The Dating of Endymion

The Dating of EndymionAuthor(s): Robert BlakeSource: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 17, No. 66 (May, 1966), pp. 177-182Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/512479 .

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NOTES 177

Dictionary of National Biography. The idea of the father entering his son's baptism has appealed to guidebook writers' and has been repeated by Gosse in the D.N.B. where he implies that Samuel Butler senior was churchwarden at the time of his son's baptism and recorded the entry himself. In fact, Samuel Butler senior was churchwarden the preceding year, and his signature below that year's entries is in a distinctive hand; he did not enter his son's baptism; and the hand that did enter it, recorded it clearly as xiiijth of February.

R. M. WILDING

THE DATING OF ENDYMION

Endymion, which was published in November i88o, is the only one of Disraeli's novels which raises any serious problem of dating. The usual version is that Disraeli began it soon after the publication of Lothair in the spring of 1870, that he laid it aside because of his renewed political activity and subsequent return to office in 1874, and that he finished it in the summer of I880 after his defeat at the general election of that year.2 This broad outline does not tell us anything about details, e.g. how far he had gone before laying it aside, nor does it tell us exactly when he did so. Moreover, it implies that he wrote none of the book while he was actually in office. An examination of a memorandum in the papers of Montagu Corry (Lord Rowton) who was his private secretary and an inspection of the original manuscript of the book at Hughenden enable us to answer some of these questions rather more accurately and to modify the accepted account in certain respects.

Corry's memorandum reads thus:

Hughenden Manor October 15 1878 "The greatest stretch of intellect in the world is to write a first rate work of

fiction. It requires first rate "narrative" power, first rate descriptive and first rate dramatic power and above [all] a first rate sense of humor."

As a general rule Lord B. would lay it down to be more difficult to be a great writer of fiction than a great speaker. Certainly his experience is that a great effort to be the former is the most exhausting.

Remarks these, on Tuesday Oct 15, 1878 on the day that we first placed papers in the newly built "strong room" at Hn-the very first papers there deposited being the M.S. of... a work (his last he vows!) wh: tho' not complete, Lord B. gives me permission to publish. He wishes to add, he says, Ioo pages:-but as

I e.g. Maxwell Fraser, Companion into Worcestershire (London, 1939), p. 217. 2 W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, The Life of Disraeli (London, I910-2o), v. 169,

vi. 551.



178 NOTES it stands the moral is worked out sufficiently to go to press, should he be able to write no more.

This was Endymion. After his defeat Lord B. finished the work wh: was published in Nov i88o At his request, I passed August i88o at Hughenden for the purpose of acting

as "critic" of the work in M.S. "Read it once my dear fellow for the purpose of seeing if the story and the

work in general be fit to publish. If you condemn it I will burn it. And then I would ask you to read it a second time to see if it be in English; and then again a third time to review the spelling & punctuation."

In the preceding month of July, he having, at my request, left it to me to ar- range for the publishing of Endymion, I was able to tell him (in a note wh: I found at his death among his most cherished things) that Mr. Longman had offered

?io,ooo for the copyright. Mr. Longman at that time had neither seen the M.S.S. nor had he any notion of the character of the work.

Mr. Longman visited me, at 19 Curzon St, a few days before Lord Beacons- field's death, and authorized me to inform Lord B.-who heard the intelligence with extreme satisfaction-that his firm had just turned the corner, & was beginning to make a profit out of the bargain.'

I believe that this was the last piece of business on wh: he and I ever spoke together.

After so many! and such! Rowton

Oct 21/82 Lord B. told me after he had completed Endymion that when the imperfect

M.S. was laid in the Hughenden strong room on Oct 15 1878 he had enclosed therewith a letter to me, pointing out how he purposed to wind up the drama, and leaving it to me to add the "hundred pages" lacking with my own hand, if I thought proper, and to publish the whole in his name.

R.2

The letter referred to in this postscript has not survived. No doubt Disraeli destroyed it when it no longer had any purpose. So our principal clue as to where Disraeli had reached in October 1878-and it is probable that he did not write any more before i88o0-is the 'hundred pages'. What Disraeli called 'a page' is the four sides of a sheet of double quarto writing paper. The third volume of Endymion takes up 195 of these, and so if we take the figure literally we get back to p. 95 of Vol. iii of Disraeli's manuscript or in the 'Bradenham' edition3 to p. 384 in Chapter 94, at the words

I The bargain looked at first like being a bad one for Longman, and Disraeli with remark- able generosity offered to cancel it. Longman would not hear of it, and fortunately the cheap edition brought out early in 1881 proved much more profitable.

2 Corry Papers. 3 Ed. P. Guedalla (London, 1927). Subsequent references are to this edition, in which

Endymion takes up 468 pages.



NOTES 179

put into Count Ferrol's (Bismarck's) mouth 'There is only one way; by blood and iron'. But it seems unlikely, though not of course impossible, that Disraeli left off in the middle of a chapter. On that assumption he would have reached the end of Chapter 94 which, it will be recalled, finishes with the death of Lord Roehampton (Palmerston). This leads clearly to the possibility of Myra (Lady Roehampton, Endymion's ambitious sister) marrying Prince Florestan (Louis Napoleon) whose love for her has already appeared, and it encourages one to anticipate the ultimate denouement when Lord Montfort, with whose wife Endymion is in love, dies equally conveniently. At all events it would be reasonable to say, as Disraeli said to Corry, that 'the moral is sufficiently worked out' by this stage in the book.

Of course it would be rash to take the 'hundred pages' too literally. It cannot have been more than a guess when Disraeli was talking to Corry in 1878 and he might well have exceeded or fallen short of it by a large margin when he came to sit down and finish the book. But it so happens that we can at least fix an upper limit to the amount which he wrote after depositing the manuscript in the Hughenden strong room on 15 October. In the original manuscript on p. 54 of Vol. iii Disraeli wrote of the commercial depression of 1842 'It was produced in 1842, as it has been produced at the time this is written (1878), .. .'. But in the published version the last seven words were changed to 'at the present time'. In the Bradenham edition this occurs on p. 351, Chapter 78. This suggests that he had certainly reached that point by October 1878 and, if we assume again that he did not leave off in the middle of a chapter, he would have reached the equivalent of at least p. 357 of the Bradenham edition.

The change made in the manuscript has a further implication which goes against the usually accepted dating of Endymion. Disraeli evidently wrote a part of it while he was Prime Minister, and it is not true that he laid it aside entirely on entering office, only resuming it after defeat. This is con- firmed to some extent by the existence of three short passages in the original manuscript written on black-edged Downing Street writing paper. (If he had kept any official writing paper from his first premiership in 1868 it would not have been black-edged, for Lady Beaconsfield did not die until 15 December 1872.) These, in the Bradenham edition, cover roughly pp. 271-80, 292-3, and 326-9. The exact details do not affect this argument, and there seems no reason why he should have used this paper for these particular passages, other than because it happened to be at hand. But on the assumptions that he wrote the book in the right order, that the black- edged passages were not rewritten versions of sections written a good deal

I The first is from 'for a liberal policy.' on p. 27I (Chapter 62) to the end of Chapter 63. The second is from 'There was a dead silence .. .' on p. 292 to the end of Chapter 65. The third is from the bottom of p. 326 'that awful assembly.. .' to the end of Chapter 72.



180 NOTES

earlier, and that he did not start or leave off in the middle of a chapter, it is tempting to guess that he wrote pp. 270-357, i.e. Chapters 62-78 inclusive, while he was Prime Minister. Some of these chapters must have been written in 1878, and there is a possible straw to suggest that the whole of this section was written late rather than early in his term of office.

Chapter 62 contains an account of Endymion's visit to Lancashire, which is supposed to occur in 1839. It begins with the words 'Lancashire was not so wonderful a place forty years ago as it is at present'. One should not read complete accuracy into so vague an expression as 'forty years ago', but the further back we place the date of writing the less natural would the phrase be. For example, he would hardly have used it if he had been writing before I875. There are, moreover, other reasons which inspire some doubt as to the likelihood of his having resumed the book before 1878. It is hard to imagine him doing any continuous literary work while in office except in the months between the rising of Parliament and the beginning of the autumn cabinets, i.e. roughly mid-August to November, but during the first four autumns of his premiership he was at that time of year nearly always either ill, or heavily engrossed in politics, or both. For example, in 1876 and 1877 the eastern question must have been all-absorbing and it was not till late in 1877 that he at last discovered a doctor, the homoeopath Benjamin Kidd, who satisfactorily treated his various illnesses including gout, asthma, and Bright's Disease. He was in better health during I878-- apart from a temporary lapse brought on by banquets in Berlin-than he had been for many years. None of this is conclusive but I am inclined to think that he wrote Chapters 62-78 in the early autumn of 1878.

Was this all that he wrote? As we saw earlier, it is possible, depending on how literally one accepts the hundred pages, that he had reached a later stage than Chapter 78. On the other hand, it does not seem likely that the section written while he was in office begins much earlier than Chapter 62. On this point we have two pieces of evidence.

The first concerns a minor character who is given, in the published version of the book, the name of Sylvia. She is the daughter of Endymion's mother's dressmaker by a bankrupt actor. She 'had no bad impulses even if she had no good ones, was of a rather cold character and extremely pru- dent'. She marries Endymion's father's private secretary, is kind to Endymion after his father's ruin, and receives her reward by ending as a rich woman at the top of the social tree despite her dubious social back- ground. In the original manuscript, down to and including the equivalent of p. 248 in Chapter 57, she is called 'Selina', the name being subsequently scratched out and 'Sylvia' substituted in its place. She does not reappear till the equivalent of p. 331 in Chapter 73, where she is written as 'Sylvia' straightaway with no erasure. Now Selina was the Christian name of Lady



NOTES 181

Bradford, with whom in the autumn of 1873 Disraeli fell head over heels in love. It is easy to see why he would not have wished to give that name to a chilly character of relatively humble antecedents. It is therefore a safe guess that he must have reached at least as far as p. 248 before this great love-affair of his Indian summer had begun. It may be noticed in passing that Buckle's suggestion that the name of Endymion, human lover of Selene Goddess of the Moon, was chosen by Disraeli as a 'kind of cryptic dedica- tion' to Lady Bradford cannot be seriously supported. The original manuscript shows that he used it from the very beginning long before he was thinking about her. It is true that he did not reveal-or Corry did not record-the title when the manuscript was put in the strong room, but this was probably a part of the aura of secrecy with which Disraeli surrounded all his efforts at authorship in his later years.

The second clue is a letter in the Hughenden Papers to Disraeli from the Duchess of Somerset dated 31 October 1872. She had been 'Queen of Beauty' at the famous Eglinton Tournament of 1839 which Disraeli wished to describe in his book, and he had evidently written to ask her for some local colour:

I am very unwell or I would have answered before your letter of Oct 26th. I do not know what I can find of the Eglinton Tournament except a coloured print which I will send you-I had all sorts of relics, points of splintered spears with the colours of the Knights but a stupid old housemaid considered them as 'rubbish' as she said and burned them together with a Blessed Palm that I had caught in mid air from the Pope's own hands, but I will certainly look out what- ever I can find.'

Chapters 57-60 inclusive, pp. 25o-67 (Bradenham), contain an account- not very accurate-of the Eglinton Tournament. It seems likely that Disraeli had reached there or thereabouts in the autumn of 1872. This brings us very nearly to Chapter 62 in which black-edged Downing Street paper is used for the first time, and suggests that the break between the sections of the book written before and after he took office as Prime Minister occurred at p. 267 or possibly p. 270 (Bradenham), the end of Chapter 61.

It is possible that Disraeli wrote some part of the first section of the book after the autumn of 1872 and before February 1874, when he won the general election that made him Prime Minister, but on balance it seems unlikely. His wife died on 15 December 1872. This was not only a great personal blow but a disruption of his whole way of life. He lost the use of her London house which was entailed on a relative of her first husband, and there was a mass of complicated detail to clear up. It is most unlikely that he had time or inclination for literary composition in December and

I Hughenden Papers, Box 234, E/vi/T/x.



182 NOTES

January. From February till August Parliament sat, and it is safe to assume that he could not have written much then. The late summer saw the beginning of his love-affair with Lady Bradford; he must have already reached at least p. 248 (Bradenham), the last Sylvia/Selina substitution before it began. This leaves only Chapters 57-61 covering the Eglinton Tourna- ment, Chapter 62 being the first to feature black-edged Downing Street paper.

He could have written these at any time after October 1872, when he corresponded with the Duchess of Somerset, and before 15 October 1878. But we have seen the reasons for doubting whether he did any sustained writing before I878 during his premiership. The only other possible time would be autumn 1873 while he was still in opposition, but it so happens that his letters give a very full account of his engagements during those months. He was largely occupied in sorting out his wife's papers at Hugh- enden, then he went to Scotland to deliver his Rectorial address to Glasgow University and followed this with a prolonged round of country-house visits. It is conceivable that he wrote a few chapters during the autumn but it seems more likely that he finished the saga of Eglinton the previous year, and that he did no further work until 1878.

To sum up, it seems a reasonable though inevitably speculative conclu- sion that Disraeli wrote Endymion in three stages. The first, covering the first sixty chapters, i.e. over half the book, was written between the early summer of 1870 and the end of 1872. The second, covering Chapters 61-78 inclusive, was written while he was Prime Minister, i.e. in the years I874- 8o, and most probably in 1878. It is possible that he went a little beyond p. 357 but we cannot be sure. The third section which comprises the re- mainder was written in May, June, and July I88o after his fall from power. The book was revised with Corry's aid in August, handed to Longman on 14 September, and published with commendable speed on 26 November.

ROBERT BLAKE



The Dating of Endymion

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