Review: Disraeli's novel "The Young Duke" is half fashion and half passion

Benjamin Disraeli’s narrator in his novel The Young Duke describes the book as “half fashion and half passion.” The meaning of that declaration depends on which edition you read, and if you do happen to be interested in reading this relatively obscure and much maligned but surprisingly entertaining novel, I strongly recommend the 2004 Routledge edition, volume two of six in the series The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli, which appears never to have been reviewed in any journal or periodical. The Routledge edition is one of the few to print the original 1831 text, rather than reprint Disraeli’s edits from the 1853 edition, which removed in embarrassment all the amusing and revealing autobiographical tangents by the 26-year-old Disraeli’s bubbly and manic narrator. In the original edition, and therefore also the Routledge, these excised effusions constitute the book’s “passionate” half. It’s not clear what Disraeli is supposed to mean in editions where the passionate tangents have been cut. The context is all gone, so it’s anyone’s guess.

Not that The Young Duke’s fashionable half is without its value. The book is considered a key example of the “novel of fashion” or “silver fork novel,” novels detailing 1800s British high society with an exhaustive amount of detail about (as one illustrative passage has it in the novel) “the pasties, and the venison, and the game, the pines, and the peaches, and the grapes, the cakes, and the confectionery, and the ices.” This aspect of its value is only somewhat marred by the fact that Disraeli had not yet actually experienced the kind of high society to which he aspired and about which he was writing here. When his father, the well-known author Isaac D’Israeli, was told Disraeli was writing a book called The Young Duke, he asked: “What does Ben know of dukes?”

Disraeli almost states directly that his narrator’s bubbly tangents are what he means by “half passion,” noting in the same passage that other novelists would burnish its depiction of high society “manners” with “some secret marriage or some shrouded murder,” as in “an English plot” or a “German mystery.” Such plotty devices constitute “a plan both good, antique and popular, but not my way,” Disraeli says: “I prefer trusting to the slender incidents which spring from out our common intercourse, and if these fail … why, then, I moralize on great affairs, or indulge in some slight essay on my own defects.” Essays on his defects are, of course, of great interest to biographers, as he ended up ascending to the top of what he would famously call the “greasy pole,” becoming one of Britian’s most famous and influential prime ministers. But he cut almost all of these “essays” out of the book precisely for that reason, perhaps: to facilitate his ambition for the top.

The novel tells the story of a 21-year-old Duke who falls in love with a Catholic girl, reforms from his profligate spendthrift ways and gives a speech on the floor of the House of Lords endorsing Catholic emancipation to impress his girl. (Catholics were required at the time to take an oath endorsing the Protestant Church of England when being sworn into Parliament, and emancipation from that policy was an issue of the day when the book was written.) The Routledge edition is the only one to annotate the full text with footnotes, an excellent introduction, and textual variants pointing out the differences between various editions. 

One does have to beware of, by my count, two errors in the footnotes, both of which come in moments that Disraeli reveals his evolving and iconic take on what exactly was a dandy. The first appears when Disraeli defines at length the specific sort of fashionable gentleman his character Charles Annesley is. Disraeli finds himself defending the very word “dandy” against an onslaught of ill opinion in the late 1820s of the sort that eventually caused his friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton to slash all references to effeminacy, among other things, from his iconic 1828 novel Pelham, the novel I reviewed last month. Disraeli writes in The Young Duke:

“Dandy has been voted vulgar, and beau is now the word. It may be doubted whether the revival will stand; and as for the exploded title, though it had its faults at first, the muse of Byron has made it not only English, but classical.”

Byron was Disraeli’s literary hero and his model of fashion. The future prime minister wore his hair in curls and ringlets like Byron, and tried to live up to his elaborate dress. But for some reason Disraeli shied away from labeling his character Charles Annesley with that moniker, though he clearly has many of the hallmarks of the disaffected dandy:

“Charles Annesley could hardly be called a dandy or a beau. There was nothing in his dress—though some mysterious arrangement in his costume, some rare simplicity, some curious happiness, always made it distinguished—there was nothing, however, in his dress, which could account for the influence which he exercised over the manners of his contemporaries ... His natural and subdued nonchalance, [is] so different from the assumed non-emotion of a mere dandy … Perhaps the great secret of his manner was his exquisite superciliousness, a quality which, of all, is the most difficult to manage.”

Sounds like a dandy to me. But interestingly, Disraeli favors instead the “beau ideal” of a prior century, citing characters from plays during England’s Restoration era, when an era of opulence in culture and costume followed the return of the monarchy under Charles II:

“On the whole, [Annesley] was unlike any of the leading men of modern days, and rather reminded one of the fine gentlemen of our old brilliant comedy, the Dorimants, the Bellairs, and the Mirabels.”

It is here, in this passage, that the editor of the Routledge edition, Miles A. Kimball, appears to make his first mistake. In a footnote, he helpfully identifies Dorimant and Bellair as being characters from playwright George Etheridge’s 1676 comedy The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter. But then he misidentifies the third character, Mirabell, whose name Disraeli has clearly misspelled. Kimball, perhaps being fooled by this misspelling, says Mirabel is a character in Colley Cibber’s The Rival Fools (1709). But Mirabel in that play is a woman, not (as Disraeli clearly states) a “fine gentleman.” To identify who Disraeli really meant, I read an excellent paper titled “Some Fops and Some Versions of Foppery” by Robert B. Heilman in the journal ELH in the summer issue of 1982. Heilman, who does not mention Disraeli, analyses at length the character of Dorimant, as he contrasts with the titular fop Sir Fopling Flutter. He describes Dorimant as “the beau ideal of the play” and “among the anticipators of Congreve’s Mirabell.” This Mirabell is the lead of Congreve’s famous 1700 comedy The Way of the World, and is almost certainly the “Mirabel” Disraeli meant. In citing these plays Disraeli places his novel in the Restoration tradition of writing comedies that ruminate about the differences between the beau ideal and the fop, a pejorative term. Who is the poseur in fashion, who is authentic? To what extent is affectation welcomed as fashionable, and to what extent is it the key to identifying a deplorable faker? The word dandy was consigned by some to the category of synonym with “fop,” and Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton hoped to make clear it was a distinct term.

Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham explored the same divisions, using “fop” negatively while attempting to define what a good dandy is. In fact, Disraeli’s Young Duke tips its cap at one point specifically to Pelham, and this is where Kimball makes his second mistake. He completely fails to recognize Disraeli’s specific nod to Pelham and interprets it as a reference to the irrelevant 18^th century prime minister Henry Pelham, who shares only his name with Bulwer-Lytton’s hero. But the context should make it patently clear Disraeli means Bulwer-Lytton’s Henry Pelham specifically because the passage comes in the context of defining the dandy:  

“The Duke of St. James was a master of the art of dress, and consequently consummated that paramount operation with the decisive rapidiy of one whose principles are settled. He was congnizant of all effects, could calculate in a second all consequences, and obtained his result with that promptitude and precision which stamp the great artist.*”

At this point Disraeli uses the asterisk to insert a footnote, which reads:

“*--This important principle is much more ably expressed in the witty memorits of the brilliant Henry Pelham. Had I his gay volumes at command, I should have pleasure in referring to them more particularly. The author of ‘Pelham’ is one of the few rising writers to whom we make look up for the maintenance of the honour of English literature.”   

This is typical of the kind of acknowledgement Disraeli writes for contemporaries in his early novels. He met Bulwer-Lytton just after finishing The Young Duke, showing up at his house for dinner in a canary-colored waistcoat and green velvet pants. They became fast friends. But Kimball misinterprets Disraeli’s footnote, inserting a pair of footnotes of his own that claim not only that Disraeli means the prime minister Henry Pelham but also that the book he refers to as ‘Pelham’ is Memoirs if the Administration of Henry Pelham (1829), and that the word “author” in Disraeli’s text refers to William Coxe, who wrote that book. Then he puzzles over why Disraeli would have called Coxe a “rising writer” a year after his death in 1828: “Given Coxe’s death in 1828, perhaps Disraeli is being sarcastic here.” But no such tortured interpretation is necessary if Disraeli meant Pelham, a book by which we know The Young Duke to have been influenced. And if it helps make the point more clearly, Encyclopedia Brittanica describes the prime minister Pelham not as a colorful dandy or beau but instead as “a somewhat colorless politician.”

Still, Kimball’s introduction does a great job of outlining the reception to the novel, which was so lackluster that “advertisements” were placed in multiple editions beginning with the first in 1831, apologizing for the novel. The first such notice warned, “In the absence of the author, who is abroad, the Publishers think it necessary to add, that the present novel was written before the accession of his present Majesty. The reader, as he peruses the volumes, will see the necessity of this explanation.” Ostensibly this warning provides a disclaimer that the book portrays King George IV positively, and yet simultaneously ironically and satirically, in a scene where he meets the young duke. The publisher wanted to be sure there was no confusion with the then-current king, William IV, who was in many ways the opposite of King George IV. But the scene with King George IV  is in the first volume, and perhaps the disclaimer is also is meant to warn that the whole of the “volumes” are influenced by, in praise of and a critique of the first king’s aesthetic. Like Charles II, George IV was known for lavish spending, generous support for the arts, and flamboyance. Disraeli’s narrator makes it known this is just fine with him, as he explains (with tongue in cheek) what kind of king he himself would be:

“Oh! people of England, be contented! You know not what might have been your lot. I might have been your King: and, although you have already conceived me, as the very prosopopoeia of amiability, the dreaded, the stem, the mortifying truth must no longer be concealed, - I should have been a tyrant! But what a tyrant! I would have smothered you in roses, shot you with bon-bons, and drowned you in Eau-de-Cologne. I would have banged up your parliaments, knocked up your steam-engines, shut up all societies for the diffusion of anything. I would have republished the Book of Sports, restored holidays, revived the Drama. Every parish should have had its orchestra, every village its dancing-master. I would have built fountains, and have burnt fireworks. But I am not a King. Bitter recollection! Yet something may turn up.”

Something did come up, of course: the next best position, Prime Minister.

This business about being the king is the sort of tangent, almost always left on the cutting room floor after 1853, that makes the book. Many of the tangents are specifically about the process of writing the book itself. In an early chapter, Disraeli’s narrator boasts of how easy the writing process is. Later, after he writes his first argument between the protagonist couple, he laments in morose terms how disappointed he is that his writing is not any better. He admits to being completely depressed by it. This is the sort of manic and depressive writing that has some historians and critics wondering whether the young Disraeli suffered from bipolar disorder. Another passage, describing a party hosted by the Catholic heroes of the novel, describes the event as just a little less glamorous than the parties to which the Duke is accustomed. 

As is true in almost every Disraeli novel that satirizes the rich, the key symbol of opulence here is the ortolan, a small songbird that was a delicacy in the 19^th Century but is now banned because the bird is endangered. It was often eaten with a napkin over one’s head to demonstrate shame to the almighty for eating such a bird cooked in such a manner. The horrible treatment of the ortolan (it was literally drowned in brandy as a marinade) made the delicacy controversial even in Disraeli’s day, which is evidenced by the fact that Bulwer-Lytton cut a reference to ortolans in Pelham in his 1835 edition and replaced it with a reference to pheasants. But Disraeli’s bubbly and often satirical narrator composes a poem to the ortolan in an early chapter. (“Let me die eating ortolans to soft music!”) Then, he laments having only two ortolans at the Catholic’s party (“an ortolan or two—ah! Once ‘twas six”), and follows up that paragraph with some suicidal prose (“What then? We die!”) as though for Disraeli’s narrator not being at the swingingest party in town is cause for a discussion of mortality.

Of this sort of excess Disraeli’s young duke repents by novel’s end (“Alas! how I have misused my power”) if only because he loses most of his money gambling. But it’s less clear that Disraeli’s narrator ever repents. He does give a solemn endorsement of the societal benefits of marriage, but he lets the narrative about the duke do all the repenting for him as far as his portrait of the good life is concerned. Here are his narrator’s words on marriage:  

“For, believe me, who, being a bachelor, may be allowed to put in a word in favour of a system in which I am not interested, Love without marriage is both expensive, immoral, and productive of the most disagreeable consequences. It tries the constitution, heart, and purse. Profligacy is almost an impossibility, and even dissipation, as this work well proves, soon gets a bore. What we call morality, is nothing else but common sense, and the experience of our fellow-men codified for our common good. And if, if marriage did not require such an income (they say three thousand now will scarcely do, even for us younkers. What times we live in!) - I have half a mind (I think we must come down) really to look about me (one gets tired of wandering), and no doubt there is great pleasure in a well-regulated existence, particularly if no children come in after dinner.”

It would be another seven years after this book was published before Disraeli would settle down with a woman much older and wealthier than he.

The best scene in the book is the one in which the young duke changes his mind about his extravagant lifestyle. It has flashes recalling his best work, which would come in his treatise on the gap between the rich and the poor in 1845, Sybil, or The Two Nations. The scene, in which the duke boards a mail carriage for a long journey from his Catholic friends’ country estate to London, features lower caste characters, including a spicily satirical portrait of a utilitarian, combining the best features of both Sybil and his satirical novella Popanilla. The scene is also followed by a great sequence in which Disraeli not only writes his duke into the House of Lords, but also critiques all the great nonfictional parliamentary orators of his day, suggesting he has great first-hand experience watching parliamentary debates even at 26 years of age when he wrote the book. He even takes his first swings at future prime minister Robert Peel, whom he would eventually help bring down by making negative speeches against his policies decades later. Here is what he writes about Peel in 1831:

“Mr. Peel is the model of a minister, and improves as a speaker; though, like most of the rest, he is fluent without the least style. He should not get so often in a passion either, or, if he do, should not get out of one so easily. His sweet apologies are cloying. His candour—he will do well to get rid of that.”

This is an obvious area of passion for the young Disraeli, and for once he left the digression in the 1853 edition. Other areas of what one might expect to be passion are often muted in the later editions. His trademark passionate ambition (embraced and then repented of and then embraced again in his first novel Vivian Grey) is spoken of with care here: “For I am one, though young, yet old enough to know, Ambition is a demon; and I fly from what I fear.” The book reveals all kinds of ambivalences – towards ambition, towards fame, towards his own writing, towards dandyism. The full title of the book is after all “The Young Duke: A Moral Tale, Though Gay.” It shows ambivalence between the moral and gay aspects of the book. (This is of course not meant in the contemporary sense of “gay,” as in homosexual, but to many modern readers that tension, between Regency mores and what Bulwer-Lytton called the novel's “effeminacy,” exists in the book too.) He even expresses ambivalence between the two political parties of the day, in a hilarious passage where he asks to which side he belongs: 

“But then I must be consistent, and not compromise my principles, which will never do in England - more than once a-year. Let me see: what are they? Am I a Whig or a Tory? I forget. As for the Tories, I admire antiquity, particularly a ruin; even the relics of the Temple of Intolerance have a charm. I think I am a Tory. But then the Whigs give such good dinners, and are the most amusing. I think I am a Whig; but then the Tories are so moral, and morality is my forte: I must be a Tory. But the Whigs dress so much better; and an ill-dressed party, like an ill-dressed man, must be wrong. Yes! I am a decided Whig. And yet - I feel like [actor David] Garrick, between Tragedy and Comedy. I think I will be a Whig and Tory alternate nights, and then both will be pleased; or I have no objection, according to the fashion of the day, to take a place under a Tory ministry, provided I may vote against them."

Of course that is just what he did. He joined the Tories and voted against them. But whatever his ambivalences, however many edits he made while alive, he can’t escape now from what this book reveals: Both his fashionable and his passionate heart.