Murray wished heartily that he had not had anything to do with it either. Editor followed editor of a newspaper which was a disaster from the beginning. After six months he had lost over £25,000 and felt compelled to call a halt. Publication ceased, its closure unlamented even by those few readers who had troubled to peruse its tedious pages.16 Murray blamed Disraeli and, in Vivian Grey, Disraeli was later to describe a scene which was, no doubt, based on one which took place at 50 Albemarle Street and in which the character whom Murray took to be based upon himself ‘raved’ and ‘stamped’ and ‘blasphemed’, levelling ‘abuse against his former “monstrous clever” young friend…who was now…an adventurer – a swindler – ayoung scoundrel – a base, deluding, flattering, fawning villain etc. etc. etc.’17
Murray was obliged to give up his houses in Whitehall Place and Wimbledon and to move his family into rooms above his office in Albemarle Street, where he received a cross letter from Disraeli’s mother defending her son from suggestions that The Representative had been ruined ‘through his mismanagement’ and ‘bad conduct’. ‘It would not be believed’, she wrote, ‘that the experienced publisher of Albemarle Street could be deceived by the plans of a boy of twenty whom you had known from his cradle and whose resources you must have as well known as his Father, and had you condescended to consult that Father the folly might not have been committed.’18
In the financial crash which followed the collapse of The Representative, Disraeli also suffered. He lost the very little money which he possessed and was left so deeply in debt that for years thereafter this increasing indebtedness hung hauntingly over him, and his reputation, such as it was, suffered from attacks like those launched upon him in the pages of the Literary Magnet where he was described as being ‘deposed amidst the scoffs and jeers of the whole Metropolitan Literary World’ after ‘a display of puppyism, ignorance, impudence and mendacity which [had] seldom been exhibited under similar circumstances’.
Unable to pay his debts and reluctant to approach his father for help in settling them, Disraeli now decided to make some money in writing about the circumstances in which they had been incurred.
Disraeli began writing Vivian Grey, his satirical ‘society’ novel, with enthusiasm and energy, letting sheet after completed sheet fall to the floor; and when he had written enough for the book to be judged, he looked for a publisher, the one he knew being no longer approachable. Tremaine, or the Man of Refinement, ‘a novel of fashionable life’, had recently been published anonymously with some success. Its author was Robert Plumer Ward and its publisher the busy, chatty, energetic Henry Colburn.
Plumer Ward’s rather dull and staid solicitor was Benjamin Austen, whose clever, attractive and lively young wife presided over a kind of literary and artistic salon at their house in Guildford Street, near to the D’Israelis’ in Bloomsbury Square. Acting as Ward’s agent, Sara Austen asked Isaac D’Israeli to review Tremaine and, in this way, Benjamin learned of Mrs Austen’s activities.
He sent her what he had so far written of Vivian Grey, a novel in conscious imitation of Plumer Ward’s Tremaine.
Mrs Austen expressed herself ‘quite delighted’. ‘I have gone through it twice,’ she wrote, ‘and the more I read it the better I am pleased.’ She entered into ‘the spirit of the book entirely’. She was ‘in a state of complete excitation on the subject,’ she wrote later. She was also attracted by its author. ‘Remember’, she wrote to him, sending the letter by a servant as though from her husband, ‘that you have the entrée whenever you like to come – at all hours – in the morn[ing] I am generally alone.’
Disraeli immediately settled down to finish the book – which he dedicated to his father, ‘the best and greatest of men’ – sending it, chapter by chapter, to Mrs Austen who, editing it as she went along, copied it out in her own hand to protect the anonymity of the author who was supposed to be a gentleman well qualified to reveal the foibles and eccentricities of the beau monde. When enough had been written for her to approach a publisher, Sarah Disraeli sent the manuscript to Henry Colburn who, offering £300 for the copyright, made much of the supposed identity of the author. ‘By the by,’ Colburn said one day to the editor of a magazine in which he hoped the novel would be reviewed, ‘I have a capital book out – Vivian Grey. The authorship is a great secret – a man of high fashion – very high – keeps the first society. I can assure you it is a most piquant and spirited work, quite sparkling.’19
The story is to a considerable extent autobiographical: Vivian Grey is the son of a literary man with a huge private income; he leaves school to read in his father’s library; he sets out to impress the politically influential and treacherous Marquess of Carabas, whose resemblance, in certain respects, to John Murray, the publisher himself found insupportable and, in the end, unforgivable.
The first part of Vivian Grey was published on 22 April 1826 and reviewed at length by William Jerdan in the Literary Gazette, a magazine of which he was editor. The book sold well and was, in general, favourably reviewed, although Jerdan maintained that the anonymous author knew too little about society to have had much experience of it himself and too much about the literary world about which the ‘mere man of fashion knows little and cares less’.
Everyone was talking about the book, Plumer Ward told Sara Austen. ‘Its wit, raciness and boldness are admired’; and it became a kind of literary game to identify the models on which various characters were based. Lord Brougham, George Canning, Lord Eldon, Lady Caroline Lamb, John Murray’s German sister-in-law Mrs William Elliot, Harriot Mellon, the actress, wife of the banker Thomas Coutts, the playwright Theodore Hook, and J.G. Lockhart were all identified as being represented or caricatured in the book – as well, of course, as John Murray, the Marquess of Carabas, whose loquacity in his cups is clearly based on Murray’s:
Here the bottle passed, and the Marquess took a bumper. ‘My Lords and Gentlemen, when I take into consideration the nature of the various interests, of which the body politic of this great empire is regulated; (Lord Courtown, the bottle stops with you) when I observe, I repeat, this, I naturally ask myself what right, what claims, what, what, what – I repeat what right, these governing interests have to the influence which they possess? (Vivian, my boy, you’ll find the Champagne on the waiter behind you.) Yes, gentlemen, it is in this temper (the corkscrew’s by Sir Berdmore), it is, I repeat, in this temper, and actuated by these views, that we meet together this day.’20
Murray threatened to go to law and might well have done so had not his friend, the solicitor Sharon Turner, advised against it. ‘If the author were to swear to me that he meant the Marquess for you,’ Turner assured Murray, ‘I could not believe him. It is in all points so entirely unlike.’ But Murray was unconvinced. He never invited Isaac D’Israeli to 50 Albemarle Street again; and never published another of his books. He turned his back on him and Mrs D’Israeli when he came across them in the street.
When the authorship of Vivian Grey became generally known, comment about it was far more wounding than it had been when Henry Colburn first published it. Instead of the well-informed authority which readers had been led to believe its author was, he was now revealed to be, in the words of Blackwood’s Magazine, ‘an obscure person, for whom nobody cares a straw’. He was, in fact, ‘a swindler’ in the words of the Literary Magnet, ‘a swindler – a scoundrel – a liar…who, having heard that several horsewhips were preparing for him…had the meanness to call upon various