Review: “Sybil,” a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

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A forerunner of Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times” and other so-called “condition of England” novels in the Victorian age, Benjamin Disraeli’s “Sybil, or The Two Nations” is a groundbreaking novel of ideas and politics. Scholars debate whether Disraeli invented the political novel. By most definitions he did not; for example his own father wrote anti-Jacobin novels about the influence of the French Revolution on England, which influenced Benjamin’s style. But he was certainly the inventor of something original in this blend of uniquely first-hand parliamentary expertise (he was a member of parliament when he wrote it and would go on of course to become Prime Minister), historical essay, proto-Wildean wit and romantic/adventure narrative.


The most recent Oxford World Classics edition is the best available, with many pages of footnotes and a fascinating introduction that assists with interpretation of a novel that was very much of its time and therefore a little challenging to readers today.

But it is an engaging read. It’s a great shame the only movie made of “Sybil”, namely a 1921 silent film directed by Jack Denton, is completely lost to us today. The book’s peculiar mix of (by today’s standard arch-) conservative politics with what then were known as radical politics probably means we never will see a movie made of this rollicking story, which if smartly done would make a great film.

The plot juxtaposes the worlds of Charles Egremont, a bored aristocrat who becomes a Minister of Parliament, with those of Sybil, a poor woman of God who does good works with the local Catholic Church. The “Two Nations” of the title are those of the rich and the poor, and Disraeli’s picture of various communities of working class persons was extensively researched (and sometimes basically plagiarized) from “Blue Books”, Parliamentary reports that filled the MPs in on the condition of England. Sybil’s father is a leader of the Chartist movement, which sought universal suffrage in a post-feudal England that wasn’t to know true democracy until 1918.

Disraeli’s idiosyncratic opinions of the battle over suffrage and the condition of England are fascinating to read, though he is somewhat long on analyses and short on solutions. As prime minister, would go on to preside over many reforms though historians say he was too old, sick and bereft of his own legislative ideas to have been the cause of them. It’s easy to imagine though that having the author of Sybil, which attempts a wide-reaching analysis of the problems of the working class, in charge gave impetus to the Tories to limit the working day, regulate factories and perform other reforms.

That said, his solution to the gaping problem of underrepresentation of working class interests is to elect a younger generation of allegedly more sympathetic aristocrats. Hardly progressive.

As a young man Disraeli ran for parliament as an “independent radical” who endorsed “democracy” at a time when democracy was a dirty word among both left and right parliamentarians. He failed in four attempts to be elected and finally succeeded only after brokering a deal with a Tory who agreed to sponsor him. Thus his political views had to accommodate, whatever his conscience said, the political expedience of a Tory, and he sought to advance by tacking both to the left and to the right of Prime Minister Robert Peel, who was in power at the time of this novel and who he (sometimes politely) savages by name in its pages.

Literary history has afforded few such great opportunities to learn about the politics of an era both with real life events (like the hilarious and fascinating Bedchamber Plot, in which Peel pressed Queen Victoria to replace some of her personal chamber-maidens with Tories rather than Whigs and consequently had to resign and turn the whole government back to the other party) and real people (including a few centuries of actual prime ministers), and with fictional ones (like Egremont, Sybil and the parodic political hacks Tadpole and Taper). He balances the real with the fictional in a saucy way that allows for the best of what both fiction and history have to offer.

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