When the two men first met, Byron treated him with so much respect that DIsraeli thought he was being teased. The fact is, he wrote complacently, that my works being all about literary men were exceedingly interesting to him. They contained knowledge that he could get nowhere else. It was all new to him.6
By the time of the appearance of the twelfth edition of Curiosities of Literature, Isaac DIsraeli had become an easily recognized figure in the streets of Bloomsbury. Some years before, an American author, who saw him from time to time in the British Museum, described him as being a dapper little gentleman in bright coloured clothes, with a chirping, gossipy expression of countenance, who had all the appearance of an author on good terms with his bookseller.
He was also by then a contented family man. At the age of thirty-five he had married Maria Basevi, the pretty daughter of an Italian Jew, a merchant in a good way of business, who had come to England from Verona in 1762. Marias mother was of distinguished Jewish stock, one of whose illustrious forebears was a leader of the great exodus of his race from Spain in 1492. Marias son, Ben, was extremely proud of his Jewish ancestry, considering himself of highly aristocratic birth, exaggerating, in a characteristically romantic way, the familys past glories and unaware of his mothers distinguished descent making unwarranted claims for that of his father.7
His mothers nephew was George Basevi, the architect, whose works included the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge and large parts of Belgravia in London which his cousin, Benjamin Disraeli, was unfairly to condemn as being as monotonous as Marylebone, and so contrived as to be at the same time insipid and tawdry.
Maria DIsraelis first child, Sarah, was born in December 1802; two years later came Benjamin, then three more boys, none of whom became in any way distinguished. Napthali died in infancy; Ralph, five years younger than Benjamin, was born in 1809; James, known as Jem, born in 1813, was almost ten years younger.
Benjamin had little in common with either of these two surviving brothers. To his sister, however, he was as devoted as she was to him; and he was to write to her with a fond and frank intimacy which endured until her death.
Benjamin was also deeply and unreservedly attached to his father, of whom he wrote affectionately, He was a complete literary characterEven marriage produced no change; he rose to enter the chamber where he lived alone with his books, and at night his lamp was ever lit within the same wallsHe disliked business, and he never required relaxationIf he entered a club, it was only to go into the library. In the country he scarcely ever left his room but to saunter in abstraction upon a terrace, muse over a chapter, or coin a sentence.8
When he was six years old, Benjamin was sent to a school in Islington kept by a Miss Roper; and from there he went to a school in Blackheath kept by a nonconformist minister, John Potticary, who numbered several Quakers among his pupils as well as at least one Jew with whom Benjamin was required to stand at the back of the class during Christian prayers. On Saturdays these two Jewish boys were also singled out to receive instruction from a Hebrew rabbi. At the end of term, so one of his fellow pupils said, Disraeli went home for the holidays in the basket of the Blackheath coach, [firing] away at the passers-by with his peashooter.9
There is no record of Benjamins father having objected to his sons instruction in the faith of his ancestors by the rabbi at Blackheath. But when, in 1813, Isaac was elected warden of the Bevis Marks synagogue, he declined to take office. A fine of £40 was imposed, he refused to pay it, requiring the elders to accept that a person who had lived out of the sphere of [their] observations, of retired habits of life who [could] never unite in [their] public worship, because, as now conducted, it disturbed instead of excited religious emotionsSuch a man never could accept the solemn function of an elder of your congregation.
Having broken with the synagogue, Isaac might well have allowed the matter to rest there, content for his son to be the non-practising Jew that he was himself. But a friend, Sharon Turner, a fellow frequenter of the British Museum, a solicitor, historian, devout Anglican and adviser on legal matters to the publisher John Murray, persuaded him to allow his four children to be baptised. The ceremony of baptism accordingly took place at St Andrews, Holborn on the last day of July 1817. Benjamin was then twelve years old.
His brothers were to go to Winchester, the public school founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham; and it seems that their father would have liked his eldest son to go to Eton. But it was, perhaps, as with the mother in Vivian Grey, that Bens mother being one of those women whom nothing in the world can persuade that a public school is anything but a place where boys are roasted alive was firmly against this proposal and, as was commonly the case, her views prevailed. So Benjamin was sent instead to Higham Hall, a school near Walthamstow in Epping Forest which was kept by the nonconformist minister and Greek scholar, the Revd Eli Cogan, and at which, as at all similar schools in those days, the classics, with a little arithmetic, formed almost the only, and certainly the main, subject on the curriculum.
According to Mr Cogan, Benjamin did not shine as a scholar. I do not like DIsraeli, 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.10 Much later, Cogans 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 Cogans, 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 authors 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 passionOh! days of rare and pure felicity, when Musaeus and myself, with arms around each others neck, wandered togetherI 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 stir11
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 Cogans 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 Disraelis 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 Camillusmade Latin verseswritingcipheringgrammar. Euripides, his notes continued. Latin exercises. Drawing. Began with myself the IliadAgain at the Greek metres bewildered! lost!Gibbon, volixDemosthenes is indeed irresistibleRead [William] Mitfords 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.12
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 DIsraeli met at John Murrays house in Albemarle Street, the great literary salon of Regency London. Also to be encountered here were Byrons intimate friend, the Irish writer, Tom Moore, and the prolific author, Robert Southey, who said that Isaac DIsraeli looked like a Portugee, who being apprehended for an assassin, is convicted of being circumcised. I dont 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 DIsraeli was occasionally taken by his father to these dinners at Murrays, and he gave a description of one of them:
November 27th 1822. Wednesday. Dined at MurraysMoore [who had recently returned from abroad] very entertaining.
Moore. This is excellent wine, Murray.
DIsraeli. Youll 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 youll soon get used to it.
M. Oh! Ive 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 wont 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! Hes 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 hell 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 authors 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 onceThere never was a man so ignorant of the worlds ways.13
The conversation at Murrays 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
You have too much genius for Fredericks Place. It will never do.
DISRAELI WAS SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD when he began to record the conversations in Murrays 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 Disraelis 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.