Disraeli's politics

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Volumn 37, Issue , 1987, Pages 65-85

  Smith, Paul ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84971946794     PISSN: 00804401     EISSN: 14740648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3679151     Document Type: Article

References (93)

1. C. Whibley, Lord John Manners and His Friends (2 vols., Edinburgh & London, 1925), i. 149.
2. R. Blake, Disraeli (1966), 175.
3. Diary, 12 Dec. 1880, in R.T. Davidson and W. Benham, Life of Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury, 3rd ed. (2 vols., 1891), ii. 429.
4. To W. Meynell, Sept. 1903, in W.S. Blunt, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events 1888–1914. (2 vols., 1921), ii. 71–2.
5. G. Watson, The English Ideology: Studies in the Language of Victorian Politics (1973), 130.
6. The views on race, religion, and the Jews expounded in Coningsby, Tancred, and Lord George Bentinck, and in the debates on Jewish disabilities are a prime example. Russell once praised Disraeli's tenacity in a speech on Jewish emancipation, ‘tho’ he knows that every word he says is gall and wormwood to every man who sits around and behind him' (a recollection by Gladstone, in J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (3 vols., 1903), iii. 476).
7. Perhaps Disraeli's writings did not percolate far enough through his party to cause much perturbation, if we accept his own complaint that ‘they never read … and did not understand the ideas of their own time’ (Stanley's journal, 9 Feb. 1853, in Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: Journals and Memoirs of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley 1849–1869 ed. J. Vincent (Hassocks, 1978), 96)Yet it is the life of Bentinck that Jawleyford is found reading in c. 15 of Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour.
8. Blake, 761–3, and cf. 211.
9. P. R. Ghosh, ‘Disraelian Conservatism: a Financial Approach’, English Historical Review, xcix (1984), especially 268, 293–5.
10. The maxim ‘expenditure depends on policy’ has also impressed Harold Wilson (The Governance of Britain (1976), 70).
11. Ghosh, 294, n. 2.
12. ‘General Preface to the Novels’ (1870), in the Bradenham Edition of the Novels and Tales of Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield (12 vols., 1926–7), i. xiii–xv.
13. Vivian Grey (5 vols., 1826–7), bk. I, c. 8.
14. The point is made twice by him and his sister in the jointly authored A Year at Hartlebury or the Election (2 vols., 1834, under the pseudonyms of ‘Cherry and Fair Star’): ‘In this country where the art most sedulously fostered is the art of making a connection numerous are the established means of arriving at the great result. A public school, a crack college, the turf if you are rich, are all good in their way—but to travel on the Continent is a highly esteemed mode’ (i. c. 2; cf. ii. c. 8).
15. If Disraeli told Rowton thatat Higham Hall ‘the whole drama of public school life was acted in a smaller theatre’ (Blake, 13), his longing for the real thing is strongly suggested by the Eton chapters in Coningshy: or the New Generation (3 vols., 1844), bk. I, cc. 8–11. But he convinced himself that his upbringing in his father's library had given him intellectual advantages over his more conventionally educated competitors in public life.
16. Blake, 49–50.
17. I. Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898), c. 10, ‘The Primrose Sphinx’.
18. P. Rieff, ‘Disraeli: the Chosen of History’, Commentary, xiii (1952), 22–33.
19. Sir I. Berlin, ‘Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, xxii (1970), 1–20.
20. See also C. Roth, The Earl of Beaconsfield (New York, 1952), c. 6, ‘Disraeli, Judaism and the Jews’.
21. M. C. N. Salbstein, The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain: the Question of the Admission of the Jews to Parliament, 1828–1860 (1982), c.5, ‘Benjamin Disraeli, Marrano Englishman’.
22. H. Fisch, ‘Disraeli's Hebraic Compulsions’, in Essays Presented to Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. H.J. Zimmels, J. Rabbinowitz, and I. Finestein (1967), 81–94.
23. Blake, Disraeli, 204.
24. Disraeli's Grand Tour: Benjamin Disraeli and the Holy Land 1830–31 (1982).
25. Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1815–1834, ed. J. A. W. Gunn, J. Matthews, D. M. Schurman, M. G. Wiebe (Toronto, 1982), 447.
26. Monypenny and Buckle, i. 244–5.
27. G. Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture (1971), 18–21.
28. The nature and function of romanticism in Disraeli's thought is another subject demanding a thorough treatment. The references to it in pt. I, c. 4 (‘Au “Sanctuaire de la Sensibilité”’) of what is otherwise the most extensive and searching study of Disraeli's personality and ideas, R. Maitre, Disraeli: Homme de Lettres (Paris, 1963), are unsatisfying.
29. More can be gleaned from the sensitive probing of Disraeli's mental world in C. Richmond's unpublished Oxford University M.Litt. thesis, ‘The Development of Disraeli's Conservatism 1820–1835’ (1982), which gives weight to the German influences—imbibed largely through Madame de Stael's Germany—that helped to render the ‘continental’ mind elusive to its English audience, touched as it was by Kantian and Fichtean notions of the transcendental role of the mind in the apprehension of the world. Disraeli read in translation Goethe, Heine, and Wieland (at least), and was himself admired as an author by the first two: see, e.g., Letters: 1815–1834, 192, 426, 427;.
30. Letters: 1835–1837, ed. J. A. W. Gunn, J. Matthews, D. M. Schurman, and M. G. Wiebe (Toronto, 1982), 51 & n. 20, 124.
31. J. S. Hamilton, ‘Disraeli and Heine’, Disraeli Newsletter, 2 (1977), 8. His Contarini Fleming: a Psychological Auto-Biography (4 vols., 1832) was among several English novels, including his friend Bulwer's The Disowned (1828), modelled on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (author's preface to the 1845 edition of Contarini Fleming, Bradenham Edition, iv, ix.
32. R. Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860 (Cambridge, 1980), 22).
33. On the contrast of the two concepts, see S. Collini, ‘The Idea of “Character” in Victorian Political Thought’, T.R.H.S. 5th series, xxxv (1985), 37–8, who notes the debt of the former to German romanticism. The antagonism between Disraeli and Gladstone could almost be summed up as Bildung versus ‘character’.
34. Though he invested it with uncommon panache, the process is a common one, familiar to students of the ‘dramatistic’ aspects of mental and social life. See, e.g., S. M. Lyman and M.B. Scott, The Drama of Social Reality (New York, 1975), c. 5.
35. Literary specialists have been cleverer than historians at recognising what Disraeli was doing, notably D. R. Schwarz, Disraeli's Fiction (1979), c. 1 and 151–2.
36. The artist as (in Hugo's word) magus was often the first heroic role for the romantic sensibility. The young Marx wrote romantic poetry and contemplated a career as a Dichter (S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford, 1976), 2).
37. ‘Mutilated Diary’, 1833, in Letters: 1815–1834, 447.
38. Re-creating in Hartlebury (ii. c. 2) his Red Lion speech of June 1832, Disraeli refers to his hero, Bohun, as ‘a perfect master of stage effect’, and many similar metaphors witness to his sense of the theatrical nature of politics as of life in general. He was almost certainly aware of the ambition to create a drama of national self-consciousness entertained by the German romantics, e.g. Friedrich Schlegel, the title and Spanish setting of whose tragedy, Alarcos (1802) he reproduced in his own The Tragedy of Count Alarcos in 1839.
39. Yet the capacity to involve a national audience in the dramatic projection of politics on the grandest scale was to elude him: if we follow John Vincent (Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted (Cambridge, 1967), 47), it was Gladstone who ‘created a national theatre for England as Verdi did for nineteenth-century Italy’.
40. The process may be seen as the progressive generalisation of the self-presenting individual's need to try to control the response of others to him by ‘influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate … the object of a performer is to sustain a particular definition of the situation, this representing, as it were, his claim as to what reality is’ (E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (English ed., 1969), 3, 74).
41. The second aspect is rarely well assimilated into attempts to give a systematic account of Disraeli's political ideas, but see W. Stafford, ‘Romantic Elitism in the Thought of Benjamin Disraeli’, Literature and History, vi (1980), 43–58.
42. Hartlebury, i.c. 14.
43. Letters: 1815–1834, 207.
44. The tactical considerations are well outlined in R. W. Davis, Disraeli (1976), 28–34. Disraeli's abortive start for the county in December 1832 struck a stronger Tory note.
45. Like Bohun, who ‘had too great a stake in the existing order of society to precipitate a revolution’, but ‘intended to ride the storm, if the hurricane did occur’ (Hartlebury, ii. c. 1).
46. A point well made by Blake, Disraeli, 90–1. His friend Bulwer's example no doubt influenced Disraeli's adoption of a radical posture.
47. His Wycombe address of 1 Oct. 1832 had already called on Englishmen to ‘rid yourselves of all that political jargon and factious slang of Whig and Tory’ and unite in a great national party (Letters: 1815–1834, 305).
48. The Diaries of John Bright, ed. R. A. J. Wailing (1930), 130.
49. England and France: a Cure for the Ministerial Gallomania (1832), 13, 50–1. Bohun follows the same progressive but national line. Change in the relations between the governors and the governed must occur, but ‘he thought it the duty of a great statesman only to effect that quantity of change in the country whose destiny he regulated which could be achieved with deference to its existing constitution’. He, too, meant to guide the ‘movement’ through a new party (Hartlebury, ii. c. 1).
50. Quoted in B. Mallet, Thomas George Earl of Northbrook G.C.S.L: a Memoir (1908), 33.
51. Hartlebury, ii. c. 1.
52. Apparently first heard in the speech of November 1832 at Wycombe quoted in Monypenny and Buckle, i. 219.
53. See his remarks on them to his sister, 26 May 1832, in Letters: 1815–1834, 280–1.
54. Byron to Hobhouse, 26 June 1819, in Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. L.A. Marchand, vi (1976), 166.
55. Cf. Disraeli's ‘the greatest gentleman I ever knew’ (Reminiscences, 37).
56. J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘Sir Francis Burdett and Burdettite Radicalism’, History, lxv (1980), 17–31.
57. Reminiscences, 37. He canvassed for Burdett in the 1837 Westminster by-election, in which the latter was effectively the Tory candidate. Another Radical figure describing himself as ‘a Tory of Queen Anne's reign’ with whom Disraeli later had dealings was David Urquhart (O. Anderson, A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics During the Crimean War (1967), 142, 145, 147–8).
58. Grey in 1830 had, however, provided government places for eight of his nearest relatives and friends; and it was Gladstone who remarked in 1855 that the ‘prizes’ of public life were ‘air, light, heat, electricity, meat and drink and everything else to that which meets at Brooks's’ (quoted in D. Southgate, The Passing of the Whigs 1832–1886 (1962), 201).
59. J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), 19.
60. L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: the Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), 173.
61. Cf. her ‘Eighteenth-century English Radicalism Before Wilkes’, T.R.M.S. 5th series, xxxi (1981), 1–19. Increasing Tory dependence on open constituencies was a factor in bringing closer involvement with popular opinion and participation. There was an obvious tension between encouragmment of popular ferment and the Tory belief in social subordination, and the ending after 1760 of the Tories' exclusion from power and place made their attitudes more conservative, yet there was still a significant Tory contribution to the Wilkite movement.
62. Though the reconciliation continued to be strenuously pursued in 1835, as Disraeli responded angrily to charges of ratting on a Radical past provoked by his appearance as Tory candidate for Taunton with attempts to demonstrate the congruity of the ‘primitive Toryism’ he was professing with his previous Radical gestures (Letters: 1833–1837, nos. 379, 398, 406, 409, 415, 458.
63. Monypenny and Buckle, i. 282–4).
64. B. Disraeli, Vindication of the English Constitution in a Letter to a Noble and Learned Lord (1835), c. 31.
65. Bolingbroke believed as profoundly as Disraeli in the power of superior spirits in public affairs. ‘These are they’, he wrote, ‘who engross almost the whole reason of the species; who are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve; who are designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human kind’ (The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (4 vols., 1844), ii. 352).
66. In Sybil or: The Two Nations (1845), Disraeli recognised a second exemplar in Burke, who ‘effected for the Whigs what Bolingbroke in a preceding age had done for the Tories: he restored the moral existence of the party’, suffusing their ‘ancient principles’ with ‘all the delusive splendour of his imagination’ (bk. I, c. 3).
67. To the Rev. A. Beaven, 17 Jan. 1874.
68. in Monypenny and Buckle, i. 222.
69. The language emphasises the historical cast of Disraeli's vision. The image of politicians seeking to emulate the Venetian polity and turn the king into a mere Doge went back at least to the late seventeenth century: see The Parliamentary Diary of Narcissus Luttrell 1691–1693, ed. H. Horwitz (Oxford, 1972), 10–11 (9 Nov. 1691).
70. Works, ii. 48.
71. Vindication, cc. 28–32.
72. Cf. The Crisis Examined (1834), 16: ‘The people have their passions, and it is even the duty of public men occasionally to adopt sentiments with which they do not sympathise, because the people must have leaders.’
73. Peel to Graham, 22 Dec. 1843, in C. S. Parker, Sir Robert Peel from His Private Papers (3 vols., 1891–9), iii. 425.
74. In chapter 3 of the Vindication, Disraeli had developed the notion that nations had characters like individuals, and, like individuals, ascertained by self-examination their principles for right conduct. It is significant that, as he pursued that collective self-scrutiny, he offered ‘the new generation’ a new edition of his paradigm of the individual search, Contarini Fleming (see the July 1845 preface, Bradenham Edition, iv. xi). The realisation of the individual self was continued alongside the collective quest in the trilogy: R. O'Kell, indeed, would see Coningsby as concerned less with contemporary politics than with the definition of ‘an ideal identity or role of heroic individualism’ (‘Disraeli's “Coningsby”: Political Manifesto or Psychological Romance?’, Victorian Studies, xxiii (1979), 58, 70).
75. The image of the ‘two nations’ so strongly associated with Disraeli reflects the receptivity of his mind to whatever was in the air. A character in Heine's play William Ratcliff (1822) speaks of ‘two nations ever at war, the well fed and the hungry’. In the 1840s, Lorenz von Stein was developing on the Continent the analysis of the dangers of class cleavage in modern industrial and urban society which derived largely from Hegel, and in Britain a Tory Radical like Ferrand could speak of the division of society ‘into two classes—the very rich and the very poor’ (at Manchester, 14 Dec. 1843; quoted by D. Southgate, ‘From Disraeli to Law’, in The Conservatives: a History From Their Origins to 1965, ed. Lord Butler (1977), 121).
76. For Maidstone, see Monypenny and Buckle, i. 375.
77. Letters: 1835–1837 284, n. 1.
78. Monypenny and Buckle, i, 323–4 (5 Dec. 1837).
79. Letters: 1815–1834, 447.
80. ‘On the Life and Writings of Mr. Disraeli. By His Son’; preface to I. D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature (14th ed., 3 vols., 1849), i. xxiii. In Tancred (bk. V, c. 5), Disraeli had written scathingly of Mlle. de Laurella, who ‘felt persuaded that the Jews would not be so much disliked if they were better known: that all they had to do was to imitate as closely as possible the habits and customs of the nation among whom they chanced to live’, and ‘really did believe that eventually, such was the progressive spirit of the age, a difference in religion would cease to be regarded, and that a respectable Hebrew, particularly if well dressed and well mannered, might be able to pass through society without being discovered, or at least noticed. Consummation of the destiny of the favourite people of the Creator of the universe!’.
81. Coningsby, bk. IV, c. 10.
82. H. S. Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899).
83. trans. J. Lees (2 vols., New York, 1977), i. 271.
84. Little has been done to relate Disraeli's harping on race to the growth of racial ideology in his day. Sidonia's ‘All is race; there is no other truth’ (Tancred, bk. II, c. 14) may be set beside the Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox's ‘in human history race is everything’ (The Races of Men (1850), quoted in Watson, 205). It might be argued that race and the Hebrew race provided for Disraeli the conceptual tools for the ideological transformation of a hostile environment which class and the proletariat provided for Marx.
85. Disraeli's Reminiscences, 103. Here and elsewhere, Disraeli no doubt owed something to the views of his father: see I. D'Israeli, The Genius of Judaism (2nd ed., 1833), especially 14, 211.
86. B. Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck: a Political Biography (1851), c. 24.
87. Stanley's journal, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 32–3.
88. The implication of Alroy seems to be that Jabaster's ‘national’ vision represents the true path. Blake (Disraeli's Grand Tour, 113, 131) holds, first, that it is impossible to envisage Disraeli's even dreaming of restoring the Jews to Jerusalem, then, that it is impossible to tell whether he did or not.
89. ‘England, mighty England, free England, England that surveys the seven seas, will understand us and our aspirations’: opening address to the fourth Zionist Congress, London, 13 Aug. 1900, in T. Herzl, Zionist Writings: Essays and Addresses (2 vols., New York, 1973), ii. 154.
90. Herzl put Disraeli's name first in a proposed series of literary profiles of ‘representative exponents of the Zionist idea’ for his new paper, Die Welt (15 May 1897: The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. R. Patai (5 vols., New York & Loyndon, 1960), ii. 548).
91. M. Vereté, ‘The Restoration of the Jews in English Protestant Thought 1790–1840’, Middle Eastern Studies, viii (1972), 3–50.
92. Cf. Zangwill, 386.
93. Fisch, 89–90, who argues that ‘Disraeli's imperialism takes its place alongside Marxist communism as one of the messianic religions or pseudo-religions of the nineteenth century. Both have their origins in a more or less perverted Hebraism’. Disraeli might have been intrigued to hear a prime minister of Israel declare that his people had learned from Britain ‘how to sustain a unique national character while preserving that which is precious to humanity as a whole’ (Shimon Peres to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 22 Jan. 1986: text circulated by the Information Department of the Embassy of Israel, London).