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Disraeli and the Natural Aristocracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Albert Tucker
Albert Tucker*
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
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Extract

Eighty years after his death, judgments of Disraeli tend to focus on two opposing impressions. One of them derives from the portrait which he created of himself in his own lifetime. Striving as he did to exaggerate his personality in social and public life, he inevitably left the impression of being too much the opportunist ever to be sincere. The word “charlatan” was attached to him before he was out of his twenties, and he never completely outgrew it. When he was in his forties even a maverick like Lord Brougham felt free to point him out on the street as “the greatest blackguard in England.” What annoyed so many of his contemporaries was not simply that Disraeli was a Jew or an upstart, but that he did not accept the moral patterns of English politics. He seemed always too ready to make alignments beyond the fixed boundaries of party, and to use even his conservatism as a means towards personal power and fame. Dislike of him on this ground existed in various quarters from earnest statesmen like Bright, Gladstone, and Shaftesbury on the one hand, to Tory aristocrats like Derby and Salisbury on the other. By the end of his life there had developed also the criticism that his political career had been essentially a failure. Walter Bagehot, for example, wrote in 1876 that Disraeli possessed an inaccurate mind with little capacity for the real business of parliament. J. A. Froude in 1891 was even more negative when he said that Disraeli's real triumph was of short duration, since “no public man in England ever rose so high and acquired power so great, so little of whose work has survived him.”

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , February 1962 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1962

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References

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