Disraeli: The Romance of Politics by Robert O’Kell (review)

Over 130 years after his death, the author and statesman Benjamin Disraeli remains one of the best-known denizens of Victorian Britain. A stream of books and articles about him began to flow during his lifetime. Since 1982 the publication of his letters (by the University of Toronto Press) has transformed the stream into a flood. Is there anything left to say? Judging by Robert O’Kell’s Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, the answer is “yes.”

Scholars have tended to compartmentalize Disraeli’s facets: his fiction from his politics, the early “silver fork” novels from both the mature Young England trilogy and the last works, his political radicalism from his Toryism. O’Kell argues that Disraeli is more coherent than this, and by implication more comprehensible. He ties it all together with the man’s own psychology, beginning with Disraeli’s two competing self-images: a being innately superior to others, and an outsider in the aristocratic circles that dominated society and politics. Both images were in large part moulded by Disraeli’s Jewish heritage, and they impelled him to pursue two objectives: to be loved and recognized for his innate superiority and to gain acceptance from the aristocracy. To achieve the former, he had to be true to everything that made him superior. In the absence of money and family connections, however, he could accomplish the latter only by demonstrating extraordinary ability (in the manipulation of others, in his dress, in conversation and speeches), which could require him to dissimulate and deny his real self.

O’Kell continues that Disraeli’s attempts to resolve the tensions between these images and objectives underlie his literary and political careers. In the novels and short stories, we meet people who fit one or both images and who grapple with the same objectives. In politics, Disraeli often played one of his own brilliantly successful fictional characters, from his schemes to establish a political newspaper in 1825 to his chivalric relationship with Queen Victoria half a century later. He gradually resolved the tensions through his interpretation of Tory paternalism: his innate superiority made him a born aristocrat; as an aristocrat, he had to act in the interest of the people; this sometimes required compromises with his pure self.

Along the way, O’Kell addresses such topics as the roles of Catholicism in Disraeli’s fiction and his politics, and his habit of writing a novel after a social or political failure (often partly to help him understand and overcome whatever had just happened). Disraeli: The Romance of Politics is underpinned by a familiarity with Disraeli unseen since Robert Blake’s 1966 biography. O’Kell thoroughly knows the political writings and speeches, the published letters, and the fiction (both novels and short stories). He offers a particularly persuasive reinterpretation of Tancred, which has often been dismissed as the least satisfying of the mature novels.

For all its strengths, the book has weaknesses. The psychology can be clichéd; are sceptres and swords necessarily phallic? The terminology is sometimes off, as with the elision of aristocracy and peerage; in Disraeli’s day, peers were one part of the landowning aristocracy. There are factual errors, as when King Leopold II of Belgium is confused with his father, who was Queen Victoria’s uncle. There are far more typos than there should be, including Hughendon for Hughenden, Maunday for Maundy, and Cypress for Cyprus.

Perhaps more seriously, many of the chapters began as articles. This leads to an uneven feel. Thus, the discussion of Vivian Grey assumes a familiarity with the novel and so does not explain the twists and turns of the plot, whereas the chapter on Endymion provides a detailed summary of the story. It also leads to repetition, for example, of Isaac D’Israeli’s unsuccessful request for an official appointment for his youngest son, James, and of the same lines from the hurt letter that Disraeli sent to Sir Robert Peel when he was denied a place in the government. [End...