Disraeli: A Personal History

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His manner, so another lady remarked, was entirely fitted to his ‘rather conspicuous attire’ and his theatrical gestures as he ‘delivered himself of high-flown compliments and sharp asides’. He performed his duties in Frederick’s Place adequately; but, like Charles Dickens, who was to start work in a smaller firm of solicitors a few years later, he yearned for other things. The books he read in his father’s library, the distinguished men he met at work and the conversations he had heard at Murray’s dinner table stirred his imagination and ambition. He felt himself worthy of a more dramatic future than that promised by the testaments and conveyances and ledgers of Frederick’s Place, Old Jewry.

Visitors to the house at 6 Bloomsbury Square, where his family had moved in 1817, described him as looking as though he were bored to death by the life that was led there. William Archer Shee, then a boy some years younger than himself, who had come to a children’s party at the D’Israelis’ house, recalled seeing him ‘in tight pantaloons with his hands in his pockets, looking very pale, bored and dissatisfied, and evidently wishing that we were all in bed. He looked like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, suffering from chronic dyspepsia.’

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In the office as well as at home, Disraeli spent as much time as he could in writing to please himself rather than the partners of Messrs Swain, Stevens, Maples, Pearse and Hunt. One of the earliest, if not perhaps the first, of his completed productions was a melodramatic play in verse, Rumpel Stilts Kin, based on the German folk tale about a deformed dwarf, Rumpelstiltskin, written in collaboration with William George Meredith, his sister Sarah’s rather staid and tedious fiancé, an undergraduate at Oxford and heir to a rich uncle.

A few months after Rumpel Stilts Kin was finished – and perhaps performed by the D’Israeli and Meredith families – Disraeli delivered to John Murray the manuscript of a novel to which he had given the title Aylmer Papillon, a short work intended, as its author said, to be a satire on ‘the present state of society’. Murray evidently did not rate the novel very highly but, reluctant to offend his young protégé, could not bring himself to write a letter of rejection. After a month had elapsed, Disraeli approached the publisher again; and, alluding impertinently to Murray’s burning of Byron’s Memoirs as being too salacious for publication, Disraeli wrote, ‘And, as you have some small experience in burning MSS, you will perhaps be so kind as to consign [mine] to the flames.’

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In the summer of 1824, Benjamin, by now aged nineteen, and his father, both of whom had been in indifferent health of late, decided to go away for six weeks on holiday on the Continent with Sarah’s fiancé William Meredith, who by then had taken his degree at Oxford. They went by steamer to Ostend and thence by diligence to Bruges, where Benjamin wrote the first of several long letters to his sister describing the places they visited, the sights they saw and, in some detail, the meals they ate. Both Benjamin and his father were enthusiastic trenchermen and Sarah was regaled with accounts of memorable meals which they enjoyed in the estaminets on their route through the Low Countries and the Rhine Valley.

Writing from Antwerp on 2 August, Benjamin told Sarah that ‘the hostess’ at Ghent had seemed ‘particularly desirous to give us a specimen of her cookery and there was a mysterious delay. Enter the waiter. A fricandeau, the finest I ever tasted, perfectly admirable, a small and very delicate roast joint, veal chops, a large dish of peas most wonderfully fine, cheese, a dessert, a salad pre-eminent even among the salads of Flanders which are unique for their delicate crispness and silvery whiteness…Cost only six francs, forming one of the finest specimens of exquisite cookery I ever witnessed.’

In Antwerp, the travellers stayed at the Grand Laboureur where there was unfortunately no table d’hôte, but they enjoyed ‘capital private feeds…the most luxurious possible’. ‘And my mother’, he added, ‘must really reform her table before our return. I have kept a journal of dinners for myself, and in doings in general for my father, so I shall leave the account of churches, cathedrals and cafés till we come home…love to Mère and all, Your affectionate Brother, B. Disraeli.’

‘The dinner was good,’ he added after describing with enthusiasm the pictures by Rubens in the Museum at Antwerp. ‘The Grand Laboureur is un hôtel pour les riches. The vol au vent of pigeons was admirable. The peas were singularly fine.’ The table d’hôte at the Belle Vue in Brussels was equally commendable – ‘dinner excellent – frogs – pâté de grenouilles – magnificent! – sublime’. He was most thankful that the English at the table d’hôte in Brussels shared a ‘vulgar but lucky prejudice against frogs. So had the pâté to myself,’ he recorded in his journal. ‘Eat myself blind.’ At Mechlin, the ‘oysters were as small as shrimps but delicately sweet’. ‘We always put up at the crack hotels,’ he wrote from Mainz, ‘and live perfectly en prince. The Governor allows us to debauch to the utmost, and Hochheimer, Johannisberg, Rudesheimer, Assmansshauser and a thousand other varieties are unsealed and floored with equal rapidity.’ At Frankfurt, the ‘Gâteau de Pouche’ was ‘superb beyond conception’.

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Occasionally Disraeli’s accounts of their travels were more than a little facetious. Describing their crossing by steamer to Ostend, he writes: ‘We had a very stiff breeze, and almost every individual was taken downstairs save ourselves who bore it all in the most manly and magnificent manner…The Governor was quite frisky on landing, and on the strength of mulled claret, etc., was quite the lion of Ostend…We rode on the Spa ponies to the distant springs…The Governor was particularly equestrian…I have become a most exquisite billiard player…Meredith and I talk French with a mixture of sublimity and sang-froid perfectly inimitable.’

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The sketches he provided for Sarah of individuals his party came across in their travels are more entertaining. He tells her, for instance, about an Irish tourist ‘who would have made an inimitable hero for [the comedian, Charles] Mathews. It was his first debut on the Continent, and, with a most plentiful supply of ignorance and an utter want of taste…I met him two or three times afterwards in different places, and his salutations were exceedingly rich. It was always “How do you do, Sir. Wonderful city this, Sir, wonderful! Pray have you seen the Crucifixion by Vandyke, wonderful picture, Sir, wonderful picture, Sir”. ’

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At Darmstadt, Disraeli sees the Grand Duke at a performance of Otello. He is an ‘immense amateur’. His ‘royal box is a large pavillon of velvet and gold in the midst of the theatre. The Duke himself in grand military uniform gave the word for the commencement of the overture, standing up all the time, beating time with one hand and watching the orchestra through an immense glass with the other.’

Occasionally, the diary reveals some inner thought or emotion:

Ghent, Sunday – High Mass. A dozen priests in splendid unity. Clouds of incense and one of Mozart’s sublimest Masses by an orchestra before which San Carlo might grow pale. The effect is inconceivably grand. The host raised and I flung myself on the ground.

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In another entry in his journal he wonders if German beggars would prove to be even more tiresome than Belgian ones: ‘But the traveller is well trained in Flanders…for your carriage never leaves an inn yard without a crowd of supplicating attendants and three old women, a dozen young ones, half a dozen men and all the children of the village attending you on your whole journey. The old women seem to have the best breath.’

There is, in the diary, a rare political observation. ‘The Belgians’, he wrote, ‘seem extremely hostile against the Dutch. It may be questioned whether, in case of a war, they may not rebel against the present authorities.’

This seems to have been the first comment of its kind that he made. He had not at that time seriously considered a career in politics. He had, however, come to one decision that was to upset ‘the Governor’: ‘I determined when descending those magical waters [of the Rhine] that I would not be a lawyer.’ ‘The hour of adventure had arrived. I was unmanageable.’

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Although determined not to return to the office in Frederick’s Place, or to go up to Oxford as his father had wanted him to do, Benjamin, on his return to London, did submit to his father’s wishes by not abandoning his legal training altogether: he followed Meredith in reading for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. But he did not relish the thought of becoming a barrister any more than he had taken to the idea of becoming a solicitor. ‘Pooh!’ he has his character Vivian Grey say. ‘Pooh! THE BAR! Law and bad jokes till we are forty, and then, with the most brilliant success, the prospect of gout and a coronet. Besides, to succeed as an advocate, I must be a great lawyer, and, to be a great lawyer, I must give up my chance of being a great man.’

(#litres_trial_promo) And, as though to emphasize his rejection of the idea of becoming successful as an advocate, he appeared one day in the Old Square chambers of his precise and pedantic cousin, Nathaniel Basevi, with a copy of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene prominently displayed.

He was soon to decide that ‘in England personal distinction is the only passport to the society of the great. Whether the distinction arises from fortune, family or talent is immaterial; but certain it is, to enter high society, a man must either have blood, a million or be a genius.’ He also decided that he himself must have both ‘Riches and Power’.

On his return to England Disraeli had found London’s financial houses and moneyed classes excited by that prospect of making such fortunes as they had hoped to do at the time of the fever of speculation resulting in the financial crisis known as the South Sea Bubble in 1720. On this later occasion, the excitement arose from the perceived opportunity of acquiring great riches from the exploitation of the gold and silver mines of South America and the profits to be derived from such companies as the Columbian Mining Association, the Chilean Mining Association and the Anglo-Mexican Mining Association which were promoted by John Powles, a persuasive merchant banker of rather dubious reputation whom Disraeli had come across while working in Frederick’s Place and who appears as the character Premium in Vivian Grey. ‘It immediately struck me’, Disraeli was later to say, ‘that, if fortunes were ever to be made, this was the moment and I accordingly paid great attention to American affairs.’

He threw himself into the business of acquiring a fortune with almost demonic energy. Although he had so very little money of his own, he bought shares in South American companies on credit, and further shares on John Murray’s behalf. The value of the shares increased enormously; but Disraeli declined to take an immediate profit in the hope of making yet more money; and then, inevitably, the share prices fell dramatically. Disraeli, however, remained optimistic and he wrote an anonymous and seriously misleading pamphlet, published by Murray, contradicting gloomy reports that drew a parallel between the present speculation and the South Sea Bubble. He produced accounts claiming that both he and John Murray had made handsome profits. He hoped to make more with money borrowed from both his uncle, George Basevi, and Robert Messer, the son of a rich stockbroker.

Not content with his endeavours to make a fortune, Disraeli planned at the same time to found a daily newspaper with the help of John Powles’s money and John Murray’s publishing expertise. With extraordinary rashness, Disraeli himself undertook to put up a quarter of the necessary capital. Meanwhile, he set out on the four-day journey to Scotland to see Sir Walter Scott and Scott’s shy and crabby son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, a journalist who had trained as a lawyer, whom he hoped to persuade to become the proposed newspaper’s editor. It was no wonder that he felt, as he told Robert Messer, ‘acutely dizzy’.

He found both Scott and Lockhart initially wary of committing themselves to the fortunes of a non-existent newspaper; and Disraeli, spending almost three weeks in Scotland – and ‘revelling in the various beauties of a Scotch breakfast of cold grouse and marmalade’

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To give authority and encouragement to Disraeli’s approach, John Murray wrote to Lockhart:

I left my young friend Disraeli to make his own way with you…But as you have received him with so much kindness and favour, I think it right to confirm my good opinion which you appear so early to have formed of him, by communicating to you a little of my own. And I may frankly say that I never met with a young man of greater promise…He is a good scholar, hard student, a deep thinker, of great energy, equal perseverance and indefatigable application, and a complete man of business. His knowledge of human nature…[has] often surprised me in a young man who has hardly passed his twentieth year, and, above all, his mind and heart are as pure as when they were first formed.

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John Murray’s high opinion of Disraeli was reinforced by the young man’s father:

I know nothing against him but his youth, a fault which a few seasons of experience will infallibly correct; but I have observed that the habits and experience he has acquired as a lawyer often greatly serve him on matters of business. His views are vast, but they are based on good sense and he is most determinedly serious when he sets to work.

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A more cautious note was sounded by one of Murray’s legal advisers, William Wright, who warned Lockhart that, while Disraeli was ‘a clever young fellow’, his judgement wanted ‘settling down’. ‘He has never had to struggle with a single difficulty,’ Wright continued. ‘Nor has he been called on to act in any affairs in which his mind has been necessarily forced to decide and choose in difficult circumstances. At present his chief exertions as to matters of decision have been with regard to the selection of his food, his enjoyment and his clothing. I take it that he is wiser than his father but he is inexperienced and untried in the world…You cannot prudently trust much to his judgement.’

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Wright went on to suggest that ‘whatever our friend D’Israeli [might] say…on this subject’, Lockhart’s acceptance of the editorship of a newspaper ‘would be infra dig, and a losing of caste’. This was ‘not the case in being editor of a Review like the Quarterly [Review, Murray’s Tory journal]. That was the office of a scholar and a gentleman.’

The longer Disraeli remained in Scotland, the closer he grew to Lockhart.

(#litres_trial_promo) Scott, however, was less sure about the young man. He described him as a ‘sprig of the rod of Aaron’, ‘a young coxcomb’; and, when Lockhart came down to London to meet Murray, the meeting with the publisher was not a success since Murray was rather drunk – as he not infrequently was in moments of stress.

Eventually, however, it was arranged that Lockhart, who declined the editorship of the proposed new newspaper, should become editor of the Quarterly Review at a handsome salary of £1,000 a year while at the same time contributing articles for an even more generous sum to the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Disraeli occupied himself with the establishment of this paper, writing to proposed correspondents in Britain and abroad,

(#litres_trial_promo) searching for premises, settling upon a house in Great George Street as suitable offices, employing George Basevi as architect for their conversion, getting himself increasingly involved in matters his experience did not qualify him adequately to deal with, and making outrageously false claims as to the correspondents he had enlisted, including Dr Edward Copleston, Provost of Oriel College, Oxford; then, having suggested a name for the newspaper, The Representative – which made its long-delayed appearance in January 1825 – he had nothing more to do with it.

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Murray wished heartily that he had not had anything to do with it either. Editor followed editor of a newspaper which was a disaster from the beginning. After six months he had lost over £25,000 and felt compelled to call a halt. Publication ceased, its closure unlamented even by those few readers who had troubled to peruse its tedious pages.

(#litres_trial_promo) Murray blamed Disraeli and, in Vivian Grey, Disraeli was later to describe a scene which was, no doubt, based on one which took place at 50 Albemarle Street and in which the character whom Murray took to be based upon himself ‘raved’ and ‘stamped’ and ‘blasphemed’, levelling ‘abuse against his former “monstrous clever” young friend…who was now…an adventurer – a swindler – ayoung scoundrel – a base, deluding, flattering, fawning villain etc. etc. etc.’

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