1

The two years which followed Disraeli’s return from his tour of the Rhine saw the first great crisis of his life. The ‘hour of adventure’ had indeed arrived and he plunged with a recklessness which, when every allowance is made for his temperament and youth, remains astounding. His fortunes fluctuated with wild rapidity. But in the end his luck failed, and at an age when most of his contemporaries would hardly have left the university he found himself burdened with a load of debt and a dubious reputation, which were to affect his career for many years to come.

His frame of mind in the autumn of 1824 may perhaps be reconstructed from Vivian Grey.1

And now … this stripling who was going to begin his education had all the experience of a matured mind – of an experienced man; was already a cunning reader of human hearts; and felt conscious from experience that his was a tongue which was born to guide human beings. The idea of Oxford to such an individual was an insult … THE BAR – pooh! law and bad jokes till we are forty; and then with the most brilliant success the prospect of gout and a coronet … THE SERVICES in war time are fit only for desperadoes (and that truly am I); but, in peace, are fit only for fools. THE CHURCH is more rational … I should certainly like to act Wolsey; but the thousand and one chances against me! And truly I feel my destiny should not be on a chance. Were I the son of a Millionaire or a noble I might have all …

Such was the general tenor of Vivian’s thoughts, until nursing himself almost into madness, he at last made, as he conceived, the GRAND DISCOVERY. ‘Riches are power’, says the Economist:— and is not Intellect? asks the philosopher. And yet while the influence of the Millionaire is instantly felt in all classes of society, how is it that ‘Noble Mind’ so often leaves us unknown and unhonoured?

The answer, Vivian concludes, is that men of intellect do not study the human nature of ordinary mankind.

Vivian conveys part of these sentiments to his father, who warns him against trying to ‘become a great man in a hurry’.

But the ice cooled the blood of neither the fictitious nor the real Vivian Grey. Disraeli was determined to make a fortune and impatient to become independent of his family. He had already begun to speculate on the Stock Exchange together with a fellow solicitor’s clerk called Evans. The two young men now resolved to play for higher stakes. A third partner by the name of Messer, the son of a rich stockbroker, went in with them. For some time past the stock market had been booming; and at this particular moment the most promising field seemed to be that in which Mr Ormolu specialized, the shares of mining companies, those of South America in particular. Finance and politics were closely connected, for everything depended on the success of the rebellions in these former Spanish colonies. Canning’s famous dispatch in March 1824, and his known desire – contrary to the opinions of the King and Lord Eldon – to recognize the new republics made him the hero of the whole commercial interest.

At first Disraeli and his fellow financiers had speculated for the fall. Their instinct was right, for most of the companies concerned were thoroughly unsound. But when the republics were at last recognized, just after Christmas 1824, there was such a boom that they lost their nerve and became ‘bulls’ at precisely the wrong moment. It was hardly surprising. The Anglo-Mexican Mining Association’s shares rose from £33 on December 10 to £158 on January 11, and those of the Colombian Mining Association, whose prospectus was drafted by Messrs Swain, Maples & Co., from £19 to £82. Both were promoted by J. & A. Powles, a leading firm of South American merchants, and Disraeli came into active contact with J. D. Powles, the principal partner. His optimism may well have encouraged Disraeli’s speculations. But mid-January saw the high point of the mining-share market. No great profit was to be made thereafter, and from April onwards values began gradually to fall. The adverse balance against Disraeli and his partners, who were, of course, operating on the margin throughout, rose from £400 at the end of 1824 to £7,000 by June 1825. Of this about half had been paid by Evans in cash. It is uncertain how much of this debt was Disraeli’s, for the surviving accounts are obscure and do not show the proportions.3 Even if we assume that his share was one-third, the sum far exceeded his means. It was the origin of the financial embarrassments that were to encumber him for the rest of his life. He did not settle finally with Messer till 1849, and then only in response to a quasi-blackmailing letter.4

Powles had the strongest motive for encouraging public confidence in the South American boom now that limited liability had resulted in wide ownership of shares, but at this juncture official warnings began to come from the Government. Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, advised caution, and Lord Eldon threatened promotors with the penalties of the Bubble Act of 1820. Powles accordingly wrote a pamphlet to counteract these jeremiads. But his style was that of most businessmen. No one read it. He accordingly enlisted Disraeli. In so far as the latter had any regular employment since leaving Messrs Swain other than speculation on the Stock Exchange, it was as reader and assistant to John Murray. He edited a life of Paul Jones for Murray, which came out at the end of 1825 and performed other services. Murray was involved in some sort of partnership with Disraeli in mining shares and was not unwilling to publish on commission pamphlets in their favour.5 Early in March there appeared Disraeli’s first authentic work, an anonymous pamphlet of nearly a hundred pages, entitled An Enquiry into the Plans Progress and Policy of the American Mining Companies. Couched in grave tones of apparent impartiality and appealing to high principles of liberty and national prosperity, it was in reality an elaborate puff for South American mining companies in general, and those promoted by J. and A. Powles in particular. A second pamphlet rapidly followed, called Lawyers and Legislators, or Notes on the American Mining Companies. Disraeli attacked the recent dicta of Lord Eldon, and denounced Alexander Baring and John Cam Hobhouse, who had presumed to cast doubt in the House of Commons upon the soundness of the prevalent gambling mania.

He ended on a lofty note, describing himself as

Disraeli’s third and final mining pamphlet was entitled The Present State of Mexico. The main part of the text was a translation of a report laid before the Mexican Congress by Don Lucas Alaman, Minister for Home and Foreign Affairs, who was being paid, on the side, by the mining companies in order to look after their interests. He was described by Disraeli, who contributed a high-flown introduction, as a ‘pure and practical patriot’.

It is impossible to say how far Disraeli believed in the correctness of his own statements in these pamphlets. What is certain is that the companies which he puffed were worthless concerns based on fraud or at best folly. For one destined to be a master of the art of fiction, this literary début was perhaps not inappropriate, but it was an odd beginning for a future Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Thirteen years later Gladstone’s first book appeared, also under the imprint of John Murray. It was entitled The Church in its Relations with the State.

2

Disraeli now proceeded to involve himself in a new and in the end equally disastrous venture. John Murray had toyed for some years with the idea of starting a daily newspaper as well as his highly successful Quarterly Review. In retrospect he doubted whether he would have taken the plunge but for Disraeli, to whose ‘unrelenting excitement and importunity’ he later described himself as having ‘yielded’.6 But by then everything had gone wrong. An experienced Scottish businessman of forty-six would not have acceded to the importunity of a flamboyant youth of twenty if he had not already been more than half converted to the project on his own account. The new paper was to be Canningite, of course. Perhaps it was expected to achieve what the pamphlets had failed to achieve. Powles was in on the business from the start and a letter from Disraeli among the Murray Papers shows the publisher’s interest in mining shares. ‘Be easy about your mines – we were more behind the scenes than I even imagined.’7 On August 3 a memorandum was drawn up under which Murray agreed to supply half and Powles and Disraeli one-quarter each of the capital required to start the new paper.8 How Disraeli supposed that he could produce the money is one of the puzzles of the affair. It is no less strange that Murray and Powles should have relied on him – he was legally still an infant – and one can only explain the transaction in the light of the commercial euphoria that swept London at the time.9

Equally strange was the dilatory manner in which Murray now proceeded. He planned to start publication on November 1, but it was not until the second week of September that anything was done about the managerial side of the new paper. Disraeli posted up to Edinburgh on September 12 to persuade J. G. Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott’s son-in-law, to become … what? It is far from clear. Evidently not editor, for this was regarded as socially degrading in the case of a daily paper. He was apparently to be manager, and contributor, too, with perhaps some form of editorial control. It may be that Disraeli was none too clear about the matter himself. He bore with him a letter from a lawyer called Wright, who seems to have advised Murray on these matters and had already written direct to Lockhart giving the erroneous impression that Canning wished Lockhart to edit the new paper.10 When Disraeli called on Lockhart at Chiefswood, his house near Melrose, Lockhart showed such palpable surprise that he had to explain it away by saying that he had expected Isaac D’Israeli. Letters from Wright and Murray had already made it obvious who Disraeli was, but Lockhart, a stiff, formal, middle-aged young man, was probably too astounded at the sight of this exotic boy to conceal his feelings. However, he treated Disraeli with civility, introduced him to Sir Walter at Abbotsford, and put him up at Chiefswood for over a fortnight.

Disraeli kept Murray informed of negotiations in a series of letters which only add to the mystery of the story. He devised a code (which he sometimes forgot to keep). ‘M from Melrose’ was Lockhart, ‘The Chevalier’ Sir Walter, ‘O’ was ‘The Political Puck’, i.e. Disraeli himself, and ‘X’ was ‘a certain personage on whom we called one day, who lives a slight distance from town and who was then unwell’.11 It is usually assumed that ‘X’ was Canning, but it is hard to believe that if so Disraeli would have said nothing at all about such a visit in his various published and unpublished reminiscences. On the other hand, if ‘X’ was not Canning, who was he?

In his third letter to Murray, probably written on September 21 he launched into what seems a world of pure fantasy. Lockhart is to be found a seat in Parliament. He must when he comes to town be convinced that ‘through Powles all America and the Commercial Interest is at our back … that the Ch.12 [Church] is firm; that the West India Interest will pledge themselves; that such men as Barrow &c &c are distinctly in our power …’ Lockhart is ‘not to be an Editor of a Newspaper but the Directeur General of an immense organ, and at the head of a band of high bred gentlemen and important interests …’ There are references to ‘X’ and to Disraeli’s ability to organize ‘in the interest with which I am now engaged, a most immense party and a most serviceable one’.13 This sounds as if some sort of Canningite faction was envisaged, but it may well have existed only in Disraeli’s imagination. The project of a seat for Lockhart is never mentioned again and the whole story becomes even odder when at the end of the month Lockhart, with his father-in-law’s full support, wrote a letter to Murray refusing what had not been offered – the editorship of the new organ,14  although from the start Wright had made it quite clear that they were not asking him to take on that post.

It is hard to avoid the impression that, in spite of his own account to Murray, Disraeli had somehow muddled matters. Although Murray regarded him as his ‘right hand’ and praised him highly to Lockhart as ‘a good scholar, hard student, deep thinker … and a complete man of business … worthy of any degree of confidence that you may be induced to repose in him’,15 a letter from Wright to Lockhart rings more truly.

… whatever our friend Disraeli may say or flourish on this subject, your accepting of the Editorship of a newspaper would be infra dig … but not so as I think the accepting of the Editorship of the Quarterly Review … Disraeli who is with you I have not seen much of, but I believe he is a sensible clever young fellow; his judgment however wants sobering down; he has never had to struggle with a single difficulty nor to act in any affairs in which his mind has necessarily been called on to consider and choose in difficult situations. At present his chief exertions as to matters of decision have been with regard to the selection of his food, his employment, and his clothing and, though he is honest and, I take it, wiser than his father, he is inexperienced and untried in the world, and of course, though you may, I believe, safely trust to his integrity, you cannot prudently trust much to his judgment …16

Meanwhile, without telling Disraeli, Murray offered Lockhart the editorship of the Quarterly, a very different proposition, which brought him hurrying down to London. He was to have £1,000 a year and several hundreds more for articles, and he also agreed to contribute to the new daily in return for a minimum of £1,500. He quickly clinched this excellent bargain.

Disraeli was now busy in London making arrangements for the daily paper – and none too soon. It could not now come out in November, but might at the New Year. His cousin George Basevi was to be architect for the new offices in Great George Street. Disraeli conferred with lawyers and printers, engaged correspondents. ‘Private intelligence from a family of distinction in Washington’ was to come ‘by every packet’. ‘Mr. Briggs the great Alexandrian merchant’ would answer for Egypt. A Herr Maas whom he had met at Coblenz would send gossip about English travellers in Germany. The Provost of Oriel (Copleston) would be correspondent for the universities.17

Disraeli was proud of one coup. He secured the services of Dr Maginn as their representative in Paris. But the doctor, an entertaining Irish scamp who also wrote under the pseudonym of Morgan O’Doherty, was a most undesirable choice. He drank like a fish, was in debt to Murray, and later, writing for Westmacott’s Age, engaged in the worst sort of blackmailing journalism. He took Disraeli in by first professing grave doubts and then appearing to be suddenly converted. ‘The Dr. started in his chair like Giovanni in the banquet scene and … ended by saying that as to the success of the affair doubt could not exist,’ Disraeli complacently told Lockhart. ‘In brief the Dr. goes to Paris and Murray acquits him (this au secret) of his little engagement.’18 Alas, it was a case of the biter bitten. Maginn’s blarney defeated Disraeli’s eloquence. He went to Paris, ran up new debts to replace those cancelled by Murray, drank much, and wrote little. Brought back to London to edit the lighter side of the paper, which certainly needed enlivening, he gave offence by his frivolities and hastened its demise.

That Disraeli with his youthful exuberance should have been wildly optimistic about the prospect is scarcely surprising. More remarkable is the enthusiasm of his hard-headed elders. Powles appears to have been confident. Murray, though he had occasional misgivings, wrote to Scott that he was ‘certain … of inevitable success’, and to a friend, William Jerdan, that ‘I have never attempted anything with more considerate circumspection’. Isaac D’Israeli, too, was sanguine enough at the time, though he denied it later. Writing to Murray on October 9 he says:

… never did the first season of blossoms promise a richer gathering. But he [Benjamin] has not the sole merit for you share it with him in the grand view you take of the capability of the new intellectual Steam Engine. You have already secured such Coadjutors as no publisher has had before … You will put out the other lights without any wish to do them that disservice but merely by outshining them.19

Scott was less enthusiastic. From the very beginning he seems to have been mildly sceptical about the newspaper and, though he approved of his son-in-law editing the Quarterly, he had no confidence whatever in the consistency or determination of Murray.20

Half-way through November, Murray sent Disraeli on a second mission to Abbotsford. ‘The most timorous of all God’s booksellers’ had become nervous about the appointment of Lockhart,21 which he had endeavoured to keep dark for the time being, not even informing the current editor, J. T. Coleridge. But the story leaked out and a cabal of the Quarterly’s old guard led by Barrow were on the warpath. Disraeli’s task was to persuade Sir Walter to reassure them. Scott, as he puts it in his journal, was not very willing ‘to tell all and sundry that my son-in-law is not a slanderer or a silly thoughtless lad’, but he did in the end write a sort of open letter to Murray.22 Disraeli seems to have botched his job as an ambassador, for he spilled the story to Lockhart himself, who was back in Scotland and was naturally perturbed to find his position less safe than he believed. He wrote at once to Murray, who was furious with Disraeli, but the quarrel was soon composed, and Disraeli defended ‘the Emperor’ to Lockhart:

Do not think Murray’s conduct in this last affair wavering and inconsistent. His situation has been very trying. You and he have never rightly understood each other … When such connections were about to be formed between two men, they should have become acquainted, not by the stimulus of wine. There should have been some interchange of sentiment and feelings. The fault I know was not yours; the result however was bad. All men have their sober moments, and Murray in his is a man of pure and honourable, I might say elevated, sentiments.23

What with Murray’s hesitation, Disraeli’s inexperience, and Powles’s financial distractions which were soon to end in disaster, it is hardly surprising that the new paper’s birth pangs were prolonged.

Although there might have been a public for a new Tory organ, if it had been well run, Murray and his allies had entered on to the field with little or no idea of the difficulties involved. It was all very well Murray’s declaring to Lockhart that ‘The Times has offended everyone so much last week that Mr. P. told us there was scarcely a knot of merchants – Rothschild was at the head of one knot – which did not talk of setting up a paper’.24 People have often said this, but The Times somehow goes on. A rival organ, to have a chance, had to be well organized, lively and interesting. At this stage the partners had not even decided its name, Lockhart upon whom they obviously depended for articles and advice, had not yet arrived in London, there was no real editor, and the printing presses seemed unlikely to be ready in time.

In the end Disraeli christened the paper. ‘I am delighted, and what is more satisfied with Disraeli’s title – the Representative’, wrote Lockhart, now at last in London, to Murray on December 21. ‘If Mr. Powles does not produce some thundering objection, let this be fixed in God’s name.’25 But already the prospect of success had begun to recede. At the end of October the market in South American mines slumped. At the end of November a prominent Plymouth bank failed. By the middle of December panic reigned in the city and a large number of people were ruined. Among them were Powles and Disraeli; ruined, moreover, at precisely the moment that they were required to provide their proportion of the capital of the Representative. Powles failed because he had made personal loans of £120,000 to the various South American republics and lost every penny. According to a letter from his daughter to Monypenny, he later recovered and paid his creditors twenty shillings in the pound plus interest at 5 per cent.26 Moreover, his friendship with Disraeli Mas resumed in the ’fifties when the latter, as his papers show, corresponded with him as a leading City Conservative. But in the late 1850s he failed again, this time irretrievably.

Smiles in his life of Murray states categorically that Disraeli and Powles did not pay their share of the capital for the Representative.27  It is hard to see how Disraeli ever could have done so. But whereas Powles seems to have continued to correspond with Murray in the capacity of a partner for another two months, Disraeli abruptly vanished from the counsels of the Representative. The reason for this difference is far from clear. Perhaps Murray continued to have hopes of money from Powles, after he had ceased to have any hope from Disraeli.

The paper, which did not begin publication till January 25, was a total failure from the start. Its first number was atrociously edited, three exclusive items of news were so concealed that no one could find them, and the leaders were, in the words of Crofton Croker, one of Murray’s writers, ‘tedious to a degree and intolerably long’. Such attempts as were made to brighten up later numbers failed dismally. ‘Lord’s mercy,’ wrote Scott to his daughter, Mrs Lockhart, ‘its jokes put me in mind of the child’s question whether a pound of feathers or a pound of lead is the heaviest.’ The economic depression no doubt made such a venture hopeless, but it is unlikely that the Representative would have been a success even in more propitious circumstances. Left with sole responsibility, and harassed by worries, Murray sank into gloom and refused to answer letters. Even the general election of the early summer did nothing to revive the paper’s fortunes. It ceased publication on July 29, 1826, Murray having lost £26,000.

Disraeli did not look back on his part in the paper with any satisfaction. When he became celebrated frequent attempts were made by his enemies to assert that he had been the editor of a journal that had miserably failed. This, of course, he could and did deny with truth. But he considered it unnecessary to explain what his real connexion was with the paper, and no one could have guessed from his denials that he had been Murray’s ‘right hand’ in promoting it, nor that he had been for a time part-proprietor of ‘the new intellectual steam engine’.28 In after years he jotted down some reminiscences about his two visits to Scotland, with a vivid description of Sir Walter at Abbotsford, and an account of how after the second visit he travelled down to London with Constable, the great publisher then ‘on the point of a most fatal and shattering bankruptcy’,29 but he gives no hint whatever of the mission which took him to the north. He did not believe in dwelling upon failure, and he was good at burying the past.

3

Disraeli’s feelings on being excluded from any further part in the Representative may only be conjectured: it must have been a disagreeable shock. A few weeks earlier he had been the associate of city magnates, the ambassador to Abbotsford, the borough-monger fixing up Lockhart with a seat, the ally – at one remove – of Canning; he was now simply a young man out of work and in debt. But he possessed resilience and energy. He had failed to acquire wealth or power, but he might still acquire fame – and some much-needed cash – by the use of his pen.

The exact genesis of Vivian Grey is uncertain. Years later Disraeli maintained that it had been completed before he was twenty-one, i.e. before December 21, at Hyde House, a place near Amersham rented by his father for the autumn of 1825. But this is incredible. No one, however energetic, could have written a novel of 80,000 words in four months, when swamped with business, as Disraeli was from August to December, and the second volume (Books 3 and 4 of the ordinary editions of today) is in large part a thinly disguised account of that very business; it must have been written afterwards – in the early months of 1826. ‘As hot and hurried a sketch as ever yet was penned,’ Disraeli himself described it.30

Hyde House did have a connexion with the novel. Its owner, Robert Plumer Ward,31 had published anonymously during 1825 Trentaine or the Man of Refinement, which was the model upon which Disraeli based his own book. Isaac D’Israeli rented Hyde House through a solicitor, Benjamin Austen, whose wife Sara was an ambitious, clever, attractive and childless blue stocking.32  Husband and wife were both in the secret of Tremaine and Austen acted as Ward’s agent in placing the book with the publisher Colburn, another of his clients. Tremaine was perhaps the first-so-called ‘society novel’ to be published in England, and it has a certain historical importance; by inspiring both Disraeli and Bulwer it set the tone which was to dominate English novel-writing for over twenty years. The mark of this particular form of novel sometimes called ‘silver-fork fiction’ was not merely that the characters came from high life. There was nothing new in that. The feature of Tremaine, of the novels of Theodore Hook, and Mrs Gore, and of the early novels of Disraeli and Bulwer was that they described, or purported to describe, the beau-monde correctly – their clothes, their houses, their furniture and their conversation. Accuracy and verisimilitude were at a premium for the first time.

The years after Waterloo were a period of immorality, ostentation, luxury, extravagance and snobbery – or, to be accurate, for such generalizations are rash, they presented this aspect to the observer of the square mile that constituted the heart of fashionable London. A whole class of new rich sought to mingle on equal terms with an aristocracy that possessed power, prestige and wealth unsurpassed in Europe. Novels which depicted with seeming familiarity, and often under thin disguise, the behaviour of persons in the grand world were certain to be popular – among the outsiders because they wished to read about the insiders, and among the insiders because they liked to read about themselves.

The publisher who cashed in on this vogue was Henry Colburn, a shrewd man of business and an adept at the art of ‘puffery’. The essence of this was to publish the book anonymously, hint that the author moved in the highest circles of society, suggest a ‘key’ for the characters (often a bogus one) and, if the author really was a man of fashion, discreetly allow his name to leak out at a suitable moment after the novel had been launched. This technique, together with the genuine merits of the book, made Tremaine the novel of the year.

No leakage was needed for the Disraeli family to know its authorship. Isaac read his landlord’s novel in manuscript. The Austens formed another link, and it was natural that when Benjamin decided to try his luck at literature he should have written a ‘silver fork’ novel modelled on Tremaine, and, using Sara Austen as reader, amanuensis and agent, should have published it with Colburn. She seems to have plunged into the business with the greatest enthusiasm. In order to keep the author’s name secret even from Colburn, she copied the manuscript in her own hand. She made suggestions and criticisms. She negotiated the contract. It is hard to believe that she was not at least half in love with Disraeli. A letter from her has survived in which after some polite commonplaces in ordinary writing she abruptly changed into a cipher:

For years afterwards she was his willing slave and her husband his less-willing creditor. In 1834 he airily demanded some research into the subject of the south-west wind for ‘a grand simile’ in a poem he was writing. ‘Get it up by the 16th,’ he ends his letter. ‘My dear Ben,’ Sara replies, ‘I am always most happy to have an opportunity of being useful to you.’

In the latter half of February, Disraeli submitted a part of his manuscript to her for the first time. She was delighted with it. ‘I have now gone through it twice and the more I read the better I am pleased …’ ‘Trouble’, she added, ‘is an odious word which shall henceforth be banished from our vocabulary.’34 This letter was written on February 25, and haste was all the more necessary because Sara Austen knew that a second novel by Ward – De Vere or the Man of Independence – was on the way (it was, in fact, not published till the following year) and it was important for Disraeli to get in first. Colburn accepted the manuscript before he saw it, but having done so was enthusiastic. He agreed to pay £200 and at once set his puffing machine into action. He controlled the New Monthly Magazine and had an interest in Literary Gazette, and Theodore Hook, the editor of John Bull‚ was in his pocket. He also had an interest in the Sunday Times. Through these and other organs news of an impending novel, ‘a sort of Don Juan in prose’ written by a Society personage, began to circulate early in April.

There is nothing to show that Colburn ‘puffed’ Vivian Grey more than was his normal practice with any new novel, and there is no evidence to suggest, as has often been alleged, that Disraeli personally took any part in the process. But Vivian Grey undoubtedly received plenty of advance publicity. One day, so Cyrus Redding, the New Monthly’s editor records in his autobiography, he called on Colburn in his office in New Burlington Street. ‘By the by’, said the publisher, ‘I have a capital book out – Vivian Grey. The authorship is a great secret – a man of high fashion – very high – keeps the first society. I can assure you it is a most piquant and spirited work, quite sparkling.’ On April 22, in the same week that saw the publication of Scott’s Woodstock and Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, the much-advertised novel appeared in two anonymous octavo volumes.

4

To understand the effect of Vivian Grey upon Disraeli’s reputation and career it is important to read the original edition of 1826.35  Most modern readers are acquainted with it only in the drastically revised version of 1853 which is the basis of nearly all the subsequent editions. In the course of time Disraeli became much ashamed of his first novel. He would have liked to exclude it altogether from the 1853 edition of his collected works, but he compromised by pleading indulgence from the public and cutting out not only phrases and locutions but chapters, scenes, and characters which he felt betrayed the author’s youth, brashness and general impudence – particularly those which showed that he was not in 1826 the man of the world which he later became.36

Few people at twenty-one can be expected to write anything but an autobiography. Vivian Grey is the story of the Representative transposed from the journalistic to the political key. Vivian himself is the young Benjamin; his father, Horace, is Isaac. Whatever ingenious defenders of Disraeli may say, there can be no doubt that Vivian with his recklessness, lack of scruple, devouring ambition and impudent effrontery is a self-portrait. Some years later, in that curious fragmentary diary which he kept between 1833 and 1836, Disraeli wrote:

No doubt he had in mind the Vivian Grey of the first three books – not the rather absurd figure of melodrama who figures at the end of the fourth – but otherwise this seems as plain a statement as one could need, written in a diary which Disraeli probably intended no one to see in his lifetime, moreover written seven years later when he had had plenty of time to reflect. Against this, the disclaimers, which appear in the preface to the second part of Vivian Grey, published in the aftermath of the uproar caused by the first, carry no great weight.38

Vivian’s schooldays, his deep reading in his father’s library, his refusal to go to Oxford, his ‘devil of a tongue’, his discovery that ‘there is no fascination so irresistible to a boy as the smile of a married woman’ – all are pure Disraeli. Then he resolves to make his fortune:

At this moment how many a powerful noble wants only wit to be a Minister; and what wants Vivian Grey to attain the same end? That noble’s influence … Supposing I am in contact with this magnifico, am I prepared? Now let me probe my very soul. Does my cheek blanch? I have the mind for the conception; and I can perform right skilfully upon the most splendid of musical instruments – the human voice – to make these conceptions beloved by others. There wants but one thing more – courage, pure, perfect courage; – and does Vivian Grey know fear? He laughed an answer of bitterest derision.39

His magnifico is the Marquess of Carabas, who holds a grand sinecure, but has lost all effective power. This prosy, politically disappointed and – in the original edition of the book – tipsy mediocrity is induced by Vivian, whose charm captivates him, his wife, his friends and his toadies, to engage in the formation of a new party, reminiscent of that ‘most immense party’ in Disraeli’s letters to John Murray, which will restore him to power. One of its members is ‘Lord Beaconsfield – a very worthy gentleman but between ourselves a damned fool’. It is, however, essential to have a leader in the House of Commons. Vivian does not undertake this role himself, just as Disraeli did not seek the editorship of the Representative, but he offers to go on a mission to persuade one Cleveland, who after a brief but brilliant career in Parliament has forsaken the world for the ‘luxuries of a cottage ornée, in the most romantic part of the Principality [of Wales]’.

Cleveland, who is clearly Lockhart,40 just as Carabas, despite all denials, must be Murray, gives Vivian a reception which is ‘cold and constrained in the extreme’. But before long all is well, Cleveland is persuaded, the new party is on the point of being formed, when Mrs Lorraine, the Marquess’s equivocal sister-in-law (alleged without much basis to be a portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb), whose amorous advances have been repulsed by Vivian, ruins the whole plan by poisoning the minds of the chief plotters against the author of the plot. Even as Vivian discourses on ‘political gastronomy’ to the Marquess, letters arrive from the other members of the party repudiating their allegiance, and finally the Marquess himself receives his dismissal from the sinecure office which he holds. He rounds in a fury on Vivian, who departs to take vengeance on Mrs Lorraine, falsely telling her that he has counteracted her machinations, and is about to become a MP. The result is gratifying.

When he had ended she sprang from the sofa, and looking up, and extending her arms with unmeaning wildness, she gave one loud shriek, and dropped like a bird shot on the wing – she had burst a blood-vessel.

He then kills Cleveland in a duel and the story ends with a tongue-in-the-cheek passage which Disraeli deleted in the 1853 edition: ‘I fear me much that Vivian Grey is a lost man; but I am sure that every sweet and gentle spirit, who has read this sad story of his fortunes, will breathe a holy prayer this night, for his restoration to society and to himself.’

The plot is highly improbable and too thin to sustain a book of that length. Disraeli, conscious of this, inserted a good deal of irrelevant padding to fill it out. The result is a novel which, in point of form and construction could scarcely be worse, but its vitality and vigour makes it remarkably readable even today. It is infused with an extraordinary compound of reckless satire, youthful worldliness, cynical observation, grandiloquent sentiment, sheer fun and impudence; and the irrelevant digressions, the superfluous minor characters, the inessential scenes and episodes are what give it its flavour.

Vivian Grey had an instant succès de scandale. It was discussed in society. There was much speculation about the identity of the characters – and above all about that of the author. Some people were delighted and some furious, but few were bored. Early in May, Plumer Ward wrote to Mrs Austen:

All are talking of Vivian Grey. Its wit, raciness, and boldness are admired; and you would have been not ill-pleased with the remarks upon particular passages and characters – the dinner at Château Désir particularly, Mrs. Millions,41 all the women, the two toadies, and universally Stapylton.42 From the Nugents’ account it is much spreading in London, excites curiosity and also resentment … It certainly frightens a great many people who expect to be shown up; and you must really be careful of discovering the author …43

But such secrets are not easy to keep. As long as the author’s name remained unknown the reviewers were cautious. Some did indeed observe that there were solecisms and social blunders which could hardly have been made by a man of fashion. One of these was Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette, who noticed that ‘the class of the author is a little betrayed by his frequent references to topics of which the mere man of fashion knows nothing and cares less’. Mrs Austen did her best to prevent the truth emerging. ‘Don’t be anxious about V.G.’, she writes excitedly to Disraeli. ‘We’ll blind them yet. I have not committed you by even a look – it’s only a guess which may be averted’44 It seems, however, that Jerdan, who knew Murray well and hence the saga of the Representative, had somehow guessed the real author, and when once the secret was out the fury of the reviewers knew no bounds.

No doubt in an ideal world critics would be indifferent to the name of an author. A book should be judged on its merits and is equally good whether written by Mr X, Lord Y, or some famous literary figure: likewise if it is bad. But the world is not ideal, and there are passages in Vivian Grey which no one could have read in quite the same light after knowing that the author was a youth of twenty-one who had never moved in society. Disraeli found himself the object of a series of ferocious personal attacks. Reviewers in those days were not the urbane and courteous figures which they have become today. Their lives were conducted in a whirlwind of splenetic fury and ceaseless vendettas. Disraeli had to suffer, moreover, not only for his own faults, but for the animosity which Colburn had acquired by his notorious methods.

Blackwood’s Magazine45 denounced ‘the shameful and shameless puffery’ which had pushed the book forward. The writer was branded as ‘an obscure person for whom nobody cares a straw’, and the book described as ‘a paltry catchpenny’. The Monthly Magazine46 said of the author:

… we shall probably never have to mention his name again. He would perhaps make a useful assistant to old D’Israeli in cutting out paragraphs to manufacture into some other half dozen dull volumes, and add to the ‘calamities of authors’; he is evidently incapable of anything better, and his only chance of escaping perpetual burlesque is to content himself with ‘wearing his violet-coloured slippers’, ‘slobbering his Italian greyhound’,47  and sinking suddenly and finally into total oblivion.

Many critics dwelt on a defect of the book, which was particularly mortifying for someone with the ambitions of the young Disraeli, his numerous social blunders or, as one critic put it, ‘his most ludicrous affectation of good breeding’. This side of Vivian Grey is one that can only be appreciated by those who read the 1826 edition, for Disraeli, who knew the manners of the beau-monde well enough by 1853, cut most of the solecisms out when he revised the novel. But in the original version there are expressions which almost remind one of the Young Visiters: the Marquess ‘dashed off a tumbler of Burgundy’; ‘the cuisine of Mr. Grey was superbe’; ‘Her Ladyship … was now passata although with the aid of cachemeres [sic] diamonds and turbans, her tout ensemble was still very striking’, etc.

The Literary Magnet went one stage beyond anyone else. It roundly declared that ‘this spark’, together with Mrs Austen, had conspired to defraud Colburn, that they had passed off the manuscript as being written by Plumer Ward, and thus secured twice as high a publisher’s advance as Disraeli would otherwise have got. Stories to this effect were widely circulated in London literary circles, and it is not inconceivable that Mrs Austen, without uttering any positive falsehood, may have allowed Colburn to gain an incorrect impression about the authorship of the book.

Slashing criticism is disagreeable, even when it can be discounted as the product of malice. The attack in Blackwood’s particularly dismayed Disraeli. Five years later he described in Contarini Fleming the effect of those hostile observations from ‘the great critical journal of the north of Europe’.

5

There was one quarter in which Vivian Grey did its author nothing but harm – the literary and political circle centred round John Murray. He considered that he had been grossly caricatured and that his confidence had been abused. He had good reason to think so. Coming on top of his previous causes for exasperation, Vivian Grey must have been the last straw. When it appeared the Representative was still in publication, running its sole remaining and solvent proprietor into ever-increasing losses. Murray had already begun to persuade himself that he would never have undertaken the venture but for Disraeli’s ‘unrelenting importunity’. Then there was his default over the capital. Monypenny in a valiant effort to defend Disraeli underestimates the degree of offence which the book was bound to give. ‘Murray,’ he says, ‘apparently fancied that he had been satirised in the character of the Marquis, though it is not easy to detect the slightest resemblance between them.’48 But no impartial reader who knew the inner story of the Representative could fail to see John Murray as the Marquess of Carabas, any more than he could fail to see Lockhart as Cleveland, Horace Grey as Isaac D’Israeli, Mr and Mrs Millions as Mr and Mrs Powles, etc., and some reviewers did, in fact, comment on these resemblances.

Here again, to appreciate the position it is essential to read the 1826 edition. Murray was a genial host and enjoyed the wine that circulated liberally at his table. In the original edition of Vivian Grey we find the Marquess depicted as a timorous and tipsy nincompoop, and it is possible that a scene such as the following, though a crude caricature, was not so very remote from what sometimes occurred at Murray’s dinner-table while the Representative was being hatched.

We are at dinner at Château Désir, where the new party is being launched. The Marquess addresses the assembly more or less coherently for a sentence or so, then:

Here the bottle passed, and the Marquess took a bumper. ‘My Lords and Gentlemen, when I take into consideration the nature of the various interests, of which the body politic of this great empire is regulated; (Lord Courtown the bottle stops with you) when I observe, I repeat, this, I naturally ask myself what right, what claims, what, what, what – I repeat what right, these governing interests have to the influence which they possess? (Vivian, my boy, you’ll find Champagne on the waiter behind you.) Yes, gentlemen it is in this temper (the corkscrew’s by Sir Berdmore), it is, I repeat, in this temper, and actuated by these views, that we meet together this day.’49

It is significant that in 1853 this and every other allusion to the Marquess’s drunkenness was omitted and the whole scene rewritten. But in 1826 John Murray’s friends would have had little difficulty in convincing him that the description of the Carabas dinner party was an impudent lampoon and an outrageous breach of trust.

Moreover, at the very moment of the publication of Vivian Grey, Disraeli involved himself in another affair, which, whatever the true facts, undoubtedly enraged Murray and his circle even further. This was the production of a satirical weekly journal called the Star Chamber. It only lasted for nine numbers from April 19 to June 7, 1826, and then abruptly ceased publication. Vivian Grey appeared three days after the first number, and it is perhaps significant that the printers, who were also printers for Murray, declined to print the second number, which accordingly had to be transferred elsewhere.

Disraeli’s part in the journal has always been something of an enigma. He denied on several occasions in later life that he had edited it, but he certainly contributed.50 The nominal editor and proprietor was one Peter Hall, a Brasenose friend of Meredith through whom he met Disraeli. Meredith was also a contributor. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Disraeli was the moving spirit. Nothing that we know of Hall, who later became a parson and edited an antiquarian magazine called The Crypt, or of Meredith, who seems to have been a serious-minded, rather grave, young man, suggests that they could have written the satires and lampoons with which the new journal abounded. Whether Disraeli wrote the Dunciad of To-day, a long satirical poem which appeared in the later numbers of the magazine, it is impossible to say for certain.51  But if he did, then Murray had even more cause for annoyance, for it contains a number of wounding hits at him and his friends.

At all events a bitter and prolonged battle now broke out between Murray and the Disraeli family. Writing more in sorrow than in anger, Isaac said:

In conversation with my son this day I find him so sensibly hurt at a sudden change of your conduct towards him that I cannot but deeply sympathize with his depression … I well know your late disappointment but the sole error does not rest with him. You were all inexperienced and it happened that the youngest was most. Without due and proper preparations you expected what with every precaution it might be difficult to provide you with. Time was that you consulted me on such things – I was near you, but I will not say anything about myself …52

Isaac was curiously forgetful of the recent past. His letters to Murray in the previous autumn were very far from those of a sage counsellor waiting only to be asked in order to warn. Evidently he made no impression on Murray, for on May 21 we find Benjamin writing thus to Mrs Murray:

Mr. Murray has overstepped the bounds which the remembrance of former friendship has too indulgently conceded him, and he has spoke and is now speaking of me to the world generally in terms which to me are as inexplicable as they appear to be outrageous. Under these circumstances one course apparently is only left to me, and that is of a decided and deplorable nature …53

Monypenny conjectures that this was a threat of legal action, but from all that we know of the young Disraeli a challenge seems more likely. Nothing, in fact, happened. On the same day Mrs D’Israeli wrote a long and revealing letter to John Murray himself.

May 21 Bloomsbury Sq.

Dear Sir,

Having learnt that my son has written to Mrs. Murray this morning I am now doing what had I pleased myself I should have done some time since, which is to write to you to request an explanation of your conduct which the kindness and pliability of Mr. D’Israeli’s character could never obtain, for while you were expressing great friendship, we were constantly hearing of the great losses Mr. Murray had sustained through the mis-management and bad conduct of my son. Surely, Sir, were this story truly told it would not be believed that the experienced publisher of Albermarle Street could be deceived by the plans of a boy of twenty whom you had known from his cradle and whose resources you must have as well known as his father and had you condescended to consult that father the folly might not have been committed.

You might then Sir perhaps would have found tho’ a clever boy he was no ‘prodigy’ and I must say I believe the failure of the Representative lay much more with the Proprietor and his Editor than it ever did with my son but I feel your disappointment and can forgive your irritability, yet I must resent your late attack on Benjamin. What can you mean by saying as an excuse for not meeting D’Israeli that our son had divulged and made public your secrets this surely you must know is not truth – and can you as the father of a family think yourself justified in hurting the character and future prospects of a young man to whose Father you subscribe yourself his faithful friend and to whose Mother her most obliged.

I now must beg an explanation of this enigma … I really cannot believe John Murray who has so often professed such strong friendship for D’Israeli should be now going about blasting the character of that Friend’s son because he had formed in his imagination a perfect being and expected impossibilities and found him on trial a mere mortal and a very very young man.

I fear I have made this letter too long and that you will destroy it instead of reading it pray for old friendship do not do that but give me the explanation I so ardently require.

And believe me ever your     
sincere well wisher                
Maria D’Israeli54          

Isaac was by no means as supine on this occasion as his wife’s letter would suggest. He too bombarded Murray with letters demanding explanations and withdrawals. Like Mrs D’Israeli, he ignored Vivian Grey and concentrated on the Representative; and he continued to display a singular obliviousness about his own attitude before the ill-fated paper came out. He did, however, deem it wise to repudiate the Star Chamber.

He withdrew from a trusteeship which he had undertaken on behalf of his old friend. He returned the books which Murray had given him. He even wrote to Mrs Murray on October 4 threatening to produce a pamphlet on the whole question. This alarmed his friend Sharon Turner, the man who had insisted on the baptizing of his children. He was a friend of Murray also, and he expressed incredulity at Isaac’s resolve.

After reading Benjamin’s agreement [with Murray and Powles] of 3rd August, 1825 [he wrote] and your letters to Murray on him and the business, of the 27th September, the 29th September, and the 9th October, my sincere opinion is that you cannot with a due regard to your own reputation, write or publish anything about it.55

He pointed out that Murray would be bound to reply, and that the ensuing scandal would damage the D’Israelis far more than it would Murray. At the same time he wrote to Murray trying to persuade him that no one could see any resemblance between him and the Marquess of Carabas. Isaac took his friend’s advice and no pamphlet appeared, but there was no genuine reconciliation.56

Murray was never again on terms of friendship with either father or son. He did indeed publish two of Benjamin’s books later.57 But there was no cordiality – a purely business relationship of ‘Dear Sirs’ and letters written in the third person. Murray’s final view was expressed in a letter of October 16 to Sharon Turner. After denying that he was annoyed because of the financial loss incurred by ‘yielding to [Disraeli’s] unrelenting excitement and importunity …’58 he went on in a passage, most of which is omitted for some reason by Smiles in his life of Murray:

So my complaint against Mr. D’Israeli’s son arises solely from the the untruths which he told and for his conduct during, (of which in part I made the discovery subsequently) and at the close of our transactions, and since, and particularly from his outrageous breach of all confidence and of every tie which binds man to man in social life in the publication of Vivian Grey. From me his son received nothing but the most unbounded confidence and parental attachment; my fault was in having loved, not wisely but too well. May his parents never have occasion to repent in bitterness the fatal moment when they expressed their approbation of Vivian Grey.59

This letter shows that Murray had a grievance about Disraeli’s conduct over the Representative as well as over Vivian Grey. But it is not clear what the alleged untruths were. Disraeli came to believe that Lockhart had poisoned Murray’s mind, and it is possible that he gave a damaging version of Disraeli’s efforts as ambassador to Chiefswood in the autumn. It may be that Croker, Stewart Rose and others lampooned in the Star Chamber did their bit, too. But since there was apparently no overt quarrel before the publication of Vivian Grey‚ it seems likely that Disraeli’s alleged misconduct over the Representative was exaggerated in retrospect by an angry and much-tried man. What is certain is that Murray had far more cause for indignation about the novel than Disraeli’s partisans have been ready to concede.

There can be little doubt that Disraeli’s career was seriously affected not merely by the character of the book but by the offence which it gave to powerful people whose help would have been useful to him in the ’thirties, when he struggled to make his way into politics. He acquired a reputation for cynicism, double dealing, recklessness and insincerity which it took him years to live down. Murray, Croker and Lockhart were influential persons in the respectable Tory world. Croker was an intimate friend of Peel until their famous breach over the Corn Laws. Lockhart for twenty-eight years edited the Quarterly, which was as much the organ of the Tory ‘establishment’ as the Edinburgh of the Whig. He persistently ignored Disraeli. As late as 1848, when the latter had been a major political figure for at least two years, and a conspicuous one for a good deal longer, his name had never even been mentioned in the Quarterly. Lockhart’s attitude of unrelenting hatred is well exemplified by his comment on Coningsby: ‘That Jew scamp has published a very blackguard novel.’60

In that same ‘blackguard novel’ Disraeli certainly got his own back on Croker, whom he held up to immortal ridicule in the character of Rigby, Lord Monmouth’s toady, creature and general factotum. But he never succeeded in squaring accounts with Lockhart, although he was under no delusion about his animosity. They must occasionally have met socially. The only recorded instance, in 1836 at a dinner party given by Lord Lyndhurst, who wanted Lockhart to review Disraeli’s Vindication, was not a success. ‘He never spoke a word,’ wrote Disraeli to his sister. ‘He is known in society by the name of Viper but if he tries to sting me he will find my heel of iron.’61 In fact, Disraeli’s one effort to use his heel of iron had not come off. In a venomous exchange of letters on the subject of The Young Duke in 1832 it was Lockhart who scored, not his opponent.62

For all Disraeli’s precocity and genius, he was remarkably blind to the adverse effect that such a book was bound to have upon his reputation in the world in which he wished to rise. No one now would regret the publication of Vivian Grey, but it is to be doubted whether it did him any good whatever in his lifetime, apart from the seven hundred much-needed pounds that it brought him.63 The notion that he achieved instant social celebrity and at once became a ‘lion’ in the drawing-rooms of London is a complete myth, although it has been often repeated. His ascent into society did not even begin for another six years, when he came back from his tour of the Near East in 1832.

Vivian Grey haunted Disraeli to the end. In vain he tried to explain it away as ‘a juvenile indiscretion’, ‘a kind of literary lusus’‚ ‘a youthful blunder’. In vain he tried to suppress it altogether, and, failing that, to make it reputable by altering the text. It was no use. He might try to laugh it off. He could not live it down. The book went into edition after edition. It seemed to possess the same inextinguishable vitality as its hero. Half a century later the Prime Minister and leader of the Tory party found his first novel quoted against him from the platform to prove that he had never been a true Conservative, and from the pulpit to denounce his moral character. Seldom can a juvenile indiscretion have had more lasting consequences than Vivian Grey.

*

The story of the Representative and Vivian Grey has been told at some length not only because of its effect on Disraeli’s career but because of what it reveals about his character. Much has been written about Disraeli’s Jewishness. He later became intensely interested in it himself to the point of being something of a bore on the subject. No doubt it should not be underestimated. But if national or racial stereotypes are to be introduced at al – and they are perilous guides – it is not so much the Jewish as the Italian streak in Disraeli that predominated. The Jews who were rising to the top in Disraeli’s day tended to be silent, prudent, high-principled persons of impeccable integrity, who acquired vast wealth, became Masters of Hounds and bought up the Vale of Aylesbury. Their quintessence is represented by Disraeli’s later friend Baron Rothschild, who on grounds of principle stood again and again for Parliament until the ban on Jews was removed, and then, having at last got there, sat for fifteen years without opening his mouth.

The ‘hour of adventure’ and the story of Disraeli’s early life in the next few chapters show how far removed he was from this sort of image. But the traits associated, though perhaps not always fairly, with the Mediterranean character are much more in evidence. Disraeli was proud, vain, flamboyant, quick-witted, generous, emotional, quarrelsome, extravagant, theatrical, addicted to conspiracy, fond of backstairs intrigue. He was also – and this is certainly un-Jewish – financially incompetent to a high degree. His great object both at this time and later was to be someone, to attract notice, to cut a dash – ‘far figura’‚ as the Italians say. It would not be just to attribute all these characteristics to any particular nation. But they are not those that leap to the mind in connexion with either Jews or Englishmen, and it is probably significant that Disraeli should have made the hero of Contarini Fleming, the most autobiographical of his novels, half-Venetian. Of course, some of his qualities were those of the romantic generation to which he belonged. His impulsiveness, his recklessness, his emotional fluctuation between euphoria and depression are features to be found in the artist’s temperament at all epochs, but it was particularly fashionable to display them just then. Byron was the hero of the hour. The day of good form and the stiff upper lip was yet to come. All the same it remains true that Disraeli, unlike his family, was a most untypical English Jew. Throughout his life people remarked upon the indefinable but indubitable impression that he gave of being a foreigner, whether it was the pride of a Spanish grandee, the ingenuity of an Italian juggler, or the plausibility of a Levantine on the make.

1 Vivian Grey (1st edition, 1826), Bk I, ch. 8 and 9 (7 and 8 in revised edition, 1858).

2 Bk I, ch. 9 (8 in 1853 edition).

3 Hughenden Papers, Box 17, A/V/A/l–9.

4 See below, p. 1.

5 Hughenden Papers, not catalogued, copy of declaration, n.d., that the mining shares and all other certificates ‘in this iron box’ are held by Murray and Disraeli in proportion of two-thirds and one-third respectively.

6 See below, p. 1.

7 Dated simply ‘May, 1825’, Murray Papers.

8 Samuel Smiles, Memoir of John Murray (2 vols, 1891), ii, 186.

9 There are many obscurities in the history of the founding of the newspaper. I am obliged to Mr R. W. Stewart for allowing me to consult his unpublished account of the episode, which clears up some of them.

10 Lockhart Papers (National Library of Scotland).

11 Smiles, Murray, ii, 189.

12 Murray Papers. Samuel Smiles, Memoir of John Murray (2 vols, 1891), ii, 191, conjectures ‘Chevalier’, but this makes nonsense.

13 Murray Papers. Nearly all of the letter appears in M. & B., i, 64–66.

14 Smiles, Murray, ii, 196.

15 Walter Scott, Familiar Letters (2 vols, 1890), ii, 405.

16 Lockhart Papers, October 8.

17 Murray Papers.

18 Lockhart Papers, Disraeli to Lockhart, October 1825.

19 Murray Papers.

20 H. J. C. Grierson, Letters of Sir Walter Scott (Centenary edition, 12 vols, 1932–7), ix, 290 and n. 296.

21 Lockhart was a controversial character. His satirical lampoons in Blackwood’s a few years earlier had caused Murray to terminate his partnership in that journal – which makes his choice of Lockhart for the Quarterly all the odder.

22 Sir Walter Scott, Familiar Letters (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1890), i, 21.

23 Grierson, ix, 290 n.

24 Lockhart Papers.

25 Smiles, Murray, ii, 206.

26 Hughenden Papers, Box 301.

27 Smiles, ii, 207.

28 See letter to a Mr L’Espinasse, March 27, 1860, Hughenden Papers, Box 26, A/X/B/l, in which Disraeli denies editing the paper and attributes the allegation to Lockhart, who, he says, was the editor and ‘an expert in all the nebulous chicanery of these literary intrigues’. He also denied that his father’s breach with Murray had anything to do with him. It is a very misleading letter.

29 See M. & B., i, 77–78, where the passage is printed in full.

30 Contarini Fleming wrote ‘Manstein’, which evidently disguises Vivian Grey, in seven days, but there is no need to take this literally. The evidence from which Mr Lucien Wolf concludes that Disraeli did not begin till after February 14 also seems unconvincing. But the book, particularly Volume ii, shows every sign of having been hastily written.

31 1765–1846. Minor politician and novelist; son of John Ward, a Gibraltar merchant, and Rebecca Raphael, who was of Spanish Jewish descent.

32 The part played by the Austens in Disraeli’s life has been treated very fully by B. R. Jerman in his The Young Disraeli (1960).

33 Hughenden Papers, Box 12, A/IV/D/2, n.d. Deciphered and published by R. W. Stewart, ‘The Publication and Reception of Vivian Grey’, Cornhill Magazine, October 1960.

34 ibid., Box 12, A/IV/D/4, dated ‘25th’.

35 The easiest way of doing this today is to obtain the excellent Centenary Edition (1905), edited by Lucien Wolf, who prints the first edition of 1826 and provides a spirited, though not always accurate, biographical introduction. In an appendix Wolf indicates the main changes made by Disraeli in 1853. Unhappily the Centenary Edition appears to have been discontinued after one more novel, The Young Duke.

36 Disraeli similarly ‘bowdlerized’ some of his other early novels, in particular The Young Duke and Henrietta Temple.

37 Hughenden Papers, Box 11, A/III/C.

38 For the contrary argument, see Lucien Wolf’s introduction to Vivian Grey, xxxvi–xxxix, and for a compromise view Monypenny (i, 87–91), who is at much pains to argue that the Vivian Grey who lapses into a heartless villain at the end of Book IV is not a self-portrait. Surely no sensible person would argue otherwise.

39 Vivian Grey, Bk I, ch. 9 (8 in the 1853 edition).

40 In the original MS the name is Chiefston, evidently an allusion to Lockhart’s house, Chiefswood, which could be fairly described as a ‘cottage ornée’.

41 Mrs Millions was a take-off of Mrs J. D. Powles.

42 Stapylton Toad, MP, a minor character in the book, a solicitor and borough-monger of obscure origin. It is not clear who was the model, if anyone.

43 The Hon. E. Phipps, Memoir of Plumer Ward (1850), ii, 147.

44 Hughenden Papers, Box 12, A/IV/D/11.

45 July 1826. Ironically the London Magazine, before the author’s identity had been established, attributed it to one of the ‘Blackwood click.’

46 August 1826.

47 Disraeli omitted this passage from the 1853 edition.

48 M. & B., i, 75.

49 Vivian Grey (1st edition), Bk II, ch. 17 (16 in the 1853 edition).

50 He avowedly contributed the Modern Aesop, and one or two reviews, but the allegation that the Star Chamber was used to puff Vivian Grey has no foundation.

51 Disraeli denied, somewhat indirectly, authorship of the satire, in his preface to Part II of Vivian Grey, but this cannot be regarded as conclusive. For a discussion of this question, and the Star Chamber generally, see Michael Sadleir, Benjamin Disraeli: The Dunciad of Today (1928). Contrary to Monypenny and Lucien Wolf, he decides on internal evidence, style, diction, etc., that Disraeli not only wrote this poem but was the chief inspirer and effective editor of the short-lived journal. He is probably right, although in the absence of any external evidence we cannot be sure.

52 Murray Papers, dated ‘3rd’, and it must be May 3.

53 loc. cit.

54 Murray Papers.

55 Smiles, Murray, ii, 217.

56 Smiles, ii, 218, says that there was, on the strength of a letter to Murray from Isaac at the end of 1826. But the letter to which he refers is cold and formal in tone and there appears to have been no further correspondence between the two men on the old familiar basis.

57 Contarini Fleming, which was a financial failure, and the Gallomania, to which other authors contributed – both published in 1832.

58 Smiles, ii, 217.

59 Murray Papers.

60 Andrew Lang, Life and Letters of J. G. Lockhart (2 vols, 1896), ii, 199.

61 M. & B., i, 322.

62 See below, p. 1.

63 Part II of Vivian Grey produced £500.