When I agreed to review this book, I had hoped for a major effort that would supplant Lord Blake's 1966 biography, just as Blake had supplanted the Monypenny and Buckle 1910–20 biography of Disraeli, one of the most unlikely and successful of politicians of any time or place. I was disappointed to receive yet another short biography without any archival research, as if there had not been enough of these in recent years. In fact, I went back and reread four of the more recent ones—John Vincent's 1990 Disraeli (Oxford), Ian Machin's 1995 Disraeli (London), T. A. Jenkins's 1996 Disraeli and Victorian Conservatism (Houndmills), and Edgar Feuchtwanger's 2000 Disraeli (London) see if there was any necessity of yet another effort along these lines. I conclude that beyond Anthem Press wanting another title in its Nineteenth Century Studies series and the author's understandable desire to appear in print there probably was not.
Having said that, I think that this is a very good book. Its target audience is undergraduates and sixth-form students (whom Ian St. John teaches at the Haberdashers’ Aske's Boys’ School in Hertfordshire) as well as the general reader. Balanced, straightforward, and occasionally nuanced, it confronts the major interpretative problems created by Victorian politics and Disraeli's signal and seemingly enigmatic role in them with considerable success. While ending each chapter with competing interpretations from a variety of historians is not as novel as the publisher would have it (the technique goes back at least to the Heath “Problem” series of the 1950s and Holt, Rinehart, & Winston's “Problem Studies” of the 1960s), it is still a useful way to get students to think about differing, and sometimes contentious, explanations of the same material.
One might argue with the author's opening claim that, of the many lives of Disraeli, his “happens to be the most important for it supplies the organizing principle that makes sense of … the others” (xi). But his emphasis on Disraeli's view of politics as art, imaginative, visionary, and bold is well taken. So is his assertion that the peculiarities of Disraeli's background gave him a wider range of choices than his more conventional political and social peers. For St. John, Disraeli's triumph is ultimately the triumph of a supreme egotism.
The chapters proceed along chronological lines and provide little that is new on the details either of his personal life or the politics of the period. The most instructive chapter is the one on Disraeli's political philosophy, and it is oddly placed. It comes right after his 1867 Reform Bill success and just before his party's 1868 electoral debacle. It would have been better for the reader if Disraeli's ideology had been dealt with earlier, perhaps before his campaign against Peel and the Corn Laws. Nevertheless, I found it the most worthwhile part of the book.
St. John demolishes the notion that Disraeli had no fixed political principles and counters the contention that he was more opportunistic than any other politician, pointedly contrasting him with his great rival, Gladstone, who, he says, “shifted his political position far more than Disraeli in his career,” even switching parties, which Disraeli never did (96). Devoting more than four pages to the influence of Bolingbroke on Disraeli, St. John presents his subject as essentially a Burkean, despite his lifelong aversion to and hostility toward Whigs and Whiggery. While Disraeli's political thought, revealed in his novels as well as works such as the 1835 Vindication of the English Constitution, was always secondary to his political career, he is here portrayed as consistent and responsible for creating a lasting Conservative culture that transcended any of his particular principles.
The balanced nature of each chapter, moderate in tone and ending with differing points of view from a variety of historians, does not quite prepare the reader for some of the stronger conclusions at the end. Yes, one has already been led to perceive Disraeli's view of politics as an art, a way of living, even a great game. And Disraeli's sentimentality as a weakness is also there. But suddenly Disraeli, while imaginative, was not a creative thinker; he “was intellectually indolent” (208), he was reactive, he “lacked the physical energy or intellectual power to shape events” (211), and he “lacked foresight. … There was a chronic short-termism in his thinking” (211). St. John's Disraeli is a great actor whose ironic detachment led him to rise above his background to hobnob with the aristocrats of his imagination, a postmodernist whose life and success “was personal and subjective. It existed, ultimately, in Disraeli's own mind” (216).
And what of his contest with Gladstone? In the body of the work, Gladstone appears as a worthy, if erratic, opponent, but in the conclusion it is Gladstone who is the heavyweight, “a political master whose powers exceeded Disraeli's own … Gladstone had reserves and dimensions to his politics that Disraeli could not match, such as intellectual vigor, administrative skill, a capacity to evolve with circumstances, sheer brute energy … in the end it was Gladstone, not Disraeli, who occupied the stage” (210). These conclusions are such a stunning contrast to the main narrative, not that they are not well founded, that one wonders why they are saved to the end where the argumentative force is diminished because the ground for them was not well prepared.
Anthem Press has priced the paperback version of this at an excessive $29.95, which implies to me that they anticipate the college text market for it, but there cannot be many courses in American colleges for which it would be required. This is not to detract from the undeniable merits of the book; it deserves a respectable place beside all the other recent short biographies of “Der Alte Jude.”
