jethrien

Title: Disraeli: The Victorian Dandy Who Became Prime Minister
Author: Christopher Hibbert
Genre: Biography
Thingummies: 1.5

Synopsis: How did someone make one of the legendary Prime Ministers of England, a be-curled ex-Jewish fop with a somewhat mad wife, boring?

Thoughts: I have a certain affection for Victorian history, and kept coming up against Disraeli as a personage of the age. I thought perhaps I should learn a little bit more about him.

I have now read an entire book on the guy, and I still feel like I don't know anything about him.

I have no idea what Hibbert's goal was in writing this book. As far as I know, it's not inaccurate, and it's not unreadable on a sentence level. But it's just...pointless. He somehow miraculously drains any interest from his subject's life. We know Disraeli is a mesmerizing speaker...from being told. Repeatedly. Without any excerpts from his speeches. Or explanations of what his speeches accomplished. In fact, there's next to no background info here whatsoever--on the political situation, on almost any of his accomplishments as a politician, on the actual content of his novels, on Jews in England, on why people disliked him so much, on practically anything of importance about his life.

What we do have is enormous amounts of trivia. We have endless excerpts of the most uninteresting diary entries and letters imaginable. (Yes, we understand his wife kept every note he ever wrote to her, including the "Writing is going well, send up some tea darling" kinds of notes. That doesn't mean it's interesting to read them.) From his first term as prime minister, we have something like three paragraphs about the fact he made some speeches, and then multiple chapters on the (completely unimportant) social engagements he attended while on vacation in the country. We have a brief mention of the Crimean War, without a good explanation of why it toppled an administration, but repeated updates on the state of the peacocks on his terrace. We know which long-dead personages characters in his novels are modeled after, but not the plot or themes of the novels. For pity's sake, we have next to no explanation of how he got his second term, but almost a full page explaining the care regime for his wife's pearl necklace.

This book assumes you already know everything important there is to know about Disraeli's political and literary career, and that the only burning question you have left is what he ate on holiday that one time.

An infuriating waste of time.