Progressive Dubiety: The Discontinuity of Disraeli’s Political Trilogy

Abstract

A brief look at Popanilla (1828), Disraeli’s early imaginary voyage, is an appropriate prelude to our discussion of the trilogy. Popanilla is undoubtedly indebted to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and The Tale of a Tub and probably also to Johnson’s Rasselas and Voltaire’s Candide and Zadig, and could be discussed in terms of those predecessors. But I begin this chapter with Popanilla because Disraeli discovered in that work that he could use fiction to express his political and philosophic views. In his first example of political fiction, he avoided character analysis and a coherent unified plot, and relied upon loosely related and implausible episodes and one-dimensional caricatures in the service of ideas. His insistence on subordinating his imagination to his ideas prepared him for writing the Young England trilogy — Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847) — in which ideas and principles are paramount. But in those novels, as we shall see, there is ample room for character exploration and for Disraeli’s increasingly sophisticated narrative technique.