Henrietta Temple

Last updated

Henrietta Temple A Love Story
Author Benjamin Disraeli
LanguageEnglish
Genre Silver fork novel
Publisher Henry Colburn
Publication date
1837
Media typePrint

Henrietta Temple is the ninth novel written by Benjamin Disraeli, who would later become a Prime Minister of Britain.

Contents

Background

Disraeli wrote the first volume of Henrietta Temple in 1833 at the start of his affair with Henrietta Sykes, on whom the novel’s eponymous heroine is based, and completed it three years later, shortly after the affair had ended. [1] The two volumes reflect these two stages of the relationship, the first with, "the rustle of real petticoats [being] more audible than in any other part of Disraeli's work," the latter where, "passion has vanished". [2] [3] The novel was written at a time when Disraeli was heavily in debt (ca £1m in today’s terms) and its limited success helped ease Disraeli’s financial situation. [4] [5]

Synopsis

Ferdinand Armine is the scion of an aristocratic Catholic family, which can trace its roots back to the time of William the Conqueror. Ferdinand had an idyllic but isolated childhood, brought up by his loving parents and his tutor Glastonbury. The family estate, Armine, is, however, dilapidated and debt-ridden due to the lifestyle of Ferdinand’s grandfather. Ferdinand becomes a favourite of his wealthy maternal grandfather, Lord Grandison, who, despite hints, fails to financially assist his daughter and son-in-law. Glastonbury therefore arranges for a duke in London, whose family he previously served, to buy an army commission in Malta for Ferdinand. Whilst Ferdinand is in Malta, Lord Grandison’s heir dies and everyone assumes Ferdinand will in due course inherit Grandison’s estate. Ferdinand therefore builds up large debts living an extravagant lifestyle but, when Grandison dies, his estate is bequeathed to his granddaughter, Katherine. On returning to England, Ferdinand realises the only way to deal with his debt is to marry Katherine, his cousin.

A retrospective portrayal (1852) of Disraeli as a young man when he wrote Henrietta Temple Dizzy-grant.jpg
A retrospective portrayal (1852) of Disraeli as a young man when he wrote Henrietta Temple

Ferdinand successfully woos Katherine who accepts his proposal of marriage. Ruminating on the sadness of his predicament, he meets Henrietta Temple and her father, the tenant of the neighbouring estate. Ferdinand and Henrietta instantly fall in love. In the coming days and weeks, with both their families away, the couple spend more time together and enter into a secret engagement.

Ferdinand concludes that he should break his engagement with Katherine and persuades Henrietta to keep their engagement secret until he has squared things with his own father. Ferdinand therefore sets off to Bath to explain what has happened to his family. He and Henrietta exchange secret letters but Ferdinand’s become progressively more infrequent and briefer. Henrietta hears of Ferdinand’s engagement to Katherine through a family friend, Lady Bellair. Distraught, she reveals her love for Ferdinand to her father and they resolve to go to Italy.

Shortly afterwards Ferdinand, having failed to tell his family about Henrietta, returns and, learning that Henrietta has left the country and has knowledge of his engagement to Katherine, falls gravely ill. His parents, Glastonbury and Katherine help nurse him back to health, whereupon Ferdinand confirms to Katherine what Glastonbury had previously told her, namely that he is in love with someone else. Ferdinand and Katherine resolve to secretly break their engagement but to remain friends.

Meanwhile in Italy, Henrietta is also ill and reclusive but is gradually brought round by Lord Montfort, the grandson of the (now deceased) duke who arranged the army commission for Ferdinand. Montfort proposes and, mainly to make her father happy, Henrietta accepts. Montfort decides that they should return to London for their wedding. Coincidentally Mr Temple is the beneficiary of an unexpected inheritance and decides to settle it on Henrietta thus making her the richest heiress in the country.

In London Ferdinand and Henrietta meet through mutual friends and chance encounters and learn how unhappy the other is. Katherine also realises Henrietta is Ferdinand’s first love and challenges both Henrietta and Lord Montfort on the subject. Henrietta and Ferdinand both separately disclose their feelings to their fathers, who react negatively. News of the termination of Ferdinand's engagement to Katherine reaches one of his creditors, who arranges for Ferdinand to be arrested and taken to a “spunging hole”, a sort of pre-debtor prison.

Various friends visit Ferdinand but he refuses help. Eventually Montfort turns up and presents him with a note written by Henrietta which states that Montfort and Katherine are to wed, thus freeing Ferdinand to marry Henrietta. Ferdinand is delighted and the following day allows a friend to pay off his debt. With all the main characters happily reconciled, the novel ends describing how Montfort and Ferdinand went on to become Whig MPs and how Ferdinand and Henrietta happily raised their four children at the former’s family home, now restored to its former splendour.

Themes

According to its author, the main theme of the novel is love at first sight, [6] as described when Ferdinand first sets eyes on Henrietta.

There is no love but love at first sight. This is the transcendent and surpassing offspring of sheer and unpolluted sympathy. All other is the illegitimate result of observation, of reflection, of compromise, of comparison, of expediency. The passions that endure flash like the lightning: they scorch the soul, but it is warmed for ever. [7]

Disraeli also writes that, "the magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end,” [8] but the novel contains additional themes common to his other work such as a character (Glastonbury) mirroring “his own wiser alter ego”, a key scene being set in a ruined abbey and artificially life-like art. [9]

The novel's hero escapes debt by a combination of marrying into a wealthy family and entering Parliament, both of which Disraeli was to do in the 3 years following the novel’s publication. [10]

Reception

The novel was generally well received at the time of its publication. Lord Tennyson described it as a “charming little story” [11] and Beverley Tucker, writing of Disraeli, "that there is no writer of novels now living whose powers are estimated so highly by the best judges among us," describes the novel as a, "striking example of the versatility of his genius." [12] The novel had a resurgence in popularity when Disraeli took centre stage at the 1878 Congress of Berlin. [13]

More recent reviews have been mixed. In 1968, Richard Levine wrote, “In the final analysis, however, [Henrietta Temple] is neither typical nor meaningful in Disraeli’s canon; for it carries within it few ideas or authorial observations, and Disraeli’s fundamental interests for us are as a novelist of ideas and as a writer of personal involvement and observation.” [14] Eleven years later Daniel Schwarz rebutted Levine's opinions on the grounds that the novel has “thematic interest and aesthetic appeal apart from Disraeli’s ideas” and that it is “hardly impersonal.” [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Disraeli</span> Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1868; 1874–1880)

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, was a British statesman, Conservative politician and writer who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He played a central role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach. Disraeli is remembered for his influential voice in world affairs, his political battles with the Liberal Party leader William Ewart Gladstone, and his one-nation conservatism or "Tory democracy". He made the Conservatives the party most identified with the British Empire and military action to expand it, both of which were popular among British voters. He is the only British Prime Minister to have been born Jewish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hughenden Manor</span> Grade I listed house in Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

Hughenden Manor, Hughenden, Buckinghamshire, England, is a Victorian mansion, with earlier origins, that served as the country house of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield. It is now owned by the National Trust and open to the public. It sits on the brow of the hill to the west of the main A4128 road that links Hughenden to High Wycombe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfred d'Orsay</span> French artist and dandy (1801–1852)

Alfred Guillaume Gabriel Grimod d'Orsay, comte d'Orsay was a French amateur artist, dandy, and man of fashion in the early- to mid-19th century.

<i>Endymion</i> (Disraeli novel) 1880 novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Endymion is a novel published in 1880 by Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, the former Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was paid an advance of £10,000 for it. It was the last novel Disraeli published before his death. He had been writing another, Falconet, when he died; it was published, incomplete, after his death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lord George Bentinck</span> British politician

Lord William George Frederick Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, better known as Lord George Bentinck, was an English Conservative politician and racehorse owner noted for his role in unseating Sir Robert Peel over the Corn Laws.

Coningsby, or The New Generation is an English political novel by Benjamin Disraeli, published in 1844.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coningsby Disraeli</span> British politician

Coningsby Ralph Disraeli, was a British Conservative politician, and MP for Altrincham.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fashionable novel</span> 19th-century genre of English literature

Fashionable novels, also called silver-fork novels, were a 19th-century genre of English literature that depicted the lives of the upper class and the aristocracy.

<i>Tancred</i> (novel) 1847 novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Tancred; or, The New Crusade (1847) is a novel by Benjamin Disraeli, first published by Henry Colburn in three volumes. Together with Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845) it forms a sequence sometimes called the Young England trilogy. It shares a number of characters with the earlier novels, but unlike them is concerned less with the political and social condition of England than with a religious and even mystical theme: the question of how Judaism and Christianity are to be reconciled, and the Church reborn as a progressive force.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Windsor, 3rd Baron Windsor</span>

Edward Windsor, 3rd Baron Windsor, was an English peer.

<i>Disraeli</i> (play) 1911 play by Louis N. Parker

Disraeli is a play by the British writer Louis N. Parker. The comedy with dramatic overtones has four acts and four settings, with a large cast, and moderate pacing. It is a fictional depiction of Benjamin Disraeli's life around 1875, when he arranged the purchase of the Suez Canal. It also contains dual love stories: Disraeli and his wife, and a young couple.

Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Romance is the fourth and most autobiographical novel written by Benjamin Disraeli, who would later become a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It was published anonymously in May 1832 but despite the author considering it his best novel, was a financial failure.

The Wondrous Tale of Alroy is the sixth novel written by Benjamin Disraeli, who would later become a Prime Minister of Britain. Originally published in 1833, a "new edition” was published in 1834, a heavily revised edition in 1846 entitled Alroy: A Romance and another in 1871 based on that. It is a fictionalised account of the life of David Alroy. Its significance lies in its portrayal of Disraeli's "ideal ambition" and for its being his only novel with a distinctive Jewish subject. Cecil Roth described it as perhaps the earliest Jewish historical novel and Adam Kirsch as "a significant proto-Zionist text". Philip Rieff described an answer by Alroy as "perhaps one of the earliest Zionist perorations given in Western literature".

<i>The Young Duke</i> 1831 novel by Benjamin Disraeli

The Young Duke - a moral tale, though gay is the third novel written by Benjamin Disraeli who would later become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Despite its moderate success, Disraeli came to dislike the novel which was a hindrance to his political career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disraeli Monument</span>

The Disraeli Monument is a Grade II* listed memorial erected in 1862 to the British writer and scholar Isaac D'Israeli, designed by the architect Edward Buckton Lamb. It is located on Tinker's Hill in the Hughenden Valley near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire.

The Voyage of Captain Popanilla is the second novel by Benjamin Disraeli, who later became a prime minister of the United Kingdom. Its allegory of a fantastic voyage is a satire on contemporary society.

The Rise of Iskander is the seventh novel written by Benjamin Disraeli who would later become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

<i>The Infernal Marriage</i> 1834 novel by Benjamin Disraeli

The Infernal Marriage is the eighth novel written by Benjamin Disraeli who would later become Prime Minister of Great Britain.

<i>Ixion in Heaven</i> 1832 novel by Benjamin Disraeli

Ixion in Heaven is the fifth novel written by Benjamin Disraeli who would later become a Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Falconet is the name generally given to the untitled, final and unfinished novel of the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who died before completing it.

References

  1. Blake, Robert (1966). Disraeli (1998 Prion Books paperback ed.). London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. pp. 97, 136. ISBN   978-1853752759.
  2. Blake p143
  3. Bradenham
  4. Blake pp108, 134
  5. Diniejko, Andrzej. "Henrietta Temple - Disraeli's Semi-Autobiographical Romance about Love and Money". The Victorian web. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  6. "Henrietta Temple". The Spectator Archive. The Spectator. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  7. Bradenham p76
  8. Bradenham p195
  9. Nickerson, Charles (8 June 2012). "Benjamin Disraeli's Contarini Fleming and Alroy". The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries. 39 (2). Retrieved 1 July 2017.
  10. Diniejko
  11. Disraeli, Benjamin (1837). Henrietta Temple A Love Story (1927 Bradenham ed.). London: Peter Davies. p. viii.
  12. Beverley Tucker, N. "1837 Review of Henrietta Temple". William and Mary Law School Faculty Publications. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  13. Blake p647
  14. Levine, Richard A (1968). "From Immersion to Reflection: Romance and Realism in Henrietta Temple and Venetia". Benjamin Disraeli . New York: Twayne. p.  58. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-04716-1_3. ISBN   978-1-349-04718-5.
  15. Schwarz, Daniel R (1979). "From Immersion to Reflection: Romance and Realism in Henrietta Temple and Venetia". Disraeli's Fiction. Springer International Publishing. pp. 55–77. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-04716-1_3. ISBN   978-1-349-04718-5.