Disraeli, Benjamin

Disraeli, Benjamin (1804–81), first earl of Beaconsfield, politician, prime minister, and novelist, the oldest son of I. D'Israeli, Benjamin attended private schools. At 17 he was articled in Lincoln's Inn, but was more interested in the literary world inhabited by his father. He was to attempt an ambitious variety of literary forms before he settled on the novel.

In 1826, with profits from speculative ventures in the Americas, he and J. Murray established a daily paper, The Representative, in opposition to The Times; but with the collapse of the boom, the new paper survived for only seven months. His highly successful first novel, Vivian Grey (1926, published anonymously), was no doubt partly written to pay off debts. In 1827 he published Popanilla, a political satire. During 1828–31 he travelled in Spain and Italy, and made much use of these and of subsequent travels in Albania, the Levant, and Egypt in future novels. The Young Duke (1831), with its dashing, dandy, Byronic young hero was followed by Contarini Fleming (1832) and Alroy (1833), a highly coloured oriental historical romance which makes much play with cabbalistic lore and with the supernatural. In 1833 his burlesque, ‘Ixion in Heaven’, appeared in the New Monthly; in 1834 The Infernal Marriage, a light political satire, and The Rise of Iskander, set in warring Albania; his one long, serious, but unsuccessful attempt at poetry, The Revolutionary Epic, in blank verse; and an anonymous novel, A Year at Hartlebury, written with his sister Sarah. A Vindication of the English Constitution, which contained several ideas developed later in Coningsby and Sybil, appeared in 1835; and the Junius-inspired Letters of Runnymede, together with The Spirit of Whiggism, in 1836.

By 1834 Disraeli had established himself in the highest social and political society, which was vividly reflected in his next two novels: Henrietta Temple (1937), a lyrical and occasionally melodramatic exploration of young love, begun in 1834, during Disraeli's open love affair with Lady Henrietta Sykes, and Venetia (1937), also a love story, set in the 18th cent. but drawn partly from the lives of Shelley and Byron. In 1837, Disraeli entered Parliament as member for Maidstone. Count Alarcos (pub. 1839; perf. 1868), set in 13th-cent. Spain, was an abortive attempt at verse drama.

Disraeli's fame as orator and wit continued to flourish, and for a while his political and literary interests worked together. The trilogy for which he is most renowned, Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847), was written because it was through novels that he felt he could best influence public opinion, and they may be regarded as the first truly political (Condition of England) novels in English. The first two, much of which are concerned with the conditions of the rural and urban poor, were particularly successful, and certain attitudes in them foreshadowed future social legislation: in them, Disraeli spoke for the ‘Young England’ party of which he had become a recognized leader. In 1852 Disraeli published Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography, in tribute to his late friend and colleague, whom he had succeeded as leader of the Tory party in 1848, and who had supported him in his courageous stand for the removal of the civil and political constraints which prevented Jews from entering Parliament. For the next twenty years his political career intensified, culminating in his appointment as prime minister, briefly in 1868 and again in 1874.

In 1870, Lothair, and the first collected edition of the novels, with an illuminating Preface by the author, was published. He became earl of Beaconsfield in 1876, the year in which he bestowed upon Queen Victoria the new title of empress of India. Endymion (1880), his last completed novel, for which he was offered £10 000, was set in the period of his youth. At his death he had completed only nine brief chapters of the intriguing Falconet (1927): it first appeared in The Times in 1905 and aimed at a satirical portrait of Gladstone.

Many of the characters were intended as portraits of prominent men and women of the time. His novels were distinguished by a combination of fascination and amused contempt for high society, a clever vein of irony, shrewd observations of personal and political manoeuvre, an apparently genuine sympathy for poverty and oppression, a skill in the portrayal of clever women, and a brisk readability. But a deficiency of creative power, revealed in some feeble characterization and long passages of rhetorical musing, has meant that in spite of their original popularity they have never received high critical acclaim. Even in his own day Wordsworth described them as ‘trashy’ and Trollope found them ‘spurious’.