Politicizing character and landscape in The Young Duke and Henrietta Temple

Across his canon of fiction and non-fiction works, Disraeli embeds political mythologizing and emblematizing that engage with, illuminate and explore specific socio-political issues, and by doing so creates an interface between political philosophy and literary representation. This can be seen in a number of his silver fork novels, written between 1831 and 1837, in advance of his political trilogy—Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847). The Young Duke, one of Disraeli’s earliest silver fork novels, and Henrietta Temple, one of his later, function both as windows onto contemporaneous aristocratic mores, and as vehicles for Disraeli’s own political philosophies and for his critiques of rival political beliefs or theories. In each novel Disraeli positions his politically conservative vision and commentary by constructing recognizable yet nuanced politicized images in his characters and by investing various locales with political mythology. Drawing on the work of Gaston Bachelard and of Edward S. Casey, specifically that focused on notions of place, memory and nostalgia, this chapter considers how the politicization of character and place in both novels—simple and static in The Young Duke, complex and dynamic in Henrietta Temple—traces the maturing of Disraeli’s political philosophies.