel about the past need not simply be a collection of historical bric-a-brac and antiquated speech ...
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