The Editor
Sheila A. Spector, recipient of the Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr.
Research Grant, awarded by the Keats-Shelley Association of
America, is an independent scholar who has devoted her professional
career to exploring the intersection between the British and
Jewish cultures, primarily during the Romantic Period. She has
approached the subject in a number of ways: bibliographically,
compiling Jewish Mysticism: An Annotated Bibliography on
the Kabbalah in English; critically, writing a two-part
study of Blake as a Kabbalist—“Glorious incomprehensible”:
The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Language, and
“Wonders Divine”: The Development of Blake’s
Kabbalistic Myth; and collaboratively, collecting two volumes
of original essays by major scholars—British Romanticism
and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature, and The Jews
and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture.
top of page
Acknowledgments
The commonplace of modern publishing—that a book requires
an already-existing audience before it will be accepted for
publication—has proved poignantly true with Alroy.
Certainly after September 11, 2001, if not before, I had assumed
that publication would be a snap: this is a novel about a failed
Jewish messiah who lived in the Middle East during the period
between the first two crusades; it contains a multi-cultural
cast of Jewish, Muslim and Christian characters; it was written
by a future British prime minister who, not coincidentally,
would be instrumental in the purchase of the Suez Canal. Yet,
lack of interest has been palpable. Because the book has never
been made accessible to the modern audience, it has never been
read, and consequently, it has been erroneously relegated to
the position of a minor novel by a minor novelist, thus ignoring
its deeper significance, not only literary but historical, not
only political but cultural. Therefore, my acknowledgments to
those who have helped make this edition an internet reality
are especially heartfelt and sincere. In my research, I have
received assistance from Michael Bott, Keeper of Archives and
Manuscripts at the Library of the University of Reading, as
well as the staffs at the libraries of Emory University, the
New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the University
of California at Berkeley. Daniel E. Spector and Reeva Spector
Simon both advised me about lacunae of Middle East Studies;
Patrick W. Conner assisted with the Latin translation; Kathryn
F. Hilt and Susan M. Hunter helped with editorial problems;
Janice Peritz and Dorothy Graham contributed suggestions for
publication. Gilad J. Gevaryahu provided information used in
the annotations, and Nanora Sweet, who used the manuscript for
a text in her course on Oriental Literature, shared with me
her own and her students' responses to the edition. Also, I
would like to thank the following for permitting me to reprint
their work: Thompson-Gale for Richard A. Levine, Benjamin
Disraeli (New York: Twayne, 1968), 51-7; the University
of California Press for selections of Robert O’Kell’s
“The Autobiographical Nature of Disraeli’s
Early Fiction,” originally published in Nineteenth-Century
Fiction 31 (1976): 262-66; John Vincent for Disraeli
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 67-70; 90-2; Daniel
R. Schwarz for his Disraeli’s Fiction, (New York:
Macmillan, 1979), 42-51, as well as his “‘Mene,
Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’: Jewish Perspectives
in Disraeli’s Fiction,” in Disraeli’s
Jewishness, ed. Todd M. Endelman and Tony Kushner (London
and Portland, Or.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2002), 44-9; and Nadia
Valman, for her “Manly Jews: Disraeli, Jewishness and Gender,”
in Disraeli’s Jewishness, ed. Todd M. Endelman and
Tony Kushner (London and Portland, Or.: Vallentine Mitchell,
2002), 72-5. Most important, I would like to thank Neil Fraistat
and Steven E. Jones, General Editors of Romantic Circles, for
agreeing to include Alroy among their electronic editions,
and most especially Joseph Byrne, Site Manager at Romantic Circles,
for his diligence in reproducing such a complex edition. Finally,
it is customary to conclude most sections like these with a
nod to anyone inadvertently omitted. Unfortunately, my computer
crashed immediately before publication, sending off into cyberspace
the full list of those whose assistance made this edition possible.
Therefore, to those who have not been mentioned, I offer a special
thanks for all they did to help with the publication of this
book. The strengths of this internet edition derive from the
full collaboration of all of the contributors; its weaknesses
are mine.
top of page
The Text
The Wondrous tale of Alroy along with The Rise of
Iskander, was first published by Saunders and Otley in 1833;
“A new edition” was issued in 1834. Two more editions
were published during Disraeli’s lifetime. In 1846,
under the title Alroy, Colburn issued a heavily revised
edition, containing a preface dated July 1845. The 1871 edition,
that is included along with Ixion in Heaven, The Infernal
Marriage, and Popanilla, as volume 8 of the Longmans’
collected edition, is based on the edited version of 1846.
The choice of a copy text is always problematic, there being
equally strong reasons for believing that the earliest version
of a work is closest to an author's original intention, and
that the last—especially when carefully supervised by
the author—reflects the evolution of intellectual and
cultural attitudes; needless to say, both approaches have their
strengths and weaknesses. While I have chosen the 1871 edition
as having the imprimatur of the mature Disraeli, I have also
included in this edition a transcript of the original Dedication
to his sister, and polemical Preface, to indicate his youthful
attitude towards the novel (and possibly his sister), as well
as possible reasons for excising what he might have deemed as
potentially troublesome sections right when he was planning
a major political campaign.
This is a diplomatic edition of the 1871 Longmans, the last
overseen by Disraeli. With the exception of a few obvious typographical
errors, which have been silently corrected, I have reproduced
all factual errors and misquotations found in the text and Author's
Notes, reserving all substantive corrections and bibliographical
information for the Editor's Notes at the end. In order to differentiate
between the Author's and Editor’s Notes, I have
retained Disraeli’s own numbering system for the
former, and indicated the editor's annotations with asterisks.
top of page
The Design
This hypertext edition was designed and marked up at the University
of Maryland by Joseph Byrne,
Site Manager at Romantic Circles. Making extensive use of tables
and style sheets for layout and presentation, it will work best
when viewed with Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator versions
5.0 and 4.7, respectively, and higher. The HTML markup is HTML
4.01/Transitional compliant, as set out by the World
Wide Web Consortium.
top of page |
