Coningsby

Coningsby, Or, The New Generation by Benjamin Disraeli, 420 pages

The first novel in the trilogy that continues with Sybil and ends with Tancred, Coningsby is the story of the young aristocrat Henry Coningsby and his circle as they seek a place for themselves and their ideals in the political and social worlds of England as the Georgian era gives way to the Victorian.  As in most of Disraeli's novels, the characters are often slightly disguised fictionalizations of actual people he knew.  Fortunately, Disraeli knew a great many interesting people.  Unfortunately, he never learned the art of showing rather than telling, and large sections of the novel are filled by character biographies and political journalism.

Early on in Coningsby, it is noted that in the debating society at Eton it was forbidden to choose contemporary issues as subjects, but it was child's play to find analogues in past eras.  For analogues to the present, Disraeli offers this: "Coningsby found that he was born in an age of infidelity in all things, and his heart assured him that a want of faith was a want of nature."  The party which he might expect to offer him a home is run on "Concessionary, not Conservative principles" according to which, "while forms and phrases are religiously cherished ... the rule of practice is to bend to the passion or combination of the hour."  In such an environment, it takes a hero to assert that "there are still great truths, if we could but work them out; that Government, for instance, should be loved and not hated, and that Religion should be a faith and not a form."