Benjamin Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli was born on December 21, 1804, in London, the eldest son of Isaac D'Israeli, a literary scholar of Italian Jewish descent, and his wife Maria Basevi ^[1]. Isaac had made a modest name for himself with his anthology Curiosities of Literature, and books filled the family home. The household was Jewish by heritage but loosely observant, and in 1817, after a quarrel with the Bevis Marks synagogue, Isaac had his children baptized into the Church of England ^[2]. That decision changed the course of his son's life: until 1858, practising Jews could not sit in the House of Commons, so the baptism made a parliamentary career possible for the boy.

Unlike most future prime ministers of his century, Disraeli attended neither a great public school nor a university. He was educated at small private academies and then, at his father's direction, articled to a firm of solicitors in the City of London in 1821 ^[1]. The law bored him. He speculated disastrously in South American mining shares in the mid 1820s, and a venture to launch a daily newspaper, The Representative, collapsed and left him with debts that shadowed him for decades ^[2].

He turned to fiction to recover. His first novel, Vivian Grey, appeared anonymously in 1826 and caused a stir with its thinly veiled portraits of society figures; when the author's identity leaked, critics savaged the young outsider ^[3]. A period of illness and depression followed, eased by a sixteen month tour of the Mediterranean and the Near East in 1830 and 1831 that took him to Spain, Malta, Albania, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Egypt. The journey left a lasting mark on his imagination and his politics, feeding both his novels and his later fascination with the East ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Benjamin Disraeli in the early 1830s would have heard of a flamboyant literary dandy, not a statesman. He wore velvet coats, gold chains, and elaborate ringlets, and he stood for Parliament four times between 1832 and 1835 without success, first as a Radical and then as a Tory ^[1]. Persistence paid off in 1837, the year of Queen Victoria's accession, when he won a seat at Maidstone as a Conservative ^[2].

His maiden speech in the House of Commons was shouted down. He ended it with a warning that members would one day hear him, a prediction that became one of the most repeated Benjamin Disraeli facts, and he spent the next years learning the drier, more disciplined style the chamber rewarded ^[3]. Passed over for office when Sir Robert Peel formed his government in 1841, Disraeli drifted toward a group of young aristocratic Tories known as Young England, who romanticized an alliance between the landed classes and the poor against the new industrial plutocracy ^[2].

He gave that outlook literary form in a trilogy of political novels: Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847). Sybil, subtitled The Two Nations, described rich and poor in Britain as peoples so estranged they might inhabit different planets, a phrase that entered the language and later gave its name to One Nation conservatism ^[3]. Then came his great rupture with Peel. When the prime minister moved to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846, Disraeli led the protectionist revolt from the back benches with a series of scathing speeches that helped bring Peel down and split the Conservative Party ^[1]. The rebellion destroyed the party's governing majority for a generation, but it made Disraeli, almost by default, the leading Conservative voice in the Commons.

For twenty years after 1846, Disraeli served as Conservative leader in the House of Commons under the Earl of Derby, who led the party from the Lords. The Conservatives held office only in short minority governments, in 1852, 1858 to 1859, and 1866 to 1868, and in each of them Disraeli was Chancellor of the Exchequer ^[2]. His first budget, in 1852, was demolished in debate by William Ewart Gladstone, opening a personal and political rivalry that dominated British public life for nearly three decades ^[1].

His most consequential act in these years was the Reform Act of 1867. With Derby's government in a minority, Disraeli outmaneuvered Gladstone and carried a measure that roughly doubled the electorate by enfranchising many urban working men, a bolder bill than the one the Liberals had failed to pass the year before ^[4]. Critics called it a leap in the dark; Disraeli calculated that new working class voters need not belong to the Liberals, and later elections proved him at least partly right.

When Derby retired through ill health in February 1868, Disraeli became prime minister at the age of sixty three. He reportedly remarked that he had climbed to the top of the greasy pole ^[2]. The first premiership lasted only ten months. Gladstone's Liberals won the general election of late 1868, held on the newly enlarged franchise, and Disraeli went into opposition, where he rebuilt the party's organization and set out its themes in major speeches at Manchester and the Crystal Palace in 1872, tying the Conservatives to the monarchy, the empire, and the improvement of the condition of the people ^[4].

Any account of Benjamin Disraeli achievements centers on his second ministry, from 1874 to 1880, formed after the Conservatives won their first clear parliamentary majority since 1841 ^[1]. Domestically it produced a run of practical social legislation. The Public Health Act of 1875 consolidated sanitary law; the Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act of the same year allowed local authorities to clear slum housing; the Sale of Food and Drugs Act tackled adulteration; and trade union measures of 1875 legalized peaceful picketing and put employers and workmen on a more equal legal footing ^[4]. Historians debate how personally engaged Disraeli was in drafting these laws, much of the work fell to his home secretary Richard Cross, but they became the foundation of the Conservative claim to social reform ^[2].

Abroad, his boldest stroke came in 1875, when he arranged the purchase of the Khedive of Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal Company for about four million pounds, financed at speed through the banker Lionel de Rothschild. The deal gave Britain a major stake in the waterway to India and was celebrated as a coup of imperial statecraft ^[5]. In 1876 he steered the Royal Titles Act through Parliament, conferring on Queen Victoria the title Empress of India, a gesture that delighted the queen and bound the crown more closely to the empire ^[1].

The climax of his career came in foreign policy. During the Eastern crisis of 1875 to 1878, when Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire and imposed the sweeping Treaty of San Stefano, Disraeli, ennobled in 1876 as the Earl of Beaconsfield, insisted on a European settlement. At the Congress of Berlin in June and July 1878 he and his foreign secretary Lord Salisbury forced a revision of the treaty, checked Russian expansion, and secured Cyprus for Britain. He returned to London claiming peace with honour, at the height of his prestige ^[5].

In 1839 Disraeli married Mary Anne Lewis, the widow of his former parliamentary colleague Wyndham Lewis. She was twelve years his senior and brought a comfortable income and a house in London, and gossips assumed a marriage of convenience ^[2]. It became instead one of the most devoted partnerships in Victorian public life. Mary Anne famously said that Dizzy had married her for her money but would, given the chance, marry her again for love, and Disraeli dedicated Sybil to her as the perfect wife ^[3]. In 1868 he asked that she, rather than he, receive a peerage, and she became Viscountess Beaconsfield in her own right. Her death in 1872 left him desolate ^[1].

The couple had no children. In 1848 Disraeli acquired Hughenden Manor, a country house near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, purchased with help from the Bentinck family so that he could hold the county seat expected of a Conservative leader ^[6]. He loved the place, planted its woods, and used it as a retreat from Westminster for the rest of his life; the house now belongs to the National Trust and preserves his study and library much as he left them ^[6].

Disraeli never disguised his Jewish ancestry. Though a practising Anglican, he wrote and spoke with pride of what he saw as the antiquity of his lineage, and he endured antisemitic abuse throughout his career, in election crowds, in the press, and from political opponents ^[2]. His response was characteristically audacious: he built his heritage into his self presentation and his fiction rather than hiding it. Friendship with Queen Victoria became another anchor of his later years. He flattered her openly, admitting that with royalty he laid it on with a trowel, and she in turn preferred him to any of her other prime ministers, sending primroses from Osborne and visiting him at Hughenden ^[1].

The triumph of Berlin faded quickly. From 1879 Britain slid into agricultural depression, and two colonial wars went badly wrong: British forces suffered a heavy defeat at Isandlwana in the Zulu War, and the occupation of Kabul in the Second Anglo-Afghan War ended in the massacre of the British envoy and renewed fighting ^[1]. Gladstone came out of semi-retirement to attack what he called Beaconsfieldism in his Midlothian campaign, a series of mass speeches denouncing the government's finance and foreign policy ^[4].

At the general election of April 1880 the Liberals won decisively, and Disraeli resigned. Now in the House of Lords, he continued to lead the Conservative opposition and, remarkably, returned to fiction. Endymion, published in November 1880, earned him ten thousand pounds from Longmans, one of the largest sums yet paid for a novel ^[3]. He began another book, Falconet, with a central character widely read as a caricature of Gladstone, but never finished it.

His health, long troubled by asthma, gout, and bronchitis, collapsed in the harsh spring of 1881. He died at his house at 19 Curzon Street in Mayfair on April 19, 1881, aged seventy six ^[1]. Offered a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, his executors followed his wish to be buried beside Mary Anne in the churchyard at Hughenden. Queen Victoria, barred by custom from attending, sent primroses and later visited the grave privately ^[6].

No Benjamin Disraeli biography can avoid the argument over what he actually believed. To admirers he was the founder of modern Conservatism, the man who taught a party of squires to win elections in a democracy by combining patriotism, empire, and social reform. To critics, beginning with contemporaries, he was an opportunist of genius whose principles shifted with the parliamentary weather ^[2]. Both traditions agree on his importance: the phrase One Nation, drawn from Sybil, has served ever since as shorthand for a Conservatism that claims to govern for the whole country, invoked by party leaders from Stanley Baldwin to the present day ^[4].

His afterlife took organized form quickly. The Primrose League, founded in 1883 and named for the flower associated with him, enrolled hundreds of thousands of members to spread Conservative principles, and for decades Primrose Day was marked on April 19, the anniversary of his death ^[1]. Statues went up in Parliament Square and in provincial towns, and his official biography, begun by William Flavelle Monypenny and completed by George Earle Buckle in six volumes between 1910 and 1920, fixed him among the monuments of Victorian politics ^[7].

He also endures as a writer. Disraeli is the only British prime minister with a substantial career as a novelist, and Coningsby and Sybil are still read as founding works of the English political novel ^[3]. His epigrams circulate constantly, and his life keeps attracting major biographers, from Robert Blake's standard 1966 study to more recent accounts that weigh his Jewishness, his imperialism, and his showmanship afresh ^[2]. A man who entered public life mocked as a bankrupt dandy left it as an earl, a queen's favourite, and the most improbable prime minister of his century.