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Sarah did, thereafter, live for her brother and the family, and, in return, Disraeli’s affection for her remained deep and constant.
‘I believe he never entirely got over his sense of suffering at the crushing disappointment of her early hopes,’ his friend Sir Philip Rose, said; ‘and, amid the many stirring incidents of his eventful life, the death-bed scene at Cairo was not seldom recalled. He rarely spoke either of his sister or of Meredith, but that was his habit where his feelings were deeply concerned…On the first occasion of his becoming Prime Minister I remember saying to him, “If only your sister had been alive now to witness your triumph, what happiness it would have given her”, and he replied, “Ah, poor Sa, poor Sa! We’ve lost our audience. We’ve lost our audience.”’37
Leaving Clay to finish their planned tour, Disraeli sailed for Malta, where he intended to take the earliest possible boat to England after enduring a month’s quarantine on the island. Clay was also obliged to spend a tedious quarantine in the Lazaretto in Venice, where he wrote a characteristically breezy letter to Disraeli:
Many returns of this day [21 December 1831, Disraeli’s twenty-seventh birthday]…Between us we have contrived to stumble on all the thorns with which (as Mr Dickens, the Winchester Porter, was wont poetically to observe) Venus guards her roses; for while you were cursing the greater evils [of some venereal disease] I contrived to secure the minor viz. a gleet [a form of gonorrhoea] from over-exertion and crabs [pediculus pubis, crab-lice]. The former I richly earned and it wore itself out, the latter was quickly cured and I am in high cue for a real debauch in Venice.
Yesterday being my birthday I drank our very good health…After dinner a capital batch of letters (yours included) arrived…I drank and drank again and read and re-read my letters until it became impossible to distinguish one correspondent from another. On reading what I thought was your hand-writing I found an exhortation to marry and settle, and when I took up, as I believed, a letter from my mother, I read that ‘Mercury [hydrargyrum, salts of mercury then prescribed for the treatment of syphilis] had succeeded to Venus’ – a most extraordinary communication from an elderly gentlewoman.38
While Disraeli’s family naturally and strongly disapproved of James Clay, they were also concerned when he took up with another young man of equally dubious reputation, Henry Stanley, brother of Edward Stanley, the future fourteenth Earl of Derby and Conservative Prime Minister.
Having become friendly on the voyage home from Malta to Fal-mouth, Disraeli and Henry Stanley travelled by coach together from Cornwall to London, where they parted. Disraeli spent two or three nights at the Union Hotel, where he commonly stayed when in London. Stanley, so it was supposed, went home to Knowsley Hall. But he did not arrive there, and his family became worried. It was known that he had gone to London with Disraeli, who was asked to help find him; and he was eventually discovered in a gambling house kept by one Effie Bond.
Disraeli owed Bond money; and it was suspected by Henry Stanley’s elder brother, Edward, that, while pretending to look for Henry, Disraeli was, in fact, working with the unscrupulous Effie Bond to part the impressionable young man from his money.
Edward Stanley consequently conceived ‘a strong prejudice against Disraeli’, wrote Sir Philip Rose, ‘and it was not until the force of public and political affairs [when Edward Stanley had succeeded his father as Earl of Derby] induced them to become associates that his hostility disappeared. It is probable that his feeling was rather the resentment of a proud man at a stranger having become mixed up in his family secrets, and cognizance of a brother’s misconduct, than any real distrust or belief that his brother had been led into difficulties by Disraeli…The letters from Lord Stanley and Colonel Long, his brother-in-law, conclusively show that they had no complaint against Disraeli, and not only acquitted him of all blame, but were grateful for his interference and aid, and the Hon. Henry’s own letters show that Disraeli had given him the best and most disinterested advice.’39
Having returned to Bradenham, Disraeli settled down to work ‘like a Tiger’. He had to undergo another ‘six weeks’ course of Mercury’ for his venereal complaint, as he told Benjamin Austen, and this had ‘pulled [him] down’. But his head was ‘all right’; and he felt quite well again.40 Indeed, despite the ‘overwhelming catastrophe’ of Meredith’s death, he was, he said, in ‘famous condition – better indeed than [he] had ever been in [his life] and full of hope and courage’.
His journey, as his biographer, W.F. Monypenny, commented:
proved a capital event in his life and had marked effects on his whole subsequent career, both literary and political. It not only enlarged his experience beyond that of most young Englishmen of his day, but, what was even more important to one of his peculiar temperament, it helped to give definite purpose and significance to that Oriental tendency in his nature which, vaguely present before, was henceforth to dominate his imagination and show itself in nearly all his achievements. We can see the influence of the Eastern journey in Contarini Fleming, in Alroy, in Tancred, and in Lothair; but we can see it not less clearly in the bold stroke of policy which laid the foundations of English ascendancy in Egypt, in the act which gave explicit form to the conception of an Indian Empire with the sovereign of Great Britain at its head, and in the settlement imposed on Europe at the Berlin Congress [of 1878].41
‘Now tell me, what do you want to be?’
SOON AFTER HIS RETURN to Bradenham in 1832, Disraeli’s book, Contarini Fleming, was with its publishers and The Wondrous Tale of Alroy was shortly to follow it.
John Murray was at first in two minds as to whether or not to accept Contarini Fleming. Sir Walter Scott’s biographer, J. G. Lockhart, expressed doubts about it, and suggested that it be sent for an opinion to Henry Hart Milman, the poet and historian, who had few reservations. It might well be ‘much abused’ and was ‘very extraordinary’, Milman said, but it was also ‘very powerful and ‘very poetical’. William Beckford, to whom Disraeli sent a copy, was also enthusiastic. ‘How wildly original!’ he wrote in reply. ‘How full of intense thought! How awakening! How delightful!’ It was ‘a truly wonderful tale’.1
‘As far as I can learn,’ Disraeli wrote to his sister on 28 May 1832, ‘it has met with decided success. Among others Tom Campbell [the poet and editor of the New Monthly Magazine], who as he says, never reads any books but his own, is delighted with it. “I shall review it myself,” he exclaims.’2
‘Contarini is universally liked, but moves slowly,’ Disraeli continued in another letter to Sarah a few weeks later. ‘The staunchest admirer I have in London, and the most discerning appreciator [of the book] is old Madame d’Arblay [the former Fanny Burney]. I have a long letter which I will show you – capital.’3
Heinrich Heine was even more enthusiastic. ‘Modern English letters have given us no equal to Contarini Fleming,’ Heine wrote. ‘Cast in our Teutonic
