Review: Benjamin and Sarah Disraeli's almost-lost novel "A Year at Hartlebury" betrays a statesman's intellectual trajectory

Benjamin Disraeli is remembered as a formative conservative in the 19^th Century, as the longtime head of the Tory party. But there was a time when he could have been a member of the liberal Whig party, RW Davis wrote in his biography of Disraeli in 1976. “There is no reason whatever to believe that Disraeli would have had any objection to entering Parliament under the Whig aegis," Davis wrote. "He had, after all, ridiculed all parties, Tories and Radicals as well as Whigs, without favoritism. And the introduction of the Whig Reform Bill early in 1831, word of which had reached him in Constantinople, he had hailed as ‘wonderful news which … has quite unsettled my mind.” Disraeli had even written, in 1831, the following in his novel The Young Duke: “Am I a Whig or a Tory? I forget." However, Davis was writing just before 1979, the year that scholars discovered Disraeli had written a novel about his first foray into elective politics in 1832, the same year as the fight over the transformative Reform Bill, which increased the number of men who could vote in England and set the country on the long, long road to democracy. A Year at Hartlebury, or the Election, a novel co-written in 1834 under a pseudonym by Benjamin Disraeli and his sister Sarah, provides both further evidence for Davis’s theory that Disraeli could just as comfortably been a Whig, and evidence of a hostility towards Whigs that undermine that theory.

A Year at Hartlebury, or the Election begins as an imitation Jane Austen novel, then morphs into a Disraeli political novel (a prototype of his best-known novels, the political trilogy of the 1840s), before morphing back to a Jane Austen romance before finally concluding rather suddenly with a murder mystery. The scholars have universally assumed, probably for good reason, that the Austin-esque sections of the book were written by Sarah Disraeli. The sections of the book on the election of 1832, modeled on Disraeli’s own experiences that year, we know to be written by Disraeli because he flew into a “rage” when a publisher suggested those were the weakest in the book. (“I longed to tell him I wrote it,” Disraeli fumed.) The novel tells the story of Helen Molesworth, a young country gentlewoman who scholars think is based on Sarah herself but is a facsimile of all of Austen’s heroines. She is torn between three suitors: the Reverend Arthur Latimer, who echoes Austin’s continual fascination with the romantic lives of English ministers; George Gainsborough, an awkward young gentleman who traveled to the East and has returned to clumsily woo Helen; and the book’s most interesting figure, Aubrey Bohun, who is a cipher for Disraeli himself. Bohun (apparently pronounced “Boon”) is introduced in a single sentence as combining “a fine poetic temperament with a great love of action. The combination is rare.” Rare indeed; readers of Disraeli’s earlier autobiographical novel Contarini Fleming or my review of it on this blog will recognize that combination as being the unique characteristic and central conflict of Disraeli’s character Contarini. And of course of Disraeli himself, who almost alone among modern heads of state was both a novelist and a politician. Aubrey Bohun, like Disraeli at the time he co-wrote Hartlebury, was just returning from an extended trip through the Middle East, and also like Disraeli was motivated by the emergence of the Reform Act to launch himself into a campaign for parliament. It is disappointing in some measure how little political specificity the novel shows, but this is revealing of Disraeli as well. Bohun says he is willing to change his politics for Molesworth. As Historian Paul Smith points out many of Disraeli’s letters from 1832 seem to show a willingness to change his politics to get the parliamentary seat.

Davis was also writing before Regina Akel’s illuminating 2016 study of Disraeli’s newspaper writing before he got into politics, Benjamin Disraeli and John Murray: The Politician, the Publisher and The Representative. That book shows what A Year at Hartlebury suggests: that Disraeli was in at least in one key respect to the right of most conservatives in his early years. Akel examines the long unresearched pages of the newspaper Disraeli launched in his twenties, which went bankrupt and left Disraeli deeply in debt and needing a parliamentary career to escape creditors (as MPs were exempt from debtor’s prison). Akel’s book suggests that one reason the newspaper The Representative flopped was that Disraeli’s editorials voiced opposition to the abolition of slavery, a position she says most publications rejected by the 1820s. Davis says Disraeli “waffled” on the abolition of slavery during his campaign in 1832 but offers no specific evidence. Hartlebury contains a deplorable use of the n-word, blaming the Whigs for campaigning for the “emancipation of the n-----s” while ignoring atrocities of human rights in the factories of Manchester. (Many of the Whigs were owners of such businesses, and prioritized the interests of such firms.) That line would have gotten Disraeli irrevocably “canceled” today – and still could – but biographies of Disraeli have long been strangely silent on his position on slavery. Later in his career Disraeli spoke laudatorily about the abolition of slavery, praising the 14^th earl of Derby for having “abolished slavery,” “educated Ireland” and “reformed Parliament,” though only the last was done while Derby was prime minister. But his words on race perhaps deserve more attention than they’ve gotten. Disraeli also wrote extremely racist things in his non-fiction biography of Lord George Bentinck in 1852 that have largely been ignored by biographers as well.

Those words also point to a conservatism that suggests Davis was perhaps overplaying Disraeli’s Whiggish tendencies. The racial remark comes in the context of a tirade against Whigs. In a passage with classic Disraeli irony, ending any remaining doubt that Disraeli wrote this section of the book, Disraeli differentiates between “high Whigs” and “low Whigs,” a pair of categories he invents. Disraeli writes:

“A high Whig is at least grand in his haughtiness. He is a tyrant, but a tyrant on a great scale. He loves a coercion bill, he cares not how many infants may be sacrificed to the bloody Moloch of Manufacturing industry, but then he can talk of the bill of rights, and advocate the immediate emancipation of the N--s; but a low Whig is the least human of all the combinations of human matter, for soul we cannot concede to those wretches with contracted minds and cold hearts. If ever a revolution come round in this once happy country, we may trace all our misery to the influence of the low Whigs. These are the real causes of Manchester massacres, though they are always abusing the magistracy; these are the men who, though they think they are only snuffing the candle in their own miserable hard-hearted parlours, are in fact lighting the torch of every incendiary in the kingdom. How the low Whigs did hate Mr. Bohun! They hated him with that intense predisposition of enmity, which cold-blooded, calculating, unsympathetic, selfish mortals always innately feel for a man of genius, a man whose generous and lively spirit always makes them ashamed of their dead, dunghill-like, existence.”

So, Disraeli’s prose was dripping with contempt for Whigs as early as Hartlebury. Disraeli had been probed by the Whigs as a potential candidate for them when he first entered the campaign. Knowing the area was predominately liberal, he had emerged as a Radical, generally meaning to the left of the Whigs, backing reform and championing liberal causes. His friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton, another novelist who had had some success in politics too, had secured for him endorsements from two of the top liberals of his day, even though they had never met Disraeli and later expressed embarrassment that they’d backed an apparent conservative who ended up with support from the Tories. But at the beginning of the campaign, the Whigs asked Disraeli if he’d be willing to back the Whig prime minister, Earl Grey. Disraeli snarkily replied that he had only one reason for being a Whig: the fact that they needed him to be one. “I cannot condescend to be a Whig,” Disraeli would write a little later. Thus the Whigs went out and found a candidate to run against Disraeli, and a high-profile one at that: the son of Prime Minister Earl Grey. Ultimately a Whig newspaper criticized Disraeli for having an “assumed liberality” and not an authentic one.

But that doesn’t mean Disraeli didn’t go through at least some form of ideological transformation. He would eventually criticize the Reform Act, and though he said what was wrong was not the Act itself but the way the Whigs passed it, reserves a scornful tongue for the act itself. In 1845’s Sybil Disraeli wrote:

“But if it have not furnished us with abler administrators or a more illustrious senate, the Reform Act may have exercised on the country at large a beneficial influence. Has it? Has it elevated the tone of the public mind? Has it cultured the popular sensibilities to noble and ennobling ends? Has it proposed to the people of England a higher test of national respect and confidence than the debasing qualification universally prevalent in this country since the fatal introduction of the system of Dutch finance? Who will pretend it? If a spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecrating all the humanities of life, has been the besetting sin of England for the last century and a half, since the passing of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases, to propose an Utopia to consist only of wealth and toil,* this has been the breathless business of enfranchised England for the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage. Are we then to conclude, that the only effect of the Reform Act has been to create in this country another of those class interests, which we now so loudly accuse as the obstacles to general amelioration? Not exactly that. The indirect influence of the Reform Act has been not inconsiderable, and may eventually lead to vast consequences. It set men a-thinking; it enlarged the horizon of political experience; it led the public mind to ponder somewhat on the circumstances of our national history; to pry into the beginnings of some social anomalies which they found were not so ancient as they had been led to believe, and which had their origin in causes very different to what they had been educated to credit; and insensibly it created and prepared a popular intelligence to which one can appeal, no longer hopelessly, in an attempt to dispel the mysteries with which for nearly three centuries it has been the labour of party writers to involve a national history, and without the dispersion of which no political position can be understood and no social evil remedied.”

By contrast, in Hartlebury, Aubrey Bohun criticizes the Reform Act only for not going far enough:

“We are both of us against Reform, and therefore I hope you will support Mr. Bohun” [said Mrs. Neville.]
“I thought Mr Bohun was for doing still more?” said Walter.
“Only to make everything quite right,” said Mrs. Neville, “and to make you quite comfortable again Mr. Walter.”

Perhaps the best summation of Disraeli’s view of the act was spoken during the campaign of 1832. He said he was a conservative to preserve everything good in the Constitution and a Radical to reform everything bad in it.

Amid the “high politics” focus of some historians on the machinations of “great men” in the passage of the Reform Act, it is sometimes forgotten that the impetus came primarily from the people themselves. Written close to the time of the act itself, however, Hartlebury is rife with references to riot and insurrection, both by Sarah and by Benajmin. For example:

“I don’t think an English mob would kill children, do you Mr. Gainsborough?” [asked Arthur Latimer.]
“It is impossible to say what an infuriated populace would do,” solemnly replied the politician.

Still, Disraeli relished the big thematic concerns of the Reform era. The narrator remarks that Bohun had never considered England interesting enough to enter politics until the Reform Act:

“Many reasons had united to induce him to return to his long-neglected country, but none had influenced him more strongly than the passing of the Reform Bill, that great and misconceived event, which already its enemies have ceased to dread, and its friends have begun to abuse. Our eager cry for Reform had created a great sensation among our Continental neighbours. Mistaking our habits, and ignorant of our customs, they had totally misconceived that state of agitation which our newspapers so forcibly depicted, and England, that envied country, in a state of anarchy and confusion, was an image too consolatory not to be worshipped. Mr. Bohun must be pardoned, if a long residence in the midst of the enslaved and repining descendants of heroes, had made him forget the peculiar characteristics of his own free-born countrymen.”

This passage has been attributed variously to both Benjamin and Sarah, because it comes in the first volume, most of which is clearly written by Sarah. But this is unmistakably Disraeli’s style of dry satire, and suggests that their writing process may have been somewhat more fluid in its back and forth than has been implied by some scholars. But for the most part I agree it seems clear which sections were his and which were hers.  

Ultimately, Disraeli lost his bid to be an MP in 1832, and would not win until he aligned himself with the backing of the Tory party. In Hartlebury Disraeli imagines that the opposite happened, with Bohun riding to victory. Then, having begun a novel that examines the important Reform Act era with a personal engagement that exceeds even George Eliot’s masterwork Middlemarch on the subject, Sarah derails the book in its final chapter. The first appendix in the 1983 edition of A Year at Hartlebury, or the Election suggests that its author always knew George Gainsborough would be a villain. Unlike the chapter itself, the appendix suggests it is obvious Gainsborough committed murder in the end. I was more fooled by Gainsborough’s charming silliness, and wonder whether Sarah really contemplated George as a villain before she wrote the final chapter. But in any case the final resolution dodges both the romantic contest that began the book, and the political implications of the sections on the election. Before the ending, this almost-lost book has a chance at being a great find, a political masterwork that foreshadows the great political novels Disraeli and his influencees would go on to write. After the ending, it is more nearly simply a fascinating curiosity.