part two of the book was published in February 1827, it did not arouse much enthusiasm. William Gladstone expressed a fairly common opinion when he called ‘the first quarter (me jud.) extremely clever, the rest trash’.1 Henry Crabb Robinson, the journalist, could not bring himself to finish it and resolved not to try to read anything else by the same author. The author himself conceded that it did not make very satisfactory reading, and that in parts it was actually unintelligible and, in general, fragmentary and formless. It did, however, contain occasionally amusing remarks as, for instance, ‘Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.’2 Disraeli had grown tired of the character of Vivian Grey and in part two he had created a new hero, Beckendorf, whom most readers did not find convincing.
However, he received £500 from the publisher, Henry Colburn, for this sequel to the book, and was consequently able to settle an outstanding bill for £140 which he had owed John Murray. But he could not pay his other debts: he and Thomas Evans, his fellow clerk at Frederick’s Place, still owed Robert Messer well over £1,000 which had been incurred by their South American speculations.
Soon after the publication of the disappointing second part of Vivian Grey, Disraeli fell ill again and, as in the case of a manic depressive, his previous high spirits suddenly collapsed, and from excited gaiety he sank into a trough of gloomy despair. The onset of the illness was heralded by an alarming ticking noise in his ears such as that endured by those suffering from tinnitus. ‘From the tick of a watch,’ Disraeli wrote, ‘it assumed the loud confused moaning of a bell tolling in a storm…It was impossible to think. I walked about the room. It became louder and louder. It seemed to be absolutely deafening. I could compare it to nothing but the continuous roar of a cataract.’ At the same time he felt confused and weak; in the morning he fainted while dressing; the noise in his head he ‘could only describe as the rushing of blood into his brain’. In his conscious state he was ‘not always assured’ of his own identity, ‘or even existence’. He would shout aloud to be sure that he was, indeed, alive; and he would take down one of his books to look at the title page to be sure that he was not just a character in a nightmare.3
He could not write; he could not bring himself to look into his legal textbooks. In 1827, he told Benjamin Austen that he was just as ill as ever; he felt that he was in the situation of those ‘jackanapes at school who wrote home to their parents every week to tell them that they have nothing to say’; and when, in the following month, he went with the Austens to stay in a house in Essex which his father had taken for the autumn, he became more ill than ever.4
He was still ‘quite idle’, so he told Sharon Turner in March 1828, still ‘decidedly an invalid’, and ‘profoundly depressed’, undergoing treatment by a succession of doctors who prescribed various and often contradictory treatments for a condition diagnosed as ‘a chronic inflammation of the membranes of the brain’. ‘I was bled,’ he said, ‘blistered, boiled, poisoned, electrified, galvanised; and, at the end of the year, found myself with exactly the same oppression on my brain.’
One of the doctors who treated him was Buckley Bolton, a young physician with a fashionable practice, who prescribed large doses of digitalis, a tincture derived from the leaf of the wild foxglove, intended to strengthen the involuntary muscular contraction of the muscle fibres in the heart. It is a depressant and was, no doubt, responsible for the moods of despair into which Disraeli sank. But Bolton had an attractive wife, Clara, whom Disraeli was to invite to stay at Bradenham, the house to which his father and family were soon to move, and with whom he was to have an affair.
At the same time he began to resent or conceive dislike for various friends or relations, even, for a time, for his father, who makes a recognizable appearance in Vivian Grey, not only as Vivian’s father, but also as the tiresome, pedantic Mr Sherborne, a man who disapproves of most of his contemporaries and even more of those ‘puppies’ who think ‘every man’s a fool who’s older than themselves’.
Disraeli himself believed that his mental breakdown was caused by frustration at his inability to achieve the reputation he felt he deserved. ‘Whether or not I shall ever do anything which may mark me out from the crowd I know not,’ he told Sharon Turner. ‘I am one of those to whom moderate reputation can give no pleasure and who, in all probability, am incapable of achieving a great one.’5 He was also, he might well have added, incapable of throwing off the anti-semitic prejudices which he believed lay in the way of his achieving a great reputation in a gentile world.
It has also been suggested that ‘sexual frustration deepened his depression’. Certainly Sara Austen played an elaborate, teasing game with ‘My dear Ben’, keeping secrets from his family (when out of London, she wrote to him at her own address in Guildford Street) and especially from his sister, Sarah, who was determined not to be replaced as the most important woman in her brother’s life. ‘They [his family] need not know that I have written to you first,’ Mrs Austen wrote from Lichfield in April 1828, ‘and I will so manage my letter to Sarah that she shall seem to have the preference.’6
Enjoying her role as trusted amanuensis, Sara Austen encouraged Disraeli in his work; and when the idea of a satire on the Utilitarians, which was at the same time to ridicule the novel of fashionable life, came into his mind, she greeted it with her usual enthusiasm. ‘Mind you write Pop,’ [The Voyage of Captain Popanilla] she wrote to him while she was still in Lichfield. ‘I shall want to work when I get home.’7
He settled down to work with an enthusiasm which had seemed to have deserted him, writing with his former speed and energy, composing a fantasy about an island named Fantasie, the inhabitants of which, in naked innocence, spend much of their time making love, just as Vivian Grey would, no doubt, have liked to do with the beautiful Violet Fane, a character in the earlier book in which – at a significant picnic in a passage excised in later editions – a ‘facile knife’ sinks ‘without effort into a bird’s plump breast, discharging a cargo of rich stuffed balls of the most fascinating flavour’.
Popanilla, dedicated to Robert Plumer Ward – who told its author that it was equal to Swift’s Tale of a Tub – was published by Henry Colburn in June 1828, and was greeted with even less éclat than the second part of Vivian Grey, receiving but two reviews, both of them short. Cast down by this reception, Disraeli fell ill again and felt no better when his parents took him to Lyme Regis for the benefit of the sea air. Sarah D’Israeli did not know ‘what to say to comfort’ him; nor did William Meredith, his sister’s fiancé; nor yet did Isaac D’Israeli, who wrote:
My son’s life within the last year and a half with a very slight exception, has been a blank in his existence. His complaint is one of those perplexing cases which remain uncertain and obscure till they are finally got rid of. Meanwhile patience and resignation must be his lot.8
Concerned about the ‘precarious health’ of Benjamin and other members of his family, so he told Robert Southey, Isaac D’Israeli decided to ‘quit London with all its hourly seductions’ and to take a house in the country. In the summer of 1829, therefore, the D’Israelis gave up the house in Bloomsbury and moved to Bradenham, a handsome Queen Anne house with over 1,300 acres at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, a few miles from High Wycombe, which was itself some three hours’ coach journey from London.
In the front of the hall [Disraeli was to write of this property] huge gates of iron, highly wrought,
