To give authority and encouragement to Disraelis approach, John Murray wrote to Lockhart:
I left my young friend Disraeli to make his own way with youBut 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 promiseHe 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.12
John Murrays high opinion of Disraeli was reinforced by the young mans 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.13
A more cautious note was sounded by one of Murrays 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 worldYou cannot prudently trust much to his judgement.14
Wright went on to suggest that whatever our friend DIsraeli [might] sayon this subject, Lockharts 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, Murrays Tory journal]. That was the office of a scholar and a gentleman.
The longer Disraeli remained in Scotland, the closer he grew to Lockhart.* 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,* 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.15
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.16 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 friendwho was nowan adventurer a swindler ayoung scoundrel a base, deluding, flattering, fawning villain etc. etc. etc.17
Murray was obliged to give up his houses in Whitehall Place and Wimbledon and to move his family into rooms above his office in Albemarle Street, where he received a cross letter from Disraelis mother defending her son from suggestions that The Representative had been ruined through his mismanagement and bad conduct. It would not be believed, she wrote, that the experienced publisher of Albemarle Street could be deceived by the plans of a boy of twenty whom you had known from his cradle and whose resources you must have as well known as his Father, and had you condescended to consult that Father the folly might not have been committed.18
In the financial crash which followed the collapse of The Representative, Disraeli also suffered. He lost the very little money which he possessed and was left so deeply in debt that for years thereafter this increasing indebtedness hung hauntingly over him, and his reputation, such as it was, suffered from attacks like those launched upon him in the pages of the Literary Magnet where he was described as being deposed amidst the scoffs and jeers of the whole Metropolitan Literary World after a display of puppyism, ignorance, impudence and mendacity which [had] seldom been exhibited under similar circumstances.
Unable to pay his debts and reluctant to approach his father for help in settling them, Disraeli now decided to make some money in writing about the circumstances in which they had been incurred.
Disraeli began writing Vivian Grey, his satirical society novel, with enthusiasm and energy, letting sheet after completed sheet fall to the floor; and when he had written enough for the book to be judged, he looked for a publisher, the one he knew being no longer approachable. Tremaine, or the Man of Refinement, a novel of fashionable life, had recently been published anonymously with some success. Its author was Robert Plumer Ward and its publisher the busy, chatty, energetic Henry Colburn.
Plumer Wards rather dull and staid solicitor was Benjamin Austen, whose clever, attractive and lively young wife presided over a kind of literary and artistic salon at their house in Guildford Street, near to the DIsraelis in Bloomsbury Square. Acting as Wards agent, Sara Austen asked Isaac DIsraeli to review Tremaine and, in this way, Benjamin learned of Mrs Austens activities.
He sent her what he had so far written of Vivian Grey, a novel in conscious imitation of Plumer Wards Tremaine.
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 fathers 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 Murrays 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 Murrays:
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, youll find the Champagne on the waiter behind you.) Yes, gentlemen, it is in this temper (the corkscrews 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 DIsraeli to 50 Albemarle Street again; and never published another of his books. He turned his back on him and Mrs DIsraeli 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 Blackwoods 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 liarwho, having heard that several horsewhips were preparing for himhad 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 Blackwoods, 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 ridiculeThe criticism fell from my handI 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 Blackwoods, 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 illnessFor Gods sake take care of yourself. I dare not say for my sake do soIf 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 Austens 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 hereParis is delightful. I never was so much struck with anything in the whole course of my lifeI 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 eveningI have not kept my journal, but of course shallGod bless you.