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  • Disraeli's Disciple: The Scandalous Life of George Smythe, and: Benjamin Disraeli: The Novel as Political Discourse
  • Robert O'Kell (bio)
Disraeli's Disciple: The Scandalous Life of George Smythe, by Mary S. Millar; pp. xvi + 380. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006, $75.00, £48.00.
Benjamin Disraeli: The Novel as Political Discourse, by Michael Flavin; pp. viii + 221. Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2005, £50.00, £16.95 paper, $69.50, $29.95 paper.

Mary Millar's well-researched biography of George Sydney Smythe is a splendid example of what can be accomplished with intelligence, sympathy, and perseverance. The result is all the more remarkable because Benjamin Disraeli's letters to Smythe were either lost or destroyed after the latter's death, and this missing half of their correspondence would constitute half of the evidence for the discipleship upon which the work is centered. Not daunted, Millar makes good use of every other possible source, including, of course, Disraeli's novels, which contain a number of characters modeled upon Smythe's complex personality and unconventional behaviour. In the first of the Young England novels, the eponymous hero, Coningsby, captures the essence of the aristocratic idealism of Smythe's early years at Cambridge and as the member of parliament for Canterbury after 1837. The wily and compulsively conspiratorial Fakredeen in Tancred (1847) reflects in part Smythe's fondness for political intrigue and the feckless betrayals of the "double game" (195ff.) that increasingly defined his friendship with Disraeli after he accepted the position of Under Secretary of the Foreign Office in Sir Robert Peel's government in 1846. And in Endymion (1880) Waldershare retrospectively embodies the very considerable charm that Smythe exerted on virtually everyone he met in his short life.

The scandals to which Millar's title alludes were mostly sexual ones, and they stretched over the whole course of Smythe's adult life. After an intense friendship with Frederick Faber during the Cambridge years—that seemed on Faber's part, at least, to have homoerotic overtones—Smythe, at twenty-one, lost himself for a number of years in a very public, adulterous infatuation with Lady Tankerville, the earl's wife, who was fifty-eight when Smythe met her. From this he went on to dozens of other "distractions" and seductions, some deliberately rakish, others ostensibly in pursuit of matrimony, but all of them complicated by his consumptive ill-health, his large debts, and his neglect of his political duties. Smythe's father, the sixth Viscount Strangford, kept hoping that his handsome son's wit and charm would lead him not only to a brilliant political success, but also to an advantageous marriage that would rescue the family's precarious finances. Whether from a foreboding consciousness of his fate or merely a perverse diffidence, Smythe mostly resisted such suggestions. His entirely futile and pathetically half-hearted pursuit of Angela Burdett Coutts across Europe in 1844 is a case in point. He much preferred the attractions of a pretty face and sparkling wit, and on several occasions, such as the ten-day elopement with the vivacious Lady Dorothy Walpole in 1846, he entangled himself to the extent of creating public outrage at his immorality.

Among the most interesting parts of this biography is the chapter that describes Smythe's career as a journalist. Even after the parting of their ways in 1846, he continued to supply Disraeli with material for speeches but more importantly became the first aristocrat to accept a regular salary from a newspaper when he went to work in February 1848 as an editorial writer for the temporarily Conservative Morning Chronicle. The timing was fortuitous, for Smythe's knowledge of foreign affairs made him the [End Page 157] perfect person to write on events in France. He was soon on the spot in Paris as the riots escalated and King Louis Philippe was forced to abdicate. His insightful articles and graphic eyewitness reports of the mobs in the streets—obtained at great personal risk—were the most authentic accounts available to English readers. For the next several years Smythe turned to writing about domestic politics and became adept at verbal "assassinations." The...

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