Edward Bulwer-Lytton's ideational evolution: He pulls Disraeli left, then Disraeli pulls him right

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who hated to have fun poked at him, has been the subject of jokes and satire for almost 200 years. A prolific novelist in the 19^th century whose sales challenged those of his friend Charles Dickens and who was also a member of Parliament and served as Colonial Secretary, he is mostly forgotten today. Everywhere, that is, except this blog, where he has made repeated appearances, and the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a bad writing competition named for him because he once started a novel with the infamous words “It was a dark and stormy night.” The contest ran for 42 years until last year, when it closed because it took too much work to administer. The famous line has more than once been cited in a “Jeopardy!” question and made immortal by Snoopy, who recurrently begins his own writing attempts with that opening. In his own day, some of the fun poked at Bulwer-Lytton came after he extended his already overlong name from Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer to Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton. (His mother had asked him to adopt her maiden name upon her death, and as an unusually devoted son he consented by appending the second instance of “Lytton.”) William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the 1848 novel Vanity Fair, mocked him by naming a character “E.L.B.L.” in a satirical novel, and even went as far in a letter to a Mrs. Bryan Walker Procter to refer to him as “E. L. B. L. B B. L L. B B L B L B L B B.”  The initials ran all the way to the end of the margin of the letter and continued on the back side (Harden 200).* Benjamin Disraeli also parodied his friend’s name confusions in the novel Endymion by inventing a character named Bertie Tremaine with a brother inexplicably named Tremaine Bertie, teasing Bulwer-Lytton and his own brother, a successful parliamentarian who retained the surname Bulwer but did not feel the need to append the maiden name Lytton. Disraeli’s novel was also one of the instances in which Bulwer-Lytton was mocked for one of the most interesting things about him: his malleable politics. Both Bertie and Bulwer-Lytton began their careers as left-wing “Radicals” and ended up as ambiguous conservatives in Parliament. The story of Bulwer-Lytton’s transition is not just comedy, but also an interesting tale that is right up the proverbial alley for this blog, which chronicles “ideational evolutions” for multiple figures in history and for the history of ideas itself. Bulwer-Lytton’s evolution is particularly interesting for these purposes because of his influence on the future prime minister Disraeli, and subsequently Disraeli’s impact on him.

Disraeli's satire of Bulwer-Lytton in Endymion is as good a place as any to begin looking at Bulwer-Lytton's political inconsistency. Bertie Tremaine is always trying to get into Parliament and failing. This is most likely an allusion to the decade Bulwer-Lytton spent out of Parliament in between stints in the House of Commons, during which he was always trying to get back in. It was during that gap that he changed from a liberal to a Tory. Bulwer-Lytton’s first stint in the Commons came between 1831 and 1841, during which he was a Radical. Bertie Tremaine was also a left-wing follower of progressive Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. Both supported the famous progressive 1832 Reform Act, which expanded the electorate by 50 percent and did away with many of the so-called “rotten boroughs” in which depopulated areas were disproportionately represented in Parliament and controlled by wealthy patrons. Later both Bertie and Bulwer exhibited late-career conservatism. The joke in the novel is that like Bulwer-Lytton, while Bertie Tremaine advances advanced liberal arguments in the media, he is privately a conservative landowner who supports protectionism. Once Bertie finally gets into Parliament, he spends his time quixotically trying to build a third party, promising everyone cabinet positions in the government he expects to form when his non-existent party becomes the majority. This is a satire of Bulwer-Lytton’s independence, which perhaps baffled Disraeli the way Bertie’s baffled the title character of Endymion:

"’What Bertie Tremaine will end in,’ Endymion would sometimes say, ‘perplexes me. Had there been no revolution in 1832, and he had entered parliament for his family borough, I think he must by this time have been a minister. Such tenacity of purpose could scarcely fail. But he has had to say and do so many odd things, first to get into parliament, and secondly to keep there, that his future now is not so clear. When I first knew him, he was a Benthamite; at present, I sometimes seem to foresee that he will end by being the leader of the Protectionists and the Protestants’" (Endymion 413).

All of this is Bulwer Lytton all over, and multiple scholars have suggested the character was based on him. (Braun 144, Mitchell 105). Endymion was published in 1880, after Bulwer-Lytton’s death. So his friend was safe to poke gentle fun at. He would probably not have done so whilst he lived.

Radical beginnings

The pair went way back, and it was probably Bulwer-Lytton’s radicalism that influenced Disraeli to try out independence when he first stood for a parliamentary seat. After Bulwer-Lytton became a member as a Radical in 1831, amid the hullaballoo of the Reform Act debate, he tried to help Disraeli join him. Bulwer-Lytton got Disraeli letters of support from more than one of Britain’s leading Radicals, even though they knew almost nothing of this young middle-class novelist (Monypenny I:216). Robert Blake, author of the seminal 1966 biography Disraeli, calls Bulwer-Lytton Disraeli’s “exemplar” as a dual political and literary figure. (Blake 86). Paul Smith agrees: “His friend Bulwer’s example no doubt influenced Disraeli’s adoption of a radical posture” (Smith 76). In Maurice Edelman’s novel Disraeli in Love, it is Bulwer-Lytton who schools Dizzy on liberalism, taking him on a tour of poor neighborhoods and advocating what we now think of as left-leaning policies (Edelman 45-55).

Bulwer-Lytton’s influence may account for the reason Disraeli became so bitter towards the Whigs, first in his 1832 bid for a parliamentary seat in Wycombe, and ultimately as part of the political philosophy expressed in his most famous political novels, Coningsby and Sybil. Initially, Biographer RW Davis wrote, Disraeli could just as easily have been a Whig as a Radical or Tory, as in his earliest days he mocked all parties. (Davis 27). As late as 1831, in Disraeli’s novel The Young Duke he asked “Am I a Whig or a Tory? I forget.” In fact, Disraeli says the Whigs vetted him as a potential candidate before this first election in 1832. By February 18 of that year, however, he had stingingly rejected the effort.  “I am still a Reformer,” he wrote his sister Sarah, “but shall destroy the foreign policy of the [Whig Prime Minister Earl] Grey faction. They seem firmly fixed at home, although a storm is without doubt brewing abroad.” Disraeli said an opening in Wycombe was set to be created if that area’s representative was made a member of the House of Lords, as was rumored to be in the offing. “He called upon me, and said that Lord John [Russell, a top Whig] often asked how I was getting on at Wycombe. He fished as to whether I should support them. I answered, they had one claim upon my support; they needed it, and no more.” (Correspondence 3). The Whigs ended up picking the prime minister’s own son to oppose the young Disraeli in that, his first election. He would not go on to win.

The remark about the Whigs needing him and not the other way around is surprisingly bitter given Disraeli’s earlier open-mindedness about party. If we seek for an answer as to why, it makes sense to look at why his more comfortably liberal “exemplar” Edward Bulwer-Lytton was not a Whig himself. Bulwer-Lytton’s biographer Leslie Mitchell gives a wonderfully tart analysis of this question:

“It was clear that the young Lytton could not be a Tory. He could not be a Whig either, but the reasons for this are more complicated. After all, he and the Whigs had much in common. Led by the greatest aristocrats, Whigs had a profound sense of caste and a contempt for the pretensions of new money. Metropolitan, cosmopolitan and well-read, they took intellectual life seriously and patronised artists. There was much in this list with which Lytton could identify. Not surprisingly, his description of Whig grandees in his early novels is almost admiring. The novice parliamentarian praised the Whig leader, Lord Grey, and hailed him as a liberator: If to enforce those ends, the Hour Hath sceptered Liberty with Power, May we not hope from thee for more Than Might ere gave to Right before?  He dined with Whigs, dedicated books to them, and went frequently to Holland House, the Mecca of the creed. More prosaically, for much of his early career, he was not above soliciting some distinction from the Whigs, through Dr Parr in 1820 and Lord Melbourne in 1837. Much of the time he found their company congenial. They were, after all, well-read men with aristocratic attitudes, like himself. They had a range that few Tories could match. In spite of this, however, Lytton was never a Whig, and his reasons for never enlisting under their banner were cogent. Quite simply, the Whig sense of caste was theoretically admirable, but not if it was so rigidly defined as to exclude the Lyttons. For a man like Lytton, who bristled with pride of ancestry, it was galling to be told that his family were neither rich enough or distinguished enough to stand among the Whig leadership. The place they were offered was that of a faithful lieutenant. … In the Whig world precedence was decided by name, birth and wealth. Those who lacked any or all these qualifications could only advance by showing unquestioning obedience. Men who claimed the right to follow an independent line should look elsewhere. It was not enough only occasional to vote with the Whig governments of these years. More consistent loyalty was required. Lytton, however, confided to his journal that ‘I will not be a subordinate’” (Mitchell 178-179).

If Bulwer-Lytton was knocked out of running for Whig leadership because of name, birth or wealth, Disraeli was even more firmly out of the question. Before he met Edward, Disraeli did not move in aristocratic circles at all. His father Isaac D’Israeli was well-connected in the literary world, knowing as he did figures like Lord Byron and William Godwin. But when the younger Disraeli wrote a book titled The Young Duke, Isaac snorted, “What does Ben know of dukes?” Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who conducted a possibly platonic affair with Lord Melbourne’s wife Caroline Lamb, was his conduit to society, such as it was. The circles Bulwer-Lytton moved in were somewhat limited by Lamb’s influence, Mitchell says, as she introduced him around to artistically-inclined outcasts (Mitchell 15). But to Disraeli that was an entrée into the Great World. 

He was almost Disraeli’s only male friend. “I have not gained much in conversation with men,” Disraeli wrote at one point. “Bulwer is one of the few with whom my intellect comes into collision with benefit. He is full of thought, and views at once original and just.” Blake adds to this quote that “The two friends, as radical young men often do, sought consolation for the hostility of the respectable world in a sense of mutual rebellion against mediocrity and stuffiness, a semi-conspiratorial alliance against the dull and the conventional” (Blake 85).

Conservative conversion

However, when Disraeli finally made the House of Commons after several attempts, it was as a Tory. Bulwer-Lytton lost his seat in Parliament in 1841. He had spent ten years as a liberal in the Commons. He embarked then on those 10 years in the political wilderness. He asked both Tories and Whigs for help getting back in. And when Bulwer-Lytton finally rejoined Parliament, from 1851 to 1866, it was as a conservative. How did he make the switch?

In part his transition to conservatism was driven by the fact that when Bulwer-Lytton's mother died, she had left him her vast estate. He was a landed aristocrat with agricultural tenants. His support of the Corn Laws—tariffs which attempted to protect farmers from foreign producers but which were opposed by “Free Trade” Whigs and Radicals--now became an insuperable barrier with the Whigs, though at first Mitchell says Bulwer-Lytton seemed not to understand that. He had always spoken in language conciliatory toward the Corn Laws, even before his acquisition of Knebworth, his mother’s estate. But afterwards it became personal. “His correspondence of 1850-51 chronicled agricultural distress,” Mitchell notes. “His own estates at Knebworth produced little income, and all around him there were 'farmers breaking in all directions'. He had two farms without tenants, and those that were worked were a drain on resources. They were 'more ruinous even than children'” (Mitchell 193).

But it was also Disraeli’s friendship that caused the switch, writes Bulwer-Lytton’s grandson, identified only as “the Earl of Lytton” in a two-part biography of Edward:

“The other circumstance which contributed to his political conversion was his increasing friendship with Disraeli. They had corresponded for some years at fitful intervals, but only about literary subjects. About this time they began to find a new common interest in politics. On August 3, 1850, Bulwer-Lytton invited Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli to stay with him at Knebworth
‘I don't think the wonder-monger,’ he said, ‘will find much to cavil at in our conjunction. After all, I am a Protectionist--and authorship is neutral ground." The invitation was accepted, and during this visit the foundations were laid of a political friendship firmer and more intimate than the literary friendship which had preceded it. Disraeli's political opinions afforded Bulwer-Lytton a convenient bridge from the Liberal to the Conservative party. This brilliant and eccentric man was a very different type of politician from the Tory leaders who were the objects of Bulwer-Lytton's scorn when he first entered Parliament; and the two friends soon found that they had much in common. Protectionist opinions were by no means the only bond of sympathy between them. Both were men of strong imagination, which in each of them produced high notions of national honour and marked imperial instincts. To both the insular prejudices of the Cobdenite school were equally repugnant, and to both the prospect of uniting the country gentlemen and the artisans of the great industrial towns in a common attack upon the middle class manufacturers, and the exclusive Whig aristocracy who now composed the Liberal party, was equally attractive. Both were imperialists and reformers at heart; and the Tory Democracy created by Disraeli was just such a policy as his friend could conscientiously support.” (Earl of Lytton 162). 

It was that support of opposition to “Cobdenite” principles—that is, the anti-tariff, free trade politics of Radical Richard Cobden—that the elder Disraeli eventually satirized in Endymion. His stand-in for Bulwer-Lytton, Bertie Tremaine, referred to his supposed third party as “The Mountain,” after the radicals who sat at the top of the risers in the Chamber of Deputies in France during the French Revolutionary period. Disraeli’s stand-in for Cobden was Job Thornberry, and Bertie Tremaine made efforts to get Thornberry to sit with his group of supposed Radicals on “the Mountain.” But the joke was, Tremaine’s values as a landed proprietor kept him from true, “total and immediate” radicalism.

“Job Thornberry took his seat below the gangway, on the opposition side, and on the floor of the House. Mr. Bertie Tremaine had sent his brother, Mr. Tremaine Bertie, to look after this new star, who he was anxious should ascend the Mountain; but Job Thornberry wishing to know whether the Mountain were going for ‘total and immediate,’ and not obtaining a sufficiently distinct reply, declined the proffered intimation. Mr. Bertie Tremaine, being a landed proprietor as well as leader of the Mountain, was too much devoted to the right of labour to sanction such middle-class madness” (Endymion 344).

Here Disraeli is satirizing Bulwer-Lytton’s alleged allegiance with the working class over the industrialists’ middle class. Still, as Disraeli parodies Bulwer-Lytton’s politics he is also satirizing himself.  He built a political philosophy that encouraged the Radicals to unite with the Tories and form a “national party.”

Disraeli pushed Bulwer-Lytton to the right in the 1840s and 1850s, just as Bulwer-Lytton had pushed Disraeli to the Left a generation before. For all his insistence on the Corn Laws being reintroduced, Bulwer-Lytton would probably not have been attracted to the Tory party had he not perceived an “in” in Disraeli. Their rhetoric became more alike. In 1848, Bulwer-Lytton sounded suspiciously like Disraeli when he wrote: “A Republic is cheap, but if ever that hour arrives it shall not be, if I and a few like me live, a Republic of millers and cotton spinners, but either a Republic of gentlemen or a Republic of workmen--either is better than those wretched money spiders, who would sell England for 1s. 6d.” That is, for one shilling and sixpence. (Earl of Lytton 165). This evocative quote shows that once Bulwer-Lytton began edging toward the Tory Party he was capable of sounding more like Disraeli than Disraeli ever did.

Note

*- The initials are reproduced here just as they are in Harden’s printing of the letter, including the periods. Biographer Leslie Mitchell misattributes the initials to Thackeray’s satire “George de Barnwell,” but correctly identifies in the footnotes the page of the Thackeray letters that contain this delicious detail.

Select Bibliography

Blake, Robert. Disraeli. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. Standish Meacham, Ed. England and the English. University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Cline, C.C.L. “Disraeli at High Wycombe: The Beginning of a Great Political Career.” Studies in English, 1942, No. 22 pp. 124-144. University of Texas Press.

Davis, Richard W. Disraeli. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976.

Disraeli, Benjamin. (Guedalla, Phillip, ed.) Endymion. The Bradenham Edition. London: Peter Davies, 1926.

Disraeli, Benjamin. Letters, Volume 1. University of Toronto Press, 1982.

Disraeli, Benjamin. Lord Beaconsfield’s Correspondence with His Sister, 1832-1852. London: John Murray, 1886.

Disraeli, Benjamin. Whigs and Whiggism: Political Writings. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1914.

The Earl of Lytton. The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton, Volumes 1 and 2. London: MacMIllan and Co., 1913.

Edelman, Maurice. Disraeli in Love. New York: Stein and Day, 1972.

Escott, T.H.S. Edward Bulwer, First Baron Lytton of Knebworth. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1910.

Fraser, Antonia. Perilous Question: Reform or Revolution? Britain on the Brink, 1832. New York: BRS Publications, 2013.

Harden, Edgar F., Ed. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray: A Supplement to Gordon N. Roy, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray Volume I. Ne York: Routledge, 1994.

Mitchell, Leslie. Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters. London: Hambledon and London, 2002.

Monypenny, William Flavelle; Buckle, George Earl. The Life of Benjamin Disraeli. Volumes I and II. New York: MacMillan, 1929.

Sadlier, Michael. Bulwer: A Panorama. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1931.

Smith, Paul. “Disraeli’s Politics.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vo. 37, pp. 65-85, 1987.