Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli’s narrator in his novel  The Young Duke describes the book as “half fashion and half passion.” The meaning of that declaration depends on which edition you read, and if you do happen to be interested in reading this relatively obscure and much maligned but surprisingly entertaining novel, I strongly recommend the 2004 Routledge edition, volume two of six in the series The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli, which appears never to have been reviewed in any journal or periodical . The Routledge edition is one of the few to print the original 1831 text, rather than reprint Disraeli’s edits from the 1853 edition, which removed in embarrassment all the amusing and revealing autobiographical tangents by the 26-year-old Disraeli’s bubbly and manic narrator. In the original edition, and therefore also the Routledge, these excised effusions constitute the book’s “passionate” half. It’s not clear what Disraeli is supposed to mean in editions where the passionate tangents h...

Why hasn’t William Gladstone, a towering figure in British politics who was prime minister four times in the 19 th Century, been the central character of any film biopics? Why has he been the starring role in only one even remotely significant play, Hugh Ross Williamson's short-lived 1937 show Mr. Gladstone , which never made it out of London? Why has his arch-rival in British politics, Benjamin Disraeli, been the subject of so many plays and films when by contrast he was only prime minister twice and usually ranks lower in the lists of the best prime ministers in Britain’s history?  The fact is, filmmakers have been so dazzled by Disraeli's positive attributes that both prime ministers have failed to get the interesting, complicated, balanced treatment they deserve. “All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,” American filmmaker Nunnally Johnson was quoted as saying in the London Review of Books in 2013, almost 40 years after the last Disraeli biopic. “It’s such a ...