91������

Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) had a political career that spanned 42 years. He began as a backbencher, graduating to Chancellor of the Exchequer, and culminating in two terms as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Beyond politics, Disraeli carved out a career as a novelist and constitutional expert. He left behind him a prolific paper trail: Commons speeches, policy papers and more than 18,000 pieces of correspondence.

The Disraeli Project began in 1972 when two Queen's faculty members, John Matthews from the Department of English and D.M. Schurman from the Department of History, travelled to England to begin working on Benjamin Disraeli as a sabbatical project. They returned with 3,000 photocopies of Disraeli letters and a sense that many more remained in British archives, family vaults, and even in antique shops. Their success in tracking down previously undiscovered Disraeli letters in England led to the establishment in 1975 of the Disraeli Project.

Now joined by Professor J.A.W. “Jock” Gunn of political studies, professors Matthews and Schurman resolved to turn their enthusiasm into a fully-fledged project to capture all of Disraeli’s correspondence. Their ambition represented a remarkable leap for Queen’s onto the stage of international research. Not only would substantial financial support be needed, but exhaustive detective work and meticulous scholarship. Each letter would have to be tracked down, documented and set in historical context.

Funding from Ottawa’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) was obtained and a publication contract signed with the University of Toronto Press.

In 1982, two years after the founding grant expired, the first two volumes, chronologically compartmentalized into periods of Benjamin Disraeli’s life, appeared. The Times Literary Supplement saluted the work as a “landmark of Victorian scholarship.” However, by that time, external funding for the project lapsed and, despite bridging funding from the university, the project became virtually dormant.

English professor Mel G. Wiebe, from the Department of English, arrived as project director later that year and revitalized it. By the 1990s, Professor Wiebe was able to renew funding through a cooperative arrangement between the public and private sectors. Funded to this point entirely by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Project was jointly funded by SSHRCC and a group of private individuals and corporations until 2000.

In 2007, Professor Wiebe was instrumental in the Disraeli Project obtaining a substantial grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He stayed on as director until 2009, and was succeeded by Michel Pharand, with Ellen Hawman as a research associate. Professor Wiebe remained actively involved in an advisory capacity, as did former long-time co-editor Mary Millar. 

A second grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation enabled the entire collection of the letters (though without annotation) to be made available on an open access website.

By 2015, co-editors Dr. Michel Pharand and Dr. Erika Behrisch Elce (Royal Military College) had begun work on Volume XI, but, upon the expiry of its SSHRCC and Mellon Foundation grants, the project closed in November of that year. More than 12,000 letters were now in print.

In December 2016, the tenth volume, BDL X: 1868 (Michel Pharand, director and general editor, co-editor Ellen L. Hawman, consulting editors Mary S. Millar, Sandra den Otter, and M. G. Wiebe), was awarded an international prize—the Robert Lowry Patten Award—for the best recent work in nineteenth-century British literary studies.

In the words of the judges who chose BDL X from a field of 278 submissions:

"This volume continues the impeccable work of previous volumes in the series, including material sourced from America, Canada, France and Australia, all arranged in an elegantly designed reference format. Volume 10, however, is the first in the series to be devoted to one year alone. The quality of the annotation is breathtakingly high: vast amounts of historical detail are distilled for the reader or (where necessary) quoted in full so that each letter by Disraeli appears in the fullest possible context, supported by judicious editorial explanation and assessment. The patience, dedication, and meticulous research, as well as the sheer legwork involved, make this a daunting model of editorial excellence. The volume as a whole achieves that unusual feat of combining accessibility with the highest level of scholarship, enabling general readers to enter its world and proving irreplaceable to critics and historians."

An estimated 6,000 additional letters remain unpublished. Despite this challenge, the Disraeli project continues to serve as a showcase for Queen’s research prowess in the humanities.