Benjamin Disraeli’s career was an extraordinary one; but there is no need to make it seem more extraordinary than it really was. His point of departure, though low by the standards of nineteenth-century Prime Ministers, was neither as humble nor as alien as some people have believed. It is possible to overestimate the obstacles in his way and underestimate the assets he possessed.
He was born in London on December 21, 1804, at his father’s house, 6 King’s Road, Bedford Row (later renamed 22 Theobald’s Road), near Gray’s Inn. He was the second child and eldest son of Isaac D’Israeli, author of the Curiosities of Literature, a volatile, kindly, sceptical literary man of comfortable private means and of Italian Sephardi1 Jewish origin. Benjamin’s mother was Maria (Miriam) Basevi, whose family was of the same origin and equally prosperous. He had an elder sister, Sarah, born in 1802, whose fiancé died tragically in 1831. She never married and devoted herself to her parents and her eldest brother. She died in 1859. Of his three younger brothers Naphtali was born and died in 1807, Ralph (Raphael) was born in 1809, James (Jacobus) in 1813. The last two became conscientious and dull public servants. James, a Commissioner of Excise, died in 1868 leaving no heirs. Ralph, who became Deputy Clerk of Parliament, outlived all the family, dying in 1898. His son inherited Benjamin’s Buckinghamshire estate and country house, Hughenden, near High Wycombe. With his death in 1936 the male line of the family became extinct.
Throughout his life Benjamin Disraeli was addicted to romance and careless about facts. His account of his ancestry, though wrong in almost every detail, is interesting both for the light that it throws and the influence that it had upon his character and beliefs. It appeared in 1849 as a memoir prefacing the collected works of his father, to whom he was devoted. Disraeli maintained that his father’s family had been expelled from Spain in the great exodus of 1492 and had settled in Venice, where they ‘dropped their Gothic surname and, grateful to the God of Jacob who had sustained them through unprecedented trials and guarded them through unheard-of perils, they assumed the name of Disraeli, a name never borne before or since by any other family in order that their race might be for ever recognised’. In Venice they flourished ‘as merchants for more than two centuries under the protection of the lion of S Mark’. Then towards the middle of the eighteenth century his great-grandfather sent the younger of his two sons, Benjamin, to England, ‘where the dynasty seemed at length established through the recent failure of Prince Charles Edward and where public opinion appeared definitively adverse to the persecution of creed and conscience’.2 The other son, so Disraeli alleged, remained in Venice as a banker and became a friend of Sir Horace Mann, the British envoy in Florence.
The learned researches of Dr Cecil Roth and the late Mr Lucien Wolf have revealed this account as largely mythical3. There is no evidence at all that the family came from Spain. The name, which was Israeli until the elder Benjamin changed it to D’Israeli, is neither unique nor Spanish nor Italian: the D’, which sounds like a nobiliary particle, is probably the Aramaic di used by the Sephardi Jews in their Synagogal names in place of the Hebrew ben, and meaning ‘son of’. The name Israeli is Arabic and was used by the Moors in Spain and the Levant to distinguish Jews holding public office or otherwise coming into contact with the non-Jewish population. The Spanish or Italian version would be Israelita, and it is most unlikely that a Jewish refugee escaping from the Spanish Inquisition to Venice would have advertised his Hebrew origin by adopting an Arabic name. Nor is the name unique even in the form of Disraeli, which was apparently adopted by Benjamin, the younger, very early in life.4 A Huguenot family of that name flourished in London for much of the eighteenth century, and died out in 1814 in the person of one Benjamin Disraeli, a rich Dublin moneylender who had no connexion whatever with his famous namesake.
The story of a Venetian ancestry is equally untrue. No record of the name appears in any Venetian records before 1821. The elder Benjamin, Disraeli’s grandfather who migrated to England, did, indeed, have two sisters who settled in Venice in middle age and kept a girls’ school in the ghetto, but there is no other connexion with Venice, and the elder brother who was alleged to be a banker and a friend of Sir Horace Mann seems to have been conjured up by Disraeli’s imagination. At all events his name is unknown to the Venetian archives and appears nowhere in the gigantic correspondence of Sir Horace Mann.
Disraeli could easily have ascertained from a glance at his own family papers that his grandfather came from Cento near Ferrara, which belonged to the Papal States. It is impossible to trace the family back beyond his great-grandfather, Isaac Israeli, of whom very little is known. He or his forebears probably came to Italy from the Levant. Isaac Israeli’s son, Benjamin, was born in 1730 and emigrated to England in 1748. His motive is unlikely to have been anything so profound as confidence in the Hanoverian dynasty or admiration of the English way of life; it was probably, in Mr Wolf’s words, ‘a humdrum but entirely creditable desire to find the best market for his knowledge of the straw bonnet trade’. In 1756 he married Rebecca Furtado, who died eight years later. It was this connexion which gave rise to the belief that Disraeli had some relationship with the grand Spanish family of Lara. Rebecca’s brother-in-law was one Aaron Lara, a prosperous London broker, and Disraeli himself enumerates among the leading Sephardi families flourishing in England in his grandfather’s time the Laras, ‘who were our Kinsmen’. In fact, this family of Lara was Portuguese and quite unconnected with the Spanish family of the same name. It is wrong to suggest, as some have, that Lara was the ‘gothic name’ which the D’Israelis originally bore. In any case, Disraeli had no blood relationship with his grandfather’s first wife. There was one daughter of this marriage, who subsequently emigrated to Italy and whose descendants are still there.
The following year Benjamin the elder married again. His second wife, Sarah Shiprut de Gabay Villa Real, was the youngest daughter of Isaac Shiprut, a rich city merchant, whose mother hailed, not from the famous Portuguese family of Villa Real, as the younger Benjamin believed, but from a family of the same name in Leghorn.5 The marriage brought Benjamin D’Israeli the elder both money and credit, and did much to re-establish his somewhat shaky finances. He became a stockbroker and left £35,000 when he died in 1816 – a comfortable fortune, but scarcely one that could ever have put him, as his grandson maintained, into the category of a potential Rothschild.
There was in Disraeli’s day, and long after, a notion that the Sephardi Jews were more ‘aristocratic’, whatever that may mean, than the Ashkenazi who came from central and eastern Europe. Disraeli was undoubtedly a Sephardi. There was also a belief that of the Sephardi the most aristocratic branch was the descendants of the Spanish or Portuguese Jews, whether those who professed their faith openly and were expelled in 1492, or the so-called Marranos or secret Jews who lived as nominal Christians adopting ‘gothic’ surnames, but were eventually forced to leave by the racialist persecution of the Inquisition. Disraeli never made it quite clear which of these branches he thought he belonged to. The point is not important, since there is no proof at all that he belonged to either. What matters is that he believed that his origins were highly aristocratic and the belief had no small effect on his political outlook and his political career.
He appears to have taken very little interest in his mother and to have disliked the Basevi family. But it is curious to notice that, by one of those ironies which so often attend human vanities, he had a far more picturesque and romantic descent through her than through his father. Here, indeed, he really might have claimed a genuine ancestor in one of the Jews who left Spain in the great exodus of 1492, and what is more a far more distinguished ancestor than he ever dared to invent for the Disraelis. Her father, Naphtali Basevi, had married another of his race, Rebecca Rieti. Rebecca’s mother came from a family called Aboab Cardoso. The Cardosos had been settled in England since the end of the seventeenth century – which gives Disraeli four generations of English-born ancestors, not merely one, as his enemies maintained. The Cardosos claimed, probably with justice, a direct lineal descent from Isaac Aboab, the last Gaon of Castille, who in 1492 led a contingent of 20,000 compatriots into Portugal, where he had obtained permission for a temporary stay from King John II. Disraeli would have made much of this if he had known the facts.
The elder Benjamin was a genial, friendly, conformist who remained to the end of his days a devout member of the Sephardi congregation at Bevis Marks in London. His wife, Sarah, was, however, a rebel. She hated the faith to which her ancestry caused her to belong. She was, her grandson says, ‘a demon’, and ‘so mortified by her social position that she lived until eighty without indulging in a tender expression’. She was evidently not a very agreeable grandmother. Her religious doubts, however, had advantages for her only son. Her mother, Esther Shiprut, Disraeli’s great-grandmother, was so grieved at this infidelity that she cut her daughter out of her will and left her fortune direct to Isaac, who thus became a man of independent means at the age of twenty-five. Esther was luckily not to know that Isaac would later behave even more badly from her point of view than Sarah did, leave the family faith altogether and have his children brought up as Christians.
Isaac was born on May 11, 1766. He seems in his early years to have shown some signs of the rebelliousness that was to characterize his eldest son. He once ran away from home and was found in a suitably romantic posture lying on a tombstone in Hackney churchyard. His father did not understand this sort of thing. His solution to the problem was to give him a pony. Later, when there seemed the ominous possibility that parental influence would oblige him to go into trade, Isaac wrote a poem ‘against commerce which is the corruption of man’. Clever youths are often out of sympathy with their fathers. Some eighty years later Isaac’s famous son remarked to his private secretary, ‘that his father never understood him, neither in early life when he failed to see his utter unfitness to become a solicitor, nor in latter days when he had got into Parliament.’6 It is a matter in which experience seldom teaches a lesson.
Isaac, thanks no doubt to the prospect of his grandmother’s fortune, escaped ‘the corruption of man’ and was allowed to travel and write. Influenced by a free-thinking tutor in Amsterdam, he soon dropped his boyish romanticism and surveyed life through the eyes of Voltaire rather than those of Rousseau. He produced various verses and other trifles, but it was in 1791 that he first made his name with a genre of literature which he continued to exploit for the rest of his life. In that year he published The Curiosities of Literature, a fascinating anthology of anecdotes and character sketches about literary men, together with random observations on history and literature, written in a dryly elegant style. Although Isaac was modest enough to issue it anonymously, indeed to present the copyright to his publisher, John Murray, it was at once a great success. The author’s name soon became known and Isaac found that he had achieved fame. Fortune arrived simultaneously, for his grandmother died that same year.
Already Isaac’s mode of life had become established: a constant worker in the British Museum during the morning and in his own ever-expanding library during the afternoon, he would cover innumerable slips of paper with notes and extracts in his tiny crabbed handwriting. The first volume of the Curiosities went into twelve editions. It was followed by five more volumes, the last appearing in 1834. A Dissertation on Anecdotes, Calamities of Authors, Quarrels of Authors were variations on the same theme. As an anecdotalist and anthologist Isaac D’Israeli had scarcely a rival in his own day or since.
He did not confine himself to anthology and anecdote. He wrote a number of novels and stories, the last appearing in 1811 and entitled Despotism, or the Fall of the Jesuits. None was successful; and they are wholly forgotten today. He also tried his hand at history. Here he followed in the Tory footsteps of Hume, and his Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I (5 volumes, 1828–80) earned him in 1832 an honorary DCL from Oxford, still loyal to the glorious memory of Charles the Martyr. It was a serious work of historical research and the author made use of much then unpublished material, but, naturally enough, it has long been superseded by modern scholarship.
In 1795 Isaac became mysteriously but seriously ill, and for three years he lived in Devonshire recuperating. Benjamin was to have a similar breakdown even earlier in life. By the time Isaac was thirty-five most of his friends regarded him as a confirmed bachelor, but on February 10, 1802, he married Maria Basevi. The Basevis were a distinguished and talented Jewish family settled in Verona since the end of the sixteenth century. Maria’s father, Naphtali, had set up in London as a merchant in 1762. He became President of the Jewish Board of Deputies in 1801. His wife’s uncle, Solomon Rieti, was the creator of the celebrated pleasure gardens by the Thames at Ranelagh. His grandson, Nathaniel, was the first Jewish-born barrister to practise in the English courts. Another grandson, George Basevi, Benjamin Disraeli’s first cousin, was an able architect, pupil of Sir John Soane and responsible for designing the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. He met his death in 1845 by a tragic accident, falling from the scaffolding round Ely Cathedral, where he was inspecting the work on the bell tower. Maria herself does not seem to have possessed any special talent other than the far from contemptible one of making a happy home for her husband and children.
Benjamin Disraeli was thus born into a family neither obscure, undistinguished, nor poor. ‘It is really nonsense’, wrote the Duke of Argyll,7 ‘to talk of a man in such a position as a mere “Jew Boy” who by the force of nothing but extraordinary genius attained to the leadership of a great party. The only impediments in his way were not in any want of external advantages but his own often grotesque and unintelligible opinions.’ The Duke was no friend of Disraeli and he overstated the case, but there was more in it than is usually admitted. His father’s réclame in the literary world was considerable, and Isaac seems to have been personally liked by other writers. Scott, Byron, Southey and Samuel Rogers praised him. John Murray was his intimate friend. He had no financial worries and his family could rely on servants, good food, a comfortable house and a generous, though not lavish, upbringing. In character Isaac was not perhaps the ideal father; but who is? He was inclined to be over-indulgent to his children. He was nervous and retiring. He was at times fussy and too readily put off by trifles. During the crisis of 1832, when there seemed danger of a run on the banks, he wrote to his son to say that he was thinking of coming up to London to take out some gold – as long as it was not raining.8
Isaac never took any active part in politics, but his views were Tory all his life. The literary world was by no means remote from the political in the early nineteenth century. Of course, the company frequented by Isaac was separated by a wide gulf from the grandees who dominated the Cabinet or led the Opposition, but John Murray’s dinner parties included a fair number of those hard-working lesser figures, under-secretaries and the like, such as Croker,9 Barrow10 and Wilmot Horton,11 for whom political gossip was the principal theme of conversation. Benjamin Disraeli’s background was more helpful and relevant to his later career than is sometimes realized.
In one respect, however, Disraeli suffered from a potentially fatal handicap. He was a Jew. The handicap did not arise from social or religious persecution. England at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a tolerant place, and its Jewish inhabitants were numerically far below the figure at which, sociologists tell us, an alien minority risks becoming the object of hatred to their fellow citizens. The Jewish religion with its strange observances and eccentric taboos inspired curiosity rather than detestation. The handicap lay in the fact that the law prohibited non-Christians from entering Parliament. Until 1829 Jews, along with Roman Catholics and Dissenters, were excluded by the Test Acts, which preserved the higher positions in public life for members of the Church of England. In 1829 this monopoly was broken so far as the Christian sects were concerned, but the parliamentary oath continued to be taken ‘on the true faith of a Christian’, and Jews were still excluded – a barrier not removed until 1858.
No such ban applied to people who were merely Jewish by race, provided that they were ready to take the oath. As early as 1770 Sampson Gideon the younger, who later became a peer, was returned for Parliament. Sir Manasseh Lopes entered the House in 1802, Ralph Bernal in 1818, and, most famous of all, the great economist, David Ricardo, in 1819. All four were members of the Anglican Church, but their racial origin was well known, and it was evidently not an insuperable bar.
Fortunately for Disraeli the difficulty soon vanished. Isaac had never taken his faith at all seriously, although he paid his dues and conformed outwardly. But in 1813, greatly to his annoyance, he was elected Parnass or Warden of the Congregation of Bevis Marks – a position somewhat analogous to that of an elder in the Scottish Kirk. Under the rules of the synagogue, refusal of office entailed a fine of £40. Isaac declined either to accept or to pay. ‘I lament the occasion’, he wrote, ‘which drives me with so many others out of the pale of your jurisdiction…. Do not shut out the general improvement of the age; … a society has only to make itself respectable in these times to draw to itself the public esteem.’
In fact, however, he did not resign at once. Probably he was anxious not to hurt the feelings of his father. The authorities of the synagogue for their part do not seem to have pressed the matter of the fine. But four years later, in March 1817, as a result of a renewed financial wrangle, he finally left the Congregation. Benjamin the elder had died in the previous year, and there was no one else whose susceptibilities would be damaged, for Isaac’s mother detested Judaism. The Basevi family withdrew at the same time.
Isaac was content to remain outside any formal religious organization, but his close friend, Sharon Turner, a solicitor and antiquary, persuaded him with some difficulty that this would not do for the children. On July 11 the two younger boys were taken by Turner to be baptized at S Andrew’s, Holborn, by the Reverend W. H. Coleridge, a nephew of the poet. But oddly enough – and contrary to his own later recollection – Benjamin was not baptized till July 31 (by the Reverend J. Thimbleby), and his sister a month after that, on August 28. Dr Cecil Roth suggests that Benjamin and Sarah, being old enough to have some ideas of their own, may have dug their toes in and refused to accompany their father’s friend on the earlier occasion12. This is possible, although Benjamin seems to have had no memory of such reluctance: in his own account he says, wrongly, that all four children were baptized on the same day.
Benjamin had taken, or been pushed into taking, far the most important decision of his boyhood. From now onwards he was a practising member of the Church of England as by law established. Had he remained a Jew, his later political career would have been impossible. He would never have become leader of the Conservative party if he had been obliged to wait till his middle fifties before entering Parliament.
There is something of a mystery about the exact chronology of his education. At a very early age he went to a dame’s school at Islington kept by a Miss Roper. He himself declared that he was sent there to learn to speak, but this is scarcely credible. After that, though it is not quite clear when, he moved to a boarding-school at Blackheath whose headmaster was a Nonconformist minister by the name of Potticany. He remained there until he was nearly thirteen, but he never mentions it at all in any of his reminiscences. At this school, according to the recollection of some of his schoolfellows, he was allowed to stand at the back of the hall during prayers, and he was apparently given some kind of instruction in Hebrew once a week by a visiting teacher.
In the autumn term of 1817, after he had become a Christian, he was sent to another school; no doubt there was some connexion between the two events. To have returned to Blackheath after the change of religion might have been embarrasing. The new school was Higham Hall in Epping Forest. Its headmaster was a Unitarian minister, the Reverend Eli Cogan, and it catered for about fifty or sixty boys from what was then termed ‘the middling class’, sons of prosperous but unaristocratic fathers – for example, the four sons of Baron Gurney, the judge, went there. The choice of school is not in itself surprising, but it becomes so when we remember that Isaac soon afterwards sent both his younger sons to Winchester. Why he had his eldest and cleverest boy educated at a rather dim little place like Higham Hall and his two younger and duller sons at one of England’s greatest public schools is far from clear. The reason cannot have been financial. Isaac’s father had died the previous year, leaving a substantial sum, and Isaac signalized his increased prosperity by moving in 1817 to a larger house in Bloomsbury Square. ‘Both my brothers,’ wrote Disraeli many years later in an autobiographical fragment which is in some respects far from reliable, ‘were at Winchester for wh: I was intended. This is the reason for my being often described as an alumnus of that public school’.13 But he does not say why the intention was frustrated. Perhaps he gives us a hint in Vivian Grey. ‘Mr Grey was for Eton but his lady was one of those women whom nothing in the world can persuade that a public school is anything but a place where boys are roasted alive; and so with tears taunts, and supplications, the point of private education was conceded.’ Did Maria Disraeli for once intervene? The first and only Wykehamist Prime Minister was Addington. It is odd to think how near Disraeli came to being the second.
He only stayed at Higham Hall for two or three years – once again the chronology is obscure – but it evidently made a deep impression on him. In his words to Lord Rowton, ‘the whole drama of public school life was acted in a smaller theatre’.14 It is hard to believe that the vivid descriptions of schoolboy life given in Vivian Grey‚ Contarini Fleming and Coningsby do not have some basis in personal experience. Nearly everything else in Disraeli’s novels has, and Contarini Fleming is described by the author as a ‘Psychological Auto-Biography’. Although this does not mean that the story must be taken as literally true, nevertheless it is worth considering. Contarini Fleming is the son by his Venetian first wife of Baron Fleming, a diplomat in some unspecified northern court, too deeply immersed in business to bother about his family. The Baron has married again. His second wife is conventional, cold, scrupulously fair, but utterly insensitive to the feelings of Contarini, who is a moody, emotional, poetical genius. There are two sons by the second marriage. ‘They were called my brothers but Nature gave the lie to the repeated assertion. Their blue eyes, their flaxen hair, and their white visages claimed no kindred with my Venetian countenance.’ Glad to escape an uncomprehending stepmother and dullard brothers whom he dislikes, Contarini goes to school, but in retrospect he hates it.
Our school boy days are looked back to by all with fondness. Oppressed with the cares of life we contrast our worn and harrassed existence with that sweet prime, free from anxiety and fragrant with innocence. I cannot share these feelings. I was a most miserable child; and school I detested more than ever I abhorred the world in the darkest moments of my experienced manhood.
Nevertheless at first things go well. Conscious hitherto of not only being different in appearance but inferior to his fair-haired northern companions, he finds to his surprise that he has a talent for wit and persiflage which astounds them all. ‘It seemed that I was the soul of the school. Wherever I went my name sounded, whatever was done my opinion was quoted.’ The hero in Vivian Grey has the same experience.
Then Contarini falls in love. In those pre-Freudian days it was possible to write about schoolboy romances in a way which could scarcely be imitated today. The object of his passion is a boy called Musaeus.
It seemed to me that I never beheld so lovely and so pensive a countenance. His face was quite oval, his eyes deep blue: his rich brown curls clustered in hyacinthine grace upon the delicate rose of his downy cheek and shaded the light blue veins of his white forehead.
I beheld him: I loved him. My friendship was a passion. Of all our society he alone crowded not round me. He was of a cold temperament, shy and timid. He looked upon me as a being whom he could not comprehend, and rather feared….
Musaeus was lowly born, and I was noble; he poor and I wealthy; I had a dazzling reputation, he but a poor report. To find himself an object of interest, of quiet and tender regard, to one to whose notice all aspired, and who seemed to exist only in a blaze of cold-hearted raillery and reckless repartee, developed even his dormant vanity. He looked upon me with much interest, and this feeling soon matured into fondness.
Oh! days of rare and pure felicity, when Musaeus and myself with our arms around each other’s neck wandered together amid the meads and shady woods that formed our limits! I lavished upon him all the fanciful love that I had long stored up; and the mighty passions that lay yet dormant in my obscure soul now first began to stir in their glimmering abyss.
There follow lovers’ quarrels, passionate scenes and frenzied letters, but term, alas, draws to an end. One last walk on the evening before, and even Musaeus sheds a tear. ‘The bell sounded. I embraced him as if it sounded for my execution, and we parted.’ But the holidays induce a different mood. Musaeus comes to stay. Contarini now finds him a bore, and on returning next term, plunged in despondency and gloom, only ‘supported by my ambition which now each day became more quickening’, severs all relations with him. The rest of the school, astonished at this change, take up the cause of Musaeus, and rather surprisingly march en masse, all two hundred of them, to remonstrate with Contarini, who is brooding in solitude on a gate in a remote part of the grounds. The leader of this curious deputation gets a short answer from Contarini. They fight, Contarini, of course, winning; and he hurls his enemy’s ‘half-inanimate body’ on to a dunghill. A similar fight, though for different reasons, occurs in Vivian Grey. Soon afterwards, tormented, unhappy, at odds with himself for reasons that he cannot analyse, Contarini runs away from school. The remainder of the novel does not for the moment concern us.
What light does all this throw on Disraeli’s adolescent life? No one can be sure, but from other straws in the wind it is reasonable to guess that some of it corresponds to reality. It is clear that he did not get on well with his mother. To transpose her for fictional purpose into that recognized object of dislike, a stepmother, would be a natural precaution. Precisely what went wrong with their relationship no one can now tell. But something went wrong. There is no record of his ever talking about her after her death, and no reference to her in the numerous autobiographical fragments which survive among his papers. Indeed, one might almost think that he wished to obliterate her memory. In the somewhat imaginative memoir recounting his family history, from which quotation has been made earlier, her name is never even mentioned. This strange omission did not go unnoticed. Sarah D’Israeli protested. ‘I do wish,’ she wrote, ‘that one felicitous stroke, one tender word had brought our dear Mother into the picture.’ Disraeli’s answer, if any, has not survived. Perhaps Maria D’Israeli gave her two younger sons, with whom Benjamin had little in common, more affection than he felt they deserved. Perhaps like Contarini’s stepmother she did not recognize his brilliance. ‘Tho’ a clever boy … no prodigy’, was her verdict in writing to John Murray after the quarrel occasioned by the publication of Vivian Grey.15 She came round in the end. In March 1847 Disraeli, now well on the way to the leadership of the Tory party, made a brilliant speech. ‘Mama at last confesses,’ wrote Sarah to Disraeli’s wife, ‘that she never before thought Dis was equal to Mr. Pitt. So you see it pleases all variety of hearers or readers.’ But it was too late. She died a month later, and if silence may thus be interpreted her son was not reconciled. One faintly pathetic piece of evidence survives to suggest that Disraeli never quite brought himself to accept this lack of the love and affection which he thought his due. It is a sonnet, a very bad one, headed ‘To My Mother nursing me on her birthday 1838’.16 Whether or not she saw it there is no means of knowing. Twenty-two years later he sent it on December 8, 1860, in a letter marked ‘immediate’ to his brother, Ralph. There is nothing to explain why. This is the only known evidence that Disraeli ever even thought about her after she died.
Yet the more his character, particularly in his relation with women, is examined, the more clear it becomes that he felt this deprivation deeply. All his life he seems to be searching for a substitute for the mother who was somehow missing. His wife, his mistresses, his friends were almost always older women who could, or he hoped that they could, supply that need.17 It is impossible to doubt that some very real experience lay behind these early passages in Contarini Fleming, and that Disraeli with his intense vanity, his supreme egoism, craved from his mother a degree of admiration and adulation which was never forthcoming.
Nor can there be much doubt that Contarini’s schooldays are in some measure based on the author’s experience. The theme of schoolboy friendship is one to which Disraeli returns on other occasions. It is difficult to believe that he had not felt such sentiments himself. There is a famous passage in Coningsby:
At school friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves of after-life can never bring its rapture, or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing and so keen! What tenderness and what devotion; what illimitable confidence; infinite revelations of in-most thoughts; what ecstatic present and romantic future; what bitter estrangements, what melting reconciliations; what scenes of wild recrimination, agitating explanations, passionate correspondence; what insane sensitiveness and what frantic sensibility, what earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of the soul are confined in that simple phrase, a schoolboy’s friendship. ’Tis some indefinite recollection of these mystic passages of their young emotion that makes grey-haired men mourn over the memory of their schoolboy days. It is a spell that can soften the acerbity of political warfare, and with its witchery can call forth a sigh even amid the callous bustle of fashionable saloons.
One is reminded of Byron’s famous meeting near Bologna with his Harrow friend, Lord Clare.18 That Disraeli wrote from his heart on this occasion is evident. It is probable that at Higham Hall he first felt the pangs of love, and felt them intensely; and that either there or at Blackheath he first became conscious of being different – ‘the Venetian countenance’. It is more than likely that he suffered some sort of rebuff on this account, possibly connected with one of these schoolboy romances. The great fight which figures in both Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming, or some similar episode, may have really occurred. Disraeli’s black curls, hooked nose, dark eyes and pale complexion must have contrasted oddly with the pink cheeks and fair hair of his companions. It is unlikely that the contrast went unobserved either by him or by them. The young Disraeli when we begin to know anything definite about him, from the age of twenty onwards, is a youth of immense ambition, consumed with an almost insolent determination to make his mark. The conquest of a hostile or indifferent world – military metaphors recur constantly when he writes about politics and society – is the theme of his life, and it remained so till in his old age he had finally triumphed. It is hard to say what gave the impetus to this ambition, if indeed any single experience did so. But it is certain that throughout his adult life he was conscious of dwelling apart from other men and it is probable that this awareness first came upon him when he was a schoolboy. Perhaps we need not look beyond it for the clue to his extraordinary determination to climb to the top. If he could not ‘belong’, he could at least rule. To the end of his days he remained an alien figure, never truly merged in the social and political order which after a lifetime of vicissitudes he had so strangely come to dominate at last.
Disraeli left Mr Cogan’s establishment some time in 1819 or early 1820. For the next year or so he worked at home. He had the run of his father’s vast and learned library, and it was during this time of his life that he began to acquire the wide if somewhat shallow knowledge of history and literature that was to characterize his thought and writing all his days. At the same time he endeavoured to turn himself into a classical scholar, but it is doubtful whether he ever really attained the knowledge of classical authors which he was inclined to claim in later life. During 1820 he kept a diary of his studies. His numerous errors of grammar, syntax, and accidence suggest that in Greek he never advanced very far. On the other hand he had a tolerable knowledge of the Latin language and literature. Disraeli probably was quite genuine in his love of the classics, but, like Stanley Baldwin, he rested that love upon somewhat shaky foundations. However, he knew enough to bandy Latin quotations in the House of Commons, and, luckily, it was not the form to do so in Greek.
In November 1821, shortly before he was seventeen, he became articled to a firm of solicitors, Messrs Swain, Stevens, Maples, Pearce and Hunt of Frederick’s Place, Old Jewry. The premium paid by his father was 400 guineas. According to Disraeli’s autobiographical note already mentioned, the firm was the principal rival of the famous City firm of Freshfields, and its ‘partners divided though in unequal portions fifteen thousand per annum’.
Maples, who was his father’s friend among the partners, had a daughter, and it was hinted that a match might well be acceptable to both families. The daughter was, so Disraeli says, ‘by no means without charm, either personally or intellectually’. There is no very reliable first-hand evidence of how Disraeli conducted himself as an articled clerk. Maples’s son, writing to Lord Rowton in 1889, said:
I have heard my father say that Mr. Benjamin D’Israeli was very diligent very obliging and useful in the business and that he then already displayed more than ordinary talents. He served nearly four years’ articles in 6, Frederick’s Place but at the end of that period my father represented to Mr. Isaac D’Israeli that his son’s talents were too great for a Solicitor’s Office and advised Mr. Isaac D’Israeli that his son should follow some profession where he would have greater opportunities of distinguishing himself and suggested that he should go to the Bar.19
Recollections of this sort are liable to be coloured by later events. It is hard to imagine Disraeli being particularly efficient in the humdrum work which must have come his way. A contemporary letter from his father rings more truly:
15th October 1824 Old Ship Hotel, Brighton.
My dear Ben,
Your sister received your letter this morning which no doubt proved highly amusing – but I wished besides amusement you had combined for my use a little business-like information …20
And, as we saw earlier, Disraeli recognized in retrospect ‘his utter unfitness to become a solicitor’, although he did not regret the experience. Indeed, he writes of his time as an articled clerk:
It would be a mistake to suppose that the two years and more that I was in the office of our friend were wasted. I have often thought, though I have often regretted the University, that it was very much the reverse. My business was to be private secretary of the busiest partner of our friend. He dictated to me every day his correspondence which was as extensive as a Minister’s, and when the clients arrived I did not leave the room but remained not only to learn my business but to become acquainted with my future clients…. It gave me great facility with my pen and no inconsiderable knowledge of human nature.
Unfortunately, if indeed I ought to use the word, the rest of my life was not in harmony with this practice and business…. I became pensive and restless and before I was twenty I was obliged to terminate the dream of my father and his friend. Nothing would satisfy me but travel. My father then made a feeble effort for Oxford, but the hour of adventure had arrived. I was unmanageable.21
As for the young lady, she and Disraeli remained good friends, but nothing came of the family’s hopes of a match. ‘She said to me one day and before I had shown any indication of my waywardness, “You have too much genius for Frederick’s Place: it will never do.”’
We must envisage the young Disraeli during these years from seventeen to twenty as a precocious, moody, sensitive and somewhat affected youth, conscious of great powers, but uncertain how or where to use them, vaguely dissatisfied with his mode of life, much given to solitary reading and imaginative flights of fancy. Whether, at this early stage, like Vivian Grey, he had ‘a devil of a tongue’, and ‘a certain espirit de société, an indefinable tact’‚ there is now no means of ascertaining. It is, however, certain that the picture given in that novel of the society which Vivian frequented, thanks to his father, Horace, who had always found himself ‘an honoured guest among the powerful and the great’, does not correspond to reality. Isaac did not move in society at all. His friends were minor politicians, scholars, authors, publishers and fellow frequenters of the British Museum. It was a porty, snuffy, rather donnish world, whose leviathan was John Murray, the friend and literary executor of Byron and the second of that great dynasty of publishers. He seems to have taken to the young Disraeli, whose precocious talent he was one of the first to recognize. While still scarcely more than a boy Disraeli was allowed to be a guest along with his father at some of John Murray’s celebrated dinner parties.22 When he was only seventeen the publisher consulted him on the merits of a play. Disraeli’s answer is one of his earliest surviving letters.
August 1822
Dear Sir,
I ran my eye over three acts of ‘Wallace’23 and as far as I could form an opinion I cannot conceive these acts to be as effective on the stage as you seemed to expect. However it is impossible to say what a very clever actor like Macready may make of some of the passages. Notwithstanding the many erasures the diction is still diffuse and sometimes languishing though not inelegant. I cannot imagine it a powerful work as far as I have read. But indeed running over a part of a thing with people talking around is too unfair…. Your note arrives. If on so slight a knowledge of the play I could venture to erase either of the words you set before me I fear it would be Yes, but I feel cruel and wicked in saying so….
Yours truly
B.D.24
In 1824, possibly encouraged by Murray, Disraeli wrote his first novel. It was a political satire entitled Aylmer Papillion. He sent it to Murray except for two chapters which he had mislaid. Murray evidently thought little of it, but perhaps did not quite like to say so. Sensing this reluctance, Disraeli wrote urging him not to bother about it, ‘and as you have had some small experience in burning manuscripts perhaps you will be so kind as to consign it to the flames’.25 Murray seems to have followed this advice. All that survives of Aylmer Papillion are the chapters which Disraeli had mislaid. They are crude and jejune. There is no need to regret the destruction of the others.
Two glimpses of the young Disraeli at this period of his life or a little earlier have come down to us. Mrs Maples recalled that even then his dress excited notice. He often dined with her and used to dress ‘in a black velvet suit with ruffles and black silk stockings with red clocks, which was very conspicuous attire on those days’.26 And William Archer Shee, son of the President of the Royal Academy, remembered juvenile parties given by Mrs Disraeli in Bloomsbury Square. He was only ten or eleven. Disraeli was some seven years older, and, not unnaturally, found them tedious.
He took little notice of the small fry around him but walked about and dawdled through the quadrilles in tight pantaloons, with his hands in his pockets, looking very pale, bored, and dissatisfied, and evidently wishing us all in bed. He looked like Gulliver among the Liliputians, suffering from chronic dyspepsia.27
Disraeli’s health seems to have caused some anxiety at this time, and in 1824 Isaac, partly because he was worried on this score, decided to vary his usual summer holiday at an English watering-place and to take Benjamin at the end of July for a six-week tour of Belgium and the Rhine valley.
The rest of the family were left behind, but father and son were accompanied by one of Benjamin’s closest friends, William George Meredith, a young man who had just come down from Brasenose. While he was still at Oxford an unofficial engagement had been contracted between him and Sarah Disraeli. Both families approved. There was indeed no reason why the engagement should not have been published and the young couple duly married, for Meredith’s parents were rich and he had no need to earn his living. But he had an even richer uncle who had given it to be understood that William would be his heir and who appears to have had some sort of objection to the match. Accordingly, and as events turned out, tragically, it was agreed to postpone matters for the time being. Meanwhile the intimacy of the two families was very close. The Merediths had a London house at Nottingham Place in addition to a country seat in Worcestershire. William, and his sister Georgiana, were constantly visiting the Disraelis. The young men wrote plays and sketches,28 the girls illustrated them, and the two families acted them. Meredith was a more prosaic character than his erratic friend, but he was by no means untalented. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society at twenty-seven and in 1829 published a reputable book on recent Swedish history.
The tour was a great success. It was Disraeli’s first visit outside England, and his letters to his sister describing what they saw, did and ate – especially the last – have survived and make excellent reading.29 Even at that early age Disraeli was very much of a gourmet. ‘Our living for the last week’, he writes from Antwerp, ‘has been of the most luxurious possible, and my mother must really reform her table before our return.’ A diary which he kept for the tour carries us without a break from a description of Rubens’s pictures in Antwerp to one of the vol-au-vent of pigeons at their hotel. The features of Brussels which struck him were the magnificence of the cathedral, the sweetness of the oysters, and the excellence of the pâté de grenouilles, which was, he said, ‘sublime’. In Mainz he dwells on the pleasures of wine. ‘The governor allows us to debauch to the utmost and Hochheimer, Johannisberg Rudesheimer, Assmanshausen, and a thousand other varieties are unsealed and floored with equal rapidity.’ The letters show a sharpness of observation and a satirical eye which anticipate the author of Vivian Grey. They also show much of the brashness, conceit and affectation which critics were to discern in the same work.
Disraeli maintained in retrospect that it was during his tour of the Rhine that he decided to give up the law as a career. ‘I determined when descending those magical waters that I would not be a lawyer.’ As with many of Disraeli’s recollections, this is slightly misleading. He did indeed abandon the plan to become a solicitor. He did not return to Frederick Place and he gave up his articles in 1825. But whether as a compromise with his father’s ‘feeble effort for Oxford’, or for other reasons, he made the gesture of reading for the Bar and was admitted on November 18, 1824, as a student of Lincoln’s Inn.30 But it is probably true that in his own mind he had abandoned either branch of the law by the autumn of 1824, and that he was already brooding on a brisker means of securing fame and fortune.
1 The Jews are divided into two principal groups: the Sephardi whose liturgy is said to descend from that of the Jews settled by Nebuchadnezzar in Babylonia, and the Ashkenazi whose liturgy is supposed to descend from that of the revived community established in Palestine by Ezra and Nehemiah. Spanish, Portuguese and Italian names predominate among the former. German, Polish and Russian among the latter.
2 Isaac D’Israeli, The Curiosities of Literature (new edition, 1881), Memoir viii–ix.
3 Cecil Roth, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (New York, 1952), ch. i. Lucien Wolf, The Times, December 21, 22, 1904, on Disraeli’s centenary.
4 He told Lord Rowton in 1873 that his father had changed it for him before he went to school: Hughenden Papers, Box 26, B/X/B/26.
5 Roth, Beaeonsfield, 8.
6 Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/B/13, Memorandum by Montagu Corry, December 14, 1878.
7 George Douglas, Duke of Argyll, Autobiography and Memoirs (2 vols, 1906) i, 280.
8 Hughenden Papers, Box 7, A/I/B/427, May 14, 1832.
9 John Wilson Croker, 1780–1857. Politician and writer.
10 Sir John Barrow, 1764–1848. Politician and geographer.
11 Sir Robert John Wilmot Horton, 3rd Bt. 1784–1841. Politician.
12 Beaconsfield, 12–13.
13 Hughenden Papers, Box 16, A/X/B/l, March 27, 1860.
14 Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/B/31.
15 See below, p. 1.
16 Hughenden Papers, Box 9, A/I/E/5.
17 See below, p. 1.
18 The sceptic, aware of Disraeli’s penchant for plagiarism, might be tempted to wonder whether this is another instance. But, in fact, the passage in question, from Byron’s ‘Detached Thoughts’, was first published in 1900 in R. E. Prothero’s six-volume Letters and Journals of Lord Byron.
19 Hughenden Papers, Box 10, A/II/B/1, February 1889.
20 ibid., Box 8, A/I/C/11.
21 W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (6 vols, 1910–20), i, 32–33. Hereafter referred to as M. & B.
22 They evidently impressed him. See M. & B., i, 37–39, where his notes on a party in November 1822 are reproduced. Tom Moore was present and discoursed on Byron. Disraeli later used the whole passage almost verbatim in Vivian Grey.
23 By C. E. Walker, first published in London in 1820. It is not clear whether Murray contemplated republishing or producing it.
24 Murray Papers. This seems to be the first example of his change in spelling his name.
25 ibid. An allusion to the famous destruction of Byron’s Memoirs only a month earlier.
26 M. & B., i, 39. Quoting a letter from Mrs Maples’s son, Frederick, to Lord Rowton, February 1889.
27 Quoted in Wilfrid Meynell, The Man Disraeli (revised edition, 1927), 21.
28 One of these called Rumpel Stiltskin ‘A Dramatic Spectacle’ survives, and has been published by Michael Sadleir for the Roxburghe Club. It is dated ‘Oxoniae 1823’. Disraeli is said to have written the songs, Meredith the rest. It must be Disraeli’s earliest surviving literary work.
29 Copious extracts appear in M. & B., i, 42–53.
30 M. & B., i, 115, wrongly puts the date as April 1827. Gladstone became a student of the same Inn later, but neither of the two great rivals was called to the Bar.