Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli has been credited, by Morris Edmund Speare in 1924, with the invention of “the political novel.” This is a dubious claim, as the novel was under development for 2,000 years, according to Margaret Anne Doody, and fictional writings dealt with political and war intrigues early on. Consequently, the critic George Watson suggested amending Disraeli’s achievement to the creation of “the parliamentary novel.” “No nation other than Victorian-Edwardian Britain has ever explored its elective institutions so extensively in fiction,” Watson writes. And in fact even America didn’t really boast a novel on the Washington congressional scene until Mark Twain’s  The Gilded Age  in 1873. But in May 1839, some five years before Disraeli had conceived his political trilogy, Honore de Balzac was beginning the process of writing a novel,  The Deputy for Arcis ,   that was to analyze in sociological detail the inner workings of the French Chamber of Deputies, or mor...

Woodrow Wilson’s second engagement, to Edith Galt, has been written about extensively, largely because she is considered by many to have acted effectively as America’s first female president. While Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke late in his second term, she guarded him zealously, kept his condition a secret, and insisted nothing was to happen without his approval. This put her in charge, the argument goes. That’s a good story, and strangely enough it’s been told in two plays of exactly the same title, The Second Mrs. Wilson , which is even stranger when one considers the titles are a reference to an obscure play, Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.  But much less often retold is the amazing story of Wilson’s engagement to his first wife, a tale of dramatic coincidence without which perhaps neither he nor his wife would have been married. Ellen Axson, after all, had sworn off men, and had plotted out a life of independence and reliance on female friendship. The sto...