Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, by Robert O’Kell

Abstract

Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, by Robert O'Kell, University of Toronto Press, 2013, xii, 595 pp. $95.00 US (cloth). Benjamin Disraeli was a phenomenally successful individual in nineteenth-century Britain. Without nobility (something he eventually gained in 1876 as Earl of Beaconsfield), and hampered by his Jewish origins colliding with the prejudices of the time, he nevertheless rose to be Prime Minster twice and, moreover, a successful novelist. He succeeded through a combination of extraordinary resilience, opportunism, risk-taking (debt almost derailed him on more than one occasion) and luck; his detractors continued to call him an adventurer throughout his career. Robert O'Kell's Disraeli: The Romance of Politics examines the relationship between Disraeli's life and writing and is the most thorough study to date of the relationship between Disraeli's political and literary careers. O'Kell's summaries of Disraeli's novels and other literary outputs are extensive, which is especially useful for the discussions of Disraeli's less well-known works. The novel as a form was helpful to Disraeli because the bedrock of its readership was the recently-enfranchised middle classes and thus Disraeli was able to get his political vision across to the public, something he achieved, O'Kell argues, with the first novel in his Young England trilogy, Coningsby (1844), which promotes an alternative Conservatism to that practiced by Robert Peel's Conservative government of 1841-46. Disraeli's vision of Conservatism comprised a kind of benign feudalism, at odds with Peel's pursuit of stability and a fiscal strategy in the face of rapid industrialization. Following the election of Peel's Conservative government and Disraeli's failure to gain ministerial office, Disraeli used the novel to present his own political philosophy, via the Young England trilogy (1844-1847). However, O'Kell argues that Disraeli was also constructing a self through his novels, as well as presenting a political alternative to Peel's creed. O'Kell further argues that Disraelian heroes in the novels undergo transformations of social identity, much as Disraeli did himself, thus underlining the relationship between the life and the literature. A number of Disraeli's early novels, for example The Young Duke (1831), feature Catholics in heroic roles. O'Kell argues that Catholicism was a cipher for Jewishness, that Disraeli used the Catholic faith, itself the subject of prejudice (Catholic Emancipation only having taken place in 1826) to explore his thoughts and feelings about Jewishness and his Jewish heritage. Subsequently, in Disraeli's political biography of 1852 Lord George Bentinck (itself a cipher for a self-justification of his own career to that point) and in Tancred, Disraeli's novel of 1847, Disraeli was confident enough, perhaps established enough, to present and advocate Judaism on its own terms, turning a negative (anti-Jewish prejudice) into a positive, primarily for the furtherance of his own political career. The fact that Tancred was written in four months demonstrates, O'Kell argues, that the work was important to Disraeli, or that, more prosaically, he needed the money, a concern which had certainly applied to some of Disraeli's earlier novels, for example Venetia (1837). …