Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

My last piece, on Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Venetia , led me to look into Woodrow Wilson and William Gladstone’s thoughts on the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the subject of that novel. The result inspired a few thoughts on why Disraeli felt the need to “domesticate” Byron and Shelley, as I argued in that essay that he does: A notion of genius which frightened the Victorians but to which Wilson and Gladstone appear to have personally related. This aside makes the case that by the late 19 th century, Romantic genius had been reconceived as emotional instability, and that Wilson and arguably even Gladstone (neither one of whom one would expect to see themselves in the Romantics) absorbed this concept as a way of understanding themselves. The first impetus for this aside is a long love letter Wilson wrote to his wife from Baltimore, Maryland, where he was getting a PhD in government studies, on November 22, 1884. The letter ruminates on what Wilson calls “the in...

When Benjamin Disraeli, just months from at last becoming a minister of parliament after years of trying, finished his novel Venetia  in 1837 he sent a copy to his friend William Beckford. He apologized that Beckford had never received his previous novel, Henrietta Temple , admitting “The book was not worth reading.” However, he said, Venetia “is more in our way, tho’ adulterated enough with commonplace, I hope, to be popular.” Disraeli did not say why the new novel was "in our way," but it likely concerned their common interest in Lord Byron, the famously rakish poet upon whom Disraeli had largely modeled his persona in the first 30 years of his life – and on whose life the novel Venetia is based. The sense in which Disraeli had “adulterated” Byron’s story hinges on a cousin of Byron’s named Mary Chaworth, his childhood companion and lifelong "one that got away." The great dandy Beau Brummel said he himself had heard Byron "romancing about her for hours....