Ben-Hur

Ben-Hur
Lew Wallace

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.‘The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is willing to do for others.’In first-century Judea, Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur is falsely accused of assassinating a Roman governor, and sentenced to life as a galley slave. His fortunes are reversed when he saves the captain’s life and he returns, determined to seek his revenge against those who have brought misfortune to both himself and his family. His life becomes intertwined with that of Christ’s, and after witnessing His teachings and eventual crucifixion Ben-Hur discovers the redemptive power of forgiveness.The bestselling American novel of the nineteenth century, ‘Ben-Hur’ had never been out of print on the hundredth anniversary of its publication in 1980. After numerous stage and film adaptations, it remains hugely influential today, and is soon to be a new major adaptation.

BEN-HUR

A Tale of the Christ

Lew Wallace

Copyright (#ue914d635-4152-57bf-8a2d-8a7fa3412dd1)

William Collins

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This Collins Classics eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008124106

Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008124113

Version: 2016-06-17

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Ben-Hur

Ben-Hur, published in 1880, is one of the bestselling novels of all time. Ambitious in scale and seven years in the making, it was the result of an extraordinary personal transformation. It has even been credited with saving a nation from reckless self-destruction. But its author, Lew Wallace, was almost the last person from whom this achievement could have been expected. Restless and lacking in direction, he spent most of his life struggling against failure, searching in vain for a sense of significance.

Early Years

Born in Indiana in 1827, Wallace was an unremarkable middle child of a prominent politician who went on to become State Governor. Already a half-hearted student, young Lew slid further into idleness following the death of his mother in 1834. A series of schools failed to inspire him and he was packed off to seek his own fortune aged just sixteen. ‘My rating at school was the worst,’ he later wrote in his memoir; but ‘looking back to the thrashings I took … I console myself thinking of the successful lives there have been with not a jot of algebra in them.’

Wallace yearned to be elsewhere doing more exciting things. He was good at drawing and writing and he loved to have adventures outdoors. Growing up in the era of American expansion and Davy Crockett, he dreamt of life on the wild frontier; what he got was a menial job in a clerk’s office. But with the outbreak of the Mexican–American War in 1846, by which point Wallace was reluctantly studying law under his father’s guidance, he finally got his first taste of the battlefield. It was a short-lived adventure but it proved decisive: even though he had little choice but to pursue life as a respectable lawyer, setting up his own practice in 1849 and marrying in 1852, he continued to dabble in military affairs, organising and commanding the local independent militia, eagerly waiting for the next war to begin.

In the Firing Line

When the Civil War between the Unionist and Confederate states broke out in April 1861, Wallace abandoned everything and rushed to the Union’s front line. He didn’t just fight; he wanted to lead. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming a colonel by the end of April and a brigadier general by September. In March 1862, aged just thirty-four, he became the Union Army’s youngest major general. He was good at his job in these early years of the war and he knew it, frequently indulging his fantasy of running the whole show in lengthy letters home to his wife, Susan, in which he complained of ‘mismanagement’ from above. But in April 1862, just one year into the war, a strategic error caused either by Wallace’s overconfidence or his superior’s mismanagement – the debate was never conclusively resolved – was blamed for preventable loss of life at the Battle of Shiloh. Wallace’s military career never really recovered from what he felt was his scapegoating, while the superior in question, Ulysses S. Grant, went on to become Commanding General of the Union Army and then President of the United States. Wallace spent the next few decades trying to clear his name.

Bored by law, let down by the military, Wallace turned to politics when he returned from the war. In 1878 he was made Governor of New Mexico, a dangerous territory in the grip of violent outlaws – among them Billy the Kid – as well as corrupt officials. His subsequent four-year stint as US ambassador to the troubled Ottoman Empire was tame by comparison. But by far the most remarkable aspect of this chaotic period in Wallace’s life was that he found the time to put pen to paper; he researched and wrote for seven years, and the result was Ben-Hur.

Spiritual Awakening

Wallace wrote Ben-Hur mainly by candlelight, in the dead of night, after a full day’s work trying to restore order to New Mexico. It was a labour of love: he hand-delivered his hand-written manuscript to a publisher in New York and it was accepted for publication in 1880.

For all its scholarship and epic backdrop, Ben-Hur is essentially a rags-to-riches tale of redemption, a story of self-made fortune and honour, which chimed perfectly in a country that was riding the wave of the Gilded Age at the same time as experiencing a significant religious revival. Any nerves Wallace’s publisher had about the sacrilege of depicting Jesus Christ in fiction proved to be unfounded: Wallace had been meticulously sensitive with his source material, scouring the King James Bible for approved dialogue (‘every word He uttered should be a literal quotation from one of His sainted biographers’) and reading almost nothing but books and maps about the Holy Land, including ‘a German publication showing the towns and villages, all sacred places, the heights, the depressions, the passes, trails, and distances’.

Ben-Hur was the project that finally turned an idle student and apathetic Christian into a scholar of religious texts, and Wallace had an extraordinary encounter with an atheist to thank for it. In 1876, aboard a train to Indianapolis, he recognised the prominent orator and fellow Shiloh veteran Robert Ingersoll, and the two men got into a long and friendly debate about religion. ‘He vomited forth ideas and arguments like an intellectual volcano,’ Wallace later wrote, ‘the whole question of the Bible, of the immortality of the soul, of the divinity of God, and of heaven and hell.’ The result of all this must have shocked Ingersoll: Wallace, feeling utterly ‘ashamed’ of his own ignorance, determined ‘to study the whole matter, if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another’. He studied so thoroughly that when he finally visited Jerusalem in the early 1880s he was able to ‘find no reason for making a single change in the text of the book’.

Redemption

Initial sales of Ben-Hur were as slow as might be expected for a relatively unknown fifty-three-year-old novelist. (Wallace’s first historical novel, The Fair God, had appeared in 1873.) But Wallace had friends and fans in high places: President James A. Garfield loved it and even Ulysses S. Grant is said to have read it from cover to cover without pause. Pope Leo XIII gave it his official blessing.

Ben-Hur sold almost half a million copies in its first ten years and then kept going, overtaking even Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to become the highest-selling American novel of the nineteenth century. Where that novel had anecdotally helped spark the Civil War, Ben-Hur helped pull the country back together, finding almost as many fans in the southern states (among them Confederate leader Jefferson Davis) as it did in the North. The nationwide hit novel became a touring hit play in 1899.

Wallace died at home in Indiana in 1905, never to know that the play would ultimately reach an international audience of 20 million in its twenty-two-year run, or become one of the most iconic (and most garlanded) films ever made; but without a doubt he died knowing he had put ‘Shiloh and its slanders’ behind him. He had found his elusive purpose in life.

Dedication (#ue914d635-4152-57bf-8a2d-8a7fa3412dd1)

To the wife of my youth who still abides with me

Contents

Cover (#u5445e752-2987-5ad4-b946-045dd76a3fa0)

Title Page (#u8d993113-8272-5b1f-8c51-79797cd3f00f)

Copyright (#ud87b62d0-1acf-5e03-a9a9-992d7e7eca2f)

History of William Collins (#ufe5461e7-fd55-50a4-b940-e6ee101e31aa)

Life & Times (#ubfc1687c-83a8-51f4-b7e7-1404a8fa7347)

Dedication (#ue3ba3316-2cac-4e27-ac1a-2ae2aebe9193)