Family of Isaac Disraeli—Life in London—Birth of his Children—Abandons Judaism and joins the Church of England—Education of Benjamin Disraeli—School Days—Picture of them in ‘Vivian Grey’ and ‘Contarini Fleming’—Self-education at Home—Early Ambition.

Isaac Disraeli, having the advantage of a good fortune, escaped the embarrassments which attend a struggling literary career. His circumstances were easy. He became intimate with distinguished men; and his experiences in Paris had widened and liberalised his mind. His creed sate light upon him, but as long as his father lived he remained nominally in the communion in which he was born. He married happily a Jewish lady, Maria, daughter of Mr. George Basevi, of Brighton, a gentle, sweet-tempered, affectionate woman. To her he relinquished the management of his worldly affairs, and divided his time between his own splendid library, the shops of book collectors or the British Museum, and the brilliant society of politicians and men of letters. His domestic life was unruffled by the storms which had disturbed his boyhood; a household more affectionately united was scarcely to be found within the four seas. Four children were born to him—the eldest a daughter, Sarah, whose gifts and accomplishments would have raised her, had she been a man, into fame; Benjamin, the Prime Minister that was to be, and two other boys, Ralph and James. The Disraelis lived in London, but changed their residence more than once. At the outset of their married life they had chambers in the Adelphi. From thence they removed to the King’s Road, Gray’s Inn, and there, on December 21, 1804, Benjamin was born. He was received into the Jewish Church with the usual rites, the record of the initiation being preserved in the register of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue Bevis Marks. No soothsayer having foretold his future eminence, he was left to grow up much like other children. He was his mother’s darling, and was naturally spoilt. He was unruly, and a noisy boy at home perhaps disturbed his father’s serenity. At an early age it was decided that he must go to school, but where it was not easy to decide. English boys were rough and prejudiced, and a Jewish lad would be likely to have a hard time among them. No friend of Isaac Disraeli, who knew what English public schools were then like, would have recommended him to commit his lad to the rude treatment which he would encounter at Eton or Winchester. A private establishment of a smaller kind had to be tried as preliminary.

Disraeli’s first introduction to life was at a Mr. Poticary’s, at Blackheath, where he remained for several years—till he was too old to be left there, and till a very considerable change took place in the circumstances of the family. In 1817 the grandfather died. Isaac Disraeli succeeded to his fortune, removed from Gray’s Inn Road, and took a larger house—No. 6 Bloomsbury Square, then a favourite situation for leading lawyers and men of business. A more important step was his formal withdrawal from the Jewish congregation. The reasons for it, as given by himself in his ‘Genius of Judaism,’ were the narrowness of the system, the insistence that the Law was of perpetual obligation, while circumstances changed and laws failed of their objects. ‘The inventions,’ he says, ‘of the Talmudical doctors, incorporated in their ceremonies, have bound them hand and foot, and cast them into the caverns of the lone and sullen genius of rabbinical Judaism, cutting them off from the great family of mankind and perpetuating their sorrow and their shame.’ The explanation is sufficient, but the resolution was probably of older date. The coincidence between the date of his father’s death and his own secession points to a connection between the two events. His mother’s impatience of her Jewish fetters must naturally have left a mark on his mind, and having no belief himself in the system, he must have wished to relieve his children of the disabilities and inconveniences which attached to them as members of the synagogue. At all events at this period he followed the example of his Spanish ancestors in merging himself and them in the general population of his adopted country. The entire household became members of the Church of England. The children read their Prayer Books and learned their catechisms. On July 31 in that year Benjamin Disraeli was baptised at St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn, having for his godfather his father’s intimate friend the distinguished Sharon Turner.

The education problem was thus simplified, but not entirely solved. The instruction at Mr. Poticary’s was indifferent. ‘Ben’ had learnt little there. The Latin and Greek were all behindhand, and of grammar, which in those days was taught tolerably effectively in good English schools, he had brought away next to nothing. But he was quick, clever, impetuous. At home he was surrounded with books, and had read for himself with miscellaneous voracity. In general knowledge and thought he was far beyond his age. His father’s wish was to give him the best education possible—to send him to Eton, and then to a university. His mother believed that a public school was a place where boys were roasted alive. ‘Ben’ was strong and daring, and might be trusted to take care of himself. The objections, however, notwithstanding the removal of the religious difficulty, were still considerable. The character of a public school is more determined by the boys than by the masters. There were no institutions where prejudice had freer play at the beginning of the present century. The nationality of a Disraeli could neither be concealed nor forgotten, and though he might be called a Christian, and though he might be ready to return blow for blow if he was insulted or ill-used, it is not likely that at either one of our great public foundations he would have met with any tolerable reception. He would himself have willingly run the risk, and regretted afterwards, perhaps, that he had no share in the bright Eton life which he describes so vividly in ‘Coningsby.’ It was decided otherwise. The school chosen for him was at Walthamstow. The master was a Dr. Cogan, a Unitarian. There were many boys there, sons most of them of rich parents; but the society at a Unitarian school seventy years ago could not have been distinguished for birth or good breeding. Neither ‘Vivian Grey’ nor ‘Contarini Fleming’ can be trusted literally for autobiographical details; but Disraeli has identified himself with Contarini in assigning to him many of his own personal experiences, and Vivian has been always acknowledged as a portrait sketched from a looking-glass. In both these novels there are pictures of the hero’s school days, so like in their general features that they may be taken as a fair account of Disraeli’s own recollections. He was fifteen when he went to Walthamstow, and was then beyond the age when most boys begin their school career.

‘For the first time in my life,’ says Contarini, ‘I was surrounded by struggling and excited beings. Joy, hope, sorrow, ambition, craft, dulness, courage, cowardice, beneficence, awkwardness, grace, avarice, generosity, wealth, poverty, beauty, hideousness, tyranny, suffering, hypocrisy, tricks, love, hatred, energy, inertness, they were all there and sounded and moved and acted about me. Light laughs and bitter cries and deep imprecations, and the deeds of the friendly, the prodigal, and the tyrant, the exploits of the brave, the graceful, and the gay, and the flying words of native wit and the pompous sentences of acquired knowledge, how new, how exciting, how wonderful!’

Contarini is Disraeli thus launched into a school epitome of the world after the Unitarian pattern. It was a poor substitute for Eton. The young Disraeli soon asserted his superiority. He made enemies, he made friends, at all events he distinguished himself from his comrades. School work did not interest him, and he paid but slight attention to it. He wanted ideas, and he was given what seemed to him to be but words. He lost the opportunity of becoming an exact scholar. On the other hand in thought, in imagination, in general attainments, he was superior to everyone about him, masters included. Superiority begets jealousy. Boys never pardon a comrade who is unlike themselves. He was taunted with his birth, as it was inevitable that he would be. As inevitably he resented the insult. Contarini Fleming and Vivian Grey both fight and thrash the biggest boy in their school. The incident in the novels is evidently taken from the writer’s experience. Disraeli was a fighter from his youth, with his fist first, as with his tongue afterwards. It was characteristic of him that he had studied the art of self-defence, and was easily able to protect himself. But both his heroes were unpopular, and it may be inferred that he was not popular any more than they. The school experiment was not a success and came to an abrupt end. Vivian Grey was expelled; Contarini left of his own accord, because he learnt nothing which he thought would be of use to him, and because he ‘detested school more than he ever abhorred the world in the darkest moment of experienced manhood.’ The precise circumstances under which Disraeli himself made his exit are not known to me, but his stay at Walthamstow was a brief one, and he left to complete his education at home. His father, recollecting the troubles of his own youth, abstained from rebukes or reproaches, left him to himself, helped him when he could, and now and then, if we may identify him with Vivian, gave him shrewd and useful advice. Disraeli wanted no spurring. He worked for twelve hours a day, conscious that he had singular powers and passionately ambitious to make use of them. He was absolutely free from the loose habits so common in the years between boyhood and youth; his father had no fault to find with his conduct, which he admitted had been absolutely correct. The anxiety was of another kind. He did not wish to interfere with his son’s direction of himself, but warned him, very wisely, ‘not to consider himself a peculiar boy.’ ‘Take the advice,’ said Mr. Grey to Vivian, ‘of one who has committed as many—aye, more—follies than yourself. Try to ascertain what may be the chief objects of your existence in this world. I want you to take no theological dogmas for granted, nor to satisfy your doubts by ceasing to think; but whether we are in this world in a state of probation for another, or whether at death we cease altogether, human feelings tell me that we have some duties to perform to our fellow-creatures, to our friends, and to ourselves.’

Disraeli’s conception of himself was that he had it in him to be a great man, and that the end of his existence was to make himself a great man. With his father’s example before him literature appeared the readiest road. Contarini when a boy wrote romances and threw them into the river, and composed pages of satire or sentiment ‘and grew intoxicated with his own eloquence.’ He pondered over the music of language, studied the cultivation of sweet words, and constructed elaborate sentences in lonely walks, and passed his days in constant struggle to qualify himself for the part which he was determined to play in the game of life. Boyish pursuits and amusements had no interest for him. In athletic games he excelled if he chose to exert himself, but he rarely did choose unless it was in the science of self-defence. He rode well and hard, for the motion stimulated his spirits; but in galloping across the country he was charging in imagination the brooks and fences in the way of his more ambitious career.

This was one side of him in those early years; another was equally remarkable. He intended to excel among his fellow-creatures, and to understand what men and women were like was as important to him as to understand books. The reputation of Vivian Grey’s father—in other words, his own father—had always made him an honoured guest in the great world. For this reason he had been anxious that his son should be as little at home as possible, for he feared for a youth the fascination of London society. This particular society was what Disraeli was most anxious to study, and was in less danger from it than his father fancied. He was handsome, audacious, and readily made his way into the circle of the family acquaintances. ‘Contarini was a graceful, lively lad, with enough of dandyism to prevent him from committing gaucheries, and with a devil of a tongue.’ ‘He was never at a loss for a compliment or a repartee,’ and ‘was absolutely unchecked by foolish modesty.’ ‘The nervous vapidity of my first rattle,’ says the alter ego Vivian, ‘soon subsided into a continuous flow of easy nonsense. Impertinent and flippant, I was universally hailed as an original and a wit. I became one of the most affected, conceited, and intolerable atoms that ever peopled the sunbeam of society.’ The purpose which lay behind Disraeli’s frivolous outside was as little suspected by those who saw him in the world as the energy with which he was always working in his laborious hours. The stripling of seventeen was the same person as the statesman of seventy, with this difference only, that the affectation which was natural in the boy was itself affected in the matured politician, whom it served well as a mask or as a suit of impenetrable armour.