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Edward Bulwer-Lytton's ideational evolution: He pulls Disraeli left, then Disraeli pulls him right

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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 19 th 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 Edw...
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I did not mean it: Gladstone, Homer and a second chance at Providence

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“Perverse mankind! Whose wills, created free, charge all their woes on absolute degree; All to the dooming gods their guilt translate, and are miscall’d the crimes of fate.” - Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s  Odyssey , Book One, spoken by Zeus. (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.”) My 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. For 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...
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Review: Gore Vidal, inheritor of Disraeli's tradition, painted a kind of political self-portrait in "Julian"

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“When the President's got an embassy surrounded in Haiti, or a keyhole photograph of a heavy water reactor, or any of the fifty life-and-death matters that walk across his desk every day, I don't know if he's thinking about Immanuel Kant or not. I doubt it, but if he does, I am comforted at least in my certainty that he is doing his best to reach for all of it and not just the McNuggets."  - Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Lyman in “The West Wing” by Aaron Sorkin. Jed Bartlet, the fictional economist who became president on “The West Wing,” presented a modern fantasy version of Plato’s “philosopher king,” an ideal ruler with a philosopher's capacity for complex thought and moral wisdom. A hankering for a leader who not only quoted Kant’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 lon...
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Did Gladstone arrive in Corfu a conservative and leave a liberal?

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“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, ...
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Review: Edelman’s “Disraeli in Love” and “Disraeli Rising,” mismarketed as 1970s romance novels, died an unfortunate death

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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...
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