Jonathan Parry - Benjamin Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli

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Jonathan Parry

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First published in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004

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Benjamin Disraeli remains the most intriguing of nineteenth-century British politicians. He lacked a conventional public school and university background, but by oratory, flair and hard graft he overcame snobbery and anti-semitism to become prime minister for seven years. His epigrams and flamboyance provided a telling contrast not only with his great rival William Gladstone but also with the stolid and insular Conservative MPs that he led. His literary productivity and historical enthusiasms demonstrated his intellectual fertility, yet many contemporaries did not see him as a man of principle, and historiansand subsequent Conservative politicianshave assessed his political philosophy and legacy in profoundly different ways.

This short biography, written originally for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, offers a guide to his life, ideas and significance. Though primarily chronological, it also explores a number of underlying themes. One is his youthful Romantic desire for fame and belief in his own genius, leading him to abandon a humdrum legal career and launch himself as a novelist. He struggled to reconcile the worlds of imagination and actionhis desire for artistic creativity with his strong thirst for political position. His initial attempts to storm the ramparts of British politics were damaged by his self-presentation as an unconventional thinker at least as much as by his lack of connections.

In the 1840s Disraeli developed his ideas in a way more appropriate for an ambitious Conservative MP. This decade of national crisis was the most important influence on his career. He saw the need to attack social divisions by improving the vigour and tone of the governing classes, especially the aristocracy and the Church. He argued that the defence of religion, property and political leadership would benefit from the guidance of insightful mindslike his ownwhich understood both Jewish philosophy and English history. As a devoted student of the latter, he also criticized the excessive influence of the commercial classes on current British foreign and colonial policy, which he felt was damaging the national interest and honour. Most of his later political strategies bore some relationship, albeit indirect, to such ideas.

Disraeli once said that his politics could be summed up in one wordEngland. Patriotism was indeed a feature of many of his initiatives, though often conceived idiosyncratically. As a leader of the Conservative opposition throughout the long period of Liberal political dominance between 1846 and 1874, he tried many political manoeuvres. Marrying low intrigue with high philosophy, they were characteristically fertile and often impractical. Several times he tangled with issues of national religion, which he never understood as well as he thought he did. Finally, as prime minister of a majority Conservative government between 1874 and 1880, he sought to supply national leadership, particularly in foreign policy, in order to restore British greatness and win lasting fame for himself.

Disraeli always looked backwards more than forwards. Arguably he did not understand or seriously court the emerging urban democracy. Yet circumstances have given him a different posthumous image. To suit the interests of the Conservative party after 1881, he was reinvented as a populist, a social reformer and an imperialist. That his career after death has been so long and many-sided is a tribute to the creativity of his mind and the fascination of his life.

Jonathan Parry

August 2006

Jonathan Parry is a Reader in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. His principal publications include