Review: “Tancred,” a novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Reception to 1847’s “Tancred, Or the New Crusade,” the third of Benjamin Disraeli’s so-called political trilogy, was largely negative until the last 20 years or so. This generation (2004-2024) has produced multiple scholarly treatments that take the book seriously and lift it above the judgment that it is a silly Orientalist travelogue that simply preaches the superiority of the Jewish race in an effort to promote the political prospects of one particular Jew, Disraeli himself. 

The novel is about a young aristocrat named Tancred Montacute, who turns down his father’s request that he seek a seat in parliament because he would rather go to Jerusalem. He yearns for a direct revelation from God, of the type received by the characters in the Bible, and figures such revelations only ever happen in the Holy Land. 

'If an angel would but visit our house as he visited the house of Lot!' says Montacute, in a “tone almost of anguish.”

'But I want to see an angel at Manchester.' ' he adds later.

That Disraeli actually provides him with such an angelic visit in the Holy Land points to the author’s hubris: he deigns to write (in a political trilogy that he says spells out his philosophy) a divine revelation that puts his own views directly in the mouth of God. 

The early complaints about the novel are not wholly unfounded. It is at its most fun in the first 100 pages when Tancred is in England, circulating among the nobility and meeting the major characters from Disraeli’s previous political novels, including Coningsby, Sybil, and their respective spouses. 

The previous books, as has been pointed out by Jennifer Conary in a 2010 essay, were highly optimistic about the power of the parliament to effect positive change. So it’s interesting to see Tancred in the lead among the leads from those books, as his philosophy (which seems to carry each argument) is that parliament is not the answer and is largely powerless. 

Instead it is the Angel of Arabia who gives the author’s guidance. The bulk of the book is spent in the Middle East, interacting with an Emir named Fakredeen whose unprincipled style of political scheming some scholars say is confessional on Disraeli’s part. 

“Fakredeen had no principle of any kind;” Disraeli writes, “he had not a prejudice; a little superstition, perhaps, like his postponing his journey because a hare crossed his path. But, as for life and conduct in general, forming his opinions from the great men of whom he had experience, princes, pashas, and some others, and from the great transactions with which he was connected, he was convinced that all was a matter of force or fraud.”

Jonathan Parry in a 2017 essay on “Tancred”does a great job of dispelling the notion that this is revelatory of Disraeli’s lack of principle as a politician, a charge that has followed him for almost 200 years. But the relish with which Disraeli writes of Fakredeen’s love for intrigues echoes lines Disraeli wrote about himself, or rather an autobiographical character named Vivian Grey, when he was just 21 years old in 1826: “It has been shown that [Vivian] was one precociously convinced of the necessity of managing mankind, by studying their tempers and humouring their weaknesses.” 

And Fakredeen’s views of his debts seems to parallel Disraeli’s views of his own significant obligations, which dogged him all his life and propelled him to his success in climbing what he famously called “the greasy pole” of parliamentary hierarchy: “Fakredeen was fond of his debts; they were the source indeed of his only real excitement, and he was grateful to them for their stirring powers.” It is worth asking whether Disraeli would even have been a Tory had he not acquired deep debts in his youth attempting to start a newspaper. It was perhaps those obligations that drove him to accept sponsorship by a member of the Tory party, before which he was running for parliament as an independent radical. 

Parry also does remarkable and much-needed work contextualizing “Tancred” within history. But his detailed historical account leaves one intriguing passage under-explained. The keys to Fakredeen’s enigmatic relationship to Disraeli may be in this passage: 

“The character of Fakredeen was formed amid the excitement of the Syrian invasion and its stirring consequences. At ten years of age he was initiated in all the mysteries of political intrigue.”

The specific nature of the “Syrian invasion” is largely lost to average reader nowadays, and this passage is ripe for investigation by a scholar. “Tancred” remains the only one of Disraeli’s political trilogy without a critical edition.

Ultimately, the latest view on this book is correct: it has been given short shrift by critics, even if it is not, as Disraeli thought, his best work.