Synopsis
Lothair, a wealthy young orphaned Scottish nobleman (loosely based on The 3rd Marquess of Bute) has been brought up in the legal guardianship of his Presbyterian uncle Lord Culloden and of a Catholic convert, Cardinal Grandison (based on Henry Edward Cardinal Manning). [2] When he comes of age Lothair finds himself the centre of attention of three fascinating women, Lady Corisande, Clare Arundel, and Theodora Campion, representing the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Radical cause respectively. Wavering in his allegiances, he unsuccessfully proposes marriage to Lady Corisande, almost joins the Catholic Church, and finally joins Theodora in Italy as a volunteer in the army of Garibaldi, which is fighting to take the Papal States for Italy. Theodora is killed at Viterbo, and Lothair is seriously wounded at the Battle of Mentana, but is nursed back to health by Clare Arundel, who tries to persuade him that he was saved by an apparition of the Virgin Mary. He takes refuge with the bohemian dandy Mr. Phoebus (a thinly disguised Frederic Leighton), [3] who takes him to Syria, which, as the cradle of Christianity, seems the ideal place to reflect on the roots of the Christian faith. In Jerusalem he meets Paraclete, a mystic who teaches him that there is truth in many religions. Lothair returns to England and decides in favour of the Church of England, resisting the attempts of Cardinal Grandison and other prelates, including Mgr Catesby (modelled on Thomas Capel), [4] to convert him to Catholicism. The novel ends with his marriage to Lady Corisande.
Critical and popular reception
Lothair was first published by Longmans, Green and Co. on 2 May 1870, in 3 volumes. This first edition of 2000 copies sold out in two days, and no less than seven more British editions were needed before the end of the year. In the United States, where it was published by Appleton, 25,000 copies were sold in the first three days. Lothair-mania, as his publisher called it, was epidemic. [5] A ship, a perfume, a galop, a waltz, a song and two racehorses were named after either Lothair himself or Lady Corisande. Bret Harte published a full-length parody called Lothaw: or, The Adventures of a Young Gentleman in Search of a Religion . By 1876 Disraeli had earned £7500 from the novel, but it had not been so beneficial to his political career. [6] Conservative politicians, it has been said, asked themselves awkward questions:
How could Parliamentarians be expected to trust an ex-Premier who, when half-way between sixty and seventy, instead of occupying his leisure, in accordance with the British convention, in classical, historical, or constitutional studies, produced a gaudy romance of the peerage, so written as to make it almost impossible to say how much was ironical or satirical, and how much soberly intended?…[It] revived all the former doubts as to whether a Jewish literary man, so dowered with imagination, and so unconventional in his outlook, was the proper person to lead a Conservative party to victory. [7]
Lothair-mania was less noticeable among the critics, some of whom had political differences with the author. Among the most unkind was the notice in Macmillan's Magazine, which declared that "A single conscientious perusal (without skipping) of Lothair would be a creditable feat: few will voluntarily attempt a second." [8] The Quarterly Review largely agreed, calling Disraeli's production:
A book which he calls a novel, but which is after all a political pamphlet, and a bid for the bigoted voices of Exeter Hall… It sins alike against good taste and justice…That there are happy thoughts and epigrammatic sentences sown broadcast in its pages need scarcely be said of a novel written by Mr. Disraeli. But as the true pearl lies embedded in the loose fibre of a mollusc, so Mr. Disraeli's gems of speech and thought are hidden in a vast maze of verbiage which can seldom be called English, and very frequently is downright nonsense…So far as feeling is concerned Lothair is as dull as ditch-water and as flat as a flounder. [9]
The Conservative Pall Mall Gazette made the best of Disraeli's stylistic carelessness by speculating that Lothair "Must have cost the author, we cannot help fancying, no effort whatever; it was as easy and delightful for him to write as for us to read." [10]
After Disraeli's death the praise came more plentifully. Edmund Gosse took the view that Disraeli had been writing with tongue in cheek, calling it "Unquestionably the greatest of his literary works – the superb ironic romance of Lothair"; the historian J. A. Froude thought it "A work immeasurably superior to anything of the kind which he had hitherto produced", because more purely a work of art than the politically engaged Coningsby and Sybil ; and the Liberal politician George W. E. Russell judged it Disraeli's masterpiece, as being "A profound study of spiritual and political forces at a supremely important moment in the history of modern Europe". Sir Leslie Stephen dissented, believing it "A practical joke on a large scale, or a prolonged burlesque upon Disraeli's own youthful performances"; but as late as 1920 Disraeli's biographer George Earle Buckle could still claim that Coningsby and Lothair were the two novels on which his reputation rested with the general reader. [11]
British editions succeeded each other at short intervals up to the 1920s, but for the last 80 years Lothair has been reprinted less often than Sybil or Coningsby. A recent critic has noted that "It is largely unread today except by dedicated literary biographers." Oxford University Press included it in their Oxford English Novels series in 1975, in an edition by Vernon Bogdanor. [12]
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.
Mary Anne Disraeli, 1st Viscountess Beaconsfield was a British peeress and society figure who was the wife of the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli.
James Anthony Froude was an English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine. From his upbringing amidst the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, Froude intended to become a clergyman, but doubts about the doctrines of the Anglican church, published in his scandalous 1849 novel The Nemesis of Faith, drove him to abandon his religious career. Froude turned to writing history, becoming one of the best-known historians of his time for his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
Earl of Beaconsfield, of Hughenden in the County of Buckingham, was a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created in 1876 for Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a favourite of Queen Victoria. Victoria favoured Disraeli's Tory policies over those of his Liberal rival, William Ewart Gladstone. Disraeli had also promoted the Royal Titles Act 1876 that had given Victoria the title of Empress of India. The subsidiary title of the earldom was Viscount Hughenden, of Hughenden in the County of Buckingham, also in the Peerage of the United Kingdom.
Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville was an English diarist and an amateur cricketer who played first-class cricket from 1819 to 1827. His father, Charles Greville, was a second cousin of the 1st Earl of Warwick. His mother, Lady Charlotte Bentinck, was a daughter of the 3rd Duke of Portland.
Edward George Geoffrey Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, known as Lord Stanley from 1834 to 1851, was a British statesman and Conservative politician who served three times as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. To date, he is the longest-serving leader of the Conservative Party. He is one of only four British prime ministers to have three or more separate periods in office. However, his ministries each lasted less than two years and totalled three years and 280 days. Derby introduced the state education system in Ireland, and reformed Parliament.
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.
William Flavelle Monypenny was an Irish-born journalist and editor whose career was split between London and South Africa. He was also the first biographer of Benjamin Disraeli.
Young England was a Victorian era political group with a political message based on an idealised feudalism: an absolute monarch and a strong Established Church, with the philanthropy of noblesse oblige as the basis for its paternalistic form of social organisation. For the most part, its unofficial membership was confined to a splinter group of Tory aristocrats who had attended Eton and Cambridge together, among them George Smythe, Lord John Manners, Henry Thomas Hope and Alexander Baillie-Cochrane. The group's leader and figurehead was Benjamin Disraeli, who bore the distinction of having neither an aristocratic background nor a public school or university education. Young England promulgated a conservative and romantic species of social Toryism.
The leader of the Conservative Party is the highest position within the United Kingdom's Conservative Party. The current holder of the position is Rishi Sunak, who was elected to the position on 24 October 2022, following his unopposed victory in the party's leadership election. Sunak announced his pending resignation as Conservative leader on 22 July 2024, and will remain party leader until a successor is elected.
George Earle Buckle was an English editor and biographer.
Coningsby, or The New Generation is an English political novel by Benjamin Disraeli, published in 1844.
Sybil, or The Two Nations is an 1845 novel by Benjamin Disraeli. Published in the same year as Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Sybil traces the plight of the working classes of England. Disraeli was interested in dealing with the horrific conditions in which the majority of England's working classes lived — or, what is generally called the Condition of England question.
The Friendly Societies Act 1875 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed by Benjamin Disraeli's Conservative government following the publication of the Royal Commission on Friendly Societies' Final Report.
Coningsby Ralph Disraeli, was a British Conservative politician, and MP for Altrincham.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, was the Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on two occasions, first in 1868 and then between 1874 and 1880.
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.
The statue of Benjamin Disraeli is an outdoor bronze sculpture by Mario Raggi, located at the west side of Parliament Square in London. It was unveiled in 1883 and became a Grade II listed building in 1970.
Sarah Brydges Willyams, born Sarah Mendez da Costa, was an English supporter and confidante of Benjamin Disraeli.
Thomas Edward Kebbel (c. 23 November 1826 – 5 November 1917) was an English journalist.
