Marking the 200th anniversary of Benjamin Disraeli’s first novel
After Benjamin Disraeli had begun to serve in Tory leadership roles in the House of Commons, he complained to a friend in 1853 that the Conservative backbenchers, largely composed of country aristocrats, could not be counted upon to read a book:
“They could not be got to attend to business while the hunting season lasted … they had good natural ability … but wanted culture; they never read, their leisure was passed in field sports … they learned nothing useful, and did not understand the ideas of their own time.”
But when Disraeli first began to think of breaking into politics, he seems to have had the opposite impression of aristocrats. When at 22 years of age he had his first novel, Vivian Grey, published anonymously in 1826, many critics clamored to guess which member of the aristocracy had written it, claiming the novel revealed inside knowledge of the nobility. One critic, however, correctly figured out that the author of Vivian Grey was no aristocrat because he was too well versed in literature to have been a nobleman: “This ‘somewhat smacks’ of the ‘literary writer,’” he wrote of Vivian Grey. “We should have the idea that the class of the author of Vivian Grey was a little betrayed by his often recurrence to topics of this sort, about which the mere man of fashion knows nothing and cares less.”
Vivian Grey turns 200 years old this spring, and nothing like it has been written since by a future statesman. Twenty-one years ago, the publisher Routledge issued a new edition of Vivian Grey bursting with new scholarship across two introductions, hundreds of footnotes notating all of the hungry young author’s literary, political, philosophical, scientific, architectural, musical and theatrical allusions, as well as hundreds of pages detailing the fascinating differences between prior editions of the novel, as the first volume of its six-part series The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli. If Google and JSTOR are to be believed, no one the world over reviewed it. This is unfortunate, as the edition represents the best way in 200 years to enjoy this witty, manic-depressive, overstuffed, audacious, sometimes perspicacious, often silly, ridiculous and revealing look at the psychology of a future star of world statesmanship.
Disraeli had the idea that all this showing off would earn him entry to the world of high society, and strangely enough it eventually did. As the Routledge edition’s editor, Michael Sanders, points out in his fascinating and thorough introduction, the young author wrote in the novel that the only routes into “the society of the great” were blood (which he lacked; his father was middle-class, a noted author and a great socialite among the literary classes but not among the nobility), fortune (which Disraeli tried to acquire first with disastrous investments in South American stocks and second with an equally disastrous entrée into the world of newspapers, leaving him deeply in debt almost until the day he died), and genius (which he acheived). This novel, Sanders says, was his attempt to make it into society via genius.
When the first four books of the novel were anonymously published, Disraeli’s book became the talk of the town. The reviews were great – until the author was revealed to be a 22-year-old upstart from what he called “middling” beginnings. After that, critics turned on it. But Disraeli’s name had been made. He even wrote a sequel, which is now always bundled with the first volume as one novel. As the great Victorian scholar John Vincent put it, “This sequel is so different in mood and style, not to say merit, that mankind has universally disregarded the second volume.” Most critics fail to say almost anything about it at all. But both parts of the book are worth looking back at as its 200th birthday approaches.
The second half is even more stuffed with allusions than the first half. Across the whole book Disraeli discusses novels (Gil Blas seems never to get enough love for Disraeli’s tastes; neither does Tremaine by Robert Plumer Ward), philosophers (the neo-Platonists are the source of particular punchlines, as well as the philosophes Voltaire, Rosseau and the Germans Kant, Fichte and Schelling), historians (Gibbon, Thucydides, Plutarch), politicians (the Duke of Wellington, Canning, Croker), architects (Brunellesco, Palladio, Sanmichele), scientists and astronomers (Aristarchus, Linnaeus, Galileo), visual artists (Cimabue, Vecellio, Corregio), and on and on. Robert Blake once said Disraeli was no intellectual, citing his public response to Darwin, which was to proclaim himself “on the side of the angels” and not on the side of evolution. But the 21-year-old Disraeli was certainly trying hard to look like an intellectual.
Vivian Grey is about ambition, primarily ambition to power, and the onslaught of allusions reflect the fact that the title character’s ambition is autobiographical. Disraeli famously said that “in Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition.” The character arc for Vivian goes from a Machiavellian form of this ambition to chastened depression and humility, back to manic ambition again.
The plot follows the young dandy Vivian Grey as he attempts to build a political party at 21 by manipulating the aristocratic Marquess of Carabas, who is based upon the publisher John Murray, a former friend he had wheedled into launching a conservative newspaper in the 1820s before it collapsed, leaving both men out thousands of pounds. Vivian’s plans collapse when the adults begin to behave as dramatically as he does, and by the end of the first part of the book Vivian accidentally kills (in a duel) a friend and collaborator based on another figure from his newspaper days. In the second part of the book, a devastated Vivian retreats to Germany to heal his emotional wounds. The real Disraeli had traveled Germany in 1824, but he did write the sequel to Vivian Grey while traveling elsewhere in Europe, after a spot of ill health not unlike Vivian’s.
In 1853 the seasoned political pro issued an edited version of the book that cut out much of the evidence of his violently swinging moods. In the sequel to the original Vivian Grey, in a passage the senior Disraeli had excised from later editions of the book, the narrator admits the characterization in the first was autobiographical but points out defensively that it was a portrait of the author as he was and not as he is:
“Of the literary vices of Vivian Grey, no one is perhaps more sensible than their author. I conceived the character of a youth of great talents, whose mind had been corrupted, as the minds of many of our youth have been, by the artificial age in which he lived. ... I am blamed for the affectation, the flippancy, the arrogance, the wicked wit of this fictitious character. Yet was Vivian Grey to talk like Simon Pure…?”
And yet several chapters later, Vivian declares that “my ambition is so exalted that I cannot condescend to take anything under the Premiership.” It may be a joke, but it reflects a change that earlier ruminations by the narrator delineate: He had decided that his earlier Machiavellian approach to ambition was the product of inexperience, but then having met the successful Mr. Beckendorff, who Disraeli said was based on the crafty conservative Austrian statesman Metternich, he sees an example of Machiavellian ambition in a man he can hardly claim is inexperienced.
Seminal Disraeli biographer William Monypenny questioned whether the young author was sincere that he had intended Vivian to get his comeuppance from the beginning, arguing somewhat convincingly that the portrait of the more ambitious version of Vivian in the early chapters of the book was too sympathetic for the claim to be believed. But in any case it is true that Disraeli had already begun an introspective analysis of whether the end of gaining power justified the means of manipulation. Vivian Grey has been ranked by Flavorwire.com as the #22 best novel of the 19th Century, ahead of his much better books Coningsby (#37) and Sybil (#47). This is exactly backwards, but it reflects the importance of the novel to the century and to Disraeli, who was known by Vivian first and in some ways most enduringly. One might say that Disraeli’s reputation for lacking principle and for Machiavellian tendencies in politics stems primarily from his own characterization of himself as Vivian Grey.
In addition to the plot about ambition, there are also some perfunctory romances, but they aren’t where the young Disraeli’s heart is. At one point he writes of Vivian: “He looked upon marriage as a comedy in which, sooner or later, he was, as a well-paid actor, to play his part; and could it have advanced his views one jot he would have married the Princess Caraboo tomorrow. But of all wives in the world, a young and handsome one was that which he most dreaded.” Vivian’s relationship with the enigmatic Mrs. Felix Lorraine makes less sense as the romantic interest she briefly becomes than when she behaves like a modern day best straight friend to Vivian’s best gay friend: “Is Mr. Cleveland handsome?” she gushes to Vivian. “And what colour are his eyes?” Vivian gives her fashion advice, which she eagerly laps up: “Allow me to recommend your Ladyship to alter the order of those bracelets, and place the blue and silver against the maroon. You may depend on it, that is the true Vienna order.” “The blue and silver next to the maroon, did you say? Yes; certainly it does look better.” When their relationship turns romantic, the pair begin speaking stiltedly in quasi-Shakespearean speeches, as though the Bard’s romantic scenes were all the 21-year-old Disraeli knew of love.
Sanders points out the book is rarely credited as a comedy, but nearly every page is full of jokes: “Mr. Grey, I wish you could get me an autograph of Mr. Washington Irving,” says one of Vivian’s female friends. “I want it for a particular friend.” Vivian replies, “Give me a pen and ink; I will write you one immediately.” Often the humor takes the form of Wildean paradoxes, in which a statement seems absurd but reveals a deeper truth. Vivian's love interest Violet Fane, for example, remarks: "Is it so unprincipled to break an appointment? I think it is one of the most agreeable and pleasant habits in the world! No young man is expected to keep an appointment." The book is said to have been of significant influence to Oscar Wilde decades after its publication.
Both Disraeli and Vivian Grey left school, which agreed with neither. The headmasters at Disraeli’s school described his as a “foreign and seditious mind, incapable of acquiring the spirit of the school,” which Sanders points out echoes the language used by school authorities in book one chapter four of Vivian Grey. I’d add that it also provides an intriguing explanation for one of the more enigmatic statements Disraeli ever made about himself, that “My mind is a revolutionary mind. It is a continental mind.” Scholars debate the meaning of this odd line, which hints again at a radicalism. But it appears no one has pointed out that Disraeli was reclaiming the language used derisively about him as a child by his headmasters.
The book is not without its innovations: it represents the first time anyone used the word “millionaire,” and the first time the word “crony” was used as a verb. (Also, or so it seems, the last, but the usage makes some dictionaries.) But Vivian Grey’s greatest value is the insight it provides into the character of this young genius, especially when that insight is provided unwittingly. The Routledge edition treats us to flights of manic fantasy that Disraeli later had cut. In moments the young author can barely contain his energy and nearly abandons his story:
“I had intended to have commenced this book with something quite terrific - a murder, or a marriage: and I find that all my great ideas have ended in a lounge. After all it is, perhaps, the most natural termination. In life surely man is not always as monstrously busy, as he appears to be in novels and romances. We are not always in action—not always making speeches, or making money. or making war, or making love.”
A few paragraphs later he is rambling about “THE PURPLE EMPEROR”, a butterfly that briefly figures in one of his father Isaac D’Israeli’s novels, a touching tribute but absolutely without context.
All this rocketing from mood to mood serves to ratify the impression of William Gladstone, Disraeli’s great parliamentary rival, who when he read Vivian Grey concluded that the first quarter of the book was exceedingly clever and the rest of it “trash.” But these deviations from what works best in the book are not only anomalous—they are also among the best insights into the mind of the young Disraeli, which is probably why he cut them and why this edition, which restores them, is so valuable.