Book Description

Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, KG, PC, FRS, (21 December 1804 - 19 April 1881) was a British Conservative politician and writer, who twice served as Prime Minister. He played a central role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach. Disraeli is remembered for his influential voice in world affairs, his political battles with the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone, and his one-nation conservatism or "Tory democracy." He made the Conservatives the party most identified with the glory and power of the British Empire. He is, at 2015, the only British Prime Minister of Jewish birth. Disraeli's early "silver fork" novels Vivian Grey (1826) and The Young Duke (1831) featured romanticised depictions of aristocratic life (despite his ignorance of it) with character sketches of well-known public figures lightly disguised. In some of his early fiction Disraeli also portrayed himself and what he felt to be his Byronic dual nature: the poet and the man of action. His most autobiographical novel was Contarini Fleming (1832), an avowedly serious work that did not sell well. The critic William Kuhn suggests that Disraeli's fiction can be read as "the memoirs he never wrote," revealing the inner life of a politician for whom the norms of Victorian public life appeared to represent a social straitjacket-particularly with regard to what Kuhn sees as the author's "ambiguous sexuality." Of the other novels of the early 1830s, Alroy is described by Blake as "profitable but unreadable," and The Rise of Iskander (1833), The Infernal Marriage and Ixion in Heaven (1834) made little impact. Henrietta Temple (1837) was Disraeli's next major success. It draws on the events of his affair with Henrietta Sykes to tell the story of a debt-ridden young man torn between a mercenary loveless marriage and a passionate love-at-first-sight for the eponymous heroine. Venetia (1837) was a minor work, written to raise much-needed cash.