The Wilde, Wilde Victorian Era

The raised-eyebrow reticence of some older biographies can strike 21^st century readers as amusing.

In his 819-page biography of Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, published in 1966, Robert Blake noted that the wily Tory politician had few friends his own age. “To say that Disraeli only gave his confidence to young men and old women would perhaps be an overstatement, but not an outrageous one,” he wrote.

Take, for example, Lord Henry Lennox, an acid-tongued, gossipy bon vivant who, as the younger son of a duke, was too lofty to work but too poor to get by comfortably.

Benjamin Disraeli

“Lennox is of interest as a type, but as a person he was never more than an intellectual flibbertigibbet,” Blake wrote. “He would long ago have been forgotten had it not been for the affection which he inspired in a man of genius. “I can only tell you that I love you,’ wrote Disraeli on Sept. 1, 1852, and a fortnight later, ‘Even a line is pleasant from those we love.’ The language must be discounted as the hyperbole of the time. But it remains something of a mystery that Disraeli should have been as he was of such an essentially trivial personality.”

Oh? And why must his declaration of love be “dismissed as hyperbole?” Today, applying Occam’s Razor, we wouldn’t regard the business as such a mystery.

“Disraeli’s previous biographers have noticed that there were some romantic irregularities in his past: he preferred old ladies to young women; he married late; he had a passion for male friendship,” wrote historian William Kuhn in Sexual Ambiguity in the Life of Disraeli.

“The standard explanation for this is that in those pre-Freudian days there was a Romantic cult of friendship and that love between men was sexually ‘innocent’ (the underlying assumption being that sexual contact is ‘guilty’).

“Some of his earliest biographers (such as W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle) explained away Disraeli’s odd history of affectionate relationships by saying it was due to the ‘oriental’ part of his nature. By this they meant that he was Jewish and thus partly ‘foreign’ and un-English. They were also hinting at a Victorian prejudice that sexual license, including same-sex contact, was more common in ‘the East’ or what we would call the Middle East.

“Lord Blake, whose 1966 biography is still authoritative, hinted that Disraeli was a lot like Oscar Wilde, and left it there. Two more recent biographers (Sarah Bradford and Jane Ridley) have been more comfortable referring explicitly to the homoerotic element in Disraeli’s personality.”

“There’s a way in which the absence of a homosexual identity in Disraeli’s time — and the disinclination of the general public to talk about such things — made it possible for men to love each other under the radar screen,” Kuhn wrote. “Of course, the more severe penalties and consequences of being caught in that time cannot be forgotten. Disraeli, however, was able to flaunt his approval of Greco-Roman sexuality, demonstrate his knowledge of Turkish baths, celebrate effeminacy, and dwell upon romance between men in his fiction — even as he experienced huge success in the world of politics and literature. Thus we can no longer regard the Victorian era as a uniformly dark age for men who loved other men. Disraeli not only got away with all this; he gloried in it.”

That something that was thought to be monstrous in one era can be seen as being merely incidental in another may be regarded as one of the ironies of social progress.

Sources: Disraeli by Robert Blake; Sexual Ambiguity in the Life of Disraeli by William Kuhn.