By Robert O’Kell
Disraeli: The Romance of Politics examines the relationship between
Disraeli’s novels and his political career and illuminates both in a way not
previously attempted. The central argument is that the recurring fantasy
structures of Disraeli’s novels and tales bear a striking similarity to the
imaginative shaping of his political career. Both endeavours express the same
urgencies of his life. The novels serve Disraeli as a means of exploring and
coming to terms with both public and private aspects of his identity that are
problematical, while the politics becomes a form of theatre in which the tensions
and ambivalences of his character, including those related to his Jewish
heritage, find ever more powerful expression in the roles occasioned by
ideological disputes and his struggle for power within the Conservative Party.
In analysing the novels in the
specific contexts of the crises of the political career – and vice-versa – this
interdisciplinary study redefines the imaginatively autobiographical nature of
the early fictions and provides radically new interpretations of the major novels,
Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), Tancred (1847), Lothair
(1870), and Endymion (1880), placing
all of them in the genre of what Disraeli called ‘the psychological romance.’
It also provides fresh analyses of the Young England movement, the discussions
of the Condition of England, the Corn Law debate of 1845–6, the Irish Disestablishment
crisis of 1868, and the Eastern Question in the 1870s. The latter two topics
also lead to new insight into the nature of Disraeli’s imperialism and his relationship
with Queen Victoria. These reassessments are all based on evidence drawn from
Disraeli’s own manuscripts, letters and speeches, and from parliamentary
debates, as well as the memoirs and correspondence of his contemporaries.
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