Middlesex University Research Repository An open access repository of Middlesex University research http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk Farmer, Sandra Jean (1992) ’Trustees of posterity’: Benjamin Disraeli and the European Bildungsroman. PhD thesis, King’s College London. [Thesis] Final accepted version (with author’s formatting) This version is available at: https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/13473/ Copyright: Middlesex University Research Repository makes the University’s research available electronically. Copyright and moral rights to this work are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners unless otherwise stated. The work is supplied on the understanding that any use for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. 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See also repository copyright: re-use policy: http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/policies.html#copy Middlesex University Research Repository: an open access repository of Middlesex University research http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk Farmer, Sandra Jean, 1992. “Trustees of posterity”: Benjamin Disraeli and the European “Bildungsroman”. Available from Middlesex University’s Research Repository. Copyright: Middlesex University Research Repository makes the University’s research available electronically. Copyright and moral rights to this thesis/research project are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. The work is supplied on the understanding that any use for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. Any use of the thesis/research project for private study or research must be properly acknowledged with reference to the work’s full bibliographic details. This thesis/research project may not be reproduced in any format or medium, or extensive quotations taken from it, or its content changed in any way, without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Middlesex University via the following email address: [email protected] The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. ~3 0"-1 "Trustees of Posterity": Benjamin Disraeli and the European "Bildungsroman" Sandra Jean Fanner For the degree of Ph.D. King's CoUege London University of London This thesis studies Benjamin Disraeli's use of the form of the "Bildungsroman" to invent and discover himself. It shows how Disraeli's own life was developing as a "Bildungsroman" while writing four of his twelve novels, Contarini Flemin&, Conin&sby, Sybil and Lothair, during the period 1832-1870. As each of these four novels is studied in turn in Chapters I-IV respectively, Disraeli's recurring hero appears in four guises, thus illustrating how the form of the "Bildungsroman" undergoes subtle changes. In the open-ended Contarini Flemin& (1832) with its emphasis on youth and ambition, Disraeli had intended to create a work similar to the classical German "Bildungsroman" portraying the development of a character. Despite its many comparisons with Goethe's paradigmatic Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Disraeli's early novel has more of an affinity with Stendhal's Le rou&e et Ie noire The eponymous hero of Conin&sby has the distinguishing quality of "insipidness" and is seen from the perspective of an exemplary class representative of the aristocracy. This novel is taken as an example of the English "Bildungsroman", an English "fairy story" because Coningsby's destiny is already predetermined. The hero of Sybil, Charles Egremont's conviction is that one's identity is not inherited but created, which returns to the classical ideal of "Bildung", and which Disraeli reformulated as "vocation". It is argued that poverty and its relief was not the theme of Sybil but was used to point to the opportunities open to a re­ educated aristocracy. In Chapter IV it is shown that it is only with Lothair, written in old age, that Disraeli discovers himself and achieves a successful classical "Bildungsroman". The narrator evaluates the represented events in a restrained and indirect manner and demonstrates a concern with analysing what is involved in the hero's discovery of himself and the world. The "Bildungsroman's" valorization of the existing social order prompts Lothair to look towards the past. He refuses to consider the future still open and his discontinuation of the quest for a philosophy of life is presented as a sign of his achieved maturity and his "Bildung" is concluded. In these four self-referential works Disraeli constructed a composite character whose biography was that of the author himself. CONTENTS List of Abbreviations page 2 INTRODUCTION page 4 CHAPTER 1 page 14 Contarini Flemiol as "Bildungsroman" : comparisons with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and Stendhal's I.e Roule et Ie Noir. CHAPTER 2 page 72 Coninrsby as "Bildungsroman" : the bero as exemplary representative of the English aristocracy. CHAPTER 3 page 127 Sybil as "Bildungsroman" : vocation as a model for the authentic activity of a life. CHAPTER 4 page 177 Lothair as classical "Bildungsroman" : the paradox of a novel of youth written with "the frame of age" • CONCLUSION page 229 NOms page 234 BmLIOGRAPHY page 293 1 ABBREVIA TIONS USED IN THE TEXT Texts by Disraeli In the case of Disraeli's novels, the Bradenham edition of The Novels and Tales of Benjamin Disraeli, edited by Philip Guedalla, 12 vols. (London, 1927) has been used. Page references to Vol. 4 Contarini F1emin& are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text as CF. Other volumes referred to are as follows:- C Vol. 8 Conin&sby E Vol. 12 Endymion L Vol. 11 Lothair S Vol. 9 Sybil V Vol. 7 Venetia VG Vol. 1 Vivian Gray YD Vol. 2 The Youn& Duke DL I and DL IV Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1815-1847, edited by J.A.W. Gunn, M.G. Wiebe et ai, (Toronto, 1982- 1989). 2 Other Texts DD George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, edited with an introduction by Barbara Hardy, (Harmondsworth, 1967). M George Eliot, Middlemarcb, edited by W.J. Harvey, (Harmondswortb, 1965). Stendhal, Scarlet and Black: a chronicle of the nineteenth century, translated by Margaret R.B. Shaw, (Harmondsworth, 1953). Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, edited with an introduction by Andrew Hook, (Harmondsworth, 1972). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Wilhelm Meisters Years of Apprenticeship: Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, translated by H.M. Waidson, 3 vols (London, 1977). 3 INfRODUCTIor 4 This thesis is a study of Disraeli and his use of the fonn of the "Bildungsroman" to invent and discover himself. It attempts to show that the hero whose "biography" appears in each "Bildungsroman" is that of the author who created him. Disraeli wrote twelve novels and a fragment between 1826 and 1880; the autobiographical nature of the early fiction rendered it a vehicle for his ambition and all his novels were an expedient means of demonstrating his sense of his own genius and its power in the pursuit of political success. The tenn "Bildungsroman" was borrowed from the Gennan, and I take the tenn to refer to the genre associated with Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which appeared both in France and England as well as in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Central to the "Bildungsroman" is the notion of the selfhood of the individual achieved through growth, and of social experience which forms that self: the projected resolution of this process is an adjustment to society. The genre's association with the value of the individual and the fact that it was often autobiographical was central to Disraeli's project. The typical "Bildungsroman" showed the development of an intelligent, open-minded young man in a society both complex and without generally accepted values. Since the French Revolution changes in society had appeared meaningless and threatening: in 1831 John Stuart Mill found the distinguishing characteristic of the time was transition in which "mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones" (1). In 1833 Disraeli's friend, 5 Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote in En2land and the En2lish that "old opinions, feelings - ancestral customs and institutions are crumbling away, and both the spiritual and temporal worlds are darkened by the shadow of change." (2). Disraeli found society then "in the midst of a convulsion in which the very principles of our political and social systems are called in question" [C p.155]. This anxiety accounted for the focus on history and narrative in nineteenth­ century culture: they offered the possibility of endowing events with meaning and order. Many writers and works appeared responsive to particular phases of social and economic development. This is not to suggest that all writers were always responsive to changes in society, although it would be difficult to argue that any author gives his account of the world from an impartial position.