Background
DISRAELI, BENJAMIN, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD - novelist, prime minister of Great Britain, and founder of the modern Conservative Party. He was born in London on Dec. 21, 1804. His grandfather was a Sephardic Jew named D'Israeli who emigrated in 1748 from Ferrara, Italy, to England, where he pursued a successful career as a merchant and stockbroker. He had one son, Isaac, who became a well-known man of letters and who, in 1802, married Maria Basevi, daughter of another Italian Jewish immigrant; Benjamin was their eldest son. In 1817, as a result of a quarrel with the Sephardic synagogue in London, Isaac had his four children baptized as Christians. Benjamin was educated at Blackheath near London and at Higham Hall in Epping Forest.
The Youthful Disraeli. When he was 17 Disraeli was sent to a lawyer's office in the City of London. He found this a humdrum profession and resolved to make his fortune by speedier methods, first (1824) engaging in disastrous speculation on the stock exchange and then endeavoring (1825-1826) with equal lack of success to float a new daily newspaper in partnership with his father's friend and publisher John Murray. In 1826 he published a novel, Vivian Grey, which to those who knew Murray and the story of his journalistic failure seemed an unkind and ungrateful satire. The result of all these activities was to leave Disraeli with a load of debt and a dubious reputation, from both of which it took him many years to recover.
In 1830-1831 Disraeli took a 16-month tour of the Mediterranean and the Near E. This not only gave him the inspiration and local color for many of his novels, but also laid the foundation of his attitude toward foreign and imperial policy nearly half a century later. On his return he took lodgings in London--his family had moved to Bradenham in Buckinghamshire--and was introduced by his friend Bulwer-Lytton, the novelist, into the salons of Lady Blessington and other literary persons on the fringes of upper-class society.
At this time Disraeli's principal aim in life seems to have been to create a sensation wherever he went. His clothes were foppish and extravagant; his conversation abounded in wit, sarcasm, and paradox. He was not popular with men, but he soon came to be much sought after by hostesses. In 1833 he acquired a fashionable mistress, Henrietta, wife of Sir Francis Sykes; the liaison proved to be exhausting, time consuming, and expensive, and in 1836 he broke with her forever. Her memory is crystallized in his novel Henrietta Temple (1836), which is partly based on this experience, and is one of his most delightful romances. His other novels during the 1830's were The Young Duke and Contarini Fleming.
Entry into Politics. Disraeli had decided during his Mediterranean tour that politics should be his real career. Twice in 1832 and again in 1834 he contested the elections at High Wycombe as an anti-Whig radical, with a certain amount of Tory aid; but he was beaten each time. Nothing daunted, he coolly informed the prominent Whig politician Lord Melbourne that he intended one day to be prime minister. It was not until early 1835 that he became a member of the Tory or Conservative Party and stood for election at Taunton, again unsuccessfully, as the party's candidate.
In 1837 he at last entered Parliament as member for Maidstone. His maiden speech was a failure; he had been involved in a furious quarrel with the Irish leader Daniel O'Connell at the time of the Taunton election, and the Irish members revenged their leader by shouting Disraeli down. In 1839 he married Mary Anne Evans, the widow of his former colleague as representative of Maidstone, Wyndham Lewis. She was 12 years older than he and was something of an oddity in personality. But she was devoted to him and she possessed a life income of £4,000p4,000 a year and a house in London; in return he treated her with the deepest respect and affection. It would be idle to pretend that he married her for any but practical motives, but her own verdict is probably correct: "Dizzy married me for my money but if he had the chance again he would marry me for love."
New Theory of Conservative Party. In 1841 Disraeli's ambition received a check when, after 11 years of opposition, the Tories were at last in power but Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, did not offer him a place in the new government. Ironically this refusal was prompted by Lord Stanley, later to be Disraeli's leader and closest political ally. During the next few years Disraeli gradually drifted away from Peel and, encouraged by a small group of youthful, romantic Tories known as "Young England," began to systematize his own version of the true role of the Tory party. The best expression of it is in his two most famous novels, Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845), although the theory had been foreshadowed in his Vindication of the English Constitution (1836).
According to Disraeli, the Tories had always been the true national party of England, but the Whigs had succeeded, by an alliance with middle-class Dissenters, Irish Catholics, and Scottish Presbyterians, in establishing a Venetian-type oligarchy under whose rule the Crown, the aristocracy, and the people were alike rendered impotent. The official Conservative Party under Peel was little better than the Whigs. The solution was an alliance of the old aristocracy and the country gentry with the impoverished masses whom the Whigs had betrayed. In accordance with this theory Disraeli spoke sympathetically on Chartism (a working-class movement for political reform), supported factory acts, and from 1843 onward attacked Peel.
Power and Problems. Throughout these years Disraeli was widely regarded as, at worst, an opportunistic adventurer, at best, an eccentric whose paradoxical views few people wished to understand. But in 1846 when Peel, after the Irish famine and a cabinet crisis, announced his intention of introducing free trade in wheat and abolishing the protective duties (Corn Laws) which the country gentlemen regarded as essential, Disraeli's hour at last arrived. Acting ostensibly as aide to the group's leader, Lord George Bentinck, he was actually the real leader of the dissident, protectionist Tories. His speeches were brilliant, and although his followers could not prevent the repeal of the Corn Laws, they could and did hurl Peel from office forever. He was succeeded by the Whig government of Lord John Russell (July 1846). Nearly all Peel's cabinet, with the exception of Stanley who was in the House of Lords, as Lord Derby, followed their leader and formed the nucleus of a group known as the Peelites.
There was a notable dearth of talent in the Protectionist Tory ranks and after the death of Bentinck in 1848, Disraeli inevitably became their leader in the House of Commons, Stanley being head of the party as a whole. With money borrowed from the Bentinck family, Disraeli now purchased the house and estate of Hughenden, near High Wycombe, and set himself up as a country gentleman. He also became member of Parliament for the county of Buckinghamshire, a seat which he retained until his death.
Although Disraeli had reached high position, his task for the next 20 years (the decades of the 1850's and 1860's), was to be arduous and discouraging. Neither Whigs nor Tories could command a majority on their own in the House of Commons, but the Whigs were far better placed to acquire the alliance of the other groups whose support was needed to carry on the government--the Radicals, the Irish members, and the Peelites. The last group, and Gladstone above all, regarded Disraeli with implacable hostility. Disraeli was fertile in expedients, but it was impossible either to outbid the popularity which the Whig-Liberal party gained from Lord Palmerston's jingoistic foreign policy or to remove from the Tories the stigma of having opposed free trade.
The Tories held office as a minority government for ten months in 1852 and again for 18 months in 1858-1859. On each occasion Lord Derby was prime minister, and Disraeli was chancellor of the exchequer. But they existed on sufferance, and a combination of their enemies could easily eject them at any time. The politics of the period were dominated by Palmerston, whom Disraeli much admired. For Disraeli it was a frustrating time. In 1847 he published Tancred, his last novel for 23 years. He completed in 1852 a biography of Lord George Bentinck, but he did little else of literary note, while his political activities were largely obstructive and negative.
In 1865 Palmerston died, immediately after winning a general election. Russell, his successor, introduced a reform bill which split his party wide open, and Derby and Disraeli took office for the third time in 1866. Despite the Tory tradition of hostility to parliamentary reform, Disraeli had long considered that the extension of the franchise ought not to be a Whig monopoly. He and Derby resolved to gain the credit for carrying a measure of reform. Their original bill was drafted with numerous antidemocratic safeguards, but Gladstone, who commanded a majority, swept these away, and the Tory leaders accepted his amendments rather than lose office. The resultant Act of 1867 went further than most Tories expected. It gave the suffrage to householders in the towns and doubled the electorate. Early in 1868, worn out by repeated attacks of gout, Derby resigned, and Disraeli became prime minister. "I have climbed," he said, "to the top of the greasy pole."
