Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield
(1804 - 1881) U.K.
Politician, novelist
His father Isaac D'Israeli, who was Jewish, had him baptized at the age of 13. After a period in a solicitor's office, Disraeli wrote the novel Vivian Grey (1826), and others, and the brilliant pamphlet Vindication of the English Constitution (1835). Entering Parliament in 1837, after four unsuccessful attempts, he was laughed at as a dandy. His ideas were expounded in the novels Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847).
Disraeli gradually came to be recognized as the leader of the Conservative Party in the Commons.In 1868 Disraeli became Prime Minister, but a few months later he was defeated at a feneral election. During the six years of opposition that followed he wrote another novel, Lothair (1870), and established a Conservative central office, the prototype of modern party organization.
In 1874 Disraeli took office, purchased from the Khedive of Egypt a controlling interest in the Suez Canal, and conferred on the Queen the title of Emperess of India. He accepted an erldom in 1876. His government was defeated in 1880, and a year later Disraeli died, after writing Endymion.
Disraeli has, in Coningsby, a quite romantic and homoerotic passage, which notwithstanding its sentimental setting may be worth quoting; because, after all, it signalizes an often forgotten or unconsidered aspect of school-life:
"At school, friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves of after-life can never bring its rapture, or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing and so keen! What tenderness and what devotion; what illimitable confidence, infinite revelations of inmost thoughts; what ecstatic present and romantic future; what bitter estrangements and what melting reconciliations; what scenes of wild recrimination, agitating explanations, passionate correspondence; what insane sensitiveness, and what frantic sensibility; what earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of the soul are confined in that simple phrase, a schoolboy's friendship."
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