Beaconsfield, BENJAMIN DISRAELI, EARL OF, statesman and novelist, was born 21st December 1804, in London, most likely at 6 King's Road, Bedford Row. He was the eldest son of Isaac D'Israeli (q.v.) and Maria Basevi, and was the descendant of a Jewish family which, driven from Spain by the Inquisition towards the close of the 15th century, had taken refuge in Venice, and thence had migrated to England in 1748. He was duly circumcised at the Spanish Synagogue in Bevis Marks, but in 1817, a boy of twelve, was baptised at St Andrew's, Holborn, with Sharon Turner for godfather, and entered thus on all the privileges from which the Jewish race was still debarred. He was educated partly at a private school kept at Walthamstow by a Unitarian minister; in 1821 was articled to a solicitor; in 1824 entered Lincoln's Inn, and kept nine terms; but in 1831 had his name removed from the books. In 1826 he published the first part of Vivian Grey, not an over-bold forecast of his own achievements, so sparkling, arrogant, and egoistic, so full of piquant burlesque of the men and events of the day, that it straightway became the talk of the town, and gained him admission to the Blessington coterie. The second part, now little read, succeeded in 1827; the Gulliverian Captain Popanilla in 1828; and the high-flown Young Duke in 1831. In 1830-31 he took a twelvemonth's holiday in the Mediterranean, visiting Spain, Venice, Jerusalem (the homes of his ancestors), and describing his doings in the fourteen graphic Home Letters (1835), where we see him young, brilliant, foppish, affectedly affected, just as we know him in Macise's portrait.
He returned to England to find the country in the throes of the Reform Bill; and in 1832 stood twice for Wycombe as an advanced Radical, hacked by O'Connell and Joseph Hume. He failed both times, and failed again in 1835, when as a Tory he contested Taunton, quarrelling with O'Connell, and sending a challenge to O'Connell's son. Not until 1837, the first year of Victoria's reign, did he enter parliament, as member for Maidstone. Meanwhile he had published Contarini Fleming (1832), a 'psychological romance,' a 'story of the development and formation of the poetic character;' The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), a stilted romance of the 12th century; The Revolutionary Epick (1834), a blank-verse rigmarole, the idea of which was conceived on the plains of Troy, and which justified tyrannicide in a passage expunged from the 1864 edition; Vindication of the English Constitution (1835); Henrietta Temple (1836), a 'love-story,' a lawless one; and Venetta (1837), where Byron and Shelley figure thinly disguised. His maiden speech, on Irish election petitions, was clever enough, yet was greeted with shouts of laughter, till, losing patience, he cried, almost shouted: 'I have begun several things many times, and have often succeeded at last; ay, and though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me.' In less than nine years that time did come. A reckless free-lance at first, persistent in little save hatred of the Whigs, he had risen since 1842 to be head of the 'Young England' party, when suddenly, from the hour of his savage onslaught on Sir Robert Peel in the Corn-Law debate of 22d January 1846, he became the real leader of the Tory Protectionist squires, though their nominal chief for two years was Lord George Bentinck (q.v.). To this period belong Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred, or the New Crusade (1847)—a trilogy intended to set forth the origin and condition of political parties, the consequent condition of the people, and the duties of the church as a remedial agency. The 'Young England' creed in fact, plus the 'Asian mystery.' As Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the Lower House in the brief Derby administration of 1852, he coolly discarded Protection, and came off on the whole with flying colours; still, his budget was rejected, mainly through Mr Gladstone's attack on it; and Mr Gladstone succeeded him, in the Aberdeen coalition ministry. In 1858 he returned, with Lord Derby, to power, and next year introduced a petty measure of parliamentary reform—his 'fancy franchises' bill—whose rejection was followed by resignation. For seven long years the Liberals remained in office; and Disraeli, in opposition, displayed talents as a debater, and a spirit and persistency under defeat that won for him the admiration of his adversaries. With his return to the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the third Derby administration (1866), came the strangest episode in all parliamentary history. He introduced and carried a Reform Bill (1867), far more democratic, more sweeping in its character, than one just rejected by the Conservatives and malcontent Liberals. True, a tentative measure was first put forward, every whit as unsatisfying as its predecessor. It would not do; none saw that sooner than Disraeli himself; so throwing overboard dissentient colleagues, among them Lord Cranborne (future Marquis of Salisbury), he produced a bill giving household suffrage in the boroughs, and widely extending the county franchise. It was 'a leap in the dark,' Lord Derby's own phrase; the leap at any rate was boldly taken. In February 1868 he succeeded Lord Derby as premier; but, in the face of a hostile majority, he resigned in the following December. On this occasion, Mrs Disraeli, in acknowledgment of her husband's services, was raised to the peerage as Viscountess Beaconsfield, an honour she survived only till 15th December 1872. The rich widow, fifty-six years old, of his first colleague, Mr Wyndham Lewis, she had married Disraeli in 1839. In 1870 appeared Lothair, a novel of which a reviewer in Blackwood's (Lord Salisbury, said rumour) observed that, 'on the whole, we had rather Mr Gladstone had written it.'
In 1874 Disraeli entered on his second premiership, the first two years of which were marked by the abolition of church patronage in Scotland, by an act to put down Ritualistic practices, and by one excellent measure, to protect British seamen against 'floating coffins,' which was forced on the government by Mr Plimsoll. But a spirited foreign policy was more to Disraeli's taste than humdrum domestic reforms. In 1875 he made Britain half-owner of the Suez Canal; and in 1876 he conferred on the Queen the new title of Empress of India, himself the same year being called to the Upper House as Earl of Beaconsfield. He had sat for Shrewsbury from 1841 to 1847, and thenceforward for Buckinghamshire. A free career was opened to his enterprise by the outbreak of insurrection in the Balkan Peninsula. Himself, he pool-pooed the 'Bulgarian atrocities,' and was all for upholding Turkey as a bulwark against Russian aggression. When Constantinople seemed threatened, a British fleet was despatched to the Dardanelles, six millions were voted for military and naval purposes, and an Indian contingent was summoned to Malta. It was very magnificent; after all, though, it was not war, for the Berlin Congress (1878), which Lord Beaconsfield himself attended with Lord Salisbury, and which raised him to the zenith of his fame, gave back to Russia all she had lost by the Crimean war, and left Turkey the shadow of her former self. England's share was 'Peace with honour'—and with Cyprus, surrendered to us in an earlier secret engage- ment. The Afghan and Zulu wars combined with commercial depression and with troubles in Ireland to sicken the country of an 'Imperial' policy; and the general election of 1880 returning a large Liberal majority, the government resigned before the meeting of parliament. The ex-premier employed his leisure in publishing Endymion, like so many of his novels the story of a fortunate politician. On 19th April 1881 he died at his London residence in Curzon Street; and the terms of his will precluding a public funeral in Westminster Abbey, he was buried at Hughenden, near Wycombe.
'It was one of the first principles of Mr Vivian Grey that everything was possible;' none ever exemplified that principle better than Lord Beaconsfield. Member of an alien and persecuted race, a race without settled resting-place or civil rights, he rose to be champion of a proud landed aristocracy, the trusted friend of Britain's queen, an arbiter of Europe's destinies. We stand too near him now, rightly to determine his claim to greatness; but this one may safely say—for praise or blame, according to men's judgments—that, in almost everything he was the very opposite of his great adversary, Mr Gladstone. He was a master of epigram, a splendid debater, rather than an orator; he possessed that first-rate requisite of statescraft, lack of zeal; he was not one to be idolised or detested. Throughout he was faithful to his two leading beliefs—in the Jewish race, and in intellect (incarnate both in himself); throughout he was loyal, ay, as a Swiss guard, to his adopted country. It may be hard to decide whether he was a genuine Tory, whether he was not chiefly a hater of the Whigs. At least, he was a true leader, for he led the Tories always whither he would himself, and often whither themselves they would never have gone. In his famous Edinburgh phrase (1867), he 'educated' his party. The masses owe to him their first enfranchisement, and Britain by him was for a while rehabilitated as one of the Great Powers. His novels are as puzzling as himself. They are brilliantly clever, most witty and entertaining; but one vainly looks in them for humour, pathos, any of the deeper qualities. They will always, however, be read, for the key they furnish to their author's character, and for their caricatures of his contemporaries—of Brougham as 'Foaming Fudge' in Vivian Grey, and Canning as 'Charlatan Gas'; of Lord Lyttelton as the hero of Coningsby, Croker as 'Rigby,' Mr Gladstone as 'Oswald Millbank;' of Palmerston, in Endymion, as 'Lord Roehampton,' and so forth.
See GLADSTONE, YOUNG ENGLAND, HUGHENDEN, PRIMROSE LEAGUE, and works cited under those articles. See, too, Lord Beaconsfield's Correspondence with his Sister, 1832-52 (1886); his Selected Speeches, edited by Kebbel (2 vols. 1882); an article on his novels, by Leslie Stephen, in the Fortnightly (1874); G. C. Thompson's Public Opinion and Lord Beaconsfield (1886); Sir W. Fraser's Disraeli and his Day (1891); and the Lives of him by John Mill (1863), O'Connor (hostile, 1879), Brandes (Danish, 1878; Eng. trans. by Mrs Sturge, 1880), Cucheval Clarigny (French, 1880), Ewald (1882), Hitchman (3d ed. 1885), Kebbel (1888), and Froude (1890).