Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1838-1841
Wiebe, M. G. & Conacher, J. B. & Matthews, John & Millar, Mary S.
T hose who believe that Disraeli was I an opportunist will find their belief refuted by the evidence of these letters, which are again presented by the Disraeli Project of Queen's University of...
...T hose who believe that Disraeli was I an opportunist will find their belief refuted by the evidence of these letters, which are again presented by the Disraeli Project of Queen's University of Kingston, Ontario, admirably edited and illuminatingly and amusingly annotated...
...I devoted to you all the passion of my being...
...Nor was opportunism the main motive for marrying Mary Anne Lewis...
...Very few of them are quotable...
...BENJAMIN DISRAELI LETTERS: 1838-1841 (Vol...
...He knew that, though advantageous, the marriage could not relieve him of the financial anxieties caused by his crushing debts...
...To quote the editors: "Disraeli's debt was a burden of such magnitude that it would crush most people . . . preventing them from being able to think of anything else...
...The attendance of peers of the realm at dinners is noted, no longer dwelt upon...
...I felt that my heart was inextricably engaged to you...
...It almost seems that for those three years at least Disraeli gratefully accepted the humdrum sobriety that so often follows the Sturm and Drang of one's twenties...
...Apart from tracing that love story and Disraeli's characteristic, but few, grand moments in the Commons, the letters in this volume do not match the excitement of those of the first two...
...I found you in sorrow, and that heart was touched...
...Indeed, virtually none of these letters reflects tension directly...
...The target of his opposition on that occasion was an Irish Municipal Corporations Bill, which he opposed because the bill was designed to weaken Ireland's central government...
...my settling in life was the implied . . . condition of a disposition of his property, which would have been convenient to me...
...Only most rarely is he impressed, as by a dinner given for the Duchess of Cambridge on her birthday, followed by a "petite balle, only 150 asked, really the very perfume of the land, all brilliants of the first water . . . the brilliant moon, the lamp lit garden, the terraces, the river, the music, the silvan ballroom, and the bright revellers, made a scene like a festa in one of George Sand's novels...
...Ministers were in their places and the Government benches very full...
...He had the very rare gift of being able to throw himself totally into whatever compartment of his life he was concerned with at the moment...
...I was not blind to worldly advantages . . . but . . . my heart was not to be purchased...
...Like the hero of Auden's Who's Who, "love made him weep his pints like you and me...
...Two days after the wedding, in one of his rare letters to his mother, Disraeli writes: "I am the happiest of men," and when his hopes for office after the fall of the Whig government have been shattered by Peel, he writes to his sister: "I must and ought to console myself for any worldly mortification in the possession of such a wife...
...But the letters leave no doubt that long before the wedding, and thereafter, Benjamin and Mary Anne were united in love...
...Disraeli's love letters to Mary Anne take up a good portion of this volume...
...Franz M Oppenheimer, a frequent contributor and a Washington lawyer, reviewed the first two volumes of Disraeli's letters in the June 1983 American Spectator...
...A reader expecting a continuation of the tales of high drama almost breathlessly related by Disraeli's letters before his becoming a member of Parliament can only be astounded to read, in a letter to Sarah: "I write merely to say that I have nothing to write about...
...A frantic note appears only when it has become certain that Parliament is about to be dissolved, and that as a consequence his parliamentary immunity from imprisonment for debt is about to be lifted: "Do you think," he writes his solicitor, "you shall be able to get me any argent...
...One other reason, though, for the routine nature of these letters is that Disraeli obviously wished to keep thefull horror of his financial condition from his sister and from Mary Anne...
...they would be more so were they less sincere...
...Disraeli suffered from no such effect...
...The minutiae of Parliament and politics—prison reform, the location of a cemetery, Lenten theatre restrictions, and the like—engulf and often bore him...
...As a freshman member of the Tory opposition to the Whig government, Disraeli had every reason to go along with his party—fulfillment of his hopes for political office after a changing of the guard had to depend on his being in the good graces of the party leadership...
...Of a dinner at Sir Robert Peel's, Disraeli writes: "Our party .. . like all such male gatherings [was] dull enough," and at another dinner he found "more noise than wit...
...The only reward Disraeli could expect from such unorthodoxies was self-satisfaction...
...My nature demands that my life should be perpetual love...
...On another occasion he speaks as one among a minority of five against the Birmingham Police Bill, an anti-Chartist measure: "I have made up my mind to oppose, even if I stand alone on our side, every anti-insurrectionary Measure which the government announce they will bring forward...
...While, unlike the first two volumes of these letters, volume three contains no startling news, it records Disraeli's uncommon moral courage during his first term in the House of Commons...
...the numerous complaints about sleepless nights"a night of unparalleled wretchedness" is a typical reference—probably reflect these anxieties indirectly...
...My father had long wished me to marry...
...He writes his future wife, Mary Anne Lewis, that he had "made a most capital speech," in which he sympathized with the Chartists, though disapproving of their stated goals,' and attacked the government for eroding civil rights through measures such as the New Poor Law...
...When Disraeli's second novel, The Young Duke, was published, his father had said: "What does Ben know of dukes...
...We should therefore not find fault when he describes his speeches as having been "brilliant," "good," and "most capital" and when he seems pleased to be able to report "the whole day has been passed in receiving compliments on my speech...
...But, as these letters also make clear, neither marriage nor re-election could solve those problems...
...500, or 300...
...The truth is far more complex: six months before their wedding, in the belief that their engagement was broken, he wrote to Mary Anne with an emotion no one could have faked: I avow when I first made my advances to you, I was influenced by no romantic feelings...
...3) Edited by M. G. Wiebe, J. B. Conacher, John Matthews, and Mary S. Millar/University of Toronto Press/$60 Franz M. Oppenheimer 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987...
...Now those days lay far behind him...
...for the Tories . . . were very few of them there to support me, while all the 'The Chartists, named after their program set forth in a Charter, were an emotional, radical working-class movement responding to the misery of factory workers by demanding reforms such as universal suffrage and yearly parliamentary elections...
...They only could be somewhat lessened and half-buried again...
...I . . . wished for the solace of a home, and shrunk from all the torturing passions of intrigue...
...He spoke "under every disadvantage...
...Still, marriage, a seat in the Commons, being elected to Crockfords (at last), the growing attention paid to his speeches afforded enough psychic security to explain Disraeli's ability to function under pressure...
...Nevertheless, as he wrote to his principal correspondent during those years, his sister Sarah, "I spoke against the Government, the great mass of the Conservative party, and even took a different view from the small minority itself...
...He can now look at Society almost with the distance of Proust in his cork-lined room...
...Though otherwise opposed to centralization on principle, he believed that in Ireland central authority, delegated from England, was "the only authority which could be trusted to execute .. . power without passion...
...In their splendid introduction the editors say that the loss of his parliamentary seat in the new elections of 1841, "would likely be followed by debtors prison and disgrace or exile...
...And they add, though they do not see Disraeli as an opportunist: "It is difficult to see how Disraeli could have survived politically if he had not married Mary Anne when he did...
Vol. 20 • September 1987 • No. 9
