Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield (December 21, 1804 - April
19, 1881), the son of Isaac
D'Israeli, was a British politician and author who entered Parliament in 1837 as Tory MP for Maidstone, after four unsuccessful campaigns for a seat in the House of Commons, the first time as a Radical. In
1842 Disraeli was amongst the founders of the Young England group.
He was Britain's first, and thus far only, Jewish Prime Minister. He was born to a Jewish family and baptized a Christian, but nevertheless continued to think
of himself a Jew. He was once attacked for being Jewish by the Irish nationalist politician Daniel O'Connell, to whom he replied:
- "Yes, I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were
priests in the temple of Solomon."
Having been lionized as a writer of romantic fiction long before he entered politics, Disraeli continued for a time to dress
as extravagantly in the House of Commons as he had before. In Parliament, Disraeli became known for his defense of the Corn Laws, in opposition to fellow Tory Sir Robert Peel's advocacy to repeal the laws, which Disraeli denounced as "laissez-faire capitalism".
Disraeli would lose the fight -- the repeal of the Corn Laws came at great political cost to the split Tory party. But Peel's
betrayal of conservative ideology would cost him the ministry, and Disraeli would rise to fill the leadership void Peel's fall
left in the Tory party.
In 1852 Lord Derby appointed Disraeli Chancellor of the Exchequer in the (in)famous Who? Who? Ministry.
Disraeli's duel with William Gladstone over the Budget marked the
beginning of thirty years of parliamentary hostility. Disraeli served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1858 and 1867-68 Tory
governments. He supported the Reform Act of 1867, which
enfranchised every adult male householder; before this legislation, a tiny proportion of the population was entitled to vote. In
1868 he became Prime Minister, but only briefly; he became Prime
Minister again in 1874. In 1876 he was made Earl of
Beaconsfield by Queen Victoria.
Although he had had several notorious affairs, in his youth, he was ostentatiously faithful and attentive to his wife:
Disraeli married, in 1839, the widow of his political colleague. Mary
Anne Lewis was some twelve years older than he and a self-proclaimed flibbertigibbet.
Known to his friends as Dizzy, Disraeli himself had a fine, if wry, sense of humor and enjoyed the
ambiguities of the English language. When an aspiring writer would send Disraeli an uninteresting manuscript to review, he liked
to reply, "Dear Sir: I thank you for sending me a copy of your book, which I shall waste no time in reading." Disraeli's own
novels have fallen out of literary fashion, but even those he came to regard as youthful follies are witty, racy chronicles of
the age, and the mature works Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred also contain an entertaining exposition in fiction of
Disraeli's political philosophy.
Disraeli is buried in Hughenden, Buckinghamshire. The anniversary of his death on 19th April is known as Primrose Day.
Benjamin Disraeli's First Government, February - December 1868
Changes
- September, 1868 - Lord Mayo resigns as Irish Secretary. His successor is not in the Cabinet.
Benjamin Disraeli's (Earl of Beaconsfield's) Second Government, February 1874 - April 1880
Changes
Fiction
The works marked with (e-book) are freely available in electronical form from Project Gutenberg; follow the link to retrieve them:
Biographies of Disraeli
- Robert Blake, Disraeli [1966]
- Sarah Bradford, Disraeli [1982]
- Christopher Hibbert, Disraeli and his World [1978]
- André Maurois, Disraeli [1927]
- Hesketh Pearson, Dizzy[1951]
- Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli [1993]
Films about Disraeli
Quotes
Mark Twain claimed that Disraeli originated the phrase, "Lies, damned lies,
and statistics", but it is unclear if this is actually one of his inventions (it was first popularized in Twain's autobiography,
though attributed to Disraeli there); most who try to pin it down do award it to the prime minister.
External links
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