Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The Victorian novel and its readers
- 2 The business of Victorian publishing
- 3 The aesthetics of the Victorian novel: form, subjectivity, ideology
- 4 Industrial culture and the Victorian novel
- 5 Gender and the Victorian novel
- 6 Sexuality in the Victorian novel
- 7 Race and the Victorian novel
- 8 Detection in the Victorian novel
- 9 Sensation and the fantastic in the Victorian novel
- 10 Intellectual debate in the Victorian novel: religion, science, and the professional
- 11 Dickens, Melville, and a tale of two countries
- Guide to further reading
- Index
7 - Race and the Victorian novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The Victorian novel and its readers
- 2 The business of Victorian publishing
- 3 The aesthetics of the Victorian novel: form, subjectivity, ideology
- 4 Industrial culture and the Victorian novel
- 5 Gender and the Victorian novel
- 6 Sexuality in the Victorian novel
- 7 Race and the Victorian novel
- 8 Detection in the Victorian novel
- 9 Sensation and the fantastic in the Victorian novel
- 10 Intellectual debate in the Victorian novel: religion, science, and the professional
- 11 Dickens, Melville, and a tale of two countries
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
“All is race; there is no other truth.” So says Sidonia, Benjamin Disraeli's fictional Jewish sage and alter ego. The novel in which Sidonia makes this pronouncement is Tancred (1847), the third in Disraeli's Young England trilogy. Even during his years as Prime Minister, Disraeli continued to believe in race as an all-encompassing explanatory category.
God works by races . . . The Aryan and the Semite are of the same blood and origin, but when they quitted their central land they were ordained to follow opposite courses. Each division of the great race has developed one portion of the double nature of humanity, till after all their wanderings they met again, and, represented by their two choicest families, the Hellenes and the Hebrews, brought together the treasures of their accumulated wisdom and secured the civilisation of man.
The metaphor of “choicest families,” suggesting divinely chosen branches of the one “great race,” provides Disraeli with a formulaic - indeed, stereotypic - explanation of Western civilization and its two ancient sources, classical Greece and Judaeo-Christianity.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel , pp. 149 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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