Disraeli: A Personal History

According to Mr Cogan, Benjamin did not shine as a scholar. ‘I do not like D’Israeli,’ Cogan was quoted as having said. ‘I never could get him to understand the subjunctive.’

‘I looked up to him as a big boy,’ an elderly clergyman said, recalling his days at school with Disraeli, ‘and very kind he was to me, making me sit next to him in play hours, and amusing me with stories of robbers and caves, illustrating them with rough pencil sketches which he continually rubbed out to make way for fresh ones. He was a very rapid reader, was fond of romances, and would often let me sit by him and read the same book, good-naturedly waiting before turning a leaf till he knew I had reached the bottom of the page.’

Other former pupils remembered Ben as a lively, carefree boy who took scant trouble over his lessons, who amused his companions on wet half-holidays by reciting romantic adventures of his own composition, and who ‘had a taste, not uncommon among schoolboys, for little acts of bargaining, and merchandise’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Much later, Cogan’s daughter told Beatrix Potter that the boy Disraeli ‘used to keep the other boys awake half the night romancing’.

But Benjamin seems not to have been happy at Mr Cogan’s, and if the schooldays of Contarini Fleming and Vivian Grey as described in his novels can be supposed to bear some resemblance to his own, they were certainly far from being contented ones. However, in his early days at the school, his idiosyncracies seem to have been tolerated at least: it was recorded of him that he suggested that he and his fellow Anglicans – who, having to walk some way to the local church and back to attend morning service, were late for dinner, which was half over by the time they returned to the school – should therefore become Unitarians during term time.

In Vivian Grey, the eponymous hero does not acquire the classical knowledge which has been dinned into the heads of the other boys but in ‘talents and various accomplishments’ he is ‘immeasurably the superior of them’. This leads him into a fight with another boy which is described with a lyricism and an evident pride in the author’s boxing skills acquired in those lessons which Disraeli was given in the holidays at home.

There is a great fight also in Contarini Fleming in which the hero enjoys a passionate friendship with another boy, a boy of sublimely beautiful countenance named Musaeus, after the semi-legendary poet whose verses had the authority of oracles.

‘I beheld him: I loved him [Disraeli has Fleming say]. My friendship was a passion…Oh! days of rare and pure felicity, when Musaeus and myself, with arms around each other’s neck, wandered together…I lavished on him all the fanciful love that I had long stored up; and the mighty passions that yet lay dormant in my obscure soul now first began to stir…’

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So Contarini endures the homosexual yearnings of youth but his passion for Musaeus soon cools and he, like Vivian Grey, is provoked into a fight which he wins. Thereafter he is shunned and persecuted by the other boys, as, no doubt, Disraeli was himself for being so obviously Jewish, as well as foppish with his ringlets and dandified clothes.

To his obvious relief he was taken away from Mr Cogan’s school when he was fifteen years old and allowed to continue his studies at home.

Questions have been sometimes raised as to the extent of Disraeli’s classical acquirements [wrote his biographer, William Flavelle Monypenny], and he has been accused in this connexion of pretending to knowledge which he did not really possess. The truth would seem to be that he contrived at this time to make himself a fair Latin scholar and retained in after life a moderate familiarity with the great Roman authors; but that his Greek was scanty at the beginning, and, in spite of his efforts after leaving school, remained scanty to the end.

He was conscientious in his studies, keeping a notebook in which he recorded his progress, listing the works he read and his precociously confident opinions of them. In one week he mentions having read Lucien and Livy, Terence and Virgil, Webb ‘on the Greek metres – the author is not very profound’ – and the ‘sensible preface of M. [J.-F.] Marmentel to the Henriade’. ‘Prepared my Greek,’ he goes on. ‘Finished the Speech of Camillus…made Latin verses…writing…ciphering…grammar.’ ‘Euripides,’ his notes continued. ‘Latin exercises. Drawing. Began with myself the Iliad…Again at the Greek metres – bewildered! – lost!…Gibbon, volix…Demosthenes is indeed irresistible…Read [William] Mitford’s History of Greece. His style is wretched, scarcely English.’ From one of the books he read, he copied out a passage from Petrarch and wrote it on the end-paper: ‘I desire to be known to posterity; if I cannot succeed, may I be known to my own age, or at least to my friends.’

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He had already made up his mind, so he afterwards declared, that he would one day make his way into the House of Commons; and his brother, Ralph, related how fond he was of ‘playing Parliament’, always reserving for himself the part of Prime Minister or at least of a senior member of the Cabinet, relegating his siblings to the benches of the Opposition.

Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott and Samuel Rogers were but three of the literary men whom Isaac D’Israeli met at John Murray’s house in Albemarle Street, the great literary salon of Regency London. Also to be encountered here were Byron’s intimate friend, the Irish writer, Tom Moore, and the prolific author, Robert Southey, who said that Isaac D’Israeli looked like ‘a Portugee, who being apprehended for an assassin, is convicted of being circumcised. I don’t like him.’ He grew to love him, however; he was, he eventually decided, ‘the strangest mixture of information, cleverness and folly’.

When he was considered old enough, Ben D’Israeli was occasionally taken by his father to these dinners at Murray’s, and he gave a description of one of them:

November 27th 1822. Wednesday. Dined at Murray’s…Moore [who had recently returned from abroad] very entertaining.

Moore. This is excellent wine, Murray.

D’Israeli. You’ll miss the French wines.

M. Yes, the return to port is awful.

D. I am not fond of port, but really there is a great deal of good port in England, and you’ll soon get used to it.

M. Oh! I’ve no doubt of it. I used to be very fond of port – but French wines spoil one for a while. The transition is too sudden from the wines of France to the port of Dover…

D. Pray, is Lord Byron much altered?

M. Yes, his face has swelled out and he is getting fat; his hair is gray and his countenance has lost that ‘spiritual expression’ which he so eminently had. His teeth are getting bad, and when I saw him he said that if ever he came to England it would be to consult Wayte about them.

B.D. Who is since dead, and therefore he certainly won’t come…

M. I certainly was very much struck with an alteration for the worse. Besides, he dresses very extraordinarily.

D. Slovenly?

M. Oh, no! no! He’s very dandified, and yet not an English dandy. When I saw him he was dressed in a curious foreign cap, a frogged great coat, and had a gold chain round his neck and pushed into his waistcoat pocket. I asked him if he wore a glass and he took it out, whereupon I found fixed to it a set of trinkets. He had also another gold chain tight round his neck, something like a collar. He had then a plan of buying a tract of land and living in South America. When I saw Scrope Davies and told him that Byron was growing fat he instantly said, ‘Then he’ll never come to England.’…

M. Rogers is the most wonderful man in conversation that I know. If he could write as well as he speaks he would be matchless, but his faculties desert him as soon as he touches a pen.

D. It is wonderful how many men of talent have been so circumstanced.

M. Yes! Curran, I remember, began a letter to a friend thus: ‘It seems that directly I take a pen into my hand it remembers and acknowledges its allegiance to its mother goose.’…

D. Have you read the Confessions of an Opium Eater?

M. Yes.

D. It is an extraordinary piece of writing.

M. I thought it an ambitious style and full of bad taste.

D. You should allow for the opium. You know it is a genuine work.

M. Indeed.

D. Certainly. The author’s name is De Quincey. He lives at the lakes. I know a gentleman who has seen him.

Murray. – I have seen him myself. He came to me on business once…There never was a man so ignorant of the world’s ways.

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The conversation at Murray’s often turned to Byron, and it was upon the romantic poet that the young Disraeli, as he grew into manhood, chose to model himself, both in his clothes and in his dandiacal gestures as suggested in the portrait of him, drawn some time later, by Daniel Maclise. In this portrait he is depicted leaning on a chimneypiece, beringed left hand on hip, right hand playing with his luxuriant curled hair.

2 A YOUNG MAN OF HIGH FASHION (#ulink_f4ba31aa-e66a-5a04-a964-428e4eb13fe6)

‘You have too much genius for Frederick’s Place. It will never do.’

DISRAELI WAS SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD when he began to record the conversations in Murray’s dining-room. He had already become an occasional consultant of the publisher, who from time to time sought his advice on manuscripts that were sent to 50 Albemarle Street in the hope of their acceptance for publication; and it was on Disraeli’s recommendation that Murray published Fairy Legends and Traditions in the South of Ireland by the Irish antiquary, Thomas Crofton Croker, a book highly praised by Sir Walter Scott, which became a bestseller.

By then Disraeli, as he had begun to sign himself, dropping the apostrophe, had become an articled pupil in a leading firm of solicitors in Frederick’s Place, Old Jewry. The senior partner, Thomas Maples, was a friend of Isaac D’Israeli; and it seems to have been agreed between them that, in due course, Benjamin should be admitted into partnership and marry Maples’s daughter.

Benjamin himself had not been at all taken with this arrangement; but his father was ‘very warm’ about the business. Indeed, it was ‘the only time in his life’, so his son records, ‘in which he exerted authority’. Benjamin accordingly went to work in the office of one of the partners, Mr Stevens, who, Benjamin recalled, ‘dictated to me every day his correspondence which was as extensive as a Minister’s; and when the clients arrived I did not leave the room, but remained not only to learn my business but to become acquainted with my future clients. They were in general men of great importance – bank directors, East India directors, merchants…it gave me great facility with my pen and no inconsiderable knowledge of human nature.’

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Disraeli, however, became ‘pensive and restless’. He could not reconcile himself to the thought of being a lawyer; and when he returned to Bloomsbury Square of an evening he did not take up the legal textbooks which he was meant to be studying, but helped himself to more interesting books from the tightly packed shelves of his father’s library.

When he went out in the evening he was careful not to dress as the articled clerk he was determined not long to be, setting himself apart from his colleagues by a style of dress – a black velvet suit with ruffles and black stockings with red clocks – as well as a manner which was considered flamboyant, even in those early years of the reign of King George IV. ‘You have too much genius for Frederick’s Place,’ a lady pleased him by suggesting one day. ‘It will never do.’