Endymion is a novel published in 1880 by Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, the former Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

He retires from his opulent house in Hill Street, London, to the modest country estate of Hurstley; his failure to reenter the government in Sir Robert Peel's brief ministry in 1835, and his inability to secure a parliamentary seat in the subsequent elections, leads his wife to die of sorrow and disillusionment, and ultimately to his own suicide.

Endymion has received a clerkship in Somerset House, a government office, and takes lodgings at the home of the Rodneys, former protégés of his parents; at Somerset House he becomes acquainted with fellow clerks Trenchard, Seymour Hicks, and the aspiring but pretentious novelist St. Barbe; Trenchard lays the foundations for his future career by introducing him to the debating club of the politically minded Bertie Tremaine.

Myra becomes a favorite member of the household, and her position enables her to introduce Endymion to the high society of the Whig party.

This places her in a position to forward Endymion's career, and she recommends him for private secretary to the Whig cabinet minister Sidney Wilton, an old friend of her father.

The action and conversations are distributed between characters who had figured in English politics or the fashionable romance of Europe during the last forty years.

Vigo, a minor character of the novel, is a combination of Poole, the tailor, and George Hudson, the Sunderland railway king, as he was styled in his time.

Job Thornberry comes into the story with the Anti-Corn-Law League, representing the remarkable change in English politics which made the Whigs so different from what they were fifty years earlier and which necessitated the passage of Reform Bills even by the Conservative Derby-Disraeli ministries.

Neuchatel, the great banker, is the historical Rothschild; Cardinal Henry Edward Manning figures as the tendentious papist Nigel Penruddock.

[3] The novel is full of political lessons and conceits, and its pictures of aristocratic circles, with the semi-ministerial management of English affairs by the queens of fashionable society on behalf of their Endymions, not only expose the romance of Disraeli's own life, but also reveal the things behind the scenes which, perhaps, none so well could have done as this Jewish ex-premier of England in the literary winding up of his strange eventful life.