Disraeli: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

the two men first met, Byron treated him with so much respect that D’Israeli thought he was being teased. ‘The fact is’, he wrote complacently, ‘that my works being all about literary men were exceedingly interesting to him. They contained knowledge that he could get nowhere else. It was all new to him.’⁶

      By the time of the appearance of the twelfth edition of Curiosities of Literature, Isaac D’Israeli had become an easily recognized figure in the streets of Bloomsbury. Some years before, an American author, who saw him from time to time in the British Museum, described him as being ‘a dapper little gentleman in bright coloured clothes, with a chirping, gossipy expression of countenance, who had all the appearance of an author on good terms with his bookseller’.

      He was also by then a contented family man. At the age of thirty-five he had married Maria Basevi, the pretty daughter of an Italian Jew, a merchant in a good way of business, who had come to England from Verona in 1762. Maria’s mother was of distinguished Jewish stock, one of whose illustrious forebears was a leader of the great exodus of his race from Spain in 1492. Maria’s son, Ben, was extremely proud of his Jewish ancestry, considering himself of highly aristocratic birth, exaggerating, in a characteristically romantic way, the family’s past glories and – unaware of his mother’s distinguished descent – making unwarranted claims for that of his father.⁷

      His mother’s nephew was George Basevi, the architect, whose works included the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge and large parts of Belgravia in London which his cousin, Benjamin Disraeli, was unfairly to condemn as being ‘as monotonous as Marylebone, and so contrived as to be at the same time insipid and tawdry’.

      

      Maria D’Israeli’s first child, Sarah, was born in December 1802; two years later came Benjamin, then three more boys, none of whom became in any way distinguished. Napthali died in infancy; Ralph, five years younger than Benjamin, was born in 1809; James, known as Jem, born in 1813, was almost ten years younger.

      Benjamin had little in common with either of these two surviving brothers. To his sister, however, he was as devoted as she was to him; and he was to write to her with a fond and frank intimacy which endured until her death.

      Benjamin was also deeply and unreservedly attached to his father, of whom he wrote affectionately, ‘He was a complete literary character…Even marriage produced no change; he rose to enter the chamber where he lived alone with his books, and at night his lamp was ever lit within the same walls…He disliked business, and he never required relaxation…If he entered a club, it was only to go into the library. In the country he scarcely ever left his room but to saunter in abstraction upon a terrace, muse over a chapter, or coin a sentence.’⁸

      When he was six years old, Benjamin was sent to a school in Islington kept by a Miss Roper; and from there he went to a school in Blackheath kept by a nonconformist minister, John Potticary, who numbered several Quakers among his pupils as well as at least one Jew with whom Benjamin was required to stand at the back of the class during Christian prayers. On Saturdays these two Jewish boys were also singled out to receive instruction from a Hebrew rabbi. At the end of term, so one of his fellow pupils said, ‘Disraeli went home for the holidays in the basket of the Blackheath coach, [firing] away at the passers-by with his peashooter’.⁹

      There is no record of Benjamin’s father having objected to his son’s instruction in the faith of his ancestors by the rabbi at Blackheath. But when, in 1813, Isaac was elected warden of the Bevis Marks synagogue, he declined to take office. A fine of £40 was imposed, he refused to pay it, requiring the elders to accept that ‘a person who had lived out of the sphere of [their] observations, of retired habits of life who [could] never unite in [their] public worship, because, as now conducted, it disturbed instead of excited religious emotions…Such a man never could accept the solemn function of an elder of your congregation’.

      Having broken with the synagogue, Isaac might well have allowed the matter to rest there, content for his son to be the non-practising Jew that he was himself. But a friend, Sharon Turner, a fellow frequenter of the British Museum, a solicitor, historian, devout Anglican and adviser on legal matters to the publisher John Murray, persuaded him to allow his four children to be baptised. The ceremony of baptism accordingly took place at St Andrew’s, Holborn on the last day of July 1817. Benjamin was then twelve years old.

      His brothers were to go to Winchester, the public school founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham; and it seems that their father would have liked his eldest son to go to Eton. But it was, perhaps, as with the mother in Vivian Grey, that Ben’s mother – being ‘one of those women whom nothing in the world can persuade that a public school is anything but a place where boys are roasted alive’ – was firmly against this proposal and, as was commonly the case, her views prevailed. So Benjamin was sent instead to Higham Hall, a school near Walthamstow in Epping Forest which was kept by the nonconformist minister and Greek scholar, the Revd Eli Cogan, and at which, as at all similar schools in those days, the classics, with a little arithmetic, formed almost the only, and certainly the main, subject on the curriculum.

      According to Mr Cogan, Benjamin did not shine as a scholar. ‘I do not like D’Israeli,’ Cogan was quoted as having said. ‘I never could get him to understand the subjunctive.’

      ‘I looked up to him as a big boy,’ an elderly clergyman said, recalling his days at school with Disraeli, ‘and very kind he was to me, making me sit next to him in play hours, and amusing me with stories of robbers and caves, illustrating them with rough pencil sketches which he continually rubbed out to make way for fresh ones. He was a very rapid reader, was fond of romances, and would often let me sit by him and read the same book, good-naturedly waiting before turning a leaf till he knew I had reached the bottom of the page.’

      Other former pupils remembered Ben as a lively, carefree boy who took scant trouble over his lessons, who amused his companions on wet half-holidays by reciting romantic adventures of his own composition, and who ‘had a taste, not uncommon among schoolboys, for little acts of bargaining, and merchandise’.¹⁰ Much later, Cogan’s daughter told Beatrix Potter that the boy Disraeli ‘used to keep the other boys awake half the night romancing’.

      But Benjamin seems not to have been happy at Mr Cogan’s, and if the schooldays of Contarini Fleming and Vivian Grey as described in his novels can be supposed to bear some resemblance to his own, they were certainly far from being contented ones. However, in his early days at the school, his idiosyncracies seem to have been tolerated at least: it was recorded of him that he suggested that he and his fellow Anglicans – who, having to walk some way to the local church and back to attend morning service, were late for dinner, which was half over by the time they returned to the school – should therefore become Unitarians during term time.

      In Vivian Grey, the eponymous hero does not acquire the classical knowledge which has been dinned into the heads of the other boys but in ‘talents and various accomplishments’ he is ‘immeasurably the superior of them’. This leads him into a fight with another boy which is described with a lyricism and an evident pride in the author’s boxing skills acquired in those lessons which Disraeli was given in the holidays at home.

      There is a great fight also in Contarini Fleming in which the hero enjoys a passionate friendship with another boy, a boy of sublimely beautiful countenance named Musaeus, after the semi-legendary poet whose verses had the authority of oracles.

      ‘I beheld him: I loved him [Disraeli has Fleming say]. My friendship was a passion…Oh! days of rare and pure felicity, when Musaeus and myself, with arms around each other’s neck, wandered together…I lavished on him all the fanciful love that I had long stored up; and the mighty passions that yet lay dormant in my obscure soul now first began to stir…’¹¹

      So Contarini endures the homosexual