Metaphors of Political Identity: Disraeli and the Visual Rhetoric of Punch

In addition to being frequently featured in Punch’s satirical squibs, Benjamin Disraeli was the subject of their full-page cartoons for almost forty years. In all there were well over 100 of them and many used a theatrical motif to illustrate their political point. This illustrated paper examines a representative sample of these cartoons and discusses the implications of depicting Disraeli variously, but consistently, as a magician, wizard, trapeze artist, dancer, musical performer, literary character, and dramatic actor. Many of the cartoons portray him as an alien figure in English politics and a good number of them are overtly anti-Semitic. Drawing mostly on material from historical English drama, contemporary theatrical productions and popular entertainments of the day, these cartoons, perhaps as befits their satiric perspective, repeatedly suggest that Disraeli is a politician who cannot be trusted and who always has ulterior motives. These cartoons are of special interest to students and scholars of the Victorian era, for their metaphors are, in effect, rhetorical critiques of Disraeli’s performances in the political public sphere. Over the period of Disraeli’s political career—from his involvement in Young England to the leadership of the Conservative Party and his eventual climb to ‘the top of the greasy pole’, and then his great triumph at the Congress of Berlin—Punch’s humorous scepticism darkens into paranoia about what the ‘oriental wizard’ is really up to: what at first, in the 1840s, is merely the ridiculous ambition of an outsider becomes by the late 1870s a sinister threat to the British constitution. For example, ‘Young Gulliver and the Brobdingnag Minister’ (8 April 1845) suggests that Disraeli’s attacks on the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, in the 1840s ought to be seen as merely the efforts of an insignificant nuisance. But by the mid-70s, when Disraeli, as Prime Minister, had the power of a significant majority in Parliament, the satirical metaphorical representations of his identity in Punch are darker and seem to share the paranoid fears of the Liberal Opposition. ‘New Crowns for Old Ones! (Aladdin adapted)’ (15 April 1876), for example, sees Disraeli’s role in the debate over the Royal Titles Bill in 1876 as that of an eastern magician’s subversive trickery. And in 1878, as the Eastern Question became the focus of British foreign policy, Punch repeatedly aligned Disraeli’s identity with the Sphinx, thereby suggesting that his power was mysterious and his intentions sinister. Such representations raise questions about the rhetorical function of humour so directed and about the relationship between Punch and its readers.

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