The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli 1818-1851 (review)

The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli 1818-1851. Edited by Charles Richmond and Paul Smith (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 212 pp. $49.95

The idea that Benjamin Disraeli, parvenu and dilettante on the make, had to "self-fashion" his character, morality, and politics, is hardly new. It was the heart of the charge made against him by contemporaries--that he was a cynical, opportunistic social and political climber and trimmer. The target of this collection of relatively brief, readable essays, however, is his interior need, as a romantic young man and deracinated Jew, to define himself to himself, and the complex symbiosis between his evolving self-image and his public projection. These essays explore this deeper understanding of self-invention, one suggested by "the construction of identity" that has become a cliché of postmodern studies. The interpretations that they offer, however, are relatively restrained and unforced. Together, they mesh convincingly, providing--from the different perspectives of literary studies, political and social history, and psychology--a creative crossdisciplinary dialogue.

The focus is on the young Disraeli, and Richmond's opening essay explores the early years to establish the character of a youthful romanticism marked by an irony attributable in part to Disraeli's "status as a Jewish étranger" (37). As in most of the subsequent essays, the early novels are mined extensively for autobiographical signs. Central to the interpretation that they offer is the idea that young Disraeli made "a sustained effort to live a fiction," a kind of Wildean life imitating art, and that the novels can be seen as "a sort of workshop of the self" (41). Daniel Schwarz elaborates this theme in his examination of the first six novels, romances about young heroes, which explores, Schwarz argues, the principles around which Disraeli could structure both his own self and a political career.

Disraeli suffered an incapacitating nervous illness in his twenties. Richmond and Jerrold Post argue in the most speculative essay of this collection that the illness reveals a kind of narcissism, a deep need to be admired, plausibly the result of the coldness of his mother, as well as the more tangible anti-Semitic humiliations that he experienced at school. His demand for attention made him a dandified exhibitionist and a political role player who lacked fixed beliefs but who could master a part.

Patrick Brantlinger argues in the following essay that Disraeli's trip to the Near East, intended in part as restorative following his illness, suggested a role that could both recuperate a sense of self-worth and redirect his career--that of a romantic hybrid, both (British) orientalist and (Jewish) oriental. Todd Endelman engages this important issue of Disraeli's Jewishness directly in the most substantial essay in this collection, "A Hebrew to the End," arguing that Disraeli's sense of his own "race" was "timebound," evolving over several decades.

The last two essays, by Peter Jupp and Smith, return us to the firmer ground of Disraeli's political ideas and early political career. The sources shift from the diaries and novels to Disraeli's political writings, and especially to his Vindication of the English Constitution (London, 1835). Even though this chapter seems well removed from the kind of psychological speculation purveyed by the other essays in the collection, there are connections. Jupp sees Disraeli's interpretation of recent history as a means of justifying a role for himself in contemporary politics; Smith suggests that Disraeli's presentation of the Tory party as the truly popular party was a technique of reversal that is directly parallel to how he presented his own Sephardic Jewishness as a kind of racial superiority.

As a whole, this collection is persuasive, and marked by a creative exchange across disciplines on the central cohering issue of identity. If there is a fault line, it is between the discipline of political history and that of literary studies. Historians may continue to feel that the evidence for a...