Disraeli's Political Trilogy and the Antinomic Structure of Imperial Desire

Abstract

Recent history provides few examples of successful careers founded on literary careers. When politicians turn to letters, they usually do so after leaving the wars to beguile the hours of retirement by constructing overly-detailed, self-aggrandizing memoirs. Benjamin Disraeli's career is unique in this respect. The son of a collector of literary curiosities who was admired by Byron, Disraeli forced his way into and thence into the House of Commons at least partly by cultivating a reputation as a somewhat unscrupulous literary figure. The notoriety which descended on him after he was revealed as the author of the roman a clef Vivian Grey, much discussed in London in the late 1820s, helped provide him with entrance to important literary and circles, although it is no doubt also true that the controversial way in which Disraeli's publisher promoted the book (it was puffed as the work of an anonymous society insider with access to the highest circles) hurt him by cementing in the minds of some influential people the feeling that he was a ruthless, untrustworthy, bounder.' Nevertheless, one token of Disraeli's modernity is the way he was able throughout his career to use publicity of any kind, whether positive or negative, to promote his own interests. Being notorious was for him simply another and sometimes more effective way of being known. Disraeli continued to write novels throughout his career, completing his last-Endymion-in 1880 after six years of service as prime minister. The publication of the three books of the so-called political trilogy of the 1840s coincided roughly with his greatest Parliamentary successes: his defeat of Peel over the Corn Law issue and his subsequent recognition as titular head of the Tory party in the Commons. This of Disraeli's rise to preeminence and his writing of the three books-Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred-by which he is chiefly known as a novelist by posterity, is, I submit, no coincidence at all but rather a demonstration of the importance of Disraeli's novels in positioning him ideologically on certain prominent questions of the 1840s. To Disraeli, novel-writing was a very expedient act of ambition which, like the artificially curled hairlock adorning his forehead and the black velvet waistcoat which he wore early in his career, set him visibly apart from the sober landed aristocrats in the Commons to whose ideological beliefs he had pledged public allegiance.