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British television show “Number 10” got personal with Disraeli and Gladstone

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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 Number 10 , 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. The first episode makes a solid case that Gladstone’s story is interesting enough to merit dramatic t...
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Review: The Disraeli myth is consequential but endangered, a new book shows

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Writing about Benjamin Disraeli as an American, as I do, can be lonely. The 19 th 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.” That 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 loo...
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Woodrow Wilson, Ezra Pound and an homage to James Joyce's "Ulysses"

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“--- … Do you believe in your own theory?   --- No, Stephen said promptly.”     - James Joyce, Ulysses.   Urbane, to comfort them, the neophyte blogger purred: -- 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. -- 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? -- No, I was hoping it would be painfully obvious. -- That’s a strange way to celebrate Bloomsday. -- 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...
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Review: “Angel Down," "To the Lighthouse" and the communicative difficulties of World War I

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“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: 'It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,’ she said.” -   Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. 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 murder...
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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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