SOURCE: "Disraeli's Coningsby: Political Manifesto or Psychological Romance?," Victorian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1, Autumn, 1979, pp. 57-78.

In the following essay, O'Kell interprets Coningsby as an attempt by Disraeli to clarify his developing Tory ideology by "replacing the actuality of his struggle to transcend his alienation from the establishment … with ideal versions of the past as it should have been."

Coningsby; or, the New Generation, written in the autumn and winter of 1843-44, has traditionally been seen as the first example of a subgenre, the political novel, and, as such, part of a trilogy that is overtly propagandist in conception. Further, most critics, of whom Robert Blake is the most eloquent and representative, have agreed that Benjamin Disraeli's trilogy made up by Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred "is quite different from anything he had written before" and that "a wide gulf separates them from his silver fork novels and historical romances...