Disraeli’s Late Novels and Tory Political Sociology

This essay examines Disraeli’s last two published novels, Lothair (1870) and Endymion (1880), as works of political sociology. The mature Disraeli was fascinated by generalisation and social analysis. He naturally viewed the world in terms of dialectic. He assessed contemporary problems as a series of tensions between opposing forces. The task of the politician was to try to resolve them and to minimise social conflict. However, in Tancred (1847), the last novel he had published before Lothair, he had argued that the traditional harmonies of the world had been destroyed since the French Revolution, and that it was not clear how they could be restored. Lothair revisits some of the main themes of Tancred, especially the idea that Semite and Aryan characteristics were essential to the genius of mankind and in creative tension with each other. It connects this tension to the contemporary battle across Europe between religion and secular republicanism. Disraeli sought to communicate to a wide readership the importance of this battle, which he presented as one largely between the Catholic Church and the revolutionary secret societies. Though Lothair contained a lot of his familiar satire, it portrayed this culture war as a serious conflict of ideas in which most leaders on both sides were motivated by high-minded ideals. One subsidiary aim of the book was to explain the Irish policy that Disraeli had adopted on becoming Prime Minister in 1868, which had aimed to combine Anglican and Roman Catholic parliamentary groups. Gladstone and the Liberal party had defeated it and the electorate had then rejected it. Lothair reminded them of their insularity, underlining that mankind needed religious institutions, and that this need would be met by a revived Papacy if the state failed to support Anglicanism. But the novel also contained a lot of social analysis of Britain, which explained to readers—and to Disraeli himself—why the country seemed oblivious to dialectical clashes like those which he had tried to publicise in 1868. Disraeli then discussed Britain’s political sociology at more length in Endymion, which he began shortly after 1870 and published after his second premiership ended in 1880. The book showed that British politics was materialistic but socially stable. The dominance of commercial topics, the desire to make money, and the acceptance of social and economic change, all created a British political world in which politician-administrators had a natural advantage over those who appeared to resist change. But British economic and social success meant that the interests of land and money, and country and town, were easily reconciled. Radicals’ zeal for change was blunted by social reality, human vanity, and the pull of history—as well as by the continuing power of private influences, and the influence of aristocratic women in particular.