Disraeli and the Bible

Abstract

Benjamin Disraeli has often been represented as a mercurial self-fashioner who adopted various expedient personae over the course of his public life. The biographical emphasis on his eccentric personality has caused many historians to distance Disraeli from his nineteenth-century intellectual contexts in their analysis of his thought. Disraeli wrote within a literary culture that remained invested in the Bible as an important narrative authority. The poetry and fiction of the period inflected, transformed, and challenged this authority, but it also remained in purposeful conversation with the Bible as it forged new moral and literary territory. Disraeli participated in this discourse throughout his fiction, especially in two of his works: Alroy (1833) and Tancred (1847). In these novels Disraeli drew considerably on biblical patterns of kingship and nationhood and often used language from the King James Bible. In surfacing his interest in Scripture, this article suggests that Disraeli represented the Bible’s ancient wisdom as an important bulwark against some of the fast-paced social and political changes of his time and particularly against the ‘Whiggish’ tendencies of his political opponents.