Benjamin Disraeli — inventor of English political fiction

For our fractured times, the release of Disraeli’s Sybil in unabridged audio, narrated with the respect it deserves by Tim Bentinck, is timely as, despite its title being familiar, these days it is seldom read. Published in 1845, 23 years before Disraeli’s first premiership, the story, rich in the minutiae of then contemporary political conflict, covers the years of reform and unrest between 1837 and 1844, but throws up startling parallels between then and now.

The young agitator Stephen Morley speaks directly to us. There’s no community in England, he says; city men are united only by their desire for gain, not in a state of co-operation but of money-seeking isolation. Did Brexiteers vote, as did the Chartist Walter Gerard for the People’s Charter, not for the ‘reforms & remedies’ but merely because they were ‘a change’? Hard-pressed labourers resent the ‘himmigrants’ from Suffolk beating down their already meagre wages and, concerned for the future by the increasing population, Gerard asks Charles Egremont: ‘How will you feed them? How will you clothe them?’

Egremont, Disraeli’s protagonist and mouthpiece, is the younger brother of Lord Marney, the savagely unfeeling aristocrat who is content for his tenants to survive — or not — on seven shillings a week. Egremont lodges for a while in the north of England in order to witness the dire conditions of the poor, where he meets Gerard and his daughter Sybil. In reply to Egremont’s boast that Victoria reigns over the ‘greatest nation’, Disraeli gives Gerard the novel’s stand-out lines. She reigns, he says, over two nations

between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones… THE RICH AND THE POOR.