ETHEL BENNETT, ANNA BENNETT, LUCY BENNETT
Ethel, Anna and Lucy Bennett were the elder daughters of Mr Bennett of Pythouse, Wiltshire. Mr Bennett was a bad manager of the family’s finances, and with five unmarried daughters at home (two of whom were too young to be released from the schoolroom) life at Pythouse was unhappy. Each season Ethel, Anna and Lucy came to London to hunt for husbands and each year they returned to the country without a suitor between them. In the mid 1820s Ethel found an aristocrat to marry but the marriage was wretched, and before many years had passed, rumours of her infidelities appeared in the gossip pages of the press. Anna and Lucy were determined to find more congenial spouses and turned their gaze to the army, only to be disappointed by a succession of soldiers. Their hearts alighted on raffish half-pay officers, matches their debt-ridden father refused to allow. In 1829, after they had been on the marriage market for a decade, a soldier with whom Lucy was in love walked out of a first-floor window at his mess, expecting to find a balcony. He fell sixteen feet, broke his back and died a week later, after which both sisters retired from the matrimonial lists.
* * *
‘I would not be unmarried for all the world’, wrote Mary Anne to her brother John in the middle of the 1820s. ‘I have just as much nay more attention than the girls – married women being the fashion – without having the misery of looking out for an establishment.’1 The Bennetts were her cousins and Ethel, Lucy and Anna among her closest friends, and she witnessed every twist and turn of their hunt for husbands. Their story emerges in the letters she wrote to John throughout the 1820s, and it reveals how dramatically her own prospects were altered by marriage. The Bennett sisters were from a grander family than her, due to to the marriage made by their mother, but they were dependent on her goodwill for carriage rides, cast-off dresses and introductions to the eligible young men who continued to cluster about her; and they treated her house as a refuge from their own home. Mary Anne’s status as the wife of a rich man gave her independence of which Ethel, Anna and Lucy could only dream, and their presence in her drawing room, where they passed hours each day lamenting the possibility of eternal spinsterhood, served as a constant reminder of the fate she escaped on the day of her wedding.
* * *
After their marriage in December 1815, Wyndham took Mary Anne to Greenmeadow, his estate outside Cardiff. Greenmeadow was a medieval farmstead, settled in rolling, fertile land overlooking the River Taff, and the oldest parts of the house dated back centuries. The house no longer survives and all the accounts of it date from after Wyndham and Mary Anne made extensive alterations in the early 1820s, so we know more about Mary Anne’s reaction to finding herself mistress of Greenmeadow than we do about the house itself during her first years there. She revelled in the freedom her own home gave her. She hunted with her brother-in-law’s harriers, planned ambitious renovations to the house and filled its guest quarters with visitors drawn from Cardiff and local landed families, who left traces of their presence in the poetry she kept. Most of it was by unattached young men who combined praise of the house with admiration for their alluring hostess. One ‘H.L.B.’ noted enviously that ‘the Rose of Enjoyment is Lewis’s Flow’r’ and another visitor not possessed of poetic prowess wrote doggerel in praise of his bedroom, expiating on its muslin curtains, pale pink sheets (‘like fair Maidens Bloom’) and lavender-scented pillows, before complaining of ‘One thing only needful without which are few charms / But a Batchelors fate – not one in his arms.’2
With Wyndham frequently away on business, Mary Anne was left to plot her own course at home. Her immediate social circle was drawn from the Lewis family and had at its heart Wyndham’s brother William Price Lewis, known universally as ‘The Governor’, who lived a few miles away at New House in Llanishen. William Lewis was a clergyman of the old school; a robust figure with no religious interest and multiple parishes, for which he did little more than install curates and collect tithes. Scandal lurked in his past just as it did in his brother’s, but while Wyndham made some provision for his illegitimate daughter, William disclaimed all interest in his offspring. After making an improvident marriage in his youth, he abandoned his wife and had to be bullied by his parents-in-law into making a contribution to the upkeep of his children after her death (they claimed that his desertion sent her into a decline from which she never recovered). He spent his days hunting and drinking, and Mary Anne enjoyed his company immensely. In Cardiff there were balls and assemblies to attend in the company of Mary and Catherine Williams, young unmarried relations of Wyndham’s. Each year Wyndham took her to Cheltenham for the social season, which she attended in the company of her cousin Harriet Semper. In 1819 she went to Paris for the first time. During Wyndham’s absences she made regular visits to Pensax, home of her childhood friends the Cluttons, and rejoiced as they in their turn married and found new authority as wives and mothers.
Mary Anne loved children and lavished affection and attention on those of her friends, but she had no babies of her own. In the hundreds of letters by her that survive, she makes almost no reference to her childlessness, and those references that do survive are oblique. Nevertheless they suggest that at times she felt it deeply. Writing to her brother John in the 1830s, twenty years after her wedding, she confessed that ‘so far from the world hardening my heart I think it has got more affectionate at least I am sure I am fonder of my husband mama & you – had I children I suppose my affections would be more divided’.3 Her letters to John in the 1820s contained regular updates about the number of children born to her friends, with Dolly Clutton, married to a Mr Whitmore Jones, leading the field by producing ten between 1820 and 1835. After the birth of Dolly’s fifth child Mary Anne remarked that she thought five was quite enough4 and after the arrival of the ninth she wrote, ‘Dolly has now nine children I am as happy as the day is long without any’,5 a defensive assertion that rings with some relief at having escaped the physical trauma of continual childbearing.
There are indications in Wyndham’s letters to Mary Anne that she did become pregnant in the years after her marriage and that the viability of her pregnancies was a source of anxiety for them both. In January 1817 he wrote from Bristol that ‘I highly approve of your forbearance in not accepting the invitations you have received & keeping yourself composed & quiet’ and also that the doctor, Mr Cooper, ‘does not think you ought to eat many sweet things such as Jellies &c as they will injure your general appetite & prevent you from eating a sufficient quantity of food that is more wholesome’. Just over a year later, in March and April 1818, his letters again became for a brief period unusually concerned with her health, appetite and daily activities.6 Whether or not Mary Anne was conceiving and miscarrying during this period, it seems probable that she felt her childlessness most acutely in the years immediately following her marriage, when her friends were adding to their families at a great rate and when both she and those around her would have expected her to produce a Lewis heir.
Deprived of the distraction of children, Mary Anne was compelled to shape a role for herself as a wife without a nursery. One of the problems she faced was that in the 1810s and 1820s the nature of marriage itself was in flux. By the 1830s the concept of companionate marriage – that is of marriage as the meeting of hearts and minds – had filtered through to all classes, and had become the ideal to which men and women of marriageable age aspired. Prior to this the status of marriage was complicated by differing social standards. The poor did not always legally marry, and aristocrats, forced into dynastic matches designed to secure land rather than hearts, were frequently adulterous. While it was far harder for women than men to subvert their marriage vows, powerful women such as Lady Oxford, mistress of both Byron and Sir Francis Burdett, or Lady Jersey, mistress of the Prince Regent, nevertheless managed to cuckold their husbands and emerge with their reputations and influence intact.
Mary Anne was married too early to be obliged to pretend that her rich husband was also her soulmate in order to conform to a social norm, but her class – and his – was too indeterminate to allow her to acknowledge that theirs was a marriage of convenience. Wyndham’s fortune was aristocratic in its extent but not its source, and the wives of rich industrialists were permitted nothing like the freedom of their social superiors. Mary Anne’s activities were constrained by a bourgeois middle-class morality that emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century and bloomed during Queen Victoria’s reign. In the 1820s this moral code was still evolving, meaning that she was caught between an aristocratic eighteenth-century view of marriage as a contract based on rational practicality and a newer cultural assumption that marriage should be the expression of perfect harmony and true love. She was also caught between an earlier assumption that a husband and wife possessed of considerable means should lead lives largely independent of each other and an increasingly powerful expectation that a wife’s domain was her home; that her role was to procreate, or, failing that, to be a submissive prop and stay to her husband.
Mary Anne wanted more. As the years passed and no children came, her progress between Greenmeadow, Cheltenham, Pensax and Bristol became restless. Left alone by Wyndham in Cheltenham, she occupied herself by writing a fantasy of physical attraction, influenced by the novels she read and made safe through a bathetic concluding twist. ‘I was left all alone in my loveliness. On the second day I pass’d an interesting looking man in the passage but it was his companion who mostly attracted my attention – he had the most beautiful black eyes I ever saw in my life.’ The companion watches her closely over the next few days, following her into rooms and sitting, arrestingly enigmatic, by her side. Fevered by the attention, she retires to bed to read, only to be disturbed in the most alarming fashion:
I was startled by a noise from behind the small stand up bed and out he rush’d – I could not breath or move for terror, he threw himself on the bed – I was ringing the bell – he was at my feet & I could not get away from him – I then screamed half panic waiters chambermaids & came to my assistance and a beautiful girl happened she threw her arms round his neck saying dearest Gustave why do I find you here – but oh the brute the horrendous brute what do you think he did say he began to bark like any other dog – and began to eat up my supper.7
* * *
In 1820 George III died after many years of illness and insanity. The Prince Regent became King and his marriage, spectacularly disastrous even by Royal standards, exploded into its final act. The new Queen, Caroline of Brunswick, had been living abroad for many years after decades of estrangement from her husband. Their only child, Princess Charlotte, died in childbirth in 1817, prompting an outpouring of national grief. Caroline’s years abroad were dogged by spies working for her husband, who was desperate to find proof of her infidelity and so divorce her. None of the spies was able to find concrete evidence of adultery, and when her husband succeeded to the throne, Caroline returned to England to claim her crown. The King, a notorious adulterer, responded by compelling the government to introduce a Bill of Pains and Penalties against her in the House of Lords, designed to prove her marital guilt and strip her of her title.
During the summer of 1820 the ‘Trial of Queen Caroline’ dominated public life. Caroline cut a dramatic figure as she swept into the House of Lords each day to hear the evidence against her, and her cause became a rallying point for radicals determined to bring down the King and his government. The popular support garnered by Caroline led those in power to fear that a verdict against her would result in revolution and the Bill was dropped. George IV nevertheless succeeded in barring his wife from his coronation, public support for her fell away, and less than a year later she was dead.
Mary Anne was absorbed by Caroline’s story, following newspaper reports of the trial avidly and canvassing the respective popularity of the King and Queen among her friends and correspondents. She was bored and found diversion as a result of George III’s death. The accession of the new King triggered an election as well as a scandal, and Mary Anne was quick to seize on the fact that the election heralded the possibility of change. The seat of Cardiff was controlled by the Marquis of Bute and held by his brother, Lord James Stuart. Standing for Parliament was an expensive business when voters had to be bribed and every vote paid for, and Lord James, realising he lacked the funds to stand again, sent in his resignation. To Mary Anne’s delight, Wyndham was persuaded by her and the local Tories to stand in his place. ‘They say’, she told John, ‘I am so popular that I must canvass tomorrow, which I shall do.’ But the election offered more than the temporary thrill of the campaign trail. ‘If W succeeds we shall have a house in town & fit up this beautifully.’8
The combination of Wyndham’s bribes, Mary Anne’s popularity and a dashing campaign livery of red ribbons won the day and Wyndham was duly elected the Member for Cardiff. He joined the back benches of Lord Liverpool’s Tory administration, which by 1820 had been in power for eight years. In February 1821 the Lewises moved to London, where they took up residence in a series of rented Mayfair addresses while they hunted for a house of their own. Their first house was in Old Burlington Street near Berkeley Square, where the Bennetts lived during the season. It cost twenty-five guineas a week, had three drawing rooms as well as a large dining room, and offered ample scope for entertaining.
If Mary Anne imagined that once she opened her doors fashionable London would flock to her parties, she soon found out her mistake. Wyndham proved to be a singularly undistinguished MP, who, in the decade and a half he spent in Parliament, got to his feet to speak only eight times. The Lewises were not in a position to offer anyone patronage and had no influence to trade, so they had little opportunity to build a social network. Their isolation was exacerbated by the fact that they personified the new money feared by high society. In the 1820s, faced with the prospect of invasion by a new class of industrialists, the old order responded by closing ranks. Exclusive clubs such as Almacks flourished, places to which one could gain entry only if one knew the right people. Codes of dress and manners became increasingly rigid and served as physical symbols of caste. The dandy, for example, as exemplified by the understated elegance of Beau Brummell, gained his cultural power because he set a standard impossible to meet without a valet, the right tailor and impeccable taste. Popular fiction of the period reflected this anxiety, and was peopled by encroaching manufacturers threatening the purity of the aristocratic pool. ‘There is nobody whose business it is to look after society, and who has a decided right to keep every one in his proper sphere’, mourns a dowager marchioness in Charlotte Bury’s The Separation, published in 1830. ‘Till there is, we shall never see the end of this confusion.’9
As a result, Mary Anne’s circle in the first part of the 1820s was predominantly restricted to members of her extended family. The husbandless Bennett girls were her most frequent companions: they whiled away mornings at her house, drove out with her in her carriage in the afternoon, and exchanged formal visits in the evening. William Lewis also took a house in London and was a frequent evening caller, as was Mary Anne’s uncle James Viney, who had retired from active army service and passed his days frittering money away on eccentric business ventures, practising his singing, and leering at the young women who kept his niece company. In addition to the Bennett sisters, these included Catherine and Mary Williams, Wyndham’s nieces from Wales, Mary Anne’s cousin Emma Scrope and, on the rare occasions that they were able to escape their families, Dolly Whitmore Jones and her sister Bessy, the friends of Mary Anne’s childhood.
Mary Anne described the pattern of her days in a letter to John written from Portman Square, where the Lewises moved after the lease on Old Burlington Street expired. ‘I am seldom out of bed until eleven, and often later – and then eating breakfast answering notes seeing the tradespeople with patterns & & and talking to Wyndham fully occupies my time with morning visitors until ½ past three O clock when the carriage comes, & one of the girls and myself drive about shopping morning visits to the park until near six, dine at seven, go to sleep afterwards for an hour and then sing play work or read & talk the rest of the Even’g, we have not been to many parties yet.’10 This somewhat sparse social schedule was enlivened by one new friendship. Rosina Wheeler was a temperamental Irish beauty in her early twenties whom Mary Anne met at John’s instigation. She was rumoured to have had a liaison with an English army officer whom she pursued from England to Ireland11 and she later taunted her husband by telling him how much she once loved Mary Anne’s brother,12 suggesting that John was the officer about whom the rumours circulated (a supposition supported by John’s Irish posting and his own numerous affairs). When Rosina was in London, Mary Anne saw her almost every day, and she looked on as Uncle Viney fixed his roving eye on her friend. ‘He is a great admirer of Rosina’s’, she reported, ‘& between you & me takes strange liberties with her … I had no idia he was so fond of kissing the girls.’
Mary Anne’s drawing room, populated by Rosina, James Viney and a giggling chorus of Bennett and Williams sisters, teetered on the edge of respectability. ‘We were obliged to give Rosina so many lectures to make her behave herself – she has such very high spirits … she cannot bear my Uncle now although at first she had certainly some thoughts of him – he told her one day before us all, he should like to suck her lips, the girls & I scream’d with laughter you never heard how he went on.’13 Ensconced in London but excluded from its upper echelons and still surrounded only by relations, Mary Anne sought new ways of feeling and experiencing the world. Pushing at the boundaries of socially acceptable conduct was one way to test the limits of one’s sphere; seeking fresh physical sensations was another. So she rode half-broken horses in Hyde Park, drank champagne and ‘beautiful ale’ and during summers in Wales, rolled underground through the Dowlais mine on tram wagons with Catherine and Mary Williams, ‘screaming and laughing all the way’.14
* * *
We know about such escapades because throughout the 1820s Mary Anne wrote long letters to her brother John, serving with his regiment overseas. Her loyalty to John ran deeper than that to her husband and she was prepared to go to any lengths to help him. Keeping him happy and helping him gain a promotion were the two ambitions that dominated her existence, and they tested her relationship with Wyndham. John could render her deliriously joyous and intolerably miserable: she called him the ‘delight and torment of my life’ and he had a greater impact on her equilibrium than anyone else in her circle.15 The delight was triggered by love, the torment by John’s constant demands for money. He was a spendthrift with no interest in saving or earning his own living, preferring instead to live off the generosity of his sister and her rich husband. Wyndham was not inclined to subsidise his indolent brother-in-law and was disturbed by Mary Anne’s devotion to her sibling. Mary Anne attributed this to jealousy – ‘he cannot bear me to love you as I do’ – and she may well have been right, but Wyndham was also angered by the way John battened on his sister, disrupting her peace for his own ends.16
John accumulated debts by overspending on luxuries for himself and was continually asking Mary Anne to settle his accounts with angry tradesmen. In addition his career prospects depended on his having the resources to purchase his promotions, first to captain and then to major. Buying commissions was an expensive business and officers not born into independent means frequently sought out investors who would lend them the purchase money in return for hefty interest. Whenever the opportunity for promotion arose for John (something that happened only occasionally, when a senior officer resigned), Eleanor and Thomas Yate, James Viney, and Mary Anne and Wyndham all became involved in a joint negotiation about how to raise the necessary funds. John’s career was thus a family endeavour, and one in which Wyndham participated reluctantly. He was too careful with money to make loans without security, and Mary Anne expended much energy coaching her brother about how best to convince her husband of his creditworthiness. Thomas Yate worked with her to wring money out of Wyndham for John and was a witness to the strain his demands placed on both Mary Anne and her husband. ‘I have seen much of Mr Lewis’, he wrote to John in 1827. ‘He feels vexed and displeased with you; writing letters to his wife that make her not only uneasy, but he says, at the time very unhappy; which he says no one has a right to do.’17
In 1826 the news that John was to be posted with his regiment to Mauritius tested Mary Anne’s loyalty to both him and her husband. The one person whom she would not permit John to disturb was their mother, and the rare occasions on which she reprimanded him arose when he caused Eleanor pain and anxiety. ‘Do not talk of expected battles to her, or say that you are to be sent abroad until the order is literally arrived’, she told him in 1825.18 The news that his preparations to leave for Mauritius were being hampered by debt provoked a rare spurt of anger, since it forced her to divert funds from Eleanor to him. ‘The inclosed 31£ which I send you was to have been for her … I rose the money by the sail of my white lace vail and two rings which I got sold for me in London – You have not only taken this sum from her but the money she sent you besides. Indeed John I do not know what sort of heart you can have to repeat such conduct so repeatedly.’19 Wyndham refused to advance money for his brother-in-law’s kit, despite Mary Anne sending John the wording for a request most likely to meet with approval. Mary Anne was distressed by Wyndham’s intransigence and scraped the necessary funds together by selling more trinkets and borrowing from James Viney. Simultaneously she organised a secret postal system centred on a series of poste restante addresses. Her efforts ensured that during John’s absence abroad she could continue to communicate with her only true confidant without Wyndham’s knowledge.
* * *
In 1820, the year in which Mary Anne moved to London, fifteen-year-old Disraeli responded to a letter from John Murray asking for his opinion on a new play. His view was uncompromising. ‘I cannot conceive these acts to be as effective on the stage as you seemed to expect.’20 The confidence of Disraeli’s reply illuminates some of the particularities of his character in the period immediately following his release from school. At fifteen, he was unshakeably convinced that he had a right to be heard, and his conviction prompted others to take him more seriously than they might otherwise have done. Why one of the most powerful figures in British publishing should have solicited the views of a fifteen-year-old is unclear, and it is possible that Murray was merely humouring the son of an old friend. But there was something about Disraeli that made people listen to him. He had an intensity of outlook and a clarity of thought that added weight to his sentiments and earned him an audience. That audience might disagree with him and might find him wrong-headed, but he could not be ignored.
In July 1820 he made his first foray into print, publishing a short story in Leigh Hunt’s Indicator. Set during the Civil War and somewhat self-consciously entitled ‘A True Story’, it related the unhappy tale of a beautiful young lady driven to insanity by discovering that the Cavalier soldier she loved was married. Two things stand out about ‘A True Story’ apart from Disraeli’s youth at the time of its publication. Its presence in The Indicator – a short-lived journal that encapsulated Leigh Hunt’s poetic and political philosophy and championed the work of Shelley, Keats and others in his circle – suggests a desire on the part of Disraeli to ally himself with the liberal, radical voices of second-generation Romanticism. And the opening of the story presented an image of the sensitive youth Disraeli perceived himself to be:
When I was a young boy, I had delicate health, and was somewhat of a pensive and contemplative turn of mind; it was my delight in the long summer evenings to slip away from my noisy and more robust companions, that I might walk in the shade of a venerable wood, my favourite haunt, and listen to the cawing of the old rooks, who seemed as fond of this retreat as I was.21
Disraeli subsequently wrote many more descriptions of his youthful self, but this one stands out because it dates from the period of his boyhood and gives us an insight into his adolescent conception of himself as a neophyte poet, more in sympathy with nature than with his contemporaries. His experiences at school, which he later used as material for his fiction, gave him reason to turn to solitude for relief. After his baptism opened up the possibility of an Anglican education, he was sent to Higham Hall, a private school in Epping Forest. Both his younger brothers subsequently went to Winchester, and Disraeli later resented the fact that he alone had been deprived of the public school education that would have smoothed his journey up the political ladder. The education he received at Higham Hall was patchy and he was bullied by anti-Semitic schoolfellows. Jane Ridley suggests that he may also have been bullied on account of his latent homosexuality; a suggestion supported by his depiction of passionate boyhood friendships in his early novels.22
Disraeli left Higham Hall at fifteen, possibly at the school’s instigation; probably because Isaac and Maria were unhappy at the education and the treatment he was receiving (that they sent their younger sons elsewhere gives weight to this theory). He was too young to join the scions of grand families at Oxford or Cambridge, so for a year he read in Isaac’s library before being articled to a firm of solicitors in 1821, the idea of university apparently abandoned for good. He spent his evenings in the theatre, tried his hand at writing plays, and in 1824 sent John Murray the manuscript of a novel entitled Alymer Papillon, which Murray declined to publish. Disraeli accepted his decision with the verbal equivalent of an insouciant head toss, telling Murray, ‘I think therefore that the sooner it be put behind the fire, the better, and as you have some small experience in burning MSS., you will be perhaps so kind as to consign it to the flames’: a strikingly impertinent reference to the burning of Byron’s memoirs overseen by Murray earlier in the year.23
It is another sign of Disraeli’s youthful confidence that he dared to write like this to Murray, and that in so doing he made an implicit comparison between his own work and Byron’s. Byron was Disraeli’s hero and the figure on whom he modelled his own persona. Byron was a genius, isolated from his countrymen by his refusal to conform to their petty morality. He was an exile, hounded out of England by a benighted establishment threatened by his brilliance. He was a style icon, his clothes and attitudes copied by legions of fans during his years of popularity. He was a sexual adventurer who followed his heart, forming relationships dictated by passion rather than convention, with young men as well as women. And he was a hero, who died fighting for Greek freedom.
Byron’s example thus gave Disraeli a context for his own future. It showed how it might be possible to fashion a public image from the raw materials of alienated brilliance, and it also demonstrated the power of the connection between politics and literature. Byron’s story provided some answers to the fundamental questions facing Disraeli at twenty. Who am I? What will I do? Who, or what, do I want to become? Disraeli was far from the only young man to face these questions or to embrace the cult of Byron, but he internalised his devotion to the poet so completely that it had a significant impact on his own life.
In 1824, the year of Byron’s death, this devotion gave an intellectual justification to Disraeli’s first foreign excursion. A month after receiving Murray’s rejection, he left England in the company of his friend William Meredith, who was informally engaged to Disraeli’s sister Sarah, and Isaac, who kept a benign eye on the two young men. Following the path mapped out by Byron in the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, they travelled through Belgium to the Rhine valley, visiting Brussels, Antwerp, Cologne, Mainz and Heidelberg. They toured the field of the Battle of Waterloo, saw cathedrals and grand city streets, ate new food and drank large quantities. Isaac, Disraeli told Sarah, ‘was most frisky on his landing and on the strength of mulled claret etc. was quite the lion of Ostend’.24 For his part Isaac, called ‘The Governor’ by both Disraeli and Meredith, permitted his charges to discover the twin delights of European travel and Rhine wine for themselves. ‘The governor allows us to debauch to the utmost and Hocheimer Johannisberg Rudelsheirnien Ashanhausen and a thousand other varieties are unsealed and floored with equal rapidity.’25 Touring with Isaac and Meredith instilled in Disraeli a love of European travel that lasted all his life, and it also established a model – again pioneered by Byron – in which foreign adventure functioned as a refuge for the young man of genius unable to harness his talent.
Disraeli’s Rhine adventure left him disinclined to pursue a legal calling. While working as a solicitor he met John Powles, who was connected with various Latin-American mining companies. In 1825 a mining bubble was developing in England, prompting a stock-market boom, and Disraeli, full of confidence and ignorance, believed that with Powles he could make his fortune. He borrowed considerable sums to buy shares, and convinced John Murray to follow his example. When the market began to slump, he attempted to prop it up by publishing pamphlets at his own expense on the security of mining investments.
Buoyed by apparent success and oblivious to the fact that he had bought into a mirage, Disraeli persuaded Murray and Powles that they should use their new-found – and imaginary – wealth to establish a new daily newspaper, to be called The Representative. He envisaged it as an antidote to The Times, and saw it as a way in which he could shape political opinion. (That Murray and Powles acquiesced demonstrates that older heads than Disraeli were fooled by the mining bubble, but also reveals something of Disraeli’s powers of persuasion.) The three agreed that Murray would put up half the money and Powles and Disraeli a quarter each, and that Disraeli would help Murray in the search for an editor. To this end he travelled to Edinburgh to persuade Walter Scott’s son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, to take on the role. Lockhart declined, angling instead for the editorship of another of Murray’s publications, the powerful Quarterly Review. A cabal of Quarterly grandees led by John Wilson Croker moved against both Lockhart and Disraeli, and at the point that Murray’s faith in the project was foundering, the mining bubble burst, leaving no funds for the paper. Murray proceeded with publication against his better judgement; The Representative limped on for six months with no official editor before folding, losing thousands of pounds and heaping ignominy on all those involved in its production.
The rest of the actors in the Representative episode were significantly older than Disraeli and had between them a wealth of experience. They nevertheless felt compelled to listen to his proposals and manoeuvre behind his back. The shadow of Scott’s fame did not deter him as he travelled north, and nor did the taste-shaping power of the Quarterly coterie. Murray was furious and temporarily broke with him, but Disraeli’s sense of his own worth was unshaken. He had already experimented with three occupations: lawyer, stock-market speculator, newspaper proprietor. At twenty-two all had failed him, so he decided instead to become a novelist.
His first novel, Vivian Grey, appeared in 1826 and lampooned Murray and many of London’s luminaries. Vivian Grey was a silver-fork novel, part of a new wave of fashionable fiction that developed in the 1820s and continued to be popular into the 1830s and 40s. Silver-fork novels were genre fiction, predominantly produced by the publishing house of Henry Colburn, a shrewd businessman with his finger firmly on the pulse of mass-market literary taste. Colburn understood that a growing middle-class readership wanted stories of aristocratic celebrity; that a young lady languishing away her days in search of a husband would part with her pin money more quickly to read generic romances featuring handsome dukes than for beautifully crafted novels such as Mansfield Park or Emma. Similarly that young lady, ensconced in the private, intimate space of her bedroom, would read novel after novel about the attempts of her social superiors to find husbands in Almacks and grand country houses, because such novels spoke to her fantasy of romantic fulfilment twinned with riches and social elevation. The young lady’s mother, meanwhile, would display a similar appetite for novels that claimed to reveal the habits of the rich: how they ate, dressed and talked. She would consume books about Byron with fascinated prurience and would therefore need little encouragement to read about fictional Byrons in order to experience again the delightful frisson generated by the ambiguous morality of aristocratic behaviour.
The vast majority of silver-fork novels were written by authors who stood outside the world about which they wrote. They purported to offer a window into the lives of a rich elite but their authors had their noses pressed against the glass alongside their readers. Silver-fork novelists stitched together their semblance of reality by listening to gossip, reading society newspapers and imagining themselves to be part of an aristocratic world from which they were excluded. This was how Disraeli, a twenty-two-year-old with little experience of the world and no acquaintance among the aristocracy, managed to produce a novel that anatomised them.
Vivian Grey tells the story of a young man emerging from school and navigating his way through a series of social and political intrigues. Like Disraeli’s, his background is modest and his schooling undistinguished. Like Disraeli he is determined to become a powerful figure. Disraeli later disowned Vivian Grey, describing it in the 1870s as ‘essentially a puerile work’,26 and before it was reissued in 1853 he cut its more intemperate passages. Many of these related to its fictionalisation of The Representative episode, refigured as a political rather than journalistic awakening. John Murray reappears in the novel as the Marquis of Carabas, a drunken shadow of a man fruitlessly scheming to harness Vivian’s charm and intellect to bolster his own influence. Vivian’s adventures on Carabas’s behalf take him into the homes of the rich and famous, and frame an anthropological study of this milieu as relentless as it is guileless.
The first volume of Vivian Grey was published by Henry Colburn on 22 April 1826. Its authorship remained a secret and some of the initial reviews were favourable. The Literary Gazette – owned by Colburn – thought its characters were drawn with ‘great spirit, vividness, and truth’, although it also commented on the limits of the novel’s ambition.27 But once the news leaked out that the author was not a young man of fashion but a callow nobody, such tempered praise vanished from the critical scene. The worst attack came in the Literary Magnet, in an article entitled ‘Nuisances of the Press’. The Magnet castigated Vivian Grey as ‘trash’ and Disraeli, in a phrase borrowed from the novel, as ‘a swindler – a scoundrel – a liar, – a base, deluding, flattering, fawning villain’. It labelled his attempts to be fashionable ‘abundantly ludicrous’ and allied hero and author in order to mock Disraeli’s dandified demeanour and to insinuate his effeminacy. ‘Vivian Grey is quite a love of a man; wears violet-covered slippers … Report says, that this would-be-exquisite, – this fashionable cutpurse, is intended by the author as a picture of himself. He may possibly have delineated his own character without knowing it.’28
Vivian Grey was Disraeli’s first attempt to weave fantasy around his identity, to use fiction to claim a significance denied him by birth, race and education. Novel-writing offered a way to escape reality just as novel-reading allowed young women to dream of improbable futures. Disraeli staked his reputation on a story, believing he could become someone other than himself and convince others of this transformation through the act of writing. The failure of Vivian Grey to achieve any of this therefore mattered deeply. It suggested that ambition was no match for circumstance, that you needed more than talent to break into the world of politics and letters. It was a bitter blow, compounded by the fact that the novel made the rift with Murray permanent. He was appalled by his portrayal and blamed Isaac for allowing Disraeli to publish. The decades-long friendship between the two older men came to an abrupt end and Murray never forgave Disraeli for what he perceived as a treacherous betrayal.
The storm triggered by Vivian Grey made Disraeli ill. He took to his bed and for the next two years, between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-six, existed in a state of nervous debility, with no direction and few occupations. He fell into lethargy and despondency with the same conviction with which he imposed his will on Murray and his vision of aristocratic London on London’s aristocrats, his experience of failure as absolute as his earlier certainty of triumph. As a young man Isaac had also suffered from periods of emotional exhaustion and was seriously concerned by the sight of his son brought low. In the summer of 1826 he contrived a plan with his friends Benjamin and Sara Austen to shake Disraeli out of himself. The Austens were going to Italy via Paris and Switzerland and it was agreed that Disraeli would accompany them. Driving in a closed carriage over the Jura ridge he saw the High Alps for the first time, with Mont Blanc silhouetted against a cloudless sky. In Geneva he made the acquaintance of Byron’s boatman, with whom he rowed every night on the lake, lapping up stories of his idol.
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Mary Anne was absorbed by Vivian Grey. She copied chunks of it into her commonplace book, excerpting more than from any other novel of the period. She was exactly the kind of reader to whom silver-fork novels appealed: bored, well-off, not of exclusive London society, but increasingly determined to break into it. To do so it was imperative that Wyndham remain in Parliament so that they had a defined place in the political world. Mary Anne threw herself into the election campaign of 1825–6, flattering and charming every potential ally who crossed her path. ‘The people had supposed I should give myself airs’, she told John from Swansea. ‘So fancy how charmed they are at my constant courtesy.’29
With Wyndham in Parliament, Mary Anne reasoned, it would be easier to persuade him to lend John money to purchase his promotion to major. ‘If Wyndham gains his Election all here will tell him it is thro me I shall then ask him as a friend to promise me to advance the money for your Majority.’30 So she donned outfits calculated to appeal to patriotic constituents, parading around Cardiff in a flannel gown, mob cap and a tall Welsh black hat. She hosted grand dinners and balls in the assembly rooms at Cardiff and Swansea, made public appearances and, despite her protestations of exhaustion, enjoyed the attention she received and the negotiations necessary to buy votes in an unreformed election. Ultimately corruption in the constituency proved her undoing. Midway through the campaign the Marquis of Bute decided he wanted his seat back, his brother having elected to stand for Parliament once more. Wyndham managed to get himself selected as the Tory candidate for the borough of Aldeburgh in Suffolk and was back in Parliament by the summer of 1827, but the whole affair gave Mary Anne a thorough disgust for Wales and the Welsh. Aldeburgh, moreover, was such a rotten seat that even Wyndham, the very model of an unreformed Tory, was taken aback at the amount of money necessary to secure his election. Meanwhile Greenmeadow was let to tenants and the Lewises redoubled their efforts to find a permanent London home.
With Wyndham absorbed in house-hunting, a return to Parliament and multiple business interests, Mary Anne looked elsewhere for entertainment. In May 1827 she told John that ‘Wyndham is quite a reform’d character & goes with me every where’, suggesting that for much of the previous year she was left to her own devices.31 She took a new protégée under her wing, an eight-year-old called Eliza Gregory who had a marvellous singing voice. Mary Anne petted Eliza and intended to have her trained as a singer but Wyndham intervened and sent the girl home, concerned that she was becoming spoiled and unfitted for life with her family. Deprived of this diversion, Mary Anne found new friends in the circle surrounding Henry Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, to whom she was introduced by her cousin Pierce Porter. Lord Worcester was chiefly known for his affair with the courtesan Harriette Wilson, who wrote about their relationship at length in her Memoirs, published in 1825. His set was composed of actresses, singers and men famous for familial scandals and serial womanising. Under his aegis Mary Anne met Augustus Berkeley and his brother, both of whom were implicated in one of the most dramatic inheritance frauds of the nineteenth century. Harriette Wilson, whose standards for male behaviour were not high, dismissed Augustus as a ‘ruffian’ and made public sport of his attempts to seduce her.32 Worcester arranged for Mary Anne to look round Crockfords, London’s notorious casino usually barred to women, and exchanged letters with her that portray a relationship premised on flirtatious exchanges. ‘The sweet Pea drops his Head in gratitude to the Verbena & will prostrate him self before that sweet scented & graceful plant in the course of the day’, ran one such note, its ornate code loitering between chivalry and dalliance.33 Worcester’s uncle, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, met Mary Anne in Brighton and took her and her maid for loose women, in an incident she reported to Worcester. ‘I was walking … rather late in the evening, with my maid when we passed him in the street & he began to sing & was going to notice me in some way not seeing my face. Like my worthless sex I enjoy’d a little mischief so did not disappoint him by allowing him to find out that I was the treasure he thought he had discovered.’34
Both in public and private Mary Anne courted scandal. At a party she was importuned by a drunken colonel who kissed her shoulder and then turned his drink over her: he was bundled out by his host but the fracas was reported in the Morning Chronicle.35 An anonymous correspondent, signing himself ‘Veritas’, wrote to inform her that a duel had been fought after two gentlemen disagreed about her reputation. Writing because of his conviction that ‘the reckless traducer of female faith and honour ought to be exposed’, Veritas reported that a Mr Robert Jackson, a barrister, had attacked Mary Anne in public, making such improper observations on her character as to provoke a Mr William O’Connell to challenge him to fight. ‘But for the interference of the police’, Veritas wrote, ‘the tongue of the calumniator would have been silenced for ever or he would have been taught a lesson that he should carry with him to his tomb.’36
To be the subject of duels might inject some variety into a mundane existence but it threatened Mary Anne’s pursuit of social acceptability. Duelling was an aristocratic activity and not something with which a woman in Mary Anne’s position could afford to be associated. By the 1820s a programme of aristocratic reform was under way, with campaigners such as William Wilberforce seeking to stamp out the four aristocratic vices of duelling, suicide, gambling and adultery, which were thought to be corrupting public morals. By 1832, the year of the Great Reform Act, the moral as well as political tone was increasingly set by the middle classes, and an upper-class disregard for bourgeois standards of polite behaviour had fallen out of fashion. Among the Worcester set Mary Anne’s position was doubly vulnerable because her presence there identified her with a mode of being that was no longer acceptable even for aristocrats, and that threatened to place the wife of an iron magnate beyond the social pale. In 1827, with Wyndham actively campaigning to return to Parliament, the Lewises finally made a decisive move to entrench themselves at the heart of Tory London. In February they bought a house: No. 1 Grosvenor Gate, Park Lane.
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Grosvenor Gate transformed Mary Anne’s existence. It provided her with a home entirely her own, a space she could create and control. Greenmeadow was Wyndham’s house, part of the Lewis inheritance, but Grosvenor Gate belonged to them both. Wyndham bought the house from the developer, so the Lewises were the first people to live there, and he handed Mary Anne control of its decor and furnishings as well as a generous budget.
Grosvenor Gate still stands, on the corner of Park Lane and Upper Grosvenor Street. Today it is separated from Hyde Park by lanes of traffic, but when Mary Anne lived there, its balconies and bay windows looked directly over the park below. The remains of her decorative scheme are just visible in the house today, although it is now occupied by the offices of a property management company. Ornate cornicing and plasterwork runs through the building and grand fireplaces survive in the principal rooms. Also still present is the central staircase, the elegant sweep of which gave Mary Anne much pleasure. It trains your eye up four flights to take in the height of the house and culminates in an elegant cupola, which floods the hall with light. But the grand public spaces of the building are all show. Its corner position results in a house smaller than its exterior suggests and with space for big rooms on only two of its four sides. There is something theatrical about the contrast between its grand staircase and light-flooded dual-aspect drawing rooms and the small, dark rooms tucked into corners around the back walls in which the Lewises slept, dressed and ate.
Grosvenor Gate was a house built for entertaining and display, designed to impress rather than to house a family. Mary Anne filled it with bright materials and vivid contrasts calculated to capture the attention of her contemporaries, themselves the owners of brocade-draped homes. Crimson carpet ran through the drawing rooms, vying with gold damask curtains. Cushions and chairs were upholstered in white and rose velvet, and dark mahogany furniture jostled with marble occasional tables, gilt-trimmed chaise longues, green Dresden vases and ebony writing desks. The male spaces of the dining room and library were a more sober brown but were still decked out in gold trim. The bedrooms and boudoirs were hung with chintz, and even the servants’ rooms were stuffed full of furniture, pieces bought and then discarded according to fashion and the dictates of Mary Anne’s changing taste.
Grosvenor Gate established Mary Anne in the heart of Mayfair and as the near neighbour of many prominent Tories. Some old connections followed her to the house, including Wyndham’s niece Catherine, who lived with the Lewises for much of 1827 and who became engaged under Mary Anne’s chaperonage. Another frequent visitor was Rosina Wheeler, who reappeared in Mary Anne’s life after her marriage to Edward Lytton Bulwer in 1826. Bulwer was a man-about-town who was beginning to make a name for himself as a writer. His mother fiercely objected to his marriage to Rosina and cut off his allowance, prompting him to turn to his pen in order to earn a living. His novels met with great success and he and Rosina established themselves in London society, where they lived beyond their means. Their marriage appeared happy but Mary Anne thought it ‘not a good match’.37 She and Rosina, now both ensconced in their own homes, exchanged visits almost every day. In contrast the Bennett sisters ceased to figure prominently in Mary Anne’s circle after 1827. Their search for husbands had become a bore and desperation made their conduct too unpredictable to render them suitable company for Mary Anne’s new acquaintances.
The most important friendship Mary Anne formed as a result of her move to Grosvenor Gate was with her neighbour Mary Dawson. Mary Dawson was the mother of five little boys, to whom Mary Anne became deeply attached. The Dawson children ran in and out of her house, stayed with her when their parents were away, begged for rides in her carriage, and looked on her as a second mother. Mary Dawson encouraged this, seeing in Mary Anne an unfulfilled maternal generosity that offered nothing but good to her own sons. Robert Dawson was nine when Mary Anne met the family. He was her particular favourite and remembered her with huge affection. Visiting her was a reward for lessons well done, and he continued to write to her and support her through his adulthood.
Mary Dawson was the sister of Robert Peel, the Tory Home Secretary. Peel was a new kind of politician: personally ambitious, politically astute and from a well-off, but provincial, manufacturing background. Two-party politics was still in its infancy in Britain in 1827 and the label ‘Tory’ only came into common usage towards the end of the decade.38 Peel was among the first generation of politicians to define themselves exclusively by party allegiance and was in the vanguard of Tory leaders who had to whip their MPs into voting along party lines. He was in and out of office in 1827 since he refused to serve under his arch-rival George Canning, or to stand by Canning’s support for Catholic Emancipation (the legal process, hotly debated in the second half of the 1820s, through which many restrictions on Catholics in Britain were removed). But even during his time on the back benches Peel was emerging as one of the most powerful politicians in the country. In 1829 he established the first modern police force, and when Canning died and (after a short-lived coalition) the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister, Peel consolidated his position as the Premier’s right-hand man. Together Wellington and Peel put together a distinctively Tory administration, which was required, in the final years of the decade, to deal with riots and frame-breaking in manufacturing districts, an economic downturn, a disunited Cabinet, trouble in Ireland, the Catholic question and intensifying demands from the middle classes for political emancipation and reform.
Peel connected his sister to all the most prominent figures in the political elite – both those from great houses and those whose power was more recently acquired. Mary Dawson in turn paved the way for Mary Anne and Wyndham to join this world. The result was that when Mary Anne announced her first large ball at Grosvenor Gate in July 1827, fashionable London answered her invitation. Wellington, who lived at nearby Apsley House, led the way, followed by the Duchess of Rutland and legions of hopeful debutantes. Mary Anne’s old friend Lord Worcester – still useful, if dangerous – dragooned all the eligible young men of his acquaintance into attending.
Even by the lavish standards of the period, Mary Anne’s party decorations were astonishing. Flowers wound through the staircase banisters, and the boudoirs were hung with white and pink muslin to give them a tented, Eastern appearance. Plants, muslin drapes, mirrors and lamps made the drawing rooms appear, according to Wellington, ‘like a fairy land’. In the supper room Mary Anne contrived a show-stopping table decoration: a windmill, complete with turning sails, perched above a stream in which swam gold and silver fish. ‘I was proud of this’, she told John, ‘because it was the only part of supper interfered with, having given the man cook the idia.’ None of this was necessarily in the best of taste, but since Mary Anne made sure her guests were entertained and well fed, questions of taste were of little moment. The Duchess of Rutland planned to stay only briefly but enjoyed herself so much she sent her carriage away and waltzed with the other guests until daybreak. And the Duke of Wellington told Mary Anne that her ball was the best of the season. ‘Are you not dazzled’, she asked John, ‘at your little Whizzy having receiv’d the noble Hero at her house.’39 A few weeks later she was mentioned in the Morning Post as one of the distinguished visitors at a ball held by Lady Reith, one of only a few House of Commons wives to be so named.
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In the summer of 1827 John wrote to Mary Anne from Mauritius to tell her that a major in his regiment intended to sell out and that his rank would therefore become available for purchase. The position cost £1,750. Wyndham refused to advance any portion of such a large sum without security. Mary Anne worked on him furiously, negotiating with her entire family in order to put the funds in place. In November 1827 she was able to write to John that she had succeeded, having secured a gift of £500 from her uncle James Viney and a loan from Wyndham for the remainder, guaranteed by written undertakings and mortgages from her uncle, her mother and Thomas Yate. John agreed to pay Wyndham regular interest and to save money from his salary to pay off the principal. Mary Anne wrote of the importance of meeting Wyndham’s stipulations and was overjoyed when, in December 1827, John was gazetted major as a result of her efforts.
Mary Anne received a letter from John in the spring of 1828, telling of his gratitude for her efforts. Then he stopped communicating. He left letter after letter unanswered, made no attempt to pay Wyndham interest on his loan, and in May 1829 the Lewises learnt that he had dishonoured drafts issued through the army agents Cox and Greenwood. Wyndham was furious and Mary Anne distraught. ‘I truly hope to keep the knowledge of these dishonoured bills from Mama as it would half kill her.’40 After a year of silence she wrote again, attempting to convey her anguish. ‘I cannot tell you how all this distresses me it appears so scampish & dishonourable for Gods sake my own dear Brother write & explain.’41 In March 1830 she made a further attempt, having heard news of John’s social activities in Mauritius from another source. ‘Is it possible John you do not love me this idia sometimes makes my heart ready to break.’42 When John did eventually write in the spring of 1830, he gave no explanation for either his silence or his debts.
John’s ingratitude was incomprehensible to all those who knew him, but for Mary Anne the pain it caused was double-edged, since it made a mockery of the sacrifice she had made for him. Unbeknownst to anyone but James Viney and John, she had perpetrated a fraud, raising £500 for the majority herself by borrowing money and subsequently selling jewellery, clothes and lace, before funnelling the money through James Viney to make it appear a gift from him.† The Yateses and Wyndham had no idea of this, and Mary Anne lived in fear of Wyndham’s anger should he discover the truth. ‘Wynd would never forgive me did he ever know it.’43 When John reneged on his promises, it implied she had risked the stability of her marriage for nothing. When he did write, it was only to tell her to stop nagging him about the debt.
Wyndham responded to John’s behaviour by threatening to report him to the colonel of his regiment, sending Mary Anne into a panic and triggering yet more deceit. Writing in secret, she drafted an apologetic letter from John to Wyndham, promising faithfully to pay his debts without delay. She then put the money in place at Cox and Greenwood herself, selling more of her possessions in order to do so. Her strategy worked and Wyndham forgave John, at least temporarily. In 1831 Mary Anne learnt that her brother had been spending his money on mistresses and possibly on an illegitimate child, which at least explained his behaviour even if it did not excuse it. And despite the lies she told Wyndham, and the debt she took on without his knowledge, John’s affairs brought the Lewises closer together. Bereft of the security of her brother’s love, Mary Anne took comfort from her husband. During John’s long silence she described Wyndham as ‘the dearest kindest of husbands’, determined to show her loyalty to her spouse even as she deceived him.44
From a historical distance, John’s hold over his sister appears mystifying, but he was the person she loved best in the world and her loyalty to him was unflinching. With no children of her own, an ageing parent who depended on her and a husband to whom she was only moderately attached, she was emotionally isolated, despite the burgeoning numbers of visitors in her drawing room. She filled her house with people and showered a succession of protégés with affection but had no one who could read her moods and for whom there was no need to perform a role. John failed to be that figure but she never gave up hope that he might one day become the idealised brother of her imagination.
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In the same letter in which she extolled Wyndham’s virtues, Mary Anne also wrote that ‘Nothing talk’d of here but the Catholic question’. In early 1829 Robert Peel reluctantly dropped his long-held opposition to Emancipation and allowed the measure to be put to the House of Commons. This was seen in some quarters as a blow to the Anglican establishment of Britain, and Mary Dawson, fearing that rioting mobs would target her house in revenge for her brother’s apostasy, sent her children to stay at Grosvenor Gate. Once the law was passed, public attention turned with renewed force to the question of more wide-ranging political reform and to the need to abolish rotten parliamentary boroughs like Aldeburgh, where corruption was endemic and votes were bought rather than won. Wyndham was out of Parliament in 1829, having resigned as the MP for Aldeburgh when the collapse of pig iron hit his income and made it impossible for him to purchase enough votes to win re-election, but despite this experience he was instinctively anti-Reform. Both he and Mary Anne were exhausted by the strain placed on them by John’s affairs, financial pressure and a combustible public mood. In August 1830 they left England for France on the first leg of a European tour planned to last between four and six months. Mary Anne saw Mont Blanc’s glacier at Chamonix, narrowly escaped being robbed by Italian bandits, went to the opera and picture galleries, and skirted revolutions in Florence and Paris.
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Disraeli also left England for Europe in 1830. He spent much of the period between 1828 and 1830 in a state of collapse, trapped in a depression triggered by the failure of Vivian Grey and the gulf he perceived to be opening between him and his more successful contemporaries. He retreated to Bradenham, a Queen Anne house near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire on which Isaac had taken a long lease. The move to Bradenham ended the D’Israelis’ long association with Bloomsbury and fostered instead a connection between the family and High Wycombe and its surrounding villages. Isaac and Maria took up permanent residence at Bradenham along with Sarah, and they offered the house as a refuge for their sons. Ralph and James immersed themselves in country pursuits and good living and Disraeli, surrounded by calm and quiet, began to write again, embarking on a second novel. The Young Duke was another silver-fork novel, a coming-of-age romance featuring young men and women of staggering fortune and elegance. It fulfilled the requirements of the evolving genre more successfully than had Vivian Grey and did so less acerbically. Scarred by his early experiences with the press and determined to make a success of his writing, Disraeli took the precaution of sending a draft of The Young Duke to a fellow author before circulating it for publication. Edward Lytton Bulwer and Disraeli began to correspond in the summer of 1829, exchanging books and polite compliments. Both were ambitious and literary and both had some experience of mixed critical reception, although Bulwer’s press had been more extensive and positive than Disraeli’s. Each modelled himself on Byron, affecting a pose of dandified disdain designed to make himself stand out from the crowd. Each found in the other an instinctively sympathetic figure.
Bulwer gave Disraeli the confidence to re-enter the literary world. He praised Vivian Grey, terming it a work of ‘wonderful promise’, but he also warned Disraeli against repeating the stylistic tricks that brought him critical opprobrium. ‘You have attained in the Book more than the excellencies of Vivian Grey – but I do not think you have vigilantly enough avoided the faults.’45 He also warned Disraeli that in getting details of clothing and fashion wrong he exposed himself to ridicule: valuable advice for a young man attempting to join a new tribe.
Disraeli finished The Young Duke and sold it to Colburn for £500, to be paid on publication. He then borrowed £500, adding to the mountain of debts that had accumulated in the aftermath of his mining speculations, and prepared to leave England. His chosen companion on this tour was William Meredith, Sarah D’Israeli’s fiancé. Once again Isaac and Maria hoped that foreign travel would clear his head, aid his health, and allow him to fulfil his promise on his return. Once again Disraeli saw the Continent as a place to which he could escape. This time he planned to travel further afield, to the East, where he would reinvent himself as a new Byron and from where he would return refashioned, ready for a new political age. In June 1830 George IV died, the last link to the heady days of the Regency in which dandies flourished, Mary Anne married and Disraeli grew to maturity. In the same month Disraeli sailed from Falmouth to Gibraltar, and a month later Eleanor Yate wrote to John that the new King, William IV, was preparing to dissolve Parliament. ‘What a bustle the different Elections will make throughout the Country.’46