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6 ‘THE JEW D’ESPRIT’

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‘Now tell me, what do you want to be?’

SOON AFTER HIS RETURN to Bradenham in 1832, Disraeli’s book, Contarini Fleming, was with its publishers and The Wondrous Tale of Alroy was shortly to follow it.

John Murray was at first in two minds as to whether or not to accept Contarini Fleming. Sir Walter Scott’s biographer, J. G. Lockhart, expressed doubts about it, and suggested that it be sent for an opinion to Henry Hart Milman, the poet and historian, who had few reservations. It might well be ‘much abused’ and was ‘very extraordinary’, Milman said, but it was also ‘very powerful and ‘very poetical’. William Beckford, to whom Disraeli sent a copy, was also enthusiastic. ‘How wildly original!’ he wrote in reply. ‘How full of intense thought! How awakening! How delightful!’ It was ‘a truly wonderful tale’.1

‘As far as I can learn,’ Disraeli wrote to his sister on 28 May 1832, ‘it has met with decided success. Among others Tom Campbell [the poet and editor of the New Monthly Magazine], who as he says, never reads any books but his own, is delighted with it. “I shall review it myself,” he exclaims.’2

Contarini is universally liked, but moves slowly,’ Disraeli continued in another letter to Sarah a few weeks later. ‘The staunchest admirer I have in London, and the most discerning appreciator [of the book] is old Madame d’Arblay [the former Fanny Burney]. I have a long letter which I will show you – capital.’3

Heinrich Heine was even more enthusiastic. ‘Modern English letters have given us no equal to Contarini Fleming,’ Heine wrote. ‘Cast in our Teutonic mould, it is nevertheless one of the most original works ever written; profound, poignant, pathetic.’

This was a view the author himself was inclined to share. ‘I shall always consider [Contarini Fleming] as the perfection of English prose,’ he wrote with characteristic immodesty, ‘and a chef d’ouvre [sic].’ But the sales of the book remained sluggish; and the author and publisher received no more than £36 between them.4

‘Don’t be nervous about the sale, that’s nothing,’ Tom Campbell tried to comfort Disraeli. ‘This will last. It’s a philosophical work, Sir.’

Disheartened by the poor sales of Contarini Fleming, Murray returned the manuscript of Disraeli’s next book, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, when it was offered to him the following year. Published instead by Henry Colburn, it was even less successful than its predecessor; and, while its author had had ‘no doubt of its success’, it aroused derision rather than the ‘golden opinions’ which, so he told Sarah, he was expecting.

‘Oh reader, dear! Do pray look here,’ one critic wrote in a parody of its style, ‘and you will spy the curly hair and forehead fair, and nose so high and gleaming eye of Benjamin Dis-ra-e-li, the wondrous boy who wrote Alroy in rhyme and prose, only to show, how long ago, victorious Judah’s lion-banner rose.’*5

Having withdrawn his name from the books of Lincoln’s Inn, Disraeli now began seriously to consider the political career which he had been vaguely contemplating for some time past. While abroad, he had become an assiduous reader of that ‘excellent publication’, Galignani’s Messenger, and on his return he declared that, ‘in the event of a new election’, he intended to offer himself as a parliamentary candidate for High Wycombe, the constituency in which Bradenham was situated. In the meantime, with Edward Lytton Bulwer’s help, he determined to make himself better known in London society.

In letters to Sarah he charted his success in this respect. At Bulwer’s house in Hertford Street, so he told her, he met Lord Strangford and Lord Mulgrave, later Marquess of Normanby, with whom he also had ‘a great deal of conversation’, and Lord Eliot, later Earl of St Germans, who invited him to a male dinner party where he sat next to John Charles Herries, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘old, grey-haired, financial’, who turned out to be ‘quite a literary man – so false are one’s impressions’.

At one ‘very brilliant party’ at Bulwer’s he met Charles Pelham Villiers, the Earl of Clarendon’s younger brother, Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton, as well as Colonel Webster, ‘who married Bodding-ton’s daughter’, a man who ‘talked to [him] very much’ and ‘turned out to be Lord William Lennox’, ‘Colonel and Captain A’Court, brothers of Lord Heytesbury’, and Captain Yorke, later fourth Earl of Hardwicke.

Disraeli’s provenance was not such as to gain him entry yet into the greatest houses, but less particular hostesses, encouraged by Bulwer, welcomed his company and enjoyed his sprightly, witty, fertile conversation. He was entertained by Lady Cork, Lady Dudley Stuart and Lady Charleville; he became a regular guest at Lady Blessington’s house, and a close friend of Lady Blessington’s lover, the attractive, egotistical, inordinately extravagant Count D’Orsay, the husband of her stepdaughter and the acknowledged arbiter of dandiacal fashion.

At Lady Blessington’s Disraeli was introduced to Lord Durham; at the opera he met William Beckford; at Lord Eliot’s he sat next to the awkward and reserved Sir Robert Peel, the former Home Secretary and future Prime Minister, who – so he confidently assured his sister in letters which boasted outrageously of his social success – was ‘most gracious’. ‘He is a very great man, indeed,’ he told Sarah, ‘and they all seem afraid of him. By-the-bye, I observed that he attacked his turbot most entirely with his knife…I can easily conceive that he could be very disagreeable, but yesterday [at Eliot’s] he was in a most condescending mood and unbent with becoming haughtiness. I reminded him by my dignified familiarity both that he was an ex-Minister and I apresent Radical.’6

Disraeli’s reception by Peel seems, however, not to have been so obliging as he claimed. ‘Probably from nervousness, Disraeli did not recommend himself to Sir Robert Peel,’ according to Lord St Germans. He asked him to lend him some papers. But ‘Peel buried his face in his neckcloth and did not speak a word to Disraeli during the rest of the meal…From his appearance or manner Sir Robert Peel seemed to take an intuitive dislike to him.’7

Peel was far from being the only person whom Disraeli offended. He himself continued to assure his sister that he was the greatest social success both in London and in the country. Certainly, there were those who were overwhelmed by his brilliance. Yet there were many others who were exasperated by him; by his habit of pontificating with his thumbs tucked into the armholes of his waistcoat; by his irritating practice of prefacing his remarks with an incantation, picked up in the Near East, ‘Allah is great’; by his elaborate affectation of weary boredom on being asked to meet someone whom he had no wish to know.

‘The world calls me “conceited”,’ he wrote in what has become known as the ‘Mutilated Diary’ of 1833, because large sections have been excised from it. ‘The world is in error. I trace all the blunders of my life to sacrificing my own opinion to that of others.’8

At Bulwer’s, as well as dandies and literati and up and coming politicians there was also ‘a large sprinkling’ of bluestockings, among them Lady Morgan, the Irish novelist, Caroline Norton, R. B. Sheridan’s granddaughter, the Whig hostess, and Letitia Landon, the poet, with whom her host was believed to be having an affair. She looked, so Disraeli said, ‘the very personification of Brompton – pink satin dress and white satin shoes, red cheeks, snub nose, and her hair a la Sappho’. At a later soirée, Disraeli met her again; but this time she ‘was perfectly à la française and really looked pretty’.9

The prolific novelist and dramatist, Catherine Gore – whose Manners of the Day had been praised by King George IV as ‘the best and most amusing novel published in his remembrance’ – was also there, and so was another bluestocking who, so Bulwer said, was particularly anxious to meet him. ‘Oh! My dear fellow,’ Disraeli said, ‘I cannot really – the power of repartee has deserted me.’10 But his host insisted. ‘I have pledged myself – you must come,’ he said, and Disraeli was accordingly introduced to a very sumptuous personage looking like ‘a full rich blown rose’. ‘I never’, Disraeli commented, ‘rec’d so cordial a reception in my life.’11

On another occasion, Bulwer’s wife asked him to take a lady, considerably older than himself, into dinner. ‘Oh! Anything rather than that insufferable woman,’ he said before walking languidly towards her.

‘In the course of an evening at Bulwer’s,’ Disraeli told Sarah, ‘I stumbled over Tom Moore, to whom I introduced myself…“I have heard of you, as everybody has,” he said. “Did we not meet at Murray’s once?”’12

He went on to talk about London’s gentlemen’s clubs, membership of which Disraeli was finding it difficult to acquire. He would have liked to join White’s which, founded at White’s Chocolate House in 1693 on the site of what is now Boodle’s, was the oldest and grandest of the St James’s gentlemen’s clubs; but its members were most unlikely to support the candidature of a prospective member of Disraeli’s background, appearance, race and manner, not to mention his authorship of Vivian Grey. Much the same objections would be raised by the members of Boodle’s, a large proportion of whom were country gentlemen of decidedly conservative views, and of Brooks’s, membership of which was described in 1822 by John Campbell, later Lord Chancellor, as a ‘feather in [his] cap’ since it consisted of ‘the first men of rank and talent in England’.

Disraeli then thought of the Travellers’ Club, founded in 1819 for gentlemen who had travelled abroad for at least five hundred miles from London in a straight line; and, since he had travelled further than most, he was qualified on that score. But its members did not want him; most particularly the Whig Lord Auckland, whose influence with other members of the committee was paramount, did not want him, and so he was blackballed. This was no disgrace, he assured Sarah. ‘These things happen every night and to the first people.’

He would, he decided, join instead the Athenaeum, of which his father had been a founding member. This, the most intellectually élite of London’s clubs, had been founded as recently as 1824 for artists, writers and scientists, almost singlehandedly by John Wilson Croker, the Irish politician and essayist whom Lord Macaulay detested ‘more than cold boiled veal’. Membership of this club was more likely for Disraeli to achieve than that of the Travellers’, although its members did not take kindly to the young man when they heard that he had ignored the club’s rules by walking upstairs to talk to his father in the library. However, his friend, Edward Lytton Bulwer, undertook to support his candidature. Disraeli had grown very attached to Bulwer, his one close friend in the literary and publishing world and, so he said, one of the few men with whom his intellect came ‘into collision with benefit’. He invited him to stay at Bradenham, telling Sarah that he was to do there ‘just what he liked’; and he went with Bulwer for a short holiday to Bath where they arrived late one evening at a public ball in all their extravagant finery and, as he was delighted to record, ‘got quite mobbed’.

Bulwer thought it as well to warn him, however, that he might well be blackballed at the Athenaeum, as its members would have reason to fear that he would ‘clap them into a Book…These quiet fellows have a great horror of us Novel writers,’ Bulwer explained. ‘For my part, if I had not got into all my Clubs (at least the respectable ones) before I had taken to Authoring I should certainly be out of them all at this time.’13

While waiting for his election to the Athenaeum, Disraeli was advised to try for membership of the recently founded Conservative Club; but he thought it unwise to join a club so obviously associated with the Tories; and it was not until 1836 that he joined a club with a less identifying name, the Carlton.

By this time the committee of the Athenaeum had made up their mind; and Disraeli was blackballed as he had been by the Travellers’. His family believed that John Wilson Croker was to blame; and in his novel, Coningsby, Disraeli was to caricature Croker as Rigby, a man ‘destitute of all imagination and noble sentiments…blessed with a vigorous, mendacious fancy, fitful in small expedients, and never happier than when devising shifts for great men’s scruples’.*

Denied membership of both the Athenaeum and the Travellers’, Disraeli joined a less prestigious club, the Albion, which few had heard of and which did not long survive.* However, it turned out to be ‘a very capital club’, so he was to say. ‘Few in number, but not at all the set I anticipated – a great number of M.P.s and tho’ not fashionable, distinguished. The grub and wines the best in London, and all on a finished scale.’14

Those who saw Disraeli for the first time in the reception rooms of private houses were not surprised by the difficulties he encountered in finding a gentlemen’s club which would have him as a member, since the young man with the lustrous black curls would stride about in clothes which seemed almost to excite ridicule, suits of satin-lined black velvet with embroidered waistcoats, rings on his gloved fingers, gold chains round his neck. ‘He wore waistcoats of the most gorgeous colours and the most fantastic patterns with much gold embroidery, velvet pantaloons and shoes adorned with red rosettes,’ wrote one observer. ‘His black hair pomaded and elaborately curled and his person redolent with perfume.’15

The beautiful, eccentric and quarrelsome Irishwoman, Rosina Bulwer – for whose extravagances her husband had to pay by his writings – did not at all care for him. One day in her house, wearing his exotic green velvet trousers, he rose from a cane chair to stalk about the room with his coat-tails over his arms, revealing the marks of the chair imprinted on his seat. Who is that? asked Samuel Rogers. Rosina, violently anti-semitic, answered, ‘Oh! Young Disraeli, the Jew.’ ‘Rather the Wandering Jew,’ said Rogers, ‘with the mark of Cane upon him.’16

A pretentious woman, who appeared at her husband’s parties in a ‘blaze of jewels’ and carrying about with her a tiny dog named Fairy, with which she seemed besotted, Rosina Bulwer did not trouble to conceal her dislike of Disraeli, of whom she was to draw an unpleasant portrait in her novel, Very Successful (1856), in which he appears as Jericho Jabber, the ‘Jew d’Esprit’ who marches about the room, ‘ostentatiously admiring the ceiling’. Nor, indeed, did she get on well with her husband, who appears as the villain in her novel, Chevely, or the Man of Honour, which was published soon after she had consented to a legal separation. Nor did Disraeli try to hide his dislike of Rosina Bulwer and of the Irish generally: ‘I never see her’, he said, ‘without thinking of a hod of mortar and a potato. Nature certainly intended that she should console her sorrows in Potheen.’*17

Unsuccessful in obtaining membership of a good London club, Disraeli was also initially unsuccessful in his attempt to get into Parliament. He had publicly announced his desire to do so at a party given by Caroline Norton, in whose house he met Lord Melbourne. ‘Well, now, tell me, what do you want to be?’ Melbourne asked him after they had been talking together for some time. ‘I want’, the young man replied, ‘to be Prime Minister.’ ‘Melbourne gave a long sigh.’18

It was, perhaps, on this occasion at Mrs Norton’s that Disraeli threw across the table to Melbourne a letter from Paul Emile Botta, the Italian doctor and archaeologist, describing Arab sexual practices. The painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, was of the company and was shocked. Talking ‘much of the East’, Disraeli seemed to Haydon ‘to be tinged with a disposition to palliate its infamous vices. I meant to ask him if he preferred Aegypt, where sodomy was preferment to England where it very properly was Death.’ Referring later to Disraeli’s behaviour, Haydon commented, ‘I think no man would go on in that odd manner, wear green velvet trousers and ruffles, without having odd feelings. He ought to be kicked. I hate the look of the fellow.’19

Although he had already decided to offer himself as a candidate at High Wycombe, he had not yet made up his mind which party to commit himself to. He had an instinctive dislike of the Whigs, but had not yet otherwise developed any strong political inclinations. In any case, he felt drawn to Westminster not, it seems, by any sense of public service, but by ambition and vanity, the desire for fame, the need to make himself remarkable. Realizing that it might prove fatal to attach himself to a falling star, he shied away from the Tories, whose influence was rapidly waning; and he made up his mind to present himself as a Radical. ‘Toryism is worn out,’ he told Benjamin Austen, ‘and I cannot condescend to be a Whig…I start in the high Radical interest.’20

Disraeli: A Personal History

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