Disraeli: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

‘pensive and restless’. He could not reconcile himself to the thought of being a lawyer; and when he returned to Bloomsbury Square of an evening he did not take up the legal textbooks which he was meant to be studying, but helped himself to more interesting books from the tightly packed shelves of his father’s library.

      When he went out in the evening he was careful not to dress as the articled clerk he was determined not long to be, setting himself apart from his colleagues by a style of dress – a black velvet suit with ruffles and black stockings with red clocks – as well as a manner which was considered flamboyant, even in those early years of the reign of King George IV. ‘You have too much genius for Frederick’s Place,’ a lady pleased him by suggesting one day. ‘It will never do.’²

      His manner, so another lady remarked, was entirely fitted to his ‘rather conspicuous attire’ and his theatrical gestures as he ‘delivered himself of high-flown compliments and sharp asides’. He performed his duties in Frederick’s Place adequately; but, like Charles Dickens, who was to start work in a smaller firm of solicitors a few years later, he yearned for other things. The books he read in his father’s library, the distinguished men he met at work and the conversations he had heard at Murray’s dinner table stirred his imagination and ambition. He felt himself worthy of a more dramatic future than that promised by the testaments and conveyances and ledgers of Frederick’s Place, Old Jewry.

      Visitors to the house at 6 Bloomsbury Square, where his family had moved in 1817, described him as looking as though he were bored to death by the life that was led there. William Archer Shee, then a boy some years younger than himself, who had come to a children’s party at the D’Israelis’ house, recalled seeing him ‘in tight pantaloons with his hands in his pockets, looking very pale, bored and dissatisfied, and evidently wishing that we were all in bed. He looked like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, suffering from chronic dyspepsia.’³

      In the office as well as at home, Disraeli spent as much time as he could in writing to please himself rather than the partners of Messrs Swain, Stevens, Maples, Pearse and Hunt. One of the earliest, if not perhaps the first, of his completed productions was a melodramatic play in verse, Rumpel Stilts Kin, based on the German folk tale about a deformed dwarf, Rumpelstiltskin, written in collaboration with William George Meredith, his sister Sarah’s rather staid and tedious fiancé, an undergraduate at Oxford and heir to a rich uncle.

      A few months after Rumpel Stilts Kin was finished – and perhaps performed by the D’Israeli and Meredith families – Disraeli delivered to John Murray the manuscript of a novel to which he had given the title Aylmer Papillon, a short work intended, as its author said, to be a satire on ‘the present state of society’. Murray evidently did not rate the novel very highly but, reluctant to offend his young protégé, could not bring himself to write a letter of rejection. After a month had elapsed, Disraeli approached the publisher again; and, alluding impertinently to Murray’s burning of Byron’s Memoirs as being too salacious for publication, Disraeli wrote, ‘And, as you have some small experience in burning MSS, you will perhaps be so kind as to consign [mine] to the flames.’⁴

      In the summer of 1824, Benjamin, by now aged nineteen, and his father, both of whom had been in indifferent health of late, decided to go away for six weeks on holiday on the Continent with Sarah’s fiancé William Meredith, who by then had taken his degree at Oxford. They went by steamer to Ostend and thence by diligence to Bruges, where Benjamin wrote the first of several long letters to his sister describing the places they visited, the sights they saw and, in some detail, the meals they ate. Both Benjamin and his father were enthusiastic trenchermen and Sarah was regaled with accounts of memorable meals which they enjoyed in the estaminets on their route through the Low Countries and the Rhine Valley.

      Writing from Antwerp on 2 August, Benjamin told Sarah that ‘the hostess’ at Ghent had seemed ‘particularly desirous to give us a specimen of her cookery and there was a mysterious delay. Enter the waiter. A fricandeau, the finest I ever tasted, perfectly admirable, a small and very delicate roast joint, veal chops, a large dish of peas most wonderfully fine, cheese, a dessert, a salad pre-eminent even among the salads of Flanders which are unique for their delicate crispness and silvery whiteness…Cost only six francs, forming one of the finest specimens of exquisite cookery I ever witnessed.’

      In Antwerp, the travellers stayed at the Grand Laboureur where there was unfortunately no table d’hôte, but they enjoyed ‘capital private feeds…the most luxurious possible’. ‘And my mother’, he added, ‘must really reform her table before our return. I have kept a journal of dinners for myself, and in doings in general for my father, so I shall leave the account of churches, cathedrals and cafés till we come home…love to Mère and all, Your affectionate Brother, B. Disraeli.’

      ‘The dinner was good,’ he added after describing with enthusiasm the pictures by Rubens in the Museum at Antwerp. ‘The Grand Laboureur is un hôtel pour les riches. The vol au vent of pigeons was admirable. The peas were singularly fine.’ The table d’hôte at the Belle Vue in Brussels was equally commendable – ‘dinner excellent – frogs – pâté de grenouilles – magnificent! – sublime’. He was most thankful that the English at the table d’hôte in Brussels shared a ‘vulgar but lucky prejudice against frogs. So had the pâté to myself,’ he recorded in his journal. ‘Eat myself blind.’ At Mechlin, the ‘oysters were as small as shrimps but delicately sweet’. ‘We always put up at the crack hotels,’ he wrote from Mainz, ‘and live perfectly en prince. The Governor allows us to debauch to the utmost, and Hochheimer, Johannisberg, Rudesheimer, Assmansshauser and a thousand other varieties are unsealed and floored with equal rapidity.’ At Frankfurt, the ‘Gâteau de Pouche’ was ‘superb beyond conception’.⁵

      Occasionally Disraeli’s accounts of their travels were more than a little facetious. Describing their crossing by steamer to Ostend, he writes: ‘We had a very stiff breeze, and almost every individual was taken downstairs save ourselves who bore it all in the most manly and magnificent manner…The Governor was quite frisky on landing, and on the strength of mulled claret, etc., was quite the lion of Ostend…We rode on the Spa ponies to the distant springs…The Governor was particularly equestrian…I have become a most exquisite billiard player…Meredith and I talk French with a mixture of sublimity and sang-froid perfectly inimitable.’⁶

      The sketches he provided for Sarah of individuals his party came across in their travels are more entertaining. He tells her, for instance, about an Irish tourist ‘who would have made an inimitable hero for [the comedian, Charles] Mathews. It was his first debut on the Continent, and, with a most plentiful supply of ignorance and an utter want of taste…I met him two or three times afterwards in different places, and his salutations were exceedingly rich. It was always “How do you do, Sir. Wonderful city this, Sir, wonderful! Pray have you seen the Crucifixion by Vandyke, wonderful picture, Sir, wonderful picture, Sir”. ’⁷

      At Darmstadt, Disraeli sees the Grand Duke at a performance of Otello. He is an ‘immense amateur’. His ‘royal box is a large pavillon of velvet and gold in the midst of the theatre. The Duke himself in grand military uniform gave the word for the commencement of the overture, standing up all the time, beating time with one hand and watching the orchestra through an immense glass with the other.’

      Occasionally, the diary reveals some inner thought or emotion:

      Ghent, Sunday – High Mass. A dozen priests in splendid unity. Clouds of incense and one of Mozart’s sublimest Masses by an orchestra before which San Carlo might grow pale. The effect is inconceivably grand. The host raised and I flung myself on the ground.⁸

      In another entry in his journal he wonders if German beggars would prove to be even more tiresome