ABSTRACT
It was in that strange and powerful third chapter of Sybil that the Disraeli of the 1840’s gave to the world his confession of faith. He showed himself there to have an understanding of the trick-history of the textbooks as deep as that of any man save perhaps Cobbett and Lingard alone. “If the history of England,” he wrote, “be ever written by one who has the knowledge and the courage, and both qualities are equally requisite for the undertaking, the world would be more astonished than when reading the Roman annals by Niebuhr. Generally speaking, all the great events have been distorted, most of the important causes concealed, some of the principal characters never appear and all who figure are so misunderstood and misrepresented that the result is a complete mystification.” The true story, he agreed with Cobbett, was that of “a mortgaged aristocracy, a gambling foreign commerce, a home trade founded on a morbid competition and a degraded people”.
