Benjamin Disraeli Letters, Volumes 1 and 2/Disraeli's Grand Tour
al, J.A.W.Gunn, et. & Blake, Robert
BOOK REVIEWS lis sins were scarlet, rut his books were read. -HilaireBelloc (for his own epitaph) Many great men, like elephants, ake a long time to grow up. How -/hat Burke called "men of light...
...is correct, and circumstances indeed produce theories...
...letters of the young Disraeli, in contrast to the writings of the mature Disraeli, is any genuine religious interest...
...positive He also withheld financial support...
...Gunn, John Matthews, Donald M. Schurman, and M.G...
...In Vivian Grey he described expulsion from one's club as "the heaviest vengeance of modern society...
...Had this letter been known to Moneypenny, Blake, Jerman, and other biographers, much learned speculation on why Peel would not give Disraeli a job in his administration would have been unnecessary...
...Lord Blake does provide helpful historical and political orientation for an understanding of Disraeli's own accounts of his travels...
...1) BENJAMIN DISRAELI LETTERS: 1835-1837 (VOL...
...It may well be that the beginning of the charges of opportunism that Disraeli had to battle all his life arose in large part from this problem of clubs: for the only "distinguished" club that the young Disraeli succeeded in joining before he finally entered the Carlton was the Reform Club-a fact that gave weight to the accusation that he had become a Tory out of sheer opportunism...
...Although Disraeli's youth f.eemed to have been covered horoughly in countless biographies, If which Moneypenny and Buckle's Classic remains unrivaled, and in 3.R...
...His descriptions are vivid and instructive, but written for effect, not catharsis...
...I find that it makes a sensible difference in the opinion of one's friends...
...My father always had two saddle horses at my command...
...However, the young Disraeli, who concentrated on entering politics in the fourth phase of his life covered by this collection, must have thought membership in at least one right club essential...
...It is probable that this lack of parental support lay at the root of young Disraeli's insecurity, an insecurity that shaped his beginnings...
...The Vindication of the English Constitution in particular presages the great man and should be made required reading for U.N...
...I said it was difficult to say . . . £2000 might be required...
...Jerman's admirable The Young Disraeli, this collection not only unearths new significant facts but Gives us an immediacy of insight into Oisraeli's development equal to that of a parent and a college roommate combined...
...Many years later when he was 70, prime minister, and a peer, Disraeli wrote Lady Chesterfield: "I detest society really, for I never entered it without my feelings being hurt...
...there was financial independence, a spacious country manor house "surrounded by a small but brilliant garden...
...Hence it is not surprising that there is nothing new about Disraeli in Disraeli's Grand Tour...
...And while Disraeli's letters to his father are often long and contain his best travel reports, they are in the main curiously impersonal...
...The uncommunicativeness of this message to his mother is characteristic...
...He demanded the exact amount...
...Even more dramatic is Disraeli's second business venture with his father's publisher Murray to launch a new newspaper, The Representative...
...Gunn, Matthews, churman, and Wiebe, have combined imaginative initiative in dis-iovering previously unknown letters ivith awesome scholarship, displayed in thorough and enlightening annotations, to give us an indispensable iource for understanding Disraeli's Growth...
...But the editors of the Letters ate of a different opinion: "D's enthusiasm for the culture of the Near East (Turkish, Jewish and Arab alike) steadily mounted throughout this tour...
...He saw the Porte as the last bulwark of a civilization to which he seemed instinctively to respond, and whose continuing appeal extended far beyond these letters . . . even to the Congress of Berlin, forty-eight years later...
...Nor did anti-Semitism assail him until his political battles had begun...
...When such connections were about to be formed between two men, they should have become acquainted not by the stimulus of wine...
...and so on...
...After all that frenzy of activity he fell into what his biographers usually call a "mysterious illness" but which, judging from the letters, was almost certainly a depression...
...Disraeli collected local color useful for an aspiring young writer and he was impressed by the ceremony and slow pace of Moslem life, but it is uncertain whether Blake is right in believing that Disraeli "had fallen in love . . . with the alien yet curiously hypnotic civilization of the Muslim world...
...The letters read like the social columns of a metropolitan newspaper...
...Yet even at that early age Disraeli knew something about conducting human affairs: when Murray fails to come to an agreement with the editor selected, Disraeli writes: "You and he have never rightly understood each other...
...No wonder Peel disliked that young whippersnapper...
...BENJAMIN DISRAELI LETTERS: 1815-1834 (VOL...
...To what extent the experience of the Middle East formed Disraeli's political and religious views or helped him find the "identity" which, Blake says, Disraeli sought, is a question discussed by Blake, but not thoroughly enough to provide entirely satisfactory answers...
...Yet it must have been insecurity that drove the young Disraeli to flamboyant dandyism, frantic financial speculations, extravagant self-congratulations, and exhibitionist controversy...
...Disraeli must have believed that travel cures such ills and embarked on his "Grand Tour" to the Middle East which is the subject of Lord Blake's slim, illustrated book...
...Disraeli soon resigned from the Reform, and wrote many letters with elaborate explanations of why he had joined it-but the real reason may well have been that he was ready to join any "distinguished" club that would take him...
...We had known that Disraeli had been elected to the Carlton Club only on his second try, and that earlier he had to suffer the humiliation of being blackballed for membership in the Athenaeum, a club of which his father had been one of the founders...
...And to Lady Bradford: "I hate clubs...
...There are no letters addressed to "Dear Father and Mother...
...I am very well and begin to enjoy my new career...
...The Letters reveal for the first time how narrowly Disraeli avoided Debtors' Prison...
...All those interested in Disraeli will be waiting for the next volumes from Toronto with impatience...
...How -/hat Burke called "men of light and eading" manage to grow up is a ritical question for society which has n interest in seeing them rise to the op...
...The first phase, the phase of business, begins well before his twenty-first birthday, with a hectic and unsuccessful speculation in South American mining stock saddling him with enormous debts...
...2) Edited by J.A.W...
...because of a fallacious belief "that theories produce circumstances, whereas the very converse...
...Disraeli rents office space," recruits editors and 27 correspondents, attempts to find a house in London for the "Director General" designate, and has "no doubt that [Murray] will succeed . . . to make [The Representative] the focus of the information of the whole world," and endorses the view of a. reporter he has hired "that a year could not elapse without our being the very first going...
...For evidence that the young Disraeli was committed to conservative principles as much as to day-to-day conservative politics we must go outside the letters to his writings of this period, Whigs and Whiggism, republished in 1971 by Kennikat Press...
...Unfortunately only four out of the 694 letters in these two volumes were written before the age of 19, leaving us as much in the dark about Disraeli's emotions during childhood and adolescence as ever...
...In Disraeli's case the outward and visible circumstances of his family were serene...
...And after his first day in the Commons he writes Sarah: "Thus endeth the most remarkable day hitherto of my life...
...I shall not sleep at Aylesbury as I intended...
...Having reached majority and failed in two business ventures, Disraeli quickly wrote his first novel, Vivian Grey, which, like all his novels, is still in print...
...the volumes under review contain only five notes to her, as contrasted with 34 letters to his father and 251 to his sister Sarah...
...I have begged the favor of his not arresting me in Bucks...
...The letters reflect an astonishing pace of enterprise for a twenty-year-old, and an astonishing mixture of competence and naivete...
...In his home district of Wycombe, where he had been defeated three times, his victory elsewhere was celebrated with surprising enthusiasm, "all bells were set a-ringing, a subscription made...
...servants, siblings, horses, dogs, and a celebrated library...
...This whole critical episode emerges from this correspondence for the first time-none of the standard biographers mention it...
...These letters impress us, as they must have been meant to impress his sister, with the glamour of his social life...
...He looked blue, but said it must be settled...
...And Disraeli writes his sister: "I attacked him about my father and made him look extremely small [emphasis mine...
...Lord Blake, like all other biographers, had previously described this tour of 16 months, the second main phase of Disraeli's life covered by the letters under review, in his full-length biography, and, again, like the others' sources, Blake's are almost exclusively Disraeli's letters...
...In these letters we also learn for the first time that Disraeli, perhaps in desperation, managed to join a now defunct club, the Albion-"a very capital club-Few in number . . . -great many M.P.s and tho not fashionable, distinguished...
...I was rather gratified by finding those among whom I have lived . . . felt such genuine satisfaction in my success...
...to illuminate the town . . . and the band called out...
...Apparently, seven years before that dinner, when Sir Robert had been home secretary, he had refused to allow Isaac D'Israeli to consult some records in the State Paper Office...
...Indeed Disraeli actually disseminated O'Connell's diatribe in the same broadsheet to the electors of Taunton in which he published his reply...
...We did not know that three years later he failed in a second attempt to become a member of the Athenaeum, nor did we know that he was also blackballed for the Traveller's Club and for Crockfords...
...Disraeli seems to have anticipated this "new school of statesmen in general" whose object it is "to form political institutions on abstract principles . . . instead of permitting them to spring from the course of events...
...Then as now there cannot have been many people in their twenties who habitually mingled with cabinet members, ambassadors, generals, and bishops...
...Something had happened to give Disraeli that minimum of security required for greatness...
...All these Characteristics are expressed in these letters that cover four principal phases of Disraeli's life...
...I believe Blake is right when saying that "one should not exaggerate" the effect on Disraeli's career of his sixteen months in the Middle East...
...Wiebe/University of Toronto Press/ $50.00 each DISRAELI'S GRAND TOUR: BENJAMIN DISRAELI IN THE HOLY LAND, 1830-1831 Robert Blake/ Oxford University Press/ $14.95 Franz M. Oppenheimer modern pedagogues call reinforcement...
...Night after night he dines with the noble, the famous, and the powerful...
...Yet it is also true that the letters written during this first political phase of Disraeli's life hardly ever reflect any commitment to political principles...
...Therefore we owe an immense ebt of gratitude to the University of ronto Press for publishing a com-lete collection of Disraeli's letters, if which the volumes reviewed here re the first two...
...As a modern President must check with the Secret Service before he can call on a friend, Disraeli often had to check with his solicitor before he dared to go from one place to another: "I trust there is no danger of my being nabbed by Mash," he writes before he can venture to attend a County Conservative Dinner where he was invited to move the principal toast...
...The letters end with Disraeli's election to the House of Commons on his fifth try...
...If the emotion was there, Disraeli preferred to hide it...
...But to fill 140 pages he must go back to Egyptian history since 1517 and give us glimpses of events in 1839 and 1841, ten years after Disraeli's tour, saying "all these changes lay ahead...
...The first letter, probably written from boarding school when Disraeli was about ten, reads in its entirety: "Dear Maman, I have arrived safe B D Israeli...
...They read like the sports page of a newspaper where games won and lost, locker room gossip, and speculation on the next winners are all duly recorded and where the only loyalty displayed is that to the home team...
...which . . . destroys the peace of families...
...The editors of these etters, Messrs...
...Sir Robert at the dinner mentioned that Office...
...I make my way easily in the highest set," he writes, and "my table was literally covered with invitations...
...One cannot escape the impression that Isaac D'Israeli the Elder was a cold fish who in his remote library withheld from his brilliant son what Franz M. Oppenheimer is a Washington lawyer...
...Whether from lack of opportunism or immaturity, the letters of this phase are also conspicuous for violating the mature Disraeli's famous injunction: "Never complain and never explain.'' Complaints and explanations abound, and rather than ignoring any ignoble attacks, such as those by the Irish M.P., Daniel O'Connell, who called Disraeli "a living lie," "a reptile," and one with "the qualities of the impenitent thief on the Cross," Disraeli counterattacked in the same tenor: "an effort should be made to restrain the exercise of that terrible and irresponsible power, that reckless and remorseless tyranny, with which the leader of the Irish Catholics has been too long in the habit of controlling society...
...However that may be, one element I cannot discover in the...
...most of the time the existence of his mother is ignored...
...But some of the newly published letters reveal fully for the first time how many rebuffs accompanied Disraeli's climb...
...Indeed, nothing could be more worldly than Disraeli's letters written after his return to England at age 26 when he entered a phase in which society and literature were his main interests while politics ran a poor third...
...As things went, The Representative folded after six months, and well before its demise Disraeli and Murray, for reasons not exactly known, had quarreled and Disraeli had left the paper...
...and UNCTAD commissions that labor to produce international codes and regulations for multinational corporations and better constitutions' for non-Communist countries they dislike...
...Only late in the period of these letters, just before his first successful election campaign, did the vexed subject come up with his father...
...There should have been some interchange of sentiment and feeling [emphasis mine...
...There is abundant evidence in these letters that Disraeli was not an opportunist: an extraordinary episode of youthful loyalty and indiscretion, unknown before now, occurred at a dinner party where Disraeli, age 28, met for the first time Sir Robert Peel, age 44, then the Duke of Wellington's principal lieutenant in the Commons, a former cabinet minister and a prime minister-to-be...
...Like virtually all letters of the young Disraeli, the letters from Greece, Spain, Egypt, and Jerusalem do not convey intense emotion...
Vol. 16 • June 1983 • No. 6
