Review: Disraeli's "Henrietta Temple" is not biography, but it would be better if it was

Having heard that Benjamin Disraeli’s 1837 novel Henrietta Temple: A Love Story was a semiautobiographical telling of his relationship with a woman named Henrietta Sykes between 1833 and 1836, I had long looked forward to reading his account of this open affair with an older, richer, married woman. Such relationships were rare in the annals of literature--and in real life--in his day. But when I opened the book, I discovered it was not a retelling of his relationship with Lady Sykes, but instead yet another Regency novel about an older man in love with a younger, poorer, unmarried woman, in a relationship wherein one or both parties must choose between love and money.  We have Jane Austen for that. Naturally Disraeli did not owe his readers accuracy about his sex life, and the mores of the day made it impossible to write about many of the things he would perhaps have loved to write about. But to modern readers the novel would be more interesting if it were more like his fascinating real life.

Disappointingly, Disraeli’s seventh novel whitewashes everything about his personal life that is interesting: his willingness to court older women, his ambiguous sexuality that is the subject of scholarly inquiries to this day, his use of the relationship to further his career, and his relative flaunting of an extramarital affair in a time more conservative than our own. Yet the novel does manage to be entertaining in its second half, particularly in its reflection of Disraeli’s real problems with debt, and in a brief detour to the political in the penultimate paragraph of the book.

Henrietta Temple's plot is engaging enough. It tells the story of a young aristocrat, Ferdinand Armine, who like Disraeli through most of his life was deeply in debt. Armine foolishly squandered inherited money on yachts and other luxuries while anticipating that his grandfather would leave a fortune to him. When the grandfather leaves the fortune instead to his cousin Katherine, Armine decides he must marry the cousin. But no sooner does he get engaged than he experiences love at first sight with a less wealthy 18-year-old named Henrietta Temple. He becomes engaged to both women until Henrietta finds out about the cousin. Then Temple herself becomes engaged to a nobleman and independently comes into a fortune that makes her the richest woman in the world. She seems a lost love. But is she? The novel, unlike the real life story, ends happily. The novel reads breezily but is not nearly as interesting as the political novels, or even his other early novels on romantic subjects.

Scholars and critics have debated the extent of Disraeli’s affections for the woman for whom Disraeli named Henrietta Temple, and therefore how autobiographical the book really is. Disraeli’s seminal modern biographer, Robert Blake, for instance, has written that Henrietta Sykes was perhaps the only woman Disraeli ever really loved, notably excluding his wife of several decades, whom he had not yet met when he was with the married woman. But the same Baron Blake also questioned the extent of Disraeli’s feelings. Quoting from a letter Disraeli wrote in which he described the first year with Henrietta as “the happiest of my life,” Blake questions why Disraeli asks how long his feelings will last:

“The whole passage is a strange one. ‘How long will these feelings last?' The question is one which a man would scarcely ask if he was swept away by a passionate love affair; it is possible to suspect that even from the start he was less in love with her than with the idea of being in love and of being loved. A grand passion was an inseparable part of that Byronic tradition which so often sounds, with a slightly hollow note, in Disraeli's life.”

Thus, Blake implies, this love seems like an attempt to live up to that tradition rather than a deep love for the woman herself.

Still, the novel is often considered positive evidence that Disraeli experienced love at first sight with Henrietta Sykes. Almost all the writers who have covered Henrietta Temple have quoted the following from its first half: “There is no love but love at first sight. This is the transcendent and surpassing offspring of sheer and unpolluted sympathy. All other is the illegitimate result of observation, of reflection, of compromise, of comparison, of expediency. The passions that endure flash like the lightning: they scorch the soul, but it is warmed for ever. Miserable man whose love rises by degrees upon the frigid morning of his mind! Some hours indeed of warmth and lustre may perchance fall to his lot; some moments of meridian splendour, in which he basks in what he deems eternal sunshine.”

However, almost no one quotes the next, much gloomier lines in the same paragraph, which predict the end of Disraeli's relationship with Henrietta. “But then how often overcast by the clouds of care," Disraeli writes, "how often dusked by the blight of misery and misfortune! And certain as the gradual rise of such affection is its gradual decline.” We don’t know whether Disraeli wrote this paragraph when he was with Henrietta or after they parted. We know he wrote the first volume while he was in the relationship with Henrietta, thus making the novel a tribute to his mistress. And we know he wrote the rest of it after the relationship was over. But at least one scholar has speculated that the first section ended just after this passage, which occurs just after the lead character of Ferdinand Armine (like most Disraeli heroes, a semi-autobiographical character) meets Henrietta. If this is true, it is was at the height of his romance with Henrietta that he was predicting its end. This would seem to bear significance for the extent to which Disraeli was in love with Henrietta. 

Those who have commented on the novel have varied in their agreement with Blake that Disraeli was “less in love with her” than with the fanciful idea that he was. Some see the section on love at first sight as convincing. Alfred Lord Tennyson said, “The silly sooth of love was given perfectly there,” meaning Disraeli had gotten love at first sight just right. Daniel Schwarz, author of a study of Disraeli’s novels, says, “One is inclined to agree with Blake’s assessment of the affair with Henrietta.” Philip Guedalla, who wrote introductions to almost all of Disraeli’s novels in the so-called Bradenham editions of 1926, agreed: “Perhaps a gleam of autobiography lingered in his whole study of the tender passion, although the slightly epileptic sentiments of love at first sight may seem a trifle fanciful.”

Disraeli’s own comments about Henrietta and marriage have contributed to this interpretation. Even while he was with Henrietta, around which time his family had been pressing (with some acquiescence on Disraeli’s part) for Ben to get married, Disraeli had terrible things to say about marrying for love: 

“As for ‘Love,’ all my friends who married for Love and beauty either beat their wives or live apart from them. This is literally the case. I may commit many follies in life, but I never intend to marry for ‘love,’ which I am sure is a guarantee of infelicity.”

This position is nothing new. In his first novel, Vivian Grey, written at age 21, Disraeli had what he acknowledged to be an autobiographical character dismiss the idea of marrying anyone young and beautiful: “He looked upon marriage as a comedy in which, sooner or later, he was, as a well-paid actor, to play his part; and could it have advanced his views one jot he would have married the Princess Caraboo tomorrow. But of all wives in the world, a young and handsome one was that which he most dreaded.” 

We know that in the end Disraeli said he did not marry for love. His marriage to Mrs. Maryanne Wynham Lewis, the widow of a wealthy man largely responsible for Disraeli’s success in climbing into parliament, was however happy enough that he said he wished he had. It is somehow telling that when Maryanne opened a bottle of champagne for him after a legislative victory somewhat late in life, he told her as a compliment: You are much more like a mistress than a wife.

Disraeli’s naming a novel for his married mistress has for almost two centuries now invited speculation about his private feelings. Several biographers have asserted a homosexual or bisexual side to Disraeli or noted that his dandyism invited the Byronian implication of sexual scandal. William Kuhn devoted a full-length biography to proving, essentially, that Disraeli was gay. Even he finds convincing Disraeli’s declaration that he was happy with Henrietta and calls the relationship “serious.” But he also finds evidence in the novel and historical documents that the great dandy statesman was also attracted to males:

“Indeed, traces of Disraeli’s recent adventures in the Mediterranean survive in this description of [Henrietta Temple’s] appearance. She dresses up to go outdoors on a moonlit night, putting a scarf over her head: ‘There,’ she said, ‘I look like the portrait of the Turkish page in Armine Gallery; don't I?’ Those Turkish pages and eunuchs were among Disraeli’s favourite androgynous figures, so to imagine his first real girlfriend dressed as an eastern boy was also to say that he found her appearance arousing. Those who were in the know about the sorts of pleasures Byron and Disraeli had enjoyed in the East would have smiled at the double entendre.”

Kuhn does not note that Henrietta Sykes’s pet name for her lover was probably also Turkish or Mediterranean in origin. For unknown reasons she called him “Ammin.” This is almost certainly why Disraeli named his lead, autobiographical character “Armine” in Henrietta Temple. The only instance in which any iteration of this name appears in the Disraeli papers is in his description of an 18-year-old Turk he called “Amin Pacha,” though most sources would use the word “Amir” or “Emir” rather than Amin. We know “Amin Pacha” was, according to Disraeli, “steeped in debauchery,” and given what Kuhn and Leslie Mitchell (biographer of Edward Bulwer-Lytton) have said about his homoerotic tourism in “the East” when he was in his twenties, one can imagine that the name Amin could conceivably have had erotic connotations for Disraeli. The only other theory as to the origin of the nickname is in the fictionalized account of Maurice Edelman’s novel about Disraeli’s relationship with Henrietta Sykes, Disraeli in Love. Edelman’s narrator says the pair picked the name out of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), which Kuhn says was influential on Disraeli and perhaps his erotic imagination. The only Amin in the many stories that come with the Arabian Nights tradition is the real-life caliph Al-Amin, who Iraqi historian al-Tabari said fell madly in love with a male slave named Kauthar. Al-Tabari reportedly says his mother insisted thereafter that the female slaves wear male clothing in order to persuade Al-Amin to engage in sexual relationships with them instead. This anecdote dovetails nicely with the one Kuhn cites in Henrietta Temple about male dress, but it isn’t even in One Thousand and One Nights. Thus we are left with thin gruel when attempting to interpret the names “Amin” and “Ammin.” But an origin consistent with the kind of eastern eroticism Kuhn writes about seems nevertheless plausible.

However shaky some of the arguments for Disraeli's sexuality seem to be, he invited the insinuations by evoking Byron. As I’ve quoted in another review on this site, Andrew Elfenbeim in his paper “Byronism and the Work of Homosexual Performance in Early Victorian England” (Modern Language Quarterly in December 1993), writes: “While the question of whether or not [Disraeli and his friend Bulwer-Lytton] were ‘really’ homosexuals is alluring, it is ultimately unanswerable because of the difficulty of defining what counts as a ‘real’ homosexual. What is clear is that both men imitated certain potentially scandalous aspects of Lord Byron's behavior, as they understood it, in a bid to achieve social prominence." The issue for us of course is not whether Disraeli was "really" homosexual, but that the novel loses complexity for its understandable whitewashing in 1837.

It is true that of all the love relationships in Disraeli’s early novels the one that rings most true is a romance with a male schoolmate named Musaeus. Kuhn and Edelman both interpret that story as autobiographical, which is persuasive to the extent that it is told in great believable detail and matches up to what else we know about Disraeli’s life in school. The story, detailed in Contarini Fleming, has the titular hero falling in “love” with a boy, getting into a tempestuous affair in which Contarini throws a temper tantrum whenever the boy finds other friends, and then taking the boy home to meet his family. Contarini then becomes embarrassed of the relationship and refuses to acknowledge him in school. This silent treatment is noticed by his other male classmates, and when they demand to know why he “dropped” Musaeus, Contarini gets into a fistfight. A similar fight occurs in Vivian Grey’s depiction of his school life, and in both books as in real life Disraeli is dropped by the boarding school.

There is no such open homoeroticism in Henrietta Temple or the paper trail on his relationship with Lady Sykes. What is clear is that Disraeli used Henrietta Sykes to move up in the world, which I would argue is a missing piece in her appeal to him in the accounts of many biographers including Edelman in Disraeli in Love.  It’s also completely absent from Henrietta Temple. Sykes introduced Disraeli to Lord Lyndhurst, a British politician who finally helped him find Tory sponsorship for his parliamentary campaigns after a long series of losses under the rubric of an “independent radical.” Lord Lyndhurst also had an affair with Henrietta Temple, and scholars disagree on whether Disraeli knew and encouraged Henrietta to have that affair while she was with him. Such a relationship does not of course prove that Disraeli was what we today would call “homosexual” (which did not become a word until the 1869) or necessarily lessen the argument that Henrietta Temple is an autobiographical account of his love with Sykes. But its absence in the novel does leave the story strangely enervated.

Fortunately, the second half of the novel, perhaps because Disraeli was out of the relationship, is entertaining. By the end of the book, Armine is arrested and taken to what was called a “sponging house,” at which debtors are shaken down before being jailed. Disraeli says two types of people end up in a sponging house: the “nobs,” who are real gentleman, and the “snobs,” who are not and are treated much more harshly in the house. Fortunately a wonderful dandy character named for Mirabel in The Way of the World by William Congreve shows up to pay Armine’s debts. (Disraeli also referenced Mirabel in The Young Duke in the context of an analysis of what true dandyism is.)  Simultaneously other events free him to marry Henrietta, and Disraeli gets what he insisted his publisher subtitle this novel: “A Love Story.”

Fans of Disraeli’s political novels must settle for one paragraph of political content. The penultimate paragraph tells us that Armine and two of his friends become Whig Ministers of Parliament—but, in a twist that apparently none of the commentary on the novel over the centuries has ever noted, he says they voted Tory. Probably this detail was left out not because it isn’t interesting but because it is couched in language that is very era-specific. Disraeli writes that Armine and one of his friends “in the most marked manner, abstained from voting on the appropriation clause.”  This is an obscure reference today, but at the time was well-known to refer to a reform bill that used surplus revenues of the Anglican Church of Ireland for secular or Catholic educational purposes. It became something of a litmus test for party identification, as Whigs were for appropriation and Tories were against it. Moderate Whigs like Disraeli’s characters abstained. Disraeli goes on: “There is little doubt that [Armine and his friend] will ultimately support that British and national administration which Providence has doubtless in store for these outraged and distracted realms.” This is Disraeli the partisan thinker rambling his way into his own peculiar partisan line: That the Tory party is the true national party, that the Whigs are oligarchs who favor the interests of the industrial north, and that Tories are destined to win as a result. “At least this,” Disraeli concludes, is Henrietta’s father “Mr. Temple's more than hope, who is also in the House, and acts entirely with Lord Stanley.” Stanley, a Tory, would become the longest serving prime minister of the century.

Thus it’s a true happy ending for Disrael, both romantic and political: the heroes will vote Tory despite being moderates, and young love wins out. It’s too bad he gets his happy tale only by emptying the story of what makes his own so fascinating: Its foibles, complications and faults.