Review: “Lothair,” a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

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Who was Disraeli really on matters of religion? 

Why did former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli write this fairly searching exploration of religious feeling, his second straight novel about a young British aristocrat on a spiritual quest, when in private, to his friends, he was inclined to diss all religions and claim he was incapable of religious belief?  Thinking about the answer to this question makes his novel “Lothair” (a huge bestseller in 1870 but often poorly reviewed) entertaining despite the fact that it is not the best, most original or most informative of his novels. 

As in prior novels like “Tancred,” Disraeli’s last novel on religious themes, in “Lothair” he touts Judaism, the religion of his childhood before he was baptized into the Anglican Church at 12 years of age. But this time the focus is on Catholicism. Lothair, the title hero, is based on the real-life 3rd Marquess of Bute, an orphan who is reported to have been the richest man in the world in the 1860s but who scandalized Victorian society by converting to Catholicism after turning 21 and reaching his majority. In the novel, Lothair is courted in entertainingly insidious fashion, though not altogether unsympathetically, by a Roman Catholic Cardinal. This character is based on an actual prelate who earned Disraeli’s wrath by switching from an allegiance with his Conservative Party to an allegiance with Gladstone’s Liberal Party, after Gladstone hit on the idea of advocating for the disestablishment of the Irish Anglican Church as a way of pushing Disraeli out of the Prime Minister’s seat. Why Disraeli lost the 1868 election is debated (was it the fact that he expanded the voters with the Reform Act of 1867 and thereby allowed in many new liberal voters?) but it is clear that Gladstone had at least one friend who saw this move as the only way to “get Dizzy out of office.” (Or so Victor Bogdanor reports in his introduction to Oxford University Press’ 1975 edition of Lothair.) So it has been argued that Disraeli wrote this book to get revenge on the real life Cardinal Manning who inspired his Cardinal Grandison. 

Lothair, thus courted for his money and influence by multiple religions, finds himself choosing between three women who each represent a religious perspective: a Catholic who is married to God, an Anglican, and a liberal humanist whose religion is her own conscience. It is the third perspective Disraeli writes with the greatest passion, interestingly, and we wonder whether he will finally end with a hero who is not (like Disraeli himself) a member of the Anglican Church. 

I suspect Disraeli secretly longed to embrace a humanist philosophy himself. Disraeli's tendency towards "open ridicule, in private, of all religions" was relayed to the ages by Lord Stanley, the 15th Earl of Derby, and quoted in Paul Smith's Disraeli: A Brief Life. Smith says Stanley in 1851 found Disraeli eager to discuss his prediction that "the sentiment, or instinct, of religion would by degrees, though slowly, vanish as knowledge became more widely spread." Elsewhere in Stanley's diaries he discloses that Disraeli was "incapable" of religious belief.

Still, he also wrote passionately about religion. Many thought Disraeli was also incapable of principle, but it’s hard to believe that when he wrote with this much reflection and investment in a subject he could easily not have written about at all. This leads me to suspect that however much he longed to be a humanist he was more than simply a believer in the institution of the church, which he sincerely thought kept England from chaos and revolution. Disraeli was a consummate enigma when it came to religion, writing with passion about Judaism but also colorfully about Catholicism and supportively of Anglicanism. The best way to explore who he was perhaps is to read this book and the novel he wrote twenty years before this one, “Tancred.”





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