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Disraeli as Political Egotist: A Literary and Historical Investigation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Richard G. Weeks Jr.
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Extract

Not many statesmen of world renown have had reputations as accomplished novelists. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) was a novelist who wanted to become a politician, a great politician. He succeeded and, in so doing, challenged his biographers to make connections between his thought, as expressed in his numerous political writings and novels, and his actions, as evidenced by his career as a leading Conservative politician in Victorian England. Disraeli's novels were like masks. Whatever the story line, whatever the configuration of main characters, the ambitious Disraeli, hungry for recognition, can be found somewhere inside. His psychology, his values, his objectives all can be discovered with greater or lesser facility in his novels. The writings of Disraeli the novelist serve as an instrument to penetrate the facade of Disraeli the politician.

The political novel allows the reader to experience political constructs in context. Political tracts seldom have the power to draw their readers into a sense of intimacy with their implications for everyday life. To the extent that a novelist can generate empathy in the reader for his characters, the reader can begin to feel the outrage, despair, joy, or tediousness of a political or social circumstance. Disraeli employed the novel to good purpose to express and spread his political ideas. But these ideas represented less of a coherent political platform than an agenda of his personal reactions to the politics of his day, particularly as they related to his own political advancement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , October 1989 , pp. 387 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1989

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References

1 Biographies of Disraeli are numerous. To name but a few: Mony-penny, William Flavelle and Buckle, George Earle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, new and revised ed., 2 vols. (New York, 1929)Google Scholar; Blake, Robert, Disraeli (London, 1966)Google Scholar; Jerman, B. R., The Young Disraeli (Princeton, N.J., 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Richard W., Disraeli (Boston, 1976)Google Scholar; Maurois, André, Disraeli: A Picture of the Victorian Age (New York, 1928)Google Scholar; Roth, Cecil, Benjamin Disraeli (New York, 1952)Google Scholar; and Bradford, Sarah, Disraeli (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. The Monypenny and Buckle volumes (1,622 pages containing agreat number of excerpts from Disraeli's correspondence) and Robert Blake's analytical study continue to be essential works for an assessment of Disraeli. He wrote the following novels: Vivian Grey (1826, 1827); The Young Duke (1831); Contarini Fleming, A Psychological Romance (1832); The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833); A Year at Hartlebury, or, The Election (1834—with Sarah Disraeli); Henrietta Temple, A Love Story (1836); Venetia (1837); The Tragedy of Count Alarcos (1839); Coningsby, or. The New Generation (1844); Sybil, or, The Two Nations (1845); Tancred, or, The New Crusade (1847); Lothair (1870); Endymion (1880).

2 Mutilated diary, in Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1815–1834, ed. Gunn, J. A. W., Matthews, John, Schurman, Donald M., and Wiebe, M. G. (Toronto, 1982), p. 447Google Scholar (hereafter cited as mutilated diary, Letters: 1815–1834). The mutilated diary was found in Disraeli's papers and is so called because of heavy oversconng of certain passages and evidence of the removal of whole pages.

3 Disraeli to Lady Bradford, September 27, 1875, in The Letters of Disraeli to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford, ed. marquis of Zetland (New York, 1929), 1:372Google Scholar.

4 The Radical Tory: Disraeli's Political Development Illustrated from His Original Writings and Speeches, ed. and introduction by Edward, H. W. J. (London, 1937), pp. 53–61Google Scholar.

5 Henrietta Sykes introduced Disraeli to Lyndhurst in July 1834. Mrs. Sykes was Disraeli's mistress, and Lyndhurst's as well. Jerman, pp. 191, 230. Blake, p. 117.

6 Monypenny and Buckle, p. 336.

7 Benjamin Disraeli, “Vindication of the English Constitution,” pp. 111–232, “The Spirit of Whiggism,” pp. 327–56, both in Whigs and Whiggism: Political Writings by Benjamin Disraeli, ed. and introduction by Hutcheon, William (New York, 1914)Google Scholar.

8 Mutilated diary, Letters: 1835–1837, ed. Gunn, et al. (Toronto, 1982), pp. 339–414Google Scholar. Also in Hutcheon, , ed., Whigs and Whiggism, pp. 233–326Google Scholar.

9 Mutilated diary, Letters: 1835–1837, p. 416.

10 Benjamin and Sarah Disraeli, A Year at Hartlebury, or The Election, appendices by Ellen Henderson and John P. Matthews (Toronto, 1983). First published under the pseudonyms Cherry and Fair Star by Saunders and Otley in 1834. The two appendices, “Cherry and Fair Star” by Matthews and “New Light on Disraeli's Early Politics” by Henderson, are most informative.

11 Hartlebury (n. 1 above), p. 57.

12 See Mutilated diary, Letters: 1815–1834 (n. 2 above), pp. 389–90.

13 Hartlebury, p. 168.

14 Ibid., p. 180.

15 Ibid., p. 104. The voice is the Narrator.

16 Ibid., pp. 103–5.

17 Monypenny and Buckle (n. 1 above), p. 414.

18 Ibid., p. 512.

19 Ibid., p. 595.

20 Manners's biographer, Charles Whibley, provides a fragment of a poem submitted to Manners by Monckton Milnes, a mischievous Young England sympathizer.

Oh! flog me at the old cart's tail.

I surely should enjoy

That fine old English punishment

I witnessed when a boy!

I should not heed the mocking crowd,

I should not feel the pain,

If one old English custom

Could be brought back again!

Whibley, Charles, Lord John Manners and His Friends (Edinburgh and London, 1925), 1:171Google Scholar. For a well-developed study of the period, with attention given to Young England, see Roberts, David, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979)Google Scholar.

21 See Monypenny and Buckle, pp. 483–85; and Foot, Michael, “The Good Tory: Benjamin Disraeli,” in Debts of Honour (New York, 1980), p. 56Google Scholar.

22 Moneypenny and Buckle, p. 540.

23 Disraeli, Benjamin, “General Preface to the Collected Edition of His Novels Published in 1870, and Known as the Hughenden Edition” (London, 1900). p. xGoogle Scholar.

24 Ibid., p. xiii.

25 Disraeli, Benjamin, Coningsby, or, The New Generation, ed. Braun, Thom (New York, 1983), pp. 277–78Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., p. 262.

27 Ibid., pp. 65, 159, 260, 377.

28 Ibid., p. 371.

29 Ibid., pp. 125, 372. Disraeli has his friend Buckhurst say, “An immense triumph. The greatest triumph the Conservative Cause has had. And yet, … if any fellow were to ask me what the Conservative Cause is, I am sure I would not know what to say” (p. 283).

30 Ibid., pp. 373, 375.

31 Ibid., p. 149.

32 Ibid., p. 144.

33 Ibid., p. 379.

34 Blake, , Disraeli (n. 1 above), p. 192Google Scholar.

35 Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, introduction and notes by Kebbel, T. E. (London, 1882), 1:81Google Scholar.

36 See Disraeli, Benjamin, Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography, 3d ed. (London, 1852)Google Scholar. Disraeli took the opportunity to expand on his singular views on the relationship of Christianity and Judaism in this volume.

37 See Thom Braun's interesting discussion of Disraeli's use of Blue Book material in Sybil: Disraeli the Novelist (London, 1981)Google Scholar. Braun draws his discussion from Smith, Sheila M., “Willenhall and Wodgate: Disraeli's Use of Blue Book Evidence,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 13, no. 52 (1962): 368–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fido, Martin, “‘From His Own Observation’: Sources of Working Class Passages in Disraeli's Sybil,” Modern Language Review 72, no. 2 (1977): 268–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Disraeli, Benjamin, Sybil, or, The Two Nations, introduction by Watson, John Gillard (London, 1954), p. 31Google Scholar.

39 Ibid., pp. 24, 265.

40 Ibid., p. 40.

41 See the section on Disraeli and Carlyle in Speare, Morris Edmund, The Political Novel: Its Development in England and in America (New York, 1924)Google Scholar. Speare must be read with caution as his facts and interpretations are not always reliable.

42 Sybil, p. 60.

43 Schwarz, Daniel R., Disraeli's Fiction (New York, 1979), p. 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nils Clausson thinks Disraeli was connecting Sybil's Catholicism not with the church of Rome but with the ideals of England's past. See his “English Catholics and Roman Catholicism in Disraeli's Novels,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 33 (March 1979): 462–65Google Scholar.

44 Sybil, pp. 267–68.

45 Ibid., p. 355. Tommy was the term used for “company store” goods sold or forced on poor workers by means of a payroll deduction. On the importance of inherited traits see Tucker, Albert, “Disraeli and the Natural Aristocracy,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 28 (February 1962): 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Sybil, p. 229.

47 Ibid., p. 280 (my italics).

48 Coningsby, p. 146 (my italics).

49 Robert O'Kell, in a fascinating essay on Coningsby, sees Sybil as being less “imaginatively autobiographical” than Disraeli's earlier novels, owing to the hectic schedule Disraeli kept during the year he wrote the book. I cannot agree. See O'Kell, Robert, “Disraeli's Coningsby: Political Manifesto or Psychological Romance?” Victorian Studies (Autumn 1979), p. 77Google Scholar. For another interpretation of Disraeli's intent in developing the “two nations” theme, see Brantlinger, Patrick, The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832–1867 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Disraeli, Benjamin, Tancred, or. The New Crusade (London, 1900)Google Scholar. Richard Levine presents a positive and thorough analysis of Tancred as closely relating and concluding the theme carried forward by Coningsby and Sybil in his Benjamin Disraeli (New York, 1968)Google Scholar. For a more skeptical view, see Braun (n. 37 above); and Schwarz, Daniel R., “Progressive Dubiety: The Discontinuity of Disraeli's Political Trilogy,” Victorian Newsletter 47 (Spring 1975): 12–19Google Scholar.

51 Levine, pp. 116–34.

52 Tancred, p. 49.

53 Ibid., p. 50.

54 Ibid., pp. 54–55.

55 Ibid., pp. 123–24.

56 Ibid., pp. 149–50.

57 Ibid., p. 195.

58 Ibid., p. 227.

59 Disraeli, Bentinck (n. 36 above).

60 Tancred, pp. 290–91.

61 Ibid., pp. 303, 309, 367, 393.

62 Ibid., pp. 421–22. “Ideny that a people can govern itself. Self-government is a contradiction in terms. Whatever form a Government may assume, power must be exercised by a minority of numbers” (Disraeli, , “The Spirit of Whiggism,” in The Letters of Runnymede [London, 1836], p. 208Google Scholar).

63 Blake, , Disraeli (n. 1 above), pp. 211, 256Google Scholar.

64 Briggs, Asa, “Benjamin Disraeli and the Leap in the Dark,” in Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–1867, rev. ed. (Chicago, 1970), pp. 264–95Google Scholar. A critique of Briggs may be found in Tucker (n. 45 above), p. 11. Another view emphasizing conservative empiricism is presented in Smith, Paul, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (London, 1967)Google Scholar.

65 Lewis, Clyde J., “Theory and Expediency in the Policy of Disraeli,” Victorian Studies 4 (March 1961): 237–58Google Scholar.

66 Vincent, John, ed., Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: Journals and Memoirs of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley, 1849–1869 (New York, 1978), p. 227Google Scholar.

67 Blake, pp. 266, 278.

68 Ibid., pp. 278–84.

69 Disraeli, , Bentinck (n. 36 above), pp. 556–57Google Scholar.

70 Vincent, pp. 33, 179, 347.