Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

“The morning brought us the sight of the grand Acroceraunian range: with brilliant sun & 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 : “Full seventeen nights he cut the foaming way: The distant land appear'd the following day: Then swell'd to sight Phaeacia's dusky coast, And woody mountains, half in vapours lost; That lay before him indistinct and vast, ...

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 '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 & 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 mar...

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. This aside makes the case that by the late 19 th 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. The 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 in...

When Benjamin Disraeli, just months from at last becoming a minister 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 "in our way," 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 "one that got away." The great dandy Beau Brummel said he himself had heard Byron "romancing about her for hours....