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, and bearing an ancient date as well as the shield of a noble house opened on a village green round which were clustered the cottages of the parish with only one exception, and that was the vicarage house, a modern building, not without taste, surrounded by a small but brilliant garden…Behind the hall the country was common land but picturesque…It had once been a beech forest.9
Isaac D’Israeli settled down to country life with surprising speed and contentment; so did his daughter Sarah, who was often to be seen in the little village taking food and presents to the poor and sick and giving orders to – and taking advice from – the gardeners. Her younger brothers, Ralph, now aged twenty, and James, sixteen, were also happy at Bradenham.
Benjamin, too, liked Bradenham, and he spoke fondly of its trees, its beeches and junipers and its wild cherries.
He told Benjamin Austen in October 1829 that he was ‘desperately ill’. But, even so, he ‘hoped to be in town in a day or two – incog, of course, because of the duns eager to nab [him]’. He would then find his way to Austen’s chambers and shake his ‘honest hand.’
He had begun another book, The Young Duke, which, so he told William Meredith, was ‘a series of scenes, every one of which would make the fortune of a fashionable novel. I am confident of its success, and that it will complete the corruption of the public taste.’10
Indeed, he was sufficiently confident to approach John Murray, suggesting an interview and assuring the publisher that it had always been his intention, should it ever be his ‘fate to write anything calculated to arrest public attention’, that the house of Murray ‘should be the organ of introducing it to public notice’.
Not surprisingly, Murray declined the offer of an interview but ‘assured Mr Disraeli that, if he cared to submit the manuscript, the proposal would be entertained with the strictest honour and impartiality’.
This was scarcely more encouraging than the comment that Issac D’Israeli was quoted as having made when informed that the title of his son’s new book was to be The Young Duke. ‘Young Duke! What does Ben know of dukes?’11
Nor were others, to whom the manuscript was shown, as enthusiastic as its author had hoped they would be. Colburn’s reader, who was asked for an opinion in March 1830, had reservations; so, too, had Edward Lytton Bulwer, whose Pelham had been published with great success two years before and whose opinion and friendship Disraeli valued. He was much cast down by these criticisms; but Colburn gave him £500 for the book and, when it was published, the critics were kind and some were enthusiastic.
The Westminster Review told its readers that ‘to parasites, sycophants, toad-eaters, and humble companions’, the book would be ‘full of comfort and instruction in their callings’. But this verdict was exceptional. As his sister told him, without overdue flattery, most of the weekly and Sunday papers ‘reviewed it with excessive praise’. She herself thought it was ‘most excellent’. ‘There is not a dull half page…One reading has repaid me for months of suspense, and that is saying everything if you knew how much my heart is wrapt up in your fame.’
As for Disraeli himself, he protested that he did not care a jot about The Young Duke. ‘I never staked any fame on it.’ It was, he said later, the only one of his books not written from his own feelings and experience. It is the fantastical story of a young coxcomb, George Augustus Frederick, Duke of St James’s, a sprig of one of the richest families in Europe, who is corrupted by society, but redeemed when he abandons rebellion for conformity and accepts the responsibilities of his inheritance.
Disraeli was much more interested in a project which he had been considering for some time, a tour in the East. He went up to London occasionally to discuss his plans with Meredith, who was to accompany him, travelling incognito, as he put it, for fear he might be seen and dunned by the various people to whom he owed money. He was careful, in fact, not to let his plans become public knowledge and thus alert his creditors to his intention of going abroad again and giving them good reason for demanding the settlement of his debts before he went.
‘Keep this letter to yourself without exception,’ he wrote to Benjamin Austen on 8 December 1829, having persuaded him to give him a letter of credit for £500, addressed to various bankers, to help finance his proposed journey to Constantinople. ‘Though generally accused of uncommunicativeness, I like a gentle chat with a friend provided it is strictly confidential and he be a tried and trusty one like yourself,’ he told Austen. ‘Women are delightful