Disraeli’s Frenetic Stasis

This chapter argues that Benjamin Disraeli’s fraught vision of progress-through-regress ultimately effects a stasis in which time is hyperactive but going nowhere, as we see in Disraeli’s extensive use of topical, sparkling dialogue. Although scholars have read Coningsby (1844), and Sybil (1845) as novelizations of a Tory radical historiography, this chapter emphasizes how these novels segment time, reading their aesthetics of immediacy together with his notorious roman-à-clef, Vivian Grey (1826 and 1853). In both his persona and his fiction, Disraeli seemed to have a paradoxical relationship to time—undergoing successive sartorial transformations eerily reflective of the Zeitgeist, while also defying expectations for the trajectory of a career. His novels feature older men who resist their reading as representatives of a debauched past being inexorably overtaken by a moral present. Instead, for Disraeli, the arc of the life ultimately challenges linear history, suggesting a vision of time as stasis punctuated by unseen rupture.