Disraeli: A Personal History

Mrs Austen expressed herself ‘quite delighted’. ‘I have gone through it twice,’ she wrote, ‘and the more I read it the better I am pleased.’ She entered into ‘the spirit of the book entirely’. She was ‘in a state of complete excitation on the subject,’ she wrote later. She was also attracted by its author. ‘Remember’, she wrote to him, sending the letter by a servant as though from her husband, ‘that you have the entrée whenever you like to come – at all hours – in the morn[ing] I am generally alone.’

Disraeli immediately settled down to finish the book – which he dedicated to his father, ‘the best and greatest of men’ – sending it, chapter by chapter, to Mrs Austen who, editing it as she went along, copied it out in her own hand to protect the anonymity of the author who was supposed to be a gentleman well qualified to reveal the foibles and eccentricities of the beau monde. When enough had been written for her to approach a publisher, Sarah Disraeli sent the manuscript to Henry Colburn who, offering £300 for the copyright, made much of the supposed identity of the author. ‘By the by,’ Colburn said one day to the editor of a magazine in which he hoped the novel would be reviewed, ‘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.’19

The story is to a considerable extent autobiographical: Vivian Grey is the son of a literary man with a huge private income; he leaves school to read in his father’s library; he sets out to impress the politically influential and treacherous Marquess of Carabas, whose resemblance, in certain respects, to John Murray, the publisher himself found insupportable and, in the end, unforgivable.

The first part of Vivian Grey was published on 22 April 1826 and reviewed at length by William Jerdan in the Literary Gazette, a magazine of which he was editor. The book sold well and was, in general, favourably reviewed, although Jerdan maintained that the anonymous author knew too little about society to have had much experience of it himself and too much about the literary world about which the ‘mere man of fashion knows little and cares less’.

Everyone was talking about the book, Plumer Ward told Sara Austen. ‘Its wit, raciness and boldness are admired’; and it became a kind of literary game to identify the models on which various characters were based. Lord Brougham, George Canning, Lord Eldon, Lady Caroline Lamb, John Murray’s German sister-in-law Mrs William Elliot, Harriot Mellon, the actress, wife of the banker Thomas Coutts, the playwright Theodore Hook, and J.G. Lockhart were all identified as being represented or caricatured in the book – as well, of course, as John Murray, the Marquess of Carabas, whose loquacity in his cups is clearly based on Murray’s:

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 the 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.’20

Murray threatened to go to law and might well have done so had not his friend, the solicitor Sharon Turner, advised against it. ‘If the author were to swear to me that he meant the Marquess for you,’ Turner assured Murray, ‘I could not believe him. It is in all points so entirely unlike.’ But Murray was unconvinced. He never invited Isaac D’Israeli to 50 Albemarle Street again; and never published another of his books. He turned his back on him and Mrs D’Israeli when he came across them in the street.

When the authorship of Vivian Grey became generally known, comment about it was far more wounding than it had been when Henry Colburn first published it. Instead of the well-informed authority which readers had been led to believe its author was, he was now revealed to be, in the words of Blackwood’s Magazine, ‘an obscure person, for whom nobody cares a straw’. He was, in fact, ‘a swindler’ in the words of the Literary Magnet, ‘a swindler – a scoundrel – a liar…who, having heard that several horsewhips were preparing for him…had the meanness to call upon various persons who have been introduced in Vivian Grey, and deny, upon his honour as a gentleman, that he was the author of the book’.

Disraeli was particularly upset by the review in Blackwood’s, and in a later novel he described his feelings upon reading it: ‘With what horror, with what blank despair, with what supreme appalling astonishment did I find myself for the first time in my life the subject of the most reckless, the most malignant and the most adroit ridicule…The criticism fell from my hand…I felt that sickness of heart that we experience in our first scrape. I was ridiculous. It was time to die.’21

In the face of such attacks as that in Blackwood’s, Disraeli fell ill. ‘What is the matter?’, Sara Austen, who was by now half in love with him, wrote anxiously. ‘My shaking hand will tell you that I am nervous with the shock of your illness…For God’s sake take care of yourself. I dare not say for my sake do so…If without risk you can come out tomorrow, let me see you at twelve or at any hour which will suit you better. I shall not leave the house till I see you. I shall be miserably anxious till I do. My spirits are gone till you bring a renewal of them.’22 When his doctor advised him against going out, Mrs Austen suggested that he went abroad for a time with her husband and herself.

Affecting to make light of the attacks on him and his book, Disraeli wrote to Austen’s husband facetiously suggesting that, although he had left his last place ‘on account of the disappearance of the silver spoons’, he defied anyone to declare that he was not sober and honest, except when entrusted with the key of the wine cellar, when he had candidly to confess that he had ‘an ugly habit of stealing the Claret, getting drunk and kissing the maids’.23

Despite the frivolous tone of this letter, Disraeli was deeply upset by the attacks to which he was subjected, not so much those upon his book as those upon him personally. He affected to be little concerned now or later about these attacks and allowed a new edition of the book, edited by his sister, to appear in 1853, maintaining most improbably that the characters in it were not drawn from life. Yet in the summer of 1826 he fell into an even deeper depression. He spent much of each day in his bedroom in Bloomsbury Square with the blinds drawn. On the verge of a nervous breakdown such as his father had once suffered, he welcomed the Austens’ suggestion that they travel abroad together.

3 A CONTINENTAL HOLIDAY

‘I feel now that it is not prejudice when I declare that England with all her imperfections is worth all the world together.’

HAVING READILY ACCEPTED the Austens’ suggestion of a Continental holiday, Disraeli was equally ready to borrow the money to pay for it and, having made arrangements to do so, he wrote the first of his reports describing his journey to his father on 9 August:

My dear Father, We reached Paris Sunday afternoon and are now in the Rue de Rivoli, the best situation here…Paris is delightful. I never was so much struck with anything in the whole course of my life…I expected another London but there are no points of resemblance. I did not expect in so short a distance to have met such a contrariety of manners and life…* I am going to the Louvre this morning and to the Opera this evening…I have not kept my journal, but of course shall…God bless you.

Yours most affectionately,

B. Disraeli.1

A fortnight or so later, on 21 August from Geneva, he wrote again, assuring his father that the ‘unparalleled heat of the season’ did not affect him in the least, and that he had not had ‘a day’s nor an hour’s illness’ since he had left England: he felt ‘ten thousand times better’ than he had done for the past three years. He would, no doubt, have enjoyed the trip more had Austen been a more entertaining companion and had not Sara been so coyly flirtatious, so ready to speak French even more quickly than she did English, and had she not kept so critical an eye on the amount of Burgundy he drank while affecting to be amused by it.2

From Geneva, Disraeli wrote again to his father:

I take a row now every night with Maurice, Lord Byron’s celebrated boatman [who] is very handsome and very vain, but has been made so by the English, of whom he is a regular pet…He talks of nothing but Lord Byron…He told me that in the night of the famous storm described in the third Canto of C[hilde] H[arold], had they been out five minutes more the boat must have been wrecked. He told Lord Byron of the danger of such a night voyage, and the only answer which B. made was stripping quite naked and folding round him a great robe de chambre so that in case of wreck he was ready prepared to swim immediately…

One day Byron sent for him and, sitting down in the boat, he put a pistol on each side (which was his invariable practice) and then gave him 300 napoleons, ordering him to row to Chillon. He then had two torches lighted in the dungeon and wrote for two hours and a half. On coming out, the gendarme who guarded the castle humbly asked for quelque-chose à boire. ‘Give him a napoleon,’ said his Lordship. ‘De trop, milor,’ said Maurice, who being but recently installed in his stewardship was somewhat mindful of his master’s interest. ‘Do you know who I am?’ rejoined the master, ‘Give it to him and tell him that the donor is Lord Byron!’ This wonderful piece of information must have produced a great effect on the poor miserable tippling gendarme. But in the slightest thing was Byron, by Maurice’s account, most ludicrously ostentatious. He gave him one day five napoleons for a swimming race across the lake. At the sight of the club foot Maurice thought he was sure to win, but his Lordship gained by five minutes.

Byron, he says, was not a quick swimmer, but he was never exhausted, by which means he generally won when the distance was great. One morning Maurice called for him very early to swim. Byron brought to the boat his breakfast, consisting of cold duck, &c., and three or four bottles of wine, and then amused himself, while they were sailing to the appointed place, by throwing the provisions gradually into the water. Upon this, honest Maurice gently hinted that he had not himself breakfasted, and that he should swim much better if he had some portion of his Lordship’s superfluity. ‘Friend Maurice,’ said B., ‘it ill becomes true Christians to think of themselves; I shall give you none. You see I eat no breakfast myself; do you refrain also for the sake of the fishes.’ He then continued his donations to the pikes (which here are beautiful) and would not bestow a single crumb on his companion. ‘This is all very well,’ says Maurice, ‘but his Lordship forgot one little circumstance. He had no appetite; I had.’ He says that he never saw a man eat so little as B. in all his life, but that he would drink three or four bottles of the richest wines for his breakfast.3

According to Sara Austen, Disraeli also refused to stint himself with wine. ‘He seems to enjoy everything,’ she told his sister, ‘and has just said High Mass for a third bottle of Burgundy.’4

‘Mrs A[usten] is very well,’ Disraeli reported in turn to his father. ‘I hope to God my mother is better. Love to all.’

A fortnight or so later, Disraeli gave a further report to his father from Milan, describing the ‘painfully sublime’ scenery of the Alps which had also deeply impressed so many travellers from the north in the earlier days of the Grand Tour when one such tourist ‘started with affright’ as he obtained the first glimpse of their ‘awful and tremendous amphitheatre’.

‘We gazed till our eyes ached, and yet dared not withdraw them from the passing wonders,’ Disraeli told his father, having driven across the Simplon Pass which had been created on Napoleon’s orders some twenty-five years before. ‘Nothing could be more awful than the first part of our passage; the sublimity of the scenery was increased by the partial mists and the gusts of rain. Nothing is more terrific than the near roar of a cataract which is covered by a mist. It is horrible.’5

The journey through the Alps was interrupted by an excursion to the Great St Bernard, so Disraeli recalled years later, and ‘the brotherhood, on hearing that a young Englishman was in the hospice, expressed an anxious desire to see me, and I waited on the Superior. I found that all the anxiety arose from a desire to hear how the Thames Tunnel [work upon which had begun some years before and was not completed until 1843] had succeeded. I had to confess that I had never seen it, and I afterwards reflected that one must travel to learn what really is to be seen in one’s own country, and resolved at once on my return to supply the omission. But, do you know, I have never seen it yet.’6

When we arrived at the summit of the road the weather cleared [Disraeli continued his account in his letter to his father] and we found ourselves surrounded by snow. The scenery here and for a mile or two before was perfect desolation, cataracts coursing down crumbled avalanches whose horrible surface was only varied by the presence of one or two blasted firs. Here in this dreary and desolate scene burst forth a small streak of blue sky, the harbinger of the Italian heaven. The contrast on descending into Italy is wonderfully striking…the purple mountains, the glittering lakes, the cupola’d convents, the many-windowed villas crowning luxuriant-wooded hills, the undulation of shore, the projecting headland, the receding bay, the roadside uninclosed, yet bounded with walnut and vine and fig and acacia and almond trees bending down under the load of their fruit, the wonderful effect of light and shade, the trunks of every tree looking black as ebony…the thousand villages each with a tall, thin tower, the large melons trailing over walls, and, above all, the extended prospect, are so striking after the gloom of alpine passes.7

By way of Lake Maggiore, Disraeli and his friends came upon Lake Como, ‘a gem’, the shore of which was ‘covered with glittering palaces’, one of which was the Villa d’Este, the residence of the late Queen Caroline, the detested, lubricious German wife of King George IV, whose antics with her major-domo and others of her entourage had led to her conduct being examined by the House of Lords.

‘The Villa’s apartments are left in exactly the same state’ as she had left them to return to England to claim her rights as Queen five or so years before. ‘There is the theatre in which she acted Columbine, and the celebrated statues of Adam and Eve carved with the yet more celebrated fig leaves. It is a villa of the first grade, and splendidly adorned, but the ornaments are, without an exception, so universally indelicate that it was painful to view them in the presence of a lady…Here, if they possessed any interest, might you obtain thousands of stories of her late Majesty, but the time is passed, thank God, for them. Our riots in her favour are the laughing stock of Italy.’8

Having examined everything worth seeing in Milan, and admired the dress of his fellow dandy Count Gicogna – ‘the leader of the ton at Milan, a dandy of genius worthy of Brummell’9 – Disraeli and his friends moved on to Brescia, then to Verona, which was, so he said, ‘full of pictures which have never been painted’, then on to Vicenza, where the ‘famous Palladian palaces’ were ‘in decay’ and disgustingly smelly. ‘They are built of brick,’ he wrote, ‘sometimes plastered, occasionally white-washed; the red material is constantly appearing and vies in hideous colour with the ever offensive roof. It is a miserable thing that a man worthy of Athens or Rome should have worked with such materials.’ The Villa Rotunda, which had served as a model for the Earl of Burlington’s Chiswick House, was in an advanced state of dilapidation.

From Vicenza Disraeli and his friends set out for Padua and, following the course of the Brenta, arrived in Venice on 8 September as the sun was setting ‘on a grand fête day’.

They took a gondola to their hotel, which was, so Disraeli told his father,

once the proud residence of the Bernadinis, a family which has given more than one Doge to the old Republic;* the floors of our rooms were of marble, the hangings of satin, the ceilings, painted by Tintoretto and his scholars, full of Turkish triumphs and trophies, the chairs of satin and the gilding, though of two hundred years’ duration, as brightly burnished as the new mosaic invention. After a hasty dinner we rushed to the mighty Place of St Mark. It was crowded. Two Greek and one Turkish ship of war were from accidental circumstances in port and their crews mingled with the other spectators…Tired with travelling we left the gay scene but the moon was so bright that a juggler was conjuring in a circle under our window, and an itinerant Italian opera performing by our bridge. Serenades were constant during the whole night; indeed music is never silent in Venice. I wish I could give you an idea of the moonlight there, but that is impossible. Venice by moonlight is an enchanted city; the floods of silver light upon the moresco architecture, the perfect absence of all harsh sounds of carts and carriages, the never-ceasing music on the waters produced an effect on the mind which cannot be experienced, I am sure, in any other city in the world.10

The next five days were spent in sightseeing and, in a later letter to his father, Disraeli described his impressions of the Doges’ Palace – in which ‘in every room you are reminded of the glory and the triumphs of the republic’ – and of St Mark’s, that ‘Christian mosque’, ‘a pile of precious stones’, outside which the four ‘brazen horses’ – not long since returned from Paris, having been looted on Napoleon’s orders – ‘amble, not prance as some have described them’.

Napoleon had also given orders for the gates of the Ghetto to be pulled down and for the Jews to live where they liked. Many Jews had chosen to remain, however, and Disraeli’s great-aunt was still living there. If he knew of her presence, he made no effort to seek her out; nor did he try to see his Basevi cousins in Verona; nor yet did he go to Cento where his grandfather had been born.

‘According to common opinion,’ however, Disraeli ‘saw all that ought to be seen but never felt less inclined to quit a place’ than he felt on leaving Venice for Bologna. On his way there he made an excursion to the tomb of Petrarch at Arqua and from Ferrara he went to Tasso’s cell. ‘The door posts of this gloomy dungeon are covered with the names of its visitors,’ he wrote. ‘Here scratched with a great nail on the brick wall I saw scrawled “Byron” and immediately beneath it, in a neat banker’s hand was written “Sam Rogers”’.*11

Reluctant as he had been to leave Bologna also, Disraeli found Florence ‘a most delightful city’ and astonishingly cheap; ‘an English family of the highest respectability may live in Florence with every convenience and keep a handsome carriage, horses, liveries etc. for five hundred a year’, that was to say in present-day terms about £17,000 a year.

‘You may live in a palace built by Michael Angelo,’ he continued, ‘keep a villa two miles from the city in a most beautiful situation, with vineyards, fruit and pleasure gardens, keep two carriages, have your opera box, and live in every way as the first Florentine nobility, go to Court, have your own night for receiving company on less than a thousand a year.’12

‘There are some clever artists and sculptors in Florence,’ Disraeli told his father:

Among the latter since the death of Canova, Bertolini [Bartolini] is reckoned the most eminent in Italy.† He is a man of genius. I had the honour of a long conversation with him…He is a friend of Chantrey but the god of his idolatry, and indeed of all Italians, is Flaxman.

In one of my speculations I have been disappointed. In the Pitti Palace there is the most beautiful portrait of Charles I by Vandyke, the most pleasing and noble likeness that I have seen. It is a picture highly esteemed. I engaged a miniature painter here to make me an exquisite copy of this picture with which I intended to surprise you. After a week’s work he has brought it today, but has missed the likeness! And yet he was the Court painter, Signor Carloni. I have refused to take the work and am embroiled in a row but in this country firmness is alone necessary and the Italians let you do what you like, so I’ve no fear as to the result. My mortification and disappointment, however, are extreme.13

This letter was written on 29 September 1826. The next was written in Turin on 10 October and in it, having given his impressions of Pisa – ‘where the Cathedral and its more wonderful Baptistry, the leaning tower and the Campo Santo rivetted [his] attention’ – he said that he expected to be at Dover on the 24th, having, according to Austen’s calculations, travelled over two thousand miles, and his share of the expenses, including £20 for prints and other purchases, being no more than £150.14 On 15 October he wrote to his sister from Lyons:

Nothing can have been more prosperous than our whole journey. Not a single contretemps and my compagnons de voyage uniformly agreeable. Everything that I wished has been realized. I have got all the kind of knowledge that I desired…I had a great row about the portrait of Charles 1st, but was quite successful. The consequence is that I have got a new miniature in which the likeness is exactly hit and at a cheaper rate…I am glad that I at last get some account of my mother – my best love to her; we must meet soon. My father says that he has been very idle and I fear from his tone that I am to believe him. I have been just the reverse, but I would throw all my papers into the Channel only to hear that he had written fifty pages.15

Mrs Austen, in a letter to Sarah D’Israeli, confirmed that the journey had passed without the least disagreement. ‘Your brother is so easily pleased, so accommodating, so amusing, and so actively kind, that I shall always reflect upon the domestic part of our journey with the greatest pleasure.’ Indeed, Benjamin, so Sara Austen said, had behaved ‘excellently, except when there is a button, or rather buttons, to be put on his shirt; then he is violently bad, and this happens almost daily. I said once “They cannot have been good at first”; and now he always threatens to “tell my Mother you have abused my linen”.’16

Travelling homewards through France, Disraeli and his friends left the main road to go to see the Layard family. Austen Henry Layard, the future excavator of Nineveh, was then nine years old. In later life he retained ‘a vivid recollection’ of Disraeli’s appearance, ‘his black curly hair, his affected manner and his somewhat fantastic dress’.17

His holiday was almost over now; and, as he approached the Channel, Disraeli congratulated himself upon having seen five capitals and twelve great cities, and, although he might well see more cities, he could not hope to see more ‘varieties of European nature’. ‘I feel now,’ he added, ‘that it is not prejudice when I declare that England with all her imperfections is worth all the world together, and I hope it is not misanthropy when I feel that I love lakes and mountains better than courts and cities, and trees better than men.’18

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