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A Dizzy Romance

On 24 November 1880, the Pall Mall Gazette carried a review of a new novel, entitled Endymion. Its author was the recently retired Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The Pall Mall Gazette could not resist drawing a comparison in its review between Disraeli and his arch-rival, Gladstone.

It is quite characteristic of the two chiefs of the great political parties that one of them should have hastened to employ his leisure after his fall from power in thunders against the Vatican. . . and that the other in the same circumstances should have betaken himself to the writing of a novel of society.

Disraeli’s ‘novel of society’ is very rarely read now. It was his last completed work of fiction, begun after the Conservative defeat of 1868, and finished after his second term as Prime Minister came to an end in the spring of 1880. Some of the reviewers were sniffy about it (one dubbed it a ‘political novel without political principles’) and some saw it as a practical joke played on opponents, but others were impressed by the energy and wit of its 76-year-old author. ‘A distinguished critic wound up an essay on Mr Disraeli’s romances three or four years ago by lamenting the degradation of a promising novelist into a Prime Minister,’ wrote the Pall Mall Gazette reviewer, as he opened his commentary. ‘Those who least admire Lord Beaconsfield’s politics will be most pleased to welcome his restoration from the lower intellectual type to the higher.’

Disraeli moved between the ‘lower intellectual’ world of politics and the ‘higher’ realm of literature throughout his career. In the 1820s and 1830s he wrote novels to make his name, to hold the bailiffs at bay and to take revenge on powerful people who snubbed him. In the 1840s, when he was excluded from government, he produced his ‘Condition of England’ trilogy, in which he used the novel form as a platform for political campai

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On 24 November 1880, the Pall Mall Gazette carried a review of a new novel, entitled Endymion. Its author was the recently retired Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The Pall Mall Gazette could not resist drawing a comparison in its review between Disraeli and his arch-rival, Gladstone.

It is quite characteristic of the two chiefs of the great political parties that one of them should have hastened to employ his leisure after his fall from power in thunders against the Vatican. . . and that the other in the same circumstances should have betaken himself to the writing of a novel of society.
Disraeli’s ‘novel of society’ is very rarely read now. It was his last completed work of fiction, begun after the Conservative defeat of 1868, and finished after his second term as Prime Minister came to an end in the spring of 1880. Some of the reviewers were sniffy about it (one dubbed it a ‘political novel without political principles’) and some saw it as a practical joke played on opponents, but others were impressed by the energy and wit of its 76-year-old author. ‘A distinguished critic wound up an essay on Mr Disraeli’s romances three or four years ago by lamenting the degradation of a promising novelist into a Prime Minister,’ wrote the Pall Mall Gazette reviewer, as he opened his commentary. ‘Those who least admire Lord Beaconsfield’s politics will be most pleased to welcome his restoration from the lower intellectual type to the higher.’ Disraeli moved between the ‘lower intellectual’ world of politics and the ‘higher’ realm of literature throughout his career. In the 1820s and 1830s he wrote novels to make his name, to hold the bailiffs at bay and to take revenge on powerful people who snubbed him. In the 1840s, when he was excluded from government, he produced his ‘Condition of England’ trilogy, in which he used the novel form as a platform for political campaigns. After the end of his first term as Prime Minister he published Lothair, a satirical account of the power of the Catholic Church in England, before rounding off his literary career with Endymion. I have spent the past six years working on a biography of Disraeli and his wife, Mary Anne, so I know his novels well, and have grown fond of them, despite – or perhaps because of – their imperfections. During the years in which I’ve read and reread those novels, it has always been Endymion that I’ve returned to with the most pleasure. It is a book which makes me laugh as well as think, in which the exuberance of its author brings its world alive. So what follows is a plea for the restoration of Endymion – perhaps not to the canon of nineteenth- century literature, but instead to the canon of books which are read for the sheer delight of reading. Endymion tells the story of Endymion and Myra Ferrars, a pair of improbably beautiful and good-natured twins, who are forced to make their own way in the world when their father loses his power and income in the aftermath of the 1832 Reform Act, which saw Tory MPs ejected from constituencies up and down the country in the first post-Reform general election. Throughout, Endymion’s story allows Disraeli to make fiction from the materials of his own political coming-of-age. The result is a novel which translates the great dramas of the nineteenth century to a human scale. The Reform Act is recounted not through the details of a parliamentary Bill, but via the effect it has on the exiled Ferrars family. ‘Their communications with the outside world’, writes Disraeli,
were slight and rare. It is difficult for us, who live in an age of railroads, telegraphs, penny posts and penny newspapers, to realize how uneventful, how limited in thought and feeling, as well as in incident, was the life of an English family of retired habits and limited means, only forty years ago.
Disraeli performs this trick throughout the novel, drawing attention to the gap between the moment of writing and the recent past in order to marvel at the advances both he and his characters have witnessed. Endymion’s ascent takes place against a backdrop of Chartism, European upheaval and what Disraeli terms the ‘humiliating disasters of Afghanistan’. He ends the novel as Prime Minister: a position he wins, like Disraeli, when the incumbent Premier is forced by illhealth to retire. The twists and turns of his career follow those of Disraeli’s at other points too, and ultimately Endymion’s story is less significant for its own sake than for the opportunity it gives his creator to contemplate the scenes of his own history. It is undeniable that creating interesting male characters is not one of Disraeli’s strong points. Endymion is a cipher, a blank on to whom the fantasies of his creator and the dreams of a series of powerful women are projected. The most intriguing of these women is Endymion’s sister Myra, a far more complex figure than her brother. After her father’s death Myra takes a job as a companion to Adriana Neuchatel, the daughter of a fabulously wealthy banking family loosely based on the Rothschilds. So universally loved does she become by the Neutchatels’ friends that she finds herself a peer to marry. As Lady Roehampton, Myra becomes a powerful Whig hostess, able to manoeuvre her brother into positions of influence and to command smart London to her drawing-room. Towards the end of the novel she is widowed in time for her to win the heart of the king of an unspecified European country who is restored to his throne in one of the novel’s many subplots. Myra thus ends the novel as a queen, adored by her king and her new subjects alike. If Endymion sounds from this summary like fluff, then that’s not entirely accidental. Disraeli wrote serious novels over the course of his career, and in Sybil, the most famous, he gave us the concept of ‘two nations’ which survives today in the speeches of both Conservative and Labour politicians. But Endymion is not meant to be serious, and it was not written to advance a particular political manifesto. It is a historical romance set in the recent past, and one of the things that makes it memorable is that it was so clearly written for the entertainment of its author as well as its readers. Reading Endymion feels a bit like being dropped into the heart of Victorian society, with one of the sharpest and funniest guides you could ever hope to meet at your elbow. The result is an insider’s account of the daily events of nineteenth-century political life which brings a lost world alive. You wouldn’t, for example, find this account of the strain general elections placed on the digestive systems of candidates in any academic history of the period:
After the luncheon came two or three more hours of what was called canvassing; then, in a state of horrible repletion, the fortunate candidate . . . had to dine with another principal citizen, with real turtle soup and gigantic turbots, entrées in the shape of volcanic curries, and rigid ceremony, sent as a compliment by a neighbouring peer.
There is fun to be had too in spotting the sketches of real people hidden in Endymion. At the time of publication newspapers printed keys to the characters so that the first readers knew exactly of whom they were reading: today the best-known figure to appear thinly disguised is Thackeray, rechristened St Barbe by Disraeli. St Barbe’s self-important pomposity shimmers through the novel, and at every stage you can sense the glee with which Disraeli caricatured his rival. On hearing that Parliament has been dissolved, for instance, St Barbe is most indignant:
The prime minister might have called on me, or at least written to me a letter . . . I have scores of letters every day, suggesting that some high distinction should be conferred on me. I believe the nation expects me to be made a baronet.
Disraeli is also not above making fun of the moments of comedy in his own career. In 1852 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in a Cabinet so undistinguished and inexperienced that it was nicknamed the ‘Who? Who?’ Cabinet, in honour of the Duke of Wellington’s incredulous response to hearing the list of appointees. In Endymion that Cabinet is mocked, and Disraeli’s own inexperience highlighted: ‘One of this band, a gentleman without any official experience whatever, was not only placed in the cabinet, but was absolutely required to become the leader of the House of Commons, which had never occurred before.’ In all his novels Disraeli never lets a plot get in the way of fantasy, and in this respect Endymion is no exception. Inconvenient husbands drop dead at the most opportune moments; exiled European monarchs are reinstated just at the point that the drama demands. If the plot requires a Protestant to become Catholic they convert with the blessing of their friends; if a poor man needs to become rich a fortune is dropped in his lap. Yet while all this adds to the pleasure of reading, and represents an act of wish-fulfilment on the part of an author who spent decades mired in debt, it also permits Disraeli to develop the novel’s central message unimpeded. Endymion makes one serious claim, for the political significance of women. Throughout the novel its female characters appear as the puppet-masters of their husbands and brothers, organizing elections, maintaining governments, brokering power-sharing deals. At the end of the novel the powerful Lady Montfort proposes to Endymion and so secures his political future: his role is merely to acquiesce to her plans. It is notable that in this romantic fantasy of a story Myra makes a resolutely unromantic and practical first marriage and then proceeds to make the best of it. ‘I did not marry for love,’ she tells her brother, ‘but love came, and I brought happiness to one who made me happy.’ It is this combination of the romantic and the rational, I think, that makes Endymion so compelling. The influence it gives to women is part of its fantasy, part of Disraeli’s determination in his final fiction to paint the world as he wished to find it: full of beauty and intrigue, rather than drab reality. In many respects the novel is a fairy story, which ends with its twin hero and heroine enthroned in majesty. But it is a fairy-tale animated by memories of the reality it disdains, and by huge affection for the world it evokes. It is not a gritty novel, but it is, undisputedly, a joyous one, and for that joy, and its peculiar quality of unromantic romance, I’ll read it again and again.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 ©Daisy Hay 2015


About the contributor

Daisy Hay’s new book, Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance, is out now. She is a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker for 2014–15, which means she is currently trying hard to think new and interesting thoughts.

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