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. 

But 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.

“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.”

However, 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.’”

Disraeli 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.”

Disraeli 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.” 

The 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.” 

“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?” 

But 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. 

The 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. 

It 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. 

It’s not a perfect legacy, but it’s one many fiction writers and statesman might wish for.