Literature and the Imperial Imagination: Benjamin Disraeli's Reading, National Identity and Britain's Global Expansion

This project places the working library of Benjamin Disraeli held by the National Trust at Hughenden Manor, alongside the Hughenden Deposit of Disraeli's papers within the Bodleian library. It is thereby afforded a unique opportunity to consider how the reading of this most powerful Victorian imperialist can be understood in relation to his career and to wider questions concerning British national identity, Victorian expansion and imperial ideology. Its work with the National Trust will model how scholarly engagement with extant libraries and theories of empire can facilitate new forms of public engagement with British imperialism, globalism and its legacies.
In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay famously declared, 'a single shelf of a good European library [i]s worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.' Scholars have drawn upon such pronouncements to argue for foundational links between British literature and British imperialism. Yet, heretofore, scant critical work has pursued connections between specific libraries and their marginalia, and this larger link posited between literature and empire.
My project examines the critically understudied library of the most 'potent imperialist,' Benjamin Disraeli, 'the expansionist prime minister of Britain at the Empire's "greatest" hour' (Kalmar 348). This library's significance is two-fold. Firstly, it is absolutely formative, as Disraeli was not university educated. Secondly, preliminary research shows that Disraeli was a prolific annotator, yet scholars have neglected this.
Whilst Ruth Clayton Windscheffel's Reading Gladstone (2008), studies William Ewart Gladstone's reading, there has been no such study regarding Disraeli. This project posits that although they occupied very similar, albeit politically opposed, positions as privileged white male leaders, Disraeli's Jewish ancestry and literary celebrity (Mayer, 2018), make him a complex individual regarding imperialism and national identity, worthy of equal critical attention.
My project will address this surprising critical lacuna through a quantitative analysis of the extant texts, their extensive marginalia, and the notes pertaining to them. Using this book-historical approach, it will be able to suggest the potential effects of specific volumes on Disraeli's political career, the methods and motives of his own literary output, and his conception of British imperialism and Britain's national identity.
Whilst the Hughenden Deposit and Hughenden library have been previously studied, they have not been placed in dialogue, nor critically understood in relation to Disraeli the reader. In proposing this dual focus, I will attempt to answer the following key research questions: What can the traces of Disraeli's reading, mapped onto his extant letters and papers, reveal about the role literature played in his political life? What is the relationship between his reading and his fiction-writing? What can this reveal about the role literature played in disseminating an influential imperialist's ideas? Can evidence of reading habits help us understand the construction and reconstruction of a public individual's sense of national identity?
Together, the Hughenden Deposit's political papers, manuscripts, diaries and notebooks, alongside the library's heterogeneous collection comprising, fictional, poetic, religious, travel, and political texts, with extensive marginalia, constitutes a body of understudied evidence. A suitable analysis of this, using Matthew Bradley (2009) and H. J. Jackson's (2001) models for effectively, critically and cautiously utilising marginalia, can illuminate our understanding of Disraeli's politics and his fictional and non-fictional works.
This programme of research will produce a substantive and original thesis, augmenting and challenging accepted paradigms of Victorian Britain's imperial relationships.