Disraeli2 - prelim.fm Page i Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:16 AM THE PICKERING MASTERS THE EARLY NOVELS OF BENJAMIN DISRAELI Volume 2 Disraeli2 - prelim.fm Page ii Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:16 AM THE PICKERING MASTERS General Introduction: Daniel R. Schwarz Volume Editors: Geoffrey Harvey Ann R. Hawkins Miles A. Kimball Jeraldine R. Kraver Charles Richmond Michael Sanders Disraeli2 - prelim.fm Page iii Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:16 AM THE EARLY NOVELS OF BENJAMIN DISRAELI Volume 2 The Young Duke (1831) Edited by Miles A. Kimball Disraeli2 - prelim.fm Page iv Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:16 AM First published 2004 byPickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Sq quare, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & FFrancis Group, an informa business © Taylor & Francis 2004 © Introduction and notes Miles A. Kimball All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered tradem arks , and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Disraeli, Benjamin, 1804–1881 The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli. – (The Pickering masters) I. Title 823.8[F] LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA A catalogue record for this title is available from the Library of Congress ISBN-13 : 978-1-85196-736-0 (set) DOI: 10.4324/9781003192480 Typeset by P&C Disraeli2 - prelim.fm Page v Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:16 AM CONTENTS Introduction vii The Young Duke (1831) 1 Book the First 3 Book the Second 41 Book the Third 105 Book the Fourth 195 Book the Fifth 235 Editorial Notes 285 Textual Variants 299 v Disraeli2 - intro.fm Page vii Friday, June 18, 2004 12:29 PM INTRODUCTION Benjamin Disraeli’s The Young Duke is perhaps best described as the bastard child of his novels, dismissed by the author and by generations of reviewers and critics as an uneven work, created hurriedly and solely for gain. It is com- mon to accept Disraeli’s estimate of the work – that he wrote it simply to raise money for his eastern trip in summer 1830. His letter to Benjamin Austen refers to selling his novel to Henry Colburn, the publisher, as a prostitution of his talents: … go I must, tho’ I fear I must hack for it. A literary prostitute I have never yet been, tho’ born in an age of general prostitution, and tho’ I have more than once been subject to temptations which might have been the ruination of a less virtu- ous young woman. My muse however is still a virgin, but the mystical flower, I fear, must soon be plucked. Colburn I suppose will be the bawd. Tempting 1 Mother Colburn! These comments reveal a mixed attitude on Disraeli’s part: a sense that the ‘mystical’ purity of art will be sullied when art is sold, combined with a sin- cere desire to sell it. The letter is also somewhat disingenuous, given that Disraeli had sold his art before, having been well paid for Vivian Grey (1826) and its sequel (1827). But given the strength of this stereotypically Romantic attitude about the unworldliness of art and the artist, many readers have not surprisingly found the novel to be flawed – and more specifically, to hold a strange mixture of contrasting elements. For example, one consistent criticism regards the novel’s style, which seems both critical of and fascinated by the exaggerated ornamentation of the silver-fork world. Bulwer Lytton, with whom Disraeli shared his manuscript in April 1830, encouraged the author’s doubts about the novel’s appropriate- ness, especially for a man who aspired to something more than ornamental dandyism. Bulwer Lytton commented that in the novel Disraeli was too ‘indulgent to flippancies’, by which he meant ‘an ornate & shewy effeminacy’ 2 he urged Disraeli to cut ruthlessly. Perhaps in response, Disraeli has his nar- rator in The Young Duke complain of the ‘confounded puppyism’ of his style (III.18, p. 181). And in the advertisement to the 1853 Bryce edition, which contained the first and most significant set of revisions to the novel, Disraeli essentially asked the reader’s pardon for the immaturity of his style: The reader will be kind enough to recollect that ‘The Young Duke’ was written ‘when George the Fourth was King’ (1829), nearly a quarter of a century ago, and that, therefore, it is entitled to the indulgence which is the privilege of vii Disraeli2 - intro.fm Page viii Friday, June 18, 2004 12:29 PM THE EARLY NOVELS OF BENJAMIN DISRAELI: VOLUME 2 juvenile productions. Though its pages attempt to pourtray the fleeting manners of a somewhat frivolous age, it is hoped that they convey a moral of a deeper and a more permanent character. Young authors are apt to fall into affectation and conceit, and the writer of this work sinned very much in these respects; but the affectation of youth should be viewed leniently, and every man has a right to be conceited until he is successful. This request for ‘indulgence’ has often been taken to reflect Disraeli’s success as a politician by 1853, but it reveals the same kind of disingenuousness we saw in his letter to Austen of 8 December 1829. For The Young Duke was not Disraeli’s first novel, but his third – scarcely a ‘juvenile production’. And despite its repetition of this idea, the advertisement’s reminder that the novel ‘convey[s] a moral of a deeper and more permanent character’ suggests that readers should acknowledge some value in the work, despite its flaws. Critics and biographers have generally either accepted this depiction of the novel as uneven, frivolous and juvenile – and therefore given it little attention – or have followed Disraeli’s 1853 advertisement in attempting to counter those objections and argue for the work’s merit on other than aesthetic grounds. The novel’s plot certainly holds no innovation: it is a rake’s progress, the tale of a vain, rich young man who comes close to losing it all, but learns responsibility through the love of a beautiful maiden. Accordingly, most twentieth-century commentary focused on decrying the novel’s manner or arguing that we should look past it. For example, Robert Blake comments in his biography of Disraeli that ‘The style is artificial, full of far-fetched witti- 3 cisms, convoluted antitheses, elaborate epigrams’. Richard A. Levine first undercuts the novel’s value by criticizing Disraeli’s lack of control, essentially agreeing with Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli’s 1853 advertisement: ‘the narrator 4 is still allowed to take liberties which underscore the author’s youth’. Yet Levine then argues that in its political commentary, the novel is a significant 5 harbinger of the later, more ‘serious’ novels of the Young England trilogy. Echoing questions about the novel’s style, Charles C. Nickerson begins by acknowledging that the novel is ‘Uneven in tone and derivative in plot’, and argues that ‘The Young Duke is a novel in which beginning and end remain 6 fundamentally at odds’. Yet he also claims that ‘For the student of Disraeli’s fiction, the final importance of The Young Duke … lies in what it shows us about his working methods and the development of his conception of what a 7 novel ought properly to be’. And Jana Davis, perhaps the novel’s strongest critical supporter, finds Disraeli’s dismissiveness of his own work a ‘pose’, and asserts that despite its stylistic flaws the novel is a serious and carefully 8 designed satire of aristocratic manners. These assessments are probably correct, at least from some perspectives. If novels should be focused and unitary, as some schools of literary criticism value, then The Young Duke oddly ties the head of a society novel to the back end of a romantic and political Bildungsroman. And if novels should be con- sistent in style, then Disraeli’s exuberance in the simple play of writing a viii Disraeli2 - intro.fm Page ix Friday, June 18, 2004 12:29 PM INTRODUCTION novel makes a poor companion to the high tone of his hero’s redemption. But reading The Young Duke now, particularly in its first edition as presented in this volume, is a more delightful and revealing experience than previous read- ers have credited. For a reader today, the very faults past readers have either decried or excused – the narrative asides, the long passages of fanciful descrip- tion, the exaggerated language, many examples of which were cut from later editions of the novel – make fascinating material for study in their own right. Perhaps it is most important to recognize that despite his apparent lack of control, Disraeli knew of the dual nature of his novel even at its first publica- tion; he did not apply the Byronic epigraph, ‘A moral Tale, though gay’, by accident, nor did he have his narrator call the novel ‘half fashion and half pas- sion’ merely as a joke (IV.3, p. 201). Disraeli fully recognized the irony that pertains to a novel that talks about its own composition, inconsistencies and faults; that both admires and criticizes aristocratic excess; and that begins with the exalted picture of a rarefied metropolitan society, only to go through the muddy give-and-take of parliamentary politics to arrive at a calm, aristo- cratic domesticity in the country.