Disraeli and the Politics of Fiction: Some Reconsiderations ed. by A.D. Cousins and Dani Napton (review)

Reviewed by: Disraeli and the Politics of Fiction: Some Reconsiderations ed. by A.D. Cousins and Dani Napton Nils Clausson (bio) Disraeli and the Politics of Fiction: Some Reconsiderations edited by A.D. Cousins and Dani Napton; pp. 182 Brill, 2022. $78.71 cloth. Unlike previous collections of essays on Disraeli, such as Todd Endelman and Tony Kushner's Disraeli's Jewishness (2002) and Charles Richmond and Paul Smith's The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli, 1818–1851 (1999), this collection is not focused on a single theme or topic, but rather brings together, in the words of the introduction, "multidisciplinary assessments of Disraeli by literary, historical, and political scholars" with the aim of "reconsider[ing] how Disraeli represents the political across the breadth of his writings, whether novels, pamphlets, personal and public correspondence, historical non-fiction, speeches" to "provide insight into the fascinating continuities and discontinuities among Disraeli's role as social commentator, politician, author, social aspirant, and implementer of policy" (2). This is an ambitious project, and it is a credit to the six contributors and editors that they succeed. This review focuses on four chapters that are representative of the diverse methods and aims of the authors, a decision that should not be interpreted as a ranking of the quality or importance of the chapters. [End Page 337] In chapter 1, "Disraeli's 'Autobiography,'" Robert O'Kell, author of Disraeli: The Romance of Politics (2014), examines the multiple genres of Disraeli's oeuvre—letters, novels, memoranda, biography and speeches—to argue that together they can be read as the autobiography that he never composed. "Benjamin Disraeli did not write an autobiography in the usual sense," O'Kell points out, "but all of his writings are autobiographical, both as a record of his concerns, and as an expression of fantasies that emerge from his desire for recognition and power, as well as from unresolved issues of his own sense of his identity, both private and public" (7). The strength of the essay lies in the skill with which O'Kell shows, through well-chosen examples, how the expression of these "fantasies" is detectable in virtually everything Disraeli wrote, from the early 1820s to the late 1870s. For O'Kell, the letters, which have received much less attention than his other works, are especially revealing because "the thousands of Disraeli's letters extant constitute an approximation of a traditional autobiography, for they capture a myriad of personal, social and political, as well as much of what he was thinking or saying at the time of their composition" (7–8). Disraeli's letters "provide not just a record of events, but also a continuous account of his intellectual and emotional experience, including the fantasies and imaginative constructions that are central in the formation of his sense of himself as it evolves over time" (8–9). As an early example, O'Kell quotes from an 1825 letter to the publisher John Murray about his negotiations with Sir Walter Scott and his son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, concerning the launch of a new daily newspaper in London. O'Kell perceptively comments: "Disraeli's imagination here has carried him to a bold vision, well beyond the establishment of another newspaper and into the realm of direct political power in a new vision of the Tory Party" (10). O'Kell then proceeds to offer similar analyses of the letters from the rest of Disraeli's life, including those to Lord Derby (when Disraeli was the Conservative leader in the House of Commons), to Queen Victoria (during his two premierships), to his sister Sarah until her death, and, late in life, to Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield. O'Kell intersperses his analyses of the letters with parallel discussions of the novels, speeches, and other writings to show how the same pattern of fantasies and imaginative constructions repeatedly appear in them as well. The very strength of O'Kell's thesis may also be its potential weakness. After reading O'Kell's seductively persuasive essay, I cannot help but ask the (likely unanswerable) question: Can it really be true that the riddle of the puzzling personality of the Great Victorian Sphinx has, at long last...

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