Disraeli reveals something about the history of taste in the nineteenth century. His early novels--such as
Vivian Grey--met the middle-class desire for revelations of aristocratic life, for romances about bizarre characters in strange lands, and for extreme behavior on the part of willful egoists posing as latter-day Byrons. As an outsider, as a man who savored his own feelings and sought unusual sensations, the youthful Disraeli saw himself as an heir to Byron and Shelley. But in the later 1830s, Disraeli, like Dickens, responded to audiences who wanted sentiment and sweetness; in
Henrietta Temple (1837) Disraeli wrote about love between virginal young women and idealistic young men whose motives are temporarily misunderstood because of circumstances beyond their control. Even when he wrote of Byron and Shelley in
Venetia (1837), he threw the mantle of Victorian respectability over them in spite of his empathy with their unconventionality. In the 1840s, the Young England trilogy--
Coningsby (1844),
Sybil (1845), and
Tancred (1847)--met the demand for serious novels that addressed major moral and political ideas. In
Lothair (1870) he drew upon the public's fascination--rekindled by the conversion of the marquess of Bute--with the journey from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, while in
Endymion (1880) he responded to the interest in character psychology created by Browning, Eliot, and Hardy, which was part of an inward turning and questioning as the Victorian era passed its high tide of confidence.
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