MARY ANNE
But you a very fairy, must
Have had another birth,
For never could the cold dull clay
Have been your native earth.
It must have been some charmed spot,
From whence your being sprung,
A lovely & a sunny place,
Where still the World was young.
(‘To Mrs Wyndham Lewis, with The Book of Beauty’)
Mary Anne Disraeli was born on 11 November 1792 in the village of Brampford Speke in Devon. Brampford Speke was a small farming community four miles north of Exeter, with a church at its centre and an assortment of cottages and farmhouses scattered along the surrounding lanes. Mary Anne was the second child of John Evans, a naval seaman, and Eleanor Viney, a vicar’s daughter. In later years she took pains to shroud her age and the date of her birth in mystery, prompting this poetic flight of fancy from an admirer. ‘Childhood yet lingers at your head’, ‘To Mrs Wyndham Lewis’ continued, ‘so soon from most exiled. In ready kindness mirth & grace / You know you are a child.’1
The house in which Mary Anne grew up was the home of her Evans grandparents and was less the picturesque ‘charmed spot’ of her admirer’s imagination than a noisy working farm. A pen-and-ink drawing of the house during the period of Mary Anne’s childhood shows a white thatched building with three tall chimneys standing in one corner of a square farmyard. Barns and outbuildings surround the other sides of the yard and the house itself is small – probably no more than seven or eight rooms – with little additional space for a young family. Anyone living there would have been intimately aware of the daily events of farm life as they unfolded outside the windows.
Mary Anne was brought up in this house by her mother and grandparents and never knew her father. From her parents’ courtship letters, however, which she kept all her life, she learnt something of his character, and something too of the opposition her parents faced when they announced their intention to marry. Little is known of John Evans’s background, but he was evidently not considered a suitable match for a young lady of Eleanor Viney’s class. The Vineys were an old family of some standing, and Eleanor was related via her mother to several branches of the landed gentry, including the Lamberts, owners of Boyton Manor in Wiltshire since the sixteenth century, and the Scropes of Castle Combe, also in Wiltshire, who could trace their name and their ownership of Castle Combe back 500 years.
John Evans, in contrast, had no ancient lineage to bolster his prospects. ‘It is true I cannot boast a long chain of distinguished forefathers’, he told Eleanor when the objections of her family to their marriage appeared insurmountable. ‘It will not be pleasant at a future day to hear you … reproached for having united yourself to a man that may be held in contempt by the rest of your family.’2 Early in their courtship he also acknowledged that Eleanor had found him ‘truly in the rough’, but continued, ‘it is your business to bend, burnish and shape me to whatever form will make you most happy and if you are not completely so ’twill be your own fault’.3 John Evans was not remotely abashed by the social disparity between him and his bride. If her family persisted in withholding Eleanor’s dowry, then they would wait until they could support themselves on his pay, and she, meanwhile, should ‘have more fortitude and a firmer reliance on her Lord & Master’.4 Yet John was not merely a martinet. He combined firmness with passion and took a frank delight in the good things in life. Writing to Eleanor in 1786, two years before their marriage, he chided her for being a virtuously punctual early riser. ‘Do you think you little Hussy I will allow you to be so regular when I am your acknowledged Master, do you imagine I will go to bed at 10 & rise by 7? – dont mistake me, I am grown quite a drone, beside it is in bed the moments fly.’5
Only John Evans’s side of the courtship correspondence survives, so we have to infer Eleanor’s responses to such statements from his letters. These suggest she was rather less sanguine about the future than he. ‘Fear is the most destructive of all passions and will sooner overturn the Human powers than any other’, he told her in January 1787.6 Yet they also suggest that she had a will of her own, and that that will could be forcibly expressed. Their epistolary courtship was punctuated by quarrels prompted by a tension between her intuitive, emotional response to circumstance and his more practical stance. ‘Dont believe’, he told her at one point, ‘that my composition is made up of Frigid materials. I certainly have as quick a sense of pain and consequently pleasure as you.’7 By 1788, the couple had put aside their differences and won consent from the Vineys to their marriage. That consent was grudging. Eleanor received a smaller marriage settlement than her sister Bridget, who was married on the same day, and incurred the displeasure of a well-off aunt, Anne Viney, who appears in the courtship letters as one of the chief obstacles to the marriage. ‘Your aunt is at present the only Barrier between us and Earthly happiness’, wrote John exasperatedly at one point.8
Anne Viney contented herself with leaving her disobliging niece an annuity worth £1,000 less than that left to her more obedient sister, but by the time she died in 1800, John was beyond the reach of either her whims or her money. After their marriage in 1788, he and Eleanor made their home with his parents in Brampford Speke. Their son, another John, was born in 1790, and Mary Anne two years later. John Evans was frequently away with his ship, and in 1794, when Mary Anne was two, he died of a fever while serving in the West Indies. Although he was always an absent figure in the lives of his wife and children, his death nevertheless changed their lives, cutting them off from his naval world and depriving them of any prospect of a settled domestic life. It also confirmed Brampford Speke as his family’s only refuge, and it was here that Mary Anne lived for her first fifteen years.
Mary Anne left no account of the years she spent in Brampford Speke, and documentary evidence for this period of her life is scarce. Only one undated letter survives to give us any indication of what her childhood was like, and that letter was written from the house of friends. Composed in a childish copperplate hand it reads, ‘Our School is broke up and I am very comfortable with three pleasant companions, with whom and my Brother I shall spent the holidays very agreeable. he unite with me, in duty to you, and all friends, and in wishing they may enjoy the pleasures of the season. I am my dear Mama your dutiful Daughter Mary Anne Evans.’9
This missive is a little more revealing than its innocuous content might initially suggest. From its subject if not from its erratic grammar it is clear that Mary Anne received an education of sorts, although it is more likely to have been from a governess shared with another family rather than from a school as we would understand it.* Eleanor Viney was more than capable of teaching her own children to read and write, so given her straitened circumstances it is noteworthy that she sent her daughter away to obtain the accomplishments of a young lady. It is possible that the cramped farm at Brampford Speke was not quite the sanctuary for Eleanor’s growing children that it was for Eleanor herself, since Mary Anne and her brother evidently remained with their friends even when ‘school’ broke up, rather than return home.
In 1807, Mary Anne’s grandparents died and Eleanor had to leave Brampford Speke. She moved to Cathedral House in Gloucester, which had been in the Viney family for many years. In 1807 Cathedral House was in the possession of Eleanor’s brother James Viney, although it is not clear whether he was actually in residence when his sister and her children lived there.
James Viney was an officer in the Royal Artillery, and in 1808 he joined Wellington’s army in the Spanish peninsula. He commanded regiments at the key Napoleonic battles of Roliça, Vimiera and Corunna, and by 1834 had become Major General Sir James Viney, having been given a knighthood and made Companion of the Bath in recognition of his military service. Mary Anne was fond of her uncle and he of her, although he could be irascible and appears from his letters to have been something of a rake, who fathered at least two illegitimate sons and was full of hare-brained money-making schemes. His nephew John (Mary Anne’s older brother) was inspired by his example to volunteer for the army, and followed him to the Peninsula. John too fought at Roliça and Vimiera, and was quickly promoted first to ensign and then to lieutenant. His promotions were obtained through purchase, as was normal practice at the time. At the Battle of Talavera in 1809, he distinguished himself by capturing a French standard, and he also took part in the Siege of Badajoz in 1812.
Mary Anne did her utmost to shield her mother from the dangers John faced, although this cannot have been easy as they followed his progress up the Spanish Peninsula in letters, newspapers and army gazettes. John’s absence affected the lives of Eleanor and Mary Anne in practical ways too. Eleanor’s husband, parents and parents-in-law were dead, her brother and her son were away fighting, and she and her daughter had not only to fend for themselves but also to find the money to pay for John’s promotions. Perhaps motivated by these practical concerns, in 1808 she remarried. Her new husband was one Thomas Yate, a lieutenant in the Worcestershire Militia. Yate joined in 1796 as a surgeon’s mate, a position that required only the most rudimentary medical training.10 In the 1790s he served with the Militia in Ireland, where Britain retained a defensive military presence right through the Napoleonic wars, but he was never engaged in battle. The Militia was based in Exeter in 1805–6, which is probably when he met Eleanor, but by the time of their marriage in 1808 it had moved to Portsmouth, and it is likely that it was there that he, Eleanor and Mary Anne made their first home.
Thomas Yate has traditionally been dismissed by biographers of the Disraelis as a shadowy, unsatisfactory figure. His letters, however, suggest that he was an attentive husband and a dutiful stepfather who immersed himself in the affairs of his adopted family and did his best to help them. Mary Anne always wrote of him kindly and conspired with him to defend her mother from unpleasantness whenever possible. He worked hard to disentangle the tortuous financial arrangements between Eleanor and her brother James, in which mortgages were transferred and loans made and recalled with dizzying frequency. The family lived on income from his naval stocks and on the slender rents deriving from property inherited by Eleanor. Attempts to increase the value of these funds seem to have taken up much of Yate’s time.
Eleanor’s marriage resulted in more upheavals for her daughter, as the family followed the Worcestershire Militia first to Portsmouth and then in 1814 to Bristol, where they moved between a series of rented houses. It was an uncertain, peripatetic existence, in which relocation from house to house was driven by necessity as the family’s small income rose and fell. Eleanor wrote to her son that she was relieved to be out of Portsmouth and settled in Bristol since ‘this Place is more reasonable than Ports which is necessary as by the Peace with France Mr Yate loses the best part of his Income’:11 a loss of income attributable to the diminution of the value of naval stocks following the Battle of Waterloo, and the accompanying reduction in the salaries of reservists like Yate. The move to Bristol suited Mary Anne. Eleanor reported that she found the society ‘very preferable to Portsmouth’, and that she enjoyed meeting people of her own age.12
It is hard to get a sense of the daily rhythms of Mary Anne’s life at this stage, since in later life she richly embroidered accounts of her youth. She told Sir Stafford Northcote and others that she had been a milliner’s apprentice13 and her friend Mrs Duncan Stewart that she had worked as a factory girl and walked barefoot to work every morning before being rescued by her first husband, who in this account fell in love with her in all her ragged glory.14 Neither story had any basis in fact. The family’s resources were not so stretched as to render it necessary for Eleanor Viney’s daughter to work for her living, and the documentary evidence that does survive suggests instead a life filled with social visits and some dutiful voluntary work at a local Sunday school. Her closest friends during this period were the Clutton sisters – Elizabeth, Barbara, Dolly and Frances – who lived at Pensax in Worcestershire. Their father Thomas Clutton served throughout the 1790s in the Militia with Thomas Yate, and it was probably in 1805–6, when the Militia was based in Exeter and Eleanor and the children were living in Brampford Speke, that the two families met. By 1808 Thomas Clutton had died and his widow and daughters had moved to Pensax, where both Mary Anne and Eleanor were frequent visitors. In the 1860s Dolly wrote to Mary Anne of her memories of ‘our early love – and wanderings up to our knees in snow & dirt at Pensas’. The two women kept up their correspondence until Dolly’s death, and her children subsequently described Mary Anne as their mother’s oldest friend.15
Mary Anne may not have experienced the life of a factory drudge that she later recounted, but nor was her youth untouched by suffering. In 1812, when she was twenty, Thomas Yate’s brother committed suicide, apparently fearing the prospect of a court martial. Richard Yate had followed his brother into the Worcestershire Militia in 1799, but he resigned his commission to join the regular army and served in the Peninsula between 1808 and 1812. By the winter of 1812 he had returned with his regiment to barracks at Kingsbridge in Devon and his suicide note suggests he believed he was about to be discovered in some regimental accounting irregularity. The note, rambling in its desperation, also reveals something of the toll the Peninsula War took on men like Richard Yate, James Viney and John Evans, who spent years away from home as the British army, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, pushed Napoleon’s forces back through Portugal and Spain into France. In the military communities in which Mary Anne grew up, the absence of these men and the changes wrought in them by war were particularly evident. ‘I must say’, Richard Yate wrote with some understatement, ‘it is truly unfortunate after having stopped for war four years … to suffer by my own hand at last.’ ‘I beg’, he continued, in a note addressed to Thomas Yate, ‘you will not nor any of my relations allow yourselves to be too much affected at my determination.’16
Given the circumstances of Richard Yate’s death, it is hard to see how this wish could have been fulfilled. The local newspaper gave graphic details about how he managed to shoot himself with a musket, leaning the gun against a wall and forcing the trigger with his sword. The press reports made no mention of accusations of fraud or a looming court martial, although whether out of ignorance, respect for a serving officer, or because the accusations and court martial were figments of Yate’s troubled mind is not clear. ‘The deceased’, ran one report, ‘had lately returned with his regiment from the Peninsula, and it appearing on evidence that he had for some time past displayed symptoms of a disordered mind, the jury without hesitation returned a verdict of Lunacy.’17
Even without the rumours of dishonourable behaviour hinted at in Richard Yate’s explanation for his actions, no young woman of marriageable age would have wanted to be associated with a story of suicide (still an illegal act) and insanity. The family’s move in 1814 from Portsmouth to Bristol may therefore have been well timed, allowing Mary Anne, now twenty-two and beyond her girlhood, to disentangle herself from a claustrophobic network of military families and establish herself in society untainted by any whiff of scandal. Marriage offered an obvious way out of a financially precarious home life, and what Mary Anne lacked in a dowry she made up for with looks and vivacity. She was a petite beautiful flirt with a mass of kiss-curls: admirers sent paeans in praise of her tiny feet and young men wrote mournfully that she was insensible to the anxiety her teasing induced in them. Her brother John described her as ‘cold’ and her heart as ‘particular’. She was evidently not prepared to accept a husband who made no attempt at romance.18 Candidates for her hand were required to hymn their devotion to her in poetry, some of which Disraeli discovered and copied into her commonplace book decades later. One Henry Harrison went so far as to ask Eleanor for permission to marry her and wrote at great length on how his feelings for her transcended his desire to obey his mother, who ‘has always declared it her wish to have her sons affection prudently settled when young’. He also referred to a quarrel with Mary Anne but noted reassuringly that ‘it has frequently been the case with me, after any little difference with my sister, that we were afterwards if possible more cordial than ever’ – hardly the sentiments to secure the heart of a romantically inclined young lady.19
By 1815, Henry Harrison and his fellow admirers were facing competition of a serious nature. Wyndham Lewis was the son of an ancient Welsh family and a major shareholder in the Dowlais Iron Works near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. Wyndham inherited his shares in Dowlais from one of its founders, his grandfather Thomas Lewis, and by 1815 was running the ironworks in partnership with the other major shareholder, John Guest. Wyndham never involved himself in the day-to-day management as Guest did, partly because Guest was the real genius behind the works’ dramatic expansion, and partly because his business interests also encompassed banking, the development of the railways and the law. From a maternal uncle he inherited the estate of Greenmeadow outside Cardiff, and a conservative estimate of his income puts it at around £11,000 a year.
Money meant that Wyndham ranked highly on an Austenian scale of eligibility. In Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, Mrs Bennet is desperate for one of her daughters to marry Mr Darcy for his £10,000 a year, and her family is much more well-to-do than was Mary Anne’s. Wyndham was not, however, quite the Mr Darcy to Henry Harrison’s Mr Collins that his wealth alone suggests. He was fourteen years older than Mary Anne, a distinctly unromantic thirty-six when they met. His income came from trade: it was a brilliant marriage for Mary Anne in material terms, but it did not elevate her to the aristocracy or even the ‘Upper 10,000’ who made up smart London society. And Wyndham had a past, in the form of an illegitimate daughter called Frances to whom he left an annuity of £60 a year and of whose existence Mary Anne was aware. His temperament was also utterly different from that of his putative bride. He was a serious, thoughtful man, not given to acting rashly, and despite his circumstances he was notoriously tight-fisted. At one stage he even went to the lengths of hiring the morning newspapers rather than buying them. But he was as captivated by Mary Anne’s good looks and rapid conversational style as the earnest young men who had previously attempted to woo her. Mary Anne was looking for someone to sweep her off her feet, and Wyndham rose to the challenge. He wrote page after page of dubious poetry in which he praised her beauty, her eyes and, rather more dampeningly, her virtue and her modesty. She was his ‘beauteous charmer’, his ‘lovely girl’, his ‘bright maid’. ‘Where is Wyndham’s joy, if Mar’ann flies?’ The unknowing world might cry ‘See there the maid with bosom cold! / Indifference o’er her heart presides, / And love & lovers she derides’, yet he, her true love, knew of the ‘grateful tumult’ hidden behind her capricious exterior.20
The poetry suggests that Wyndham, aware of Mary Anne’s reputation but entranced by her beauty, thought that he could mould her into the virtuous wife he wanted, even as she did her best to persuade him to adopt the persona of the ardent lover. It may have been an affair of the heart for him, in which concerns about lineage, money and flightiness were put to one side, but for her it was firmly an affair of the head, in which romance did not arise spontaneously but had to be invented to fill an emotional vacuum. Her brother John, camped with his regiment outside Paris after the fall of Napoleon, was beside himself with delight at the fact that his wilful sister had made such a strategic choice. Reacting to her ‘kindly’ description of Wyndham, he noted approvingly, ‘you do not speak like a blind lover’. ‘You mention’, he continued, ‘that Mr Lewis’s family are very good on both sides.’21
Some sense of the courtship of this oddly matched couple can be gleaned from the letters Wyndham wrote to Mary Anne during their engagement. His bulletins were formal, full of detailed accounts of his travels and his business affairs. Mary Anne evidently required more than the muted expressions of affection he offered. ‘If you co’d see into my heart you wo’d be assured that you have no cause to entertain the slightest doubt of the unshakable Love of your most affectionate Wyndham Lewis’, ended one letter.22 Another mourned a look of ‘scornful anger’ directed towards him. ‘That I love you truly most truly I call Heavn’ to witness & I never can place my affections on another.’23 Wyndham evidently needed Mary Anne’s love and missed her company when parted from her, but he was also wary of her moods and what he perceived to be a levity so excessive as to border on the hysterical. In one undated letter he tried to explain that his devotion to her was unswerving but that it was tested by her behaviour. ‘You certainly have a most amiable and virtuous heart oh that you wo’d always consult its dictates when you seem overwhelm’d by an excessive flow of spirits – if you knew how bewitching you were in your softer moods you would never give way to any rhapsodies.’24
Like her mother, Mary Anne married a calm, phlegmatic man, who, like her father, was simultaneously entranced and disturbed by his intended’s passions. Wyndham’s letters evoke a bride who was highly strung and easily provoked to jealousy, but who was also full of energy and determined to find excitement in a match made for material gain. They suggest a groom devoted to his beloved in her moments of quietness, made anxious by her whims and outbursts. It was not, perhaps, the most secure foundation for a life together, but many of their contemporaries made marriages that were even less well suited. In the end, anxieties and jealousies were put aside, and Mary Anne Evans became Mary Anne Lewis on 22 December 1815.
* * *
Benjamin Disraeli was born on 21 December 1804, twelve years after Mary Anne. In the memoir of his father he published in 1849, he claimed to be descended from Venetian ancestors who assumed the name D’Israeli ‘in order that their race might be for ever recognised’.25 The truth was rather less romantic. Disraeli’s grandfather came from Ferrara in Italy, arriving in England in 1748. The family papers suggest that all Disraeli’s efforts to establish the nobility of his lineage failed to find any genealogical line beyond his great-grandfather, but it was crucial to his conception of himself to be part of an ancient Jewish aristocracy quite as grand as the English aristocracy whose traditions he assumed. His mother’s family, the Basevis, were in fact more distinguished than the Disraelis and could be traced back to 1492, but Disraeli was never remotely interested in his maternal ancestry. It was his name that mattered to him, along with the sense that he was fulfilling his destiny as the son of a noble line. In adulthood he dropped the apostrophe from his name while his parents retained it. They were always ‘of Israel’: he was simply Disraeli.
He was the eldest son and second child of Isaac D’Israeli and his wife Maria, and was born in London at their house, 6 Kings Road, Bedford Row. Isaac greeted his birth in laconic fashion, writing to the publisher John Murray that ‘I wish to speak to you concerning the Index which they are calling for – the work is finished – Mrs D’I is in the beginning of labour – so that I cant go out.’26 A few days later he wrote again to Murray requesting some books, and reported that ‘Mrs D and Child are doing well.’27 It was typical of Isaac that he should combine news of his newborn son with requests for books and questions about work. He was an affectionate, proud father, devoted to his two elder children, Benjamin and Sarah (born in 1802), and benignly interested in the pursuits of his younger sons: Ralph, born in 1809, and James, born in 1813. (A fourth son, Naphtali, was born in 1807 but died in infancy.) Above all he was a man of letters: a scholar and literary historian and a much-admired writer. In 1791 he published the first edition of his Curiosities of Literature, a multi-volume work in which he combined portraits of literary figures with commentary and analysis. From its first appearance Curiosities was tremendously popular, tapping as it did into an eighteenth-century enthusiasm for anthologies, observation and anecdote. Writing to John Murray in 1818, Byron summed up the affection in which Isaac was held by the literary world: ‘I have a great respect for Israeli and his talents, and have read his works over and over and over repeatedly, and have been amused by them greatly, and instructed often … I don’t know a living man’s books I take up so often, or lay down more reluctantly, as Israeli’s.’28
By the time of Benjamin’s birth, Isaac had settled into the mode of life that would sustain him into old age: long days reading in his library, work on new editions of Curiosities and other literary titles, a genial social life among the publishers and antiquarian book dealers of literary London. The arrival of his children did little to disrupt this. Disraeli claimed to have been ‘born in a library’, and the bookish atmosphere of 6 Kings Road was not remotely disturbed by the presence in its quiet rooms of a growing family. Isaac’s wife Maria, whom he married in February 1802, hardly figures in the family correspondence, and in later life Disraeli had nothing to say about her. It is almost impossible to glean an impression of her from the surviving evidence, since she appears as a silent figure in a family of opinionated, loquacious writers. It is notable, however, that the homes she made for her husband and children were happy ones, and her daughter and younger sons appear to have been fond of her. Disraeli’s biographer Jane Ridley has suggested that his silence on the subject of his mother tells us more about his disappointment at her refusal to recognise his talents than it does about her, noting that in the letters from her that do survive she appears intelligent and engaged but not easily impressed by her eldest son’s achievements.29 Disraeli was sent first to a small school in Islington and then to a Noncomformist boarding school at Blackheath. Much of his education took place under his father’s eye. He had the run of the library and mixed from his earliest days with Isaac’s literary friends: John Murray, the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, and Byron’s friend and fellow poet Samuel Rogers.
Disraeli venerated his father’s work and his opinions, worried about his health, and did his best, as his own public profile grew, to protect him from unpleasantness. As important was his sister Sarah, two years his senior. Sarah and Benjamin formed a strong pairing in the family, separated by age and temperament from their younger brothers. They looked alike (both had their mother’s dark hair, pale skin and strong features, in contrast to the fairer Ralph and James) and they shared a passion for books. Sarah was intelligent and vicariously ambitious. Although she had literary plans of her own, from an early age her energy was centred on her brother, in whose abilities she had unwavering faith. Her devotion and support were vital to Disraeli, first as he sought to establish himself among his peers at school, and subsequently as he fought to claim a place in the world of politics and letters. He repaid her devotion with total loyalty. His affection sustained her all her life.
In 1816 Isaac’s father Benjamin died. His death brought about two major changes in the family’s circumstances. First, it left them better off and allowed them to move to a larger house at 6 Bloomsbury Square, which would remain Disraeli’s home until the second half of the 1820s. Second, it paved the way for a final break with their Jewish roots. For some years Isaac had been in dispute with the authorities of the Bevis Marks synagogue, after he contravened the synagogue’s rules by refusing to take the office of Warden of the Congregation or to pay the fine of £40 levied in consequence of his refusal. The death of his father meant there was no point in continuing with the outward observances of a faith in which he had no religious interest. In March 1817 he withdrew from the synagogue and, at the insistence of his friend Sharon Turner, who believed it to be crucial to the children’s prospects that they should belong to a faith, had them baptised Anglicans. Ralph and James were baptised on 11 July at St Andrew’s, Holborn, and Benjamin and Sarah a month later.
Disraeli was thirteen when he was baptised, and the ceremony changed the course of his life. Jews could not sit in the House of Commons, so without being baptised he could not have pursued a political career. When the bar on Jewish MPs was lifted in 1858 he was already leading the Conservative Party in the Commons, something unthinkable had he not been a practising member of the Church of England. But while Isaac’s dispute with the Bevis Marks authorities opened a door for his son, it also marked an irrevocable separation between Disraeli and his Jewish heritage. From 1817 that heritage would become increasingly mysterious and romantic as Disraeli gloried in myth-making about his ancestry without suffering any of the penalties felt by practising Jews. Cut off from his lineage but still separated from his literary and political contemporaries by race, he occupied a hinterland between two traditions: one Jewish, one Christian. In both he was an outsider. Like Mary Anne, poised for marriage to Wyndham Lewis, he was moving steadily away from his origins, and shaping his own conception of those origins would become increasingly important as he grew up.
* * *
1815, the year of Mary Anne’s wedding, was the year when Britain’s war with France came to an end on the field of Waterloo. But although the long years of conflict were over, poverty was rife. On the streets of London and Bristol, the cities where Disraeli and Mary Anne lived, returning soldiers with no homes to go to collapsed in frosty streets and died.30 They were both remade by Anglican ritual, she by marriage and he by baptism, but Britain was still governed by aristocratic families who would not willingly open their doors to a sailor’s daughter or a Jew. Disraeli and Mary Anne knew that they would have to be made to do so, compelled to stop and listen by exceptional voices and extraordinary stories.