[{"title":"British television show \u0026ldquo;Number 10\u0026rdquo; got personal with Disraeli and Gladstone","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-08-23-number-10/","date":"August 23, 2026","tags":["Disraeli","Gladstone"],"text":"British television show \"Number 10\" got personal with Disraeli and Gladstone William Ewart Gladstone ranked second, third or fourth on all five of the lists of the best prime ministers in UK history that are cataloged on Wikipedia, which includes lists compiled by The Times of London and four prominent historians. But as I noted in a blog post last year, Gladstone has never been the subject of a movie, unlike Winston Churchill, who ranks first on all of the lists, and Benjamin Disraeli, who ranks considerably lower. There is however one filmed representation of Gladstone, a fifty-minute episode of a 1983 ITV television series called \u0026ldquo;Number 10,\u0026rdquo; named for the home of the Prime Minister at Number 10 Downing Street. This month I managed to find a copy of an NTSC DVD of the series, which I’d struggled to find when I wrote that article. The show presents a character study of seven prime ministers that is unmatched by anything comparable on American television.\nThe first episode makes a solid case that Gladstone’s story is interesting enough to merit dramatic treatment. It focuses on the splashiest subject in Gladstone’s biographies, namely his habit of “night walks” on which he picked up sex workers and brought them back to Number 10 Downing Street, allegedly to reform them under the aegis of an organization called the Church Penitentiary Association of the Reclamation of Fallen Women. The $60,000 question has always been whether Gladstone, who spent time alone with these women, was really driven by altruistic motives, or whether the night walks were an elaborate cover for a simple predilection for something seamier. The episode raises that question, lets us ponder the evidence for 35 minutes, and then finally proposes its own answer: Gladstone was tortured by temptation, and was pushing that boundary, but never gave in. The show’s climax is plausibly argued. We know Gladstone to have been plagued by a hyperactive Christian conscience, marking in his diary instances of flogging himself for what can therefore rightly be known as self-abuse. The actor who plays Gladstone, Denis Quilley, looks just like the historical Gladstone, and his energetic, pompous, bombastic manner plays like a plausible read on the Grand Old Man’s demeanor. The episode is one of the best of the seven in the series, each of which covers a different prime minister.\nWhere the Gladstone episode is intriguing for the psychological study it includes, the episode dedicated to Benjamin Disraeli is fascinating for an element of psychology it excludes. The Disraeli segment is interesting in part from the standpoint of queer studies, not because it depicts him as gay but because its subject raises interesting questions for those inclined to interpret him that way. Disraeli was prime minister twice: The first time was brief, less than a year in duration, and the second time, which lasted much longer, he was in his seventies. The \u0026ldquo;Number 10\u0026rdquo; episode, entitled “Dizzy,” brings us the latter Disraeli, a septuagenarian who was nonetheless engaged in wooing two women at once. One of them, a very much married Lady Selina Bradford, received literally 1,100 letters from Disraeli. The other woman was Lady Bradford’s sister, Lady Chesterfield, to whom Disraeli proposed marriage specifically as a way of getting closer to Selina. Lady Chesterfield, who received 500 letters from Disraeli, turned him down. (Ah, but who wouldn’t have found such a proposal charming?) The letters are catalogued in a two-volume book from 1929 entitled The Letters of Disraeli to Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield. Biographer Robert Blake says these letters are among the great sources not only for Disraeli’s biography but for “the times until Disraeli’s death” in 1881. Blake’s characterization in his 1966 biography Disraeli of the prime minister as having ‘fallen head over heels in love with Lady Bradford” is interesting given that in a later book (Disraeli’s Grand Tour, his travelogue of Disraeli’s youthful trip through what the British called “the East” or “the Orient”) the same Blake says that his relationship with another woman named Henrietta Sykes was “the only real love in his life.” Blake also notes that “it is difficult to avoid the impression that, although flattered at the attention, and delighted to be ‘in the know,’ [Lady Bradford] never really cared for him much.” However, Blake does not speculate, as do Kuhn and Buckle, on just how passionate Disraeli’s attraction to Bradford was.\nStill, because Disraeli was a prominent dandy, a prototype for the aesthetes of Oscar Wilde’s day who was openly admired and emulated by the great dramatist, questions about his sexuality have always followed him. Biographer William Kuhn wrote a study of his sexuality titled The Politics of Pleasure in 2006, pointing out for example that Gladstone’s rhetoric against Disraeli sometimes flirted with accusation of homosexuality. Kuhn presents Disraeli as a man with an orientation “out of the ordinary,” recognized to some extent by some who knew him. Disraeli was a puzzle to our modern stereotypes: He was a flamboyant dresser with close platonic relationships with women and few but passionate, intense relationships with (especially younger) men; a man who famously married a much older woman for her money (but who, she said, would do it again for love). In what he described as an autobiographical novel, Contarini Fleming, Disraeli had his lead character explore a “love” relationship in his school days with a boy named Musaeus, in an anecdote so detailed and odd that historical novelist Maurice Edelman went so far as to depict it as a real event in Disraeli’s life. So, the modern reader might be initially puzzled by his ardor towards the 55-plus-year-old Lady Bradford. As early as 1920, seminal biographer George Buckle wrote that “Disraeli’s chivalrous devotion to women was independent of physical attraction and the appeal of youth … It is a most honourable feature in his composition that, in relation to women, as in his relation to the problems of life and eternity, he rejected absolutely any physical or sensuous standard, and poured out his devotion before an ideal, regardless of the ravages of care and time.” This language, were Disraeli not interpreted as gay, might be considered offensive: Fifty-five is, after all, pretty young to a 70-year-old, and “the ravages of care and time” is an extreme description of so young a woman even in Victorian times when life expectancies were much lower. But descriptions of Disraeli as interested intellectually in women but not physically stretch back further than that. The granddaughter of Disraeli’s contemporary Lady Londonderry wrote that “for Disraeli Woman was the perfect companion, and it is remarkable that the pleasure he experienced in female society was largely intellectual and often quite independent of physical attraction.” Kuhn, after quoting this, adds “That someone could have recognized this about him so close to his own generation is evidence that Disraeli’s contemporaries knew that Disraeli’s orientation to the opposite sex was out of the ordinary.”\nRichard Pasco plays Disraeli with a robust zeal that seems directly influenced by George Arliss’s Oscar-winning 1929 portrayal, though with more realism. The episode deftly juxtaposes Disraeli’s courting of Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield with the other woman in Disraeli’s life at this time: Queen Victoria, played with convincing restraint by Zena Walker. The attempt to replace Disraeli’s beloved wife Mary Anne Disraeli, who died in 1872, is depicted sensitively if somewhat puzzlingly: We never quite see what Disraeli sees in either Lady Bradford or her sister.\nThe other episodes in the \u0026ldquo;Number 10\u0026rdquo; series, all written by Terence Feely, author of a book about the personal lives of the prime ministers that bears the same title, are equally fascinating capsules in British history. Seeing Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, struggle to furnish \u0026ldquo;Number 10\u0026rdquo; because he can’t afford it is as instructive in British politics as anything in the series. That’s why there’s been three generations of Tory governments, MacDonald observes in the teleplay: No one else could afford to be prime minister. The episode on Asquith seizes on a story too little told on this side of the pond at least: the extraordinary battle with the House of Lords that was necessary to the passage of the revolutionary People’s Budget, which instituted a progressive income tax and established a safety net for the poor and elderly. Also featured are David Lloyd George, Arthur Wellesley the Duke of Wellington, and William Pitt the Younger. Nothing quite so entertainingly concise has been produced for American television on the comparable figures in US political history.\n"},{"title":"Review: The Disraeli myth is consequential but endangered, a new book shows","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-07-12-disraeli-myth/","date":"July 12, 2026","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: The Disraeli myth is consequential but endangered, a new book shows Writing about Benjamin Disraeli as an American, as I do, can be lonely. The 19th century British prime minister and 12-time novelist’s only recent appearance in the American pop consciousness came in a cameo on the animated television show “The Family Guy.” In one of the show’s famous cutaway gags Disraeli turns to the TV audience and intones dolefully “You don’t know who I am.”\nThat walk-on is mentioned by Emily Jones in the opening pages of her excellent new book The Disraeli Myth: The Making of a Conservative Tradition. But Jones cites it as evidence of Disraeli’s continued relevance and leaves out the point of the bit: Disraeli is passé. This is a lesson I also learned when I tried to sell my near mint copy of a scholarship-packed edition of Disraeli’s first novel Vivian Grey at a hip used bookstore in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. The bookstore employee offered me a quarter of its sticker price and explained, with a look of remorseful pity, “Not too many people are looking for Disraeli novels these days.” The last I knew, it was still there, marked $30, next to a copy of his novel Coningsby. A Reddit thread about 300 days ago, not by me, asked, “Why isn’t Benjamin Disraeli lionized anymore?” I, too, tried interesting the literary crowds on Reddit in the 200th anniversary of Vivian Grey and, while I received 8,000 views and several “upvotes” not one person commented on my post, unlike other posts of mine.\nJones’ book, however, makes a case that Disraeli’s influence has remained surprisingly important in British politics. If she’s right, and I think she is, then Disraeli’s 1845 Sybil, or the Two Nations, which is brilliant but politically vague and inert, is perhaps the single most influential novel of all time on politics.\nThus Jones’ book suggests indirectly that there is an enduring power in fiction that is largely unrecognized and ignored. Tom Stoppard once said that he’s always felt the worst way to change the world is to write a play. But it is because of Sybil that British politicians still identify themselves today as “One Nation Conservatives,” including recent prime ministers Boris Johnson (2019-2022), Theresa May (2016-2019) and David Cameron (2010-2016). Sybil, or The Two Nations argued that Britain had become divided into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor, and the phrase “one nation” suggests those two nations should be somehow united, though it’s rarely clear just how, either in the novel or in the rhetoric Jones lays out that followed. Jones points out Disraeli never used the term “One Nation Conservative,” or endorsed the vague mix of social reform and institutional conservatism it has implied at least since 1924, when prime minister Stanley Baldwin used the term in a speech. Hence Disraeli’s legacy is built not so much an history as on a myth.\nDisraeli started his own myth Sybil shows that the Disraeli myth was really started by Disraeli himself. Jones’ book could have outlined just how, but its focus is on the historical development of the myth in the succeeding years. The fact is that Disraeli reveled in the fact that no one could figure out where he was coming from politically. When he first emerged on the political scene in 1832 he was baffling enough to voters that he wrote a pamphlet titled “What is He?”, attempting in typically amorphous terms to answer the question that he asked in one of his novels: Was he liberal, or conservative? “Am I a Whig, or am I a Tory?”\nIn fact, he wrote a scene in Sybil in which a club full of political observers and participants react with that very question to a speech that his hero Charles Egremont has given in parliament, a speech Disraeli clearly based on one of his own speeches on a key issue of the day, the working-class Chartist’s petition for such reforms as universal suffrage at a time when only a sliver of the adult male population had the vote. Writing a novel is one way to fantasize about the ideal reactions one might receive to a speech. Here is what Disraeli fantasized in Sybil:\n“It was very remarkable speech — that of Egremont,’ said the grey-headed gentleman. ‘I wonder what he wants.’\n‘I think he must be going to turn Radical,’ said the Warwickshire peer.\n‘Why the whole speech was against radicalism,’ said Mr. Egerton.\n‘Ah, then he is going to turn Whig, I suppose.’\n‘He is ultra anti-Whig,’ said Egerton.\n‘Then what the deuce is he?’ said Mr. Berners.\n‘Not a Conservative certainly, for Lady St. Julians does nothing but abuse him.’\n‘I suppose he is crotchetty,’ suggested the Warwickshire noble.\n‘That speech of Egremont was the most really democratic speech that I ever read,’ said the grey-headed gentleman. ‘How was it listened to?’\n‘Oh! capitally,’ said Mr. Egerton. ‘He has very seldom spoken before and always slightly though well. He was listened to with mute attention; never was a better house. I should say made a great impression, though no one knew exactly what he was after.’” This passage from Sybil shows the mythic enigma of Disraeli’s politics. Disraeli voted against the petition of the Chartists, who are the main force for the so-called nation of the poor in Sybil. His great contribution in the parliamentary debate on the Charter was to suggest that although he did not “approve of the remedy suggested by the Chartists, it did not follow that they should not attempt to cure the disease complained of.” He has Egremont take the same position, and once again it’s not his support for the Chartists but the inscrutability of his position that Disraeli celebrated in Sybil:\n“’What does he mean by obtaining the results of the Charter without the intervention of its machinery?” enquired Lord Loraine …\n“He spoke throughout in an exoteric vein,” said the grey-haired gentleman, ‘and I apprehend was not very sure of his audience; but I took him to mean, indeed it was the gist of his speech, that if you wished for a time to retain your political power, you could only effect your purpose by securing for the people greater social felicity.’”\nDisraeli had a good point, surely, that to retain their goals the upper classes needed to make sacrifices, but that’s as far as Disraeli would go in Sybil to endorse the political cause of his book’s heroes Sybil and her father. In fact Egremont wins the love of Sybil on the basis of a rather tepid argument: That the people should rely on the political engagement of a young aristocratic class: “The future principle of England will not be a levelling principle; not a principle adverse to privileges, but favourable to their extension, It will seek to ensure equality, not by levelling the Few but by elevating the Many.’” It is with those uninspiring words that a climactic conversation ends between Sybil and Egremont, and by the next time they meet she has finally fallen in love with him.\nThus Sybil has always been a frustratingly inert book politically. One could argue its legacy has been simply to grant members of the conservative parties from both Britain and the USA permission to see themselves as magnanimous supporters of the poor. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, for example, described themselves as Disraelian conservatives after Robert Blake’s 1966 biography Disraeli made the subject a hot one temporarily in both countries. But the book, and the resultant myth of One Nation Conservatism, also provoked conservatives to pursue social reforms they might ordinarily have ignored.\nA revolutionary mind Still, for its time Sybil was a mightily advanced argument for a Tory to make. Disraeli biographer Paul Smith wrote, on a page cited in a footnote in Jones’ book, that Benjamin “lived in an uneasy symbiosis” with the Tories: “At once its leader and its prisoner, he could not transform its character or reshape its thinking; he could only influence and modify its outlook and course.” I’d argue it was this quality of Disraeli as prisoner to the Tory party that cemented his image as lacking in principle, despite all the thousands of pages in which he spelled out his political philosophy. That inability to be straight about his ambitions for the poor and working class meant he had to straddle two political lines, the ultra-Tory and the Radical. It didn’t help that in his first novel Vivian Grey he painted a portrait of a politician as an unscrupulous young man, trying to intrigue his way to political heights. But when communicating with friends on the Left, he could reveal flashes of subversive intent. “I am much misunderstood,” Disraeli told famous “non-conformist” preacher turned Radical politician William Johnson Fox. “My forte is revolution.”\nWe don’t know exactly when he said that, but it wasn’t the first time he’d cast himself as a revolutionary. “My mind is a revolutionary mind. It is a continental mind,” Disraeli famously confessed to a diary in his youth. To date I’m the only writer I’ve found who has suggested that this curious phraseology might have been inspired by the headmasters at Disraeli’s school who, before he dropped out, described him as a “foreign and seditious mind, incapable of acquiring the spirit of the school.” In youth as in age, Disraeli embraced the enigma of his own myth.\nContrary to the representation by some conservative historians, I’d suggest Disraeli’s revolutionary spirit persisted at least as a burning force beneath his ultra-Toryism. And it wasn’t just when talking to the Left that he bashed the Right. “While affecting to be anti-Whig,” historian John Vincent wrote of his first political novel Coningsby, “it was in reality venomously anti-Tory. By restricting true Toryism to a definition peculiar to the author, all actual Tories were placed firmly in the wrong. Coningsby may enrich the inheritance of every educated Englishman; it cannot gladden the Tory heart.” It’s easy to forget that Coningsby’s young conservative heroes advocated emphatically for a position apart from either Whig or Tory lines. Those heroes were based on the faction of the Tory party into which Disraeli had fallen, and which he led in the 1840s, “Young England.” It’s this “revolutionary” spirit in “Young England” that perhaps caused Friedrich Engels in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in Britain to characterize them as “philanthropic Tories” whose “feudal socialism” is “worth something anyhow,” despite his complaints with it:\n“The hope of ‘Young England’ is a restoration of the old ‘merry England’ with its brilliant features and its romantic feudalism. This object is of course unattainable and ridiculous, a satire upon all historic development; but the good intention, the courage to resist the existing state of things and prevalent prejudices, and to recognize the vileness of our present condition, is worth something anyhow.”\nSo how did the revolutionary instinct of Sybil translate into action when Disraeli reached the top of what he called “the greasy pole” of politics? When Disraeli finally fulfilled his childhood ambition of becoming prime minister, he was reportedly old, sick with gout and without ideas. As Jones points out, it was his home secretary, R.A. Cross, who instituted the social reforms that have become part of the legend of One Nation Conservatism: “Social legislation tackling housing, factory work, sanitation, and trade unions.” Thus a tepidly revolutionary novel led to a smattering of genuine reforms. It was these policies that became the basis for the argument that the Tory party was the true home for national reform.\nJones traces the influence of a consequential man To her credit, Jones does not write another biography of this, or any other, Disraeli. The Myth of Disraeli attempts to chart “how, why and when” Benjamin Disraeli’s reputation was “established in Britain, how it was subsequently adapted, and to what substantial uses it has been put.” She acknowledges that “since the 1960s a growing body of scholarship has sought to explode, first the ‘myth’ of Disraeli the democratizing social reformer, and second the notion of a timeless ‘One Nation’ tradition which can be seamlessly traced from Disraeli to later One Nation Conservatives.” Then she charts that myth from the years Disraeli lived to the present day. She begins by cataloguing “impressions of Disraeli” in Hollywood and elsewhere in media, and how they altered the myth. In the second chapter she explores what Randolph Churchill called “Tory Democracy,” another term flattering to Disraeli’s philosophy like “One Nation Conservatism” that emerged after his death. After the 1884-85 Reform Acts, which furthered Britain on its slow path to democracy by expanding the electorate, “there was a struggle to define terms such as ‘democracy’, ‘the democracy’ and ‘democratic government,’” Jones writes. Tory Democracy from the early 1880s “was associated with various forms of ‘progressive’ Conservatism that adopted a more flexible and relaxed approach towards increasing democratization in the political sphere.”\nLater in the book a chapter is devoted to the seemingly (as Jones points out) oxymoronic concept of “Tory Socialism.” When the implementation of democracy in Britain introduced for the first time a battle for the vote of the working man, a whole new concept of the role of each party necessarily had to emerge. Disraeli, after his death, was credited with spotting (as a sculptor spots an angel in a block of marble, the London Times remarked) the working-class Tory voter. His 1866 Reform Act, which expanded the vote beyond that which the Liberal bill had done, was credited with this. And indeed, winning the new voters to Toryism was one of Disraeli’s famously inscrutable motives for championing that bill. (It didn’t immediately work, we know, as Gladstone and the Liberal Party rode to victory just a few months after Disraeli’s bill enfranchised these new voters). In any case, it made the concept of Tory Socialism possible in succeeding decades. Naturally those who advocated this amorphous concept credited Disraeli as inspiration.\nThe third chapter, which focuses on Sybil, is the most interesting. It explores the critical reception to the book Sybil and the path it took to this strange political longevity, or as she puts it “the rise and institutionalization of historicist English literature as a discipline that could be studied along strictly historical lines.” She notes that English literature was only just beginning to be studied, and tracks the critical reception to the book. More than one quoted scholar congratulates Disraeli’s wisdom in, as Saturday Review critic Arthur Baumann wrote in 1930, “selecting the novel as the vehicle of his political principles.”\nTracing Sybil’s contribution as the most politically consequential novel of all time, as she does implicitly, is a great contribution to the literature on Disraeli. I know of only one other book that attempts to measure the impact of Sybil on actual political outcomes. That slim volume, Sheila M. Smith’s 1966 Mr. Disraeli’s Readers, reprinted several letters to Disraeli recounting their reactions to the novel. Some were from working class readers and one was from the improbably named Rev. Jonathan James Toogood, who informed the author of Sybil that his book had inspired the construction of St. Alban’s Church, “built for the poor of a crowded district in Holburn,” Smith notes. She says that this “scrap of evidence of the practical effect of a social problem novel” is “something of a find.” “It is difficult to assess how effective the social problem novels of the 1840s and early 1850s were in changing public opinion and making people act,” Smith writes.\nBy explicating the path of Sybil to the modern-day “One Nation Conservatism,” Jones provides more than a scrap of evidence, both of the real-world impact of the book and of the specific shape of Disraeli’s myth. It was Michael Foot, a liberal writing sympathetically of Disraeli in 1980, who suggested that enigmatic myth was paradoxical as it came after so much self-revelation on Disraeli’s part:\n“One irony of the situation is that we have, and have always had, a better chance of dissecting the mind of Disraeli, alien or not, than any other Prime Minister in our history. Winston Churchill is the only conceivable rival in this claim; he poured out his thoughts, in books, letters and writings of every variety in such a superabundant profusion that we may be excused for supposing that no secrets remain. But who else? … No other leading politician, let alone a Prime Minister, has left a literary treasure to compare with Disraeli’s dozen or so novels. What a wonder it would be, to press the point further, if say, Lloyd George or Charles James Fox had possessed a similar gift.”\nThe trivial side of Disraeli Sybil is of course not the only way in which Disraeli made his impact. Not all of Disraeli’s copious writings were political. In addition to his many “silver fork novels,” which attempted to tell stories first from an outsider’s and then from a partial insider’s perspective of the great world of high society in a level of detail that included the style of the silverware, his letters too were fascinating and eloquent but often devoid of political content. Disraeli’s letters were celebrated for being “trivial” by no less notable a trivialist than Oscar Wilde, in a review of the first printed edition of those epistles. And while Disraeli’s political philosophy was spelled out with great historical sweep, his interpretation of history was suspect even to conservatives. As Foot put it:\n“If the Whig interpretation of history was a caricature, the Disraeli reinterpretation was something much worse, much cruder still, which, apart from its intrinsic evil, has jeopardised the credibility of all subsequent and genuine Conservative essays in the same field. At the time when he did it, the attempt to make a Tory patron-saint-cum-prophet out of the free-thinking roué and rogue, Lord Bolingbroke, deeply and inevitably offended Victorian sentiment. How could anyone so intelligent contrive a theme so implausible?”\nOver the years mythic Disraeli’s role in the party was somewhat exaggerated by some. Jones’ prior (and first) book, titled Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914: An Intellectual History, argued that Burke did not found modern conservatism, but that the label of founder was applied to him at the turn of the 20th century. In The Disraeli Myth, Jones traces the same kind of trajectory for Disraeli. She cites Paul Smith in saying Disraeli did not play the founding role either. “He did not found modern Conservatism,” Smith wrote. “Indeed, in destroying Peel, he had retarded its main line of development, the absorption of the bourgeoisie, by some twenty years. What he did was to assist its gestation, and facilitate its achievement of some kind of modus vivendi with the working classes.”\nStill, the impact is undeniable. Sometimes One Nation Conservatives have operated in the party’s opposition, as in the era Margaret Thatcher, who spoke fleetingly in the Disraelian language of “one nation” but firmly favored Gladstonian fiscal conservatism and attacked the parliamentarians who actually called themselves One Nation Conservatives as “the wets.” More recently, those adopting the title have taken the lead. But the losses by the Tory party and the even more recent ascendence of the far right Reform UK Party have shown Disraeli’s waning influence on the right. In fact, Jones notes in her opening paragraphs that “One Nation Conservatism remains one of the most recognizable, if increasingly endangered, traditions within British political discussion and analysis.” (The emphasis is mine.)\nA tradition in danger That the tradition is endangered is a matter of consequence, too. Sybil’s inert attempt to address the problems of the poor is still nonetheless useful. The first review of Jones’ book, in The New Criterion by Simon Heffer, who sits in the House Lords, defines the One Nation tradition as “a sort of exaggerated care for the well-being of the poor.” Today’s era is increasingly being compared to Disraeli’s, with the potential for a new technological industrial revolution the near horizon that could dwarf the massive impact of the factories on the economy of his day. Heffer’s language in such a context seems frighteningly out of touch with reality. He is no fan of Disraeli’s (the piece is titled “An exalted opportunist” and favors the line that Disraeli was without principle). Whatever one thinks of the tepidness of Sybil’s or Disraeli’s government’s vaunted “care for the poor,” that quote puts in sharp relief the fact that some form of one nation conservatism is better than none at all. Hopefully Disraeli will not fade into the darkness for which the “Family Guy” sketch suggests he is destined, in which he must turn to us and admit, “You don’t know who I am.”\n—\nCorrection: An earlier version of this essay stated incorrectly that Jones’ first book Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914: An Intellectual History argued that Burke founded modern conservatism. In fact the book argues that the label of founder was inaccurately applied to Burke at the turn of the 20th century. This version has been corrected accordingly.\n"},{"title":"Woodrow Wilson, Ezra Pound and an homage to James Joyce\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eUlysses\u003c/em\u003e","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-06-17-wilson-pound-joyce/","date":"June 17, 2026","tags":["Wilson"],"text":"Woodrow Wilson, Ezra Pound and an homage to James Joyce's *Ulysses* Urbane, to comfort them, the neophyte blogger purred:\n\u0026ndash; And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Ezra Pound in The Dial from June 1922, reviewing the then-new novel Ulysses by James Joyce? A great poet on a great brother poet.\n\u0026ndash; um, what? Am I not supposed to recognize that that opening mangles the first words of Joyce’s great episode “Scylla and Charybdis” from Ulysses, in an attempt to paraphrase it?\n\u0026ndash; No, I was hoping it would be painfully obvious.\n\u0026ndash; That’s a strange way to celebrate Bloomsday.\n\u0026ndash; Meh, Bloomsday was yesterday. This is June 17 already. Back to my point. I am contemplating the words of Ezra Pound on Joyce in 1922, in which he suggests that having writers as precise with words as Joyce before Woodrow Wilson died in 1921 might have saved “America and Europe” from Wilson. In fact, he implies, from the writing of Wilson.\n\u0026ndash; From the writing of Wilson?'\n\u0026ndash; Yes. “Far be it from me…” P\u0026rsquo;ound said, “to disparage the public utility of accurate language which can be attained only from literature, and which the succinct J. Caesar, or \u0026rsquo;the lucid Macchiavelli, or the author of the Code Napoleon, or Thos. Jefferson, to cite a local example, would have in no ways despised.”\n\u0026ndash; I see. He was talking about the writing of political leaders, and its impact.\n\u0026ndash; And he happens to be naming leaders who attempted literature in other genres than political writing, like Caesar who wrote poetry or Napoleon Bonaparte who wrote a novel. That’s a recurrent subject on this blog.\n\u0026ndash; Go on.\n\u0026ndash; Then Pound says: “Of course it is too soon to know whether our present ruler”—he meant Warren G. Harding, who was president at the time—“takes an interest in these matters; we know only that the late pseudo-intellectual Wilson did not, and that the late bombastic Teddy did not, and Taft, McKinley, Cleveland, did not, and that, as far back as memory serves us no American president has ever uttered one solitary word implying the slightest interest in, or consciousness of, the need for an intellectual or literary vitality in America.\n\u0026ndash; Actually Wilson wrote an essay while a college professor called “Mere Literature” that made a similar argument, didn’t he?\n\u0026ndash; Yes. A philologist addressing a class of Wilson’s brother-in-law while the future president was a PhD candidate at John Hopkins University referred to “mere literature,” comparing literary writing unfavorably to scientific writing, and it set off the young Woodrow Wilson. He allegedly told a classmate, “I’ll get even with him!” So he wrote a highly successful book of essays arguing for an attention to style in educational writing. Which is ironic, because it’s style Pound accused Wilson of lacking. Here’s the kicker in Pound’s piece:\n“A sense of style could have saved America and Europe from Wilson; it would have been useful to our diplomats. The mot juste is of public utility. I can’t help it. I am not offering this fact as a sop to aesthetes who want all authors to be fundamentally useless. We are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate.”\n\u0026ndash; Well that’s well enough said. But, of course, Pound ended up going to Italy and supporting Mussolini, voicing support for Adolph Hitler of all people, and then being prosecuted for treason in the United States. Why are we quoting this guy again?\n\u0026ndash; It’s Bloomsday. The single day on which all 900 pages of Ulysses takes place, named for the lead character of the novel, Leopold Bloom.\n\u0026ndash; Bloomsday was yesterday.\n\u0026ndash; I have a theory about Woodrow Wilson and Ulysses.\n\u0026ndash; A theory? Like Stephen Daedalus in “Scylla and Charybdis”? Do you believe it?\n\u0026ndash; No.\n\u0026ndash; I thought not. Well let’s hear it?\n\u0026ndash; Having the world run by a writer, Woodrow Wilson, who allowed censorship of all other writers who dissented from his world war, ultimately gave way to the necessity of a new interior style of writing that acknowledged the paucity of truth in the surface layer of communication by revealing a vast teeming consciousness underneath that thought what could not be said. Hence Ulysses and Virginia Woolf and the entire modernist movement.\n\u0026ndash; That is ridiculous.\n\u0026ndash; Yes, yes, of course it is. But it feels true. It’s almost as if Wilson’s own writing style, cascading as it was with its own verbosity, squelched the vibrancy of all other writers until he died.\n\u0026ndash; Is that some kind of compliment to Wilson?\n\u0026ndash; No, it’s not a compliment. In my opinion Wilson’s style could be charming but quickly becomes wearisome. Have you ever tried to cut a Wilson speech? The sentences are long and complicated. But the fact is Wilson did directly control the words of writers who disagreed with him. His postmaster general actively banned from the mails all publications that opposed Wilson’s point of view on the war. In other words, those who used different terms than he did to talk about the war. One of these publications was written in part by John Reed, the writer famously played by Warren Beatty in the movie Reds. He wrote Wilson and tried to appeal to his generosity as a writer, “as friends of yours, and knowing how dear to you is the Anglo-Saxon tradition of intellectual freedom.” Wilson forwarded the letter to his postmaster with a message saying “These are very sincere men and I should like to please them.” But the postmaster rejected the idea they should be allowed to mail their dissent to the war and Wilson did nothing after all to stop it. Meanwhile Wilson was (as Harold Lasswell put it in 1927) the “great generalissimo on the propaganda front.” Thus in a sense one had to speak like Woodrow Wilson — making the world safe for democracy, the full propagandistic regimen — or not at all.\n\u0026ndash; But that hardly explains modernism, which began before Wilson was in office, and in Europe.\n\u0026ndash; Woolf said character changed in December 1910, which is just after Woodrow Wilson found out he was switching to politics from academia. He was elected governor of New Jersey in November 1910.\n\u0026ndash; Yeah, something tells me that is not what Woolf was talking about. George V took over from Edward VII in May of that year, that probably has more to do with it. And what does this have to do with Ezra Pound?\n\u0026ndash; In his writings in the 1920s Ezra Pound repeatedly danced around this notion that Wilson set the tenor of the times with his writing and that the world was not better for it. The footnotes of the Ezra Pound Cantos Project, a web site which annotates his poetry, says:\n“Pound had a few important grudges against Wilson: the fact that he had involved the United States in WWI too late; the rise of bureaucracy, especially passports; and the wooden official language. Pound believed that \u0026ldquo;Le style c\u0026rsquo;est l\u0026rsquo;homme\u0026rdquo; and that the character of a person is discernible in the way the person talks and writes.”\n\u0026ndash; The way a person talks and writes, maybe. But not the way the rest of the culture talks or writes. He said Wilson’s writing was wooden? What’s the source for that?\n\u0026ndash; Ezra Pound’s Letters to His Parents. The relevant page includes the following quote:\n“I intended Cantos XIV and V to give an accurate picture of the spiritual state of England in the years 1919 and following. Including Mr Wilson. They were written before the Harding Coolidge period, or I shd. have devoted a line or two to the mushiness of the former and the cant of the latter.”\n\u0026ndash; The mushiness of Wilson and the cant of Harding and Coolidge?\n\u0026ndash; Right. He goes on:\n“Coolidge writes better than Woodie, but the common sense bluff or pose can be as bad almost as the mealymouthed blah. It is more efficient, a better implement. The silliness and triviality of the murkn mind. (sic.) Woodie so conceited he didn\u0026rsquo;t feel it necessary to know anything about Europe. Cal, ditto re economics.”\n\u0026ndash; So Wilson’s writing was a mealymouthed blah to Ezra Pound.\n\u0026ndash; Right. And this is what Pound had to say about that elsewhere, in his How to Read:\n“The governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws, without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised literati. When their work goes rotten\u0026ndash;by that I do not mean when they express indecorous thoughts—but when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, ie., becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot. This is a lesson of history, and a lesson not yet half learned.”\n\u0026ndash; Well, there’s a case against your whole blog.\n\u0026ndash; Thanks.\n\u0026ndash; But Wilson was not a horrible writer. The fact that he was so successful with propaganda, getting the whole world including Germany at one point in 1919 to call for his leadership makes his writing hard to argue with.\n\u0026ndash; Yes, the editors of the Cantos Project said “Pound’s opinion diverged from that of ordinary Americans, for whom the rhetoric of Wilson’s propaganda had been very effective.” Then they quote a paper by Matthew Kibble entitled “Modernism and the Daily Mail” from the journal Literature \u0026amp; History in 2002: \u0026ldquo;Woodrow Wilson\u0026rsquo;s speeches had been hugely successful in bringing American sympathy behind the idea of entering the war; his declaration of the \u0026lsquo;Fourteen Points\u0026rsquo; which the USA was fighting to defend showed that Wilson had learnt the power of brief arresting statements from recent developments in advertising.” But the point is that he was so successful at propaganda that in a sense it controlled how people could talk.\n\u0026ndash; So after he died literature exploded. TS Elot’s The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and of course Ulysses all appeared the year after he was gone.\n\u0026ndash; You’re getting the hang of this. Correlation equals causation.\n\u0026ndash; You gave up trying to sound like Joyce in the first paragraph, by the way.\n\u0026ndash; Never really tried. Pound said it’s impossible to imitate Joyce. He wrote: “Ulysses is, presumably, as unrepeatable as Tristram Shandy; I mean you cannot duplicate it; you can\u0026rsquo;t take it as a \u0026ldquo;model,\u0026rdquo; as you could Bovary; but … it does add definitely to the international store of literary technique.”\n\u0026ndash; So did Woodrow Wilson. For better or for worse.\n"},{"title":"Review: \u003cem\u003eAngel Down\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eTo the Lighthouse\u003c/em\u003e and the communicative difficulties of World War I","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-06-07-angel-down-to-the-lighthouse/","date":"June 7, 2026","tags":["Wilson"],"text":"Review: *Angel Down*, *To the Lighthouse* and the communicative difficulties of World War I The difficulty of interpersonal communication at the turn of the century was a common subject for British literature in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. From Will and Dorothea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who drown in longing while unable to express their true feelings, to EM Forster, whose motto “Only Connect” underscored the extent to which his characters could never quite get on the same page. By the time World War I started, all Europe may have been sick from this communicative illness. A case can even be made that the war began and worsened because of this difficulty, which must have infected the network of literal royal cousins who ruled the whole continent when the archduke of Austria was suddenly murdered, and the world blundered into an intractable war. Did the era’s difficulty in expressing intent\u0026ndash;extensive protocols, the gap between diplomatic language and actual meaning\u0026ndash;contribute to the disaster? One thinks of Philip Zelikow’s case that Woodrow Wilson might have been able to strike a peace deal ending the war before the United States’ entry into the conflict had his top deputy Colonel Edward House not trusted snail mail by boat to conduct urgent diplomacy with Great Britain. By the time Wilson’s letters reached their recipients they had already been fired or decided what they thought of key diplomatic issues. Communication was not easy in those years, for both interior and exterior reasons. And after years of trench warfare the world shared a widespread trauma that made it even more difficult to be forthcoming in interpersonal communication.\nThis may be one of the reasons that literature exploded with new forms of expression during the war and after it ended: Years of bottled-up communication bubbled over in records of thought rather than spoken expression in Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses and Woolf’s 1927 To the Lighthouse, among other books. Last month’s new Pulitzer winner for fiction went to a book firmly in that line of heritage, Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down, which covers the Great War with a single run-on sentence that comprises the whole book, beginning and ending with the word “and.” It represents World War I as a seemingly never-ending conflict that to its contemporaries was like “a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped.” I just read both Angel Down and To the Lighthouse, the latter of which was just named the number four novel of all time by London’s Guardian. I was struck with the similarities between these seemingly very different depictions of the Great War and its effects. Both books convey this sense of a runaway train of contained interiority. Each can be interpreted as an extended argument for its own stylistic innovations. And implicitly both contain as a theme the difficulty of communication in this emotionally constrained time.\nA classic text on the way language changed because of the war, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, reminds us how vastly different language was before and after the war. “Indeed, the literary scene [before the war] is hard to imagine. There was no Waste Land, with its rats\u0026rsquo; alleys, dull canals, and dead men who have lost their bones: it would take four years of trench warfare to bring these to consciousness. There was no Ulysses, no Mauberley, no Cantos, no Kafka, no Proust, no Waugh, no Auden, no Huxley, no Cummings, no Women in Love or Lady Chatterley\u0026rsquo;s Lover. There was no ‘Valley of Ashes’ in The Great Gatsby. One read Hardy and Kipling and Conrad and frequented worlds of traditional moral action delineated in traditional moral language.”\nThe novels could not be more different in subject. Angel Down takes place directly on the front lines, depicting what happens when five American soldiers find a literal angel among the wreckage of No Man’s Land. It has been called a horror novel. To the Lighthouse, which could certainly have been on Fussell’s list of post-war works, by contrast shows us the quiet lives of about 15 English men and women summering on the Isle of Skye before and after the war. Not much happens; a boy wishes to take a boat to the lighthouse off the coast of their summer home and is unable to go for 10 years because the war breaks out. The novel paints a picture of a Victorian and post-Victorian temperament that was too much without words. In this case, that picture justifies the stream of consciousness style of the novel, as the characters say so little to each other that a conventional approach to dialogue and storytelling would leave a very laconic book. Instead, it unveils the thoughts of the characters as brimming with verbosity and on the brink of boiling over, because so little is stated outright.\nThe book is full of lines like the one that serves as the epigraph of this review, depicting the quietness of its protagonists: “Mrs. Ramsay sat silent,” Woolf writes at one point. “She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows, even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren\u0026rsquo;t things spoilt then? Mrs. Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them. Aren\u0026rsquo;t we more expressive thus? The moment at least seemed extraordinarily fertile.”\nOr, take this moment in which Mrs. Ramsay, who is based on Woolf’s own Victorian mother, surveys a dinner table full of 15 guests and feels as though she can see who they are beneath the little that they express directly:\n“It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort, like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. So she saw them; she heard them; but whatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held together; for whereas in active life she would be netting and separating one thing from another; she would be saying she liked the Waverley novels or had not read them; she would be urging herself for-ward; now she said nothing. For the moment she hung suspended.”\nAngel Down wields commas the way Woolf wields those semi-colons. The more recent book furthers modernism’s exploration of this damaged moment in radical formal terms. Like the film 1917 which depicted trench warfare in one long take, Angel Down uses its one long sentence to depict the endlessness of the war. Fussell depicted the same thing by quoting Great War veteran and poet Edmund Blunden, who wrote of the Somme battle of July 1916, \u0026ldquo;By the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning.” That’s Angel Down all over.\nIn Angel Down the difficulty of communication is not the major theme, but is implicit, and the torrent of thoughts that express so much that are not expressed in dialogue is in part the offspring of Woolf’s approach. The difficulty of communication, the dominance of the unspoken, is shown in “Angel Down” too as each of the five soldiers carrying the angel back to camp react differently to the brush with the celestial. Most of them turn out quietly to be interpreting the angel as someone from their own lives whom they have lost or are otherwise obsessed with. This is like something out of Woolf, if more dramatic: everyone leaves their true selves at a hidden level and it takes the angel to uncover the truth.\nMeanwhile, Kraus’ book is full of black humor, and when it isn’t black humor it’s a black sensibility. Fussell says black humor was born in World War I. \u0026ldquo;The more revolting it was,” he quotes WWI-era writer Philip Gibbs as saying, \u0026ldquo;the more\u0026hellip; [people] shouted with laughter. It was \u0026hellip; the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise.”\nThis line about the beast instinct even seems directly echoed in the epigraph that leads Kraus’ Angel Down. “But they are hideous creatures— degraded beasts of a lower order. How could you speak the language of beasts?” The quote is from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Son of Tarzan, references to which are spread throughout Angel Down because Burroughs is being read by two of the main characters in the trenches. The adoption of this adventure novel for the epigraph, rather than some weightier citation, suits the book, which dares to be a genre novel even as it handles higher questions in rich and sparklingly original prose. It isn’t giving away too much to say that sections of the final sequences read almost more like a Harry Potter book than a modernist classic, as the climax dips into a supernatural fantasy reminiscent of Harry’s battles against Voldemort. The amazing thing is that it works, largely because it segues back to a higher tone so swiftly. One is reminded that TS Eliot began his masterpiece on World War I, The Waste Land, with an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness,” specifically, of all (now-)hackneyed things, “the horror! The horror!” It was Pound who said “I doubt if Conrad is weighty enough to stand the citation,” leading Eliot to switch to a line from “The Satyricon.” The weight of the citation in Angel Down is defiantly right for the beastly content*.*\nThe communicative illness depicted in both books, as I noted, started before World War I. Virginia Woolf said in 1924 that human character changed in December 1910, seven months after George V took over from Edward VII in Britain. What Woolf meant when she said character changed in 1910, said James Wood in his essay “Virginia Woolf’s Mysticism,” was that “Character, to the Edwardians, was everything that could be described, to her generation it was everything that could not be described. The Edwardians blunted character, she felt, by stubbing it into things\u0026ndash;clothes, politics, income, houses, relatives. She wanted to sharpen character into the invisible.” This invisibility Woolf would develop more specifically in The Waves, which omits more information about characters’ details, incomes, houses, politics. But the invisibility shows up in To the Lighthouse too, as the novel is about what is not said—what is invisible—more than what is said.\nIn this way the book makes its case for its own style. It does this largely through the figure of the painter Lily Briscoe, who paints in a modernist style that is based on Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell’s post-impressionism. Lily struggles to capture a stylistically radical vision on the canvas in the same way Woolf struggled to capture it on the page. Susan Dick, who transcribed the first draft of To the Lighthouse, has said that it gives \u0026ldquo;the impression that at times [Woolf’s] mind was working more swiftly than her pen and that she was able only to jot down fragments of her thoughts before these were crowded out by others.” Lily Briscoe has the same trouble getting her thoughts on the canvas while painting. Lily describes that difficulty in the passage that leads up to the epigraph that began these reflections:\n“She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment\u0026rsquo;s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself - struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: \u0026lsquo;But this is what I see; this is what I see, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then, too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own in-adequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs. Ramsay\u0026rsquo;s knee and say to her - but what could one say to her? \u0026lsquo;I\u0026rsquo;m in love with you\u0026rsquo;? No, that was not true. I\u0026rsquo;m in love with this all\u0026rsquo;, waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children? It was absurd, it was impossible. One could not say what one meant. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box, side by side, and said to William Bankes: \u0026lsquo;It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,’ she said.”\nThis leaves us where we began, in a struggle to communicate what can’t be communicated verbally. Both To the Lighthouse and Angel Down do impressive work exposing the interior thought that Woolf shows to be such a struggle to get on the page or canvas. They both get to the heart of the communicative sickness endemic to the era surrounding World War I.\n"},{"title":"Edward Bulwer-Lytton\u0026rsquo;s ideational evolution","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-05-06-bulwer-lytton-ideational-evolution/","date":"May 6, 2026","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Edward Bulwer-Lytton's ideational evolution Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who hated to have fun poked at him, has been the subject of jokes and satire for almost 200 years. A prolific novelist in the 19th century whose sales challenged those of his friend Charles Dickens and who was also a member of Parliament and served as Colonial Secretary, he is mostly forgotten today. Everywhere, that is, except this blog, where he has made repeated appearances, and the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a bad writing competition named for him because he once started a novel with the infamous words “It was a dark and stormy night.” The contest ran for 42 years until last year, when it closed because it took too much work to administer. The famous line has more than once been cited in a “Jeopardy!” question and made immortal by Snoopy, who recurrently begins his own writing attempts with that opening. In his own day, some of the fun poked at Bulwer-Lytton came after he extended his already overlong name from Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer to Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton. (His mother had asked him to adopt her maiden name upon her death, and as an unusually devoted son he consented by appending the second instance of “Lytton.”) William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the 1848 novel Vanity Fair, mocked him by naming a character “E.L.B.L.” in a satirical novel, and even went as far in a letter to a Mrs. Bryan Walker Procter to refer to him as “E. L. B. L. B B. L L. B B L B L B L B B.” The initials ran all the way to the end of the margin of the letter and continued on the back side (Harden 200).* Benjamin Disraeli also parodied his friend’s name confusions in the novel Endymion by inventing a character named Bertie Tremaine with a brother inexplicably named Tremaine Bertie, teasing Bulwer-Lytton and his own brother, a successful parliamentarian who retained the surname Bulwer but did not feel the need to append the maiden name Lytton. Disraeli’s novel was also one of the instances in which Bulwer-Lytton was mocked for one of the most interesting things about him: his malleable politics. Both Bertie and Bulwer-Lytton began their careers as left-wing “Radicals” and ended up as ambiguous conservatives in Parliament. The story of Bulwer-Lytton’s transition is not just comedy, but also an interesting tale that is right up the proverbial alley for this blog, which chronicles “ideational evolutions” for multiple figures in history and for the history of ideas itself. Bulwer-Lytton’s evolution is particularly interesting for these purposes because of his influence on the future prime minister Disraeli, and subsequently Disraeli’s impact on him.\nDisraeli\u0026rsquo;s satire of Bulwer-Lytton in Endymion is as good a place as any to begin looking at Bulwer-Lytton\u0026rsquo;s political inconsistency. Bertie Tremaine is always trying to get into Parliament and failing. This is most likely an allusion to the decade Bulwer-Lytton spent out of Parliament in between stints in the House of Commons, during which he was always trying to get back in. It was during that gap that he changed from a liberal to a Tory. Bulwer-Lytton’s first stint in the Commons came between 1831 and 1841, during which he was a Radical. Bertie Tremaine was also a left-wing follower of progressive Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. Both supported the famous progressive 1832 Reform Act, which expanded the electorate by 50 percent and did away with many of the so-called “rotten boroughs” in which depopulated areas were disproportionately represented in Parliament and controlled by wealthy patrons. Later both Bertie and Bulwer exhibited late-career conservatism. The joke in the novel is that like Bulwer-Lytton, while Bertie Tremaine advances advanced liberal arguments in the media, he is privately a conservative landowner who supports protectionism. Once Bertie finally gets into Parliament, he spends his time quixotically trying to build a third party, promising everyone cabinet positions in the government he expects to form when his non-existent party becomes the majority. This is a satire of Bulwer-Lytton’s independence, which perhaps baffled Disraeli the way Bertie’s baffled the title character of Endymion:\n\u0026ldquo;’What Bertie Tremaine will end in,’ Endymion would sometimes say, ‘perplexes me. Had there been no revolution in 1832, and he had entered parliament for his family borough, I think he must by this time have been a minister. Such tenacity of purpose could scarcely fail. But he has had to say and do so many odd things, first to get into parliament, and secondly to keep there, that his future now is not so clear. When I first knew him, he was a Benthamite; at present, I sometimes seem to foresee that he will end by being the leader of the Protectionists and the Protestants’\u0026rdquo; (Endymion 413).\nAll of this is Bulwer Lytton all over, and multiple scholars have suggested the character was based on him. (Braun 144, Mitchell 105). Endymion was published in 1880, after Bulwer-Lytton’s death. So his friend was safe to poke gentle fun at. He would probably not have done so whilst he lived.\nRadical beginnings The pair went way back, and it was probably Bulwer-Lytton’s radicalism that influenced Disraeli to try out independence when he first stood for a parliamentary seat. After Bulwer-Lytton became a member as a Radical in 1831, amid the hullaballoo of the Reform Act debate, he tried to help Disraeli join him. Bulwer-Lytton got Disraeli letters of support from more than one of Britain’s leading Radicals, even though they knew almost nothing of this young middle-class novelist (Monypenny I:216). Robert Blake, author of the seminal 1966 biography Disraeli, calls Bulwer-Lytton Disraeli’s “exemplar” as a dual political and literary figure. (Blake 86). Paul Smith agrees: “His friend Bulwer’s example no doubt influenced Disraeli’s adoption of a radical posture” (Smith 76). In Maurice Edelman’s novel Disraeli in Love, it is Bulwer-Lytton who schools Dizzy on liberalism, taking him on a tour of poor neighborhoods and advocating what we now think of as left-leaning policies (Edelman 45-55).\nBulwer-Lytton’s influence may account for the reason Disraeli became so bitter towards the Whigs, first in his 1832 bid for a parliamentary seat in Wycombe, and ultimately as part of the political philosophy expressed in his most famous political novels, Coningsby and Sybil. Initially, Biographer RW Davis wrote, Disraeli could just as easily have been a Whig as a Radical or Tory, as in his earliest days he mocked all parties. (Davis 27). As late as 1831, in Disraeli’s novel The Young Duke he asked “Am I a Whig or a Tory? I forget.” In fact, Disraeli says the Whigs vetted him as a potential candidate before this first election in 1832. By February 18 of that year, however, he had stingingly rejected the effort. “I am still a Reformer,” he wrote his sister Sarah, “but shall destroy the foreign policy of the [Whig Prime Minister Earl] Grey faction. They seem firmly fixed at home, although a storm is without doubt brewing abroad.” Disraeli said an opening in Wycombe was set to be created if that area’s representative was made a member of the House of Lords, as was rumored to be in the offing. “He called upon me, and said that Lord John [Russell, a top Whig] often asked how I was getting on at Wycombe. He fished as to whether I should support them. I answered, they had one claim upon my support; they needed it, and no more.” (Correspondence 3). The Whigs ended up picking the prime minister’s own son to oppose the young Disraeli in that, his first election. He would not go on to win.\nThe remark about the Whigs needing him and not the other way around is surprisingly bitter given Disraeli’s earlier open-mindedness about party. If we seek for an answer as to why, it makes sense to look at why his more comfortably liberal “exemplar” Edward Bulwer-Lytton was not a Whig himself. Bulwer-Lytton’s biographer Leslie Mitchell gives a wonderfully tart analysis of this question:\n“It was clear that the young Lytton could not be a Tory. He could not be a Whig either, but the reasons for this are more complicated. After all, he and the Whigs had much in common. Led by the greatest aristocrats, Whigs had a profound sense of caste and a contempt for the pretensions of new money. Metropolitan, cosmopolitan and well-read, they took intellectual life seriously and patronised artists. There was much in this list with which Lytton could identify. Not surprisingly, his description of Whig grandees in his early novels is almost admiring. The novice parliamentarian praised the Whig leader, Lord Grey, and hailed him as a liberator: If to enforce those ends, the Hour Hath sceptered Liberty with Power, May we not hope from thee for more Than Might ere gave to Right before? He dined with Whigs, dedicated books to them, and went frequently to Holland House, the Mecca of the creed. More prosaically, for much of his early career, he was not above soliciting some distinction from the Whigs, through Dr Parr in 1820 and Lord Melbourne in 1837. Much of the time he found their company congenial. They were, after all, well-read men with aristocratic attitudes, like himself. They had a range that few Tories could match. In spite of this, however, Lytton was never a Whig, and his reasons for never enlisting under their banner were cogent. Quite simply, the Whig sense of caste was theoretically admirable, but not if it was so rigidly defined as to exclude the Lyttons. For a man like Lytton, who bristled with pride of ancestry, it was galling to be told that his family were neither rich enough or distinguished enough to stand among the Whig leadership. The place they were offered was that of a faithful lieutenant. … In the Whig world precedence was decided by name, birth and wealth. Those who lacked any or all these qualifications could only advance by showing unquestioning obedience. Men who claimed the right to follow an independent line should look elsewhere. It was not enough only occasional to vote with the Whig governments of these years. More consistent loyalty was required. Lytton, however, confided to his journal that ‘I will not be a subordinate’” (Mitchell 178-179).\nIf Bulwer-Lytton was knocked out of running for Whig leadership because of name, birth or wealth, Disraeli was even more firmly out of the question. Before he met Edward, Disraeli did not move in aristocratic circles at all. His father Isaac D’Israeli was well-connected in the literary world, knowing as he did figures like Lord Byron and William Godwin. But when the younger Disraeli wrote a book titled The Young Duke, Isaac snorted, “What does Ben know of dukes?” Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who conducted a possibly platonic affair with Lord Melbourne’s wife Caroline Lamb, was his conduit to society, such as it was. The circles Bulwer-Lytton moved in were somewhat limited by Lamb’s influence, Mitchell says, as she introduced him around to artistically-inclined outcasts (Mitchell 15). But to Disraeli that was an entrée into the Great World.\nHe was almost Disraeli’s only male friend. “I have not gained much in conversation with men,” Disraeli wrote at one point. “Bulwer is one of the few with whom my intellect comes into collision with benefit. He is full of thought, and views at once original and just.” Blake adds to this quote that “The two friends, as radical young men often do, sought consolation for the hostility of the respectable world in a sense of mutual rebellion against mediocrity and stuffiness, a semi-conspiratorial alliance against the dull and the conventional” (Blake 85).\nConservative conversion However, when Disraeli finally made the House of Commons after several attempts, it was as a Tory. Bulwer-Lytton lost his seat in Parliament in 1841. He had spent ten years as a liberal in the Commons. He embarked then on those 10 years in the political wilderness. He asked both Tories and Whigs for help getting back in. And when Bulwer-Lytton finally rejoined Parliament, from 1851 to 1866, it was as a conservative. How did he make the switch?\nIn part his transition to conservatism was driven by the fact that when Bulwer-Lytton\u0026rsquo;s mother died, she had left him her vast estate. He was a landed aristocrat with agricultural tenants. His support of the Corn Laws—tariffs which attempted to protect farmers from foreign producers but which were opposed by “Free Trade” Whigs and Radicals\u0026ndash;now became an insuperable barrier with the Whigs, though at first Mitchell says Bulwer-Lytton seemed not to understand that. He had always spoken in language conciliatory toward the Corn Laws, even before his acquisition of Knebworth, his mother’s estate. But afterwards it became personal. “His correspondence of 1850-51 chronicled agricultural distress,” Mitchell notes. “His own estates at Knebworth produced little income, and all around him there were \u0026lsquo;farmers breaking in all directions\u0026rsquo;. He had two farms without tenants, and those that were worked were a drain on resources. They were \u0026lsquo;more ruinous even than children\u0026rsquo;” (Mitchell 193).\nBut it was also Disraeli’s friendship that caused the switch, writes Bulwer-Lytton’s grandson, identified only as “the Earl of Lytton” in a two-part biography of Edward:\n“The other circumstance which contributed to his political conversion was his increasing friendship with Disraeli. They had corresponded for some years at fitful intervals, but only about literary subjects. About this time they began to find a new common interest in politics. On August 3, 1850, Bulwer-Lytton invited Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli to stay with him at Knebworth\n‘I don\u0026rsquo;t think the wonder-monger,’ he said, ‘will find much to cavil at in our conjunction. After all, I am a Protectionist\u0026ndash;and authorship is neutral ground.\u0026quot; The invitation was accepted, and during this visit the foundations were laid of a political friendship firmer and more intimate than the literary friendship which had preceded it. Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s political opinions afforded Bulwer-Lytton a convenient bridge from the Liberal to the Conservative party. This brilliant and eccentric man was a very different type of politician from the Tory leaders who were the objects of Bulwer-Lytton\u0026rsquo;s scorn when he first entered Parliament; and the two friends soon found that they had much in common. Protectionist opinions were by no means the only bond of sympathy between them. Both were men of strong imagination, which in each of them produced high notions of national honour and marked imperial instincts. To both the insular prejudices of the Cobdenite school were equally repugnant, and to both the prospect of uniting the country gentlemen and the artisans of the great industrial towns in a common attack upon the middle class manufacturers, and the exclusive Whig aristocracy who now composed the Liberal party, was equally attractive. Both were imperialists and reformers at heart; and the Tory Democracy created by Disraeli was just such a policy as his friend could conscientiously support.” (Earl of Lytton 162).\nIt was that support of opposition to “Cobdenite” principles—that is, the anti-tariff, free trade politics of Radical Richard Cobden—that the elder Disraeli eventually satirized in Endymion. His stand-in for Bulwer-Lytton, Bertie Tremaine, referred to his supposed third party as “The Mountain,” after the radicals who sat at the top of the risers in the Chamber of Deputies in France during the French Revolutionary period. Disraeli’s stand-in for Cobden was Job Thornberry, and Bertie Tremaine made efforts to get Thornberry to sit with his group of supposed Radicals on “the Mountain.” But the joke was, Tremaine’s values as a landed proprietor kept him from true, “total and immediate” radicalism.\n“Job Thornberry took his seat below the gangway, on the opposition side, and on the floor of the House. Mr. Bertie Tremaine had sent his brother, Mr. Tremaine Bertie, to look after this new star, who he was anxious should ascend the Mountain; but Job Thornberry wishing to know whether the Mountain were going for ‘total and immediate,’ and not obtaining a sufficiently distinct reply, declined the proffered intimation. Mr. Bertie Tremaine, being a landed proprietor as well as leader of the Mountain, was too much devoted to the right of labour to sanction such middle-class madness” (Endymion344).\nHere Disraeli is satirizing Bulwer-Lytton’s alleged allegiance with the working class over the industrialists’ middle class. Still, as Disraeli parodies Bulwer-Lytton’s politics he is also satirizing himself. He built a political philosophy that encouraged the Radicals to unite with the Tories and form a “national party.”\nDisraeli pushed Bulwer-Lytton to the right in the 1840s and 1850s, just as Bulwer-Lytton had pushed Disraeli to the Left a generation before. For all his insistence on the Corn Laws being reintroduced, Bulwer-Lytton would probably not have been attracted to the Tory party had he not perceived an “in” in Disraeli. Their rhetoric became more alike. In 1848, Bulwer-Lytton sounded suspiciously like Disraeli when he wrote: “A Republic is cheap, but if ever that hour arrives it shall not be, if I and a few like me live, a Republic of millers and cotton spinners, but either a Republic of gentlemen or a Republic of workmen\u0026ndash;either is better than those wretched money spiders, who would sell England for 1s. 6d.” That is, for one shilling and sixpence. (Earl of Lytton 165). This evocative quote shows that once Bulwer-Lytton began edging toward the Tory Party he was capable of sounding more like Disraeli than Disraeli ever did.\nNote *- The initials are reproduced here just as they are in Harden’s printing of the letter, including the periods. Biographer Leslie Mitchell misattributes the initials to Thackeray’s satire “George de Barnwell,” but correctly identifies in the footnotes the page of the Thackeray letters that contain this delicious detail.\n"},{"title":"I Did Not Mean It: Gladstone, Homer and a Second Chance at Providence","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-04-14-gladstone-homer-providence/","date":"April 14, 2026","tags":["Gladstone"],"text":"I Did Not Mean It: Gladstone, Homer and a Second Chance at Providence  (Or, as Emily Wilson’s recent translation more simply put it, “This is absurd, that mortals blame the gods. They say we cause their suffering, but they themselves increase it by folly.”)\nMy last piece on William Ewart Gladstone explored the earthly reasons he went to Corfu and changed parties in 1858-59. This time I’m exploring Gladstone’s views of potential celestial reasons that these things happened to him: Providence, fate, destiny, predestination, free will and progress.\nFor just before Gladstone left for Corfu, which I argue in the last essay led to his changing parties, he had written a 1,600-page, three-volume book called Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, in which he analyzed at length his and Homer’s views of those concepts. My operating theory is that Gladstone would have had these ideas bouncing around his mind as he toured what he believed to be the site of Odysseus’ storytelling to the Phaeacians, while contemplating both his own, then-frustrated and isolated fate in the world and the fate of an Ionian people demanding it be reunited with what it saw as its homeland. The questions dove-tailed. He was undergoing a transition, very quietly, from a conservatism about the self-interest of Britain abroad to a new liberalism both about the humanitarian needs of foreign peoples and the conditions of the people at home. He had a role to play in the world but was immersed in a Homeric perspective on both personal and national agency. Given what he had to say about his despair at being “cast out of party connection” he may even have felt out of control of his destiny, which he seized only by accepting a top role in the new Liberal party. Gladstone the conservative believed progress was not inevitable, but Gladstone the liberal, though he never recanted that view, tried to become an instrument of justice in what he called the providential order of the world.\nProgress Of the abstract concepts listed above, a belief in inevitable progress is the most relevant to Gladstone’s politics. In the 19th century liberals tended to believe history inevitably progresses towards better outcomes. Conservatives tended to believe the opposite. In his book The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone, Robert Kelley speculates that Gladstone was converted to a belief in progress as a controlling influence on history when he changed from the Conservative to the Liberal Party. Kelley wrote:\n“[Gladstone] possessed that most distinguishing mark of the Liberal mind, a fundamental optimism about life in its larger aspects. His supreme optimism allowed him to bear the innumerable disappointments that came his way. To him the nineteenth century clearly demonstrated that the processes of history tended inevitably and progressively to free the individual. Like Jefferson he believed in social evolution to some consummation, though in his case to a pre-eminently Christian one. Even after his defeat on Irish Home Rule in 1886, he disagreed with Alfred Tennyson\u0026rsquo;s bleak ruminations on the modern world, insisting that it had grown gentler, more tender in public conscience, in the years since he had first entered public life.\n“Gladstone made the rare journey from vigorous conservatism to vigorous liberalism. The son of a rich Tory entrepreneur, he began his political career as a young man whose seat in the Commons was given to him by a duke. He execrated the Reform Bill of 1832, saying it foretold the collapse of Britain into weakness and anarchy—in sharp contrast to his later optimism. In despair he wrote to a friend: ‘The day of our greatness and stability is no more \u0026hellip; the chill and damp of death are already creeping over England\u0026rsquo;s glory.’ In his first years in Parliament he opposed practically every reform that came before it” (Kelley 149).\nBut, writing as he was in 1969, Kelley did not have David Bebbington’s 2004 The Mind of Gladstone, which argued that the statesman never recanted his initial rejection of the concept of progress. “I am not a man very sanguine about what is called political progress;” Gladstone said in 1877 in Dublin, “that is to say, I labour for it, I thankfully accept its results. But I am convinced that we are very far indeed from the day when the actual state of political and social circumstances will so much approximate to anything like our ideal standard” (Bebbington 268).\nGladstone rejected the notion of inevitable progress in his study on Homer. His book was motivated in large part by his distaste for the views of another Homeric scholar whom he knew personally as a fellow member of Parliament. George Grote, an English political radical and the author of an extensive history of Greece, believed in the forward march of progress. In his 12-volume History of Greece, published between 1846 and 1856, Grote celebrated golden age of philosophers in the fifth century BC and viewed Homer’s much earlier time as a dark age. “Grote insisted that there were no ethics taught in Homer and that in Homeric society … there are ‘scarcely any other moralizing forces in operation,’” Bebbington wrote in an essay titled \u0026ldquo;Gladstone and Grote\u0026rdquo; in a book of essays edited by Peter Jagger. \u0026ldquo;As the veneration of the gods lost its hold \u0026hellip; moral standards steadily developed down to the time of Socrates. Homer\u0026rsquo;s age had been marked, according to Grote by homicide, fraud, brutality, robbery, perjury, neglect of orphans, mutilation and vengeance” (Jagger 172). Thus, Grote believed, Homer\u0026rsquo;s era was a dark time from which Socrates\u0026rsquo; later era progressed.\nThis perspective, that Homer\u0026rsquo;s religious era was less moral than Socrates\u0026rsquo; less religious time, was anathema to Gladstone. His view ran the opposite direction: Morality was pure in Adam’s time, and the rest was subject to the Fall. \u0026ldquo;The closer to the dawn of human history, the purer the religion and morality must be,” Bebbington writes of Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s view. Gladstone rebutted Grote in Studies of Homer: “I ask permission to protest against whatever savours of the idea that any Socrates whatever was the patentee of the sentiment of right and wrong, which is the most precious part of the patrimony of mankind. The movement of Greek morality with the lapse of time was chiefly downward, and not upward.” (Gladstone 420).\nGladstone specified the treatment of women in Homer as an example of the fallaciousness of this idea of the march of progress. He felt women were treated well in Homer\u0026rsquo;s time, a strange conclusion when one focuses for example on the routine enslavement and rape of female prisoners during the Trojan Wars as depicted in The Iliad. But Gladstone focused instead on the fact that in The Odyssey the Phaeacian Nausica was allowed to choose her own husband. This proved morals had not improved since Homer\u0026rsquo;s time. Gladstone wrote:\n“No view of a peculiar civilization can on its ethical side be satisfactory, unless it include a distinct consideration of the place held in it by woman. And, besides, the position of the Greek woman of the heroic age is in itself so remarkable, as even on special grounds to require separate and detailed notice. It is likewise so elevated, both absolutely and in comparison with what it became in the historic ages of Greece and Rome amidst their elaborate civilization, as to form in itself a sufficient confutation of the theories of those writers who can see in the history of mankind only the development of a law of continual progress from intellectual darkness into light, and from moral degradation up to virtue” (Gladstone 479).\nAfter joining the Liberal Party, however, Gladstone became more likely to speak in terms of progress. He talked of progress as stemming from the Advent of Christ and eventually said that he saw progress occurring in the education and virtue of the working class and therefore shifted his opinion of their suitability to the vote. Still, he maintained his conservative position that there had been a downward slide in morality since Homer\u0026rsquo;s age even in his last book on the poet in 1890, just eight years before his death.\nPredestination Relevant to whether Gladstone sees in history a move towards progress is whether he sees history as serving a design. Thus, his view of predestination, fate, destiny and Providence are material. Gladstone omits predestination from his examination of Homer, but he did write about it in his early conservative days in the 1830s. He said God’s election may be influenced by the way he knows humans will react to his grace. Bebbington heralds this as a “major step toward\u0026rdquo; the doctrine of free will. More relevant to his Homeric studies, however, is the concept of Providence, or the view that God provides guidance over human events (Bebbington 52).\nProvidence Gladstone spoke regularly of God’s Providence in speeches and conversation. He apparently felt Providence moved slowly, as England had in its long move toward democracy, which wouldn’t be completed until 20 years after Gladstone’s death in 1898. In any case he applied that logic to Italy’s fight for unification in 1859:\n“It may be in the designs of Providence that [Italy] shall one day be territorially great, but if she is to attain to that kind of greatness and to join with it any durability of power, it must be by the slow growth of the oak, by the prolonged exercise of self-command and self-denial, by the careful development of her industry and her internal resources, by disinterested service to her sister States in Italy, and above all by the strictest respect for every political and legal right.” (Beales 29).\nGladstone refers to providence in two senses in Studies on Homer. First, he asserts that Greece and the Homeric poems have a special place in what he calls “the Providential order of the world.” H.C.G. Matthew points out that this theory was controversial when Gladstone published it. “Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s belief that Homer represented almost a parallel revelation to that of the Old Testament (though lacking the latter\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;one invaluable code of Truth and Hope\u0026rsquo;) was, to many Victorians, a shocking, startling, and almost blasphemous claim, Matthew writes. “Greece … had in Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s view a special place in the \u0026lsquo;providential order of the world\u0026rsquo;, and it was the duty of those involved in the construction of a modern society to study and expand its lessons” (Matthew 159).\nThe second sense in which Gladstone discusses Providence is the application of the concept within the Homeric poems themselves. Gladstone found four different Greek words in Homer that he believed to describe “the idea of Divine Providence.” Each of these words reflects the agency of the Gods over human events. Gladstone says Homer also uses references to Zeus when he intends to imply providence. Providence is almost always associated with Zeus, though sometimes with Apollo and Athena, Gladstone adds. (He uses the Roman names, Jupiter for Zeus, Minerva for Athena.) And, significantly, he says that providence in Homer’s poems sides with justice. At one point in Studies on Homer, Gladstone contemplates “The Providential Government of the World and the administration of retributive justice.” As Hugh Lloyd-Jones puts it in his book Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Gladstone finds that in The lliad as in The Odyssey the justice of the gods is upheld at every stage and that in the end \u0026rsquo;the authority of the providential order is reestablished’” (Lloyd-Jones 121).\nDestiny and fate While Gladstone implies that in Homer providence bends toward justice, destiny is a whole different matter. Destiny and fate, which are used more or less interchangeably in Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s writings on Homer, represent the idea that what happens in life\u0026ndash;particularly death\u0026ndash;is predetermined. Gladstone found another five “forms of speech” that are “deployed by Homer to express the idea of Destiny.” The words that refer to Destiny convey concepts like one’s “portion,” or “share,” and do not convey a deliberation by the gods. Sometimes in Greek and Roman mythology fate is personified, as in the Moirai, the Fates, who weave destiny. The Moirai came after Homer, but the nearly identical figures of \u0026ldquo;the Spinners\u0026rdquo; do appear briefly in The Odyssey:\n“They made the offerings and drank as much as they desired, and then Alcinous said,\n‘Listen, lords. Hear what my heart commands.\nThe feast is over; go home, go to bed.\nAt dawn, we will call more of our best men, and host the stranger in our halls, and offer fine sacrifices to the gods, then plan how we may help his journey, so our guest may travel quickly, without pain or trouble, encountering no trouble on the way, however far away it is, until\nhe reaches home. Once there, he must endure whatever was spun out when he was born by Fate and by the heavy ones, the Spinners.’”\n- The Odyssey Book Seven (Wilson 214).\nHomer is perhaps not entirely consistent in his representation of fate. In one moment in The Iliad, Zeus determines the death of Hector with a set of weights on golden scales:\n“Zeus, the father, held his golden scales up high an\u0026gt;d in them set two deadly weights,\ntwo dooms of death that stretches suffering\u0026ndash;one for Achilles, one for horse-lord Hector.\nThe god raised up the middle of the scales, and down the destined day of Hector sank and went to Hades.”\n- Homer, The Iliad Book 22 (Wilson 533).\nIn most instances, however, the deaths of characters are determined not by Zeus or the other gods, but by fate or destiny itself. This brings up an ancient subject of discussion in Homeric scholarship: Are the Gods limited by fate, or not? Books and papers are still being written today on the subject. For his part, Gladstone makes a somewhat controversial statement when he asserts that “We thus see that, on the whole, the force of destiny, as it appears in Homer, although it commonly prevails, is not uniformly irresistible” and then in the very next sentence says “We never find the deities actually fighting against it, or against them.”\nThe fact is we very often do see the Gods fighting the edicts of destiny in Homer. For example, Poseidon knows destiny is said to call for Odysseus to make it home, but he nonetheless throws every storm he’s got in Homer’s way as he attempts perilously to make it to Ithaca by raft. I’ll be quoting more in the next few paragraphs from Homer than Gladstone generally does. His impenetrable prose could have used a few more Homeric block quotes. It is not for no reason that Gladstone told a friend Volume 3 of that work, which covers politics, was the “least unreadable” (Jenkins 183). This essay quotes only from Volume 2, which covers religion. In the following passage the white goddess Ino makes clear Poseidon is fighting what \u0026ldquo;fate\u0026rdquo; intends for Odysseus:\n\u0026ldquo;Poor man! Why does enraged Poseidon\ncreate an odyssey of pain for you?\nBut his hostility will not destroy you.\n… Fate decrees that there you will survive.”\nIno the white goddess in Book Five of The Odyssey (Wilson 191). Similarly, Zeus considers saving both his own son Sarpedon and the Trojan Hector, before being talked out of it. In fact, the implication is made by Hera in Book 16 of The Iliad that not only does Zeus have the power to overrule Destiny, so do the other gods. But they never do:\n\u0026ldquo;What a disaster this will be for me! [said Zeus.]\nThe man I love the most of all mankind, my son Sarpedon, is assigned to die, killed by Patroclus. I am of two minds, wondering if I ought to lift him up alive and take him from the battlefield, the source of tears, and carry him away, and set him in the fertile land of Lycia\u0026ndash;or kill him now beneath Patroclus\u0026rsquo; hands.\u0026rdquo;\nHera, the ox-eyed goddess, answered, \u0026ldquo;What?\nWhat have you said, disastrous child of Cronus?\nYou want to free from painful death a mortal whose lot was dealt out long ago? Then do it!\nBut none of us Olympians supports you.\nNow let me tell you this. Take it to heart.\nIf you convey Sarpedon to his home\nalive, watch out! Some other gods may also decide to take their offspring from the battle.\nAround the mighty town of Priam fight numerous sons of other deathless gods, who may do likewise—-and incur your rage.\u0026rdquo;\n- The Iliad, Book 16 (Wilson 395).\nIn fact, when Athena challenges Zeus on his briefly posited idea of saving Hector from fate’s fatal decree, Zeus even responds (in essence) “aw, I didn’t mean it:”\n\u0026ldquo;Look at this dreadful scene\u0026gt;!\nI see a man I love chased round the wall.\nI pity Hector in my heart. He burned numerous cattle thighs as offerings to me upon the peaks and glens of Ida, and also in the citadel of Troy.\nNow glorious Achilles chases him on quick feet all around the town of Priam.\nSo come now, gods, consider and decide whether to save this man from death, or crush him, a fine man though he is, beneath the hands of great Achilles, son of Peleus.\u0026rdquo;\nAthena, gray-eyed goddess, answered him,\n\u0026ldquo;God of the brilliant lightning and dark clouds, father, what have you said? This man is mortal!\nHe has long since been doomed by fate to die.\nAnd yet you want to set him free from death, whose name is pain? Then go ahead and do it!\nBut none of us will praise what you have done.\u0026rdquo;\nThen Zeus who gathers clouds together answered,\n\u0026ldquo;Dear daughter, child of Triton, do not worry.\nI did not mean it when I said those things.”\nThe Iliad, Book 22 (Wilson 531-532). Gladstone was contemplating these matters in 1858-59, just as he was playing God himself in Corfu, where he was scandalized to discover there were few copies of Homer available for the natives (Magnus 136). The people of Corfu and the other Ionian Islands were clamoring to be made part of Greece, not stay the British colonies they had been since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. It fell to Gladstone to recommend to the Queen whether to grant the people’s request or stay in the unpopular godlike position of ruling them without their consent. When he turned in his recommendations to the Queen, he recommended a continued presence there for the crown, advising her to go easy on those who continued to advocate for union with Greece but sticking to a conservative version of British self-interest that he would not hold to in the end. Five years later in 1864, though, he voted to let Corfu and the other Ionian Islands join Greece. (His side won.) Did he, like Zeus, mutter “I did not mean it when I said those things”?\nWhen Gladstone took a stance in favor of the colonization of the Ionian Islands, he was standing for the existing order, for Greece’s “portion” as it seemed to be doled out by destiny. When he later voted for the Ionian Islands to be returned to Greece, he bucked that destiny and became the change he wished to see. He became the instrument of that Providential Order in which he once said Greece had a special place.\n"},{"title":"Review: Gore Vidal, inheritor of Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s tradition, painted a kind of political self-portrait in \u003cem\u003eJulian\u003c/em\u003e","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-03-29-gore-vidal-julian-self-portrait/","date":"March 29, 2026","tags":["Disraeli","Wilson"],"text":"Review: Gore Vidal, inheritor of Disraeli's tradition, painted a kind of political self-portrait in *Julian* Jed Bartlet, the fictional economist who became president on \u0026ldquo;The West Wing,\u0026rdquo; presented a modern fantasy version of Plato\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;philosopher king,\u0026rdquo; an ideal ruler with a philosopher\u0026rsquo;s capacity for complex thought and moral wisdom. A hankering for a leader who not only quoted Kant\u0026rsquo;s soundbites but understood the full context of his intellectual contributions was in the air in the early 2000s, when the TV show aired. In 2008, when we selected Barack Obama, a college professor who went on to annually post a long list of his favorite books and movies like a critic and man of letters, we were looking for a sort of real-life Jed Bartlet. It was said at the time that we were calling back the model of leadership associated with Woodrow Wilson, to this day the only PhD president. We might also have thought of Benjamin Disraeli, the only prolific novelist to be prime minister in Britain (and one who name-dropped Kant in his first novel). The Kant-quoting man-of-letters statesman, in the Trump era, seems like a thing of the past. I felt that loss reading Gore Vidal\u0026rsquo;s 1964 novel Julian, which is a kind of self-portrait of the artist as an aspiring statesman.\nVidal was once himself an aspirant to the position of philosopher king. He was literally known to comment on Kant in interviews and was once called \u0026ldquo;the best political novelist since Benjamin Disraeli\u0026rdquo; by novelist Louis Auchincloss. However, after losing two bids for public office, eventually Vidal said the notion of a writer-politician was inherently inconsistent. \u0026ldquo;You cannot be both a politician and a writer, since, as I have said so often, a writer must always tell the truth to the extent he understands it and a politician must never give the game away,\u0026rdquo; Vidal said in an interview with PBS\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;American Masters\u0026rdquo; series that aired on March 19, 2001. \u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s why, except for Benjamin Disraeli, there\u0026rsquo;s never been a good writer politician and don\u0026rsquo;t write in about Winston Churchill, he was a terrible writer.\u0026rdquo; Wilson (who called Kant one of the greatest of philosophical minds in Germany while a college man, but who never referenced him as president) agreed with Vidal about this. The future president wrote in 1890 that statesmen could not be fiction writers, because they cannot write characters with multiple perspectives. Wilson\u0026rsquo;s case in point was Disraeli, who he said wrote characters who were not real people but \u0026ldquo;chess-men\u0026rdquo; who served only his own point of view. (Just a few years before Wilson had written a short story and failed to get it published.) But Vidal didn\u0026rsquo;t let the difficulty of being both writer and statesman prevent him from trying to be both. A scion of a political family who grew up in Washington DC and was related to JFK, Gore ran a campaign for the House of Representatives in 1960, and then a bid for the US Senate in 1982. When he died in 2012, Vidal was heralded as \u0026ldquo;the last public intellectual\u0026rdquo; (Globe and Mail, February 9, 2012) and \u0026ldquo;the last American man of letters\u0026rdquo; (PBS, August 3, 2012). Thus, he was primed to be one of the key inheritors of Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s tradition as a writer-politician. However, Vidal never made it to public office. His career, and the novel Julian, are shaped by a recurring anxiety that a statesman cannot also be a truth-telling writer.\nIn fact, Julian can be read as an attempt to work through that conflict in narrative form. Written in part while Vidal was running his first campaign for the House, it could (paradoxically) be called his most autobiographical novel. The book is a portrait of Emperor Julian, the last Pagan Roman emperor in the fourth century AD. Like Vidal, Julian was an aspirant both to public office and to the humanities. A philosopher-in-training when his cousin the emperor Constantius died and made him his successor, Julian was a skilled writer who at one point even wrote a satirical pamphlet that doubled as self-parody and propaganda. The satire was a response to mockery of Julian from the citizens at Antioch, who made fun of him for wearing a beard. Philosophers wore beards; emperors did not. Julian\u0026rsquo;s sharp-tongued method of communicating with the public was unique among emperors and remains exceedingly rare among statesmen today. His sharp wit was not unlike that of Vidal, who The New York Times Review of Books described as running a campaign of \u0026ldquo;quips\u0026rdquo; when he ran in 1960. Vidal once called himself \u0026ldquo;the least autobiographical of novelists,\u0026rdquo; and there are more obvious differences between himself and Julian, who lived in a vastly different world, than there are similarities. Still, in this way and others, Julian might be the closest thing in his oeuvre to self-portraiture.\nIn this respect, Julian resembles some of Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s work. Vidal\u0026rsquo;s book is narrated by three characters: Julian himself, through a fictional unpublished memoir, and two biographers (Libanius and Priscus) who comment on the action described by their friend the late emperor. (Vidal would use the same structure almost a decade later in Burr.) Julian tells the story of its protagonist\u0026rsquo;s rise from philosophy student to the title of Caesar (second-tier emperor) and then Augustus (top dog in the Roman empire). His conflict between the needs of statesmanship and the needs of philosophy mirrors that of the titular character in Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s 1832 novel Contarini Fleming. Disraeli said that novel depicted \u0026ldquo;the development of my poetic character.\u0026rdquo; Like Contarini, Julian has something of a psychological split because of his interest in both philosophy and politics. As the philosopher Priscus narrates in Vidal\u0026rsquo;s novel, Julian was not the same person with everyone in his court:\n\u0026ldquo;The philosophers and warriors\nseldom mingled. … I sat in a corner and watched Julian play his various roles.\nUp to a point, we all tend to assume different masks with different people. But\nJulian changed completely with each person. With the Gallic soldiers, he became\na harsh-voiced, loud-laughing Gaul. With the Asiatics, he was graceful but\nremote, another Constantius. Not until he turned to a philosopher friend was he\nhimself. Himself? We shall never know which was the true Julian, the abrupt\nmilitary genius or the charming philosophy-mad student. Obviously he was both.\nYet it was disquieting to watch him become a stranger before one\u0026rsquo;s eyes, and an\nantipathetic one at that.\u0026rdquo;\nVidal must have known the feeling of fragmentation of self, making a conscious effort to avoid it even as he launched his political career. He tried to position himself as that rare political aspirant who never let himself fragment into multiple parts. \u0026ldquo;I say 80 percent of what I think, a hell of a lot more than any politician I know,\u0026rdquo; Vidal told The New York Times Review of Books when he ran for Congress in 1960.\nVidal\u0026rsquo;s truth-telling took aim specifically at religion, and he used Julian as an opportunity to shoot pointed one-liners at Christianity. He\u0026rsquo;d also taken aim at religion in his prior novel Messiah and other works. \u0026ldquo;Granted, no educated man can accept the idea of a Jewish rebel as god,\u0026rdquo; his narrator Priscus says of Jesus Christ. On the Bible: \u0026ldquo;Even that book so embarrasses them that they must continually alter its meaning. For instance, nowhere does it say that Jesus was God,\u0026rdquo; says the Pagan teacher Maximus. \u0026ldquo;Except in John,\u0026rdquo; replies Julian, who quotes: \u0026lsquo;And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.\u0026rsquo; Maximus replies: \u0026ldquo;That is open to interpretation. What precisely was meant by \u0026lsquo;Word\u0026rsquo;?\u0026rdquo; Later, the young emperor effectively attempts to restrain the ability of Christians to build an intellectual Christian scene, banning the teaching of the classics by Christians so as to curtail their ability to usurp the great achievements of Pagan societies, such as Homer and Plato. Perhaps Vidal saw a similar threat in Christian intellectuals like William F. Buckley, Jr., with whom he had an extended and very public televised feud later in the decade. In any case, the battleground over religion was contemporary and personal to Vidal.\nHe wrote the novel at a time, from 1959 to 1964, when religion was undergoing severe changes and challenges. The novel was not only autobiography, then, but in a limited sense a biography of his own time as well. He may have been drawn to the subject of Julian for the same reason that playwright Henrik Ibsen had been drawn to the subject almost a century before, when he wrote the massive two-part play Emperor and Galilean about Emperor Julian. When Ibsen wrote, a move toward disbelief was being largely driven by the new emergence of Darwinism. When Vidal published Julian, the Pope had just approved \u0026ldquo;Vatican II,\u0026rdquo; the sweeping rearrangement of policy in the Catholic Church. Religious attendance was dropping, and the search for new spiritual connections in cults or communes was widespread. Julian\u0026rsquo;s status as a bestseller may reflect these trends.\nRather than reserve its fire for Christianity exclusively, Vidal and some of his characters make a case against Paganism as well. Vidal sympathized with but ultimately rejected Paganism. One of Julian\u0026rsquo;s narrators, Priscus, wonders how Julian managed to leave Christianity at great personal peril only to embrace what he sees as an equally preposterous religion:\n\u0026ldquo;But having rejected [the\nChristian] myth, how can one then believe that the Persian hero-god Mithras was\nborn of light striking rock, on December 25th, with shepherds watching his\nbirth? (I am told that the Christians have just added those shepherds to the\nbirth of Jesus.) Or that Mithras lived in a fig tree which fed and clothed him,\nthat he fought with the sun\u0026rsquo;s first creation, the bull, that he was dragged by\nit (thus symbolizing man\u0026rsquo;s suffering) until the bull escaped … Between the\nMithraic story and its Christian sequel I see no essential difference.\u0026rdquo;\nVidal\u0026rsquo;s Julian also exhibits his author\u0026rsquo;s ambivalence about political figures, particularly military ones. One general says Aristotle gives the military man a headache. Another is skewered by Julian: \u0026ldquo;As far as I know, he has never read a book of any kind, though in preparation for this campaign he told me, quite seriously, that he was studying Alexander. When I asked which biography he was reading, he said, Alexander and the Wicked Magician, a popular novel!\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s no surprise, then, that as a candidate for the House in 1960 Vidal said he wanted to cut military spending. (\u0026ldquo;The Pentagon talks about our power to \u0026lsquo;overkill\u0026rsquo; Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.\u0026rdquo;) It is true that the book shows his facility with at least ancient military scenarios, as the final third of the book covers Julian\u0026rsquo;s war to annex Persia. This would seem to show off one asset for writers of fiction who aspire to office.\nWhen it comes time to assign blame for Julian\u0026rsquo;s ultimate failure as an emperor, it is Vidal\u0026rsquo;s sourness towards religion that wins the day. That is not the case in Ibsen\u0026rsquo;s telling. In both versions Julian, once he becomes emperor, attempts to establish a new age of religious tolerance. But the continued antagonism from Christians drives him into legislating harder in favor of his own religion. This drift into persecution is more distinctly depicted in Ibsen\u0026rsquo;s Emperor and Galilean than it is in Vidal\u0026rsquo;s Julian. Ibsen has the persecutory attitude towards Christians drive Julian\u0026rsquo;s downfall. For Vidal, it\u0026rsquo;s Julian\u0026rsquo;s continued superstition that leads to his doom, as he presses too far into Persia with his army because a prophecy told him he would be successful. For Vidal, perhaps, an atheist philosopher king stands a better chance than a deluded religious one.\nAs admirable as Vidal\u0026rsquo;s dogged truth-telling was, the dream of the philosopher king is better served by the models offered by Disraeli and Obama in this present moment. Obama had at least one thing on Vidal politically: He did not argue from a standpoint of intellectual dismissal of Christianity. He instead made religion part of his intellectual argument. Similarly, Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s brand of intellectualism may have been more successful politically because it was honest about his belief in the importance of the institution of the church. While Disraeli privately scorned religion too—a fact that he kept so quiet we know it only from reading the diaries of the 15th Lord Derby—he made support for the institution of the church a strength even to a moral fault. Vidal, by contrast, grabbed at the chance to take shots at the church and religion on television. (He used to say that one should never give up a chance either to have sex or to be on television.) In one appearance by Vidal on London Weekend Television c.1999, Vidal took aim at Christianity in response to a McNugget from Kant:\n\u0026ldquo;Interviewer: Immanuel Kant said\nthat without the afterlife morality couldn\u0026rsquo;t survive. What\u0026rsquo;s your response to\nthat idea?\n\u0026ldquo;Gore Vidal: God is blackmailer.\nGod is warden of the prison. He created us all in his image — probably a\nmistake — and then allows us to run wild and punishes us or rewards us with his\nbeaming vision of himself. This is no god I really want to have any traffic\nwith at all. I mean, the idea that good behavior only depends upon your fear of\nwhat will happen to you after you die, that you will be punished excludes all\nof philosophy. It excludes Plato, it excludes the mystery cults of Greece, it\nexcludes the Roman idea of what is a good man. There goes Marcus Aurelius,\nthere goes Epictetus, there go the stoics. These are all better thinkers than\nanything that the Christian church has come up with in 2,000 years.\u0026rdquo;\nSome in the novel think Julian is, like Vidal, too much a truth-teller to be successful as a statesman. Priscus criticizes his emperor for disclosing too much about himself in his self-satire \u0026ldquo;the Beard-Hater.\u0026rdquo; Vidal would ask whether winning was worth being deceptive. For his part, Julian believes his satire told uncomfortable truths and would tell them again. \u0026ldquo;My friends were appalled when I published this work,\u0026rdquo; Vidal\u0026rsquo;s Julian writes, \u0026ldquo;but I do not in any way regret having done so. I was able to say a number of sharp and true things. Priscus thought the work ordinary and its publication a disaster. He particularly objected to my admitting that I had lice. But Libanius felt that I had scored a moral victory against my invisible traducers.\u0026rdquo; When it\u0026rsquo;s his turn to narrate, Libanius says he sees the significance of the man-of-letters emperor: \u0026ldquo;Never before had an emperor attacked his own people with a pamphlet! The sword and the fire, yes, but not literature. Nor had any emperor ever before written a satire upon himself.\u0026rdquo; An emperor with a sense of humor about himself. We could stand to have such a leader now.\n"},{"title":"Did Gladstone arrive in Corfu a conservative and leave a liberal?","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-03-15-did-gladstone-arrive-corfu-conservative/","date":"March 15, 2026","tags":["Gladstone","Disraeli"],"text":"Did Gladstone arrive in Corfu a conservative and leave a liberal? “The morning brought us the sight of the grand Acroceraunian range: with brilliant sun \u0026amp; mild air,” wrote William Ewart Gladstone in his diary of November 24, 1858 as he sailed into the Ionian Islands for his strange new job as the Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary of the tiny British colonies, an assignment that led to ridicule from enemies and embarrassment from friends. “Then Corfu: which I do not think is like a ῥινόν from the North: but Homer probably meant a mirage.” The footnotes to Gladstone’s diary explain that ῥινόν in The Odyssey is variously translated as “ox-skin, hence shield, or mist, hence, in Gladstone’s view, mirage.” Gladstone was thinking of Odysseus’s trip into what is now the island of Corfu in Book Five of The Odyssey:\n“Full seventeen nights he cut the foaming way:\nThe distant land appear'd the following day:\nThen swell'd to sight Phaeacia's dusky coast,\nAnd woody mountains, half in vapours lost;\nThat lay before him indistinct and vast,\nLike a broad shield amid the watery waste.” That Gladstone had Homer on his mind while he sailed into the mist is not a big surprise. Corfu fascinated Gladstone, a sometime Homeric scholar, because it was believed to be the land where Homer’s Odysseus told his tall tales of battling a Cyclops, and a witch, sea monsters, and giants to an audience of Phaecians. Homer was no casual obsession for Gladstone. Just eight months before he had published a massive, three-volume, 1,600-page treatise entitled Studies of Homer and the Homeric Age (Magnus 122). Homeric scholars scoffed, with one Oxfordian calling it “a mere nonsense” (Aldous 97-98). But Gladstone was besotted with Odysseus, and it was in his writings on Homer that he most clearly articulated an ideological transformation from conservative to liberal on some of the top issues of the day—an ideological transformation that was actualized just three months after his trip to Corfu ended, when he joined the ragtag coalition of radicals, liberals, and Whigs that would become the Liberal Party and eventually be led Gladstone for decades. In Corfu something changed in him that led Gladstone, previously labeled “the last hope of the stern unbending Tories” by Thomas Babington Macaulay, to become known widely as “The People’s William;” one of his era’s primary definitions of liberalism. Studies of Homer and the Homeric Age, said Gladstone scholar David Bebbington, “should be seen as the climax of his intellectual career as a Conservative” (Bebbington 177).\nHistorians have debated for more than a century why Gladstone made the decisions to go to Corfu and to join the liberals. But few have examined the impact of Corfu on his ideological transformation. This comic episode, coming as it did after four long years out of high office, was a major factor that resulted in his sudden decision just weeks later to leave the Tories. He arrived in Corfu a politically isolated conservative. He left it as a seedling of a new liberal.\nWhy did Gladstone, a singular young star on Britain’s parliamentary stage, accept this comically quixotic assignment 1,400 miles from the political scene in London? Both contemporaries and historians have speculated the whole thing was a set-up by his rival, Benjamin Disraeli, and Disraeli’s best friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton. “Now that we have got him down, let us keep him down,” Disraeli is reported to have declared, infuriating Gladstone and reportedly motivating his ire at the Conservative Party.\nGladstone’s friends thought the decision to go to Corfu was farcical. Richard Aldous in his 2006 double biography The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli reports that they viewed the incident as resembling something out of Gilbert and Sullivan (Aldous 110). Gladstone should have stayed home, they said, and built on his position as a star in the parliamentary scene. Former Prime Minister Lord John Russell called the mission to Corfu “a curious one” and even suggested Gladstone had accepted the assignment in order to be absent on discussions of electoral reform. Gladstone friend and fellow Peelite Sir James Graham called the mission “a sad mess.” Some of his contemporaries believed Disraeli, then head of the House of Commons and a top leader in the Conservative Party, had trapped him into agreeing to make the trip. Another Peelite friend, Abraham Hayward, said the government prided itself on “having made a prize of Gladstone.” Graham said Gladstone “fancies he is not hooked.” However, if he were to break the line that connected him and Disraeli, Graham said, “Dizzy’s harpoon will be in him” (Hawkins 84).\nHistoriography What was going on in Gladstone’s head? He had decided to accept his “Lilliputian” destiny, he told a friend. But why? For their part, historians have debated why Gladstone took the assignment for almost two centuries. Travis L. Crosby in The Two Mr. Gladstones lays out the historiography of the question of why Gladstone went to Corfu more comprehensively than anyone else. The Disraeli quote that triggered Gladstone’s transition and a very important observation that gets relegated to a mere footnote also help make Crosby the right guide for this section of our tour:\n“Even more surprising than the ministry’s invitation to Gladstone was his interest in the project. Historians have since tried to puzzle it out. Morley emphasizes the decline of Catherine Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s health since the death of her sister Mary Lyttelton. Matthew believes that Gladstone understood the strategic importance of the islands within the context of the traditional European rivalries in the eastern Mediterranean and thus saw his role as a significant one. Pointon thinks Gladstone was intellectually intrigued with the visit to offshore classical Greece: he could continue his researches on the Homeric age in a most congenial atmosphere. Shannon, however, sees Gladstone as \u0026ldquo;frustrated, impatient, and restless\u0026rdquo;; Ionia offered an \u0026ldquo;opportunity for escape.\u0026rdquo; It may be that all these reasons played a part in his decision to go. But above all, the lonian mission represented for Gladstone the ladder lowered to the bottom of his well. Ionia might provide a resolution to his political isolation, or it could become a kind of restful limbo. In any case, taking the position would be a revival of the strategy of avoidance\u0026ndash;to the extent of removing himself entirely from the sources of stress in England” (Crosby 91).\nBut it was Aldous who suggested the most intriguing explanation. “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Gladstone’s Ionian adventure had been anything other than an elaborate setup,” Aldous writes (Aldous 110). This was a popular point of view among the moderate Peelite wing of the Conservative Party, which supported Gladstone because he was one of them. “Holding this office meant that Gladstone vacated his seat in the Commons,” HCG Matthew explains in a footnote in his Gladstone 1809-1898. “Some Peelites indeed see the whole lonian episode as a Disraelian plot to draw Gladstone into a by-election which he would probably lose.” (Matthew 165). Thus the motive for Disraeli to send Gladstone to Corfu was to get rid of him.\nThe recollections of an undersecretary in Bulwer-Lytton’s Colonial Office, however, clinched the interpretation. As Crosby reports: “When Bulwer-Lytton asked Carnarvron\u0026rsquo;s advice, he recommended Gladstone because of his abilities and because he was unconnected with any major party at that time. Disraeli agreed: The place with its classical aestheticism suits him [Gladstone] very well. But as Disraeli also added, in a remark closer to the truth, ‘Now that we have got him down, let us keep him down.’” In a telling footnote, Crosby adds: “These words were repeated to Gladstone, which infuriated him, and he returned to England with feelings of anger against the Conservative party. This was, Carnarvon believed, a turning point in Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s relations with the Conservatives” (Crosby 90, 241).\nThus, one catty remark from Disraeli confirms two things at once via a first-hand witness: First, that Gladstone’s trip to Corfu was the result of Disraeli’s mischief, and second, that it resulted directly in Gladstone’s accepting a new home on the Left.\nIonian Politics After seeing the “mirage” of mist on the horizon of Corfu, Gladstone launched into a busy day. His diary for that first day continues:\n“Landed with military honours and other forms at one. Presented to the Senators \u0026amp; their Secretaries by my old friend Sir J. Young. Four hours with him on Ionian politics. We had a dinner party in the evening. Began to arrange \u0026amp; settle in our room: \u0026amp; to turn my address into Italian.”\nWe know what Gladstone was there to do, if not why he wanted the gig. Secretary of State for the Colonies Bulwer-Lytton offered Gladstone the job of Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary to advise Queen Victoria on what to do with its tiny colonial possessions while the locals clamored to be once again made part of Greece. \u0026lsquo;To reconcile a race that speaks the Greek language to the science of practical liberty seemed to me a task that might be a noble episode in your career,\u0026rsquo; Bulwer-Lytton told Gladstone (Morley 594).\n“My Lilliputian die is cast and I am going,” Gladstone wrote when he decided to go to Corfu. “I hope you will not disapprove of this proceeding … Only be assured of one thing: it is but the consequence of having become entangled unawares in such circumstances as left me no right to secede.” He had agonized over the move. “My circumspection, perhaps wretched in quality, has in mere amount been enormous.” (Shannon 365).\nThe assignment may have been Lilliputian, but the consequences were in some ways Brobdingnagian.\nCorfu was, and still is, a 35-by-11-mile island with a population of 100,000. It, like the rest of the Ionian Islands, is now part of Greece, having been ceded to that nation by Britain in 1864. The islands had become part of the British empire in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. However, Greece won its independence in 1830, after which the people of the Ionian Islands began campaigning for what they called Enosis, or union with Greece. The situation was similar to that of Italy, which at the time was a group of nation-states with different monarchical rulers, including some under the thumb of the Austrian empire. (This comparison was surely not lost on the people of the Ionian Islands when, for example, Verdi’s opera Nabucco , a symbol of Italian unification, was performed on Corfu in 1844.) Gladstone arrived with limited sympathy for Italian independence, and an ambivalence about the Ionian Islands’ desire to join Greece. Writing in The Irish Times, journalist Richard Pine explained in September 2014, “As a British politician he had to support Britain’s continued role; as a passionate Philhelene he could see an unanswerable case for union with Greece. His eventual report was typically ambiguous and ambivalent, and was rejected by both sides. Perhaps his experience moved him towards the concept of Home Rule for Island twenty years later.” It’s my contention that the experience also moved him towards supporting self-government for the Italian peoples, and therefore to the Liberal Party.\nInitially, the Ionians greeted Gladstone as their means to rally for union with Greece. John Morley, Gladstone’s first major biographer and still today one of the key biographers, writes of his trip to another of the islands, Cephalonia:\nIn Cephalonia he was received by a tumultuous mob of a thousand persons, whom neither the drenching rains nor the unexpected manner of his approach across the hills could baffle. They greeted him with incessant cries for union with Greece, thrust disaffected papers into his carriage, and here and there indulged in cries of … down with the protectorate, down with the tyranny of fifty years. This exceptional disrespect he ascribed to what he leniently called the history of Cephalonia, meaning the savage dose of martial law nine years before. He justly took it for a marked symbol of the state of excitement at which under various influences the popular mind had arrived. Age and infirmity prevented the archbishop from coming to offer his respects, so after his levee Mr. Gladstone with his suite repaired to the archbishop. ‘We found him,’ says [Gladstone’s private secretary Arthur Gordon, the son of Lord Aberdeen] ‘seated on a sofa dressed in his most gorgeous robes of gold and purple, over which flowed down a long white beard\u0026hellip;. Behind him stood a little court of black-robed, black-bearded, black-capped, dark-faced priests. He is eighty-six years old, and his manners and appearance were dignified in the extreme. Speaking slowly and distinctly he began to tell Gladstone that the sole wish of Cephalonia was to be united to Greece, and there was something very exciting and affecting in the tremulous tones of the old man saying over and over again, “questa infelice isola, questa isola infelice,” [“this unhappy island, this unhappy island”] as the tears streamed down his cheeks and long silvery beard. It was like a scene in a play.’” (Morley 604).\nGladstone condemned the existing system as bad for Britain and bad for the Islands, Morley continues: “Circumstances made it impossible for him to suggest amendment by throwing the burden bodily off [British] shoulders, and at that time he undoubtedly regarded union with Greece as in itself undesirable for the Ionians. Circumstances and his own love of freedom made it equally impossible to recommend the violent suppression of the constitution. The only course left open was to turn the mockery of free government into a reality, and this operation he proposed to carry out with a bold hand.” (Morley 611). Morley means that the islands had the structure of representative government before he arrived, but not the substance, and implies Gladstone set out to supply that structure.\nMorley is not the only biographer who celebrates Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s achievement in Corfu. \u0026ldquo;Gladstone produced a scheme which allowed the islanders a large measure of self-regulation through an [existing] elected assembly,\u0026rdquo; Bulwer-Lytton\u0026rsquo;s biographer Leslie Mitchell writes, declaring it a success for both Bulwer-Lytton and Gladstone. Then Mitchell quotes Bulwer-Lytton: \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know what the Assembly has done or may do\u0026ndash;I know that we have succeeded. We vindicated the honor of England in the eyes of all free nations. I know that I now have the right to say to Despotic Sovereigns, \u0026lsquo;what we have preached to you we have practiced ourselves\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; (Mitchell 216).\nHis words are ironic: Bulwer-Lytton and Disraeli were both fans of Greek culture, but the former had doomed the mission’s ability to respond to the public demand for union with Greece by requiring at the outset that no such union was to be accomplished. He also insisted that British public opinion would not allow anything that could be seen as Britain \u0026ldquo;giving up,\u0026rdquo; and declared that the electorate was to be made up only of property-holders, with no full democracy to be enacted. Mitchell sees these constraints as reasonable boundaries that allowed for an authentically liberal arrangement. He celebrates the outcome: “Demands to join Greece faded away, and a potentially disruptive issue in European diplomacy was put to rest,” Mitchell writes (Mitchell 215). But within four years, the islands did rejoin Greece, so the demand hardly faded away.\nIndeed, other historians paint the trip as a failure, emphasizing what happened afterwards: All of Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s proposals were rejected by the Ionian Islands assembly on February 16, 1859. He left three days later, as Gladstone biographer Philip Magnus has it, \u0026ldquo;reflecting, ruefully, that he had entirely failed in his purpose of reconciling the islanders with a continuance of British connexion\u0026rdquo; (Magnus 138). HCG Matthew\u0026rsquo;s footnotes to The Gladstone Diaries add that \u0026ldquo;the assembly declined to see him off\u0026rdquo; (Gladstone Diaries 370).\nThere was a reason Gladstone was not long for the islands. He had discovered that keeping the post in Corfu meant he would have to surrender his seat in parliament, representing Oxford. Having just been granted the commission by Queen Victoria, he then had to turn around and ask her to rescind it. He was not going to give up that seat. He stood for re-election unopposed and kept his job.\nGladstone returned to London on March 8, but not before a stop in Italy, the subject of which he would say was one of the top issues that provoked his switch to the Liberal Party (Morley 628). His anger at Disraeli apparently combined with a newfound sensitivity to the plight of oppressed nations to drive him to join the Liberals. Corfu started him on that path.\nItaly changes everything Wrestling with the people demanding self-government and a union with Greece seems to have changed Gladstone. When he arrived in Corfu, he was negative about Italy’s goal of unity. After he left, he headed straight to Italy and announced he would support it. Corfu had changed his mind. While in Italy he met with the prime minister of the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the Count of Cavour, who had modernized the northern Italian states’ economies and would go on to become the leading architect of Italian unification. Historians agree that the meeting led to his support for Italy. “During previous visits he had been skeptical about the uniting of the Italian peninsula, but by the spring of 1859 the combination of the tide of excitement sweeping the north and Cavour\u0026rsquo;s assured persuasiveness not only stilled his doubts but kindled his enthusiasm,” writes Roy Jenkins in his biography Gladstone.\nJenkins discounts the possibility that Corfu changed Gladstone’s mind, but his argument proves the opposite. “For his future, and that of British politics, Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s three hours with Cavour were more important than his three months in Corfu,” Jenkins asserts. (Jenkins 198). But did Gladstone really make so major a transition in just three hours? This seems impossible. It\u0026rsquo;s much more likely that Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s perspective on Italy changed because the thousands of people lobbying him to unite the Ionian Islands with Greece changed his mind. Gladstone’s enthusiastic embrace of all things Greek reportedly drove his British colleagues to distrust and ridicule him while he was in Corfu (Magnus 136). It’s that enthusiasm that transferred to his view of Italy.\nRegardless of what caused the switch, Gladstone himself said his enthusiasm for Italy led to his joining the new Liberal Party. He suddenly found common ground with Lord Palmerston, who was to be the prime minister in the new Liberal coalition after June 6 1859. Lord Stanmore writes in his biography of Sidney Herbert:\nThe position of affairs in Italy had an important influence on the working of party politics at home. During 1858, Mr. Gladstone had, step by step, drawn nearer to Lord Derby\u0026rsquo;s Government. He had accepted from it a mission to Corfu, and was in that island at the beginning of 1859. He had no wish for a fresh measure of Parliamentary Reform, and he abhorred the system of election by ballot, which a few years later became law on his proposal. But he had a profound antipathy to Austria and the Austrians, and an equally profound sympathy with Italian aspirations for unity and freedom; and as the Conservative Ministry was strongly prejudiced against the Italian cause, and the Liberal leaders as strongly in its favour, this powerful attraction produced a great change in the attitude, and even in the opinions, of Mr. Gladstone. (Stanmore 180).\nPreviously Gladstone had been no fan of Palmerston. “There were broadly only two subjects on which Gladstone agreed with Palmerston,” Jenkins writes. “The first was Italy, and the second was their shared coolness (although differently expressed) to an extension of the franchise. It was the prominence of these two issues, the first still more than the second, in the three months following Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s return from Corfu which made Palmerston temporarily less repugnant to him than was Disraeli and led him to make a choice of direction which had the most momentous permanent effects” (Jenkins 198).\nOne of those effects was that Gladstone’s sympathy for oppressed people abroad led to his changing his mind about expanding the vote at home. “There is no doubt that his sympathy with oppressed peoples abroad came first in order of time, and modified his domestic views,” writes W.E. Williams in the only book on Gladstone’s transition to liberalism, The Rise of Gladstone to the Leadership of the Liberal Party 1859 to 1868. Then he quotes Lord Stanmore: “Parliamentary reform when accompanied by a sympathetic attitude toward Sardinia (\u0026hellip;or towards Greece or Italy\u0026hellip;) seemed far more tolerable to him than it had appeared to be shortly before.” The parenthetical statement about Greece and Italy was added by Williams to Stanmore’s words. “[Gladstone] began to observe conditions at home with more sympathy.”\n“The overwhelming interest and weight of the Italian question, and of our foreign policy in relation to it, led me to decide without one moment’s hesitation” to join what would become the Liberal Party, Gladstone wrote in a letter to Sir John Acton in 1864 (Morley 628).\nThis transition to supporting domestic rights could not have happened in a mere three hour meeting with Cavour. More likely, Corfu opened the door of Gladstone’s sympathy for oppressed peoples, and Cavour had only to walk through it.\nIsolation breeds change Gladstone’s decisions to go to Corfu, and to switch to the Liberal Party, were also motivated by a desperation for a home in a party. “For thirteen years, the middle space of my life, I have been cast out of party connection: severed from my old party and loath irrevocably to join a new one,\u0026quot; Gladstone said by way of explaining why he switched to the Liberal Party in June of 1859 (Hawkins 261).\nHe had been out of high office for four years, since 1855 when he last resigned the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. But his isolation had really gone on longer than that. Gladstone had for all intents and purposes left the Conservative Party in 1846, after his mentor Sir Robert Peel had ended the so-called Corn Laws, which imposed tariffs on imported grain and therefore—according first to the liberal Whigs and then to Peel—raised the cost of bread and other food. Gladstone supported Peel, and when Disraeli successfully led a rebellion against Peel in support of the Corn Laws, Gladstone left the party. He was a Peelite, not aligned with any party, when the trip to Corfu happened, and it was that desperation in part that had led him to accept the gig. But when he was offered a position in the government by Disraeli in 1858, he rejected it vociferously.\nGladstone’s acceptance of the new role with the Liberals was also probably motivated by the age of his new superiors. Palmerston and Russell were both near the end of their careers, and Disraeli as the potential head of the post-Peel Conservative Party was much younger. Thus his trip to prime minister was likely to be shorter with the Liberals. The new post he was offered with the Liberals was one of the top posts in the government, and was likely to make that transition easier. “The one condition Gladstone made in his acceptance of a post in Palmerston\u0026rsquo;s cabinet was that he be given the Chancellorship of the Exchequer,” Hawkins writes (262). This peeved many of his colleagues in the new party, but Russell and Palmerston wanted Gladstone’s tongue on their side and not on the other side.\nSome historians think Gladstone’s embrace of Italy was motivated by politics. But his ambivalence in Corfu shows he was already beginning to make an ideological switch, and the depth of his transition shows that it was not done for political expedience.\nThe results of Corfu Once the dam was broken, Gladstone began taking more liberal positions. The year after he returned from Corfu, he supported a free press by eliminating the “paper duties” that made political information available to the masses. Robert Kelley in The Transatlantic Persuasion says this was a breakthrough for Gladstone:\n“He introduced his new directions in 1860 by repealing the paper duties, in a tumultuous struggle in which the Lords were humiliated, making cheap newspapers-and therefore political information—available to the masses. He also in this way won the lasting devotion of the new popular newspaper press that was revolutionizing British politics and becoming the voice of the rising Liberalism” (Kelley 204).\nNot that tracking the change in Gladstone’s thought is always easy. He was cagey about political philosophy. David Bebbington in his excellent The Mind of Gladstone searches the documents Gladstone left behind for traces of what Gladstonian Liberalism is, and finds few hits. He even finds a quote from Gladstone saying political philosophy is not England’s thing: “We of this island are not great political philosophers,” Gladstone said. Bebbington says Gladstone found the “ancients” more “concerned than the moderns with the business of government ‘as an art and as a science.’” Christianity, he felt, replaced political philosophy with a “preoccupation with individual ethics,” Bebbington says.\nPerhaps Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s view of the ancient\u0026rsquo;s comfort with political philosophy is one reason that the clearest articulation of his ideological change on the key issue of the day came in his writings on Homer, not politics. It is true that Gladstone once slipped up and stated his support of eventual democracy in a parliamentary debate. “I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger,” Gladstone declared, “is morally entitled to come within the pale of the constitution.” But Gladstone immediately backed off those words, reaching to rather silly depths to try to wiggle out of them.\nWilliams says this statement “was not a mere indiscretion. It was the result, though he did not admit it at the time, of a long process of development.” But Gladstone also would come eventually to describe himself as “an out-and-out inequalitarian,” as Morley chronicles:\n“Something like a little amicable duel took place at one time between [Victorian polymath and writer John] Ruskin and Mr. G., when Ruskin directly attacked his host as a \u0026rsquo;leveller.\u0026rsquo; \u0026lsquo;You see you think one man is as good as another and all men equally competent to judge aright on political questions; whereas I am a believer in an aristocracy.\u0026rsquo; And straight came the answer from Mr. Gladstone, \u0026lsquo;Oh dear, no! I am nothing of the sort. I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inequalitarian,\u0026rsquo; a confession which Ruskin treated with intense delight, clapping his hands triumphantly.”\nA clearer view of Gladstone’s transition on the subject of democracy comes in his Homeric scholarship. A few months before he went to Corfu, in Gladstone’s Studies of Homer and the Homeric Age, he wrote disparagingly of the system of rule by majorities, or as he called it decision by “numbers.” Gladstone said Agamemnon’s forces in the Trojan War did not decide issues by majority rule—and he said that Britain doesn’t and shouldn’t, either.\n“Decision by majorities is as much an expedient, as lighting by gas. In adopting it as a rule, we are not realizing perfection, but bowing to imperfection. We follow it as best for us, not as best in itself. The only right to command, as Burke has said, resides in wisdom and virtue. In their application to human affairs, these great powers have commonly been qualified, on the one hand by tradition and prepossession, on the other hand by force. Decision by majorities has the great merit of avoiding, and that by a test perfectly definite, the last resort to violence; and of making force itself the servant instead of the master of authority. But our country still rejoices in the belief, that she does not decide all things by majorities. The first Greeks neither knew the use of this numerical dogma, nor the abuse of it. They did not employ it as an instrument, and in that they lost: but they did not worship it as an idol, and in that they greatly gained. Votes were not polled in the Olympus of Homer; yet a minority of influential gods carry the day in favour of the Greeks against the majority, and against their Head” (Studies 116-117).\nHowever, when Gladstone revised that work for a new book called Juventus Mundi, he reversed his verdict on decisions by numbers, saying that “the doctrine of majorities” is caused by “a more advanced social development” (Juventus 434). Historians Bebbington and Frank M. Turner have pointed out this marked change (Bebbington 179, Turner 242).This change of mind on the key issue of the day is a major transition. It came just after Britain’s Second Reform Act passed in 1867. While Disraeli was responsible for the passage of the final version of the act, Gladstone had fought for reform as well. And once the reforms were in effect, it was Gladstone who benefited, replacing Disraeli as prime minister on the strength of new working-class voters.\nIn 1864 Gladstone voted for the Ionian Islands to rejoin Greece after all. This demonstrates that the ultimate consequence of his trip to Corfu was that it increased his sympathy for self-governing peoples. His vote was on the winning side, and the islands rejoined Greece and remain part of that nation today.\nAn interpretation of Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s move to the left as stemming from Corfu has rarely been examined in depth. Morley conjectured that \u0026ldquo;close contact with liberal doctrines as to free institutions and popular government must have quickened Mr. Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s progress in liberal doctrines in our own affairs at home,\u0026rdquo; but left the assertion as an undeveloped aside (Morley 620). Most scholars instead emphasize the gradualness of Gladstone’s transformation. Morley himself finds Gladstone’s transformation to liberalism “protracted.” Jenkins calls his motion to the left in 1859 “crabwise,” meaning a sideways walk. Blake says that the differences between politicians like Gladstone and Disraeli in politics of the time appear small to us today. Woodrow Wilson is the only one who seems to think Gladstone’s transformation to liberalism was a speedy one. “As far as I can see [Gladstone’s] transition was a short one,” he said. “His liberalism matured and strengthened rapidly.” But Wilson saw the transition as having happened long before he joined the Liberal party, when Robert Peel was trying to take the Tories in a more moderate direction. So, the transition obviously took longer than Wilson implies.\nThat gradualness was not imagined by scholars, but it obscures the question of where the new path originated. What hasn’t been examined sufficiently is the answer to the question of whether Gladstone arrived in Corfu a conservative and left a liberal. The answer is clear: Gladstone was a Conservative at heart when he landed in the Ionian Islands, and began his path to what the world would come to know as Gladstonian Liberalism. Ironically, it was Disraeli who suffered for it. Like the hero of his first novel, Vivian Grey, Dizzy had concocted a Machiavellian gambit that backfired. Gladstone became his toughest rival for decades thereafter.\n"},{"title":"Review: Edelman\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eDisraeli in Love\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eDisraeli Rising\u003c/em\u003e, mismarketed as 1970s romance novels, died an unfortunate death","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-02-19-review-edelman-disraeli-in-love/","date":"February 19, 2026","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: Edelman's *Disraeli in Love* and *Disraeli Rising*, mismarketed as 1970s romance novels, died an unfortunate death In 1972, the year that The Flame and the Flower launched the sexy historical genre known as the modern “bodice-ripper,” a British MP named Maurice Edelman quietly released an intelligent, campy biographical novel with an unassumingly unsexy cover: Disraeli in Love. The novel quickly sold 400,000 copies in hardcover, perhaps from an audience that skewed male. By the late 1970s the paperback racks of drugstores and airports had been taken over by Harlequin Enterprises and the bodice-ripper. Thus, when Disraeli in Love\u0026rsquo;s sequel, Disraeli Rising, appeared in 1978,it was packaged like The Flame and the Flower, with a mature Disraeli in a crimson smoking jacket, standing behind a bare-shouldered woman in a black evening dress with his hands seemingly slipping down to her almost-bare bosom. In 1984, Stein \u0026amp; Day followed up with an equally bodice-boasting paperback cover to Disraeli in Love, featuring a younger Disraeli in a dashing dandy’s attire playing tonsil-hockey with a married mistress in a strapless dress.The remarketing of these novels seems to have backfired, however, and the bodice-ripping covers are the last the book saw. Both novels are well out of print. Reviews old or new are scarce online (not one word has been written on Goodreads about Disraeli Rising). The mismatch between intelligent text and sensual mass-marketing may have shrunk the audience for the books and consigned them to a fate worse than the bargain bin.\nEdelman’s novels, however, are great (campy) fun. In fact, they improbably represent the best entertainment we have about Dizzy. Disraeli, the splashy dandy prime minister with a quick wit and a sensational life story, has always been crying out to be made into fabulous fiction. But creatives have struggled to produce stories that live up to his promise, as the two films named Disraeli(1929 and 1978) and one named The Prime Minister(1941) all attest. The films emphasize his statesmanship to the point of dullness, flattening out the lively dandy, novelist, man of letters and wit. By contrast, the surprise in Edelman’s novels is that rather than being trashy romance pulp that fudges the truth of Disraeli and his relationships, Disraeli in Love andDisraeli Rising present a relatively serious fictionalization that follows the history both of Disraeli’s politics and his love life fairly closely. The true story is sensational enough on its own to make an entertaining novel.\nFor those who felt the way I did about Disraeli’s 1830s romance novel Henrietta Temple, that it left out everything interesting in Disraeli’s romance with the married Henrietta Sykes, Disraeli in Love is another option. It tells the story of the young Disraeli, loaded with debt and seeking a parliamentary career, bedding a married woman whose connections would lead by novel’s end to a seat in the House of Commons. Edelman mostly follows the lines of the evidence but when a paucity of information forces a choice, he usually flatters the young Benjamin Disraeli. He also opts to glamorize what may have been a less sincere relationship than he makes it out to be, as my review of Henrietta Temple argues. The politics are a somewhat rosy view of young Ben’s early leanings, as Edelman does fictionalize certain events to create the appearance that Disraeli always cared about the poor as much as he seemed to when he wrote Sybil. Disraeli showed limited interest in what was then called “the condition of England” until later in his career.\nDisraeli Rising is full of the many secondary characters who populated Disraeli’s life as he rose in parliament from 1837-1852. It begins with the great dandy Count D’Orsay forcibly suggesting that it’s time for Disraeli to get married (“Marriage is all the rage. You must get married, Ben”), though not in the more colorful terms that he actually did (“You will not make love! You will not intrigue! You have your seat; do not risk anything! If you meet with a widow, then marry!”, as quoted in Stanley Weintraub’s biography Disraeli.) Immediately thereafter in Edelman’s narrative, Disraeli is in fact courting a widow for her money: Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis. The only two or three characters who don’t appear in Disraeli biographies include George Inglefield, who becomes engaged to Sarah Disraeli, Benjamin’s sister. This is by far the oddest choice in the book as Sarah died unmarried. The second most absurd choice is the over-indulgence of a character that should have remained in the periphery, Mrs. Clarissa Edmonds. In the novel, she is a former mistress of Disraeli’s who stalks him and tries to break him. Though she is not in the index of any of the Disraeli biographies I checked, Edmonds is mentioned in Robert Blake\u0026rsquo;s seminal biography as a forger who briefly embarrasses Disraeli before his lawyer unmasks her scheme. I also found a footnote in a paper on the insanity defense that suggested she had in fact been rumored to be Disraeli’s mistress and to have tried to finance an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Robert Peel. Clarissa’s supposed involvement in the latter plot is only briefly alluded to in Disraeli Rising as a paranoid fever dream on the part of Peel himself. But the assault, which killed an assistant to Peel, is given a surprising amount of space as it mostly leaves Disraeli behind and focuses on the perspective of both Peel and his unfortunate assistant.\nEdelman’s research is thorough, as is to some extent his portrait of Disraeli. In the relentlessly heterosexual world of the historical romance novel, for example, he could have easily ignored what many scholars consider to be Disraeli’s homosexual side. But both novels address it at least in passing. In Disraeli in Love Edelman gives us a delicious paragraph utilizing the character of Musaeus from Disraeli’s novel Contarini Fleming. Musaeus was, to an astonishing extent, an open lover of Disraeli’s semiautobiographical character Contarini in their mutual school days. Edelman writes the Musaeus story as though it happened to Disraeli, which it well may have. That Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s effeminate side vanishes for the length of the first book is less fun and less rigorous. But Edelman returns to the subject in Disraeli Rising as he seeks to explicate the puzzling relationship between Disraeli and Lord Henry Lennox, a younger man to whom he wrote declarations of “love.” Blake explains away the use of love language as the “hyperbole” of the time, but admits to being baffled as to why Disraeli lavished such attention on so “trivial” a person. In Disraeli Rising the young parliamentarian explains his relationship with Lennox by saying “he provides me with a lot of information.” His wife, a sugar momma first and a love match only later, replies “Is that all?” It’s not the last quip she makes about Lennox.\nIt’s surprising how little bodice-ripping there is particularly in the second novel. Disraeli and his wife-to-be get it on in their first encounter in the book, which seems a bit premature for the relationship in 1837, then never return to bed again. The first novel is steamier, depicting in detail what gets Disraeli over a bout of dysfunction with his older lover. But Edelman’s interest in the evolution of Disraeli’s politics often takes precedence over the romance.\nDisraeli in Love was published in the wake of Blake’s classic 1966 biography of Disraeli, at a time when centennial interest was high in Disraeli’s 19th Century career as prime minister. With Disraeli’s oldest novel turning 200 this year, there is little keeping these fascinating old books alive, despite a robust burst of scholarship on them in the last 20-40 years. Thus, it’s interesting to revisit a pair of books that make the case Disraeli can be a mass entertainment experience. Dizzy is as colorful a character as politics has ever given us. He is worthy of more than these novels, and a better film or play than the 20th Century gave us, but if one is interested in a fictional treatment of the full Disraeli these novels are the best starting point. Just ignore the covers.\n"},{"title":"An aside: Byron and Shelley’s influence on Wilson and Gladstone","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-01-31-byron-shelley-wilson-gladstone/","date":"January 31, 2026","tags":["Wilson","Gladstone","Disraeli"],"text":"An aside: Byron and Shelley’s influence on Wilson and Gladstone My last piece, on Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Venetia, led me to look into Woodrow Wilson and William Gladstone’s thoughts on the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the subject of that novel. The result inspired a few thoughts on why Disraeli felt the need to “domesticate” Byron and Shelley, as I argued in that essay that he does: A notion of genius which frightened the Victorians but to which Wilson and Gladstone appear to have personally related.\nThis aside makes the case that by the late 19th century, Romantic genius had been reconceived as emotional instability, and that Wilson and arguably even Gladstone (neither one of whom one would expect to see themselves in the Romantics) absorbed this concept as a way of understanding themselves.\nThe first impetus for this aside is a long love letter Wilson wrote to his wife from Baltimore, Maryland, where he was getting a PhD in government studies, on November 22, 1884. The letter ruminates on what Wilson calls “the intellectual marriage,” a phrase he picked up from Philip Hamerton’s book The Intellectual Life. Wilson uses Shelley’s first marriage as the prime example of the intellectual marriage phenomenon.\nIt’s difficult to cut, and a great read, so below is the full letter. In it, Wilson tells his then-fiancée Ellen Axson about something he read in an essay about Percy Bysshe Shelley by one of his heroes, the economist, government theorist, and man of letters Walter Bagehot. The passage he quotes is about Shelley’s disastrous first marriage with Harriet Westbrook, whom he abandoned because he did not believe in living with someone with whom one was not in love. Westbrook ultimately committed suicide, and Shelley went on to marry Mary Godwin, the eventual author of Frankenstein. Wilson muses on the difficulty of finding a soul mate for a genius like Shelley, explains that he relates to that quandary, and celebrates his happiness in finding Ellen.\n“My own darling,\n“Here is an extract I have just hit upon and which I know you will appreciate and enjoy, as a supplement to certain chapters in Hamerton\u0026rsquo;s Intellectual Life which you will doubtless recall. This is more vivacious than Hamerton because it is from an essay on Shelley by my master, Bagehot\u0026ndash;the most vivacious, the most racily real of writers on life\u0026ndash;whether the life be political, social, or separately intellectual. Of the first Mrs. Shelley he says:\n‘We should conclude that she was capable of making many people happy, though not of making Shelley happy. There is an ordinance of nature at which men of genius are perpetually fretting, but which does more good than many laws of the universe which they praise: it is that ordinary women ordinarily prefer ordinary men. \u0026lsquo;Genius,\u0026rsquo; as Hazlitt would have put it, \u0026lsquo;puts them out.’ It is so strange; it does not come into the room as usual; it says \u0026lsquo;such things\u0026rsquo;; once it forgot to brush its hair. The common female mind prefers usual tastes, settled manners, customary conversation, defined and practical pursuits. It is a great good that it should be so. Nature has no wiser instinct. The average woman suits the average man; good health, easy cheerfulness, common charms, suffice. If Miss Westbrook had married an everyday person\u0026ndash;a gentleman, suppose, in the tallow line\u0026ndash;she would have been happy, and have made him happy. Her mind could have understood his life; her society would have been a gentle relief from un-odoriferous pursuits. She had nothing in common with Shelley \u0026amp;c.’\n“This is a long quotation to burden a short letter with, but I know that you will not begrudge it the space. This is the only way in which I can even come near to realizing the luxury of carrying the best, most suggestive, passages of my favourite authors to my best loved companion. Of course the explanation of Shelley\u0026rsquo;s mistake in this unfortunate marriage is simple. Mistake was inevitable when he chose to marry a girl because her beauty had won his fanciful love at first sight, and because her name was Harriett\u0026ndash;a name of tender associations with him because it was borne by a cousin whom he had loved but whom he had lost-to another man! When a man marries off-hand he can\u0026rsquo;t count on anything as certain, except extreme danger. It\u0026rsquo;s like dying offhand and blindly running the chances as to climate in the next world. But to marry thus is just what the man of genius\u0026ndash;especially if his nature drives him in straight lines of simple impulse, as Shelley\u0026rsquo;s nature did him\u0026ndash;is exceedingly likely to do, and his only protection is to be found in the rule which Bagehot points out: that an essentially ordinary woman is not likely to want him!\n“‘Some eccentric men of genius have, indeed,’ continues Bagehot, \u0026ldquo;felt in the habitual tact and serene nothingness of ordinary women a kind of trust and calm. They have admired an instinct of the world which they have not—a repose of mind they could not share. But this is commonly in later years. A boy of twenty thinks he knows the world; he is too proud and happy in his own eager shifting thoughts, to wish to contrast them with repose. The commonplaceness of life goads him: placid society irritates him. Bread is an encumbrance; upholstery tedious; he craves excitement; he wishes to reform mankind. You cannot convince him it is right to sew, in a world so full of sorrow and evil.’\n“This is obviously a fair description of the state of mind of most boys of twenty, those without genius as well as those with\u0026ndash;so they be ever so little awake to intellectual interests. The problem of choosing a life-companion is, therefore, a serious one for everybody out of the \u0026rsquo;tallow line,\u0026rdquo; though there\u0026rsquo;s more tragedy in it for the genius than for lesser folk. Perhaps it is fortunate for the race that there are so few geniuses in it. The average man would be monstrously uncomfortable if the wife of his bosom were of this rare make\u0026ndash;no less uncomfortable, I take it, than a woman would be at the incomings and outgoings of a husband who was afflicted with the disease of being unlike anybody else she had ever known or heard of, and consequently altogether hopelessly unaccountable. The frequent mistakes that are made, by the wrong matching of less extraordinary people, are probably due to the fact that intellectual young men\u0026ndash;even more than intellectual young women\u0026ndash;see very little of general society; are kept apart until they reach the most susceptible age, and then thrown into associations which ensure their falling in love with the first pretty woman they meet. The boy who from the first is free to live with the other sex and is not taken from them for any long seclusion in school or college cloisters, has much the best chance to make a safe marriage. There ought not to be any great difficulty in the choice for anybody, one is inclined to think. Is not everyone more sensitive to the faults of those whom they love than to the faults of others? Apparently the fault-finding faculties are sharpened rather than dulled by love.\n“I remember the time, Eileen, when I read Hamerton\u0026rsquo;s chapters on marriage as affecting the intellectual life with great disquietude. I was oppressed by all the possibilities of mistake, somewhat terrified by the impossibility of any provident provision against danger. I knew the strength of my own impulses\u0026ndash;the power of love that was in me, the ruling power of my nature\u0026ndash;and I realized that mistake was ruin, happy choice, salvation. Everything depended on the selection I should be allowed to make. Is there any wonder, then, darling, in the fact that I am now so happy? Hasn\u0026rsquo;t a man a right to feel happy who knows that his heart\u0026rsquo;s fortune is made! We have been very fortunate, my little queen. We have had unusual opportunities for gaining experience in each other\u0026rsquo;s dispositions, for reading each other\u0026rsquo;s hearts. Everything that has happened since that blessed 16th of September [the day of their engagement] has gone to make it impossible that there should ever be any realization of the sweet, unselfish, puzzling, baffling fear that day urged by the lips I that day kissed. I did not know my darling then as I know her now: but my later knowledge of her has proved nothing but that she is what I then thought her. And the little lady who wrote the letter which I received this morning must surely be satisfied with her part in the bargain. You wouldn\u0026rsquo;t dare, Miss, to talk to me thus, as you write! There\u0026rsquo;s no telling what I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t do. Kisses and caresses would stop the sweet words from coming: I wouldn\u0026rsquo;t for the world stop them, they are too precious! and yet how could I keep from taking you in my arms and overwhelming you with kisses? Will you try the experiment next time I see you\u0026ndash;just to test my self-restraint? I would make almost any sacrifice to hear my shy little sweetheart talk that way\u0026ndash;to have her tempt me both with words and with those precious looks of love and confidence! It would be worth any number of weeks of this tedious hermit life. My darling! 1 wonder if you have any conception of the joy your love gives me\u0026ndash;of the gayety of spirit with which I look forward to the time when you shall be mine, by the law of the land as well as by the law. … With all the love of all my heart,\nYour own\nWoodrow.\nFrom The Papers of Woodrow Wilson Volume 3, beginning on page 471. The indentation of the quotes from Bagehot is mine. This letter shows that the attitude about genius that inspired Venetia in 1837 was still going strong in 1884. Dino Franco Falluga in his 2005 book The Perversity of Poetry argues that Lord Byron’s genius was attacked by disease in part as a way of putting down the threat of his radicalism politically. In my blog post on Venetia this week, I follow the thinking of Falluga and his collaborator Emily Allen in their 2024 book Novel-Poetry that Disraeli was attempting a similar maneuver by fictionalizing the story of Byron and his lost love Mary Chaworth, a cousin he fell in love with as a child. Disraeli by centralizing her story, I argued, was preparing for a new parliamentary career as a Tory.\nIn Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Kay Redfield Jamison shows how Byron embraced the pathologization of genius himself (as Falluga argues he did):\n“Lady Byron, who ultimately sued Byron for separation on the grounds that he was insane, wrote: \u0026ldquo;The day after my marriage he said, You were determined not to marry a man in whose family there was insanity? have done very well indeed,\u0026rsquo; or some ironical expression to that effect, followed by the information that his maternal grandfather had committed suicide, and a Cousin\u0026hellip; had been mad, \u0026amp; set fire to a house.”\nWhile Byron may have found the image of “madness” helpful for his reputation as a poet, Disraeli knew his reputation as a politician was another matter.\nWilson in this 1884 letter does not go so far as to argue that the genius is insane, but he comes close, arguing that the genius is impulsive. Wilson confesses he was unnerved by what Hamerton had to say about “marriage as affecting the intellectual life.” “I was oppressed by all the possibilities of mistake, somewhat terrified by the impossibility of any provident provision against danger,” Wilson writes. “I knew the strength of my own impulses\u0026ndash;the power of love that was in me, the ruling power of my nature\u0026ndash;and I realized that mistake was ruin, happy choice, salvation. Everything depended on the selection I should be allowed to make.”\nHere is a brief, telling passage of Hamerton’s book, which caused Wilson to freak out about what Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s:\n“This difficulty of finding the true mate is the real reason why so many clever men marry silly or stupid women. The women about them seem to be all very much alike, mentally; it seems hopeless to expect any real companionship, and the clever men are decided by the color of a girl’s eyes, or a thousand pounds more in her dowry, or her relationship to a peer of the realm.”\nThis is just the logic Wilson uses to psychoanalyze Shelley in his letter: “Mistake was inevitable when he chose to marry a girl because her beauty had won his fanciful love at first sight.”\nWhen Wilson’s fiancée writes him back, she teases him slightly for regarding himself as “extraordinary.” She very subtly points out, I think, the sexism in Bagehot’s characterization of the ordinary woman. She refers to Bagehot’s view of male genius mockingly (“the poor helpless man of genius,” she calls him). Here is Ellen’s response:\n“Many thanks also for the very interesting and suggestive passages from Bagehot. I would like to read the essay on Shelley, both to obtain in full his very sensible views on \u0026ldquo;the intellectual marriage,\u0026rdquo; and also to see what he has to say in defense of Shelley for it would seem to be to some extent an apology for him. What a very keen observer he\u0026ndash;Bagehot\u0026ndash;is! And what a very fortunate thing it is for the world that it is so largely regulated by the law he points out; a most natural law too,-for everybody knows that \u0026ldquo;birds of a feather flock together\u0026rdquo;; and the rarer sort, of which there are not enough to make \u0026ldquo;flocks,\u0026rdquo; dwell apart-to themselves. It is a cheering reflection, from one point of view, for it shows that the poor helpless men of genius are not utterly unprotected, after all. Yet it is, for me, a very uncomfortable reflection too, if it be absolutely essential to the happiness of an extraordinary man that his choice should be an extraordinary woman; but I won\u0026rsquo;t tease you with such talk now, when it will do no good;-and after all I am not quite as \u0026ldquo;ordinary\u0026rdquo; as the type Mr. Bagehot describes, for she, it seems, is too essentially commonplace even to appreciate or understand anything above the average can and do love you, my darling, beyond the common.”\nWhen reading Ellen’s carefully sarcastic response, I noticed again that Wilson had not called Ellen an intellectual or a genius in his initial letter. He reserves the description for himself, which is notable particularly when one realizes that Ellen at this moment in time is in New York City enrolled a prestigious art school learning to paint with talented New Yorkers. (Her landscape paintings are quite good.)\nDoes Wilson catch Ellen’s sarcasm? It would seem not. When he replies, he calls her a silly “little goose,” and while he complements her by saying she is not Bagehot’s “ordinary woman,” he once again reserves all implication of genius for himself:\n“I think, my love, that I can safely agree to the proposition that you are ‘not quite as ordinary as the type Mr. Bagehot describes’! Oh, you dear, delightful, incorrigible little goose! Why will you persist in making me out an \u0026ldquo;extraorindary [sic] man\u0026rdquo;? If you won’t be convinced, I think that I can point out a way to comfort yourself by disproving your own inferiority. Since it is evident that you overestimate my abilities—it is at least demonstrable that you quite appreciate me. But no ordinary woman can appreciate an extraordinary man. Therefore you must be quite as extraordinary as I am! Q.E.D. Besides, my precious little sweetheart, there\u0026rsquo;s no surer proof of the entire fitness of a woman for the man to whom she gives herself than that her love satisfies him. It\u0026rsquo;s not the quantity alone, but quite as much the quality of love that makes it sufficient for the needs of the natures on which it is bestowed: and if your love is of the kind 1 want, then are you mine indeed, my darling, and we were meant to make each other happy. And you yourself will admit-wont you, little queen?\u0026ndash;that your love for me is of that kind. I know that it is: because I know that it satisfies even my great, overmastering, tender love I say, what more complete demonstration could there be? May my Eileen feel identified with me? If she does\u0026ndash;and I believe she does\u0026ndash;she ought to put away these misgivings. Oh my darling, my darling! How shall I ever prove my love for you!”\nGladstone biographer HCG Matthew thinks one of Wilson’s heroes, William Ewart Gladstone, had also been influenced by Byron. This is counterintuitive, as Gladstone is known for being everything Byron is not: rigid, religious, even sanctimonious. In fact, on the web site of Gladstone’s personal library, the editors suggest he was too religious to like Lord Byron. They point out his library had an \u0026ldquo;R\u0026rdquo; section for Romantic poetry. But they say he was not a fan.\nHowever Matthew thinks Gladstone was a fan, or at least he was just after he read Byron’s epic poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” in his younger years before he had met his wife. When earlier hopes for a different romance dissolved Gladstone wrote with what Matthew considers Byronic melancholy, saying, “The world outside me seems somehow dismantled now. Bitter things which have gone the wrong way for me because of the icy coldness of my heart,” and “the daily sadness that is upon me in the midst of this painted life of inward trouble” and “I live almost perpetually restless \u0026amp; depressed.” Matthew says the tone is Byronic: “Childe Harold had offered a model of romantic restlessness to Gladstone\u0026rsquo;s generation, and he read it as the fruitlessness of his suit of Caroline Farquhar began to be apparent.” If Matthew is right, Gladstone identified with Byron in much the same manner Wilson identified with Shelley.\nThus we get a small window into the impact of the Romantics on the two figures who have thus far been the major subjects of this blog besides Disraeli: Wilson and Gladstone. Wilson also copied out Shelley’s poems for his fiancee on occasion. One can overstate the Romantics’ influence; Wilson barely read Byron. While he did read “Childe Harold” in college, for some reason he only owned Canto Three. The only evidence that Byron made an impression is that Wilson copied out a section of Canto Three describing the Swiss Alps and noted in the margin that it was a good description of life in the mountains.\nStill, as an aside, these are fascinating relics of the influence of Romanticism on multiple generations—first Gladstone and Disraeli, and then the younger Wilson.\n"},{"title":"Turning Tory: Disraeli domesticates the scandalous Lord Byron in his novel \u003cem\u003eVenetia\u003c/em\u003e","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2026-01-27-review-venetia/","date":"January 27, 2026","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Turning Tory: Disraeli domesticates the scandalous Lord Byron in his novel *Venetia* When Benjamin Disraeli, just months from at last becoming a member of parliament after years of trying, finished his novel Venetia in 1837 he sent a copy to his friend William Beckford. He apologized that Beckford had never received his previous novel, Henrietta Temple, admitting “The book was not worth reading.” However, he said, Venetia “is more in our way, tho’ adulterated enough with commonplace, I hope, to be popular.” Disraeli did not say why the new novel was \u0026ldquo;in our way,\u0026rdquo; but it likely concerned their common interest in Lord Byron, the famously rakish poet upon whom Disraeli had largely modeled his persona in the first 30 years of his life – and on whose life the novel Venetia is based. The sense in which Disraeli had “adulterated” Byron’s story hinges on a cousin of Byron’s named Mary Chaworth, his childhood companion and lifelong \u0026ldquo;one that got away.\u0026rdquo; The great dandy Beau Brummel said he himself had heard Byron \u0026ldquo;romancing about her for hours.\u0026rdquo; Byron told a friend that if he had married Chaworth \u0026ldquo;perhaps the whole tenor of my life would have been different.\u0026rdquo; (Both lines are quoted in Ian Gilmour\u0026rsquo;s 2002 biography The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Own Time.)\nThe scholarship on the novel, at least in English, has almost completely ignored Chaworth as an influence on the story. In its early printings, however, the publisher specifically advertised that the title character, Venetia Herbert, was based on Chaworth. A blurb on the cover of an early edition quoted a contemporary review:\n“The story is shaped upon the character of Lord Byron, and some of the events of his life. He figures here, as in his own poems, as the hero of the piece, and is introduced as Lord Cadurcis, at the age of eleven years. His fond, passionate, and inconsistent mother, is also prominent; whilst Miss Chaworth, somewhat metamorphosed, appears as Venetia Herbert. There is much of poetical beauty and vivid description throughout the volumes.”\nWhy did Disraeli name the book for the character based on Mary Chaworth? Critics have focused on his figuring of Byron, but Disraeli didn’t choose to name the novel for his Byron character, Lord Cadurcis, and his novels are always named for the lead character. Moreover, the novel is clearly told from the point of view of Venetia Herbert. Analyzing this choice, we can see that Disraeli was in fact “adulterating” the myth of Lord Byron not only to make his book more popular but also to prepare himself for parliament. This article argues that Disraeli used Mary Chaworth’s story to rehabilitate and, simultaneously, to distance himself from the great poet, who had suffered from scandal in the years before his death in 1824. Venetia reframes Byron as an icon of lost domestic virtue, in the process crafting a public persona as he transitioned from being an “independent Radical” to becoming a conservative Tory politician.\nTo see why Disraeli made this choice, we must visit the political moment in which Disraeli wrote the book. It’s 1837. Benjamin Disraeli has finally become a Tory, after spending much of five years unsuccessfully standing for parliament as an “independent Radical.” He has now found a patron, Lord Lyndhurst, who has gotten him into an important Tory Club, and with whom he has shared his mistress (perhaps unknowingly). But now he has to find a way to win over the more conservative Tory crowd, despite having supported the Reform Act of 1832 and called for the adoption of “the democratic principle” over “the aristocratic principle.” One obstacle to this transition is his carefully crafted image as a Byronic dandy, with deliberately curled hair and a wardrobe of flashy colorful suits and trousers, like the great Radical aristocratic poet\u0026rsquo;s. On top of this Disraeli has written a library of novels that ape the effusive political and personal tangents of Byron’s poetry. As critics like Emily Allen and Dino Franco Felluga have argued, Byron was viewed by certain Tories as a dangerous Radical, whose personal life generated an enormous scandal that drove him out of England permanently in 1816. At this moment, in 1837, Disraeli chooses to write a novel, Venetia, that fictionalizes the lives of Byron and his even more radical friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. Disraeli fragments the historical parallels, giving some characteristics of Byron to his Shelley character Marmion Herbert, and some characteristics of Shelley to his Byron character, Cadurcis, and setting the entire story in the time of the American Revolution. This has confused critics, even causing one to think Herbert to be Byron and Carducis to be Shelley. But the move is not merely the move of sloppy writing born of haste and dire financial need, as he hid from creditors. As we shall see, it is a thematic and structural choice that many critics have missed. Why would someone seeking to shed the image of a radical choose such risky subject matter? Particularly when he has aligned himself with the more scandalous aspects of Byron’s reputation by carrying on with a married woman in public, and opening himself to the charge of effeminacy in an England that associated such characteristics with the crime of “buggery”?\nPerhaps Disraeli was attempting to simultaneously rehabilitate and distance himself from Byron\u0026rsquo;s image. This conclusion is in line with a recent wave of scholarship on the novel that takes it more seriously than most critics in earlier decades. (See, most recently, 2024’s book Novel-Poetry by Allen and Falluga.) What recent scholarship has not emphasized, however, and what has laid dormant as an interpretive lens for almost 200 years, is that Disraeli attempted to accomplish this sort of literary makeover in part by making a heroine out of Chaworth, who Byron associated for decades with his lost innocence. A review of the literature on Venetia since 1837 has shown that almost no one has alluded to Chaworth, even fewer by name. Philip Guedalla, who edits the 1926 Bradenham edition of Disraeli’s novels, says Byron’s “moods, his mother, and his Muse all make their appearance with Plantagenet Cadurcis” but does not specify who his muse is. He presumably means Chaworth, who inspired multiple poems including “The Dream.” More recently Ann R. Hawkins, who edited the 2004 Routledge edition (the best way to read the book by far), quotes the Colburn blurb mentioning Chaworth by name in her December 2004 paper \u0026ldquo;Evoking Byron from Manuscript to Print.\u0026rdquo; But even Hawkins only covers Chaworth as one of several influences and does not interpret the novel through the lens of Chaworth’s story. The most extensive mention of Mary Chaworth appeared first in 1868: Teresa Guiccioli\u0026rsquo;s memoir of a life her time as Byron\u0026rsquo;s mistress, My Recollections of Lord Byron. But that fascinating account emphasizes that the character of Venetia also represents other figures from Byron\u0026rsquo;s life, which as we shall see it did. None of these sources interpret the novel with Chaworth as the central figure, as I do here.\nThe parallels between Chaworth’s story and Venetia’s are easy to tick off. She is born in a country estate called Cherbury that is described in a detail that allows us to see how clearly it is modeled after Chaworth’s home Annesley Hall. (“Annesley” incidentally is a name that Disraeli used for one of his characters in The Young Duke several years before, showing perhaps how long Chaworth’s story had moved this young author). The estate is near a vast, almost-abandoned abbey that is clearly based on the abbey in which Byron grew up. Like Chaworth, Venetia meets the lord of the abbey when he is but 10 years old. Lord Byron and Lord Cadurcis have both become lords without much money, parented by a single parent with whom they are in continual conflict. That Byron had such a conflict with his mother was so notorious that his key 20th Century biographer, Leslie Marchand, had to refute it thusly:\n“Mrs. Byron was not always in a tantrum, and there is ample evidence that she loved her son and that she sacrificed her own comfort to give him every advantage her poverty permitted. The chronological vagueness of early accounts of Byron\u0026rsquo;s childhood has left the impression that his mother habitually threw the fire tongs at her son\u0026rsquo;s head or broke dishes over it. But most of these spectacular performances belong to the period of his obstreperous youth in England.”\nDisraeli didn’t have Marchand to inspire his novel. But he did have Thomas Moore’s biography of Byron, and the relationship of Cadurcis to his mother follows almost precisely its depiction. Both Byron’s mother and Cadurcis’s mother die while their sons are away from home. Both say that “God gave me one friend,” and that this friend is now gone. Meanwhile, both couples fall in love, with the female character rejecting the young male in both cases. Both young lords go on to become famous poets and scandalous Whig libertines. The parallels go on and on.\nOne reason critics have de-emphasized the Chaworth connection, it would seem, is that Disraeli did not only use the character of Venetia to represent Mary. Venetia is also based on Ianthe Shelley, who was abandoned by her father Percy Bysshe Shelley along with her mother, Shelley’s first wife Harriet Westbrook, when Ianthe was very young. Venetia also represents Ada Byron, the daughter of Lord Byron. Disraeli named the character\u0026rsquo;s mother Annabell, presumably after Lady Annabell Byron.\nThe novel tells the stories of Byron and Shelley in so fragmented a way that many early critics rejected the book altogether. Blake said the book was “fatally marred by its whole concept — a fictionalized account of Byron and Shelley put back in the period of the American War of Independence.” This is indeed a hard move to account for, as Byron and Shelley helped make the 19th Century what it was. “It as if someone had produced in recent times a book about TE Lawrence or Rupert Brooke in the setting of the Crimean War.” What does anything mean in a particular historical moment, if the central icons of that time are dislocated? Probably one of Disraeli’s motivations for changing the chronology of the story was the fact that Byron had died only 13 years before the book was published, and his use of Byron’s life story was still sensitive. In reviewing the novel, The Edinburgh Review refused to go into the details of the novel on the grounds that it was too intrusive.\nHowever, the reason for the alteration has a purpose beyond mere legal defense. In moving the pair backwards in time, Disraeli seems to be asking how radical they really were. In the moment he wrote the book, the pair were remembered for the scandal of their personal lives and political persuasions. John Wilson Croker, a Tory politician, once observed in a letter to Byron (and Disraeli’s) publisher John Murray that Byron was feared by conservatives as a political threat: “It was only yesterday at dinner that somebody said that he had read or seen a letter of Lord Byron\u0026rsquo;s to somebody, saying that if the Radicals only made a little progress and showed some real force, he would hasten over and get on horseback to head them,” Croker wrote. (This is quoted in Falluga’s 2005 The Perversity of Poetry.) Croker downplayed the notion of Byron as a Radical leader, but the threat seemed real enough to someone that he felt the need to reject it. Associated inevitably with Byron already, Disraeli had to persuade readers that neither the sins nor the politics of the notorious poet would have been so radical in the 18th Century. Surprisingly, this motivation has not been suggested by any of the analysts of the novel that I’ve read.\nThis interpretation is backed up by the fact that when Disraeli gives us philosophical and literary discussions between the two poets, he draws from sources in the 18th century rather than the 19th. For example, Hawkins’ footnotes in the Routledge edition point out that Cadurcis’ views on Shakespeare are drawn from Enlightenment scholars, not Byron or anyone of the era of the Romantic poets:\n\u0026ldquo;And who is Shakspeare?\u0026rdquo; (sic) said Cadurcis. \u0026ldquo;We know of him as much as we do of Homer. Did he write half the plays attributed to him? Did he ever write a single whole play? I doubt it. He appears to me to have been an inspired adapter for the theatres, which were then not as good as barns. I take him to have been a botcher up of old plays. His popularity is of modern date, and it may not last; it would have surprised him marvellously. Heaven knows, at present, all that bears his name is alike admired; and a regular Shaksperian falls into ecstasies with trash which deserves a niche in the Dunciad. For my part, I abhor your irregular geniuses.”\nHad Disraeli been merely pressed for time when he chose the 18th century as his setting, as some critics allege, he would probably have located his characters’ discussion in the present day. It is more work to carefully place the philosophy back several decades.\n***\nThus, confusing as it may seem at first blush, one must ask why Disraeli made his choices as he did rather than simply dismissing them hastily. The same question applies to his choice to name the novel Venetia. The fact is, Disraeli is not the only Victorian novelist to use the Mary Chaworth episode to somehow domesticate or comment upon Lord Byron. Andrew Elfenbein in his book Byron and the Victorians does not mention Chaworth in his excellent discussion of Venetia, but he does mention her in discussing Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle. Caworth’s story was relatable to persons who found Byron’s sex life to be off-putting. Byron was known to contemporaries to have had homosexual affairs, had a child with his half-sister, and to have claimed to have slept with 200 women in one three year period in Vienna. This was scandalous in the time of the Regency and was positively contrary to the spirit of the Victorian age. But the Caworth story was redemptive: He was really at heart with one sweetheart from childhood, and Victorians may have perceived that had she accepted him he would have been a model citizen.\nAs Disraeli plotted damage control for a career in Parliament, he had to straddle a line. He had openly courted attention to his affair with the married Lady Henrietta Sykes, naming his prior novel Henrietta Temple for her. Elfenbein points out that such a Byronic image had advantages. But the affair also had costs: As Blake describes, he was dogged for decades by those who found it too much that Disraeli brought both Henrietta and his Tory patron Lord Lyndhurst home to his father’s house – at the time that she was sleeping with both. To this day questions remain about whether Disraeli was allowing Henrietta to sleep his way to the top. Arguments may be made on both sides, as it’s unclear Disraeli knew about Henrietta and Lyndhurst. Biographer John Vincent wrote in 1990:\n“Byron and Shelley were, in Tory eyes, men of the left. Moreover, their private lives were hardly conventional. To write about them was only to advertise to the world, and especially to the Tory world, all that was suspect about Disraeli. Where [the semiautobiographical hero of Henrietta Temple] Armine had debts, Marmion Herbert (Shelley) had a mistress. Disraeli had had both; but why draw attention to the fact? Yet in his introduction Disraeli boldly commended Shelley and Byron as ‘two of the most renowned and refined spirits that have adorned these, our latter days.’”\nHowever, Disraeli distanced himself from Byron at the same time he lauded him. Disraeli does this explicitly once the once-soaring reputation of Lord Cadurcis, who is described in the book as a libertine but whose crimes are left almost entirely to the imagination, succumbs at last to scandal. As his character’s presence at the House of Lords causes a riot, Disraeli pauses both to defend and distance himself from his hero. First, Disraeli copies almost verbatim (says Hawkins) a paragraph straight out of Thomas Babbington Macauley’s review of Moore’s biography:\n“It has been well-observed, that no spectacle is so ridiculous as the British public, in one of its periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces. and family quarrels, pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years, our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated. We must make a stand against vice. We must teach libertines that the English people appreciate the importance of domestic ties. Accordingly, some unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than hundreds whose offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out as an expiatory sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from him. If he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by the higher orders, and hissed by the lower.”\nInterestingly, it is not Byron\u0026rsquo;s libertine ways that Disraeli criticizes in this moment, it is his literature:\n“But Lord Cadurcis had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is punished most severely; Lord Cadurcis had been overpraised. He had excited too warm an interest: - and the public, with its usual justice, was resolved to chastise him for its own folly.”\nStill, Disraeli was one of Byron’s biggest fans. He is blaming the public more than Byron for their overestimation of him. This distinction helps explain an ambivalence that is apparent in the letter with which I opened this article. It reveals a conflicted young man who had enjoyed the company of the literary radicals and maybe even one who is anxious about leaving them to join the Tory party. Beckford, the author of the novel Vathek, was himself a radical who was approached by Utilitarian writer Jeremy Bentham to make a case for abolishing the death penalty for “buggery.” He also had fled England, much like Byron, because of rumor and scandal. Disraeli obviously wished to avoid Byron and Beckford\u0026rsquo;s fate. He may have wished to show he understood Byron without being identified with him. However, Disraeli had originally built for himself a reputation as a Radical, having secured letters of endorsement for Parliament in his first election in 1832 from two of the major Radicals of the day, thanks to his Radical friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a fellow novelist, dandy and man of letters. Those Radicals were appalled to see how conservative Disraeli was in the end, and one of them withdrew his endorsement. However, Disraeli’s wishing to write a novel in Beckworth’s “way” might highlight the extent to which his heart was still in radicalism, even as his father’s Toryism won the day. Thus, Venetia is less a rejection of Lord Byron than a protection and a transformation. Disraeli’s domestication of Byron, through the story of Mary Chaworth, can even be read as a hint that at least to his radical friends Disraeli was going into Tory politics as something of a Trojan horse, a conservative concealing the sometime liberal within. Disraeli strongly valued the conservation of institutions like the monarchy, the church and the aristocracy. But he was after all only a few years older than he’d been when he championed the democratic ideal over the aristocratic one. When he named his novel Venetia, Disraeli was using a story of lost idyllic domesticity to bring his Byronic hopes for social justice with him into the world of Tory conservatism.\n"},{"title":"Review: Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eHenrietta Temple\u003c/em\u003e is not biography, but it would be better if it was","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-12-21-review-henrietta-temple/","date":"December 21, 2025","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: Disraeli's *Henrietta Temple* is not biography, but it would be better if it was Having heard that Benjamin Disraeli’s 1837 novel Henrietta Temple: A Love Story was a semiautobiographical telling of his relationship with a woman named Henrietta Sykes between 1833 and 1836, I had long looked forward to reading his account of this open affair with an older, richer, married woman. Such relationships were rare in the annals of literature\u0026ndash;and in real life\u0026ndash;in his day. But when I opened the book, I discovered it was not a retelling of his relationship with Lady Sykes, but instead yet another Regency novel about an older man in love with a younger, poorer, unmarried woman, in a relationship wherein one or both parties must choose between love and money. We have Jane Austen for that. Naturally Disraeli did not owe his readers accuracy about his sex life, and the mores of the day made it impossible to write about many of the things he would perhaps have loved to write about. But to modern readers the novel would be more interesting if it were more like his fascinating real life.\nDisappointingly, Disraeli’s seventh novel whitewashes everything about his personal life that is interesting: his willingness to court older women, his ambiguous sexuality that is the subject of scholarly inquiries to this day, his use of the relationship to further his career, and his relative flaunting of an extramarital affair in a time more conservative than our own. Yet the novel does manage to be entertaining in its second half, particularly in its reflection of Disraeli’s real problems with debt, and in a brief detour to the political in the penultimate paragraph of the book.\nHenrietta Temple\u0026rsquo;s plot is engaging enough. It tells the story of a young aristocrat, Ferdinand Armine, who like Disraeli through most of his life was deeply in debt. Armine foolishly squandered inherited money on yachts and other luxuries while anticipating that his grandfather would leave a fortune to him. When the grandfather leaves the fortune instead to his cousin Katherine, Armine decides he must marry the cousin. But no sooner does he get engaged than he experiences love at first sight with a less wealthy 18-year-old named Henrietta Temple. He becomes engaged to both women until Henrietta finds out about the cousin. Then Temple herself becomes engaged to a nobleman and independently comes into a fortune that makes her the richest woman in the world. She seems a lost love. But is she? The novel, unlike the real life story, ends happily. The novel reads breezily but is not nearly as interesting as the political novels, or even his other early novels on romantic subjects.\nScholars and critics have debated the extent of Disraeli’s affections for the woman for whom Disraeli named Henrietta Temple, and therefore how autobiographical the book really is. Disraeli’s seminal modern biographer, Robert Blake, for instance, has written that Henrietta Sykes was perhaps the only woman Disraeli ever really loved, notably excluding his wife of several decades, whom he had not yet met when he was with the married woman. But the same Baron Blake also questioned the extent of Disraeli’s feelings. Quoting from a letter Disraeli wrote in which he described the first year with Henrietta as “the happiest of my life,” Blake questions why Disraeli asks how long his feelings will last:\n“The whole passage is a strange one. ‘How long will these feelings last?\u0026rsquo; The question is one which a man would scarcely ask if he was swept away by a passionate love affair; it is possible to suspect that even from the start he was less in love with her than with the idea of being in love and of being loved. A grand passion was an inseparable part of that Byronic tradition which so often sounds, with a slightly hollow note, in Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s life.”\nThus, Blake implies, this love seems like an attempt to live up to that tradition rather than a deep love for the woman herself.\nStill, the novel is often considered positive evidence that Disraeli experienced love at first sight with Henrietta Sykes. Almost all the writers who have covered Henrietta Temple have quoted the following from its first half: “There is no love but love at first sight. This is the transcendent and surpassing offspring of sheer and unpolluted sympathy. All other is the illegitimate result of observation, of reflection, of compromise, of comparison, of expediency. The passions that endure flash like the lightning: they scorch the soul, but it is warmed for ever. Miserable man whose love rises by degrees upon the frigid morning of his mind! Some hours indeed of warmth and lustre may perchance fall to his lot; some moments of meridian splendour, in which he basks in what he deems eternal sunshine.”\nHowever, almost no one quotes the next, much gloomier lines in the same paragraph, which predict the end of Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s relationship with Henrietta. “But then how often overcast by the clouds of care,\u0026quot; Disraeli writes, \u0026ldquo;how often dusked by the blight of misery and misfortune! And certain as the gradual rise of such affection is its gradual decline.” We don’t know whether Disraeli wrote this paragraph when he was with Henrietta or after they parted. We know he wrote the first volume while he was in the relationship with Henrietta, thus making the novel a tribute to his mistress. And we know he wrote the rest of it after the relationship was over. But at least one scholar has speculated that the first section ended just after this passage, which occurs just after the lead character of Ferdinand Armine (like most Disraeli heroes, a semi-autobiographical character) meets Henrietta. If this is true, it is was at the height of his romance with Henrietta that he was predicting its end. This would seem to bear significance for the extent to which Disraeli was in love with Henrietta.\nThose who have commented on the novel have varied in their agreement with Blake that Disraeli was “less in love with her” than with the fanciful idea that he was. Some see the section on love at first sight as convincing. Alfred Lord Tennyson said, “The silly sooth of love was given perfectly there,” meaning Disraeli had gotten love at first sight just right. Daniel Schwarz, author of a study of Disraeli’s novels, says, “One is inclined to agree with Blake’s assessment of the affair with Henrietta.” Philip Guedalla, who wrote introductions to almost all of Disraeli’s novels in the so-called Bradenham editions of 1926, agreed: “Perhaps a gleam of autobiography lingered in his whole study of the tender passion, although the slightly epileptic sentiments of love at first sight may seem a trifle fanciful.”\nDisraeli’s own comments about Henrietta and marriage have contributed to this interpretation. Even while he was with Henrietta, around which time his family had been pressing (with some acquiescence on Disraeli’s part) for Ben to get married, Disraeli had terrible things to say about marrying for love:\n“As for ‘Love,’ all my friends who married for Love and beauty either beat their wives or live apart from them. This is literally the case. I may commit many follies in life, but I never intend to marry for ‘love,’ which I am sure is a guarantee of infelicity.”\nThis position is nothing new. In his first novel, Vivian Grey, written at age 21, Disraeli had what he acknowledged to be an autobiographical character dismiss the idea of marrying anyone young and beautiful: “He looked upon marriage as a comedy in which, sooner or later, he was, as a well-paid actor, to play his part; and could it have advanced his views one jot he would have married the Princess Caraboo tomorrow. But of all wives in the world, a young and handsome one was that which he most dreaded.”\nWe know that in the end Disraeli said he did not marry for love. His marriage to Mrs. Maryanne Wynham Lewis, the widow of a wealthy man largely responsible for Disraeli’s success in climbing into parliament, was however happy enough that he said he wished he had. It is somehow telling that when Maryanne opened a bottle of champagne for him after a legislative victory somewhat late in life, he told her as a compliment: You are much more like a mistress than a wife.\nDisraeli’s naming a novel for his married mistress has for almost two centuries now invited speculation about his private feelings. Several biographers have asserted a homosexual or bisexual side to Disraeli or noted that his dandyism invited the Byronian implication of sexual scandal. William Kuhn devoted a full-length biography to proving, essentially, that Disraeli was gay. Even he finds convincing Disraeli’s declaration that he was happy with Henrietta and calls the relationship “serious.” But he also finds evidence in the novel and historical documents that the great dandy statesman was also attracted to males:\n“Indeed, traces of Disraeli’s recent adventures in the Mediterranean survive in this description of [Henrietta Temple’s] appearance. She dresses up to go outdoors on a moonlit night, putting a scarf over her head: ‘There,’ she said, ‘I look like the portrait of the Turkish page in Armine Gallery; don\u0026rsquo;t I?’ Those Turkish pages and eunuchs were among Disraeli’s favourite androgynous figures, so to imagine his first real girlfriend dressed as an eastern boy was also to say that he found her appearance arousing. Those who were in the know about the sorts of pleasures Byron and Disraeli had enjoyed in the East would have smiled at the double entendre.”\nKuhn does not note that Henrietta Sykes’s pet name for her lover was probably also Turkish or Mediterranean in origin. For unknown reasons she called him “Ammin.” This is almost certainly why Disraeli named his lead, autobiographical character “Armine” in Henrietta Temple. The only instance in which any iteration of this name appears in the Disraeli papers is in his description of an 18-year-old Turk he called “Amin Pacha,” though most sources would use the word “Amir” or “Emir” rather than Amin. We know “Amin Pacha” was, according to Disraeli, “steeped in debauchery,” and given what Kuhn and Leslie Mitchell (biographer of Edward Bulwer-Lytton) have said about his homoerotic tourism in “the East” when he was in his twenties, one can imagine that the name Amin could conceivably have had erotic connotations for Disraeli. The only other theory as to the origin of the nickname is in the fictionalized account of Maurice Edelman’s novel about Disraeli’s relationship with Henrietta Sykes, Disraeli in Love. Edelman’s narrator says the pair picked the name out of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), which Kuhn says was influential on Disraeli and perhaps his erotic imagination. The only Amin in the many stories that come with the Arabian Nights tradition is the real-life caliph Al-Amin, who Iraqi historian al-Tabari said fell madly in love with a male slave named Kauthar. Al-Tabari reportedly says his mother insisted thereafter that the female slaves wear male clothing in order to persuade Al-Amin to engage in sexual relationships with them instead. This anecdote dovetails nicely with the one Kuhn cites in Henrietta Temple about male dress, but it isn’t even in One Thousand and One Nights. Thus we are left with thin gruel when attempting to interpret the names “Amin” and “Ammin.” But an origin consistent with the kind of eastern eroticism Kuhn writes about seems nevertheless plausible.\nHowever shaky some of the arguments for Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s sexuality seem to be, he invited the insinuations by evoking Byron. As I’ve quoted in another review on this site, Andrew Elfenbeim in his paper “Byronism and the Work of Homosexual Performance in Early Victorian England” (Modern Language Quarterly in December 1993), writes: “While the question of whether or not [Disraeli and his friend Bulwer-Lytton] were ‘really’ homosexuals is alluring, it is ultimately unanswerable because of the difficulty of defining what counts as a ‘real’ homosexual. What is clear is that both men imitated certain potentially scandalous aspects of Lord Byron\u0026rsquo;s behavior, as they understood it, in a bid to achieve social prominence.\u0026rdquo; The issue for us of course is not whether Disraeli was \u0026ldquo;really\u0026rdquo; homosexual, but that the novel loses complexity for its understandable whitewashing in 1837.\nIt is true that of all the love relationships in Disraeli’s early novels the one that rings most true is a romance with a male schoolmate named Musaeus. Kuhn and Edelman both interpret that story as autobiographical, which is persuasive to the extent that it is told in great believable detail and matches up to what else we know about Disraeli’s life in school. The story, detailed in Contarini Fleming, has the titular hero falling in “love” with a boy, getting into a tempestuous affair in which Contarini throws a temper tantrum whenever the boy finds other friends, and then taking the boy home to meet his family. Contarini then becomes embarrassed of the relationship and refuses to acknowledge him in school. This silent treatment is noticed by his other male classmates, and when they demand to know why he “dropped” Musaeus, Contarini gets into a fistfight. A similar fight occurs in Vivian Grey’s depiction of his school life, and in both books as in real life Disraeli is dropped by the boarding school.\nThere is no such open homoeroticism in Henrietta Temple or the paper trail on his relationship with Lady Sykes. What is clear is that Disraeli used Henrietta Sykes to move up in the world, which I would argue is a missing piece in her appeal to him in the accounts of many biographers including Edelman in Disraeli in Love. It’s also completely absent from Henrietta Temple. Sykes introduced Disraeli to Lord Lyndhurst, a British politician who finally helped him find Tory sponsorship for his parliamentary campaigns after a long series of losses under the rubric of an “independent radical.” Lord Lyndhurst also had an affair with Henrietta Temple, and scholars disagree on whether Disraeli knew and encouraged Henrietta to have that affair while she was with him. Such a relationship does not of course prove that Disraeli was what we today would call “homosexual” (which did not become a word until the 1869) or necessarily lessen the argument that Henrietta Temple is an autobiographical account of his love with Sykes. But its absence in the novel does leave the story strangely enervated.\nFortunately, the second half of the novel, perhaps because Disraeli was out of the relationship, is entertaining. By the end of the book, Armine is arrested and taken to what was called a “sponging house,” at which debtors are shaken down before being jailed. Disraeli says two types of people end up in a sponging house: the “nobs,” who are real gentleman, and the “snobs,” who are not and are treated much more harshly in the house. Fortunately a wonderful dandy character named for Mirabel in The Way of the World by William Congreve shows up to pay Armine’s debts. (Disraeli also referenced Mirabel in The Young Duke in the context of an analysis of what true dandyism is.) Simultaneously other events free him to marry Henrietta, and Disraeli gets what he insisted his publisher subtitle this novel: “A Love Story.”\nFans of Disraeli’s political novels must settle for one paragraph of political content. The penultimate paragraph tells us that Armine and two of his friends become Whig Ministers of Parliament—but, in a twist that apparently none of the commentary on the novel over the centuries has ever noted, he says they voted Tory. Probably this detail was left out not because it isn’t interesting but because it is couched in language that is very era-specific. Disraeli writes that Armine and one of his friends “in the most marked manner, abstained from voting on the appropriation clause.” This is an obscure reference today, but at the time was well-known to refer to a reform bill that used surplus revenues of the Anglican Church of Ireland for secular or Catholic educational purposes. It became something of a litmus test for party identification, as Whigs were for appropriation and Tories were against it. Moderate Whigs like Disraeli’s characters abstained. Disraeli goes on: “There is little doubt that [Armine and his friend] will ultimately support that British and national administration which Providence has doubtless in store for these outraged and distracted realms.” This is Disraeli the partisan thinker rambling his way into his own peculiar partisan line: That the Tory party is the true national party, that the Whigs are oligarchs who favor the interests of the industrial north, and that Tories are destined to win as a result. “At least this,” Disraeli concludes, is Henrietta’s father “Mr. Temple\u0026rsquo;s more than hope, who is also in the House, and acts entirely with Lord Stanley.” Stanley, a Tory, would become the longest serving prime minister of the century.\nThus it’s a true happy ending for Disrael, both romantic and political: the heroes will vote Tory despite being moderates, and young love wins out. It’s too bad he gets his happy tale only by emptying the story of what makes his own so fascinating: Its foibles, complications and faults.\n"},{"title":"The Scholar in Politics","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-11-21-the-scholar-in-politics/","date":"November 21, 2025","tags":["Wilson"],"text":"The Scholar in Politics Recently someone sent me a quote from Gore Vidal ’s 1987 novel Empire, an exploration of the United States’ entry into the colonial marketplace at the end of the 19th Century. The quote got me thinking about both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt and their roles in a new generation of college-educated men born in the 1850s and 1860s who got into politics at a time when that was not the thing to do. That moment in history presents a striking contrast with our present moment, when a generation of politicians is doing battle with higher education.\nThe quote from Empire is spoken by Vidal’s fictional version of the novelist Henry James, reflecting on Theodore Roosevelt and his 1894 book of essays, American Ideals and Other Essays Social and Political, which James did in fact review for the journal Literature. In the novel James addresses his dinner party host, 19th Century historian Henry Adams, with characteristic labyrinthine verbiage:\n“I’m afraid I cannot, dear Adams, in my heart, endure your white knight, Theodore. I have just—tell no one—reviewed his latest … latest … well, book for want of a description other than the grim literal paginated printed nullity, called American Ideals, in which he tells us over and over—and then over once again—how we must live, each of us, ‘purely as an American,’ as if that were something concrete.”\nThen Vidal’s James digs into Roosevelt’s notion of the educated man in politics:\n“[Roosevelt] also warns us that the educated man—himself, no doubt—must not go into politics as an educated man because he is bound to be beaten by someone of no education at all—this he takes to be some sort of American Ideal, which he worships, as it is American, but which, he concedes, presents a problem for the educated man, whom he then advises to go into the election as if he had had no education at all, and presenting himself to the electorate—yes, you have grasped it!—purely as an American, in which case he will win, which is what matters. There is, dear Adams, as far as I can detect, no mind at all at work in your friend.”\nIt’s worth looking back at Wilson and Roosevelt’s tumultuous relationship as their mutual academic backgrounds took paths that both diverged and—driving each man crazy—veered back towards one another.\nWilson, of course, is well known to have been our only president with a PhD. He spent much longer in academia, as a student, a teacher, and eventually president of Princeton University, than he spent in politics. But he always dreamed of being a statesman. Roosevelt, in the meantime, was a Harvard graduate with what Wilson called a little-seen “sane, academic side.” (The emphasis is Wilson’s.)\nHistorian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1948’s The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made Itabout the generation in which Roosevelt (born 1858) and Wilson (1856) came of age as young college men. First, he describes the intellectuals who chose not to go into politics, which was the norm at the time:\n“The coarse, materialistic civilization that emerged in the United States during the years after the Civil War produced among cultivated middle-class young men a generation of alienated and homeless intellectuals. Generally well-to-do, often of eminent family backgrounds, clubmen, gentlemen, writers, the first cluster of a native intellectual aristocracy to appear since the great days of Boston and Concord, the men of this class found themselves unable to participate with any heart in the greedy turmoil of business or to accept without protest boss-ridden politics. Money-making was sordid; politics was dirty; and the most sensitive among them made their careers in other ways. Those who were less interested in public affairs usually managed to fit themselves into the interstices of American existence. Some, like Henry James, escaped abroad or, like his brother William immersed themselves in academic life. One, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., found sanctuary on the Massachusetts bench and at length rose to the Supreme Court: another, Henry Adams, made a sort of career of bitter detachment. Some who were strong enough to overcome their distaste for business entered it without finding much personal fulfillment and left without regret. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., upon retiring from an unhappy career as a railroad executive, observed that among all the tycoons he had met, \u0026ldquo;not one\u0026hellip; would I care to meet again in this world or the next; nor is one associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought, or refinement. Conventional politics, on the other hand, offered a choice between merely serving the business class or living of it in a sort of parasitic blackmail. For the more scrupulous this was impossible; in the case of the fastidious Adamses, Brooks and Henry, even the weight of a great family tradition and an absorbing concern with political affairs was not enough to counter-balance distaste. … The era impelled the frustrated politician into scholarship and forced his interest in politics to find wistful expression in the writing of history.”\nThen, Hofstadter described the men who of that generation who diverged from the norm and did go into politics:\n“Among hardier and somewhat younger souls, however, there appeared the scholar-in-politics, a type represented by Albert J. Beveridge, John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Such men, though hardly typical politicians, held their noses, made the necessary compromises, worked their way into politics, and bided their time until the social milieu gave them a chance to ride into power. These were the practical men of the breed, men of steady nerves, strong ambition, tenacity, and flexible scruples. The most striking among them was Theodore Roosevelt. In his autobiography Roosevelt tells how horrified his friends were when he first broached to them his determination to enter politics. ‘The men I knew best,’ he recalled, ‘were the men in the clubs of social pretension and the men of cultivated taste and easy life.’ Politics, they told him, is a cheap affair run by saloon-keepers and horse-car conductors and shunned by gentlemen. ‘I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that the other people did and that I intended to be one of the governing class.’”\nRoosevelt would go on to publish an appeal to educated young men to go into politics, in (you guessed it) American Ideals. Roosevelt wrote that \u0026ldquo;a growing feeling among educated men that they are in honor bound to do their full share of the work of American public life” was a hopeful sign for the nation.\nVidal’s satire, and the book review from Henry James that inspired it, hinges on Roosevelt’s saying that “An educated man must not go into politics as such; he must go in simply as an American; and when he is once in, he will speedily realize that he must work very hard indeed, or he will be upset by some other American, with no education at all, but with much natural capacity.”\nRoosevelt, who was not above being influenced by other nations like Germany, hinted that he associated jingoism with anti-intellectualism, but advised college students nonetheless to be nationalistic. “If an educated man is not heartily American in instinct and feeling and taste and sympathy,” Roosevelt wrote, “he will amount to nothing in our public life. Patriotism, love of country, and pride in the flag which symbolizes country may be feelings which the race will at some period outgrow, but at present they are very real and strong, and the man who lacks them is a useless creature, a mere incumbrance to the land.”\nJames, in response, called Roosevelt “a dangerous and ominous jingo.” Roosevelt in turn regarded James as “a miserable little snob” and “effete.” Vidal does a wonderful job of explicating all of this in a 1986 review in The New York Review of Books, of a then-new collection of James’ many book reviews.\nBoth Wilson and Roosevelt are fascinating case studies of Hofstadter’s “scholar in politics.” Even before they met, Roosevelt had already taken a shot at the young academic Wilson, whom he had not met yet. The pair had a long honeymoon before coming to hate each other. In his double-biography of Wilson and Roosevelt, The Warrior and the Priest, John Milton Cooper suggests it was Wilson who started the war of words between the two future presidents. But he isn’t counting this passage, which clearly alludes to Wilson’s book (and PhD dissertation) Congressional Government. That book earned Wilson national attention for suggesting that the US Congress should operate more like Britain’s parliament. Here’s what Roosevelt had to say about that idea and “the people who wrote about it” (read, Woodrow Wilson) in American Ideals and Other Essays:\n“It is always a pity to see men fritter away their energies on any pointless scheme; and unfortunately, a good many of our educated people when they come to deal with politics, do just such frittering. Take, for instance, the queer freak of arguing in favor of establishing what its advocates are pleased to call \u0026lsquo;responsible government\u0026rsquo; in our institutions, or in other words of grafting certain features of the English parliamentary system upon our own Presidential and Congressional system. This agitation was too largely deficient in body to enable it to last, and it has now, I think, died away; but at one time quite a number of our men who spoke of themselves as students of political history were engaged in treating this scheme as something serious. Few men who had ever taken an active part in politics, or who had studied politics in the way that a doctor is expected to study surgery and medicine, so much as gave it a thought; but very intelligent men did, just because they were misdirecting their energies, and were wholly ignorant that they ought to know practically about a problem before they attempted its solution. The English, or so-called \u0026lsquo;responsible,\u0026rsquo; theory of parliamentary government is one entirely incompatible with our own governmental institutions. It could not be put into operation here save by absolutely sweeping away the United States Constitution. Incidentally, I may say it would be to the last degree undesirable, if it were practicable. But this is not the point upon which I wish to dwell; the point is that it was wholly impracticable to put it into operation, and that an agitation favoring this kind of government was from its nature unintelligent. The people who wrote about it wasted their time.”\nThat’s entertainingly catty prose. However, when Roosevelt and Wilson met, the year before Roosevelt published this essay, they hit it off. As Cooper reports in The Warrior and the Priest, they met in March 1896, when they were both speaking at a rally for a municipal reform movement in Baltimore. They dined together in January of the following year, when Roosevelt visited Princeton. Wilson was so impressed with Republican Roosevelt that the staunch Democrat’s brother-in-law Stockton Axson accused him of converting to the Grand Old Party. But a few years later, in 1900, Wilson would explain to his wife what he found so appealing about Roosevelt: \u0026ldquo;a very sane, academic side of him —not known by everybody so much as to exist, but constituting his hope of real and lasting eminence.\u0026rdquo; While Roosevelt was governor of New York, Wilson praised \u0026ldquo;this gifted man\u0026rdquo; who was \u0026ldquo;too big a man to have it make any difference to him whether he was in office or out of office.\u0026rdquo;\nRoosevelt and Wilson ended up running against each other for president in 1912, and died hating each other. But Cooper says Wilson and Roosevelt continued to admire each other through Roosevelt’s first term in the Oval Office.\n“Wilson moved first in ending the good feelings between them,” Cooper writes. “In his new role as an anti-Bryan Democratic spokesman after 1901, he attacked Roosevelt and the Republican dissidents as well as the Bryanites of his own party. Publicly, Wilson muted his criticism of the president for a while … An acquaintance remembered Wilson saying privately during the summer of 1906 ‘with a smile that he found it difficult to admire the politician as much as the man.’”\nRoosevelt soured on Wilson as well. Cooper writes: “In December 1907 Roosevelt praised his friend Wister for a speech in which he had condemned the teaching in most American colleges. Lumping Wilson with William Graham Sumner, the noted economist and Yale professor, he asserted, ‘I do not feel that Sumner and Wilson have any real place in the study of economics and government.’ In August 1908 Roosevelt thanked the magazine editor Lyman Abbott for sending him a passage from Wilson\u0026rsquo;s Constitutional Government. ‘That is a great quotation from Woodrow Wilson,’ Roosevelt commented. ‘I had not read the book because I have felt rather impatient with his recent attitude on certain matters, notably the effort to control corporations; but this is a really first-class paragraph.’\u0026rdquo;\nWe have learned from American Ideals that Roosevelt did not respect that book, which apparently he had not read. Cooper does not explain why Roosevelt was so irritated with Wilson’s comments on the “effort to control corporations,” but a little investigation into where the two men were that year on the issue reveals why Teddy was so irked.\nIn April 1908, Wilson had made a big move to the left rhetorically on the issue of regulation of corporations. Having spoken out for years against the regulation of business, Wilson did not explain why he made the change. “No one now advocates the old laisser faire (sic),” Wilson said, “or questions the necessity for a firm and comprehensive regulation of business operations in the interest of fair dealing and of a responsible exercise of power.” But until that day, says Harry Bragdon in his Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (1967), Wilson had been quite in favor of lassiez-faire economics. Roosevelt, on the other hand, had become a reformer who wished to control corporations. And here was Wilson, implying he was more consistent than Roosevelt. This is undoubtedly what was bothering Roosevelt about what Wilson had been saying “recently.”\nThey both had good reason to be in that camp at that particular time. The Panic of 1907 had created an urgency in public opinion for regulation of the banks and corporations. As usual, the “great men” of the great man theory of history were influenced first by the people.\nPlus, it doesn’t necessarily take a college man to be a good public servant, as Roosevelt pointed out in American Ideals. Britain\u0026rsquo;s progressive era, more often called “the new liberalism” across the pond, came before America’s not because of a new class of college-educated servants but because of a newly self-made politician. Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who is credited with (and derided for) the creation of the so-called welfare state in Britain, rose from poor beginnings without a college degree. This was rarer in England, where a ruling aristocracy had made men of letters frequent politicians. Disraeli, Mill, Churchill, Bulwer-Lytton, Gladstone all wrote literature or literary criticism alongside their parliamentary duties. But in America, a new class of educated politicians helped pass reforms aimed at making a difference for working people.\nRoosevelt and Wilson were elites and as such each had their elitisms. Roosevelt, as Hofstadter notes, never really understood poor people. Both had mixed records at best on labor, and both had famous problems with racism. But for all their faults, they represented political leadership that valued complex, nuanced thought.\nStill, as Hofstadter pointed out, they were unlike the politicians that came before them in their desire to do right by the public:\n“The ends for which Roosevelt and his peers entered politics were not mere boodling or personal advancement. Searching for goals that they considered more lofty, ideals above section or class or material gain, they were bent on some genuinely national service, sought a larger theater in which to exercise their state-craft, and looked down with the disdain of aristocrats upon those who, as Roosevelt said, had never felt the thrill of a generous emotion.”\nThis is perhaps what a society without strong higher education stands most to lose: a class of public servant that at least believes it is motivated first by ethical concerns and not pecuniary ones.\n"},{"title":"Review: Benjamin and Sarah Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s almost-lost novel \u003cem\u003eA Year at Hartlebury\u003c/em\u003e betrays a statesman\u0026rsquo;s intellectual trajectory","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-11-08-review-year-at-hartlebury/","date":"November 8, 2025","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: Benjamin and Sarah Disraeli's almost-lost novel *A Year at Hartlebury* betrays a statesman's intellectual trajectory Benjamin Disraeli is remembered as a formative conservative in the 19th Century, as the longtime head of the Tory party. But there was a time when he could have been a member of the liberal Whig party, RW Davis wrote in his biography of Disraeli in 1976. “There is no reason whatever to believe that Disraeli would have had any objection to entering Parliament under the Whig aegis,\u0026quot; Davis wrote. \u0026ldquo;He had, after all, ridiculed all parties, Tories and Radicals as well as Whigs, without favoritism. And the introduction of the Whig Reform Bill early in 1831, word of which had reached him in Constantinople, he had hailed as ‘wonderful news which … has quite unsettled my mind.’” Disraeli had even written, in 1831, the following in his novel The Young Duke: “Am I a Whig or a Tory? I forget.\u0026rdquo; However, Davis was writing just before 1979, the year that scholars discovered Disraeli had written a novel about his first foray into elective politics in 1832, the same year as the fight over the transformative Reform Bill, which increased the number of men who could vote in England and set the country on the long, long road to democracy. A Year at Hartlebury, or the Election, a novel co-written in 1834 under a pseudonym by Benjamin Disraeli and his sister Sarah, provides both further evidence for Davis’s theory that Disraeli could just as comfortably been a Whig, and evidence of a hostility towards Whigs that undermine that theory.\nA Year at Hartlebury, or the Election begins as an imitation Jane Austen novel, then morphs into a Disraeli political novel (a prototype of his best-known novels, the political trilogy of the 1840s), before morphing back to a Jane Austen romance before finally concluding rather suddenly with a murder mystery. The scholars have universally assumed, probably for good reason, that the Austin-esque sections of the book were written by Sarah Disraeli. The sections of the book on the election of 1832, modeled on Disraeli’s own experiences that year, we know to be written by Disraeli because he flew into a “rage” when a publisher suggested those were the weakest in the book. (“I longed to tell him I wrote it,” Disraeli fumed.) The novel tells the story of Helen Molesworth, a young country gentlewoman who scholars think is based on Sarah herself but is a facsimile of all of Austen’s heroines. She is torn between three suitors: the Reverend Arthur Latimer, who echoes Austin’s continual fascination with the romantic lives of English ministers; George Gainsborough, an awkward young gentleman who traveled to the East and has returned to clumsily woo Helen; and the book’s most interesting figure, Aubrey Bohun, who is a cipher for Disraeli himself. Bohun (apparently pronounced “Boon”) is introduced in a single sentence as combining “a fine poetic temperament with a great love of action. The combination is rare.” Rare indeed; readers of Disraeli’s earlier autobiographical novel Contarini Fleming or my review of it on this blog will recognize that combination as being the unique characteristic and central conflict of Disraeli’s character Contarini. And of course of Disraeli himself, who almost alone among modern heads of state was both a novelist and a politician. Aubrey Bohun, like Disraeli at the time he co-wrote Hartlebury, was just returning from an extended trip through the Middle East, and also like Disraeli was motivated by the emergence of the Reform Act to launch himself into a campaign for parliament. It is disappointing in some measure how little political specificity the novel shows, but this is revealing of Disraeli as well. Bohun says he is willing to change his politics for Molesworth. As Historian Paul Smith points out many of Disraeli’s letters from 1832 seem to show a willingness to change his politics to get the parliamentary seat.\nDavis was also writing before Regina Akel’s illuminating 2016 study of Disraeli’s newspaper writing before he got into politics, Benjamin Disraeli and John Murray: The Politician, the Publisher and The Representative. That book shows what A Year at Hartlebury suggests: that Disraeli was in at least in one key respect to the right of most conservatives in his early years. Akel examines the long unresearched pages of the newspaper Disraeli launched in his twenties, which went bankrupt and left Disraeli deeply in debt and needing a parliamentary career to escape creditors (as MPs were exempt from debtor’s prison). Akel’s book suggests that one reason the newspaper The Representative flopped was that Disraeli’s editorials voiced opposition to the abolition of slavery, a position she says most publications rejected by the 1820s. Davis says Disraeli “waffled” on the abolition of slavery during his campaign in 1832 but offers no specific evidence. Hartlebury contains a deplorable use of the n-word, blaming the Whigs for campaigning for the “emancipation of the n\u0026mdash;\u0026ndash;s” while ignoring atrocities of human rights in the factories of Manchester. (Many of the Whigs were owners of such businesses, and prioritized the interests of such firms.) That line would have gotten Disraeli irrevocably “canceled” today – and still could – but biographies of Disraeli have long been strangely silent on his position on slavery. Later in his career Disraeli spoke laudatorily about the abolition of slavery, praising the 14th earl of Derby for having “abolished slavery,” “educated Ireland” and “reformed Parliament,” though only the last was done while Derby was prime minister. But his words on race perhaps deserve more attention than they’ve gotten. Disraeli also wrote extremely racist things in his non-fiction biography of Lord George Bentinck in 1852 that have largely been ignored by biographers as well.\nThose words also point to a conservatism that suggests Davis was perhaps overplaying Disraeli’s Whiggish tendencies. The racial remark comes in the context of a tirade against Whigs. In a passage with classic Disraeli irony, ending any remaining doubt that Disraeli wrote this section of the book, Disraeli differentiates between “high Whigs” and “low Whigs,” a pair of categories he invents. Disraeli writes:\n“A high Whig is at least grand in his haughtiness. He is a tyrant, but a tyrant on a great scale. He loves a coercion bill, he cares not how many infants may be sacrificed to the bloody Moloch of Manufacturing industry, but then he can talk of the bill of rights, and advocate the immediate emancipation of the N\u0026ndash;s; but a low Whig is the least human of all the combinations of human matter, for soul we cannot concede to those wretches with contracted minds and cold hearts. If ever a revolution come round in this once happy country, we may trace all our misery to the influence of the low Whigs. These are the real causes of Manchester massacres, though they are always abusing the magistracy; these are the men who, though they think they are only snuffing the candle in their own miserable hard-hearted parlours, are in fact lighting the torch of every incendiary in the kingdom. How the low Whigs did hate Mr. Bohun! They hated him with that intense predisposition of enmity, which cold-blooded, calculating, unsympathetic, selfish mortals always innately feel for a man of genius, a man whose generous and lively spirit always makes them ashamed of their dead, dunghill-like, existence.”\nSo, Disraeli’s prose was dripping with contempt for Whigs as early as Hartlebury. Disraeli had been probed by the Whigs as a potential candidate for them when he first entered the campaign. Knowing the area was predominately liberal, he had emerged as a Radical, generally meaning to the left of the Whigs, backing reform and championing liberal causes. His friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton, another novelist who had had some success in politics too, had secured for him endorsements from two of the top Radicals of his day, even though they had never met Disraeli and later expressed embarrassment that they’d backed an apparent conservative who ended up with support from the Tories. But at the beginning of the campaign, the Whigs asked Disraeli if he’d be willing to back the Whig prime minister, Earl Grey. Disraeli snarkily replied that he had only one reason for being a Whig: the fact that they needed him to be one. “I cannot condescend to be a Whig,” Disraeli would write a little later. Thus the Whigs went out and found a candidate to run against Disraeli, and a high-profile one at that: the son of Prime Minister Earl Grey. Ultimately a Whig newspaper criticized Disraeli for having an “assumed liberality” and not an authentic one.\nBut that doesn’t mean Disraeli didn’t go through at least some form of ideological transformation. He would eventually criticize the Reform Act, and though he said what was wrong was not the Act itself but the way the Whigs passed it, reserves a scornful tongue for the act itself. In 1845’s Sybil Disraeli wrote:\n“But if it have not furnished us with abler administrators or a more illustrious senate, the Reform Act may have exercised on the country at large a beneficial influence. Has it? Has it elevated the tone of the public mind? Has it cultured the popular sensibilities to noble and ennobling ends? Has it proposed to the people of England a higher test of national respect and confidence than the debasing qualification universally prevalent in this country since the fatal introduction of the system of Dutch finance? Who will pretend it? If a spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecrating all the humanities of life, has been the besetting sin of England for the last century and a half, since the passing of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases, to propose an Utopia to consist only of wealth and toil,* this has been the breathless business of enfranchised England for the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage. Are we then to conclude, that the only effect of the Reform Act has been to create in this country another of those class interests, which we now so loudly accuse as the obstacles to general amelioration? Not exactly that. The indirect influence of the Reform Act has been not inconsiderable, and may eventually lead to vast consequences. It set men a-thinking; it enlarged the horizon of political experience; it led the public mind to ponder somewhat on the circumstances of our national history; to pry into the beginnings of some social anomalies which they found were not so ancient as they had been led to believe, and which had their origin in causes very different to what they had been educated to credit; and insensibly it created and prepared a popular intelligence to which one can appeal, no longer hopelessly, in an attempt to dispel the mysteries with which for nearly three centuries it has been the labour of party writers to involve a national history, and without the dispersion of which no political position can be understood and no social evil remedied.”\nBy contrast, in Hartlebury, Aubrey Bohun criticizes the Reform Act only for not going far enough:\n“We are both of us against Reform, and therefore I hope you will support Mr. Bohun” [said Mrs. Neville.]\n“I thought Mr Bohun was for doing still more?” said Walter.\n“Only to make everything quite right,” said Mrs. Neville, “and to make you quite comfortable again Mr. Walter.”\nPerhaps the best summation of Disraeli’s view of the act was spoken during the campaign of 1832. He said he was a conservative to preserve everything good in the Constitution and a Radical to reform everything bad in it.\nAmid the “high politics” focus of some historians on the machinations of “great men” in the passage of the Reform Act, it is sometimes forgotten that the impetus came primarily from the people themselves. Written close to the time of the act itself, however, Hartlebury is rife with references to riot and insurrection, both by Sarah and by Benajmin. For example:\n“I don’t think an English mob would kill children, do you Mr. Gainsborough?” [asked Arthur Latimer.]\n“It is impossible to say what an infuriated populace would do,” solemnly replied the politician.\nStill, Disraeli relished the big thematic concerns of the Reform era. The narrator remarks that Bohun had never considered England interesting enough to enter politics until the Reform Act:\n“Many reasons had united to induce him to return to his long-neglected country, but none had influenced him more strongly than the passing of the Reform Bill, that great and misconceived event, which already its enemies have ceased to dread, and its friends have begun to abuse. Our eager cry for Reform had created a great sensation among our Continental neighbours. Mistaking our habits, and ignorant of our customs, they had totally misconceived that state of agitation which our newspapers so forcibly depicted, and England, that envied country, in a state of anarchy and confusion, was an image too consolatory not to be worshipped. Mr. Bohun must be pardoned, if a long residence in the midst of the enslaved and repining descendants of heroes, had made him forget the peculiar characteristics of his own free-born countrymen.”\nThis passage has been attributed variously to both Benjamin and Sarah, because it comes in the first volume, most of which is clearly written by Sarah. But this is unmistakably Disraeli’s style of dry satire, and suggests that their writing process may have been somewhat more fluid in its back and forth than has been implied by some scholars. But for the most part I agree it seems clear which sections were his and which were hers.\nUltimately, Disraeli lost his bid to be an MP in 1832, and would not win until he aligned himself with the backing of the Tory party. In Hartlebury Disraeli imagines that the opposite happened, with Bohun riding to victory. Then, having begun a novel that examines the important Reform Act era with a personal engagement that exceeds even George Eliot’s masterwork Middlemarch on the subject, Sarah derails the book in its final chapter. The first appendix in the 1983 edition of A Year at Hartlebury, or the Election suggests that its author always knew George Gainsborough would be a villain. Unlike the chapter itself, the appendix suggests it is obvious Gainsborough committed murder in the end. I was more fooled by Gainsborough’s charming silliness, and wonder whether Sarah really contemplated George as a villain before she wrote the final chapter. But in any case the final resolution dodges both the romantic contest that began the book, and the political implications of the sections on the election. Before the ending, this almost-lost book has a chance at being a great find, a political masterwork that foreshadows the great political novels Disraeli and his influencees would go on to write. After the ending, it is more nearly simply a fascinating curiosity.\n"},{"title":"Review: Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s \u003cem\u003eAlroy\u003c/em\u003e prefigures modern Zionism. Did he see himself in the Messianic fantasy?","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-10-16-review-alroy/","date":"October 16, 2025","tags":["Gladstone","Disraeli"],"text":"Review: Disraeli's *Alroy* prefigures modern Zionism. Did he see himself in the Messianic fantasy? Zionism did not yet exist as a political movement in 1833, but future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli was already telling a story in which the Jews attempted to reclaim Jerusalem in his novel The Wondrous Tale of Alroy. Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s hero was the historical David Alroy, a self-proclaimed Jewish messiah in the 12th century who won several military victories in an ultimately failed effort to win Jerusalem for the Jews before being murdered by adversaries. In one passage from the book, Alroy comes upon the ruins of a Jewish town in the desert. The narrator, voicing Alroy’s feelings, and perhaps Disraeli’s, marvels:\n“Empires and dynasties flourish and pass away; the proud metropolis becomes a solitude, the conquering kingdom even a desert; but Israel still remains, still a descendant of the most ancient kings breathed amid these royal ruins, and still the eternal sun could never rise without gilding the towers of living Jerusalem.\n“A word, a deed, a single day, a single man, and we might be a nation.”\nThe “single man” Alroy has in mind to restore the nation of Israel in the 12th Century is himself. But did Disraeli have himself in mind in 1833? The modern state of Israel had not yet been born, and neither had Zionism, the movement to develop it. But the 28-year-old Disraeli, who said he conceived the idea for the novel when he was 22 and who started writing it in earnest while visiting Jerusalem and the Holy Lands in 1831, imagined in the book an adventure that we might now call Zionist. In Alroy, Disraeli creates a Romantic Jewish messiah that embodied a desire on his part to see Jerusalem reclaimed for the Jews.\nI read the 2004 Routledge edition, which restores the original 1833 text and notes where it differs from later versions of the novel that were sanitized by Disraeli as he became a politician. That edition does not appear to have been reviewed before, which is a shame as it is the best way to experience Alroy, with its extensive endnotes and its informative introduction by Geoffrey Harvey**.**\nWhat was Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;ideal ambition\u0026rdquo;? Disraeli specifically stated that the book was autobiographical, though he did so in a context that was cryptic, leaving the nature of its autobiography a mystery that scholars and critics have debated now for almost 200 years.\n“My works are the embodification of my feelings,” Disraeli wrote in a diary entry. “in [my first novel] Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition: In Alroy my ideal ambition.” It’s pretty clear what Disraeli meant about Vivian Grey, which is about the ambition (and overambition) toward a political career of the title character, Vivian Grey. Disraeli when he wrote it was dreaming of a political career of his own. But it’s less clear what he meant by “ideal ambition.”\n“He did not elucidate what that ambition might be,” wrote Disraeli biographer Sarah Bradford. “The novel was conceived in 1829, the year in which, following the emancipation of the Catholics, an attempt was made to gain the same rights for the Jews, and published in 1833 when the idea was again mooted; one might, therefore, surmise that the idea of Jewish emancipation was the inspiration for the book.”\nIn fact, early-20th-Century Disraeli biographer William Monypenny wrote that returning the Holy Land to the Jews was the only possible explanation for the phrase “ideal ambition:”\n“The thought may have passed through his mind that the true aim of the political ambition which was beginning to shape itself within him should be to win back the Holy Land for the chosen people and restore the sceptre to Judah. To any young Hebrew of genius such thoughts would naturally— nay, inevitably occur; and in no other way can Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s own declaration that Alroy represented his \u0026lsquo;ideal ambition\u0026rsquo; be construed.”\nThe movement of Zionism, always controversial, has of course only become more so in recent years. But the young Disraeli was one of its forerunners. A Jew by birth whose father had him convert to Anglicanism when he was 12 years old, Disraeli was something of an enigma on religious issues. Alroy was his only novel on explicitly Jewish themes, though he wrote extensively about Judaism in other novels as well. His heroes almost always end up Anglicans, though they may undergo significant religious searching before that conclusion. Privately Disraeli was prone to scorning all religions, as recorded by his friend Henry Stanley, the 15th Earl of Derby. In his diaries Stanley said Disraeli was “personally incapable of religious belief, yet holds (so far as I can judge, quite sincerely) that a nation which has lost its faith in religion is in a state of decadence.” And indeed one of Disraeli’s most oft-recurring themes was that the church was the foundation of English society. Stanley wondered how, given his personal beliefs, he could advocate for the union of church and state. In 1861 Stanely wrote: “How can I reconcile his open ridicule, in private, of all religions, with his preaching up of a new church-and-state agitation?”\nDisraeli dreams of the Promised Land We also know from Stanley that Disraeli dreamed out loud of returning Jerusalem to the Jews. Stanley records in his diary that Disraeli said as much in 1851, and that this was “the only instance in which he ever appeared to me to show signs of any higher emotion,” though “I have many times since seen him under the influence of irritation or pleasurable excitement.” Stanley wrote:\n“The country, [Disraeli] said, had ample natural capabilities; all it wanted was labour, and protection for the labourer: the ownership of the soil might be bought from Turkey: money would be forthcoming: the Rothschilds and leading Hebrew capitalists would all help: the Turkish empire was falling into ruin the Turkish Govt would do anything for money: all that was necessary was to establish colonies, with rights over the soil, and security from ill treatment. The question of nationality might wait until these had taken hold. He added that these ideas were extensively entertained among the nation. A man who should carry them out would be the next Messiah, the true Saviour of his people. He saw only a single obstacle: arising from the existence of two races among the Hebrews, of whom one, those who settled along the shores of the Mediterranean, look down on the other, refusing even to associate with them.”\nPaul Smith, who quotes this passage in his Disraeli: A Brief Life, tied it into an argument about the meaning of Disraeli’s mysterious phrase “ideal ambition”:\n“If the novel embodied Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;ideal ambition\u0026quot;, as he said it did, it was seemingly to be an Alroy less compromised in his integrity as a Jew. The ideal might not be attainable, or relevant, in the conditions of English politics, but that it lingered, however abstractly, in Disraeli’s mind is suggested by his conversation with his young intimate Lord Stanley (the 24-year-old elder son of his party chief) in January 1851.”\nAlternative interpretations Not everyone, however, found it plausible that Disraeli’s ideal ambition was what would come to be known as Zionism. But if Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s ideal ambition was not Zionist in nature, what else might he have meant? Several writers have offered alternative readings. In his introduction to a 1926 edition of Alroy, for example, Philip Guedalla wrote:\n“The author recognised in Alroy his \u0026lsquo;ideal ambition.\u0026rsquo; This oracle is obscure, unless it is sufficient to detect a Jewish hero blessed, like Disraeli, with a devoted sister. For it is not easy to believe that he ever played, even in fancy, with the notion of a Jewish career. … In Alroy, for all its highly scented eloquence, the Jewish quality was distinctly tepid.”\nThe notion that Disraeli’s taking up what he perceived as Jewish interests would constitute a “Jewish career” is offensive. But the notion that Disraeli could not possibly have had this as a goal drove some scholars to find another explanation for the phrase “ideal ambition.” Richard Levine agrees with Guedalla and then states an alternative theory:\n“Is it not possible to read the author\u0026rsquo;s ideal ambition in these terms as a commitment to traditional principles and to the Hebraic past? And, by Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s own qualification, the Hebraic past must also include Christian tradition. Furthermore, the diary entry in which he mentioned the ideal ambition reflected in Alroy was written in the same year that saw the publication of his Vindication of the English Constitution (1835). This is a Disraeli in his early thirties who is studiously engaged in a consideration of the past and who is also seriously intent on a political career. Yet he later looks back across the few years to Alroy and perceives his ideal ambition mirrored there. The commitment to tradition which permeates the_Vindication_ might very well be part and parcel of Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s reading of his ideal ambition in 1835.”\nIn fact, Harvey, in his excellent introduction to the Routledge edition, follows Levine on his logic:\n“Alroy must be regarded as a seminal work in the evolution of Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s political thought. The diary entry referring to this novel as an expression of his ideal ambition was written in the same year as his Vindication of the English Constitution (1835). At this point Disraeli was considering a political career and this text reveals the importance to him of the overriding concept of tradition.”\nFor Jane Ridley, author of Young Disraeli, this argument for tradition signals that the novel is a specifically conservative book, an early and important definition of Disraeli’s conservatism. She points out that it put Disraeli at odds with his own father, with whom he almost always agreed, and about whom he always wrote admiringly. Isaac D’Israeli wrote a book at about the same time as Alroy that argued Jews should assimilate into the broader culture.\n“Alroy, in other words, is not a liberal text; far from it. It affirms the virtues of orthodoxy, and reveals Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s rejection of Isaac\u0026rsquo;s liberal humanism. Alroy also contradicts the liberalism of [the hero of his book] Contarini Fleming; it confirms Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s essential Toryism, or rather his belief in such anti-liberal, Romantic values as race and faith. Nor is it fanciful to see Alroy as Disrael\u0026rsquo;s ideal ambition. True, Disraeli did not see himself as a defender of Jewish orthodoxy, nor did he at this stage cherish Zionist ambitions to reconquer Jerusalem for the Jews. But the novel expressed Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s dreams of achieving leadership and power in an alien English culture; it confirmed his new-found confidence about his race and his determination to conquer England as a Jew, rather than abandoning his Jewishness and becoming assimilated.”\nJohn Vincent in his biography of Disraeli says that what Disraeli meant was that Alroy was devoted to action as opposed to thought. He quotes Alroy: “\u0026lsquo;Say what they like, man is made for action\u0026rsquo;, is his doctrine—and perhaps the author\u0026rsquo;s too, for Disraeli later wrote that Alroy represented his ideal ambition.’”\nEmbracing Judaism William Kuhn, in his biography The Politics of Pleasure, agrees with Paul Smith’s assessment of the phrase “ideal ambition.” “Alroy [is] an idealized fantasy of what he might do with his life if he more completely embraced his Judaism,” Kuhn writes. There is textual support for Kuhn\u0026rsquo;s interpretation in the final scene of the novel. The real David Alroy was likely assassinated by Persians. Disraeli’s Alroy is captured by Arabs and then given a choice: He can go free if he abandons Judaism. If he won’t, he will be tortured. Alroy refuses to renounce his Jewishness. He riles up his executioner and gets him to chop his head off before he can be tortured, thereby avoiding pain and sticking to his faith.\nThe moment is significant in part because Alroy had previously embraced what Ridley calls “latitudinarianism”—a tolerant view of other religions, particularly Islam. This toleration is however Alroy’s downfall. Disraeli associates Alroy\u0026rsquo;s religious tolerance with the temptations of the rich, lively city of Bagdhad. We can tell Disraeli disapproves of the excesses of Baghdad because he has Alroy consume ortolans there. This songbird, a Victorian delicacy, is now banned in Europe. The bird was treated terribly, boiled alive in brandy, and eaten whole, often with a napkin over one’s head so that God could not see the decadent offense. Disreali mentioned the ortolan in almost every novel, almost always as a symbol of aristocratic decadence and overreach. (See the paragraph on ortolans in my review of Disraeli’s earlier novel The Young Duke.) For Alroy, this decadence is also has religious significance. His period of indulgence comes after he wins military battles with an army of Jews, is declared King of the East, and then names himself the new Caliph. The Caliphate was what the Jews had been rebelling against when they won the victory for Alroy, so when he becomes Caliph several influential Jews oppose him. They end up winning a military victory against him, leading to his imprisonment.\nThis anti-latitudinarianism is a decidedly different take than his later (1847) novel Tancred. That book climaxes with the appearance of the Angel of Arabia telling the eponymous hero to preach the gospel of toleration:\n“The equality of man can only be accomplished by the sovereignty of God. The longing for fraternity can never be satisfied but under the sway of a common father. The relations between Jehovah and his creatures can be neither too numerous nor too near. In the increased distance between God and man have grown up all those developments that have made life mournful. Cease, then, to seek in a vain philosophy the solution of the social problem that perplexes you. Announce the sublime and solacing doctrine of theocratic equality.”\nDisraeli\u0026rsquo;s influence on Zionism Whatever the young Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s exact meaning, his literary imagination left a legacy that would outlive him. After his death Disraeli ended up influential on the foundation of the movement of Zionism, and therefore the foundation of the state of Israel. Smith says the founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, before he became a famous advocate for the cause included Disraeli as the first in a series of profiles of proto-Zionists. And author Paul Johnson, writing in The New York Times on January 22, 1984, said Tancred had been one of the reasons British politicians elected to support returning Palestine to the Jews:\n“The British are a very literary people. In those days, leading British politicians were well read and inclined to allow politics a literary dimension. Needless to say, few of the British involved had come across Herzl\u0026rsquo;s Judenstaat. But all had read, and many knew intimately, the Old Testament. … Nearly all, too, had read two key novels that, on the British side at least, formed the true ideological background to the Declaration. These were Benjamin Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s Tancred (1847) and George Eliot\u0026rsquo;s Daniel Deronda (1876). The first is the story of a Christian aristocrat who goes to the sleeping Orient to give it, as it were, the kiss of life. Disraeli was a proto-Zionist of a sort and his story formed an imaginative introduction to the cause for the British ruling class. But it was also misleading. Herbert Asquith, Lloyd George\u0026rsquo;s predecessor as Prime Minister, a man inclined to sneer at Jews and certainly no friend of audacious experiments in nation-building, liked to quote the novel\u0026rsquo;s most famous axiom: \u0026ldquo;All is race, there is no other truth,\u0026rdquo; which by 1914 had become a dangerous proposition for any Jew to advance. Then, too, Disraeli held that the Christian and Moslem Arabs of Palestine were exactly the same race as the Jews; as he says in Tancred, ‘The Arabs are only Jews on horseback.’ The novel fostered this dangerous illusion among British statesmen. As Mr. Sanders makes clear, the one objection to a Zionist Palestine never seriously considered by the British Cabinet was the hostility of the Arabs.”\nDisraeli certainly seemed to see the difference between Jews and Arabs in Alroy. But that novel is even more forward about the formation of a Jewish state than Tancred. His treatment of the subject is operatic. Like many operas his hero falls in love with a woman on the other side of the war in which he is fighting. In fact, during Disraeli’s lifetime an effort was made to turn the book into an opera, and in 1906, after he died, an opera of Alroy was in fact made. The language of the novel is also operatic. Disraeli declared in a lengthy passage in the introduction that he would cut from later editions that he had innovated a new style of prose poetry. But the style is mostly an imitation of the King James Bible. Much of it feels like cut-rate Shakespeare, and it has been for over a century one of the main sources of derision for the novel, which Disraeli biographer Robert Blake called “profitable but unreadable” and of which Disraeli himself said “I have heard no complaints about the style except from the critics.” But Alroy tells a story that is gripping, a fast read, and worth revisiting. It has been called the first Jewish historical novel, and the amazing true tale the story is based on has rarely been adapted since.\nDisraeli\u0026rsquo;s foreign policy and the limits of ideal ambition Disraeli did not spend his career fighting for a Jewish state. Indeed a keystone of his foreign policy was to prop up the Ottoman Empire, which even in his day could be seen clearly to be dying a slow death. His great rival, William Gladstone, abhorred this policy because he saw the Turks as brutal and backward, campaigning against Ottoman \u0026ldquo;atrocities\u0026rdquo; against Christians in Bulgaria. This ideological split between the two British prime ministers anticipated battles between liberal and conservative visions of foreign policy in the West that linger to this day. As Robert D. Kaplan noted in a 2013 Forbes article, \u0026ldquo;For Disraeli, both a cynic and a romantic, foreign policy was about naked national interests or it was nothing; for Gladstone, the arch-moralist, foreign policy was a humanitarian crusade or it was nothing. Sound familiar? Today\u0026rsquo;s foreign policy community is often divided along similar lines.\u0026rdquo;\nIt is possible that Disraeli saw the reclamation of Israel for the Jews as an unrecognizable goal. But as Stanley\u0026rsquo;s 1851 conversation showed, he was emotional about that goal. Disraeli did not provide a blueprint for what the new nation of Israel would look like, and he may not have envisioned anything like what came to be Israel, let alone the violence that came with its creation and maintenance. But he did imagine Israel reviving as a nation.\n"},{"title":"An aside: Ellen Wilson and Benjamin Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s conflicting views of Balzac reveal much","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-10-13-ellen-wilson-disraeli-balzac/","date":"October 13, 2025","tags":["Wilson","Gladstone","Disraeli"],"text":"An aside: Ellen Wilson and Benjamin Disraeli's conflicting views of Balzac reveal much Reflections by politicians on authors of literature and their works are not just trivia. They have a way in some cases of revealing almost more than political writings. Thus this article will glance at the remarks Woodrow Wilson\u0026rsquo;s family and Benjamin Disraeli made about the novelist Honore de Balzac, about whom I wrote last month. After ruminating on Balzacin my last post because his political novels were a forerunner of Disraeli and the political novel, I thought I might look up what Woodrow Wilson, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone thought of him. Because the results were charming and interesting, I am pausing to share them.\nOnly one document in the monumental 69-volume Papers of Woodrow Wilson references Balzac, and it’s not by Woodrow. It is a letter to the future president by his young wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, an even more devoted reader of literature than Woodrow, who dabbled in fiction himself but largely specialized in works about government and history. I always like looking up literary figures in the indexes of the Wilson papers because one of the most interesting things about Wilson as opposed to other presidents is that he was our only president with a PhD, and thus was exposed to myriad great writers in the course of his long academic career. Even some of Wilson’s biggest detractors find this to be an appealing fact about Wilson. Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, who has called himself a founding member of the “Hate Woodrow Wilson Club,” said as much in his book Liberal Fascism. “There’s no disputing that a big part of Wilson’s appeal, then and now stemmed from the fact that he was the first PhD to serve in the Oval Office. Of course, the White House was no stranger to great minds and great scholars. But Wilson was the first professional academic at a time when the professionalization of social science was considered a cornerstone of human progress.”\nEllen Wilson\u0026rsquo;s rejection of Balzac Here is what Ellen wrote to Wilson about Balzac on March 8, 1889, while Wilson was a young professor in Middletown, Connecticut:\n“I need you to get me some more books to read! Have finished all those\u0026ndash;all except two which were uninteresting so I merely looked them over. I feel inclined after this dose of Balzac to equal or exceed you in your contempt for the French. One of them particularly is a revelation in the singular \u0026amp; total inability shown by both the author \u0026amp; his characters to even form the conception of morality! However that is evidently only true of Parisian life. It was consoling to read in Hamerton [author of The Intellectual Life, which the Wilsons read and discussed in their letters] that the smaller communities are in this respect exactly like the same in England. ‘There is no question as to the morality of the women,\u0026ndash;it is a matter of course.’ [This is a quote from Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady.]Even Balzac recognizes conjugal fidelity as a ‘bourgeoise virtue’!”\nThe first interesting thing about this letter is that it is revealing of how the future president thought about the French, with whom he had to negotiate to end World War One in 1919. “I feel inclined after this dose of Balzac to equal or exceed you in your contempt for the French,” Ellen writes. Earlier this year I wrote about scholars’ debates on whether the young Wilson was contemptuous of Germans, and once again found his reflections on the subject in the context of a discussion with his wife about a literary writer. Then it was Henry James and his negative view of Germans that inspired Wilson to reveal a little of what he thought of them. This time reflecting on Balzac got Ellen started on Woodrow’s “contempt for the French.” This is fascinating in light of speculation by some writers that Woodrow was biased against the French in the talks over the Versailles Treaty in 1919 that settled the lay of the new world after the Great War ended. Adam Tooze, in a 2015 book called The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931, wrote that “Wilson was no doubt more comfortable with the British than the French.” Tooze chronicled what he viewed as Wilson’s stereotypes coming into relations with the European leaders. For example he viewed British prime minister Lloyd George as a reactionary warmonger, Tooze says, and Wilson’s top deputy “Colonel House, when he visited London, much preferred dealing with Tory patricians, such as Lord Balfour and old-school Liberal Grandees like Sir Edward Grey, who fitted Wilson\u0026rsquo;s aspic image of British politics far better than the populist Lloyd George.” This caused French prime minister Georges Clemenceau to react with his own stereotypes, Tooze writes: “Faced with this wall of stereotypes, it was tempting for the Europeans to respond with their own version of the stylized transatlantic difference. At Versailles, Georges Clemenceau was to remark that he found Wilson\u0026rsquo;s sanctimoniousness easier to stomach when he reminded himself that the American had never lived in a world where it was good form to shoot a Democrat.” Thus Wilson’s “contempt” for the French may have had real world impacts on the terms to end World War One.\nThe second interesting thing about Ellen’s letter about Balzac is what her outright rejection of Balzac’s depiction of sexual infidelities says about the history of the culture wars in this country and in Europe. We tend to think of conservatives as being more strict on sex, and liberals as being more relaxed. But as this letter shows it hasn’t always been thus. The Wilsons were a conservative Christian family, though liberal in some respects in 19th Century Presbyterian culture. Disraeli, by contrast, whose view of Balzac we will get to in a moment, was the leader of the capital-C Conservative Party in England and yet is much more “liberal” about sex. His arch-rival William Gladstone was a very strict Christian who has become famous for notating in his diary the moments when he whipped himself for sexual thoughts, but headed the Liberal Party in the UK. The evolution of the United States’ Republican and Democratic parties on the subject of religion is worth a closer look in some other essay. But suffice it to note here that the progressives of Wilson’s era originated their views in a socially conscious religious tradition that included not only Wilson but also Jane Addams and many others.\nEllen says in the letter that the two Balzac novels she perused demonstrated a “total inability … by both the author \u0026amp; his characters to even form the conception of morality.” Perhaps she was looking at Cousin Bette, one of his most famous novels, which satirizes the Parisian culture of marital infidelity and is consequently loaded with extramarital affairs. Or perhaps she was reading Lost Illusions, the inciting event of which is an affair, among other examples of extramarital sex. Or his Father Goroit, in which a young lawyer tries to climb into high society by sleeping with married women. All these novels satirize and scrutinize the culture of infidelity in 19th Century Paris.But Ellen seems not to pick up on Balzac’s satire.\nIf Ellen missed Balzac’s criticism of Parisian life it may be partly because Balzac was not always satirizing sex. He had a complicated relationship to the subject. “Salvation through sexual intercourse is one of the themes of his life and work,” wrote Balzac biographer Graham Robb. (So though was a view of sex as a negative “drain on creative energy.”) Or it could be that word of Balzac’s sometimes casual approach to sex in his own life had somehow reached the Wilsons in central Connecticut, though this is unlikely. Balzac married very late. After years of trying to wed, in part for money, he finally married the year he died, in 1850. In the meantime evidence exists of trysts with women and prostitutes: “Scraps of correspondence reveal a certain amount of casual promiscuity,” Robb writes. “A note from a girl called Jenny who worked as a waitress at the Cafe Frascati downstairs; and some transactions with Armand Dutacq involving ‘Annette’ and another Louise. Recourse to prostitutes was common enough to be relatively insignificant \u0026ndash; but not with someone who had firm ideas about sex as a drain on creative energy. Here, the work appears far richer than his life. In [Balzac’s 90-plus-novel series] ‘La Comédie Humaine,’ shop-girls and waitresses earning money on the side have surnames and identities; in Balzac\u0026rsquo;s life, they do not. These women were just distractions from the task of finding the global solution he hoped [his girlfriend] would provide.”\nIn any case, Ellen’s dismissal of Balzac out of hand is perhaps evidence of a certain social conservatism on the part of the Wilsons, who both grew up in small towns in the South. Ellen’s rejection of Balzac’s often sociological studies of all aspects of Parisian life reminds one that Ellen was not just a strong female who grew up planning not even to marry a man (see my writing on Ellen’s independence in youth in this blog post). She also, despite that history, agreed with Woodrow in the Gilded Age that women belonged only in certain gender roles. In 1884 after hearing a woman speak at the Association for the Advancement of Women in Baltimore, Woodrow remarked: “Barring the chilled, scandalized feeling that always overcomes me when I see and hear women speak in public, I derived a good deal of whimsical delight … from the proceedings.” In response, Ellen said that the sight of “representative women in medicine, the pulpit and the law” lecturing from the podium sometimes made her “too indignant to see the funny side.” She wondered: “How can they make themselves so absurd,—and worse than absurd! I know some of them are as good as can be, and I suppose they must be clever,—above the average; and yet how absolutely senseless their conduct. Why is it that cleverness is so apt to unsettle a woman\u0026rsquo;s brains? Isn’t there room in our poor heads for both common sense, and uncommon?” Woodrow did however have positive comments for women who preserved some femininity, or were “motherly” or “jolly” or “graceful” in attitude, as Victoria Bissell Brown points out in a chapter entitled “Conservative among Progressives: Woodrow Wilson in the Golden Age of American Women\u0026rsquo;s Higher Education,” in editor James Axtell’s 2011 essay anthology The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson. This is what women who sought to get Wilson to approve the vote for women were up against. Though Wilson ultimately signed the amendment that got women the vote, his conversion to that side of the issue was long and incremental.\nDisraeli\u0026rsquo;s admiration of Balzac It\u0026rsquo;s also interesting to note the contrast between Ellen’s view on Balzac and Benjamin Disreali’s. Woodrow detested Disraeli, perhaps mainly because he was such a huge fan of Dizzy’s archrival William Gladstone. The difference between Gladstone and Disraeli’s views of sex were one of the things Gladstone hated about his rival. It’s been said he never felt Disraeli had the moral fortitude Gladstone saw as necessary for prime minister. This may have been in part rank hypocrisy on Gladstone’s part, as he had a long shadowy history looking for prostitutes to “reform,” but it is true that Disraeli for better or worse was much more cosmopolitan about sex. He wrote a novel about a long extramarital affair with a married women and has been rumored to have left “illegitimate” children after relationships with other women.\nDisraeli had the highest respect for Balzac as a writer. “I should not be surprised if the great body of writers of fiction that have flourished in France during the last half of a century will ultimately take in their literature the same position as is occupied in ours by the Elizabethan Dramatists,” Disraeli wrote in 1860, in a diary entry reprinted in Helen M. Swartz and Marvin Swartz’s 1975 book Disraeli’s Reminiscences. “Among these French writers, two names will, I apprehend, stand out pre-eminent, though their style is very different. I will not speak of George Sand as of Shakespeare, for they have little resemblance, though Balzac may be pitted with Ben Jonson\u0026ndash;but Sand is in my opinion, without doubt, the finest prose writer in any language.” (The emphasis is mine.) This compliment to Balzac is perhaps an even greater tribute than one might realize, as Disraeli rarely read English novelists. As Disraeli biographer Sarah Bradford wrote:\n“Another curious aspect of Disraeli as a writer is that, although living in the greatest age of the English novel, he rarely read the works of his contemporaries and when he did was not impressed. “In September 1857 he confessed in a letter to Lady Londonderry, ‘I wish, like you, I could console myself with reading novels … but I have lost all zest for fiction, and have for many years.” [Thirteen years later he would release another novel and Charles Dickens would welcome him back to the brotherhood of men of letters. But in 1857 Disraeli went on:] “I have never read anything of Dickens, except for an extract in a newspaper, and therefore, I cannot help to decide on the merits of *Little Dorrit.*”\nBut then Disraeli didn’t have to speculate on Balzac’s character from Middletown, Connecticut, as did the Wilsons. He actually once attended a dinner with Balzac, as well as Alexandre Dumas. Disraeli wrote, in another diary entry in Disraeli’s Reminiscences:\n“This reminds me, that in 1842 I met one evening at the Opera one Charles Le Dru whose acquaintance I had made at Lady Blessington\u0026rsquo;s\u0026ndash;an advocate \u0026amp; great democrat, but very much addicted to the English, a lively, cordial man. He was with my banker John Drummond, \u0026amp; he told me that a provincial poet, of whom much was expected, was to read a tragedy that night after, or before, of at, a supper which he was to give in a sort of barn, or colossal garret, or gigantic artist\u0026rsquo;s studio, quite unfurnished, which was lent him for the occasion— \u0026amp; so I went. And it was a wonderful scene. John \u0026amp; Harvey Drummond \u0026amp; I think George Smythe, \u0026amp; then all the literary heros of whom we had heard so much, Sue \u0026amp; Souliés, Balzac, \u0026amp; many more. I dare say forty persons—rough fare, but plenty.”\nA survey of indexes, incidentally, in works about William Gladstone turned up no comments at all about Balzac. Perhaps he would have agreed with Ellen Wilson.\nIn any case, while there are obvious limits to what can be gleaned from a short private statement about a writer like Balzac, these statements reveal flashes of the inner hearts of these political figures, and sometimes (as in the case of Wilson’s depicted “contempt for the French”) more than would ever be shown in their public writings.\n"},{"title":"Review: Balzac in \u003cem\u003eDeputy for Arcis\u003c/em\u003e attempted to introduce the parliamentary novel before Disraeli","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-09-25-balzac-deputy-for-arcis/","date":"September 25, 2025","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: Balzac in *Deputy for Arcis* attempted to introduce the parliamentary novel before Disraeli Benjamin Disraeli has been credited, by Morris Edmund Speare in 1924, with the invention of “the political novel.” This is a dubious claim, as the novel was under development for 2,000 years, according to Margaret Anne Doody, and fictional writings dealt with political and war intrigues early on. Consequently, the critic George Watson suggested amending Disraeli’s achievement to the creation of “the parliamentary novel.” “No nation other than Victorian-Edwardian Britain has ever explored its elective institutions so extensively in fiction,” Watson writes. And in fact even America didn’t really boast a novel on the Washington congressional scene until Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age in 1873. But in May 1839, some five years before Disraeli had conceived his political trilogy, Honore de Balzac was beginning the process of writing a novel, The Deputy for Arcis, that was to analyze in sociological detail the inner workings of the French Chamber of Deputies, or more specifically one rural election for a seat in that chamber. I’m taking a break from reviewing Disraeli’s novels to explore the broader context of the political novel by reviewing that novel.It can be argued that The Deputy for Arcis quietly inaugurated the parliamentary novel before Disraeli with a book that helps show why parliamentary novels have been so rare. Strikingly, the novel demonstrates a surprising affinity not just with Balzac’s famous reactionary “legitimist” politics but with Disraeli’s brand of specifically English Toryism.\nThe Deputy for Arcis tells the story of a small-town election in Arcis-sur-Aube. Balzac says in the introduction to the book that its events didn’t actually take place in Arcis, but in some other rural district of France. He wrote all of the book’s first part and some of the book’s second part before he died in 1850. After Balzac\u0026rsquo;s passing, his friend Charles Rabou was commissioned by Balzac’s wife (who married him the year he died) to write the rest of part two and all of part three. “It is not as easy as one might hope to detect the point at which Balzac’s wine turns into Rabou’s water,” as Balzac biographer Graham Robb put it. “Part One: The Election”, the first 114 pages in the 1899 Gebbie edition of the novel, ends with two competitors for the Arcis seat in the Chamber of Deputies: republican Simon Giguet, a young hometown boy who puts the audience to sleep by speaking on the meaning of the word “progress” for two hours, and the bourgeois Mayor Beauvisage, who built a small fortune on hosiery during the Napoleonic Wars. In the second part, another competitor emerges, Charles Dorlange, a heroic sculptor who discovers he is a member of the nobility. Suddenly given the title of Charles de Sallenauve by his long-lost father, he is a member of the democratic party, and as one character describes him, “neither Legitimist nor Conservative, nor Left Centre, but a republican who deprecates a republic.” This cantankerous ideology is reminiscent of Balzac’s despite the fact that he was generally no republican. The notion of an artist running for a seat in the chamber is dear to Balzac’s heart, as he stood for election to parliament himself. Balzac was not a democrat or a republican, emphasizing monarchy and the Catholic Church (“throne and altar”) in the manner good conservatives did in 19th Century France. He continued to support the ousted Bourbon regime after the 1830 revolution. Sallenauve’s iconoclastic and idiosyncratic political style reminds one of Balzac, who had bitingly satirical words for almost everyone and rarely wrote a purely heroic character. Ironically, that’s just what Rabou did with Sallenauve: he wrote a distinctly heroic politician.\nScarcity of English-language Scholarship Though it has been published as a novel since 1854 and was serialized in part in periodicals in the 1840s, Balzac’s Deputy for Arcis has rarely been written about in English to this day. Searches of academic journals on JSTOR and of the Internet on Google turn up only passing references to it, as does a search of Balzac biographies and critical literature in print. One of the few exceptions is Scottish historian Christopher Harvie, who was once a member himself of the Scottish Parliament. Harvie compared The Deputy for Arcis to Disraeli’s 1845 Sybil in his own 1991 book on the history of the political novel, The Centre of Things: Political Fiction in Britain from Disraeli to the Present. Harvie makes several interesting contrasts but his commentary is somewhat odd in that he does not mention the fact that Balzac never finished the novel, or that it was finished by Rabou. He seemingly attempts to ignore this fact by implying the novel ended in the first part, the only one Balzac wrote in full. But he gets the ending of even this part wrong. Harvie writes:\n“Balzac deals with the 1839 election in Arcis-sur-Aube, birthplace of [French revolutionary Georges] Danton. The republicans are putting up a candidate to oppose the aristocratic nominee, only to hear that [the nominee] has been killed in a colonial war. The centre-right government sends down a failing roue, Maxime de Trailles, to infiltrate a government placeman. But the mayor, a hosier and successful speculator, outmaneuvers both and claims the seat.”\nHowever, the mayor does not win in the novel, either in the version that Balzac published in newspapers serially, or in the part of the book he completed before he died (“Part One: The Election”). Why did Harvie get this wrong? I found two potential reasons. One is that he might have been going on a popular book of synopses of Balzac novels, which includes a very brief entry on this novel that seems to imply that the mayor wins. Another is a document from the Maison de Balzac, Balzac’s home and museum, which says “we learn indirectly and by allusion” that the mayor wins from other Balzac stories. In Cousin Bette, considered one of his masterpieces, Balzac devotes a couple of paragraphs to the mayor, Phileas Beauvisage, saying he eventually became deputy for Arcis: “Crevel and Hulot were announced separately, and then a deputy named Beauvisage,” Balzac writes. “Beauvisage, formerly a stocking manufacturer at Arcis, was anxious to pick up the Paris style.” In another book, Beatrix, the Maison de Balzac points out, Balzac revealed that de Trailles got his way and indeed married the daughter of Beauvisage, an important plot point that the completed Deputy leaves untold.\nThe Rarity of the Parliamentary Novel Perhaps Rabou didn’t read these works by Balzac before he started writing, or perhaps Beauvisage wins some other election to the Chamber of Deputies and not the 1839 election depicted in Deputy for Arcis. But in his version, it is Sallenauve that wins the election, and by a landslide. The fact that Rabou had to write at all, after the years and years Balzac tried to finish, speaks to a reason parliamentary novels are so rare. His initial inspiration came as the May 1839 parliamentary election was held in France, the election that the novel depicts. For decades after that he struggled with finishing it. I, and apparently several French critics, wonder if Balzac had trouble finishing the novel because the politics in France kept changing tumultuously. At one point in part one, Balzac’s character Eugene de Rastignac, who appears in several of his novels, says that in France under the so-called July Monarchy the government in parliament is always being overturned as the opposition keeps winning elections:\n“In France it is the government that is blamed, the opposition never; it may lose as many battles as it fights, but like the allies in 1814, one victory suffices. With ‘three glorious days’ it overturned and destroyed everything. Therefore, if we are heirs of power, we must cease to govern, and wait.”\nIn other words, if you don’t like the politics in France just wait five minutes; prepare for the change of government to accomplish your ends in politics.\nDisraeli, by contrast, may have been able to finish novels like Coningsby, Sybil and Endymion, which went into detail about the changes in government, because he knew them all so well. He did not need four volumes and 100 characters because unlike Balzac he was not writing a sociological “study” (as Balzac called it) on a local election. Harvie points out that Balzac was writing “sober realism” by contrast to Sybil’s “wild melodrama.” “While Disraeli painted his political colours with a broad brush and simply wiped out all opposition to his cardboard hero and heroine,” Harvie writes, “Balzac’s chief characters notably Rastingac, had matured before his readers over several books of The Human Comedy. Both writers attempted to present a panorama of their societies, but [The Deputy for Arcis] could depict only a small part of the France of the late 1830s.” The Human Comedy is Balzac’s name for his own collected works, totaling more than 90 novels and untold short stories.\nWhat Were Balzac’s Politics? After the passage above Rastignac goes on to summarize Balzac’s politics perhaps as tightly as anything in his collected works save the preface he wrote to the 1842 edition of The Human Comedy. “I belong by my personal opinions to the aristocracy, and by my public opinions to the royalty of July,” Rastingac says in *Deputy.*“The house of Orleans served me to raise the fortunes of my family, and I shall ever remain attached to it.” This monologue would seem to be as close as anything in the book to Balzac’s own opinion.\nNot everyone agrees, however, with the majority view that Balzac was a “reactionary legitimist.” (The Legitimists supported the Bourbon monarchy after it fell in 1830 in France.) Biographer Robb says, “a struggle for the political soul” of Balzac “goes on to this day in academic journals.” In his introduction to Northwestern University Press’ edition of Balzac’s The Bureaucats, Marco Diani writes “The paradoxical scenario that for years cast Balzac as a monarcho-clerical legitimist, political reactionary, and artistic progressive should be discredited once and for all. The legend was born—other than from contradictory statements, as ambiguous as they are innumerable, made by Balzac himself—in the letters of Marx and Engels, from which Marxist scholars have since constructed analytic telescopes so reductive as to eliminate the possibility of any other vision.” Diani goes on to quote a letter from Engels: “Certainly, Balzac was a political legitimist; his great work is a continuous elegy of the inevitable ruin of decent society. All his sympathies are for the class condemned to fade into the dusk. Nevertheless, his satire is never so pungent, his irony never so bitter, as when he puts into play the very men and women with whom he so profoundly sympathizes—that is, the nobles.” Diani concludes: “This reading willingly acknowledges the analytical ‘progressivism’ in Balzac\u0026rsquo;s work, while simultaneously pointing out the limitations of his conclusions, drawn in an era of theoretical immaturity.” In other words, in Diani’s view, Balzac was writing in an era before Marx’s analysis was mature and therefore was himself theoretically immature.\nIndeed, the critic Georg Lukacs agreed that what made Balzac great was his ability to present viewpoints contrary to his own, writing contradictory characters that reflect reality rather than, one might add, Disraeli’s style of writing characters who are emblematic of one or two ideas throughout each novel. Lukacs writes:\n“What makes Balzac a great man is the inexorable veracity with which he depicted reality even if that reality ran counter to his own personal opinions, hopes and wishes. Had he succeeded in deceiving himself, had he been able to take his own Utopian fantasies for facts, had he presented as reality what was merely his own wishful thinking, he would now be of interest to none and would be as deservedly forgotten as the innumerable legitimist pamphleteers and glorifiers of feudalism who had been his contemporaries.”\nBalzac’s willingness to write multidimensional characters is one of the ways one can tell the difference between Balzac and Rabou. Rabou never lets Sallenauve’s heroism falter, whether because he sympathizes with the nobility, democracy or republicanism.\nSimilarity to Disraeli’s Politics But, Lukacs asserts, Balzac didn’t sympathize so much with the Bourbons as he did with a particular vision of constitutional monarchy: That of the English Tories. Lukacs writes:\n“Of course even as a political thinker Balzac had never been a common-place, empty-headed legitimist; nor is his Utopia the fruit of any wish to return to the feudalism of the Middle Ages. On the contrary: what Balzac wanted was that French capitalist development should follow the English pattern, especially in the sphere of agriculture. His social ideal was that compromise between aristocratic landowner and bourgeois capitalist which was achieved in England by the \u0026lsquo;glorious revolution’ of 1688 and which was to become the basis of social evolution in England and determine its specific form. When Balzac (in a paper dealing with the tasks facing the royalists after the July revolution and written in 1840, just when he was about to begin The Peasants) severely censured the attitude of the French aristocracy, he based his criticism on an idealized conception of the English Tory nobility.”\nIn other words, had Balzac known who the young MP named Benjamin Disraeli was, he would have sympathized with his politics. Disraeli, in 1839 when Balzac began work on The Deputy for Arcis, was about to launch a campaign against the Tory leadership that would come at then-prime minister Robert Peel from both the left and the right. Disraeli would adopt an ultra-Tory line endorsing leadership by aristocrats undergirded by a belief in medieval feudalism as a kind of ideal era. But in Sybil and elsewhere he would also propose a sort of entente with what were called the Radicals, who came in various stripes but generally endorsed a move closer to democracy.\nIn at least one of his handful of political novels (“Scenes From the Political Life,” he called them) Balzac had a character argue for an English system of government. In The Bureaucrats, which takes place in 1820s under the ruling Bourbons, Madame Celestine Rabourdin argues with her husband, the novel’s leading bureaucrat, when he expresses his plan to cut civil service jobs in order to make the government more efficient. She points to Britain as a counterexample:\n\u0026ldquo;The thing to do is to increase jobs instead of cutting them. Instead of redeeming bonds, you should multiply the number of bondholders. If the Bourbons want to reign in peace, let them create creditors in every last town and village, and above all keep foreigners from touching French interests, for someday they will ask us for the capital. Whereas if all the bonds are in France, neither France nor credit will perish. That\u0026rsquo;s what saved England. Your plan is that of a petit bourgeois. An ambitious man should only approach his minister picking up where Law left off, except for his bad luck, explaining the power of credit, demonstrating that we simply mustn\u0026rsquo;t reduce the principal but interest, as the English do.\u0026rdquo;\nIn this instance, Madame Rabourdin appears to be written sympathetically. But by the end of the novel her husband wins the argument, and she embraces him joyfully to congratulate him on doing so. This conclusion might signal Balzac was not in sympathy with English ultra-Toryism, or Disraeli’s brand of Radical-Tory collaboration. However, Lukacs says Balzac was looking for an “English Utopia” that does sound somewhat like that collaboration:\n“Balzac\u0026rsquo;s English Utopia was based on the illusion that a traditional but nevertheless progressive leadership could mitigate the evils of capitalism and the class antagonisms resulting from them. Such leadership could in his opinion be given by none save throne and altar. The English land-owning nobility was the most important intermediate link in such a system. Balzac saw with merciless clarity the class antagonisms engendered by capitalism in France. He saw that the period of revolutions had by no means come to an end in July, 1830. His Utopia, his idealization of English conditions, his romantic conception of the supposed harmony existing between the great English landowners and their tenants, together with other ideas of a similar nature, all had their origin in the fact that Balzac despaired of the future of capitalist society because he saw with pitiless clarity the direction in which social evolution was moving.”\nBalzac Versus Capitalism and Democracy Indeed, Balzac was “obsessed with money,” as Rebecca Terese Powers puts it in her 2024 *Balzac on the Barricades: The Literary Origins of an Economic Revolution.*“He gave such reliable numbers in his texts that the economist Thomas Piketty even used them to estimates the rates of income from capital in the 19th century,” Powers writes. This hyper-specific style of writing is another of the ways one can tell the difference between Balzac’s and Rabou’s writing in The Deputy for Arcis. In a passage that could only be by Balzac, Deputy delves at length into the economic particulars of the hosiery market in rural France during the Napoleonic Wars. Beauvisage, not yet mayor, gets himself into a sort of hoarding race with Napoleon himself, as each attempts to buy up the dwindling supply of stockings left under a blockade of British ships that would otherwise import stockings. Such crises of supply were a reality in the first Empire, though Balzac’s choice of hosiery is in large measure satirical.This kind of sociological detail recalls the first page of the novel that is often considered his greatest masterpiece, Lost Illusions (made in 2021 into one of the best movies in recent years by French director Xavier Gianolli). That page leaps not into character or plot development but instead into a fascinating treatise on the difference between printing methodology in the big city and Angouleme.\nBalzac, though he dreamed for decades of becoming a deputy, was largely resistant to democracy. The entirety of The Deputy of Arcis, with or without Rabou, can be read as a criticism of rule by election. From Simon Giguet’s exposure of the weakness of a moderate republican from the seat of Arcis, to his vision of the ruling party sweeping into town to prop up a competing candidate, Balzac critiques democracy more than he endorses it. “Election,” Balzac wrote in his 1842 preface to The Human Comedy, “extended to everything, gives us government by the masses, the only form of government that is not accountable, and where tyranny knows no bounds, for it is called law.” Balzac once compared Georges de Buffon\u0026rsquo;s attempt to study and name all of the animals on earth to the Human Comedy, which attempted to dissect a few thousand of the most pivotal people in French history, as Balzac said. The study of a local election in this manner, Balzac said, would require 100 characters and four volumes. It is no wonder he did not finish the book. Naturally Disraeli gets the title of progenitor of the parliamentary novel, as he finished his works. Thus Deputy’s broken status, borne of the difficulties of depicting democracy itself, stands as an emblem of what makes the parliamentary novel so difficult: It must cover thousands of characters to encapsulate the full grandeur of the system, not just a handful of royals or nobles at the top. It must, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, contain multitudes.\n"},{"title":"A miraculous coincidence: Providence, politics, and the little-remembered first engagement of Woodrow Wilson","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-09-09-miraculous-coincidence/","date":"September 9, 2025","tags":["Wilson"],"text":"A miraculous coincidence: Providence, politics, and the little-remembered first engagement of Woodrow Wilson Woodrow Wilson’s second engagement, to Edith Galt, has been written about extensively, largely because she is considered by many to have acted effectively as America’s first female president. While Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke late in his second term, she guarded him zealously, kept his condition a secret, and insisted nothing was to happen without his approval. This put her in charge, the argument goes. That’s a good story, and strangely enough it’s been told in two plays of exactly the same title, The Second Mrs. Wilson, which is even stranger when one considers the titles are a reference to an obscure play, Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. But much less often retold is the amazing story of Wilson’s engagement to his first wife, a tale of dramatic coincidence without which perhaps neither he nor his wife would have been married. Ellen Axson, after all, had sworn off men, and had plotted out a life of independence and reliance on female friendship. The story of the coincidence that led to their engagement, for all its drama, has never been made into a play. Not only that, but it didn’t even make the lengthy biopic Wilson in 1944. And it is often omitted from biographies. The story underscores something interesting about Wilson, the role of the doctrine of Providence in both his politics and his theology. That philosophy has been both lauded as one of his good characteristics and derided as emblematic of his flaws as a political thinker. Above all, the tale of his first engagement is a good yarn, maybe even for the ever-growing numbers of people, who for good reasons and for reasons on all sides of the political spectrum, can’t stand Woodrow Wilson.\n“The peculiar sequence of events that culminated in Woodrow Wilson’s engagement to Ellen Axson tempts one to believe that they were later right in ascribing the result to a kind of Providence,” wrote editor Arthur Link in his Papers of Woodrow Wilson. To appreciate how unlikely the engagement meeting of Woodrow and Ellen Wilson was, one must contemplate 1883, a time before not only cell phones but also phones, a time when one wanted to write a letter to someone who was traveling, one had to send the letter without an address and hope that the letter found its recipient. Both Woodrow and Ellen were traveling for the summer in August 1883, moving from one southern town to another, hoping to meet up somewhere in the South. Their letters to each other were forwarded from town to town as they moved.\nIn the end, they ended up by sheer coincidence in the same town, Asheville, North Carolina, neither one knowing the other was there. In fact, Woodrow only discovered she was in town because he recognized the shape of her hair in the window of a hotel as he passed by. He must have thought he was just seeing his loved one everywhere, as people do when they are under love’s influence. But it turned out really to be her. We know this happened from a letter Wilson wrote later, in which he lamented that his wait for Ellen’s letters made him emotionally “susceptible to circumstances”:\n“I need not be ashamed of being dominated by circumstances, tho’, for they are big things. Consider the arrangement of a lady’s hair, for instance: her habit in the matter is a trivial enough circumstance in itself; but if a certain little woman who is very dear to me had departed once from her usual way of coiling her hair about the back of her shapely head, it is more than probable that I should not have recognized a certain vanishing figure at the window of a certain hotel in Asheville—and what then? I couldn’t have been very happy\u0026hellip;”\nThe pair, who were cousins, had met in Rome, Georgia, at the church where Ellen’s father was a pastor. Woodrow saw her and decided on the spot that she was the girl for him. Ellen, however, took longer to fall in love. In fact, when Woodrow arrived in town she was known as “Ellie the Man Hater” by her friends and family. She got that reputation because she told a friend that if she ever loved a man it would be against her will, as Frances Wright Saunders reports in her biography Ellen Axson Wilson: First Lady Between Two Worlds. Ellen had turned down at least five different young men who had proposed to her. She intended to go to art school in New York City, which she did after she became engaged to Wilson, to study painting. She had extremely close relationships with other women, including one Beth Adams, to whom she wrote the following, as reprinted in Saunders’s book:\n“Now I will tell you [of two instances] when I oftenest think of you: that evening, or afternoon rather, spent in the Parlour with my head on your lap, with my eyes looking straight up in your face, seeing nothing there to lead to distrust, only all that was loving and sincere. If anyone were to tell me that the love you then expressed for me was not sincere love they could never convince me of it. I know that you enjoyed just as much as I did that sweet confidential talk. I can understand easily, dear, how I could have fallen so idiotically in love with you, but why did you fancy me?.. You are the only girl I have ever seen who I think understands me\u0026hellip;. The next picture [of you] is one evening lying down in Carrie\u0026rsquo;s room [at the Rome Female College] resting. Do you remember Mamie\u0026rsquo;s disgust at our ‘sickening ways’ because we exchanged one single kiss. Then I remember looking so straight into your eyes as I kissed you goodbye and your steadfast earnest gaze in return.”\nLater, after their engagement, Woodrow would tease her and call her “The Girl Who Had Never Loved.” In a love letter in Link’s Wilson papers, Wilson grilled Ellen on when she had turned from her prior attitude and fallen in love with him, and revealed that she had really only realized she loved him after leaving the site of their engagement, in Asheville:\n“You knew that I loved you before I told you; didn’t you, love? Why, I had told you often enough by plain enough signs, and even by pretty plain words. … In one of your letters you say that you did not know how much you loved me until you found how wretched it made you to have me go away (from Asheville). Then you had known before that that you loved me some? How long had you known it? Tell me all about it, if you don’t mind telling. And tell me something else: tell me what were those thoughts and opinions of the dear little stranger, your former self, (‘the girl who had never loved’) which now so amuse you and fill you with wonder? Am I asking too many questions? You need not feel bound to answer any of them, my darling.”\nBut their chance encounter in Asheville did lead Ellen to fall in love. Having seen her hair in the window of the Eagle Hotel in Asheville in September 1883, Wilson ran into the hotel and convinced her to stay a few days longer. He himself was only in town because he was switching trains on the way from his family vacation with his mother and brother to the first days of his PhD program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. After two days of walking around Asheville and talking, they had their first kiss. Impulsive Woodrow proposed just before he boarded the train to Baltimore. She accepted. Then he realized he did not know her ring size and ran back to the Eagle Hotel to borrow one of her rings. With it in hand, he boarded the train an unexpectedly engaged man.\nPerhaps this seeming miracle in Asheville helped cement what had already been a major tenet in Wilson’s philosophy, that of Providence. After Wilson had been president, his top secretary Joe Tumulty wrote in a memoir that Wilson had confessed on the way to the Paris peace talks that resolved World War One the importance of this belief to his politics:\n\u0026ldquo;Well, Tumulty, this trip will either be the greatest success or the supremest tragedy in all history; but I believe in a Divine Providence. If I did not have faith, I should go crazy. If I thought that the direction of the affairs of this disordered world depended upon our finite intelligence, I should not know how to reason my way to sanity; but it is my faith that no body of men however they concert their power or their influence can defeat this great world enterprise, which after all is the enterprise of Divine mercy, peace and good will.\u0026rdquo;\nThis point of view has riled observers on multiple sides of the political spectrum. Sigmund Freud, who co-wrote a psychological biography of Wilson with William C. Bullitt, quoted the above line from Tumulty’s book. He maintained Wilson was “close to psychosis” at the Paris peace talks. Freud believed Wilson had a Christ complex and that his religious views were a way of working out his relationship with his father, who had been a Presbyterian minister, as was Ellen’s father. “We have seen that submission to God and unconscious identification with Christ were the only two large conduits for his passivity to his father through which his libido was still able to run freely,” Freud and Bullitt wrote.\nMore recently, the conservative political science scholar Ronald J. Pestritto criticized the earliest of Wilson’s writings on providence. In his 2005 book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, Pestritto said Wilson’s belief in the predestined nature of historical progress was Hegelian, though the writings he cited had been written when the future president was a teenager, well before he read Hegel:\n“In keeping with a primary tenet of historicism, Wilson saw God’s divine plan coming to fruition on earth. … The culmination of Wilson’s battle in the final earthly victory of good over evil coincides with Hegel’s argument that the process of historical progress represents the gradual actualization of God’s divine plan on earth. … Since progress for Wilson is divinely ordained, one\u0026rsquo;s participation in progress takes on the form of an obligation to God. This also means that those opposed to progressive ideas are also opposing God\u0026rsquo;s plan for the earth. Wilson made clear that there can be no compromise on these matters: one is either for God or against Him, either for progress or against it. Certainly this attitude is familiar to those who study Wilson as a public figure, where Wilson was often inexplicably intransigent on issues where compromise would seem to have been the only means to at least partial success.”\nOthers see Wilson’s belief in Providence as a reason to embrace him, and this resulting “intransigence” as heroic resolve. The adulatory movie Wilson even ended with a laudatory reference to Providence. As the president says goodbye to his cabinet in the film, Wilson valorously utters that “I’ll even make this concession to Providence: [The League of Nations] may come about in an even better way than I proposed.” But Freud thought Wilson’s belief in Providence was a sign that he still hankered for his father’s opinion. The psychoanalyst cited this quote: “I trust,” Wilson said in 1908 while president of Princeton University, “that a kind of Providence will presently send me some sign of guidance which I shall have sight enough to perceive and interpret.”\nWhen he spoke then of this Providence, perhaps Wilson thought of Ellen and that September day they got engaged.\n"},{"title":"Review: Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s novel \u003cem\u003eContarini Fleming\u003c/em\u003e is torn between competing temperaments","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-08-26-review-contarini-fleming/","date":"August 26, 2025","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: Disraeli's novel *Contarini Fleming* is torn between competing temperaments When the title character in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1832 novel Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Autobiography returns home from college, his father (based in part on the author’s father, Isaac D’Israeli) listens with pleasure and amusement as Contarini shows off the results of his reading at school. The boy is newly witty and articulate, tossing off pithy observations on philosophy, history and other disciplines. “But when he found that I believed in innate ideas, he thought that my self-delusion began to grow serious,” Contarini narrates. The 27-year-old Disraeli was referencing a philosophical point of view held by Descartes and Plato, that humans are born with certain ideas innately, such as the nature of God, or moral viewpoints. This philosophical position was opposed by some of the great 18th Century Enlightenment masters, including Locke and Voltaire, as its sort of Romantic mysticism was at odds with their empiricism.\nScholars have often pointed out that Contarini Fleming is a portrait of the conflict between Disraeli’s temperament as a “poet” and his temperament as an aspiring statesman. That’s an interesting enough subject, as very few statesman have also been novelists. The cognitive dissonance this conflict causes in the lead character can reveal much about each temperament, because we rarely have the chance to see both in the same person. That’s fascinating in its own right. But what critics don’t appear to have pointed out about Contarini Fleming is that the book is also a portrait of the conflict in Disraeli’s thought between 18th Century Enlightenment thinking like his father’s and 19th Century Romantic thinking like that of the book upon which in part he modeled Contarini, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.\nPaul Smith in his 1987 essay “Disraeli’s Politics” notes that “The nature and function of romanticism in Disraeli’s thought is another subject demanding a thorough treatment.” Smith names an unpublished dissertation and other similarly unavailable sources as candidates to fill in this gap but deems them unsatisfying. Since then, in 1999, Smith and Charles Richmond published a book of essays called The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli that features an essay by Daniel Schwarz on romanticism in Disraeli’s thought, but it does little to cover the tension in the statesman’s thought between the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. More recently, in 2014, Robert O’Kell released a book, Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, whose title suggests it would seem to fit the bill, but it is not the book Smith was looking for. Neither is this review, but it strikes me that the intellectual conflict is one of the under-covered aspects of Contarini Fleming.\nA key moment demonstrating this tension between 18th and 19th Century temperaments is found in the tale of Contarini\u0026rsquo;s championing of the notion of innate ideas. Contarini continues detailing his father\u0026rsquo;s reaction to his embrace of the Cartesians: “Affecting no want of interest in my pursuits, he said to me one day in a careless tone, ‘Contarini, I am no great friend to reading, but as you have a taste that way, if I were you, during the vacation, I would turn over Voltaire.’” Disraeli’s hero has never read Voltaire before, but he takes the suggestion and dives in to his dad’s vast collection of writings by the 18th Century philosophe, who was one of the first international stars of writing and philosophy, was a moral leader around Europe and is perhaps best known as the author of Candide:\n“I stood before the hundred volumes; I glanced with indifference upon the wondrous and witching shelf. History, poetry, philosophy, the lucid narrative, and the wild invention, and the unimpassioned truth, they were all before me \u0026hellip; Never shall I forget the effect this work produced on me. What I had been long seeking offered itself. This strange mix of brilliant fantasy and poignant truth, this unrivalled blending of ideal creation and worldly wisdom, it all seemed to speak to my two natures … A philosopher and a statesman, I moralized over the condition of man and the nature of government. The style enchanted me. I delivered myself up to the full abandonment of its wild and brilliant grace.”\nIn that contrast, between a flirtation with the philosophy of innate ideas and a new love for Voltaire, Disraeli explores his ambivalence about 18th Century and 19th Century ideals.\n“The whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigor turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion. … The decline from thinking to feeling, you see.” The character of Hannah Jarvis in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia Contarini Fleming is Disraeli’s attempt to write a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age tale) like Wilheim Meister that explicates the development of the poetic mindset, including the emotional travails that came with his attempts at writing. He wrote in a preface to Contarini that such a history of the development of the poet had not yet been written, though he acknowledged Wilheim Meister as one attempt, and said he hoped to surpass that book. Goethe had praised Disraeli’s first novel, Vivian Grey. Contarini Fleming tells the story of the childhood and young adulthood of a boy in an unnamed Scandinavian country who is torn between becoming a poet (a category into which Disraeli includes disciples of other forms of creative writing, including novels) and becoming a statesman. It is heavily autobiographical, though many of the details of setting, character and plot have been fictionalized. Disraeli thought it was his best novel, though it did not sell well and few of the critics agree. The publisher of the novel changed the subtitle from A Psychological Autobiography to A Psychological Romance, presumably hoping that would sell better and perhaps trying to liberate the author from the word “autobiography” and the baggage it comes with for a young author. But Disraeli admitted, at least in his diary, that Contarini Fleming was largely autobiographical: “My works are the embodiment of my feelings. In Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition. In [the 1833 novel] Alroy, my ideal ambition. The P.R. [Psychological Romance] is the development of my poetic character. This trilogy is the secret history of my feelings. I shall write no more about myself.” That he kept writing about himself all the way to the end of his life is a side point for our purposes.\nThe word “psychological” had not yet, in 1832 when the book came out, been professionalized the way it would come to be by Sigmund Freud. The 2004 Routledge edition of this work, which is volume three in the publisher’s series The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli (and which appears not to have been reviewed anywhere), contains an excellent introduction by Richmond that points out Freud had said no man could psychoanalyze himself. However, Richmond wrote, self-analysis is “in some measure what Disraeli seems to have achieved … It is not so much a literary, as a proto-psychoanalytic, tour de force.” Contarini tells us, in a bit of proto-Freudian analysis, that his emotional ills come as the result of a lack of maternal love. His mother was killed in childbirth, and the stepmother who replaced her presented a comparative lack of love. Critics have compared Contarini\u0026rsquo;s stepmother to Disraeli’s own biological mother, who did not die in childbirth but about whom he had strangely little to say in the decades of writings he produced. As seminal Disraeli biographer Robert Blake wrote in 1966, “It is clear that he did not get on well with his mother … Precisely what went wrong with their relationship no one now can tell. But something went wrong. There is no record of his ever talking about her after her death, and no reference to her in the numerous autobiographical fragments which survive among his papers. Indeed, one might almost think that he wished to obliterate her memory.”\nAs did the narrator in his prior novel, The Young Duke, Disraeli describes symptoms of a mental illness in detail in Contarini Fleming. The anonymous narrator in The Young Duke (1831) depicted himself writing in a room with statues and paintings that seemed to speak to him as he wrote, reinforcing his candidly depicted despair at the quality of the writing of that book. This time, the book was written under the influence of a depressive episode. As Richmond writes, “In part four of Contarini, Disraeli describes somatic manifestations of his illness, the existence of which are supported by external evidence in his letters at the time. It does not seem that he understood their connection to his depression. Contarini feels languid, indolent, faint, experiences loss of appetite and broken sleep, together with a ‘mysterious imbecility’ or lack of mental energy – all accompaniments of depression. He also suffers from hyperesthesias (hypersensitivity), depersonalization, auditory disturbances and fainting.” Contarini revels in these symptoms, however, suspecting as Romantic-era writers often did, that such problems accompany genius. Tom Stoppard eloquently described this point of view in the stinging passage that serves as the epigraph in this section of this blog post, from his character Hannah Jarvis, who tells her colleague Bernard that this idea of tortured genius is what became of Enlightenment rationalism: “A mind in chaos suspected of genius … The decline from thinking to feeling.”\nThus, we have the picture of Contarini as enamored of the rationalist Voltaire but besotten by Romantic emotion. The story develops that picture in the pages that follow his discovery of Voltaire. Contarini returns to his college (what would be a boarding high school in contemporary America) and forms a sort of Voltaire fan club. In these scenes Disraeli combines his idolization of Voltaire with his typical satire of the Whiggish, progressive point of view the Frenchman’s philosophy helped to encourage in England. Voltaire advocated for civil liberties, constitutional monarchy, and the values embodied in England as opposed to France. His enlightened perspective helped influence the values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity that led to the French Revolution after his death in 1778. In fact, in the depiction of his Voltaire club, Disraeli seems to sardonically satirize the Voltaire’s impact on the French Revolution. Like his father before him, who loved Voltaire but wrote a Voltairean anti-Jacobin novel lamenting the influence of French ideas in England, Disraeli was a Tory who had little love of revolutionary fervor. Contarini’s Voltaire club begins to take on a tint of anti-authority sentiment, and when the principal of the school attempts to shut it down, they flee the college and become bandits, taking up residence in an abandoned castle and robbing passing travelers at gunpoint.\nThe thematic implications of having a Voltaire club degenerate into lawlessness have not been explored by any of the many critics I’ve seen write about Contarini Fleming, even though critics have been writing about the book for nearly 200 years. But it seems logical to surmise that Disraeli was lampooning Voltaire’s anti-authority side. The Englishman’s political philosophy had much to do with the enshrining of the monarchy as an unassailable sovereign, and he often sympathized with authoritarians in his youth. Two of the few writers to mention the bandit episode are Richmond, who points out the influence of Gothic literature on the section of the book that tells the story of the band of bandits, and Philip Guedalla, who wrote the introduction to a 1926 edition of the book and who simply describes the episode as “operatic.\u0026quot;\nBut the bandit episode shows the evolution of Disraeli’s tension between his father’s Enlightenment views and his own Romanticism. By 1833 Disraeli had written more specifically of this conflict, in his poem “The Revolutionary Epick,” in which he pits an icon of “feudalism” against an icon of “federalism,” to enact a conflict about which he was then ambivalent. In a letter in 1833, quoted in Smith’s biography of Disraeli, the future prime minister described the poem: “All great works that have formed an epoch in the history of the human intellect have been an embodification of the spirit of their age\u0026hellip; Since the revolt of America a new principle has been at work in the world to which I trace all that occurs. This is the Revolutionary principle, and this is what I wish to embody in ‘The Revolutionary Epic.’” He aligned the feudal principle with what in a separate essay he called “the aristocratic principle,” and the revolutionary or “federalist” principle with what he called the “democratic principle.” That essay, titled “What Is He?,” attempted to explain his complicated radical/conservative perspective in the days when he was running as an “independent Radical” for parliament. In it he said he felt the nation of England needed to move toward the democratic principle. Then he spent most of his career embracing the aristocratic.\n**“I think it better that in times like these\nA poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth\nWe have no gift to set a statesman right”**\nWilliam Butler Yeats, “On being asked for a War Poem.” The above epigraph demonstrates one reason why Contarini Fleming is as valuable a work as it is. When such a poet as Yeats shows reluctance to voice political opinions because poets lack the “gift to a set a statesman right,” he obviously wasn’t thinking of statesmen who doubled as poets, like Disraeli. What advice does the poet-statesman give himself? Can a poet-statesman set himself right? In Contarini Fleming the double temperament seems mainly a source of psychological conflict within himself. In the end of the book, Disraeli is unable to choose between his poetic side and his political side. His most valued advisor, Peter Winter, tells him it is time to abandon “meditation,” meaning the long period of romantic gestation that precedes his fast writing process. It is time for action, Winter tells him, and that means he should “create.” That’s an interesting conclusion for a book that previously associated the word “action” not with poetic creation but with politics. Contarini’s father in the book, while modeled on his writer dad, becomes prime minister of their northern European nation, and then gives Contarini a job as his secretary. After one remarkable scene in which Contarini single-handedly resolves a diplomatic summit between European nations by threatening to have his country’s king elected democratically, Contarini’s father Baron Fleming predicts that one day Contarini too will be prime minister. This was of course a remarkable portent of things to come for Disraeli.\nContarini stays a fan of Voltaire’s, despite the plot twist of the band of bandits. At the diplomatic summit, he sits aside the conflagration and laughs uncontrollably, thinking, “Voltaire would soon settle this.” Disraeli stayed a Voltaire fan too. Having written a highly Voltairean satire titled Popanilla in 1828, he went on to identify Voltaire as a great man, suggesting that the man of letters is often a greater man than the statesman, with Voltaire as the prime example, saying he was clearly a greater man than the prime minister of France. But Disraeli wrote, as Schwarz and others have pointed out, like a romantic. He idolized Lord Byron, adopting his manner of dress and writing a novel (Venetia) in which a character based on Byron is the hero. His father stayed skeptical of the romantic poets, saying as much in notes transcribed by his son that were found at the family home after Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s death. Of the romantic poets, Isaac praised only Byron, perhaps as has been suggested only because that poet was a huge fan of D’Israeli’s own work (by Clarence Lee Cline in a fascinating 1941 paper revealing the contents of previously unpublished remarks by D’Israeli on the romantic poets in the journal Studies in English). Like the romantic poets, however, Disareli evinced a nostalgia for medieval feudalism and seemed to embrace the notion of imagination as an innate capacity, as did many of the Romantics.\nBut just as Disraeli remained ambivalent about the temperaments described in the book (poetic, political; Romantic, Enlightenment) Contarini too ends on a note of ambivalence:\n“Here let me pass my life in the study and the creation of the Beautiful. Such is my desire; but whether it will be my career is, I feel, doubtful. My interest in the happiness of my race is too keen to permit me for a moment to be blind to the storms that lour on the horizon of society. Perchance also the political regeneration of the country to which I am devoted may not be distant, and in that great work I am resolved to participate.”\nIn the writings that followed Contarini Fleming, Disraeli never quite shook the influence of this ambivalence. By his last book, Endymion, he is so mellow about politics that he makes his hero a Whig and celebrates the Whig culture of high society into which he was never allowed. That book’s lack of a thesis, unlike works like Sybil and Coningsby, disappoints one because once he reaches the highest stage of statesmanship in England he seems unable to give himself the advice Yeats said poets were often unable to give. Plus, the advice Disraeli the poet gave himself as Disraeli the statesman was often deplorable, such as his standing up not for the \u0026ldquo;democratic principle\u0026rdquo; but for a parliament of enlightened aristocrats.\nThere is also evidence that Disraeli never entirely shook what some have suspected was his bipolar disorder. In his days as prime minister he was reportedly paranoid, obsessed, as was Contarini Fleming in portions of the book, with conspiracy. Contarini reports that “fancied I had a predisposition” for “conspiracies.” Disraeli’s right hand man as prime minister, Salisbury, who he is said to have relied upon for much of the legislation, said of Prime Minster Disraeli, the first Earl of Beaconsfield: “What with deafness, ignorance of French, and Bismarck’s extraordinary mode of speech, Beaconsfield has the dimmest idea of what’s going on – understands everything crossways – and imagines a perpetual conspiracy.”\nThus it seems the poetic skill is not the key to immaculate statesmanship, whether born of the 18th or 19th Century.\n"},{"title":"Analyzing \u0026ldquo;Margaret,\u0026rdquo; an almost-lost short story fragment by Woodrow Wilson","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-08-12-analyzing-margaret/","date":"August 12, 2025","tags":["Wilson","Disraeli"],"text":"Analyzing \"Margaret,\" an almost-lost short story fragment by Woodrow Wilson A work of fiction by a future United States president is a rare occurrence, so it’s strange that no one appears to have written anything about an unfinished, six-page short story entitled “Margaret” that Woodrow Wilson wrote in longhand in a notebook, probably sometime in the 1880s. It is now preserved at the Library of Congress. The story was even left out of editor Arthur S. Link’s unprecedentedly exhaustive 69-volume Papers of Woodrow Wilson. The most extensive mention I’ve found is in a brief footnote in Henry Bragdon’s biography of Wilson, which merely notes the story’s existence and quotes a few lines from it. Even Edwin A. Weinstein, who printed an extensive analysis of Wilson’s only completed short story, “The World and John Hart,” in his psychological study of Wilson, ignored “Margaret” altogether. Biographer John Mulder, surveying his early writing, does mention “Margaret” and reminds us that Wilson also once outlined a novel that he never wrote, but then wraps up by noting simply that “Wilson’s failure to get these works published was no loss to American letters.” Of course, it’s possible I missed something, as there are allegedly more than 2,000 books on Wilson in English alone, according to the latest addition to the pile of biographies (Christopher Cox’s 2024 Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn). But the fragment’s complete omission from most of the commonly held biographies in most good libraries is unfortunate, because what it says about this much-examined man and his family is fascinating. I believe “Margaret” to have been inspired by Wilson’s future wife Ellen Axson and her father, who probably committed suicide and whom Wilson appears to see as a symbol of the devastation of the Civil War in the South and the so-called “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy.\nAlmost the whole of “Margaret” is reprinted in the course of this article, below.\nThe fact that Wilson dabbled in fiction at all is interesting. I’ve surveyed the papers of all the presidents, looking for any evidence that any other inhabitant of the West Wing had written any fiction before being elected, and have been unable to find any. Fiction is more common from ex-presidents, including 2004\u0026rsquo;s The Hornet’s Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War by Jimmy Carter, and 2022’s The President’s Daughter, by Bill Clinton and novelist James Patterson. Wilson himself, once he gave up short story writing, came to believe that a statesman could not also be a fiction writer. He slammed British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s novels in the course of writing this position in 1890, in somewhat laborious prose:\n“The true leader of men, it is plain, is equipped by lacking such sensibilities, which the literary man, when analyzed, is found to possess as a chief part of his make-up. He lacks that subtle power of sympathy which enables the men who write the great works of the imagination to put their minds under the spell of a thousand individual motives not their own but the living force in the several characters they interpret. No popular leader could write fiction. He could not conceive [Robert Browning’s verse novel ‘The] Ring and the Book’, the impersonation of a half-score points of view. … Mr. Browning could no more have been a statesman—if statesmen are to be popular leaders also—than Mr. Disraeli could write a novel. Mr. Browning could see from every individual’s point of view—no intellectual sympathy came amiss to him. Mr. Disraeli could see from no point of view but his own,—and the characters which he put into those works of his which were meant to be novels move as mere puppets to his will,\u0026ndash;as the men he governed did. They are his mouthpieces simply, and are as little like themselves as were the Tory squires in the Commons like themselves after they became his chess-men.”\nSo, it’s interesting to see what Wilson wrote before he decided he (and all other statesman) lack what it takes. One might think, particularly if one is familiar with Sweden’s King Gustav III or Czech playwright-president Vaclav Havel, that fiction writing would help an aspiring statesman be better at the job. Writing characters forces one to think empathetically, in order to imagine the inner life of strangers, and to think morally, in order to decide what to emphasize, what questions to ask, and of course what lessons to draw. Therefore, one can imagine that the impulse to write fiction might indicate a thoughtful and moral leader. This is not always the way it turns out. Gustav III (1746-1792), who wrote plays and scenarios for operas, showed signs of being an enlightened monarch early in his career, but ended up quashing the freedom of the press and committing other violations of first principles. So did Wilson. During the First World War, he allowed his postmaster general to ban publications that objected to the war. Wilson did, meekly, try to prevent this, specifically when writers appealed to his sensibility as a writer himself. The editor and writers from the publication The Masses, including editor Max Eastman, who had endorsed Wilson in the 1916 presidential race, and John Reed, whom Warren Beatty played in his Oscar-winning movie Reds, wrote President Wilson in opposition to censorship, appealing to him “as friends of yours, and knowing how dear to you is the Anglo-Saxon tradition of intellectual freedom.” Wilson forwarded the letter to his postmaster with a note reading “These are very sincere men and I should like to please them.” His underling insisted on censoring the publications, and Wilson did not overrule him.\nWoodrow Wilson not only dreamed of being a fiction writer, he dreamed of being a playwright. On Christmas day 1883 he wrote his wife-to-be: “You know I am deeply interested in the drama; and am thinking seriously of arising as the American Shakespeare—good plan!\u0026ndash;don’t you think so?” Wilson saw more plays than any other president, according to Thomas A. Bogar, author of American Presidents Attend the Theatre. But he never tried his hand at playwriting. He did, however, attempt at least two short stories as well as the novel he outlined, The Life and Letters of John Briton.\n“Margaret” is about a father who was ruined by the Civil War and his daughter, a young woman who “seemed such a flower, a fair bloom hidden away in the seclusion of a far Southern forest, where nobody who was likely to appreciate her was likely to see her. Her full name was then Margaret Pierce.” Not surprisingly, the only other woman he had written about in such admiring terms is his future wife, Ellen Axson, who grew up in a sort of far Southern forest herself. Her family was from Savannah, as is the family of Margaret Pierce, and she moved to isolated Rome, Georgia, where she met Wilson. Rome, 70 miles northwest of Atlanta, had a population ofabout 2,700 in 1870, which was about a third of what it had been before the war. Margaret’s mother in the story died in childbirth, and that is also exactly how Ellen’s mother died. And finally, like Ellen, Margaret was left alone with her father. This is where the story gets particularly interesting.\nBelow is the opening of the story, which quotes a famous line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The roughly 30-year-old Wilson, then a young professor, seems to tweak himself for quoting the famous couplet, implying he could have gotten it from a book of famous quotations. Because the story fragment was written in longhand, there are words that are illegible. These passages are the only ones cut in the excerpts that follow from \u0026ldquo;Margaret.\u0026rdquo;\n“Whenever I hear that old couplet of Gray’s,\n“‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,\nand waste its sweetness on the desert air.’\n“I think of Margaret … Even when they come empty from the lips of someone to whom ‘Familiar Quotations’ are all of literature.\n“For as I first remember Margaret she seemed such a flower, a fair bloom hidden away in the seclusion of a far Southern forest, where nobody who was likely to appreciate her was likely to see her. Her full name was then Margaret Pierce \u0026ndash; it is not now, for she is married.\n“She lived with her father in a little cottage which stood lonely by an unfrequented road far away from towns and railroads in one of the counties near the sea in the ‘low country’ of Georgia \u0026ndash; a part of the country much of which cannot even be included in the ‘New South.’\n“It contains for the most part driftwood from the wreck of the Old South, and Dr Pierce, Margaret’s father, was a piece of this driftwood. Much of the wreckage is full of suggestions of nobility\u0026ndash;a wreckage of foolishness only, not of courage, honour or high purpose. Dr Pierce had neighbors on the farms about his little residence who had lost nothing but this honour and their slaves by the war; who remained men and gentlemen, as well worth knowing as before they had known what it was to follow the plow themselves, and as serve to breed a noble race of sons for the changed times of the future, But Dr Pierce himself had lost something besides the fortune into which he had been born; had lost, not Energy, for that he had never had, but character\u0026hellip;”\nWilson writes elegiacally about the Lost Cause of the South here, though he doesn’t go so far as to endorse the point of view that begot its own genre of literature in the South after the war, that of the Lost Cause genre. Novels and plays and other works in the years after the Civil War embraced a philosophy that the Confederacy had been a noble cause, but a hopeless one. This included writers like novelist and playwright Thomas Dixon, whose play The Clansmen was turned into the movie Birth of a Nation while Wilson was president. Wilson’s words supporting the Ku Klux Klan were quoted in the movie, and he caused a stir by viewing the film in the White House. In analyzing the extent of “southern thinking” on Woodrow Wilson, Link once wrote that Wilson’s father never wrote anything “repining for the Lost Cause.” It’s debatable whether that’s true. But in “Margaret” it’s Wilson himself who writes with a nostalgia about the Confederate days. Perhaps he was even under the influence of some of the Lost Cause novelists in writing this short story. It is true that Wilson never endorsed slavery (he said slavery had been bad for the South economically and was therefore undesirable), and said he endorsed the “Federalist” point of view. But he rejected pro-African American policies of the Southern Reconstruction era in the decades after the war, including the very right to vote for African Americans. He was also a creature of the North, attending school and ultimately teaching in New Jersey at Princeton. His father’s siblings lived in the North, though he appears to have had little contact with them. But his heart remained southern, as this passage demonstrates.\nThe story’s depiction of Dr. Pierce seems to me to be based on Ellen’s father, the Presbyterian minister Samuel Edward Axson, who himself did speak of the Confederate goals as a lost cause, according to Frances Wright Saunders in her excellent biography Ellen Axson Wilson: First Lady Between Two Worlds. Edward Axson, as he was known, attributed the failure of the South in the Civil War to “corruption in the Confederate government and people. Their cause remained noble,” Saunders wrote. She says Axson called the fall of the Confederacy “the saddest of failures,” and contrasted “the bright fancies of the past with the gloomy realizations of the dark present.”\nReverend Axson was devastated, and despite success growing a church in Rome from a post-war nadir of 40 to 50 members to 186 in 1880, he was laid low with depression. Eventually Ellen would have to place her father in a mental hospital. It’s not surprising Wilson saw in Edward Axson an emblem of the devastation of the war. Wilson’s story continues with these remarks on Margaret’s father Dr. Pierce:\n“He was drift-wood from the war, but the wood had been rotted by other influences. His early life had been spent in Savannah, whereas, after a preparation made thorough by foreign study he had nominally engaged in the practice of medicine, but really in the indulgence of his literary and social tastes … By the well-known high-grounding and the coveted wealth of his family; and he had proved his knowledge of the best ways of the world by combining family traditions and the demands of natural affection by marrying lovely woman \u0026hellip; It had been a sincere love match, and so long as his wife lived, his companionship inspired and his love steadied him. … She lived only eight years after this marriage \u0026ndash; just long enough to make herself an indispensable part of his life \u0026ndash; when she died in bringing Margaret, in the first child of the union, into the world. The bereavement was too much for her sensitive … husband. Without her to enjoy his favorite authors and entertain his favorite friends with him, he knew not what to do with himself. He clung passionately to his child, keeping her near him for long hours every day at the dead mother’s sister’s house where the little one was being tenderly nurtured with all but motherly care; but gradually he drifted off into desperate expedients for drowning sorrow, so that this care found Margaret but two years old and her father a drunkard.”\nWe don’t know that Edward Axson was a drunkard; as a minister he probably was not. But by his last days in Milledgeville Hospital in 1884, hospital records show he had a chloral habit, regularly taking the once widely-used sedative and hypnotic substance. “Slight suicidal tendency,” the Milledgeville records stated, according to Saunders. “Is disposed to be violent occasionally … Has been in the habit of taking chloral at night.” This record is one of the reasons Saunders believes he took his own life in the end. Suicide was taboo at the time, so no one talked about it directly in the surviving letters and other documents. But, Saunders says, there is much more evidence to suggest he did take his life than evidence to the contrary. For example, Ellen received a letter from the Reverend Morgan Palmer, a cousin from New Orleans, that read: “The place and manner of your father’s death are inexpressibly sad … It was a dark cloud which had settled upon his reason.” Saunders adds, “During the last two months in Milledgeville, Edward was terribly depressed, and, in view of his generally sound physical health, his death was sudden.” After his death, Ellen almost broke off the engagement to Woodrow. “He came to comfort her,” Saunders writes, “and was heartbroken when Ellen, because of the doctrinal disgrace related to her father’s death, tried to break their engagement. Only Woodrow’s ardent importunities ‘overrode her scruples.’” The quote is attributed to Stockton Axson, Ellen’s brother.\nBack to the story. Wilson exercises a little imagination as he describes Margaret’s father as a surgeon during the war:\n“The war scarcely stayed his dissipations. He entered the army as surgeon and displayed throughout the four fiery years of the great struggle; such courage and faithfulness as entitled him to honour along with the most courageous and faithful of his followers in arms; but his coolness and daring in the face of the hurtling and whistling dangers of the battlefield had a dash of fearlessness … Rations served out to him satisfied him so little as the liquor. For every catastrophe of the dreadful strife was plunging him into deeper desolation. It seemed to him that every [illegible] of the carnage went straight to the heart of his own family. His aged father and both of his brothers fell in battle. His sister died from the hardships of refugeeship. His fortune was … utterly out of existence for it was commercial and invested only in the South. The end found him the only representation for his family \u0026ndash; with no named relation within reach other than the sister-in-law \u0026ndash; herself now involved in the common ruins \u0026ndash; with whom to stand in the new struggle, against the struggle for [hunger]. He knew that he could not support his child amidst the temptation of a town; [he] fled both his old haunts and his old vision and buried himself in the country on a very small farm, who had ones bear a neglected \u0026ndash; almost forgotten \u0026ndash; part of his property but which was now all … that remained. He hoped here to eke out a support as a farmer … with the \u0026hellip; sparsely settled country-side where his few acres lay.”\nThat is where the fragment ends. Perhaps he lost interest as his story got further from its origin in Samuel Edward Axson, who for one thing left his children what today would be more than $300,000. We don’t know exactly when Wilson wrote the story. He wrote his other short story in 1886 while he was a professor of young women at Bryn Mawr University, complaining that he wished he were teaching boys and dreaming of a literary career. 1886 is also the year he named his first daughter Margaret. It’s unclear which was named after which. If he wrote the story “Margaret” then, his story was informed by the tragic end of Edward Axson’s life. In any case, it was informed by a deep sympathy for the cause of the South. That sympathy contributed both to his racism and to his politics as president.\n"},{"title":"Review: Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s novel \u003cem\u003eThe Young Duke\u003c/em\u003e is half fashion and half passion","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-07-28-review-young-duke/","date":"July 28, 2025","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: Disraeli's novel *The Young Duke* is half fashion and half passion Benjamin Disraeli’s narrator in his novel The Young Duke describes the book as “half fashion and half passion.” The meaning of that declaration depends on which edition you read, and if you do happen to be interested in reading this relatively obscure and much maligned but surprisingly entertaining novel, I strongly recommend the 2004 Routledge edition, volume two of six in the series The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli, which appears never to have been reviewed in any journal or periodical. The Routledge edition is one of the few to print the original 1831 text, rather than reprint Disraeli’s edits from the 1853 edition, which removed in embarrassment all the amusing and revealing autobiographical tangents by the 26-year-old Disraeli’s bubbly and manic narrator. In the original edition, and therefore also the Routledge, these excised effusions constitute the book’s “passionate” half. It’s not clear what Disraeli is supposed to mean in editions where the passionate tangents have been cut. The context is all gone, so it’s anyone’s guess.\nNot that The Young Duke’s fashionable half is without its value. The book is considered a key example of the “novel of fashion” or “silver fork novel,” novels detailing 1800s British high society with an exhaustive amount of detail about (as one illustrative passage has it in the novel) “the pasties, and the venison, and the game, the pines, and the peaches, and the grapes, the cakes, and the confectionery, and the ices.” This aspect of its value is only somewhat marred by the fact that Disraeli had not yet actually experienced the kind of high society to which he aspired and about which he was writing here. When his father, the well-known author Isaac D’Israeli, was told Disraeli was writing a book called The Young Duke, he asked: “What does Ben know of dukes?”\nDisraeli almost states directly that his narrator’s bubbly tangents are what he means by “half passion,” noting in the same passage that other novelists would burnish its depiction of high society “manners” with “some secret marriage or some shrouded murder,” as in “an English plot” or a “German mystery.” Such plotty devices constitute “a plan both good, antique and popular, but not my way,” Disraeli says: “I prefer trusting to the slender incidents which spring from out our common intercourse, and if these fail … why, then, I moralize on great affairs, or indulge in some slight essay on my own defects.” Essays on his defects are, of course, of great interest to biographers, as he ended up ascending to the top of what he would famously call the “greasy pole,” becoming one of Britian’s most famous and influential prime ministers. But he cut almost all of these “essays” out of the book precisely for that reason, perhaps: to facilitate his ambition for the top.\nThe novel tells the story of a 21-year-old Duke who falls in love with a Catholic girl, reforms from his profligate spendthrift ways and gives a speech on the floor of the House of Lords endorsing Catholic emancipation to impress his girl. (Catholics were required at the time to take an oath endorsing the Protestant Church of England when being sworn into Parliament, and emancipation from that policy was an issue of the day when the book was written.) The Routledge edition is the only one to annotate the full text with footnotes, an excellent introduction, and textual variants pointing out the differences between various editions.\nOne does have to beware of, by my count, two errors in the footnotes, both of which come in moments that Disraeli reveals his evolving and iconic take on what exactly was a dandy. The first appears when Disraeli defines at length the specific sort of fashionable gentleman his character Charles Annesley is. Disraeli finds himself defending the very word “dandy” against an onslaught of ill opinion in the late 1820s of the sort that eventually caused his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton to slash all references to effeminacy, among other things, from his iconic 1828 novel Pelham, the novel I reviewed last month. Disraeli writes in The Young Duke:\n“Dandy has been voted vulgar, and beau is now the word. It may be doubted whether the revival will stand; and as for the exploded title, though it had its faults at first, the muse of Byron has made it not only English, but classical.”\nByron was Disraeli’s literary hero and his model of fashion. The future prime minister wore his hair in curls and ringlets like Byron, and tried to live up to his elaborate dress. But for some reason Disraeli shied away from labeling his character Charles Annesley with that moniker, though he clearly has many of the hallmarks of the disaffected dandy:\n“Charles Annesley could hardly be called a dandy or a beau. There was nothing in his dress—though some mysterious arrangement in his costume, some rare simplicity, some curious happiness, always made it distinguished—there was nothing, however, in his dress, which could account for the influence which he exercised over the manners of his contemporaries \u0026hellip; His natural and subdued nonchalance, [is] so different from the assumed non-emotion of a mere dandy … Perhaps the great secret of his manner was his exquisite superciliousness, a quality which, of all, is the most difficult to manage.”\nSounds like a dandy to me. But interestingly, Disraeli favors instead the “beau ideal” of a prior century, citing characters from plays during England’s Restoration era, when an era of opulence in culture and costume followed the return of the monarchy under Charles II:\n“On the whole, [Annesley] was unlike any of the leading men of modern days, and rather reminded one of the fine gentlemen of our old brilliant comedy, the Dorimants, the Bellairs, and the Mirabels.”\nIt is here, in this passage, that the editor of the Routledge edition, Miles A. Kimball, appears to make his first mistake. In a footnote, he helpfully identifies Dorimant and Bellair as being characters from playwright George Etheridge’s 1676 comedy The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter. But then he misidentifies the third character, Mirabell, whose name Disraeli has clearly misspelled. Kimball, perhaps being fooled by this misspelling, says Mirabel is a character in Colley Cibber’s The Rival Fools(1709). But Mirabel in that play is a woman, not (as Disraeli clearly states) a “fine gentleman.” To identify who Disraeli really meant, I read an excellent paper titled “Some Fops and Some Versions of Foppery” by Robert B. Heilman in the journal ELH in the summer issue of 1982. Heilman, who does not mention Disraeli, analyses at length the character of Dorimant, as he contrasts with the titular fop Sir Fopling Flutter. He describes Dorimant as “the beau ideal of the play” and “among the anticipators of Congreve’s Mirabell.” This Mirabell is the lead of Congreve’s famous 1700 comedy The Way of the World, and is almost certainly the “Mirabel” Disraeli meant.In citing these plays Disraeli places his novel in the Restoration tradition of writing comedies that ruminate about the differences between the beau ideal and the fop, a pejorative term. Who is the poseur in fashion, who is authentic? To what extent is affectation welcomed as fashionable, and to what extent is it the key to identifying a deplorable faker? The word dandy was consigned by some to the category of synonym with “fop,” and Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton hoped to make clear it was a distinct term.\nBulwer-Lytton’s Pelham explored the same divisions, using “fop” negatively while attempting to define what a good dandy is. In fact, Disraeli’s Young Duke tips its cap at one point specifically to Pelham, and this is where Kimball makes his second mistake. He completely fails to recognize Disraeli’s specific nod to Pelham and interprets it as a reference to the irrelevant 18th century prime minister Henry Pelham, who shares only his name with Bulwer-Lytton’s hero. But the context should make it patently clear Disraeli means Bulwer-Lytton’s Henry Pelham specifically because the passage comes in the context of defining the dandy:\n“The Duke of St. James was a master of the art of dress, and consequently consummated that paramount operation with the decisive rapidiy of one whose principles are settled. He was congnizant of all effects, could calculate in a second all consequences, and obtained his result with that promptitude and precision which stamp the great artist.*”\nAt this point Disraeli uses the asterisk to insert a footnote, which reads:\n“*\u0026ndash;This important principle is much more ably expressed in the witty memorits of the brilliant Henry Pelham. Had I his gay volumes at command, I should have pleasure in referring to them more particularly. The author of ‘Pelham’ is one of the few rising writers to whom we make look up for the maintenance of the honour of English literature.”\nThis is typical of the kind of acknowledgement Disraeli writes for contemporaries in his early novels. He met Bulwer-Lytton just after finishing The Young Duke, showing up at his house for dinner in a canary-colored waistcoat and green velvet pants. They became fast friends. But Kimball misinterprets Disraeli’s footnote, inserting a pair of footnotes of his own that claim not only that Disraeli means the prime minister Henry Pelham but also that the book he refers to as ‘Pelham’ is Memoirs if the Administration of Henry Pelham (1829), and that the word “author” in Disraeli’s text refers to William Coxe, who wrote that book. Then he puzzles over why Disraeli would have called Coxe a “rising writer” a year after his death in 1828: “Given Coxe’s death in 1828, perhaps Disraeli is being sarcastic here.” But no such tortured interpretation is necessary if Disraeli meant Pelham, a book by which we know The Young Duke to have been influenced. And if it helps make the point more clearly, Encyclopedia Brittanica describes the prime minister Pelham not as a colorful dandy or beau but instead as “a somewhat colorless politician.”\nStill, Kimball’s introduction does a great job of outlining the reception to the novel, which was so lackluster that “advertisements” were placed in multiple editions beginning with the first in 1831, apologizing for the novel. The first such notice warned, “In the absence of the author, who is abroad, the Publishers think it necessary to add, that the present novel was written before the accession of his present Majesty. The reader, as he peruses the volumes, will see the necessity of this explanation.” Ostensibly this warning provides a disclaimer that the book portrays King George IV positively, and yet simultaneously ironically and satirically, in a scene where he meets the young duke. The publisher wanted to be sure there was no confusion with the then-current king, William IV, who was in many ways the opposite of King George IV. But the scene with King George IV is in the first volume, and perhaps the disclaimer is also is meant to warn that the whole of the “volumes” are influenced by, in praise of and a critique of the first king’s aesthetic. Like Charles II, George IV was known for lavish spending, generous support for the arts, and flamboyance. Disraeli’s narrator makes it known this is just fine with him, as he explains (with tongue in cheek) what kind of king he himself would be:\n“Oh! people of England, be contented! You know not what might have been your lot. I might have been your King: and, although you have already conceived me, as the very prosopopoeia of amiability, the dreaded, the stem, the mortifying truth must no longer be concealed, - I should have been a tyrant! But what a tyrant! I would have smothered you in roses, shot you with bon-bons, and drowned you in Eau-de-Cologne. I would have banged up your parliaments, knocked up your steam-engines, shut up all societies for the diffusion of anything. I would have republished the Book of Sports, restored holidays, revived the Drama. Every parish should have had its orchestra, every village its dancing-master. I would have built fountains, and have burnt fireworks. But I am not a King. Bitter recollection! Yet something may turn up.”\nSomething did come up, of course: the next best position, Prime Minister.\nThis business about being the king is the sort of tangent, almost always left on the cutting room floor after 1853, that makes the book. Many of the tangents are specifically about the process of writing the book itself. In an early chapter, Disraeli’s narrator boasts of how easy the writing process is. Later, after he writes his first argument between the protagonist couple, he laments in morose terms how disappointed he is that his writing is not any better. He admits to being completely depressed by it. This is the sort of manic and depressive writing that has some historians and critics wondering whether the young Disraeli suffered from bipolar disorder. Another passage, describing a party hosted by the Catholic heroes of the novel, describes the event as just a little less glamorous than the parties to which the Duke is accustomed.\nAs is true in almost every Disraeli novel that satirizes the rich, the key symbol of opulence here is the ortolan, a small songbird that was a delicacy in the 19th Century but is now banned because the bird is endangered. It was often eaten with a napkin over one’s head to demonstrate shame to the almighty for eating such a bird cooked in such a manner. The horrible treatment of the ortolan (it was literally drowned in brandy as a marinade) made the delicacy controversial even in Disraeli’s day, which is evidenced by the fact that Bulwer-Lytton cut a reference to ortolans in Pelham in his 1835 edition and replaced it with a reference to pheasants. But Disraeli’s bubbly and often satirical narrator composes a poem to the ortolan in an early chapter. (“Let me die eating ortolans to soft music!”) Then, he laments having only two ortolans at the Catholic’s party (“an ortolan or two—ah! Once ‘twas six”), and follows up that paragraph with some suicidal prose (“What then? We die!”) as though for Disraeli’s narrator not being at the swingingest party in town is cause for a discussion of mortality.\nOf this sort of excess Disraeli’s young duke repents by novel’s end (“Alas! how I have misused my power”) if only because he loses most of his money gambling. But it’s less clear that Disraeli’s narrator ever repents. He does give a solemn endorsement of the societal benefits of marriage, but he lets the narrative about the duke do all the repenting for him as far as his portrait of the good life is concerned. Here are his narrator’s words on marriage:\n“For, believe me, who, being a bachelor, may be allowed to put in a word in favour of a system in which I am not interested, Love without marriage is both expensive, immoral, and productive of the most disagreeable consequences. It tries the constitution, heart, and purse. Profligacy is almost an impossibility, and even dissipation, as this work well proves, soon gets a bore. What we call morality, is nothing else but common sense, and the experience of our fellow-men codified for our common good. And if, if marriage did not require such an income (they say three thousand now will scarcely do, even for us younkers. What times we live in!) - I have half a mind (I think we must come down) really to look about me (one gets tired of wandering), and no doubt there is great pleasure in a well-regulated existence, particularly if no children come in after dinner.”\nIt would be another seven years after this book was published before Disraeli would settle down with a woman much older and wealthier than he.\nThe best scene in the book is the one in which the young duke changes his mind about his extravagant lifestyle. It has flashes recalling his best work, which would come in his treatise on the gap between the rich and the poor in 1845, Sybil, or The Two Nations. The scene, in which the duke boards a mail carriage for a long journey from his Catholic friends’ country estate to London, features lower caste characters, including a spicily satirical portrait of a utilitarian, combining the best features of both Sybil and his satirical novel Popanilla. The scene is also followed by a great sequence in which Disraeli not only writes his duke into the House of Lords, but also critiques all the great nonfictional parliamentary orators of his day, suggesting he has great first-hand experience watching parliamentary debates even at 26 years of age when he wrote the book. He even takes his first swings at future prime minister Robert Peel, whom he would eventually help bring down by making negative speeches against his policies decades later. Here is what he writes about Peel in 1831:\n“Mr. Peel is the model of a minister, and improves as a speaker; though, like most of the rest, he is fluent without the least style. He should not get so often in a passion either, or, if he do, should not get out of one so easily. His sweet apologies are cloying. His candour—he will do well to get rid of that.”\nThis is an obvious area of passion for the young Disraeli, and for once he left the digression in the 1853 edition. Other areas of what one might expect to be passion are often muted in the later editions. His trademark passionate ambition (embraced and then repented of and then embraced again in his first novel Vivian Grey) is spoken of with care here: “For I am one, though young, yet old enough to know, Ambition is a demon; and I fly from what I fear.” The book reveals all kinds of ambivalences – towards ambition, towards fame, towards his own writing, towards dandyism. The full title of the book is after all “The Young Duke: A Moral Tale, Though Gay.” It shows ambivalence between the moral and gay aspects of the book. (This is of course not meant in the contemporary sense of “gay,” as in homosexual, but to many modern readers that tension, between Regency mores and what Bulwer-Lytton called the novel\u0026rsquo;s “effeminacy,” exists in the book too.) He even expresses ambivalence between the two political parties of the day, in a hilarious passage where he asks to which side he belongs:\n“But then I must be consistent, and not compromise my principles, which will never do in England - more than once a-year. Let me see: what are they? Am I a Whig or a Tory? I forget. As for the Tories, I admire antiquity, particularly a ruin; even the relics of the Temple of Intolerance have a charm. I think I am a Tory. But then the Whigs give such good dinners, and are the most amusing. I think I am a Whig; but then the Tories are so moral, and morality is my forte: I must be a Tory. But the Whigs dress so much better; and an ill-dressed party, like an ill-dressed man, must be wrong. Yes! I am a decided Whig. And yet - I feel like [actor David] Garrick, between Tragedy and Comedy. I think I will be a Whig and Tory alternate nights, and then both will be pleased; or I have no objection, according to the fashion of the day, to take a place under a Tory ministry, provided I may vote against them.\u0026quot;\nOf course that is just what he did. He joined the Tories and voted against them. But whatever his ambivalences, however many edits he made while alive, he can’t escape now from what this book reveals: Both his fashionable and his passionate heart.\n"},{"title":"Why aren\u0026rsquo;t there any movies starring Gladstone?","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-07-23-movies-starring-gladstone/","date":"July 23, 2025","tags":["Gladstone","Disraeli"],"text":"Why aren't there any movies starring Gladstone? Why hasn’t William Gladstone, a towering figure in British politics who was prime minister four times in the 19th Century, been the central character of any film biopics? Why has he been the starring role in only one even remotely significant play, Hugh Ross Williamson\u0026rsquo;s short-lived 1937 show Mr. Gladstone, which never made it out of London? Why has his arch-rival in British politics, Benjamin Disraeli, been the subject of so many plays and films when by contrast he was only prime minister twice and usually ranks lower in the lists of the best prime ministers in Britain’s history?\nThe fact is, filmmakers have been so dazzled by Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s positive attributes that both prime ministers have failed to get the interesting, complicated, balanced treatment they deserve. “All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,” American filmmaker Nunnally Johnson was quoted as saying in the London Review of Books in 2013, almost 40 years after the last Disraeli biopic. “It’s such a showy part—half Satan, half Don Juan, man of so many talents, he could write novels, flatter a queen, dig the Suez Canal. Present her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Erp.” That may be why the Internet Movie Database counts so many portrayals of Disraeli: seven biopics about Disraeli and 14 portrayals in films that aren’t primarily about him.\nThere are actually more portrayals of Gladstone recorded on IMDB, but he’s never been the subject of a theatrical film release. Gladstone shows up in 20 movies, almost always as a scowling prude, and often a villain. But the only screen treatments of Gladstone that make him the central figure are one hour episodes on BBC television series: In 1983 an episode of “Number 10,” a British television series in which each episode covers a different prime minister, focused on Gladstone. Then in 1960 a television series of filmed plays called the “ITV Play of the Week” featured a one-hour drama entitled “Old Man in a Hurry” by (here he comes again) Hugh Ross Williamson, the author of the 1937 play Mr. Gladstone.\nBy contrast, there were films named Disraeli in 1916, 1921, 1929 and 1978. It is true that three of the Disraeli films starred George Arliss and were based on a long-running Broadway play for which he originated the role. But there was also one called The Prime Minister in 1941 and one called Invincible Mr. Disraeli in 1963. The remaining biopic was the hour episode on Disraeli in TV’s “Number 10” (the title of which alludes to the prime minister’s house at No. 10 Downing Street in London). A case can be made that it might be time for an intelligent dramatic treatment of Disraeli too, one that doesn’t treat the conservative prime minister as an unmitigated hero. After all, 1978 was a long time ago, and the films are all heavily flawed.\nBut for now let’s focus on the strange treatment of Gladstone by the entertainment industry: There is much to dislike in the Liberal prime minister, but the main reason he is most often portrayed in an uncomplicatedly negative light is that the films he is in usually feature Disraeli as a hero. One can only speculate why Gladstone has gone comparatively underrepresented in movies, but let us start with his personality. For all the reasons that Disraeli is beloved by actors, Gladstone is the opposite. He was not a Don Juan, though he did have a habit of going into the streets to “reform” prostitutes. (That was the subject of his episode in “Number 10.”) He could not write novels, though he did publish seven books of Homeric criticism. (“Gladstone read Homer for fun,” Winston Churchill quipped, “and it served him right.”) And, famously, where “Dizzy” did in fact flatter Queen Victoria, Gladstone merely infuriated her. The reasons why are keys to understanding Hollywood’s aversion. The Queen felt he treated her as though he were giving speeches to her. She may also have felt he had an irritating Messianic complex, seemingly believing that God had appointed him to fight the causes he fought. Where his supporters called him G.O.M. for the “Grand Old Man,” his rivals called him “God’s Only Mistake.” And where Disraeli was possessed of a proto-Wildean wit, Gladstone was famously humorless. This explains why Gladstone is a stick in the mud in supporting role after supporting role.\nWe think of Hollywood as liberal, but Gladstone’s reputation as “the People’s William” has not won him more favor. The strange thing is that this is not because he was a very conservative Liberal. Actually, the best untold story about Gladstone is his transformation from being what historian Thomas Babington Macauley called “the rising hope of those stern, unbending Tories” when he started in politics in the 1830s to being perhaps the primary representative of what liberalism meant in the second half of the 19th Century. None of the films or plays about Gladstone tell this story in any depth. The closest I’ve seen from a dramatic treatment of Gladstone is in the 1978 Disraeli miniseries, which suggests that Gladstone’s switch from the Tory party to the new Liberal party in 1859 was made because the leaders of the Liberal party at the time were old, giving him a much shorter path to the premiership than a Tory party led by the young Disraeli. This is probably largely true, but it doesn’t tell the full fascinating story.\nSo, if not the ideational evolution of Gladstone, what story does the one full-length dramatic treatment of Gladstone tell? Williamson’s play Mr. Gladstone quite deliberately tells the same story about Gladstone that all the other plays of the 1930s told about the G.O.M.: The 1880s Gladstone, embroiled in the controversy over Irish “home rule,” or freedom in government from Britain. In fact, Williamson wrote in an “author’s note” in the script that his play was specifically written for an audience that had already seen the other plays, an audience which of course no longer exists today. “This play was written in 1937 for the Gate Theatre Studio,” Williamson wrote:\n“That is to say, it was written for a particular audience, which might be presumed to have seen Elsie Schauffler’s Parnell and Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina. Both these plays, in my opinion, were extremely partisan statements on political matters still recent enough to be controversial. Parnell presented what can only be described as a gross caricature of Gladstone himself, besides completely falsifying the Home Rule issue as it affected the two men. Mr. Housman seems to me to over-sentimentalize a Queen who appears to have been one of the more unattractive characters, as she was certainly one of the most unconstitutional monarchs, who have occupied the English throne. It was my criticism of these dramatized versions of history which led to the writing of Mr. Gladstone, as an attempt to present to the audience which first saw them in England the real issues of the time, conveyed as nearly as possible in the actual words of the characters.”\nAnd yet when the play was reviewed, it was criticized for being as one-sided in Gladstone’s favor as Williamson felt the other plays had been against him. As The New York Times reported on Friday, October 1, 1937, “The dramatist’s portrait of Gladstone is careful and reasonable … Nevertheless, it fails, in the opinion of critics, to do him justice. For the Times of London the fault lies in the oversimplification of the ‘Grand Old Man’s’ character, an omission of those complexities—his arrogance and humility, his tactical adroitness and passionate faith—from which arose the special character of his genius.”\nAs one might guess from Williamson’s words above, Queen Elizabeth is not portrayed favorably in Mr. Gladstone. The stage directions describe her as “undeniably ‘difficult,’’ having “surrendered her independence of judgment to the dazzling attentions of ‘DIZZY’ … in process of becoming that obstinate conservative old lady whose continual nagging almost broke even Mr. Gladstone’s spirit.” And lest that make it sound like Disraeli escapes scorn, he is described in the stage directions by a quote from Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians: “After a lifetime of relentless determination, infinite perseverance and superhuman egotism, he found himself at last, old, hideous, battered, widowed, solitary, diseased, but Prime Minister of England.” To Williamson’s credit this is a more interesting take on Disraeli than any of the films or plays titled after him offer. But the conception of drama in the 1930s thus seemed to be that if the story was told from the perspective of the Queen or Disraeli, one couldn’t also tell the story from the perspective of Gladstone. One or the other had to be a villain. This was also the tendency of historians, observed Robert Blake in an essay in 1998: “Too often biographers of these two extraordinary men have felt it their duty to see their hero’s enemy through their hero’s eyes, and to denigrate or at least sneer at the opponent almost as if the battle was still raging when they wrote,” Blake wrote. “This is absurd over a century after Gladstone’s death, and after all he outlived Disraeli by 17 years.”\nRoom remains, therefore, for a balanced portrait of both Disraeli and Gladstone on both stage and screen. That may not be the priority of Hollywood and Broadway, which for very good reason have been trying (if haltingly) to rectify the huge gaps in representation of peoples who, to put it simplistically, are not heterosexual white males. But leaving Gladstone out of our library of film history entirely leaves a gap in our historical education about the whole of the second half of the 19th Century. (A similar gap exists in United States history, where TV’s “The Gilded Age” is one of the few screen tellings of a half-century of presidents.)\nI can imagine a fun new portrait of Gladstone, one that finds humor in his humorlessness while locating interest in the conflict between the Gladstone who called himself an “out and out inequalitarian” and the Gladstone who said anyone had a moral entitlement to the vote. One that finds him haunted by the Greek Gods of Homer as much as by a rigid Christian conscience that drove him to note in his diary each time he whipped himself for lustful feelings. One in which Gladstone changes parties in part because he was humiliated by his experience in Odysseus’ homeland as the stooge of Disraeli. But also one in which he embraces new opportunities to speak to the masses in the mid-19th century, ending up partially changed by his efforts to speak to people who didn’t have the kind of aristocratic background he had overvalued. One that is honest about his deplorable racism, evidenced in his early support of slavery and the Confederacy in America. And one that is honest in depicting his attempt to recant both positions. One with a Gladstone who believed himself driven by principle even as he went from one party to the next, but who was also a lauded tactician. One in which the Liberal leader failed to pass a law expanding the vote to the working class by such tactics, only to see Disraeli pass an even stronger reform because the Grand Old Man\u0026rsquo;s supposed brilliance in tactics failed him.\nNone of those aspects of Gladstone’s story have been told yet on stage or screen.\n"},{"title":"Review: \u003cem\u003ePelham\u003c/em\u003e, a novel by Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-06-30-review-pelham/","date":"June 30, 2025","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: *Pelham*, a novel by Disraeli's friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton I’m taking a pause from writing about Benjamin Disraeli’s early novels (having reviewed his first, 1826-27’s Vivian Grey, and his 1828 novella Popanilla) to ruminate upon his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1828 novel Pelham: The Adventures of a Gentleman. I take on Pelham now not only because that’s how it fits in chronological order but also because the latter apparently offers insight into the novels to come from Disraeli, and into Disraeli himself. Written when Bulwer-Lytton was 25, Pelham is often described as a manual for the dandy, a category to which both authors belonged. To understand Disraeli one should understand where he stood on the spectrum of dandyism in his early years, and Pelham is an invaluable resource in doing so.\nPelham, an exploration of a young man’s journey from dandy to serious adult, combines multiple genres, some of which were not really in existence when Bulwer-Lytton wrote it. First, as discussed, it is a guidebook for the dandy. Second, its relationship to intellectualism was reportedly something new. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction describes Bulwer-Lytton as “the first 19th-century novelist to project himself as an intellectual, interested in ideas, and how fiction can be their vehicle.” (This sort of intellectualism is actually contrasted with dandyism in Pelham, as we shall see later.) Third, it is a murder mystery, one of the early prototypes for what would later become the mystery genre. And fourth, it is one of literary history’s key examples of the “silver fork novel,” which shows high society in a level of detail that reputedly extends to the metal of the silverware. It’s worth noting that when Disraeli began writing silver fork novels he was not writing from experience, as he was not born to an aristocratic lifestyle. Bulwer-Lytton, by contrast, was writing from personal experience with the “beau monde,” or great world of high society.\nBulwer-Lytton, after writing this novel, went on to a somewhat distinguished literary career. He wrote The Last Days of Pompeii(1834), which is still remembered today, innovated a certain brand of early science fiction in The Coming Race, and changed men’s fashions forever by writing Pelham. Today he is perhaps best remembered as the author of the line “It was a dark and stormy night,” but he also is responsible for coining the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Lytton eventually became a member of parliament and a member (under his friend Disraeli) of the cabinet, as Secretary of State for the Colonies. He was also influential, Paul Smith speculates in his essay Disraeli’s Politics, on the future prime minister’s “radical posture” in his early days of politics in the 1830s.\nOne of the interesting things about Pelham is the extent to which it was really a manual for a more moderate brand of dandyism than Disraeli’s. It betrays a certain amount of ambivalence about dandyism itself. In the opening pages of the book, the lead character Henry Pelham receives a letter from his mother telling him she prefers him in black rather than green. “I did not like that green coat you wore when last I saw you—you look best in black—which is a great compliment, for people must be very [distinguished] in appearance, in order to do so.” In his 1835 edition of Pelham, Lytton changed the word “green” in that passage to “blue,” which makes Pelham’s style more conservative. After receiving that letter, Pelham takes his mother’s advice, and opts for simplicity in dress:\n“On entering Paris I had resolved to set up \u0026lsquo;a character\u0026rsquo; for I was always of an ambitious nature, and desirous of being distinguished from the ordinary herd. After various cogitations as to the particular one I should assume, I thought nothing appeared more likely to be remarkable among men, [In 1835 Lytton changed the word “remarkable” to “obnoxious”] and therefore pleasing to women, than an egregious coxcomb: accordingly I arranged my hair into ringlets, dressed myself with singular plainness and simplicity (a low person, by the by, would have done just the contrary), and putting on an air of exceeding languor, made my maiden appearance at Lord Bennington\u0026rsquo;s.\u0026quot;\nDisraeli, by contrast, rarely opted for “singular plainness or simplicity.” The night he met Bulwer-Lytton, in the Spring of 1830, at a dinner in Edward’s house, he dressed in a manner one could hardly have described as simple. Lytton’s elder brother, Henry Bulwer, recollects the occasion. Monypenny and Buckle’s_Life of Benjamin Disraeli_ volume one quotes Henry Bulwer:\n“Disraeli wore green velvet trousers, a canary coloured waistcoat, low shoes, silver buckles, lace at his wrists, and his hair in ringlets. \u0026hellip; If on leaving the table we had been severally taken aside and asked which was the cleverest of the party we should have been obliged to say ‘the man in the green velvet trousers.’”\nThe prototypical Regency dandy Beau Brummel, who is depicted in Pelham under the guise of the character Russelton, has been credited with popularizing black evening wear, having worn such subdued colors at a time when 18th Century fashions favored wild colors as a matter of fashion. However he apparently disapproved of Pelham’s popularizing black and white as evening wear, which as some writers have pointed out has never since gone out of fashion. As Ellen Moers writes in The Dandy(1960):\n“[Brummel] disapproved of Bulwer\u0026rsquo;s views on dress. Captain Jesse once presented himself to Brummell in a formal evening costume of black and white\u0026ndash;a combination which now seems inevitable and eternal, but which became the fashion only as a result of Pelham. Brummell, who wore blue, saw fit to admonish Jesse ‘gently’ on his appearance. “My dear Jesse,\u0026quot; he protested, \u0026ldquo;I am sadly afraid you have been reading Pelham; but excuse me, you look very much like a magpie.\u0026rdquo;\nA sort of moderate dandyism seems to have been Lytton’s taste from the get-go, but changes he made in later editions of the novel transformed it into an even more moderate document of dandyism. Lytton began editing his novel in the same year it initially came out, 1828. The first edition includes a long passage defining Pelham\u0026rsquo;s (and Lytton’s) particular taste in suits. But later that year Bulwer already issued a second edition that cut out all of that sartorial detail because, he noted in a footnote, fashion had already changed that year. He replaced the passage with a lengthy series of “Maxims” for the dandy, one of which admits that the dandy should always take into account the taste of the present day and not just his own taste (\u0026ldquo;Never in your dress altogether desert that taste which is general. The world considers eccentricity in great things, genius; in small things, folly.”) By 1835, Bulwer had heavily edited the novel because dandyism began to go out of fashion, in part because of Thomas Carlyle’s attack on the lifestyle called Sartor Resartus. As Moers puts in in her book The Dandy: “It is only in the pages of the first few editions that the true ‘Pelham’ can be read at all. Frightened by what he had read … Bulwer would edit out of his novel all of what was wicked, most of what was naughty and a great deal of what was amusing. … Since 1836, ‘Pelham’ has never been reprinted in its entirety.” It took me a while before I found Jerome McGann’s 1972 University of Nebraska Press edition, which charts all of Lytton’s changes to the novel in the many editions he issued, and uses as its main text the 1828 second edition (as most of the changes from the first edition merely cleaned up the text). This is by far the best way to read Pelham, though the public domain e-book labeled “Pelham— Complete”does use the 1828 text.\nIn the 1835 Pelham Bulwer-Lytton cut most if not all of the references to the words “effeminate“ and “effeminacy.” He also changes descriptions of “masculine” men to “stalwart men,” in contexts where masculinity is clearly contrasted with his hero Henry Pelham. These changes to the language of masculinity beg the question: Were Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton gay? Since the 1890s, in Oscar Wilde’s day, dandyism has been associated very directly with homosexuality. This was not the case in the 1820s and 1830s, when “homosexual” was not yet a word (it became one in 1869). Some biographers have explored the idea Disraeli gay or bisexual, but with little direct evidence. It was certainly true that Bulwer-Lytton’s wife, Rosina Bulwer-Lytton, accused the pair of dandies of sodomy with each other. She alleged that is how Bulwer-Lytton was chosen for the cabinet while Disraeli lead the House of Commons. She wrote the word “queer” in all of Disraeli’s novels in Lytton’s personal library and when her husband stood for parliament she went on a sort of a road tour accusing him of all sorts of infidelities. Leslie Mitchell’s biography Bulwer-Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters, the only modern biography of him, contains the best gossip on the subject. Lytton and Disraeli went to what they referred to as the “Naughty House” — a brothel — together to be “shampooed and vapour-bathed,” as reported in Richard Aldous’ The Lion and the Unicorn. In his book The Politics of Pleasure, William Kuhn makes an argument that Disraeli was gay but relies mainly on interpretations of his novels. The most believable of these interpretations may be found in a passage in Disraeli’s novel Contarini Fleming in which the autobiographical lead character describes a crush on a male schoolmate. In his essay “Byronism and the Work of Homosexual Performance in Early Victorian England,”Andrew Elfenbein makes a case that Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton used Byronic dress and affectations to deliberately draw associations with sexual scandal and homosexuality, in order to attract attention to themselves that helped them gain power despite risks (Modern Language Quarterly in December 1993). “While the question of whether or not they were ‘really’ homosexuals is alluring, it is ultimately unanswerable because of the difficulty of defining what counts as a ‘real’ homosexual,” Elfenbein writes. “What is clear is that both men imitated certain potentially scandalous aspects of Lord Byron\u0026rsquo;s behavior, as they understood it, in a bid to achieve social prominence.“\nHowever much dandyism helped lift Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton’s prospects in parliament (both men spent time as MPs before Disraeli became prime minister), Disraeli made a conscious decision to stop dressing flamboyantly in 1847. Pelham’s transition, meanwhile, from dandy to serious statesman, is one of the chief preoccupations of the book. A bildungsroman, defined as a novel about the spiritual coming of age of a young person, the novel draws a contrast between the unserious life of the dandy and a more serious life after dandyism. In fact, though Lytton goes out of his way to fill the novel with evidence of his intellectualism, including epigrams before each chapter in Latin, French, Italian and English, his character Pelham affects a certain anti-intellectualism that he apparently associates with dandyism. At the end of the first volume of this three-volume novel, when Pelham acquires a seat in parliament and begins reading at his uncle’s suggestion the writings of the main political theorists of the day (including Bentham and Mill), the move is discussed as a departure. In 1848 Lytton wrote an introduction to the latest edition of the novel that said that all the reading the character did was deemed out of character by some critics:\n“Mr. Pelham studying Mill on Government and the Political Economists, was thought by some an incongruity in character at the day in which Mr. Pelham first appeared; the truth of that conception is apparent now, at least to the observant. The fine gentlemen of that day were preparing themselves for the after things, which were already foreshadowed; and some of those, then best known in clubs and drawing-rooms, have been since foremost and boldest, nor least instructed, in the great struggles of public life.”\nEven after that, however, in a sort of Wildean ironic fashion, the character of Pelham affects anti-intellectualism. His mother tells him he is reading too much: “I have, lately, been very much afraid that [your uncle] should convert you into a bookworm,” she says; “after all, my dear Henry, you are quite clever enough to trust to your own ability. Your great geniuses never read.” Pelham responds: “‘True, my dear mother,’ said I, with a most unequivocal yawn, and depositing on the table Mr. Bentham upon Popular Fallacies; ‘true, and I am quite of your opinion.’” Later, when his friend Mr. Vincent asks him, “Do you ever read?” Pelham responds, “I never do read.” Pelham surprises Vincent when he ably discusses Cicero. “I am perhaps less ignorant than I affect to be,” Pelham admits. “It is now my object to be a dandy; hereafter I may aspire to be an orator—a wit, a scholar, or a Vincent. You will see then that there have been many odd quarters of an hour in my life less unprofitably wasted than you imagine.” Then he lapses back “into my usual tone of languid affectation” saying “I shall have too much to do in attending to Stultz [a tailor mentioned in the novel] and Nugee [a famous Regency tailor] and Tatersall [“a popular gathering place for sportsmen of all sorts,” McGann tells us], and Baxter [a London hatter], and a hundred other occupiers of spare time.” When he begins reading with his uncle, Pelham feels the need to inform us this is a major transformation:\n“And I must say, in justification of my studies and my tutor, that I derived one benefit from them which has continued with me to this hour\u0026ndash;viz. I obtained a clear knowledge of moral principle. Before that time, the little ability I possessed only led me into acts, which, I fear, most benevolent Reader, thou has already sufficiently condemned: my good feelings\u0026ndash;for I was not naturally bad\u0026ndash;never availed me the least when present temptation came into my way. I had no guide but passion; no rule but the impulse of the moment. What else could have been the result of my education? If I was immoral, it was because I was never taught morality. Nothing, perhaps, is less innate than virtue. I own that the lessons of my uncle did not work miracles\u0026ndash;that, living in the world, I have not separated myself from its errors and its follies: the vortex was too strong\u0026ndash;the atmosphere too contagious; but I have at least avoided the crimes into which my temper would most likely have driven me. I ceased to look upon the world as a game one was to play fairly, if possible\u0026ndash;but where a little cheating was readily allowed; I no longer divorced the interests of other men from my own: if I endeavored to blind them, it was neither by unlawful means, nor for a purely selfish end: if\u0026ndash;but come, Henry Pelham, thou hast praised thyself enough for the present; and, after all, thy future adventures will best tell if thou art really amended.”\nThat is only the end of volume one, however. How does Pelham’s new morality square with the moral of the book in its entirety? In a preface to the 1840 edition, Lytton told of having written a forerunner to this story, a short tale called \u0026ldquo;Mortimer, or the Memoirs of a Gentleman.\u0026rdquo; “Its commencement was almost word for word the same as that of Pelham,\u0026rdquo; Lytton wrote, “but the design was exactly opposite to that of the latter and later work. ‘Mortimer’ was intended to show the manner in which the world deteriorates its votary, and Pelham, on the contrary, conveys the newer, and I believe, sounder moral, of showing how a man of sense can subject the usages of the world to himself instead of being conquered by them, and gradually grow wise by the very foibles of his youth.”\nIt\u0026rsquo;s worth remembering that in the first paragraph of my review of Vivian Grey, I noted that the sort of aristocratic gentlemen with whom Lytton hung out — and Disraeli wished he did — generally did not read, and that when the future prime minister did acclimate to the aristocratic world this illiteracy frustrated Disraeli. Reading that paragraph now is encouraged.\nLytton wrote Pelham perhaps in part as a response to Vivian Grey; there is a paragraph in Lytton’s novel where at a party one of Pelham’s aristocratic conversationalists critiques Disraeli’s novel:\n“’In one work, which, since it is popular, I will not name, there is a stiffness and stiltedness in the dialogue and descriptions, perfectedly ridiculous. The author makes his countesses always talking of their family, and his earls always quoting the peerage. There is as much fuss about state, and dignity, and pride, as if the greatest amongst us were not far too busy with the petty affairs of the world to have time for such lofty vanities. There is only one rule necessary for a clever writer who wishes to delineate the beau monde. It is this: let him consider that \u0026lsquo;dukes, and lords, and noble princes,\u0026rsquo; eat, drink, talk, move, exactly the same as any other class of civilized people—nay, the very subjects in conversation are, for the most part, the same in all sets—only, perhaps, they are somewhat more familiarly and easily treated than among the lower orders, who fancy rank is distinguished by pomposity, and that state affairs are discussed with the solemnity of a tragedy—that we are always my lording and my ladying each other—that we ridicule commoners, and curl our hair with Debrett\u0026rsquo;s Peerage.’\n“We all laughed at this speech, the truth of which we readily acknowledged.”\nLytton knew better than Disraeli what these parties were like. His character, Pelham, also knows dandies well; at one point in the novel he promises a leader in the House of Commons that he will bring “a whole legion of dandies to the House door” in support of a particular measure. What can we conclude about the characteristics of a dandy from Pelham? Below are some observations.\nThree examples of dandyish humor:\nParadox. This style of humor, in which a statement seems absurd but reveals a deeper truth, is perhaps what Wilde became most famous for. Examples include “Life is too important to be taken seriously” and “the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” Disraeli was a prototypical practitioner of paradox, as when in Sybil he had a character praise “bad wine,” as good wine was tiresome. Bluntness. This is what Brummel was best known for. His style of wit was typified by one of his most famous lines, which Pelham assigns to his character Russelton: “Coat? You call this thing a coat?” Another example of Brummel’s blunt wit is his equally famous line, “Who’s your fat friend?” Ostentation: outlandish arrogance that is so over the top as to be charming, as with Wilde’s line “I have nothing to declare except my genius,” or Bulwer-Lytton in Pelham: “He has a superb head, though. I like to allow that other people are handsome now and then\u0026ndash;it looks generous.\u0026quot; Another aspect of the dandy that is covered in Pelham is his relationship to women. In his “maxims” for the dandy, Pelham identifies two features of that relationship. First, he says, effeminacy is only for the very brave: “Remember that none but those whose courage is unquestionable, can venture to be effeminate.” Second, one should only wear effeminate clothes for women’s sake: “Never let the finery of chains and rings seem your own choice; that which naturally belongs to women should appear only worn for their sake. We dignify foppery, when we invest it with a sentiment.” Disraeli often made clear in his novels that he (or his characters) preferred conversing with women to conversing with men, largely because women don’t spend all their time talking of sportsmanship, which in Victorian times usually means hunting. This activity was disdained both by Pelham and by Disraeli. Pelham notes that when he goes hunting he usually ends up getting shot at. Pelham also makes clear that he strikes effeminate notes in conversations in order to rile up the men, principally to drive the women into the position of defending him. The following passage illustrates this phenomenon, as Pelham at a society event tells the story of his falling in a river. He handled the situation not by doing what a masculine man would do – get out as fast as he could – but by girlishly screaming for help. The men call him a “puppy,” a term for an effeminate man, and the women defend his behavior.\n“‘Pray, Mr. Aberton, what do you think I did in that dangerous dilemma?’\n\u0026ldquo;’Why, got out again as fast as you could,’ said [one man].\n\u0026ldquo;’No such thing, I was too frightened: I stood still and screamed for assistance.’\n“Madame D\u0026rsquo;Anville was delighted, and Miss Paulding astonished. Mr. Aberton muttered to a fat, foolish Lord Luscombe, ‘What a damnation puppy,’—and every one … looked at me six times as attentively as they had done before. As for me, I was perfectly satisfied with the effect I had produced, and I went away the first, in order to give the men an opportunity of abusing me; for whenever the men abuse, the women, to support alike their coquetry and the conversation, think themselves called upon to defend.”\nLater in the novel, Pelham decides he is tiring of always favoring the attentions of women and announces he will adopt an ambition for the favor of men. But attracting the attention of women, both to Disraeli and to Bulwer-Lytton, is the way up, for as Pelham’s mother tells him: “Never talk much to young men—remember that it is the women who make a reputation in society.\u0026rdquo; This is a major theme in some of Disraeli’s novels: the wives of the parliamentarians are the truly powerful ones.\nUltimately, in part because he kept changing his version of what a dandy was, Bulwer-Lytton’s version of a dandy comes off as somewhat compromised next to Disraeli’s. Was Lytton insecure? According to Mitchell, he was obsessed with losing his youth. But then so was Disraeli, who once wrote, in 1830, that “I grieve to say my hair grows very badly, and I think more grey, which I can unfeignedly declare occasions me more anguish than even the prospect of death.” On some level you have to love an 1828 male who uses “almond paste” to keep his skin youthful, as confessed of Henry in Pelham. But one does wish Lytton had the courage to admit that Pelham was based on himself. Instead, in 1848, he wrote: “I trust that this work may now be read without prejudice from that silly error that long sought to identify the author with the hero.” Disraeli was more forthcoming when he wrote Vivian Grey that the character was semi-autobiographical.\nAs for the quality of the novel, Bulwer-Lytton was himself disappointed. His mother complained that he could be writing literature of a higher sort. He replied that of course he could and she was the reason he was not, as his mother had disinherited Lytton when he married Rosina, causing him to write fast to make money. But Pelham was a success. And though the speed with which it was written is evident in the quality of the plotting and prose, it remains a rather enlightening and entertaining read. Its descent into plotty mysteries in the last of three volumes is best read briskly, but this novel makes a case that it is one for the ages, particularly as a statement on an aspect of the history of masculinity.\n"},{"title":"The war against Woodrow Wilson reaches the top","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-06-10-war-against-wilson/","date":"June 10, 2025","tags":["Wilson","Gladstone"],"text":"The war against Woodrow Wilson reaches the top Through three Trump campaigns for president, the question loomed: If we have to make America great again, when was it great? Then, after his second victory in 2024, President Trump answered the question. And the answer was, before Woodrow Wilson became president for the first time in 1913.\n“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” Trump said days after taking office. “That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept. It’s fine. It’s OK. But it would have been very much better.”\nJoy Reid, formerly of MSNBC, recorded a video declaring Republicans were waging a war on “the 20th Century” because some of the “super rich” have never believed there should be an income tax, which Wilson and his Congress instituted, or Social Security, or Medicare or Medicaid and that the poor should just “figure it out.” She might also have added other institutions for which Wilson was responsible, including the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission.\nThis resentment of Wilson’s progressivism dates back to 2008, when conservative author Jonah Goldberg published Liberal Fascism, which made a case against Wilson and included many of the thoughts from a soon-to-be popular 2005 book entitled Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism by Professor Ronald J Pestritto of Hillsdale College. Wilson hate exploded in the early days of the Tea Party during Barack Obama’s first term, when then-Fox News host Glenn Beck made it regular feature on his show to declare, “I hate Woodrow Wilson.” That was largely because he had read Pestritto’s book. He made Pestritto a regular guest on his program. Pestritto’s sales soared.\nI have been writing on this blog about some of the aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s intellectual career that appalled fans of Beck, Pestritto and Goldberg in the early 2000s, such as his derision for the preface of the Declaration of Independence. Conservatives also recoiled at his endorsement of a “living constitution,” a phrase he coined, which endorses the view that the constitution needs to evolve.\n“All of the stuff about Wilson has been completely erased from the popular histories,” Goldberg said in an interview in a book called The Progressive Century that among other things tracks the influence of Wilson-detractors. “I\u0026rsquo;m a fairly well-read guy. No academic, but historically literate by American standards. I had no idea about some of that stuff. So it was compelling on the merits. But it was also seen as evidence in a larger indictment that liberals have been \u0026ldquo;hiding\u0026rdquo; a lot of stuff from us. I don\u0026rsquo;t mean that in the paranoid sense. But when Liberal Fascism came out there was a boom in history books purporting to tell the history liberals don\u0026rsquo;t want you to know, yada yada yada. And this was stuff a lot of smart, book-reading people simply didn\u0026rsquo;t know.”\nIn 2020 a book came out purporting to track the lack of coverage of what Goldberg called “all of the stuff about Wilson” in the historical literature over a century. Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea by Bradley C.S. Watson included brief synopses of most of the popular and some academic histories of the century, noting again and again the omission of discussion of Wilson’s rejection of natural rights and the endorsement of the “living constitution.” The book doesn’t put this rejection in a historical context, or quote those who point out such a view was quite common in the 19th century when Wilson began to voice it, among both liberals and reactionaries, largely because the French Revolution of 1789 was fresher in mind in the 19th Century, as discussed in a prior blog post. But the book reflects the influence of critique of Wilson furthered not only by Pestritto but also the school he attended. It has been called “the Clarendon critique.”\nThus the movement against Wilson’s influence began to shape the Tea Party movement, according to Steven M. Teles in a chapter of The Progressive Century titled “How the Progressives Became the Mortal Enemy of the Tea Party.”\nThe view that Wilson was our worst president remains popular among conservatives and liberals today, even though he ranks in the top 15 in rankings of the presidents among historians. That ranking has been dropping in large part because of his abysmal record on race and during World War One on civil liberties.\nThe Internet is full of derisive memes about Wilson. One shows a cartoon of Winnie the Pooh remarking to Piglet, “I love honey. But you know what I don’t love? Woodrow Wilson.” Another shows Joe Biden’s Tweet that Trump is “the worst president we’ve ever had,” followed by a photo of Wilson asking “Am I a joke to you?” Most tellingly, perhaps, is a graph which shows the reasons the Left and Right hate Wilson. The chart is divided in four quadrants; all four are filled with reasons to despise Wilson.\nIronically, Trump himself seems not to mind Wilson.\n\u0026ldquo;Can anyone believe that Princeton just dropped the name of Woodrow Wilson from their highly respected policy center,\u0026rdquo; Trump wrote in a Tweet after petitions against Wilson’s racism at Princeton found purchase in 2020. \u0026ldquo;Now the Do Nothing Democrats want to take off the name John Wayne from an airport. Incredible stupidity!\u0026rdquo;\nAnd, equally ironically, Michelle Obama tweeted the opposite argument at about the same time. \u0026ldquo;Heartened to see my alma mater make this change, and even prouder of the students who\u0026rsquo;ve been advocating for this kind of change on campus for years,\u0026rdquo; Michelle Obama wrote. \u0026ldquo;Let\u0026rsquo;s keep finding ways to be more inclusive to all students\u0026ndash;at Princeton and at every school across the country.\u0026rdquo;\nAs the quote that leads this article makes clear, Trump’s favor for 1870-1913, what historians call “the Gilded Age,” is mainly related to the prominent use during that period of tariffs to fund government. Wilson campaigned against the overuse of tariffs as early as 1882, when he testified before a commission examining their use in Atlanta while he was still a 25-year-old lawyer. It was his first involvement in politics. Before the commission he made the point that tariffs had been used after the Civil War to pay off the significant debt incurred in the conflict. “Free trade has been a slumbering question” as a result, he said, but “will soon” become one of the leading political questions as “now that peace has come the people of the South will insist upon having the fruits of peace, and not being kept down under the burdens of war.”\nHe had been influenced in this position by his love for the classical liberals of Victorian England, most notably William E. Gladstone, who was a consummate free-trader. Wilson is said to have hung a picture of Gladstone on his desk as an adolescent and declared that he wished to follow in his footsteps. It’s one of the aspects of Wilson’s politics that he carried with him to the Oval Office, and historian John Milton Cooper says he re-read John Morley’s biography of Gladstone while in the White House. Gladstone and the free traders of Britain had rallied for the repeal of tariffs under the symbol of cheap bread, as taxes on foreign grain caused the cost of food to rise to what they considered unacceptable levels. This is of course analogous to the concern about rising prices under tariffs today. Trump has acknowledged that, contrary to what he said on the campaign trail, there may be some “pain” as a result of price increases because of the hefty tariffs he has proposed.\nWhen Wilson became president one of his first acts was to slash the tariffs. He began negotiating an act to do so before he took office. As it happened, the first income tax was simultaneously being formulated in Congress, and though this was less a personal initiative of President Wilson he signed it into law. Last year Trump declined to rule out the elimination of the income tax.\nWilson’s detractors acknowledge his accomplishments have turned out to be surprisingly difficult to repeal. What they manage to accomplish in this administration remains to be seen.\n"},{"title":"Review: \u003cem\u003eThe Voyage of Captain Popanilla\u003c/em\u003e, a novella by Benjamin Disraeli","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-05-12-review-captain-popanilla/","date":"May 12, 2025","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: *The Voyage of Captain Popanilla*, a novella by Benjamin Disraeli This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Panic of 1825, a financial cataclysm caused in part by rampant speculation in Latin American stocks that wiped out many people including a young Benjamin Disraeli. In the three years before the crash, seven nations in South and Central America raised 20 million pounds, of which 19 million of those bonds were in default by 1829. More than 100 British banks closed by the end of 1826, according to recent scholarship (Jackson 2022; see bibliography below). Disraeli and his trading partners lost thousands of pounds investing in South American mining companies, a loss which when combined with his losses thereafter on a failed newspaper venture amounts to millions of dollars today. These events left Disraeli in debt almost to the day he died. He suffered a nervous breakdown after he wrote a sequel to his first novel Vivian Grey, which led him to write a relatively little-remembered 1828 satirical novella called The Voyage of Captain Popanilla, which biographer William Monypenny called the future prime minister’s “first political essay.”\nA striking essay it is, using political allegory to lampoon what he viewed as liberal orthodoxies, both anticipating and contradicting some of his later writings. It is a very interesting read, though a review like this one might help for those who aren’t yet familiar with 1820s politics.\nThe novella, I suspect, was largely inspired by the most spectacular story from the Latin American bubble. A reputed swindler who called himself Gregor MacGregor was arrested in September 1825 for selling government bonds for a fictional land in Central America he called Poyais. He had traveled to an area there and received a land grant from one of the parties that considered themselves a ruling authority. He declared it a new nation, and himself its ruler, and then traveled back to Britain to sell securities in it and tickets to 200 emigrants who subsequently sailed to “Poyais” to make their fortune, only to find there was no such place as Poyais. Fewer than 50 of them made it back to Britain in the end, the rest dying of diseases and conflicts with local natives. Popanilla, which stylistically is inspired by satiric works like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Voltaire’s Candide, tells the story of a “savage” named Popanilla from an island country called Fantaisie, which may have been inspired by Poyais. Popanilla in the end is arrested, like Gregor MacGregor, apparently for making up the island in a plot to swindle investors.\nDisraeli’s so-called “political trilogy” of Coningsby, Sybil and_Tancred_ is often considered a beginning point in the history of the political novel, but as Popanilla shows Disraeli was not a stranger to political fiction even before those books. His only completed novel before Popanilla, Vivian Grey, contained almost no specificity about his political positions. By contrast, Popanilla is a virtual doctrinaire pamphlet in fictional form.\nPerhaps Disraeli began his novella by asking himself the question, what if Poyais had been a real place? At the beginning of the novella we are informed by the narrator that Fantaisie is populated by “an innocent and a happy, though a voluptuous and ignorant race. They have no manufactures, no commerce, no agriculture, and no printing-presses.” This state of innocence changes when Popanilla discovers a crate of books from the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (a real organization founded by Henry Lord Brougham), reads them all, and is converted to Benthamite Utilitarianism, a liberal creed Disraeli detested and satirizes mercilessly here. Popanilla comes to believe “that man was not born for himself, but for society; that the interests of the body are alone to be considered, and not those of the individual; and that a nation might be extremely happy, extremely powerful, and extremely rich, although every individual member of it might at the same time be miserable, dependent, and in debt.” Intoxicated by this new knowledge, he founds a university on Fantaisie and teaches the young of the island until the king gets sick of him and puts him in a canoe to discover new islands and establish relations with them. Popanilla paddles and paddles until he comes upon a land called Vraibleusia, which is a satirical stand-in for England. Popanilla is informed Vraibleusia is the richest country in the world, but that it is deeply in debt.\n“‘Debt! I thought you were the richest nation in the world?’ [says Popanilla.]\n‘Tis true; nevertheless, if there were a golden pyramid with a base as big as the whole earth and an apex touching the heavens, it would not supply us with sufficient metal to satisfy our creditors.’ [says his Vraibleusian companion.]\n‘But, my dear sir,’ exclaimed the perplexed Popanilla, ‘if this really be true, how then can you be said to be the richest nation in the world?’\n‘It is very simple. The annual interest upon our debt exceeds the whole wealth of the rest of the world; therefore we must be the richest nation in the world.’”\nThus Disraeli mocks the liberal nation of England and its Utilitarian economic philosophers. The Vraibleusians are delighted to discover in Popanilla a resident of an unknown, undeveloped land they can trade with and invest in – much like Poyais before 1825. They quickly dispatch a fleet of ships to bring their goods to Fantaisie to trade. But, like the Poyais bubble, the Fantaisie bubble bursts when the ships are unable to find any such nation. This causes a run on the banks, as did the Panic of 1825:\n“The whole island was in a state of the greatest commotion, and that martial law universally prevailed. This disturbance was occasioned by the return of the expedition destined to the Isle of Fantaisie. It appeared, from his account, that after sailing about from New Guinea to New Holland, the expedition had been utterly unable not only to reach their new customers, but even to obtain the slightest intelligence of their locality. No such place as Fantaisie was known at Ceylon. Sumatra gave information equally unsatisfactory.”\nIn the end, Popanilla is arrested like Gregor MacGregor. Popanilla is charged with “high treason,” presumably because he is suspected of having invented his home island of Fantaisie and misled hundreds of Vraibleusians to try to invest there.\nPopanilla shows that Disraeli’s politics changed in some respects over time. For example, his complex relationship with 19th Century Britain’s Corn Laws is launched in this story. Here he mocks the laws, which were tariffs on imported grain attempting to protect local farmers and therefore local landlords, meaning the country aristocrats who largely composed the Tory party. In Popanilla, there is only one such farmer, named The Aboriginal Inhabitant, and he insists that “it was the common law of the land that the islanders should purchase their corn only of him. They grumbled, but he growled; he swore that it was the constitution of the country … Thus, between force, and fear, and flattery, the Vraibleusians paid for their corn nearly its weight in gold; but what did that signify to a nation with so many pink shells!”\nThe Whigs, and eventually moderate Tory Prime Minister Robert Peel, argued that the Corn Laws raised the cost of bread and other food, making it harder for the working class to survive. When Peel eventually repealed the Corn Laws, Disraeli seized on the resulting outrage from ultra-Tories by campaigning against Peel in the Commons. Peel resigned, and between that and other issues in Ireland, the Tories were consequently split and out of power for 30 years. When Disraeli began to come to powerful positions, however, he did not work to reinstate the Corn Laws, choosing instead to “educate his party” on the need for an alternative to protectionism, as Peel failed to do, writes Nicholas Shrimpton in his excellent introduction to Disraeli’s novel Sybil.\nSomewhat defensively, Monypenny (who sometimes seems to have felt it was his job to defend Disraeli the conservative) wrote:\n“Needless … to say, the outlines of his own philosophy are not yet firmly drawn nor his views on party politics consistently elaborated. No one therefore need be surprised to find the future leader of the Protectionists ridiculing the Corn Laws, or the future founder of Imperialism ridiculing the Colonial system.”\nHowever indicative of Disraeli’s changes of mind, the novella also predicts positions he would take in later novels and writings. The prime example is perhaps that the ruler of Vraibleusia is “a colossal and metallic Statue of extraordinary appearance. It represented an armed monarch.”\nThat the king of Vraibleusia is a statue constitutes a criticism of the lack of agency of the British monarchy. In later works like Coningsby Disraeli lamented that the political system of his time diminished the power of the British monarchs to the point that he felt they were expected to behave like Venetian doges, chief magistrates in Vienna whom Disraeli believed deferred to aristocratic oligarchs rather than ruling on their own:\n“\u0026lsquo;I repeat it,\u0026rsquo; said Coningsby. \u0026lsquo;The great object of the Whig leaders in England from the first movement under Hampden to the last most successful one in 1688, was to establish in England a high aristocratic republic on the model of the Venetian, then the study and admiration of all speculative politicians. Read Harrington; turn over Algernon Sydney; then you will see how the minds of the English leaders in the seventeenth century were saturated with the Venetian type. And they at length succeeded. William III found them out. He told the Whig leaders, \u0026ldquo;I will not be a Doge.\u0026rdquo; He balanced parties; he baffled them as the Puritans baffled them fifty years before. The reign of Anne was a struggle between the Venetian and the English systems. Two great Whig nobles, Argyle and Somerset, worthy of seats in the Council of Ten, forced their Sovereign on her deathbed to change the ministry. They accomplished their object. They brought in a new family on their own terms. George I was a Doge; George II was a Doge; they were what William III, a great man, would not be. George III tried not to be a Doge, but it was impossible materially to resist the deeply-laid combination. He might get rid of the Whig magnificoes, but he could not rid himself of the Venetian constitution. And a Venetian constitution did govern England from the accession of the House of Hanover until 1832.”\nThe statue in Popanilla is tended by 12 “managers,” who represent the British cabinet: “They alone were permitted to hear its voice; for the Statue never spoke in public save on rare occasions, and its sentences were then really so extremely commonplace that, had it not been for the deep wisdom of its general conduct, the Vraibleusians would have been almost tempted to believe that they really might exist without the services of the capital member.”\nThe novella includes one digression of a sort we saw the previous year in his Vivian Grey, in which we find the author in a silly mood. He writes: “Shortly before Popanilla’s illness he had been elected a member of the Vraibleusian Horticultural Society, and one evening he had endeavoured to amuse himself by reading the following CHAPTER ON FRUIT.” What follows is a long allegorical chapter, as promised, about fruit. Critics have pointed out the various fruits represent ecclesiastical positions: Catholics eat pineapple, puritans crab-apple, and so forth.\nNot everyone likes Popanilla. In 1990 John Vincent described the novella, “a product of Disraeli’s years of nervous breakdown,” as “a quaint, disrespectful, semi-radical, not very funny or biting satire on British society.” A reviewer at the time the novella came out wrote, \u0026ldquo;at present we must dismiss it as a jeu d\u0026rsquo;esprit of considerable merit, though unequal, and not so racy as a Swift of 1828 might have made it.\u0026rdquo; But Gary Dyer in a monograph on British satire describes it as an important work because it appeared as verse and prose satires were disappearing in the 1820s, which he says happened in part because the Panic of 1825 caused publishers to pare back less popular works and therefore the publication of satires like this one. That is apparently one reason Disraeli began writing in the then-more popular genre of \u0026ldquo;silver fork novels,\u0026rdquo; or stories of aristocratic life, including the next novel he wrote after this one, The Young Duke, which he wrote for financial reasons. When Isaac D\u0026rsquo;Israeli, his father, heard he\u0026rsquo;d written a book by that title he is reported to have asked: “What does Ben know of dukes?”\nIf one is prepared with some familiarity with the politics of the 1820s, however, Popanilla is quite entertaining and illuminating as to the mindset of the young Disraeli after the crash of 1825.\n"},{"title":"He learned it from his Dad: Woodrow Wilson\u0026rsquo;s opposition to inalienable rights","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-05-02-learned-it-from-his-dad/","date":"May 2, 2025","tags":["Wilson"],"text":"He learned it from his Dad: Woodrow Wilson's opposition to inalienable rights It may be shocking to modern ears to hear Woodrow Wilson did not agree with the founders about the inalienable rights of all men. But he did not: \u0026ldquo;We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence,\u0026rdquo; Wilson said in 1907. \u0026ldquo;We are not here to worship men or a document.\u0026rdquo;\n“No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual,” Wilson wrote a year later, “and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle. The rights of man are easy to discourse of … but they are infinitely hard to put into practice. Such theories are never ‘law.’ … Only that is ‘law’ which can be executed, and the rights of man are singularly difficult to execute.”\nNowhere in the copious literature about Woodrow Wilson, it would seem, does anyone suggest that this surprisingly derisive view of the Declaration was bequeathed to him by his dad, a Presbyterian minister who preached in the South during the Civil War. Wilson’s idiosyncratic dislike of the philosophy of natural rights has mostly been discussed by conservative scholars, who have implied that Wilson’s aversion to the preface betrayed a xenophilic streak. Wilson is portrayed, not unjustly, as a lover of German and English forms of governance rather than an admirer of the American founders. But an early piece of writing by Wilson’s father suggests the distaste for natural rights was in the family well before the young student began reading foreign opponents of natural law like Edmund Burke – and was a symptom of his early brand of southern conservatism, not his eventual progressivism.\nIn an 1861 sermon, Wilson’s dad Joseph Ruggles Wilson argued that slavery was endorsed by the Bible, and that in Biblical times there had been an “abolition party” that argued, like the Republicans during the Civil War, that there are natural rights against slavery. Ruggles Wilson, like his son, said this notion of natural rights was too abstract to be enforced:\n“In the days of the Apostles, it is proper for me to remind you, there was a party, whose numbers were scattered throughout the empire, which constituted the ‘abolition party’ of that period. It is known that the Pharisees gave a special prominence to political freedom, joined with them were the Essenes, and binding together the whole, were certain philosophers who inculcated unattainable notions of universal liberty. These persons were in the habit of condemning Roman masters as unjust, impious, and destroyers of a law of nature. They inculcated the same abstract doctrines as those which have proceeded from mistaken philanthropy in our own distracted country, and which, at the time when Paul wrote to the Ephesians, were threatening the world with discord and bloodshed, as now, by the permissive wrath of God again they threaten.” (Emphasis added.)\nThus for Wilson\u0026rsquo;s father, and perhaps Wilson himself, the position against natural rights is part of a history of racism. Much has been written about Wilson\u0026rsquo;s racism in recent years, but this aspect has not been examined. While the future president never endorsed slavery like his father, he vehemently opposed the vote for African Americans in his youth and repeatedly used the phrase \u0026ldquo;ignorant and inferior race\u0026rdquo; to describe Blacks. As president, he allowed his subordinates to segregate the federal government. As late as 1919 there are stories of Wilson telling derogatory \u0026ldquo;negro stories,\u0026rdquo; and that year he worked against the addition of a statement in the Versailles Treaty that all races are created equal. We will see here that for Wilson, though not for everyone who shared his view, the rejection of the idea of natural rights was rooted in his southern background.\nThe position against natural rights was not a youthful fancy for Wilson. As late as 1911, the year before he was elected president, Wilson again put down the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface,” he said in a speech at the Jefferson Club in Los Angeles, while he was still governor of New Jersey. “The question is not whether all men are born free and equal or not. Suppose they were born so, you know they are not.”\nNor was this position a sign of crusty old age. In fact, Wilson made similar statements very early in life – as early as July 4, 1876, when he was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Princeton University.\n“One hundred years ago America conquered England in an unequal struggle and this year she glories over it. How much happier … she would be if she had England’s form of government instead of the miserable delusion of a republic. A republic too founded upon the notion of abstract liberty! I venture to say that this country will never celebrate another centennial as a republic.”\nBy “too founded upon the notion of abstract liberty,” Wilson meant the founders’ notion of natural rights, including the inalienable rights guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence.\nIn between those two statements, in 1893, Wilson also wrote that Thomas Jefferson is “not a thorough American” because “of the strain of French philosophy that permeated and weakened all his thought” – meaning those natural law ideas found in the preface of the Declaration of Independence. “It is his speculative philosophy that is exotic, and that runs like a false and artificial note through all his thought. It was un-American in being abstract, sentimental, rationalistic, rather than practical.”\nThis point of view, so strange to our ears, is usually explained by scholars as rooted in Wilson’s love for the 18th century English statesman Burke, often known as the father of conservatism, or for the 19th century philosopher Hegel. But it was years before Wilson would read Hegel, and his acquaintance with Burke was just beginning. In the Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Wilson writes in his diary:\n“[October] 6th [1876] Friday. … This afternoon and evening read a portion of [Henry Lord] Brougham’s sketch of Burke’s character. It is a very well written piece, but I will not pronounce upon its merits as a piece of criticism until I know more of the subject with which it deals. Knowing little of the French Revolution and the history of the latter part of the 18th century I cannot say whether Burke’s actions at the time were consistent or not.”\nSo Wilson’s exposure to Burke was new when he was 19, but he was already passionately against the “too abstract” notions of natural law. He also quoted this new acquaintance, Mr. Burke, in a collection of favorite quotations sometime between 1876 and 1877, as saying “Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.” By 1877 he owned a copy of John Morley’s biography of Edmund Burke, which in its fourth chapter includes a section on the “unsound metaphysical abstraction” of America’s belief in natural rights during and after the American revolution.\nWhy did Wilson connect so emotionally with the words of this long-dead British lawmaker? Where did this passion come from? His dad’s sermon indicates it may have been a family passion, born of the southern identity of the Wilson family, which has not been noted in the extensive literature about Wilson — even in the debates about his southern origins, and the argument over whether he was or was not a southern partisan (see prior posts on this blog on “The two arguments about Woodrow Wilson’s racism” and Wilson’s“Calhoun views”). The closest I\u0026rsquo;ve seen any Wilson scholar come to identifying a kind of southern thinking as the origin of Wilson’s thought on abstraction is a line in a paper by Terry Bimes and Stephen Skowronek in the journal Polity entitled “Woodrow Wilson\u0026rsquo;s Critique of Popular Leadership: Reassessing the Modern-Traditional Divide in Presidential History.” In it Bimes and Skowronek write:\n“Of course, southern reactionaries as far back as John Randolph had blasted Jefferson for embracing \u0026rsquo;exotic\u0026rsquo; ideas that sowed the seeds of populism. But this fact itself alerts us to an important aspect of the change that Wilson underwent in the writing of his histories: the rediscovery of his southern roots. Exposure to northern, proto-progressive intellectuals in the 1880s and to the Populist and labor upheavals of the 1890s left Wilson uneasy. The French doctrines of the \u0026ldquo;rights of man\u0026rdquo; that \u0026ldquo;crept in through the phrases of the Declaration of Independence\u0026rdquo; offered indigenous institutions little protection from popular reform movements, and the social and economic unrest of the day was bringing to the fore Wilson\u0026rsquo;s concern for the preservation of traditional institutional arrangements. This instinctive protection of institutions is evident throughout Wilson\u0026rsquo;s histories, and it lays a firm foundation for his defense of the Constitution, the Democratic party, the courts, and local- ism in Constitutional Government, as well as for the regressive racial policies of his presidency.”\nBut Wilson didn’t start writing this way about the nation being founded on ideas that were too abstract in the 1890s. As we have seen, this kind of thinking was present in Wilson’s writing as early as 1876 and in his father’s as early as 1861, when Wilson was a toddler. It has been argued that Wilson individuated from his father’s southern identity in certain respects, but this appears to be one respect in which he did not.\nIn fact, the argument against natural rights became very common in the South after Jefferson’s death in 1826, say scholars who study southern thinking before the Civil War. Clement Eaton in his 1940 book Freedom of Thought in the Old South says that as the South became more dependent on cotton for economic survival, as other crops faltered, southern intellectuals were less likely to oppose slavery, and with that philosophical difference came a new rejection of natural rights:\n“A turning point came in Southern liberalism shortly after the death of Jefferson in 1826–a change preceded by a profound economic revolution. The old Tidewater aristocracy, mellowed by age, sank in importance as exhausted tobacco fields and rice plantations became less productive. Cotton was enthroned as king on the rich black loam of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. ‘Cotton capitalism’ became a strident, aggressive force in politics and the intellectual life of the section. A new political philosophy arose that discarded much of the idealism of Jefferson. In 1829 Thomas Cooper was teaching to his classes a doctrine that repudiated the theory of natural rights—\u0026lsquo;Rights are what society acknowledges and sanctions, and they are nothing else.’”\nLouis Hartz documents the same trend in his classic 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America, ina chapter about Southern Reactionaries called “The Reactionary Enlightenment: Southern Political Thought Before the Civil War.” In it Hartz writes: “American Southerners \u0026hellip; began to break with their Jeffersonian past around 1830.”\nOne of the first southern thinkers to separate from Jefferson on natural rights was John Randolph of Roanoke, according to conservative historian Russell Kirk. In fact Kirk called Randolph “the American Burke”:\n“It is in the speeches of Randolph of Roanoke that we first encounter a thorough expression, in America, of opposition to the assumptions of the Declaration of Independence. Randolph was not alone, it is true; by the time of the Virginia Convention of 1829, the new system of thought—or, perhaps, the revived old system of thought, long dormant—was strong in lower Virginia and developing in power elsewhere but Randolph was the ablest spokesman of this opposition.”\nWilson\u0026rsquo;s father, his correspondence shows, was a fan of John Randolph. He approved of his view of state\u0026rsquo;s rights, and could also have gleaned his language about natural rights from him.\nIn his book America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism (2021), Ronald J. Pestritto of Hillsdale College outlines the various different oppositions to natural rights among early American progressives like Wilson, John Dewey, Frank Goodnow, Charles Beard and Theodore Roosevelt. He does not emphasize the differences in their thought, however, and fosters the impression that progressivism was a single force against the American founders’ theory of natural rights. But Beard, Roosevelt and Dewey took aim at the right to property, and Wilson did not. In fact, the latter’s reasons for opposing the notion of natural rights was rooted in an argument for the protection of property rights against the dangers of the French Revolution, which was founded on the principle of the “Rights of Man.” While Pestritto acknowledges this was Wilson’s thinking, he does not note that these philosophies come fundamentally from opposite ends of the political spectrum.\nThe opposition to natural rights came from both ends of the political spectrum in the 18th and 19th centuries. Enemies of natural rights included not only Burke, the so-called father of modern conservatism, who was concerned about the specter of the French Revolution occurring in England, but also Jeremey Bentham, the Utilitarian whose ideas were so influential on liberals in the 19th Century. Bentham called natural rights “nonsense upon stilts” and was also concerned about a recurrence of the French Revolution. The idea of natural law was in fact quite out of favor in Europe for most of the 19th Century, as Thomas J. Donahue-Ochoa notes in an excellent essay published on his web site online. He emphasizes that this opposition was not the province of one side or another:\n“After the final defeat of Napoleon, natural rights theory and individualistic social contract theory both came under sustained attack in Europe: not just by conservative defenders of the status quo and reactionaries who yearned for the extinct old order, but also by liberal reformers and even republican and socialist revolutionaries. Two objections were especially important to the reformers\u0026rsquo; criticisms of natural rights and the contract. The first was against metaphysical natural rights: the idea that there were some objective, universal, and perennial moral rights possessed by human beings in virtue of a common human nature. Utilitarian Positivists like Bentham, the Philosophic Radicals, and J. S. Mill challenged the existence of such rights on the positivist grounds that no one could possibly experience such a right.”\nJeremy Waldron also spells out “The Decline of Natural Right” in an essay of that name. He opens with a passage from an 1894 preface to David G. Ritchie’s Natural Rights: A Criticism of Some Political and Ethical Conceptions:\n“ When I began, some three years ago, to write a paper on ‘Natural Rights,’ I had a certain fear that in criticizing that famous theory I might be occupied in slaying the already slain. Recent experience has, however, convinced me that the theory is still, in a sense, alive, or at least capable of mischief. Though disclaimed by almost all our more careful writers on politics and ethics, it yet remains a commonplace of the newspaper and the platform, not only in the United States of America, where the theory may be said to form part of the national creed, but in this country, where it was assailed a century ago by both Burke and Bentham.”\nSuch was the state of things in Europe in the 19th century, that the surprising position was for natural right and not against it. Pestritto describes the progressives as having followed Germans, most notably Hegel, to this perspective, but Waldron says Hegel’s influence can be overstated: “We should be careful how much direct influence we attribute to Hegel, particularly as the nineteenth century wore on. The celebrity of his work was largely a matter of fashion and Hegel was unfashionable in Germany by mid-century.” For his part, Wilson did not read Hegel until well after his first passionate statements against the abstraction of natural rights.\nIn the end, Pestritto’s implication that this all lies somehow at the heart of modern progressives like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (the latter of whom Pestritto notes identified herself in a presidential run as a progressive in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) falsely suggests that this 19th Century opposition to natural rights still lingers. Pestritto is not alone in this error. Rogers M. Smith in his paper “The Constitutional Philosophy of Barack Obama: Democratic Pragmatism and Religious Commitment” attempts to tie Obama to Dewey’s distrust of natural rights, without much success. Obama was hardly speaking out against inalienable rights, as did Wilson. Instead, he was embracing the philosophy as a building block of his own. As Obama said on January 16, 2013:\n“This is the land of the free, and it always will be. As Americans, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights that no man or government can take away from us. But we\u0026rsquo;ve also long recognized, as our Founders recognized, that with rights come responsibilities. Along with our freedom to live our lives as we will comes an obligation to allow others to do the same. We don’t live in isolation. We live in a society, a government of, and by, and for the people. We are responsible for each other.”\nThe basic assumptions of natural right are the foundation for the idea of “human rights,” which lies beneath modern liberal philosophy and in some respects united both left and right until only recently. As Wilson\u0026rsquo;s dream of a \u0026ldquo;League of Nations\u0026rdquo; became reality in the United Nations, his resistance to naming all men as created equal passed away. The United Nations\u0026rsquo; universal charter now reads, \u0026ldquo;All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.\u0026rdquo;\n"},{"title":"Review: \u003cem\u003eVivian Grey\u003c/em\u003e, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-04-25-review-vivian-grey/","date":"April 25, 2025","tags":["Gladstone","Disraeli"],"text":"Review: *Vivian Grey*, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli After Benjamin Disraeli had begun to serve in Tory leadership roles in the House of Commons, he complained to a friend in 1853 that the Conservative backbenchers, largely composed of country aristocrats, could not be counted upon to read a book:\n“They could not be got to attend to business while the hunting season lasted … they had good natural ability … but wanted culture; they never read, their leisure was passed in field sports … they learned nothing useful, and did not understand the ideas of their own time.” (Source: The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830-1867 by Robert Stewart.)\nLater, in 1870, after he’d been prime minister, Disraeli put that complaint in the mouth of a character who states with dripping irony that what he loves about aristocrats is “that they live in the air, that they excel in athletic sports, that they can only speak one language, and that they never read.” But when Disraeli first began to think of breaking into politics, he seems to have had the opposite impression of aristocrats. When at 22 years of age he had his first novel, Vivian Grey, published anonymously in 1826, many critics clamored to guess which member of the aristocracy had written it, claiming the novel revealed inside knowledge of the nobility. One critic, however, correctly figured out that the author of Vivian Grey was no aristocrat because he was too well versed in literature to have been a nobleman: “This ‘somewhat smacks’ of the ‘literary writer,’” he wrote of *Vivian Grey.*“We should have the idea that the class of the author of Vivian Grey was a little betrayed by his often recurrence to topics of this sort, about which the mere man of fashion knows nothing and cares less.”\nVivian Grey turns 200 years old next year, and nothing like it has been written since by a future statesman. Twenty-one years ago, the publisher Routledge issued a new edition of Vivian Grey bursting with new scholarship across two introductions, hundreds of footnotes notating all of the hungry young author’s literary, political, philosophical, scientific, architectural, musical and theatrical allusions, as well as hundreds of pages detailing the fascinating differences between prior editions of the novel, as the first volume of its six-part series The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli. If Google and JSTOR are to be believed, no one the world over reviewed it. This is unfortunate, as the edition represents the best way in 200 years to enjoy this witty, manic-depressive, overstuffed, audacious, sometimes perspicacious, often silly, ridiculous and revealing look at the psychology of a future superstar of world statesmanship.\nDisraeli had the idea that all this showing off would earn him entry to the world of high society, and strangely enough it eventually did. As the Routledge edition’s editor, Michael Sanders, points out in his fascinating and thorough introduction, the young author wrote in the novel that the only routes into “the society of the great” were blood (which he lacked; his father was middle-class, a noted author and a great socialite among the literary classes but not among the nobility), fortune (which Disraeli tried to acquire first with disastrous investments in South American stocks and second with an equally disastrous entrée into the world of newspapers, leaving him deeply in debt almost until the day he died), and genius (which he acheived). This novel, Sanders says, was his attempt to make it into society via genius. When the first four books of the novel were anonymously published, Disraeli’s book became the talk of the town. The reviews were great – until the author was revealed to be a 22-year-old upstart from what he called “middling” beginnings. After that, critics turned on it.\nBut Disraeli’s name had been made. He even wrote a sequel, which is now always bundled with the first volume as one novel. As the great Victorian scholar John Vincent put it, “This sequel is so different in mood and style, not to say merit, that mankind has universally disregarded the second volume.” Most critics fail to say almost anything about it at all. But both parts of the book are worth looking back at as its 200th birthday approaches. The second half is even more stuffed with allusions than the first half. Disraeli seems to have learned his lesson in his later books: The later novels are packed with references, for example, to “the Opera,” but outside of one reference to the composer Donizetti in Tancred, they omit any reference to specifics. So it’s a delight to see Disraeli talking about composers and operas by name and in detail in Vivian Grey. He also discusses novels (Gil Blas seems never to get enough love for Disraeli’s tastes; neither does Tremaine by Robert Plumer Ward), philosophers (the neo-Platonists are the source of particular punchlines, as well as the philosophes Voltaire, Rosseau and the Germans Kant, Fichte and Schelling), historians (Gibbon, Thucydides, Plutarch), politicians (the Duke of Wellington, Canning, Croker), architects (Brunellesco, Palladio, Sanmichele), scientists and astronomers (Aristarchus, Linnaeus, Galileo), visual artists (Cimabue, Vecellio, Corregio), and on and on. Robert Blake once said Disraeli was no intellectual, citing his public response to Darwin, which was to proclaim himself “on the side of the angels” and not on the side of evolution. But the 21-year-old Disraeli was certainly trying hard to look like an intellectual.\nVivian Grey is about ambition, primarily ambition to power, and the onslaught of allusions reflect the fact that the title character’s ambition is autobiographical. Disraeli famously said that “in Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition.” The character arc for Vivian goes from Machiavellian ambition to chastened depression and humility, back to manic ambition again. The plot follows the young dandy Vivian Grey as he attempts to build a political party at 21 by manipulating the aristocratic Marquess of Carabas, who is based upon the publisher John Murray, a former friend he had wheedled into launching a conservative newspaper in the 1820s before it collapsed, leaving both men out thousands of pounds. (Murray, who also published Byron and Jane Austen among many others, felt the characterization in Vivian Grey of the Marquess was libel, and the Routledge edition nicely documents the transition from Disraeli’s entertaining treatment of the Marquess as a hapless drunk in the original 1826 edition to his much kinder treatment in the 1853 edition.) Vivian’s plans collapse when the adults begin to behave as dramatically as he does, and by the end of the first part of the book Vivian accidentally kills (in a duel) a friend and collaborator based on another figure from his newspaper days. In the second part of the book, a devastated Vivian retreats to Germany to heal his emotional wounds. The real Disraeli had traveled Germany in 1824, but he did write the sequel to Vivian Grey while traveling elsewhere in Europe, after a spot of ill health not unlike Vivian’s.\nIt has been observed that the young Disraeli showed signs of bipolar disorder, and it’s no surprise that in 1853 the seasoned political pro issued an edited version of the book that cut out much of the evidence of his violently swinging moods. In the sequel to the original Vivian Grey, in a passage the senior Disraeli had excised from later editions of the book, the narrator admits the characterization in the first was autobiographical but points out defensively that it was a portrait of the author as he was and not as he is:\n“Of the literary vices of Vivian Grey, no one is perhaps more sensible than their author. I conceived the character of a youth of great talents, whose mind had been corrupted, as the minds of many of our youth have been, by the artificial age in which he lived. The age was not less corrupted than the being it generated. In his whole career he was to be pitied; but for his whole career he was not to be less punished. When I sketched the feelings of his early boyhood, as the novelist, I had already foreseen the results to which those feelings were to lead; and had in store for the fictitious character the punishment which he endured. I am blamed for the affectation, the flippancy, the arrogance, the wicked wit of this fictitious character. Yet was Vivian Grey to talk like Simon Pure…?”\nAnd yet several chapters later, Vivian declares that “my ambition is so exalted that I cannot condescend to take anything under the Premiership.” It may be in part a joke, but it reflects a change that earlier ruminations by the narrator delineate: He had decided that his earlier Machiavellian approach to ambition was the product of inexperience, but then having met the successful Mr. Beckendorff, who Disraeli said was based on the crafty conservative Austrian statesman Metternich, he sees an example of Machiavellian ambition in a man he can hardly claim is inexperienced.\nSeminal Disraeli biographer William Monypenny questioned whether the young author was sincere that he had intended Vivian to get his comeuppance from the beginning, arguing somewhat convincingly that the portrait of the more ambitious version of Vivian in the early chapters of the book was too sympathetic for the claim to be believed. But in any case it is true that Disraeli had already begun an introspective analysis of whether the end of gaining power justified the means of manipulation. Vivian Grey has been ranked by Flavorwire.com as the #22 best novel of the 19th Century, ahead of his much better books Coningsby(#37) and Sybil (#47). This is exactly backwards, but it reflects the importance of the novel to the century and to Disraeli, who was known by Vivian first and in some ways most enduringly. One might say that Disraeli’s reputation for lacking principle and for Machiavellian tendencies in politics stems primarily from his own characterization of himself as Vivian Grey.\nIn addition to the plot about ambition, there are also some perfunctory romances, but they aren’t where the young Disraeli’s heart is. At one point he writes of Vivian: “He looked upon marriage as a comedy in which, sooner or later, he was, as a well-paid actor, to play his part; and could it have advanced his views one jot he would have married the Princess Caraboo tomorrow. But of all wives in the world, a young and handsome one was that which he most dreaded.” Disraeli’s novels have been used to argue that he was gay or bisexual, most notably by William Kuhn in The Politics of Pleasure. Indeed while there is nothing overt to satisfy the prurient, an inquiring mind finds Disraeli sometimes seeming more comfortable writing gay than straight. Vivian’s relationship with the enigmatic Mrs. Felix Lorraine makes less sense as the romantic interest she briefly becomes than when she behaves like a modern day best straight friend to Vivian’s best gay friend: “Is Mr. Cleveland handsome?” she gushes to Vivian. “And what colour are his eyes?” Vivian gives her fashion advice, which she eagerly laps up: “Allow me to recommend your Ladyship to alter the order of those bracelets, and place the blue and silver against the maroon. You may depend on it, that is the true Vienna order.” “The blue and silver next to the maroon, did you say? Yes; certainly it does look better.” When their relationship turns romantic, the pair begin speaking stiltedly in quasi-Shakespearean speeches, as though the Bard’s romantic scenes were all the 21-year-old Disraeli knew of love.\nSanders points out the book is rarely credited as a comedy, but nearly every page is full of jokes: “Mr. Grey, I wish you could get me an autograph of Mr. Washington Irving,” says one of Vivian’s female friends. “I want it for a particular friend.” Vivian replies, “Give me a pen and ink; I will write you one immediately.” Often the humor takes the form of Wildean paradoxes, in which a statement seems absurd but reveals a deeper truth. Vivian\u0026rsquo;s love interest Violet Fane, for example, remarks: \u0026ldquo;Is it so unprincipled to break an appointment? I think it is one of the most agreeable and pleasant habits in the world! No young man is expected to keep an appointment.\u0026rdquo; The book was of significant influence to Oscar Wilde decades after its publication, and Wilde is said to have called the novel \u0026ldquo;chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning,\u0026rdquo; which is about right. One scene with Horace Grey, one of the novel’s best characters and a seemingly accurate portrait of Disraeli’s own father, the novelist and literary historian Isaac D’Israeli, is written with the fast-talking moralistic and comedic flair of Aaron Sorkin. Young Vivian, studying for a year in his father’s house just as Disraeli did in his own father’s 25,000-volume library, has begun reading philosophy at a precocious age. Horace launches into a long monologue discouraging him from delving too deeply into that corner of philosophical history at the expense of his duty to humanity, and then puts what Sorkin has called a \u0026ldquo;button on the scene,\u0026rdquo; a distinctive characteristic of his comic rhythm:\n“’Father! I wish to make myself master of the latter Platonists. I want Plotinus, and Porphyry, and Iamblichus, and Syrirnus, and Maximus Tyrius, and Proclus, and Hierocles, and Sallustius, and Damascius.’\n“Mr. Grey stared at his son, and laughed. ‘My dear Vivian! are you quite convinced that the authors you ask for are all pure Platonists? … Try to ascertain, when you are alone, what may be the chief objects of your existence in this world. I want you to take no theological dogmas for granted, nor to satisfy your doubts by ceasing to think; but, whether we are in this world in a state of probation for another, or whether we cease altogether when we cease to breathe, human feelings tell me that we have some duties to perform; to our fellow creatures, to our friends, to ourselves. Pray tell me, my dear boy, what possible good your perusal of the latter Platonists can produce to either of these three interests? I trust that my child is not one of those who look with a glazed eye on the welfare of their fellow-men, and who would dream away an useless life by idle puzzles of the brain; creatures who consider their existence as an unprofitable mystery, and yet are afraid to die.\n“’You will find Plotinus in the fourth shelf of the next room, Vivian.’\u0026quot;\nHorace, as some have argued, is the moral center of the book, and this loving portrait of Disraeli’s dad suggests that Disraeli’s heart is more than just a Machiavellian shell bereft of principle. In fact, the closest Disraeli gets to a specific prescription for political policy in the book comes when he rescues an agricultural tenant from the callous slumlord Stapylton Toad. And Sanders argues that moments edited from the book constitute a young Disraeli reflecting youthful radicalism that the elder Disraeli, now a Tory leader, edits out.\nBoth Disraeli and Vivian Grey left school, which agreed with neither. The headmasters at Disraeli’s school described his as a “foreign and seditious mind, incapable of acquiring the spirit of the school,” which Sanders points out echoes the language used by school authorities in book one chapter four of Vivian Grey. I’d add that it also provides an intriguing explanation for one of the more enigmatic statements Disraeli ever made about himself, that “My mind is a revolutionary mind. It is a continental mind.” Scholars debate the meaning of this odd line, which hints again at a radicalism. But it appears no one has pointed out that Disraeli was reclaiming the language used derisively about him as a child by his headmasters.\nThe book is not without its innovations: it represents the first time anyone used the word “millionaire,” and the first time the word “crony” was used as a verb. (Also, or so it seems, the last, but the usage makes some dictionaries.) But Vivian Grey’s greatest value is the insight it provides into the character of this young genius, especially when that insight is provided unwittingly. The Routledge edition treats us to flights of manic fantasy that Disraeli later had cut. In moments the young author can barely contain his energy and nearly abandons his story:\n“I had intended to have commenced this book with something quite terrific - a murder, or a marriage: and I find that all my great ideas have ended in a lounge. After all it is, perhaps, the most natural termination. In life surely man is not always as monstrously busy, as he appears to be in novels and romances. We are not always in action—not always making speeches, or making money. or making war, or making love.”\nA few paragraphs later he is rambling about “THE PURPLE EMPEROR”, a butterfly that briefly figures in one of Isaac D’Israeli’s novels, a touching tribute but absolutely without context. And finally he is on about a dog, in a passage much derided by critics in 1826:\n“Now Hyacinth, now my Hyacinth, now my own dog; try to leap over me! - frolick away, my beautiful one: I love thee, and have not I cause? What confidence have you violated? What sacred oaths have you outraged? Have you proved a craven in the hour of trial? Have I found you wanting when I called. or false when I fondled? Why do you start so my pretty dog? Why are your eyes so fixed, your ears so erect. Pretty creature! does any thing frighten you? Kiss me, my own Hyacinth my dear, dear dog! Oh! you little wretch! You\u0026rsquo;ve bit my lip. Get out! I\u0026rsquo;ll not speak to you for a fortnight.”\nIn fact, in the end (spoiler forthcoming!) it is the manic rambling that wins out. In the final paragaphs of the book, Disraeli confesses he had planned to keep writing but decided instead that he has written too much already:\n“Here leave we Vivian! It was my wish to have detailed, in the present portion of this work, the singular adventures which befel him in one of the most delightful of modern cities - light hearted Vienna! But his history has expanded under my pen, and I fear that I have, even now, too much presumed upon an attention which, probably, I am not entitled to command.”\nAll this rambling rocketing from mood to mood is almost enough to back the perception that bipolar people often end up the most successful. And to ratify the impression of William Gladstone, Disraeli’s great parliamentary rival, who when he read Vivian Grey concluded that the first quarter of the book was exceedingly clever and the rest of it “trash.” But these deviations from what works best in the book are not only anomalous—they are also among the best insights into the mind of the young Disraeli, which is probably why he cut them and why this edition, which restores them, is so valuable.\n"},{"title":"Woodrow Wilson \u0026amp; The Jackass","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-04-01-wilson-the-jackass/","date":"April 1, 2025","tags":["Wilson"],"text":"Woodrow Wilson \u0026 The Jackass When I saw the email pop up in my inbox from Princeton University Library Special Collections, I hoped I was about to find out what Woodrow Wilson’s least favorite professor had to say about him. This was the professor whose son Wilson fired from the university, in what the editor of the Woodrow Wilson Papers calls the greatest controversy in Wilson’s tenure as president of Princeton. This was the professor he badmouthed for decades. This was the professor a 19-year-old Wilson called “the jackass.”\nI’d been reading the personal correspondence of Henry Clay Cameron, longtime professor of Greek at Princeton, with his son, Arnold Guyot Cameron, a future professor of French there. The Camerons are two of the most colorful characters in the whole of the Wilson Papers. But the letters I’d been reading were part of the little known archive of the Cameron Family Papers at Princeton University. In one letter, written April 17, 1893, the elder Cameron begins to reveal his thoughts on Woodrow Wilson, and specifically on the professor-turned-president’s book about the Civil War and its impact, Division and Reunion. The letter in the collection was truncated; the last sentence of the last page began as follows:\n“Prof. Wilson’s ‘Epoch of US History’ – Disunion and Reconstruction (sic) is rather sharply criticized in The Nation. I read the article today but had already formed my opinion by an examination of the work in the College Library. A Southern man is hardly qualified to\u0026hellip;”\nAnd thence the letter abruptly ends, the final pages of the letter missing. A Southern man is hardly qualified to what?! I wanted to know. To analyze the Civil War? To vote on matters of concern to the North? To speak knowledgeably? The beginning of Cameron’s thought did not sound like a compliment was on its way.\nI had written Princeton to ask if the problem might be a simple error in the digitization of the collection, as I was reading it in an online format. The extremely helpful librarian had told me it was a 50-50 chance that the problem was with the digitization. We both hoped the team that had scanned the letter might have accidentally missed the final page. But the email read: “I am sorry to say that it looks like that is the entirety of the letter! I wish I had better news.”\nThus we have Woodrow Wilson’s thoughts on Professor Cameron, but only a fragment of Professor Cameron’s thoughts on Professor Wilson and his book. But the story of Woodrow Wilson and the professors Cameron is one of the least told and most entertaining in the whole of Wilson’s career as a student and then professor and ultimately president of Princeton.\nHated for his politics One of the reasons Wilson, a Democrat, hated Henry Clay Cameron, a Republican, was his politics. The story of this Greek professor, who was viewed as pedantic, boring and persnickety at least by Wilson and his friends, begins with a vehement argument between Cameron and Wilson\u0026rsquo;s father in the lobby of the Princeton Hotel on September 11, 1876. Wilson\u0026rsquo;s dad, Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was a slavery-supporting southern Presbyterian minister, and Cameron was a Radical Republican at a time when that meant supporting equality and the vote for African Americans. Wilson would go on to write scathing articles opposing the vote for Blacks. When the subject came up of whether the so-called \u0026ldquo;Solid South\u0026rdquo; would ever depart from its loyalty to the Democratic party, sparks flew.\nThe following is from Wilson’s diary as a sophomore at Princeton University in 1876:\n“September 11th Monday. Immediately after breakfast I went to the hotel to see father before his early start. We met Professor Cameron in the hall of the hotel and father had quite a discussion with the jackass on the southern question. He is one of the kind of men that have rent the country and are the curse of the South. He is one of those who says that he was born in the South and knows all about it when they know less than a two year old baby. Such men are a scandal to leaders, as Macaulay said of Croker. Father left on the 9:45 train. I accompanied him to the Junction. It was chilly and rained all day.”\nApparently the argument culminated in this exchange of bitter one-liners:\nCAMERON: I am happy to say that I was never in the state of South Carolina.\nWILSON\u0026rsquo;S FATHER: I have no doubt, Sir, that the state of South Carolina reciprocates.\nWilson’s future brother-in-law, Stockton Axson, who himself would become a professor at Princeton, provides this detail in his memoir, Brother Woodrow: A Memoir of Woodrow Wilson (1993). He says Joseph Ruggles Wilson\u0026rsquo;s retort was \u0026ldquo;prompt\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;dignified but stinging.” In the footnotes of the memoir, editor Arthur S. Link says the allegedly bigoted northerner was “undoubtedly” Cameron.\nThe “southern question,” in 1876 Reconstruction politics, was usually the question of whether the “Solid South”, which voted consistently Democratic, would ever vote Republican. Six years after the event in the hotel lobby Wilson would answer that question by saying that the south would absolutely vote Republican as long as the Republicans stopped insisting on the vote for African Americans.\nHated for his teaching and preaching Cameron’s politics were not, however, the only reason Wilson hated him. James Axtell, in his book The Making of Princeton University, lists Cameron first on a list of “some of the worst” Princeton professors in Wilson’s day:\n“According to the shrewd analysis of Dean ‘Billy’ Magie, [a contemporary of Wilson’s at Princeton] the older underperformers on the pre-Wilsonian faculty seemed to outnumber the younger stars … Some of the worst were:\n“Henry C. Cameron ’47: Presbyterian minister and pedant with an ‘almost encyclopedic’ knowledge of Greek grammar and vocabulary. Assuming that his students were ill-prepared for anything better, he made them ‘parse, and parse, and parse,’ line by tedious line, which naturally ‘killed any interest in Greek as literature.’ For which offense “disorder was rife in his classes” and the sophomores regularly destroyed his hat … On the last day of class, the students would steal his felt hat, cut it into pieces, and distribute them as souvenirs.”\nIn the days following the argument at the Princeton Hotel, Wilson’s diary was full of complaints about Cameron’s teaching and preaching. (Cameron was also a Presbyterian minister and gave sermons on campus.) Here are some highlights of Wilson’s diary.\n“[September] 15th Friday. … Made two recitations to Cameron on Demosthenes De Corona, which recitations he made very stupid as usual.”\n“[September] 19th Tuesday. Went into recitations with Packard[,] Hunt and Deffield in all of which I learned something which is more than I can say of all my recitations. In Cam[eron’s] I learned nothing.”\n“[September] 25th Monday. Went into Greek Testament and Greek recitation with Cameron twice by both of which I was much bored. Studied Greek during the morning. Immediately after dinner having nothing else to do and feeling very little like reading or any kind of confining work I loafed around very generally … and then was bored by Cam for an hour.”\n“[October] 8th Sabbath. Got up about 8:45 and ate a late breakfast—not alone however. Went to church this morning and heard a sermon from Cam. He preached in his usual dull style.”\nWilson was not the only classmate to consider Cameron a jackass. Axtell’s book features a drawing of Cameron with the body of a donkey, made by one of Wilson’s friends. Cameron’s reputation for schoolmarmish eccentricity preceded Wilson. In the days when James McCosh, university president from 1868 to 1888, first arrived at what was then the College of New Jersey, Cameron was in charge of lending books at the library, which was at the time open only one day per week and had a desperately small collection. Still, says Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker in his book Princeton 1746-1896, even with such skimpy resources, Cameron “somewhat grudgingly” opened the library each Monday “to hand out a few volumes.” With such a library policy, Wertenbaker observed, “there would not be much intellectual life on campus.”\nWhat were Cameron’s politics? Yet there was a political dimension to Wilson’s dislike of “Cam.” In November of 1876, two months after the incident at the University Hotel, one of the most notoriously disputed presidential elections happened, as Republican Rutherford Hayes virtually tied Democrat Samuel Tilden. Cameron made a speech for the Republicans, which Link said, in perhaps a significant understatement, was “not reverently received.” Wilson doesn’t mention this part of the festivities in his diary, which Link says “suggests he did not listen to the Republicans.” He did, however, record others of the day’s events in his diary, noting the tense relations between the campus Democrats and Republicans:\n“Last evening and all day today the returns have come in heavy for Tilden. From today’s outlook we might judge that Tilden was elected. I sincerely hope that it may be so. This evening we Democrats had a large bonfire around the cannon on the campus and fine speeches in honor of Tilden’s supposed election. The bonfire and jollification was appointed to take place at 7 1/2 o’clock but about that time reports arrived that Hayes had carried the Union by a majority of four votes in the electoral college. This report made the Republicans jubilant and they immediately got up a procession and tried in every way to demoralize us—jeering at our fire etc. But later in the evening more encouraging reports were received and with confidence once more restored we proceeded with our Democratic demonstration. Our bonfire was a perfect success and the speeches from … Democratic speakers were some of the best that it has been my good fortune to hear.”\nCameron stayed a devoted Republican, as his own papers attest. On November 15 1892 he wrote his son an analysis of another hard-fought election, in which Democrat Grover Cleveland lost to Benjamin Harrison:\n“It is raining hard as I write and will prevent the great Dem. Parade tonight. I am sorry for them. As to the election do not blame the Tribune. The Democrats are as much surprised as the Republicans. Outside of N.Y. I was of the opinion that it would be a close contest – a Waterloo I did not expect. If you will take a map of the U.S. you can easily understand it.\n\u0026ldquo;1. A solid South (159 votes) where the Republican party is practically disfranchised, the whites ostracized and the Blacks terrorized.\n\u0026ldquo;2. New York City ruled by Tammany who are nearly all foreigners with a State (stolen?) and laws as to elections, naturalization and registration made a farce of. Even respectable Democrats who know the facts do not condemn the crimes but even enjoy the fruits.\n\u0026ldquo;3. N.J. and Conn. are made Dem by the overflow from N.Y.\n\u0026ldquo;4. Chicago overwhelmed Illinois.\n\u0026ldquo;5. The general desire for cheap goods as if free trade would produce them, and abundance of money as if the free coinage of silver would give that result.\n“I am not sorry they have the Senate now that they have Pres. \u0026amp; House. They will not dare to carry out their platform.”\n1899: The Wilsons dish the Camerons Seven years later, the Camerons would begin appearing in the letters of Woodrow Wilson, now a professor at Princeton himself, and his wife Ellen. By this time Cameron\u0026rsquo;s son Arnold Guyot Cameron too had joined his father on the faculty of Princeton, teaching French. If the gossip in Princeton is to be believed, it seems Guyot Cameron was getting married to a woman of whom his parents did not approve. The Wilsons\u0026rsquo; letters are uncommonly catty and dishy, as the Wilsons refer to the elder Cameron couple as “the old people,” make fun of the way Guyot Cameron walks, and describe the family’s patriarch as “wicked.” The series of four letters is so entertaining and amusing it is worth reprinting the sections on the Camerons in full:\nJuly 3, 1899\nEllen to Woodrow:\n“[And where do you suppose I went today? To the Guyot Cameron\u0026rsquo;s.] Everyone is rushing to see them, and exhorting everyone else to rush, for a singular though good natured reason. It is because the old parents are behaving scandalously about it; they actually refuse to speak to either their son or his wife; and for no reason whatever except that they were madly determined that he should make a ‘brilliant marriage’!\u0026ndash;which, I am informed means that he should marry a rich any rich New York society girl. It seems he was engaged to this girl for years,\u0026ndash;ever since he was a professor at Miami College (she is from Ohio) \u0026ndash; and has been trying in vain all this time to get their consent, and postponing his marriage solely on that account. He is supposed to feel this sort of thing more keenly than the average American because of his Parisian training; for in France, it seems, it is actually against the law for even mature men to marry without their parents’ consent. So it seems we have a ‘stage father’ among us too. I believe it is the only thing Mr. and Mrs. Cameron ever agreed upon\u0026ndash;a fine one on which to begin!”\nJuly 6 1899\nEllen to Woodrow:\n“Had rather a shock last evening from a most terrific thunder-bolt,— the worst I ever heard. I was sure the house had been struck …The bolt, I learn today, struck Mr. Guyot Cameron\u0026rsquo;s house and knocked down a chimney. His parents will probably consider it a ‘judgment’ on him for his disobedience, It was rather a trying experience for one\u0026rsquo;s honeymoon,\u0026ndash;but doubtless it only afforded him a golden opportunity to show her how brave and ‘noble’ he is.”\nJuly 16, 1899\nWoodrow to Ellen:\n“Your letters are infinitely interesting, my love. I have just read the one about Guyot Cameron’s marriage, the woman he married and their home. It is better to read your descriptions than to see with one\u0026rsquo;s own eyes. As for the attitude and iniquitous action of the old people, it is unspeakable,\u0026ndash; the crowning wickedness of their foolish lives, whose very folly has been essentially wicked. It has been some time since I could trust myself to speak of Dr. Cameron himself,\u0026ndash;but this is more grossly and unintelligently wrong than I supposed even he could do! It almost makes me resolve to like his son, whom he has so brutally mistreated. Let us hope that his young wife will cure him in some degree of the things we find distasteful in him, and will make him more like other men in walk and conversation. It is hard to think of such a mimic man (and a poor, extravagant mimic at that!) having a tragedy of his own, and choosing the way of love rather than the way of filial submission. But that fact alone invests him with a little dignity, and we must give him the benefit of it,\u0026ndash;at any rate in our thought.”\nJuly 31, 1899\nEllen to Woodrow:\n“I was amused at your vivacity of language in condemning the Camerons, yet I feel more than ever today that they deserve it; Mrs. Cameron is going about talking in the most outrageous way. The sympathy of the community is with her son and his wife now, but someday it will be with her when her reasons are known. Oh, she could tell such things, if she chose, about the woman, but she will be silent,\u0026rdquo; \u0026amp;c. \u0026amp;c. Just think how completely such hints might ruin that poor young woman\u0026rsquo;s reputation. Most fortunately, though she is a stranger, there is someone here who knows all about her; she is an intimate friend of Ethelbert Warfield\u0026rsquo;s wife, they taught in the same school and lived in the closest relations. Needless to add they declare [Guyot’s wife] above reproach or suspicion in character, social standing, \u0026amp;c. Mrs. C. also wrote such insulting letters to her that she attempted to break her engagement, but Guyot prevailed with her. And their love affair began ten years ago!”\nAugust 13, 1899\nWoodrow to Ellen:\n“This dear letter of yours, just received (oh, how your letters fill me up, heart and mind!) is the one which tells of Mrs. Cameron’s abominable conduct about her daughter-in-law. I cannot trust myself to speak of it! Even if all that she intimates about the poor girl were true, she ought to be tarred and feathered for speaking of it. But it goes without saying that what such a she-devil says is necessarily false and conceived in mere malevolence! It is indeed most fortunate that there is someone in Princeton who knows Mrs. Guyot\u0026rsquo;s character and antecedents familiarly and can of knowledge offset the slanders of the false mother.”\nThe controversial firing of Guyot Cameron When Wilson found out that Guyot Cameron had received a promotion in 1900, he complained to Ellen that it was a waste of university resources and boosted the old guard at the expense of improvement. As Axtell reports, he ranted, “How complete it all is. Not a pound added to our working force; not a name added to our list, or prestige; money saved and second-rate men promoted!” Guyot Cameron’s classes were popular, but his lectures were reportedly rambling discourses on everything but French. He was widely considered eccentric, or (if one asked Wilson’s classmate Magie) insane. Axtell writes, “His faculty photographs show a handsome narrow-eyed man with a full dark beard neatly trimmed, but sporting an ostentatious handlebar moustache and an arrogant tilt of the head. He may have affected the look of a boulevardier among the staidly attired Protestants of Princeton.” Axtell points out that when Link knew him – Axtell says as late as the 1940s – Guyot Cameron wore “a French-like flowing cape, beret, and moustache and was known for his flamboyance and exaggerated manners.” He was also guilty of a level of sexism that Wilson felt had to be called out: Guyot Cameron said in a classroom that “women were good only for raising bread, babies and hell,” as Link reports in the Wilson Papers, prompting Wilson to say his lectures “went beyond the bounds of decency.”\nWhen Professor Wilson finally became president of Princeton University in 1902, Henry Clay Cameron finally resigned. And not long after that, as early as November of 1903, Wilson’s draft letters make clear he was considering removing his son from the faculty as well. The following spring he began checking with other faculty members about the idea. He fired Guyot Cameron in 1905. Both Axtell and Link in the Wilson Papers do a very good job of covering the controversy. Stockton Axson, who conceded that Wilson’s reasons for firing Guyot Cameron were “all very intangible,” describes talking down a protesting student from going to the newspapers about the firing:\n“I had a visit one night from a student who was a correspondent of one of the New York papers. He came in great anger to tell me that the next day\u0026rsquo;s papers were going to contain an exposure of the whole matter and wanted to know if I had anything to say. I told him exactly what Mr. Wilson\u0026rsquo;s attitude was toward the gentleman and gave him an unimpassioned account of the reasons why Mr. Wilson did not think this gentleman was competent for his position. Rather to my surprise, the student was convinced and, before leaving the room, he told me the articles would all be suppressed. And so the matter never got into the papers.”\nBut it was stormy internally. Wilson initially told Guyot Cameron in a meeting in the Wilson home that he was going to give him a year to find another job. The French professor became so heated that Wilson rescinded the offer. A member of Cameron’s class told a trustee of the university that Wilson “had ‘hounded’ and ‘persecuted’ Cameron until he had become excited and almost beside himself,” as the trustee wrote in a letter to Wilson. “I told him that those were general terms; and asked him to specify the acts which he called ‘hounding’ and ‘persecuting.’ He said you had attacked Cameron\u0026rsquo;s scholarship. I asked him to specify how you had attacked it. He said by talking about it.” The same trustee was accosted as well by Guyot Cameron’s parents. “Cameron tackled me at Princeton and earnestly protested against what he called an ‘outrage.’ Mrs. Cameron waylaid me outside of Alexander Hall and to use a classical phrased, ‘gave it to me in the neck,’ as a trustee—and I may add, she did not spare” Woodrow Wilson.\nWilson would eventually relent and give Guyot Cameron the year to find another teaching job, but he never did. He continued to live in Princeton, though he supposedly never set foot on the campus again (“a very difficult feat for any Princeton resident,” Axtell notes). He sent all of his many sons to Yale, at which he had taught beginning in 1891. Link speculates the children attended Yale on scholarship. Though the family fell on hard times, Link says, Guyot Cameron would destroy food baskets left on the back porch because he refused to accept charity. Guyot Cameron did eventually do some writing for the Wall Street Journal and other financial publications, Axtell adds.\nIn 1911, the year Wilson began as governor of New Jersey and the year before he became president of the United States, Guyot Cameron wrote a report of his own activities since graduating Princeton as an undergraduate in 1886.\n“I have been ‘out of a job’ for six years. I shall not discuss this, nor the causes of these results. Into that tissue of falsehoods, hypocrisies, hereditary enmities, and personal ones, due to entirely honorable reasons, I shall not go. … In 1905, thrown out of Princeton, I was out. And these six years have been another story, in which many vicissitudes and adversities have been mine, but in which I would not [trade]—I respect myself too much, which is no fatuous remark—with the men who have done wrong and have then lied to cover it.”\n"},{"title":"Review: \u003cem\u003eEndymion\u003c/em\u003e, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-03-25-review-endymion/","date":"March 25, 2025","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: *Endymion*, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli “How is that your hero should be a Whig?” Queen Victoria asked Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in a letter after she finished her two-month project of reading his final novel Endymion in 1880.\nUntil April of that year Disraeli was the head of the conservative Tory party and therefore in charge of defeating the liberal Whig party. And yet “the whole tone of Endymion is distinctly Whiggish,” as Philip Guedalla wrote in his introduction to a 1926 edition of the book. The lead character is a Tory turned Whig, and many of the most sympathetic supporting characters are Whigs too.\nThe political observations in this entertaining and wistful novel may fail to coalesce into a roman à thèse like those of Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s earlier political novels, which is disappointing. But Endymion is an under-read work of considerable wit even when it lacks the thematic focus of his prior novels.\nPerhaps the book has a Whiggish tone because Disraeli was in a mellow mood. The narrative of Endymion begins in a moment in time, 1827, when Disraeli felt things were less bitter in politics:\n“The darkest hour precedes the dawn, and a period of unusual stillness often, perhaps usually, heralds the social convulsion. At this moment the general tranquillity and even content were remarkable. In politics the Whigs were quite prepared to extend to [hardline Tory leader the Duke of Wellington] the same provisional confidence that had been accepted by [the more liberal Tory leader] Mr. Canning, and conciliation began to be an accepted phrase.”\nTo Disraeli, the social convulsion that was approaching was the battle that accompanied the Reform Act of 1832, which expanded the tiny electorate and attempted to fix the problem of \u0026ldquo;rotten boroughs,\u0026rdquo; legislative districts that were absurdly drawn and dominated by aristocratic families. So bittersweetly nostalgic a look at that time is jarring from a contemporary perspective, for good reason: we usually regard the years before reform as the dark ages. But the view from Disraeli’s unique vantage is a fascinating one.\nIn fact, though the book is approaching its 150th birthday, no one has examined the politics in this novel in quite enough detail. The book has never been annotated the way almost all of Disraeli’s other novels have. Without annotation, for non-Brits in particular, the book may be approachable only because the Internet has made it easy to look up the historical details. But with that tool at hand it\u0026rsquo;s a fascinating and fun read.\nThe novel, set between 1827 and 1855 (according to Thom Braun in his book Disraeli the Novelist), tells the story of Endymion Ferrars, who as the book begins is the small child of a Tory government official swimming in the London high society life. After the Reform Act is passed in 1832 and the Whigs take over, however, Endymion’s father is unable to climb back into government and they are forced to move miles out of London to a country area not yet serviced by the railroads. Ultimately, he commits suicide, and his wife dies of grief, leaving Endymion and his twin sister orphaned. The rest of the book relates Endymion’s climb from office boy to, in the final pages of the novel, Whig Prime Minister.\nThrough the story of Endymion’s family Disraeli tells of the so-called “great world” of English high society, which is in transition between domination by the aristocracy to domination by industry. He writes that the aristocracy was much smaller, and though it had adopted the new rich \u0026ldquo;nabobs\u0026rdquo; who had gone to India and then returned to England wealthy as a result, and investors in land, it had yet to have to meet a vast new class of incoming entrepreneurs and industrialists who would become rich in the decades after the Reform act passed:\n“The great world then, compared with the huge society of the present period, was limited in its proportions \u0026hellip; It consisted mainly of the great landed aristocracy, who had quite absorbed the nabobs of India, and had nearly appropriated the huge West Indian fortunes. Occasionally, an eminent banker or merchant invested a large portion of his accumulations in land, and in the purchase of parliamentary influence, and was in time duly admitted into the sanctuary. But those vast and successful invasions of society by new classes which have since occurred, though impending, had not yet commenced. The manufacturers, the railway kings, the colossal contractors, the discoverers of nuggets, had not yet found their place in society and the senate.”\nDisraeli says with an almost audible sigh that the social world before the Reform Act was in some ways preferable because it was smaller but that they knew less of the poor, and the poor knew less of themselves:\n“Conversation was more cultivated; manners, though unconstrained, were more stately; and the world, being limited, knew itself much better. On the other hand, the sympathies of society were more contracted than they are at present. The pressure of population had not opened the heart of man. The world attended to its poor in its country parishes … but their knowledge of the people did not exceed these bounds, and the people knew very little more about themselves. They were only half born.”\nSuch concern for the poor is less a major theme here than in Disraeli’s earlier novel Sybil. (Such as it was \u0026ndash; while it focused on the condition of the under-classes its thesis supporting a government run by young aristocrats hardly qualified as the most sensitive of all novels of its time.) But it does paint a rousing picture of multiple elements of British society at the time. The character list is made up of fictionalized and often satirical portraits of persons Disraeli knew: Louis Napoleon, William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Carlyle (the latter two of whom are combined in the brilliantly funny character of St. Barbe), Bismarck, the Rothschilds, and many others.\nThe characters in_Endymion_ are not always Disraeli’s most fully sketched. The author never mentions the age of one character, Lady Montfort, until late in the book, and I know from reading reviews on Goodreads that I’m not the only reader to have been picturing a much older woman than Disraeli intended almost until she was the young Endymion’s romantic interest. Lady Monfort’s dry, sharp wit conjures Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell until suddenly, on page 315 of 511, she is described as young and beautiful: “Here were three women, young, beautiful and powerful, and all friends of Endymion.”\nWomen are important to this novel. Critics have rarely failed to notice the theme of women advancing the careers of men, and that’s not surprising given how often Disraeli’s characters ruminate about the qualities of “women” in general. Here is a smattering of examples:\n“Everything in this world depends upon will,” Lady Monfort says.\n“I think everything in this world depends upon women,” Endymion retorts.\n“It is the same thing,” answers back Lady Monfort.\n“I wish I had been a woman,\u0026quot; says the cynical journalist St. Barbe. \u0026ldquo;Women are the only people who get on. A man works all his life, and thinks he has done a wonderful thing if, with one leg in the grave and no hair on his head, he manages to get a coronet; and a woman dances at a ball with some young fellow or other, or sits next to some old fellow at dinner and pretends she thinks him charming, and he makes her a peeress on the spot. Oh! it is a disgusting world; it must end in revolution.”\n\u0026ldquo;I like fascinating women,\u0026rdquo; says a prince, \u0026ldquo;but they are rare.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Perhaps it is better it should be so,\u0026rdquo; said Lady Roehampton, \u0026ldquo;for they are apt—are they not?—to disturb the world.\u0026rdquo;\nOccasionally the author and/or his characters mean to be complimentary but come off as condescending instead:\n“I believe that women are loved much more for themselves than is supposed. Besides, a woman should be content if she is loved; that is the point; and she is not to inquire how far the accidents of life have contributed to the result. Why should you not be loved for yourself? You have an interesting appearance. I think you very pretty.”\nEndymion marks the first time Disraeli inserts a fictional prime minister into his otherwise historical timeline of real prime ministers: at the end of the novel, Endymion takes over after the real-life Aberdeen government has fallen. Before Endymion, Disraeli’s mature novels (from Coningsby on) have always named the prime ministers by their real names and often commented sarcastically upon them. The only exception was Lothair, set during the years Disraeli himself was prime minister. In that novel he simply ignored the prime minister altogether, avoiding the unsightly egotism of depicting himself.\nWas Disraeli in a Whiggish mood at the close of his life? (He died the year after the book was published.) It wouldn’t be the first time. John Vincent wrote that his first political novel, Coningsby, “while affecting to be anti-Whig … was in reality venomously anti-Tory.” It’s been speculated that Disraeli made Endymion a Whig because that party dominated politics during the period he chose to write about, so it’s impossible to write a rising Tory in that age. But this is unconvincing as Disraeli himself rose to prominence as a Tory during that time, and there’s no reason he could not have given Endymion an ascent to Tory power like his own.\nWhen he answered Queen Victoria’s question — why make your hero a Whig of all things?— Disraeli offered no hint of a change of political mind. Stanley Weintraub’s Farewell Victoria!(2011) reveals that Disraeli returned the queen’s letter by writing that his lead character Endymion “was not intended for a hero any more than M. Gil Blas by LeSage.” Weintraub decodes this reference: “In Alain-Rene LeSage’s Gil Blas (1715), the hero is a rather passive student pushed by circumstance into a series of adventures.”\nEndymion, Disraeli continued, was given “no imagination and very controlled passions: but he has great patience, perseverance, judgment and tact, which qualities, with good looks, have, before this, elevated men in your Majesty’s Councils.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;He is in fact rather a plodder,\u0026rdquo; Disraeli concluded with a sneer, \u0026ldquo;and I thought quite good enough to be a Whig.”\n"},{"title":"Fired for “Calhoun views”: 19th Century cancel culture and Woodrow Wilson’s relationship to a quintessential southerner","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-03-24-fired-for-calhoun-views/","date":"March 24, 2025","tags":["Wilson"],"text":"Fired for “Calhoun views”: 19th Century cancel culture and Woodrow Wilson’s relationship to a quintessential southerner In 1886 a young Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Bryn Mawr College, struck up a conversation with a fellow professor from Indiana University. He poked around asking questions about Indiana University because, as he explained, his friend Richard Heath Dabney was going to be taking a position as a professor of history there. Wilson later told Dabney about the results: “He said, amongst many things that were irrelevant to my purpose, this, which was extremely relevant, that your predecessor, Newkirk, had been turned out because he often spoke before he thought and, thus speaking, had let drop ‘Calhoun views’ on the Constitution. In a word, you have gotten into a chair whose incumbent is expected to present, not the scientific truth with reference to our Constitutional history, whether that truth be on the side of Webster or of Calhoun in the great historical argument, but ‘Yankee sentiments’—sentiments agreeable to that eminent body of scholars, the Grand Army of the Republic. It’s a shame; but I hope that the reality isn’t half as bad as these bits of rumor.”\nThis forgotten episode invites a conversation on how Wilson’s own thinking was shaped by southern intellectual traditions, an inheritance that some modern Wilson scholars have recently tended to downplay. It also beckons an examination of Calhoun’s influence on Wilson, and could even suggest that a 19th century “cancel culture,” to use a modern term, may possibly have influenced his later partial embrace of northern thinking on some issues.\nIn my March 17 post, “The two arguments about Woodrow Wilson’s racism,” I rebutted Ronald J. Pestritto’s statement that Wilson’s attitude toward African Americans was “mostly attributable” to the historicist nature of his philosophy, which is to say mainly the influence of Hegel and other Germans. In making his case that Wilson\u0026rsquo;s racism had roots somewhere other than in his southern origins, however, Pestritto also makes another argument: That Wilson was “no southern partisan,” and “did not, in fact, subscribe to the ‘southern’ position on most political questions.” Among the reasons he comes to this conclusion is that Wilson declined to call the southern statesman John C. Calhoun a “Great American” when he wrote his “Calendar of Great Americans.” In two books Pestritto says Wilson described Calhoun as “reactionary and ‘provincial.’” This is less than half accurate: Wilson never uses the word “reactionary” to describe Calhoun, which is why Pestritto doesn’t put it in quotation marks. Wilson did use the word “provincial,” but Pestritto neglects to mention that he called him a “great provincial.” He was not insulting Calhoun or his provincialism, he was merely pointing out that Calhoun’s purpose was not national. “The strength displayed,” Wilson wrote, “the intellectual power and address, abundantly entitle him to be called great; but his purpose was not national. It regarded but a section of the country, and marked him—again be it said with all respect—a great provincial.”\nIn reality, Wilson had a more complex intellectual relationship with John C. Calhoun than Pestritto implies, and though the young Wilson may not have fully realized it, not a few “Calhoun views” of his own. The future president seems to have been greatly influenced by admirers of Calhoun, including his own father, and a closer look at the facts backs up my argument that his southern roots were more impactful on his racism and his thinking than is admitted by some scholars.\nCalhoun, a major figure in 19th Century politics, is perhaps dimly remembered by many today. Here\u0026rsquo;s the basics: Calhoun was the seventh vice president, under John Quincy Adams. After that he was a consequential senator from South Carolina, from 1845 to 1850, as well as Secretary of State for both Polk and Tyler. He is probably best remembered as a supporter of slavery, and as a constitutional theorist with a view of state’s rights that set up the country for a civil war a decade after his death. His views were heavily influential on the secession of the South in 1860. When Woodrow Wilson talks about “Calhoun views,” he is mainly talking about a view of the Constitution that emphasizes the sovereignty of the states, and when he talks about the “great historical debate” he is perhaps talking about a pro-Union view versus a state’s rights perspective.\nWhat follows below is a brief catalog of “Calhoun views” enumerated in a great book review by Allan C. Guelzo titled “American Heretic, American Burke.” The review, of Robert Elder’s Calhoun: American Heretic, appeared in The New Criterion in February 2021. All of these views have been attributed to the young Wilson when he was a scholar of government and derided by Pestritto and conservative colleagues as Hegelian.\nGuelzo says Calhoun’s political theory was built around three key views:\n“First, his repudiation of the Declaration of Independence and the natural-law principles it embodies. Calhoun went straight to the root of American political self-understanding by insisting that the Declaration of Independence, by taking inalienable natural rights as its fundamental premise, was an enormous mistake. ‘There had never been a proposition of such dangerous import, or which had been so misunderstood, or been productive of so much evil’ as the notion that ‘certain inalienable rights’ had been conveyed to anyone, much less life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness …\n“Second, his advocacy of white racial supremacy. Nothing was more obvious to Calhoun but that Africans were far, far below the bar of such political privileges. “I appeal to facts,” he declared in an 1837 speech. “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually” as it has under American slavery …\n“Third, his romantic glorification of historical process. Not only were the Declaration and natural law wrong, they were also historically irrelevant. ‘If we trace it back,’ Calhoun declared before the Senate in 1848, ‘we shall find the proposition’ about equality ‘expressed in the Declaration of Independence’ had been ‘inserted in our Declaration of Independence without any necessity.’ The real origins of the Revolution were evolutionary, as British colonists used, developed, and asserted traditional English liberties … It stood to reason, then, that historical process would not stand still, either, but continue to reveal itself in new developments, in different places, among the relations of different peoples. The Constitution contained more than one ‘case of mission,’ and relied on ‘slow and successive experience’ for ‘correction and adaptation.’ It was only to be expected that ‘preservation is perpetual creation.’ Calhoun was, in that sense, the first living constitutionalist.”\nHere are Wilson’s views on these three points:\nFirst, Wilson also derided the Declaration of Independence’s theory of natural rights. He once counseled that if one was to understand the Declaration of Independence, one should skip the preface, which establishes the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual,” Wilson wrote in 1908, “and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle. The rights of man are easy to discourse of … but they are infinitely hard to put into practice. Such theories are never “law.” … Only that is “law which can be executed, and the rights of man are singularly difficult to execute.”\nSecond, Wilson has been described, however fairly, as a white supremacist. When Trygve Throntveit made an argument in his book Power Without Victory (2017) that Wilson was racist but not a white supremacist, he was excoriated in not one but two different book reviews on a single web site, for the latter argument. Splitting hairs on the extent of Wilson’s racism has not been a popular position in recent years.\nThird, the first person to use the term “living constitution,” if Wikipedia and Pestritto are to be believed, was Wilson himself. The thesis of Pestritto’s book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (2005) is that Wilson had a “historicist” point of view that history is evolutionary and government through history is a “work-in-progress” therefore requiring “continual adjustment to historical circumstances as it tried to fulfill the broad democratic vision of the founders,” as Pestritto writes. This he contrasts with his own view, that the founders did not understand themselves that way, “as Wilson well knew. This is why much of his scholarship is devoted to a reinterpretation and critique of both the political theory of the founding.” The founders, Pestritto says, had a “fixed view of the US Constitution’s meaning” and did not expect its meaning to evolve. That interpretation of the founders contradicts Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that “I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it,” but that’s a debate for another post on this blog.\nAll three of these views have also been described as Hegelian. The first point of view is not described by Pestritto as Hegelian, but it is by Jean Yarbrough in her book Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition (2014). Not everyone agrees Hegel held this view. In the case of the second view, while Pestritto does not say Hegel is a “white supremacist,” he makes the case that Hegel, like Calhoun and Wilson, saw slavery as a positive development for African Americans, and saw history as progressing through the advance of superior races.\nOne of Pestritto’s college professors, Harry Jaffa, goes so far as to suggest that Calhoun was actually directly influenced by Hegel. This view is rejected by Nathan Sheely in his paper “Jaffa’s Critique of Calhoun and the Conservative Civil War Over the Civil War”:\n“Although there are a number of compelling correspondences between Calhoun and Hegel, as with his comparison of Calhoun and Rousseau, Jaffa can be faulted for appearing to suggest that there was direct influence, and for insisting so stridently that Calhoun was, in fact, a Hegelian. Jaffa seems to ignore profound methodological and substantive differences in their political theories and the lack of any documented connection between Calhoun and Hegelian thought. This does not mean, however, that the comparison is fruitless, nor that the resemblances in their thought are merely superficial. By demonstrating that Calhoun and Hegel share a similarly progressive view of history, and that elements of their view of the nature of government overlap, Jaffa certainly raises doubts about the extent to which Calhoun can be viewed as the answer to the modern progressive movement. The fact that Calhoun’s thought shares as many similarities as it does to a German philosophy that deeply influenced the early progressive movement should certainly give conservatives seeking to champion Calhoun pause.”\nSheely points out that Calhoun was widely read and admired by German political scientists. But the reverse — that Calhoun and his followers in the South read Hegel and other Germans — does not appear to be the case.\nIn any case, Wilson doesn’t appear to have gotten these “Calhoun views” directly from Calhoun. The Wilson papers don’t show any evidence that he read Calhoun’s books. His source on the southern statesman was a (derogatory) biography by H. Van Holst titled John C. Calhoun that does not explicate the points described above, though it does include in its bibliography Calhoun’s posthumously released books Disquisition on Government and_A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States_, which do include the above arguments.\nThis raises the question: To what extent did his father and other southerners in Wilson’s life pass on these views to the future president? Clement Eaton, in his in book Freedom of Thought in the Old South(1940) charts how hugely influential Calhoun was in the South and identifies him as a major influence on a stage of southern thinking in which Jefferson’s natural law views become de-popularized in the South. Wilson likely picked up his resistance to the inalienable rights section of the Declaration of Independence that way. And on states rights, his father was also likely influential. Wilson’s dad Joseph Ruggles Wilson wrote about his agreement with Calhoun on state’s rights. The following is from a letter Wilson’s dad wrote him about a paper a classmate of Woodrow’s wrote about Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke, a contemporary of Calhoun’s. In it Joseph Ruggles Wilson specifically mentions Calhoun:\n“Why, the boy mistakes R[andolph]’s chief glory for his principal shame – ie, his view of the federative feature in the constitution, which he predicted would become the all-in-all of its entire face, which recent events are rapidly showing to be already the fact\u0026ndash;\u0026amp; in this prescience (shared by Calhoun) it was that his advocacy of State’s rights was grounded—a kind of rights which, if subverted, will leave us a prey to every political danger – will be a shearing of the republic of its locks and leave it in the lap of some anarchical Deliliah for a destructive enemy to bind. These rights are all, or nearly all, that render our gov’t peculiar. These gone, it becomes like any other republic which has been both the surprise and the contempt of history. And yet, [the classmate’s essay] speaks of R[andolph]\u0026rsquo;s adherence to the doctrine of State’s rights as ‘merely an extension of egotism. The whole tone of the piece is away from my taste.”\nThe word “peculiar” in this letter is a clear reference to Calhoun’s famous description of slavery as “the peculiar institution.”\nIt would be easy to argue that Wilson did not inherit his dad’s view of state’s rights, but in his early years he clearly did. Woodrow writes like a state’s rights advocate in the margins of a biography of (once again) John Randolph by Henry Adams in 1882, saying “Strange that the best interpretation of State’s Rights should come from an Adams!”\nBy 1893 in his book Division and Reunion, about the Civil War, Wilson was making a tortured argument against state’s rights that betrayed his “Calhoun views” despite its conclusion. As Pestritto writes in his book America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism (2021), “for Wilson, it was the southerners who were the constitutional originalists … The forces of state’s rights and secession, as Wilson understood them, represented the founders’ constitution as it was originally intended to be.” But then, Pestritto says, he praises Abraham Lincoln for treating the Constitution as a living document that is intended for evolution, and opts for a pro-Union view. Pestritto argues this means Wilson was “no southern partisan.”\nThe way Wilson constructs his argument, however, strikes me as though he had felt pressure to choose the northern side of the debate – almost as though, in other words, he was afraid of being “cancelled” (censored) for his Calhoun views. In any case, Calhoun’s thinking was pervasive in the South when Wilson grew up, and if we seek an explanation for these particular views showing up in Wilson’s thinking before he began to read the Germans, an explanation including Calhoun’s influence in the South seems much more likely than one that excludes it.\n"},{"title":"Review: On \u003cem\u003eLothair\u003c/em\u003e and Benjamin Disraeli’s Religious Psychology","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-03-22-review-lothair/","date":"March 22, 2025","tags":["Gladstone","Disraeli"],"text":"Review: On *Lothair* and Benjamin Disraeli’s Religious Psychology Who was Disraeli really on matters of religion?\nWhy did former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli write this fairly searching exploration of religious feeling, his second straight novel about a young British aristocrat on a spiritual quest, when in private, to his friends, he was inclined to diss all religions and claim he was incapable of religious belief? Thinking about the answer to this question makes his novel “Lothair” (a huge bestseller in 1870 but often poorly reviewed) entertaining despite the fact that it is not the best, most original or most informative of his novels.\nAs in prior novels like “Tancred,” Disraeli’s last novel on religious themes, in “Lothair” he touts Judaism, the religion of his childhood before he was baptized into the Anglican Church at 12 years of age. But this time the focus is on Catholicism. Lothair, the title hero, is based on the real-life 3rd Marquess of Bute, an orphan who is reported to have been the richest man in the world in the 1860s but who scandalized Victorian society by converting to Catholicism after turning 21 and reaching his majority. In the novel, Lothair is courted in entertainingly insidious fashion, though not altogether unsympathetically, by a Roman Catholic Cardinal. This character is based on an actual prelate who earned Disraeli’s wrath by switching from an allegiance with his Conservative Party to an allegiance with Gladstone’s Liberal Party, after Gladstone hit on the idea of advocating for the disestablishment of the Irish Anglican Church as a way of pushing Disraeli out of the Prime Minister’s seat. Why Disraeli lost the 1868 election is debated (was it the fact that he expanded the voters with the Reform Act of 1867 and thereby allowed in many new liberal voters?) but it is clear that Gladstone had at least one friend who saw this move as the only way to “get Dizzy out of office.” (Or so Victor Bogdanor reports in his introduction to Oxford University Press’ 1975 edition of Lothair.) So it has been argued that Disraeli wrote this book to get revenge on the real life Cardinal Manning who inspired his Cardinal Grandison.\nLothair, thus courted for his money and influence by multiple religions, finds himself choosing between three women who each represent a religious perspective: a Catholic who is married to God, an Anglican, and a liberal humanist whose religion is her own conscience. It is the third perspective Disraeli writes with the greatest passion, interestingly, and we wonder whether he will finally end with a hero who is not (like Disraeli himself) a member of the Anglican Church.\nI suspect Disraeli secretly longed to embrace a humanist philosophy himself. Disraeli\u0026rsquo;s tendency towards \u0026ldquo;open ridicule, in private, of all religions\u0026rdquo; was relayed to the ages by Lord Stanley, the 15th Earl of Derby, and quoted in Paul Smith\u0026rsquo;s Disraeli: A Brief Life. Smith says Stanley in 1851 found Disraeli eager to discuss his prediction that \u0026ldquo;the sentiment, or instinct, of religion would by degrees, though slowly, vanish as knowledge became more widely spread.\u0026rdquo; Elsewhere in Stanley\u0026rsquo;s diaries he discloses that Disraeli was \u0026ldquo;incapable\u0026rdquo; of religious belief.\nStill, he also wrote passionately about religion. Many thought Disraeli was also incapable of principle, but it’s hard to believe that when he wrote with this much reflection and investment in a subject he could easily not have written about at all. This leads me to suspect that however much he longed to be a humanist he was more than simply a believer in the institution of the church, which he sincerely thought kept England from chaos and revolution. Disraeli was a consummate enigma when it came to religion, writing with passion about Judaism but also colorfully about Catholicism and supportively of Anglicanism. The best way to explore who he was perhaps is to read this book and the novel he wrote twenty years before this one, “Tancred.”\n"},{"title":"The impact of Britain\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;New Liberalism\u0026rdquo; on Woodrow Wilson","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-03-21-new-liberalism-wilson/","date":"March 21, 2025","tags":["Wilson","Gladstone"],"text":"The impact of Britain's \"New Liberalism\" on Woodrow Wilson Woodrow Wilson called himself a “progressive” in 1916, and a “liberal” in 1917, Helena Rosenblatt asserts in her book The Lost History of Liberalism(2018). This change of nomenclature, she suggests, happened in part because Wilson “imported” what in Britain is called “the New Liberalism.” While British scholars debate whether there was such a thing as a New Liberalism, the term refers to a sea change between 19th Century “Classical Liberalism,” which promoted small government, lassiez-faire values and free trade, and 20th Century “New Liberalism,” which promoted an activist government that provides a social safety net for the poor, the elderly and the working class. Those who argue for the existence of a New Liberalism say it guided the establishment of a safety net by the ruling Liberal Party between 1906 and 1914.\nSo: what is the evidence Wilson knowingly imported New Liberalism? It certainly would seem to make sense that Wilson would be influenced by the trend. For one thing, he was more a fan of British government as a young man than he was of American government. When he was a college student Wilson wrote in his diary on July 4, 1876, “One hundred years ago America conquered England in an unequal struggle and this year she glories over it. How much happier … she would be if she had England’s form of government instead of the miserable delusion of a republic.” Secondly, it’s indisputably true that Wilson followed the Brits into progressive politics, becoming governor of New Jersey in 1910 on a progressive platform and then president in 1912 in large measure because he went out of his way to be perceived as progressive.\nWhat is surprising, however, is the paucity of evidence that the Wilson of 1906-1914 thought very much at all about changes in either Britain’s domestic policy or the meaning of the word “liberal.” A review of all the references to Great Britain in the exhaustive Woodrow Wilson Papers in the years before the war shows zero references to the domestic policies that anchored New Liberalism under the Liberal Party between 1906 and 1914, such as Britain’s 1909 People’s Budget, which established a British version of our social security program, and other social initiatives.\nWilson did make one statement, however, to identify himself with the Liberal Party of Britain after he became governor of New Jersey, contrary to Rosenblatt’s claim that Wilson didn’t identify himself as a liberal until 1917. In an article on April 30, 1911 in Virginia’s Norfolk Landmark, the future president is quoted as saying: “We do not find any one kind of Democrats or any one kind of Republicans—they are progressives or standpatters, and there are standpatter Democrats as well as standpatter Republicans. There are Liberals, who believe that because there is to be a change things are not going to be torn down, and there are Tories who are satisfied with the deterioration of the past.” Then he asked a question people were unaccustomed to being asked: ‘Are you a Liberal, allied with the future of the race, or a Tory, satisfied with the deterioration of the past?”\nWhat type of liberalism – whether what we today call “classical liberalism” or “modern liberalism” – Wilson does not say. When Wilson was in college, he wrote glowing essays endorsing the liberalism of William Gladstone, symbol of the classical style. When Wilson’s influences (like fellow Gladstone fan Edwin Godkin, founder of The Nation) excoriated the new liberalism, however, Wilson did not do it with them. He continued to write as though liberalism had never changed. One scholar of Wilson’s thought, William Diamond in The Economic Thought of Woodrow Wilson(1943), once speculated that Wilson’s own thinking was somewhat confused as to the distinction between two liberalisms. Though Diamond called them “American liberalism” and “economic liberalism” they appear to basically be the same as modern and classical liberalism:\n“Although it is theoretically possible to draw such a distinction, it is obvious that the two ‘liberalisms’ had enough in common to permit them to become confused and frequently indistinguishable in American thought. The confusion and conflict between these two sets of doctrine may be seen in Wilson’s thought, too. During his academic years, the competitive rigors of economic individualism were frequently attenuated by Wilson’s insistence upon social responsibility and equality of opportunity. If the two were in conflict, it was because the impact of social conditions made laissez faire seem sometimes inconsistent with equality. In the years that followed, sometimes one tradition, the entrepreneurial, and sometimes the other, the equalitarian, seemed to predominate in Wilson’s thought. At all times both were present, and Wilson would have made no distinction between the two.”\nI’m not the only one to find it difficult to establish a direct connection between British New Liberalism and American progressivism. In 1956 Arthur Mann wrote an essay titled “British Social Thought and American Reformers of the Progressive Era.” While the purpose of the paper is to catalog the influence of the British on American progressivism, Mann ends up despairing of being able to chart that very thing:\n“But the influence of an idea eludes mathematical measurement, and the historian cannot formulate in decimal points the impact of British social criticism on the American Progressive Era. It is frustrating, for example, to attempt to measure the influence of Robert Blatchford\u0026rsquo;s Merrie England on Eugene Debs\u0026rsquo;s conversion to socialism, when we know that he read other socialistic books while in Woodstock jail, and when we recall that he came out of jail more Populist than Socialist. … The historian of ideas must fall back on the statement that British criticism was but one factor in the Progressive equation.”\nMann does come up with some evidence of influence from British Liberalism on American Liberalism, however. To establish that the People’s Budget had an impact on Progressive thinkers in the USA, Mann cites the 1911 autobiography of the then-mayor of Cleveland, Ohio: “When [then-Chancellor of the Exchequer] Lloyd George\u0026rsquo;s budget completed the British assault on laissez faire,” Mann writes, ‘“Mayor Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland said: ‘We of the United States are interested in that struggle over there, not as outsiders but as insiders.’” It’s interesting that Mann has to go as far from Washington politics as the mayor of Cleveland to establish American interest in the revolution of what liberalism meant that was solidified in England in Lloyd George’s budget.\nThe literature in such transatlantic studies has produced few books, and the ones that have been written tend to comment on the relative lack of related literature. When Robert Kelly wrote The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone(1969), which makes a case that British politics were heavily influential on American politics in the second half of the 19th Century, he said he planned to write a sequel that covered the same kind of influence during the Wilson years. He never wrote the sequel, perhaps in part because he failed to find the kind of direct evidence for which he was looking. The most respected book on the flow of ideas across the ocean seems to be Daniel Rodgers\u0026rsquo; Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age(2000), which does a great job covering the influence of European social thought on the United States — especially through Theodore Roosevelt, as one might expect — but which finds little more establishing a direct connection between New Liberalism on Woodrow Wilson before World War One than is acknowledged here. After the war Wilson’s “secretary” Joe Tumulty did propose old-age pensions, health insurance and other measures very much like what Britain passed before the war. And both Rodgers and Rosenblatt identify the influence of new liberalism on The New Republic, which was influential on Roosevelt before the war and Wilson after. But before the war Wilson appears to have been surprisingly quiet about Britain’s influence. Rodgers does spot an interesting anecdote from the presidential campaign of 1912, when Wilson praised the government of the city of Glasgow, Scotland as being “way ahead of us.” But that’s the closest pre-war Wilson comes to acknowledging his debt to Britain in Rodger’s book.\nAdam Tooze, in his book The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order(2014),implies that Wilson seemed almost uninformed of Lloyd George’s liberal accomplishments: “Wilson was no doubt more comfortable with the British than the French and wrote eloquently about the merits of the British constitution,” Tooze writes. “But precisely because Britain was the nation from which America\u0026rsquo;s own political culture had historically derived, it was essential for Wilson that Britain itself must remain fixed in the past. The thought that it might be advancing along the path of democratic progress, alongside rather than behind America, was deeply unsettling. The fact that the Prime Minister who took office weeks after Wilson\u0026rsquo;s re-election, Lloyd George, was perhaps the greatest pioneer of democracy in early twentieth-century Europe, was lost on the White House. Wilson was only too happy to fall in with radical critics who denounced the Prime Minister as a reactionary warmonger.” This may have been because Lloyd George achieved the Prime Minister’s office in large measure by trying to appeal to warmongers, but Tooze’s analysis casts the president’s relationship to Lloyd George’s liberal policies in an interesting light.\nThe word “liberalism” came to the USA quite late, Rosenblatt says:\n“The word only came to the United States in the 1910s. According to the intellectual and political commentator Walter Lippmann, it acquired common currency thanks to a group of reformers who identified as Republican Progressives in 1912 and Wilsonian Democrats by around 1916. By then the term had evolved significantly from its century-long association with French political developments, and the ideas of German “ethical” economists such as Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand, and Karl Knies had made their mark—especially in England, where a “new liberalism” advocated for government intervention. Thanks largely to the travails of the British Liberal Party, liberal newspapers, and liberal theorists such as Leonard Hobhouse, this new form of liberalism spread, and by the second decade of the twentieth century, its advocates felt secure enough to drop the “new” and just call it liberalism. It was this liberalism that was imported into the United States after the war.”\nDaniel Yergin agrees with her assessment in his 1998 book The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, and notes that the battle over the meaning of the word extended into the FDR years:\n“During the First World War, some of the leading Progressive writers began to use the word liberalism as a substitute for progressivism, which had become tarnished by its association with their fallen hero, Theodore Roosevelt, who had run and lost on a Progressive third party ticket. Traditional liberals were not happy to see their label transformed. In the 1920s, the New York Times criticized “the expropriation of the time-honored word ‘liberal’ and argued that ‘the Radical-Red school of thought … hand back the word liberal to its original owners. During the 1930s, Herbert Hoover and FDR duked it out as to who was the true liberal. Roosevelt won, adopting the term to ward off accusations of being left-wing. He could declare that liberalism was ‘plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of the government toward economic life.’ And since the New Deal, liberalism in the United States has been identified with an expansion of government’s role in the economy.”\nIn Britain, of course, the effort to reclaim the word “liberalism” by libertarians continues. But in America liberalism remains what Woodrow Wilson — inadvertently or with intention — played a major role in making it.\n"},{"title":"Review: \u003cem\u003eTancred\u003c/em\u003e, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-03-18-review-tancred/","date":"March 18, 2025","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: *Tancred*, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli Reception to 1847’s “Tancred, Or the New Crusade,” the third of Benjamin Disraeli’s so-called political trilogy, was largely negative until the last 20 years or so. This generation (2004-2024) has produced multiple scholarly treatments that take the book seriously and lift it above the judgment that it is a silly Orientalist travelogue that simply preaches the superiority of the Jewish race in an effort to promote the political prospects of one particular Jew, Disraeli himself.\nThe novel is about a young aristocrat named Tancred Montacute, who turns down his father’s request that he seek a seat in parliament because he would rather go to Jerusalem. He yearns for a direct revelation from God, of the type received by the characters in the Bible, and figures such revelations only ever happen in the Holy Land.\n\u0026lsquo;If an angel would but visit our house as he visited the house of Lot!\u0026rsquo; says Montacute, in a “tone almost of anguish.”\n\u0026lsquo;But I want to see an angel at Manchester.\u0026rsquo; \u0026rsquo; he adds later.\nThat Disraeli actually provides him with such an angelic visit in the Holy Land points to the author’s hubris: he deigns to write (in a political trilogy that he says spells out his philosophy) a divine revelation that puts his own views directly in the mouth of God.\nThe early complaints about the novel are not wholly unfounded. It is at its most fun in the first 100 pages when Tancred is in England, circulating among the nobility and meeting the major characters from Disraeli’s previous political novels, including Coningsby, Sybil, and their respective spouses.\nThe previous books, as has been pointed out by Jennifer Conary in a 2010 essay, were highly optimistic about the power of the parliament to effect positive change. So it’s interesting to see Tancred in the lead among the leads from those books, as his philosophy (which seems to carry each argument) is that parliament is not the answer and is largely powerless.\nInstead it is the Angel of Arabia who gives the author’s guidance. The bulk of the book is spent in the Middle East, interacting with an Emir named Fakredeen whose unprincipled style of political scheming some scholars say is confessional on Disraeli’s part.\n“Fakredeen had no principle of any kind;” Disraeli writes, “he had not a prejudice; a little superstition, perhaps, like his postponing his journey because a hare crossed his path. But, as for life and conduct in general, forming his opinions from the great men of whom he had experience, princes, pashas, and some others, and from the great transactions with which he was connected, he was convinced that all was a matter of force or fraud.”\nJonathan Parry in a 2017 essay on “Tancred”does a great job of dispelling the notion that this is revelatory of Disraeli’s lack of principle as a politician, a charge that has followed him for almost 200 years. But the relish with which Disraeli writes of Fakredeen’s love for intrigues echoes lines Disraeli wrote about himself, or rather an autobiographical character named Vivian Grey, when he was just 21 years old in 1826: “It has been shown that [Vivian] was one precociously convinced of the necessity of managing mankind, by studying their tempers and humouring their weaknesses.”\nAnd Fakredeen’s views of his debts seems to parallel Disraeli’s views of his own significant obligations, which dogged him all his life and propelled him to his success in climbing what he famously called “the greasy pole” of parliamentary hierarchy: “Fakredeen was fond of his debts; they were the source indeed of his only real excitement, and he was grateful to them for their stirring powers.” It is worth asking whether Disraeli would even have been a Tory had he not acquired deep debts in his youth attempting to start a newspaper. It was perhaps those obligations that drove him to accept sponsorship by a member of the Tory party, before which he was running for parliament as an independent radical.\nParry also does remarkable and much-needed work contextualizing “Tancred” within history. But his detailed historical account leaves one intriguing passage under-explained. The keys to Fakredeen’s enigmatic relationship to Disraeli may be in this passage:\n“The character of Fakredeen was formed amid the excitement of the Syrian invasion and its stirring consequences. At ten years of age he was initiated in all the mysteries of political intrigue.”\nThe specific nature of the “Syrian invasion” is largely lost to average reader nowadays, and this passage is ripe for investigation by a scholar. “Tancred” remains the only one of Disraeli’s political trilogy without a critical edition.\nUltimately, the latest view on this book is correct: it has been given short shrift by critics, even if it is not, as Disraeli thought, his best work.\n"},{"title":"The two arguments about Woodrow Wilson\u0026rsquo;s racism","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-03-17-two-arguments-wilson-racism/","date":"March 17, 2025","tags":["Wilson"],"text":"The two arguments about Woodrow Wilson's racism For decades the conventional wisdom among Woodrow Wilson scholars was that his infamous racism towards African Americans was the product of his being a child of the American South – a simple enough argument and seemingly obvious. However, more recently a strange counterargument keeps emerging in the literature: He was racist, but his racism did not stem from his origins in the American South. This is a harder case to make and has been used to inaccurately diminish his reputation for racism.\nPerhaps the first expression of this counterargument was made by the preeminent Wilson scholar Arthur S. Link in a 1970 paper entitled “Woodrow Wilson: The American as Southerner.” Link began his career as a skeptic about President Wilson, but in his last days went so far as to name Wilson as the most impressive person he’d ever read about besides Jesus and St. Paul. This may explain why Link appears to have gone from arguing the conventional wisdom early in his career to innovating the counterargument. “The earlier writings of Link tend to rely heavily on the assumption that Wilson’s racial views were grounded in his southern heritage,” writes Ronald J. Pestritto in a footnote in his monograph Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism. “Yet Link’s later scholarship on this issue—no doubt having benefitted from his working on the multivolume collection of Wilson’s papers—shows a much greater appreciation for how much Wilson departed from the traditional southern worldview.” He cites “The American as Southerner” and goes on to note that “Link does in this essay, however, give Wilson more credit for a favorable view of the black race than I believe is warranted by the evidence.” This is so true it’s worth going into detail about Link’s essay, which we shall do shortly.\nIn 2008 historian Gary Gerstle added his voice to the counterargument in an essay in John Milton Cooper’s anthology Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson. “Much has been written about Wilson\u0026rsquo;s racial attitudes,” Gerstle wrote. “One popular school of thought, associated with Arthur S. Link, grounds his racism in his white southern heritage. In this view, virtually no white southerners of Wilson\u0026rsquo;s time were prepared to regard blacks as their equals, with the same claims as whites on the promise of American life—liberty, equality, and opportunity … However, we cannot understand Woodrow entirely in terms of his residence in and experience of the South.” Gerstle\u0026rsquo;s arguments are not without merit: The Wilson family \u0026ldquo;had strong northern roots.\u0026rdquo; Even Woodrow\u0026rsquo;s father, a Presbyterian minister who preached for slavery from the southern pulpit, lived in Ohio for 29 years before heading south to Virginia. Wilson also had six uncles who lived in the north. Gerstle admits we know very little about his attitudes towards the northern family, which means he said little about them in his papers. And he makes a solid argument that Wilson\u0026rsquo;s philosophy in his youth mixed an identification with the South with some sympathy for certain Northern ideals. (\u0026ldquo;Because I love the south,\u0026rdquo; Wilson said, \u0026ldquo;I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy \u0026hellip; Even the damnable cruelty and folly of Reconstruction was to be preferred to helpless independence.\u0026rdquo;) It is true that Wilson\u0026rsquo;s southern origins can be caricatured, but that does not mean his racism doesn\u0026rsquo;t emanate primarily from his sympathy with the South.\nPestritto shares Gerstle’s thesis, as the former points out in a review of Gerstle\u0026rsquo;s essay and the book it appears in, in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He restates Gerstle\u0026rsquo;s thesis even more directly before rebutting him with his less sound reasoning for the same argument: “While Gerstle is very much correct to reject the tired notion that Wilson\u0026rsquo;s reprehensible views on race came from his origins in America\u0026rsquo;s South, he doesn\u0026rsquo;t quite put his finger on the fact that Wilson\u0026rsquo;s racism was, in large part, a product of his German historicism, where human progress takes place by way of the rise and fall of particular peoples or races.”\nRebutting Pestritto This idea that Wilson’s racism came from his Hegelianism seems easy to rebut: he wrote racist things before he read Hegel as a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University. Actually it’s harder on those grounds to rebut than one might think, because his statements on race and slavery as a young man were few and far between. That might be because his mother actively urged him to hide his views from his Northern friends, or as she called them, “your Radical companions” (the capital letter implying they are Radical Republicans who supported the rights of African Americans):\n“My darling son,\nI have been thinking more than usual, even, about you the last few days. The fear that you may be provoked beyond endurance, during these anxious days, by those Radical companions of yours, has crept into my heart. I know your self-control – or I would be miserable – but it is so hard to bear their ignorant thrusts quietly – and yet that is the only thing to be done – for ones own self respects sake. I trust you have been brave enough to disregard their insolence. Tommy dear don’t talk about knocking any body down – no matter what they do or say – or rather don’t think of doing such a thing. Such people are beneath your notice. Besides they don’t mean anything personal—strange as it may seem …\nGod bless you my darling …\nYour own mother.”\nThe picture history provides of Wilson’s youth is, however, clearly not that of someone who only began to believe in racial discrimination only after 1883, when he began reading Hegel and other Germans in the PhD program at Johns Hopkins. Two years before that, he more than once described African Americans as an “ignorant and inferior” race and from his undergraduate days at Princeton in the 1870s vehemently opposed the vote for blacks. In February of 1881 he made notes in the margins of a document saying that southerners did not dread the Republican Party but opposed it “because the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded.” A few days later he used the same phrase (“ignorant and inferior race”) publicly in a newspaper article titled “Stray thoughts from the South.” As an undergraduate at Princeton University, in his diary in June of 1876, he wrote, “Universal suffrage is at the foundation of every evil in this country!” Later at Princeton he refused to participate in a debate on universal suffrage because he didn’t want to argue the affirmative even though he ordinarily accepted the academic debate style wherein the affirmative and negative positions on each topic are assigned regardless of the students\u0026rsquo; own political perspectives.\nIn fact, one of Wilson’s southern relatives saw him as more southern than their neighbors. Margaret Axson Elliott, the younger sister of Wilson’s first wife Ellen Axson Wilson, begins her book My Aunt Louisa and Woodrow Wilson by explaining the similarities between those two figures: “They were children of Presbyterian ministers, who had moved South and had become more southern than the Southerners.” This is quite a different description of Woodrow than Pestritto and other biographers, who tend to seize upon his having come from northern stock as a reason to interpret Wilson as somehow less southern than other southerners, and often therefore as less bigoted toward African Americans.\nIn his book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism Pestritto says Wilson’s “views on race” are “mostly attributable” to the “historicist nature of his political philosophy.” The book’s few short paragraphs on the subject of race begin with that thesis sentence, and then back it up with quotes from The State, a book Wilson wrote after starting at Johns Hopkins. (He would later cite as evidence that Wilson was heavily influenced by Hegel, who used the phrase “the State” often, the fact “that the title of the book is The State, for Pete’s sake.”) Pestritto notes that “In The State, Wilson explained that certain races had been ‘progressive,’ and that all governments must have had their historical foundations in the beginnings of these ‘progressive races.’”\nPerhaps Pestritto is right to argue that this is influenced by German historicists. And he’s not wrong to cite the book as evidence of Wilson’s racism. In it, Wilson lists a handful of “races” whose governments are worth studying. He then dismisses the others as unnecessary to study, not merely in the scope of his book but at all. “To know other systems which are defeated or dead,” he says, “would aid only indirectly towards an understanding of those which are alive and triumphant.” As Pestritto notes, “he traced the roots of modern government to the development of three races in particular: Aryan, Semitic and Turanian.” Pestritto does not mention that Wilson then effectively rules out the Semitic and Turnaian as worthy of only a secondary place, leaving only the Aryan as primarily worthy of study:\n“Even Semitic institutions, indeed, must occupy only a secondary place in such inquiries. The main stocks of modern European forms of government are Aryan. The institutional history of Semitic or Turanian peoples is hardly part of the history of European governments: it is only analogous to it in many of the earlier stages of development.”\nBut as I’ve shown, Wilson’s racism precedes The State. It also precedes a later work that Pestritto cites next, which was written after 1890. Moreover, Pestritto cites Hegel – and only Hegel – as the source of the racism in those documents.\nA look through the 69-volume Wilson papers shows only a handful references to Hegel (all of which Pestritto catalogues in a footnote) and the evidence that he has read any Hegel mostly begins after his Hopkins career in 1883. It is true that there is one reference to Hegel in a document Wilson wrote in 1876, a so-called “Index Rerum” that consists of quotations from books Wilson has read. But the reference is made in passing by an encyclopedia entry on Aristotle, not from any first-hand reading in German literature. It reads, “It is acknowledged by Kant and (Hegel), the two most profound thinkers of Germany, that from the time of Aristotle to their own age logic had made no progress.” The strange parenthetical is in Link’s Wilson Papers and is unexplained anywhere in the book. Perhaps Wilson’s handwriting was hard to read in that spot. But after that, Hegel disappears until 1883.\nIt doesn’t take more than 15 minutes to find and read all the other references to Hegel in the copious writings Wilson produced in and after his Hopkins years. First, there are his notes on Hegel from an 1884 lecture on Herbert Spencer at Johns Hopkins. (“There is a lot of truth in this view,” Wilson adjudges Hegel’s ideas from the lecture.) Second, in an 1885 letter to his then-fiancee, Ellen Axson, Wilson refers to “Hegel’s beautiful conception, that [men and women] can find their true selves only in the love and devotion of family life.” Third, in a lengthy essay on “The Study of Administration” Wilson briefly quotes Hegel as saying that the philosophy of any time is “nothing but the spirit of that time expressed in abstract thought.” Fourth, in a “working bibliography” that covers all of Wilson’s work from 1883 to 1890, Wilson cites a single book by Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, as translated by J. Sibree. In 1892 he wrote another “Bibliography of Law” that included another single work of Hegel’s, this time in German, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. That’s it until a little joke someone else told mentioning Hegel in 1908, and then a poignant anecdote from a cousin of Wilson’s about his now late wife Ellen, among a collection of memories sent to Wilson less than a month into his period of mourning, in which Ellen is remembered as saying “I had always supposed I was not intelligent enough to read Kant and Hegel. But they were quite comprehensible.” That covers all of the references to Hegel in the Wilson Papers.\nSo while Pestritto makes a nice case that Hegel and the Germans may have influenced Wilson’s thought, it hardly amounts to evidence that his racism against African Americans, which apparently started at an early age, is “mostly attributable” to the “historicist” nature of his philosophy, meaning his Hegelian and German influences. While it is true that Pestritto allows that “to attribute Wilson’s historical thinking to Hegel is not to suggest that Wilson absorbed all of his argument directly from the German thinker,” in the short section on race he offers no other thinkers but Hegel. Wilson never referenced Hegel’s theory of race.\nRebutting Link Link’s essay “The American as Southerner” deserves a close look here, as he is the foremost Wilson scholar, the editor of the monumental Woodrow Wilson Papers, and as it goes so far as to argue the South barely impacted Wilson. “That southern birth, rearing, and partial education left slight marks on Wilson in his maturity can be seen when we apply a few necessarily crude tests of southernness to his thinking about certain issues during the period 1883-1895,” Link wrote. The second of these issues covers what Link calls Wilson’s “attitudes toward the Negro”: “Wilson,” Link writes, “is supposed to have been a southerner most markedly in his attitudes toward the Negro. However, if he was a southerner in this regard, he belonged to that tiny minority who were in advance even of the groups whom Guion Griffis Johnson has called progressionists and paternalists.”\nThis is a somewhat audacious assertion on Link\u0026rsquo;s part. The obscure book Link cites with an essay by Johnson is edited by a former college professor of his, Fletcher Green, who in fact first inspired Link to look into Wilson as a subject of research. I was unable to find any reference in the cited essay to “progressionists,” but it does refer to “those who accepted the theory of progress through education.” When one reads Johnson’s essay one sees that Wilson’s views were not that far ahead of what Link says Johnson calls the “progressionists.” Link seems to imply Wilson is ahead of the paternalists and progressionists because Wilson advocated mandatory education for black people. But Johnson specifically says this view was common not just in 1883 when Wilson was writing but before the period of Reconstruction as well:\n“No American writer of the period who tried seriously to analyze the race problem failed to find some comfort in the hope of education. The extent of hope usually depended upon the writer’s concept of the theory of progress, and the theory of progress was itself undergoing a vast change at the very time that equalitarianism was being incorporated into the federal constitution. The hypothesis of progression from a lower to a higher state was expressed first by the moral philosophers and then by the natural scientists. From this position it was but a step to the application of the theory to all plant and animal life including man.”\nMeanwhile, what Johnson calls the “paternalists” also favor education, which in no way makes them enlightened about African Americans. Thus Wilson’s view in 1881 is not necessarily more advanced than that of the paternalists, but in some ways actually behind many of them, as he continued to oppose the amendments that granted suffrage to black men and these “paternalist” laws attempted to enforce them. It is true that the article proffers examples of attitudes toward African Americans that are less advanced than Wilson’s, but they are in general not the paternalists or the progress advocates Link calls “progressionists”, contrary to Link’s claim.\nReturning to Link’s essay “The American as Southerner,” he writes: “As early as 1881 we find Wilson writing hopefully about the development of a class of sturdy, independent Negro landowners in the South, advocating compulsory education for Negroes who did not want to go to school, and applauding independent Negro political action.”\nBut the essay that Link is referring to from 1881 is the one we\u0026rsquo;ve earlier cited as referring to African Americans as an ignorant and inferior race:\n“Under such circumstances the choice of the white voters was quickly and naturally made. The alternatives presented to them were, to be ruled by an ignorant and an inferior race, or to band themselves in a political union not to be broken til the danger had passed. They determined … never to suffer themselves to be ruled by another race in every respect so unlike themselves; and in that resolve they cannot be, they should not be, shaken.”\nWilson quotes with explicit admiration “the Hon. AHH Stuart, of Virginia”: “The Southern people are, he says, opposed to ‘ignorant suffrage, entirely irrespective of race or color.’ They do not object to the votes of the negroes ‘because they are negroes—because their faces are dark …We object to their votes because their minds are dark—because they are ignorant, uneducated and incompetent to form an enlightened opinion on any of the public questions which they may be called on to decide at the polls.’” This position does not show much growth from his earlier remark that universal suffrage is the root of all evil.\nLink goes on to claim that “Whatever youthful doubts Wilson may have had about the wisdom of the Fifteenth Amendment and of universal male suffrage were clearly gone by the time, 1885, that he wrote his first general treatise on democratic government.” But that treatise, which Link identifies in the footnotes as the essay “Modern Democratic State,” contains another classic Wilson swipe at universal suffrage: “Not mere universal suffrage constitutes democracy. Universal suffrage may confirm a coup d’etat which destroys liberty.” How Link managed to read this essay as endorsing universal suffrage is a mystery.\nLink’s essay also made a particularly strange argument about a dramatic episode in his young life, an argument Wilson’s father got into with a college professor with whose family the future president went on to have an antagonistic relationship for decades. First, Link makes the sound point that Wilson chose a northern college when he first had the chance to pick. Then, strangely, he brings up the argument between Wilson’s dad and his professor:\n“More impressive is the evidence that we have about Wilson\u0026rsquo;s undergraduate convictions, interests, and reactions. He could dismiss Professor Henry Clay Cameron, a professional southerner, in his diary with the contemptuous re mark that the professor of Greek at Princeton was a \u0026ldquo;jackass on the southern question.\u0026rdquo;'\nThat Link finds this evidence even \u0026ldquo;more impressive\u0026rdquo; is surprising as he completely misinterprets the whole incident. Wilson doesn’t actually call him “a jackass on the southern question.” Wilson says “We met Professor Cameron in the hall of the hotel and father had quite a discussion with the jackass(emphasis Wilson’s) on the southern question.” In context this clearly implies that “on the southern question” modifies “had quite a discussion with the jackass,” not that Cameron was a jackass on the southern question. Wilson goes on to say that Cameron “is one of the kind of men who have rent the country and are the curse of the South. He is one of those who says that he was born in the South and knows all about it when they know less than a two-year-old baby. Such men are a scandal to leaders, as Macaulay said of Croker.”\nLink presents this as evidence that Wilson was taking the northern position in an argument with a “professional southerner.” But we can tell from Link\u0026rsquo;s own Wilson papers that Cameron made a pro-Republican speech after the 1876 presidential election. And we learn from a newer book by an expert on Princeton (William Barksdale Maynard’s 2008 Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency) that Professor Henry Clay Cameron was not a proslavery southern partisan but a Radical Republican, an advocate for the total and complete abolition of slavery; the virtual opposite of Wilson’s father’s position. Cameron\u0026rsquo;s own letters at Princeton University make it clear that he supported Republican President Benjamin Harrison, and offer no evidence he was ever a southerner, let alone a professional one.\nWhat is the southern question? From the World Biography of US Presidents:\n“The southern question, as Republicans were apt to refer to it, actually had two distinct components: Could the black people be protected in the enjoyment of the economic, legal and political rights they had won as a consequence of the Civil War, and could the Republican party prevent the South from being made over into a Democratic monolith? Few, if any, Republicans believed the two components could be separated.”\nMaynard’s vivid account of the incident places the blame for the argument on Wilson’s father. He writes that Wilson as a young man at Princeton “yawned at the famous Princeton scientists,\u0026quot; and that “His condescension toward all these professors owed much to Joseph [Ruggles Wilson], who quarreled publicly with Professor Cameron over Reconstruction politics in the hallway of the University Hotel and who had long ago convinced Tommy that true self-improvement comes from hard solitary work, not classrooms.”\nWhat side did Wilson and his father take in the debate on the “southern question”? Wilson didn\u0026rsquo;t put his views in ink until years later, but when he did he argued that southerners would be open to voting for Republicans if they would only give up the fight for African Americans\u0026rsquo; rights.\nThus Link\u0026rsquo;s attempt to impress us with Wilson\u0026rsquo;s relative lack of racism fails each time he brings it up. And Wilson\u0026rsquo;s racism is very specifically rooted in his southern roots, at least before 1883. That Wilson stayed on the wrong side of the race question is established elsewhere. Gerstle for instance notes that the president was heard telling jokes about African Americans as late as 1919, on the way to the Paris peace talks.\n"},{"title":"Review: \u003cem\u003eSybil\u003c/em\u003e, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-03-15-review-sybil/","date":"March 15, 2025","tags":["Disraeli"],"text":"Review: *Sybil*, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli A forerunner of Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times” and other so-called “condition of England” novels in the Victorian age, Benjamin Disraeli’s “Sybil, or The Two Nations” is a groundbreaking novel of ideas and politics. Scholars debate whether Disraeli invented the political novel. By most definitions he did not; for example his own father wrote anti-Jacobin novels about the influence of the French Revolution on England, which influenced Benjamin’s style. But he was certainly the inventor of something original in this blend of uniquely first-hand parliamentary expertise (he was a member of parliament when he wrote it and would go on of course to become Prime Minister), historical essay, proto-Wildean wit and romantic/adventure narrative.\nThe most recent Oxford World Classics edition is the best available, with many pages of footnotes and a fascinating introduction that assists with interpretation of a novel that was very much of its time and therefore a little challenging to readers today.\nBut it is an engaging read. It’s a great shame the only movie made of “Sybil”, namely a 1921 silent film directed by Jack Denton, is completely lost to us today. The book’s peculiar mix of (by today’s standard arch-) conservative politics with what then were known as radical politics probably means we never will see a movie made of this rollicking story, which if smartly done would make a great film.\nThe plot juxtaposes the worlds of Charles Egremont, a bored aristocrat who becomes a member of parliament, with those of Sybil, a poor woman of God who does good works with the local Catholic Church. The “Two Nations” of the title are those of the rich and the poor, and Disraeli’s picture of various communities of working class persons was extensively researched (and sometimes basically plagiarized) from “Blue Books”, Parliamentary reports that filled the MPs in on the condition of England. Sybil’s father is a leader of the Chartist movement, which sought universal suffrage in a post-feudal England that wasn’t to know true democracy until 1918.\nDisraeli’s idiosyncratic opinions of the battle over suffrage and the condition of England are fascinating to read, though he is somewhat long on analyses and short on solutions. As prime minister, would go on to preside over many reforms though historians say he was too old, sick and bereft of his own legislative ideas to have been the cause of them. It’s easy to imagine though that having the author of Sybil, which attempts a wide-reaching analysis of the problems of the working class, in charge gave impetus to the Tories to limit the working day, regulate factories and perform other reforms.\nThat said, his solution to the gaping problem of underrepresentation of working class interests is to elect a younger generation of allegedly more sympathetic aristocrats. Hardly progressive.\nAs a young man Disraeli ran for parliament as an “independent radical” who endorsed “democracy” at a time when democracy was a dirty word among both left and right parliamentarians. He failed in four attempts to be elected and finally succeeded only after brokering a deal with a Tory who agreed to sponsor him. Thus his political views had to accommodate, whatever his conscience said, the political expedience of a Tory, and he sought to advance by tacking both to the left and to the right of Prime Minister Robert Peel, who was in power at the time of this novel and who he (sometimes politely) savages by name in its pages.\nLiterary history has afforded few such great opportunities to learn about the politics of an era both with real life events (like the hilarious and fascinating Bedchamber Plot, in which Peel pressed Queen Victoria to replace some of her personal chamber-maidens with Tories rather than Whigs and consequently had to resign and turn the whole government back to the other party) and real people (including a few centuries of actual prime ministers), and with fictional ones (like Egremont, Sybil and the parodic political hacks Tadpole and Taper). He balances the real with the fictional in a saucy way that allows for the best of what both fiction and history have to offer.\n"},{"title":"Wilson, Henry James and anti-German bias: Did Wilson\u0026rsquo;s youthful attitude towards Germans influence his foreign policy?","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-03-14-wilson-henry-james-anti-german-bias/","date":"March 14, 2025","tags":["Wilson"],"text":"Wilson, Henry James and anti-German bias: Did Wilson's youthful attitude towards Germans influence his foreign policy? Woodrow Wilson famously tried to insist on neutrality in the early days of World War One, refusing to declare a side between the Allies and Germany. But was he really neutral himself? Some speculate that his seeming neutrality was a cover for a dislike for Germans. But other writers argue that, far from being biased against them, he was heavily influenced by specifically German thought. Biographer Patricia O’Toole, author of the book The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, was asked the question “Do we know if Wilson, before the war, was determinedly anti-German?” in an interview on CSPAN from the New York Historical Society on May 16, 2018.\nO’Toole: “Oh yes, he’s anti-German I think from the time he is young … He’s a big Anglophile from his childhood on and he goes to Johns Hopkins where the scholarship is much influenced by German methods and he doesn’t like that\u0026ndash;at all\u0026ndash;so he contrives to get out of some of his classes and write this book Congressional Government. So he’s anti-German from the beginning. But in neutrality he’s trying to steer a pretty strict straight line – although American banks are lending so much more money to the Allies then they are to the Germans, that it’s neutrality, that’s the official policy, but the tilt is really to the Allies, the Americans are manufacturing a lot of goods for the Allies, so there is no question about whose side we’re going to enter. He was just trying to delay the entry into the war.”\nDespite some evidence that Wilson may have had mixed attitudes towards Germans, the full picture, when a collection of sometimes amusing anecdotes in the Wilson papers and elsewhere are examined, does not support the notion that Wilson’s feelings about Germans were so strong that his foreign policy was mastered by his prejudices.\nFirst, while Wilson did in fact have a preference for all things English from his boyhood days, he knew what he was doing when he signed up for the program at Johns Hopkins, which was not only based on German methods but also studied heavily the German political thinkers. Wilson boasted about this before he started the program in a May 1883 letter to a friend who was studying in Berlin, Richard Heath Dabney. Woodrow confessed “one could not help envying a man whose [sic] is taking, under the most favorable circumstances imaginable, the very course that one longs to take himself. I am, however, (let me tell you with rejoicings) about to do what is the next best thing, for a fellow who is confined to the limits of this continent: for I have about made up my mind to study, at Johns Hopkins University, the very subjects which you are now studying in Germany under the great masters with unpronounceable names. In doing this I am, beyond all reasonable doubt, following the natural bent of my mind.”\nThe model for PhD programs came from the Germans, and if one wanted to participate in advanced study one wanted to study in or after the model of the German education system. Johns Hopkins was one of the first universities to follow this model. A debate about the Germanness versus the Britishness of Woodrow Wilson was fought in American Mind in 2019 between Paul Gottfried and Ronald Pestritto:\n“Paul Gottfried questions the connection between the American Progressives and German political thought—Hegel’s in particular,” wrote Pestritto. “Gottfried is correct in pointing us to Wilson’s admiration for things British; he was an Anglophile in certain important respects, especially on matters of constitutionalism, which led him to a fierce criticism of separation of powers. But Wilson was at least as taken with the Germans. His educational pedigree was decidedly more German than it was British, for starters. Wilson did his graduate work at Johns Hopkins, which was founded in 1876 for the express purpose of bringing the German educational model to the United States, and which featured a faculty educated in Germany.”\nSo, given this debate and Wilson’s desire to study as a German student studies, it is naturally interesting when Wilson offers evidence of what his view of a German scholar is. He did that, oddly enough, when he gave his opinion of a Henry James short story that featured a German scholar, on March 8, 1884. Wilson wrote in a letter to his wife that the “ponderous German” character in James’s 1879 story “Bundle of Letters” was what “we all suppose a German student to be without having seen him.” This implies it is also what Wilson himself supposed a German student to be, at least before meeting one. He wasn’t the only reader to find this character distasteful. Literary critic Edward Wagenknecht said in his book The Tales of Henry James that the character, Dr. Rudolph Staub, “embodies everything James did not like about the Germans and … thinks as Allied war propaganda tried to make all Americans believe all Germans thought in 1914.” It was of course Wilson’s propagandists who disseminated that point of view about Germans during the war. Other critics were even more negative about Staub, with one critic during World War Two going so far as to say the character represented all that was wrong with Germans.\nDr. Staub, who has taken up like all the characters in the story in a boarding house in Paris, expresses what might be considered bellicose and nationalistic thoughts in a letter to a German friend; he expected the French to carry a grudge from the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and is disappointed that they don’t.\n“I mentioned to you before that my expectation of rough usage, in consequence of my German nationality, had proved completely unfounded. No one seems to know or to care what my nationality is, and I am treated, on the contrary, with the civility which is the portion of every traveller who pays the bill without scanning the items too narrowly. This, I confess, has been something of a surprise to me, and I have not yet made up my mind as to the fundamental cause of the anomaly. My determination to take up my abode in a French interior was largely dictated by the supposition that I should be substantially disagreeable to its inmates. I wished to observe the different forms taken by the irritation that I should naturally produce; for it is under the influence of irritation that the French character most completely expresses itself. My presence, however, does not appear to operate as a stimulus, and in this respect I am materially disappointed. They treat me as they treat everyone else; whereas, in order to be treated differently, I was resigned in advance to be treated worse. I have, as I say, fully explained to myself this logical contradiction; but this is the explanation to which I tend. The French are so exclusively occupied with the idea of themselves, that in spite of the very definite image the German personality presented to them by the war of 1870, they have at present no distinct apprehension of its existence. They are not very sure that there are any Germans; they have already forgotten the convincing proofs of the fact that were presented to them nine years ago. A German was something disagreeable, which they determined to keep out of their conception of things. I therefore think that we are wrong to govern ourselves upon the hypothesis of the revanche: the French nature is too shallow for that large and powerful plant to bloom in it.”\nStaub also criticizes the national characteristics of all the other European characters. He insults the French for being too pro-woman (“I need not remind you what an abnormally-developed part this sex has played in French history”), calls a Frenchman a “simian,” and predicts the demise of English speaking nations and the rise of the German homeland:\n“You will, I think, hold me warranted in believing that, between precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the English-speaking family is destined to consume itself, and that with its decline the prospect of general pervasiveness, to which I alluded above, will brighten for the deep-lunged children of the Fatherland!”\nAn even more cartoonish portrait of bellicose Germanness finds its way into a book of anecdotes about Woodrow by his sister-in-law, Margaret Axson Elliott. That book relates one tale in which Woodrow and Ellen hire a German maid who does not get along with Margaret. She feels the need to rationalize Woodrow’s hiring a German maid: “The leading writers of the day in Woodrow’s field were German, and Ellen had long read widely in the German philosophers,” Elliott explains. The maid allegedly tells Margaret that “if my Kaiser” ordered her, she would kill the Wilson family. This story reveals more about Margaret Axson Elliott than it does about Woodrow and Ellen, but the anecdote is interesting in the context of the debate about Wilson’s attitudes towards Germans.\nOverall the evidence does not support the idea that Wilson was so anti-German that he stacked the deck in World War One for England. The entertaining anecdotes we’ve examined here fill in some gaps in our picture of Wilson’s attitudes but don’t suggest that someone so excited about studying German thought was hiding a rabid anti-German perspective.\nGiven the debate over Wilson’s true feelings about Germans, I find it disappointing Wilson had no more to say about Dr. Staub than he did. But in case any other readers find the literary reviews of significant statesmen to be of interest, I’ll close with the full commentary of Wilson on “Bundle of Letters.”\nHere is the text of Wilson’s letter to his wife about Henry James’s short story:\n“I can’t say that I think Henry James’s ‘Bundle of Letters’ more than clever. The conception might have been anyone’s: private letters written from the same boarding house in Paris by two Yankee girls of very pronounced types, by a Boston ‘aesthete’ of the most extravagant sort, by an unsophisticated English maiden, by a conceited, shallow Frenchman, and by a ponderous German. There is of course very considerable skill of style in the execution of the plan; but each of the letter-writers personifies only what may be said to be everybody’s ideas as to the different national characteristics. The German is what we all suppose a German student to be without having seen him, the Boston youth is just a litter bigger ass than young Bostonians are supposed to be by those who laugh at Boston, the New England girls have the hard, angular, unattractive characteristics usually supposed to be typical of women of their nativity, \u0026amp;c., \u0026amp;c. Any clever, observant, satirical, cynical traveler who had hobnobbed with numberless representatives of various nationalities might have wiled away his leisure by writing letters such as these, and could have published them without fear of being suspected of possessing anything more than a surface acquaintance with human nature. Mr. James’s art in these letters is admirable, but the pictures are commonplace—one is not certain that they are not meant for caricatures. I can imagine Macauley writing such letters for his dear sister Hannah; but I cannot imagine his publishing them a serious literary work, as part of his contribution to literature—though sister Hannah’s son would doubtless have spread them before the public without hesitation. But—“being as how” I have very uncompromising opinions of my own as to the sort of literary work that is worth while, and am nothing if [not] critical, I’d better let you off from any further expression of my views upon this very popular bit of Mr. James’ writing.”\nA previous letter to his then-fiancee Ellen makes it clear he had not read anything else by James.\n“Mr. Shinn, who is constantly manifesting great solicitude regarding my entertainment and the advancement of my acquaintance with ‘light’ literature, has just brought me in Henry James’s ‘Bundle of Letters,’ insisiting that I can read them ‘in a few minutes’: for I a few moments ago confessed to him, very indiscreetly, that I had never read anything of James’s. But I think—don’t you?—that the perusal of this budget of letters ‘from Miss Miranda Hope, in Paris,’ \u0026amp;c. may very well be postponed to the present and much more inviting pleasure of writing a letter of my own to my little queen; away down South in Dixie.’”\nEllen responded:\n“By-the-way, I am curious to know what you think of Henry James, when you finish your ‘Bundle of Letters’; though I have never read that book, and don’t know whether it is a fair specimen of his style. So you didn’t examine ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ when it was ‘all the rage,’—have never made the acquaintance of ‘Miss Archer,’ ‘the spontaneous young woman from Albany’!”\n"},{"title":"Ideational evolution: an introduction","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-03-11-an-introduction/","date":"March 11, 2025","tags":["Wilson","Gladstone","Disraeli"],"text":"Ideational evolution: an introduction At certain moments in history, the ideological changes in a single individual can change the course of history. This blog notes the results of research on a few key examples of those remarkable transitions, specifically the transitions in the thought lives of Woodrow Wilson, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.\nIn April of 1908, Woodrow Wilson suddenly and inexplicably stopped speaking out against the regulation of business and started preaching for it. “No one now advocates the old laisser faire (sic),” he announced, though until that day he had advocated for just that, “or questions the necessity for a firm and comprehensive regulation of business operations in the interest of fair dealing and of a responsible exercise of power.” It was biographer Henry Bragdon who first documented this moment. The transition has been denied by other biographers who claim either that Wilson was always a progressive (Pestritto) or that he was always a conservative (Diamond). But the transformation was dramatic and sudden, as Bragdon tracks it, and leaves behind a mystery: why did he change his mind? How did it affect the course of history?\nIt is entertaining to argue that another such dramatic moment occurred for Wilson’s early political hero, William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone, who would eventually become prime minister of the United Kingdom four times for the Liberal Party, famously began his career on the other side, as a Tory. He joined the Liberals in 1859, just a few months after he returned from a quixotic assignment as the Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary to the British colonies in the Ionian Islands in what is now Greece, a mission that made him look foolish to colleagues and appears to have been engineered by his arch-rival Benjamin Disraeli and Disraeli’s best friend, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. A case can be made that without the trip to the Ionian island of Corfu Gladstone would never have agreed to join a government under the leadership of Liberals. Corfu fascinated Gladstone, a sometime Homeric scholar, because it was once the land where Homer’s Odysseus told his tall tales of battling a Cyclops and a witch, sea monsters and giants to an audience of Phaecians. Did this dalliance into his side interests accelerate Gladstone’s shift from right to left? And what impact did that shift have on history?\nDisraeli, meanwhile, had an ideological transition in the opposite direction. “Disraeli, as everyone knows,” writes seminal Disraeli biographer Robert Blake in a 1998 essay, “began his many unsuccessful efforts to storm his way into Parliament as a Radical.” This ostensibly put him on the left side of the political spectrum. At a time when the word “democracy” was a dirty word on both the left and right of British politics, Disraeli wrote an essay stating, “We must either revert to the aristocratic principle, or we must advance to the democratic. … I for one believe it is utterly impossible to revert to the aristocratic principle … I feel it absolutely necessary to advance to the new or democratic principle.” Historians argue he was not really talking about what we think of today as democracy, but he was clearly taking a stance for some policy to the left of the kind of aristocratic stance for which he would become known. What made Disraeli shift from “independent Radical” to sometime ultra-Tory? What did it have to do with his own side interests, as a prolific writer of fiction? How much of his old point of view on democracy did he bring with him? And what impact did his transformation have on history?\nEach of these figures were pivotal in the evolution of our concepts of liberal and conservative. Wilson has been described by both right and left historians as a consequential president whose style of governance stood at the beginning of what we think of as modern liberalism. Gladstone has been described as the key defining personage for the liberalism of his time, and stood for what Wilson stood for before Wilson changed. Disraeli defined conservatism for a generation and has been held up (rightly or wrongly) as the founder of “one nation conservatism,” which still is cited by some conservatives as their operational philosophy today.\nIn this blog I’m going to explore those pivotal moments and the meaning of liberalism and conservatism. I’ll also review books and other media that are relevant directly or indirectly. I’ll explore something all three of these figures had in common: they all wrote either fiction or criticism of fiction, an exceedingly rare thing in the world of statesmen.\n"},{"title":"Review: \u003cem\u003eConingsby\u003c/em\u003e, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli","url":"https://www.ideationalevolution.com/posts/2025-03-11-review-coningsby/","date":"March 11, 2025","tags":["Wilson","Disraeli"],"text":"Review: *Coningsby*, a novel by Benjamin Disraeli In centuries of history very few statesmen have tried to communicate their view of politics through fiction. In the late 18th century, Sweden’s King Gustav III wrote plays and scenarios for operas that today are interpreted as a kind of savvy propaganda. Vaclav Havel wrote plays of consequence both before he was President of the Czech Republic and after, but never tried to use his plays to advance a political agenda in between. In the late 19th century a young Woodrow Wilson, then a professor of government, made abortive attempts to write short stories, but his were not politically oriented; in fact he used the format to ruminate wistfully about how nice it would be to be an author of fiction. However, later in his career as a professor Wilson renounced (bitterly?) the idea that an aspiring statesman, which he had been since youth, could also write fiction. Look at the novels of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Wilson wrote: the characters in those novels aren’t real people, he said, they are mere “chessmen” just like Disraeli’s subordinates in parliament.\nBut in “Coningsby; or The New Generation” (1844) Parliamentarian Disraeli purported to create something no one had created before: a political philosophy expressed entirely through fiction.\n“When I attempted to enter public life,” Disraeli wrote in an 1870 edition of his novels, “I expressed these views, long meditated, to my countrymen, but they met with little encouragement. He who steps out of the crowd is listened to with suspicion or with heedlessness: and forty years ago there prevailed a singular ignorance of the political history of our country. I had no connection either in the press or in public life. I incurred the accustomed penalty of being looked on as a visionary, and what I knew to be facts were treated as paradoxes.”\nHowever, ten years later, Disraeli said, “affairs had changed. I had been some time in Parliament and had friends who had entered public life with myself, and who listened always with interest and sometimes with sympathy to views which I had never ceased to enforce.” These friends suggested he treat “in a literary form those views and subjects which were the matter of our frequent conversation. That was the origin of ‘Coningsby, or the New Generation.’”\nDisraeli set about writing his peculiar “visionary” views of British politics, which with regret saw the government as an oligarchy rather than the monarchy it was supposed to be, jettisoned personal identification with with the existing political parties and promoted the hope of the new generation of young aristocratic politicians he had befriended, who by then were known as “Young England.”\nDisraeli in the 1870 preface went on: “The derivation and character of political parties; the condition of the people which had been the consequence of them; the duties of the Church as a main remedial agency in our present state; were the three principal topics which I intended to treat … These were all launched in ‘Coningsby,’ but the origin and condition of political parties, the first portion of the theme, was the only one completely handled in that work.”\nThe novel, which preceded the two other novels in his so-called Young England Trilogy, is a little rough around the edges but is witty, verbose, filled with idiosyncratic historical rumination, very bold and wily politically and also somewhat backward. Disraeli sought to appeal to what were known as the “ultra-Tories,” tacking to the right of then-Prime Minister Robert Peel who is often credited with inventing modern conservatism as he renamed the Tories “the Conservative Party.” Disraeli, expounding on decades of prime ministers both by name and by saucy nickname, throughly rejected the name “Conservative” as a horrible hybrid of “Tory men and Whig measures.”\n“What do you mean to conserve?” asks the young hero Coningsby in the novel. “Do you mean to conserve things or only names, realities or merely appearances? Or, do you mean to continue the system commenced in 1834 [after Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto, which spelled out the terms of modern conservatism in the U.K.], and, with a hypocritical reverence for the principles, and a superstitious adhesion to the forms, of the old exclusive constitution, carry on your policy by latitudinarian practice?”\nBut Disraeli was not wholly ultra-Tory either; he had begun his political career calling himself an independent radical, and endorsed the word “democracy” at a time when it was anathema to both the left and the right of parliamentary politics. That too shows itself in the book.\nThe characters of Mister Tadpole and Mister Taper, both Tory political hacks who toady up to the landowners, as well as the landowners themselves, come in for sharper criticism than the liberal Whigs.\nIt has been suggested that Disraeli’s ultra-Tory philosophy was really geared to convince the aristocratic Tories to follow his lead in helping the poor and other victims of the Industrial Revolution and Victorian politics. This was only so evident in his time as prime minister, but he did pass the second Reform Act, which extended the vote to the working class, and oversee several bits of reform legislation geared at helping the oppressed.\nIt’s not a perfect legacy, but it’s one many fiction writers and statesman might wish for.\n"}]