A Sublime Fantasy: Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby and Populist Desire

This essay suggests that Benjamin Disraeli's “Young England” novel Coningsby (1844), often dismissed as a reactionary instance of early Victorian political and social-problem fiction, is actually an instructive case of populism in the novel from which important critical—and political—lessons may be drawn. The fundamental problem Coningsby confronts us with, through its insistent rehearsal of libidinal dynamics and phantasmatic scenarios in the midst of a conscious and emphatically intentional political argument, is the notion that fantasy is ultimately indissociable from an agonistic conception of politics (whether of the Left or the Right).