Benjamin DisraeliReseñas

In 2015 The Guardian published a list of the 100 best novels published in English, listed in chronological order of publication. Under Covid inspired lockdown, I have taken up the challenge.
Number 11 in the list is Sybil, by Disraeli. Appropriately for a politician, the book has strong political roots. The writing is surprisingly good - more Trollope than Dickens. But while Trollope was never plot driven, this one has the hero and heroine fighting the odds to achieve their ends.
An excellent read and worthy of its place on this list.

For Benjamin Disraeli, the early years of the 1860s were ones of both excitement and frustration. Events such as the unification of Italy, the American Civil War, and the start of the wars of German unification brought upheaval and turmoil to the international scene. Such conflicts stood out in stark contrast to the torpor which characterized domestic politics in Britain, as Lord Palmerston’s government made few waves with its stance of practiced inactivity. With the Conservative Party winning by-election after by-election, the promise of a return to office seemed tantalizingly close yet frustratingly slow in arrival for Disraeli, who nonetheless patiently waited as the top of the greasy pole loomed ever closer to his reach.

This is the period detailed in the eighth volume of the Benjamin Disraeli Letters series. It contains over 900 letters written by Disraeli between 1860 and 1864 to a variety of correspondents. Addressing as they do the gamut of his social and political activities, they provide a window into Disraeli’s everyday life and his views on the myriad personalities and events of his time. Aiding in this is the meticulous editorial work of Mel Wiebe, Mary S. Millar, and Ann Robson, who carefully detail the location of each letter and its publication history, and provide extensive footnotes that supply the context of the letters and the texts of related correspondence. Over a half-dozen appendices provide supplemental materials and older documents discovered since the publication of the previous volumes, including a previously unattributed 1848 pamphlet coauthored with Lionel de Rothschild on Jewish emancipation.

The enormous amount of research and editorial effort put into assembling and presenting the letters is the key to the value of the book. With its comprehensive notation, thorough indexes, and detailed chronologies, this is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to understand Benjamin Disraeli or British politics during the 1860s. This makes it all the more regrettable that this was the last volume edited by Mel Wiebe, who in the Acknowledgments section notes his departure as the chief editor. Hopefully his successor maintained the high standards and regular output of this invaluable series, especially as it rests on the cusp of the vital years of Disraeli’s premiership.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3279286.html

This is one of the many novels of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), published in 1845, two years before he was elected to Parliament, seven years before he became Chancellor of the Exchequer for the first time and 23 years before the first of his two terms as Prime Minister of the UK. The only other British prime minister that I know published any novels was Churchill; I am fairly sure that the combined tally of all the others must be rather less than Disraeli's 16 or so.

The political sentiments of the novel are very interesting, and completely worn on its sleeve. Since the revolution of 1690, Britain has been run by the corrupt Whigs and their successors, out only to enrich themselves. The ancient and noble aristocrats, and the poor working classes, have both been exploited by the nouveaux riches and it's jolly well time that they got their act together. The working respectable poor live in horrible conditions, exploited by the Whigs and their own local bigwigs. The Catholic church (rather to my surprise) is a strong potential unifying factor, partly because the Whigs hate it but mainly just because. Egremont, noble both in blood and spirit, dares to openly state in Parliament that maybe the Chartists have a point and pays a social price. Sybil, whose father is a leader of the misguided but well-intentioned Chartists, orbits around Egremont and then it turns out - spoiler! - that she too has noble blood as well as noble sentiments. The establishment defeats the Chartists; yet nothing can ever be the same again.

The characters are paper-thin, but there's nice interplay within Egremont's own family (his stuck-up elder brother, his manipulative mother) and the political fixers Tadpole and Taper are quite good fun - as is Mr Hatton, fixer of family trees. I was also surprised by the number of memorable one-liners:

On Ireland in the eighteenth century: “to govern Ireland was only to apportion the public plunder to a corrupt senate.”

About an MP with a bee in his bonnet about foreign policy: “he had only one idea, and that was wrong.”

An old-fashioned lord harumphs: “pretending that people can be better off than they are, is radicalism and nothing else.”

Advice to a trainee lobbyist: “be ‘frank and explicit;’ that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.”

Most surprisingly, on page 415: “Resistance is useless!” (Had Douglas Adams read this?)

Not everything stands the passage of time. “Slowly delivering himself of an ejaculation, Egremont leant back in his chair.” Errrr....

I picked this up (after a long time) mainly as a result of F.R. Leavis' recommendation in The Great Tradition. My main conclusion is that I wonder what he was on, recommending this ahead of most other novels of the nineteenth century? It's entertaining for a glimpse of the political atmosphere of 1845 (with the glaring absence of Ireland), but it really isn't Great Literature.½

If you don't like politics or satires, this is not the book for you. While I am not very political myself, I like satires very much. This one uses a variation of Romeo and Juliet as a framework: Charles Egremont, newly-elected aristocratic Member of Parliament, meets and falls in love with the beautiful poor Chartist Sybil Gerard. Disraeli used little subtlety in making his point of England being "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; ... THE RICH AND THE POOR." and amidst the humor and the romance, there are strong indictments about a government that allows the terrible conditions of the working classes. The book covers the conditions of farming labourers, mill workers, miners and metalworkers - each suffers in a different way but all suffering.

I particularly liked the satire of the political hostesses & the names Disraeli used for the minor characters (such as Lord Muddlebrains, Lady Firebrace, Colonel Bosky, Mr. Hoaxem etc.). I had a little bit of familiarity with the way aristocratic women sometimes figured as political hostesses before this & so Disraeli's lampooning of them struck me as very funny, such as Lady St. Julian's belief that all that is necessary for the party to secure a Member's vote on some particular issue is to have "asked some of them to dinner, or given a ball or two to their wives and daughters! ... Losing a vote at such a critical time, when if I had had only a remote idea of what was passing through his mind, I would have even asked him to Barrowley for a couple of days."½

Sybil; or, The Two Nations isn't the greatest work of nineteenth-century literature, or even a middling one, but it has its moments. Benjamin Disraeli's Tancred; or, The New Crusade has a moment. Exactly one: when there's a two-page joke at the expense of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. What does it say about me that I actually laughed at a joke about pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory? Unfortunately, literally nothing else interesting happens in this novel. I skimmed hundreds of pages looking for something good, but it never came. I was interested to note that some characters from Sybil reappear in this book: I had known that Coningsby; or, The New Generation, Sybil, and Tancred constituted the "Young England" trilogy, but until I read Tancred I'd thought the links were just thematic. (That Tancred is the only "Young England" novel to lack a contemporary reprint should have been a clue. Whatever source led me to think that science actually had something to do with this book beyond the two-page Vestiges joke I need to hunt down and get my revenge on.)

I found this book amazing, fascinating, and irritating.
Let's get the irritating part out of the way first. I have no sympathy for the wealthy and powerful of any age and even less for the simpering Victorians -- perhaps this is a result of too many hours watching Master Piece Theater. In addition, I found the writing style of the mid 1800's ponderous compared to the current almost journalistic approach of many writers. Unlike another reviewer, I did not find Disraeli's insertion of reams of social and political commentary into the storyline a detraction. Again this is a personal bias of mine: I am an avid reader of history.

The fascinating part of Sybil is the historical context and Disraeli's narrative descriptions of life outside the Victorian Beltway. As I mentioned, I found his social and political digressions very interesting. I also found it fascinating that today's romantic novels are direct descendents of the Victorian's popular literature: something that may be common knowledge to many but was lost on me.

Lastly, Sybil amazed me because the social conflicts that so troubled Disraeli are still with us. America. One hundred and sixty-four years after Sybil was first published, the same dynamics of wealth and self-absorption that Disraeli wrote about still thrive.

Reading Sybil was time well spent.

Why don't more heads of state write novels? Actually, after reading Sybil we should be thankful that they don't, since apparently Disraeli thinks it's totally legit to interrupt the narrative for whole chapters devoted to the political and social history of England. Actually, I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would at first. When Disraeli is actually talking about things happening, he's really fairly good at it. Also, he has this dramatic device that initially annoyed me-- ending a chapter on a cliffhanger and then jumping ahead in the next chapter and filling in the resolution much later-- that I soon came to like, since I did want to know what happened next and thus kept on reading. Like Gaskell in North and South, though, Disraeli tangles with social problems that can't be solved in a novel, even a 400-page one, and so the resolution doesn't quite work. But Charles Egremont is a decent, likable protagonist (the best sort, really), and his overbearing, scheming mother was certainly fun; I wish she had had more to do. And that Sybil herself had had a character of any sort beyond "immensely virtuous", really.

1923 Coningsby or, The New Generation, by Benjamin Disraeli (read 3 May 1985) This is the only Disraeli novel I have read [so far]. It was first published in 1845. I enjoyed it. It deals with the rising ideals of the "new generation."

History of Financial Advice Collection. This was one of three guides penned anonymously by future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in 1825 to promote the Latin American mining ventures in which he and his publisher, John Murray, were invested. Something of a cut-and-paste job from company prospectuses, the pamphlet’s main contribution was political. Spooked by the prospect of action by lawyers and legislators to curb the trade in the shares of unincorporated companies at a time when the Bubble Act of 1720 was still on the statue books, An Inquiry made the case for the export of capital at the expense of domestic investment. Whereas the profits from domestic enterprises merely involved redistribution of profits from one party (e.g. canal owners) to another (railway proprietors), by foreign investment were “the interests and resources of great nations supported and expanded.” The pamphlet was a success, rapidly going through three editions, and its arguments may have contributed to the repeal of the Bubble Act later in 1825. But the mining schemes it promoted were less successful, and with prices collapsing, Disraeli and Murray made substantial losses on their speculations.