''Venetia'' is a minor novel by
Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British statesman and Conservative politician who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He played a central role in the creation ...
, published in 1837, the year he was first elected to the
House of Commons
The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. T ...
.
The novel is a lightweight romantic fantasy. A contemporary reviewer, writing in an 1854 issue of the ''New Monthly Review'', declared that he “liked it least of all Disraeli’s works.”
:
Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the ...
and
Shelley figure in its pages, under different names and different worldly circumstances from those in which they actually lived. We do not consider either portrait well drawn, and that of Shelley especially defective; but still ''Venetia'', like all that Disraeli has written, contains much that is vivid and beautiful, and will be read with interest and delight by every man of taste.
Michael Flavin’s ''Benjamin Disraeli: The Novel as a Political Discourse'' suggests that Venetia was largely a commercial endeavour for Disraeli, who was deep in debt at the time that he wrote it.
In ''Byron and the Victorians'', Andrew Elfenbein discusses ''Venetia'' in terms of Disraeli's presenting himself as "the moral, political and literary successor to Byron, by manipulating the representation of Byron's sexuality", making him straight instead of bisexual and portraying him as having steady but distant male friendships. He says the novel can best be described as "kooky" because of its confused and confusing portrayals of both Byron and
Shelley, giving each traits and life circumstances actually possessed by the other.
[Andrew Elfenbein, ''Byron and the Victorians''. Cambridge University Press, 1995.]
Footnotes
1837 British novels
Novels by Benjamin Disraeli
Books written by prime ministers of the United Kingdom
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