Turning Tory: Disraeli domesticates the scandalous Lord Byron in his novel "Venetia"

When Benjamin Disraeli, just months from at last becoming a minister of parliament after years of trying, finished his novel Venetia in 1837 he sent a copy to his friend William Beckford. He apologized that Beckford had never received his previous novel, Henrietta Temple, admitting “The book was not worth reading.” However, he said, Venetia “is more in our way, tho’ adulterated enough with commonplace, I hope, to be popular.” Disraeli did not say why the new novel was "in our way," but it likely concerned their common interest in Lord Byron, the famously rakish poet upon whom Disraeli had largely modeled his persona in the first 30 years of his life – and on whose life the novel Venetia is based. The sense in which Disraeli had “adulterated” Byron’s story hinges on a cousin of Byron’s named Mary Chaworth, his childhood companion and lifelong "one that got away." The great dandy Beau Brummel said he himself had heard Byron "romancing about her for hours." Byron told a friend that if he had married Chaworth "perhaps the whole tenor of my life would have been different." (Both lines are quoted in Ian Gilmour's 2002 biography The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Own Time.)

The scholarship on the novel has almost completely ignored Chaworth as an influence on the story. In its early printings, however, the publisher specifically advertised that the title character, Venetia Herbert, was based on Chaworth. A blurb on the cover of an early edition quoted a contemporary review:

“The story is shaped upon the character of Lord Byron, and some of the events of his life. He figures here, as in his own poems, as the hero of the piece, and is introduced as Lord Cadurcis, at the age of eleven years. His fond, passionate, and inconsistent mother, is also prominent; whilst Miss Chaworth, somewhat metamorphosed, appears as Venetia Herbert. There is much of poetical beauty and vivid description throughout the volumes.”

Why did Disraeli name the book for the character based on Mary Chaworth? Critics have focused on his figuring of Byron, but Disraeli didn’t choose to name the novel for his Byron character, Lord Cadurcis, and his novels are always named for the lead character. Moreover, the novel is clearly told from the point of view of Venetia Herbert. Analyzing this choice, we can see that Disraeli was in fact “adulterating” the myth of Lord Byron not only to make his book more popular but also to prepare himself for parliament. This article argues that Disraeli used Mary Chaworth’s story to rehabilitate and, simultaneously, to distance himself from the great poet, who had suffered from scandal in the years before his death in 1824. Venetia reframes Byron as an icon of lost domestic virtue, in the process crafting a public persona as he transitioned from being an “independent Radical” to becoming a conservative Tory politician.

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To see why Disraeli made this choice, we must visit the political moment in which Disraeli wrote the book. It’s 1837. Benjamin Disraeli has finally become a Tory, after spending much of five years unsuccessfully standing for parliament as an “independent Radical.” He has now found a patron, Lord Lyndhurst, who has gotten him into an important Tory Club, and with whom he has shared his mistress (perhaps unknowingly). But now he has to find a way to win over the more conservative Tory crowd, despite having supported the Reform Act of 1832 and called for the adoption of “the democratic principle” over “the aristocratic principle.” One obstacle to this transition is his carefully crafted image as a Byronic dandy, with deliberately curled hair and a wardrobe of flashy colorful suits and trousers, like the great Radical aristocratic poet's. On top of this Disraeli has written a library of novels that ape the effusive political and personal tangents of Byron’s poetry. As critics like Emily Allen and Dino Franco Felluga have argued, Byron was viewed by certain Tories as a dangerous Radical, whose personal life generated an enormous scandal that drove him out of England permanently in 1816. At this moment, in 1837, Disraeli chooses to write a novel, Venetia, that fictionalizes the lives of Byron and his even more radical friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. Disraeli fragments the historical parallels, giving some characteristics of Byron to his Shelley character Marmion Herbert, and some characteristics of Shelley to his Byron character, Cadurcis, and setting the entire story in the time of the American Revolution. This has confused critics, even causing one to think Herbert to be Byron and Carducis to be Shelley. But the move is not merely the move of sloppy writing born of haste and dire financial need, as he hid from creditors. As we shall see, it is a thematic and structural choice that many critics have missed. Why would someone seeking to shed the image of a radical choose such risky subject matter? Particularly when he has aligned himself with the more scandalous aspects of Byron’s reputation by carrying on with a married woman in public, and opening himself to the charge of effeminacy in an England that associated such characteristics with the crime of “buggery”?

Perhaps Disraeli was attempting to simultaneously rehabilitate and distance himself from Byron's image. This conclusion is in line with a recent wave of scholarship on the novel that takes it more seriously than most critics in earlier decades. (See, most recently, 2024’s book Novel-Poetry by Allen and Falluga.) What recent scholarship has not emphasized, however, and what has laid dormant as an interpretive lens for almost 200 years, is that Disraeli attempted to accomplish this sort of literary makeover in part by making a heroine out of Chaworth, who Byron associated for decades with his lost innocence. A review of the literature on Venetia since 1837 has shown that almost no one has alluded to Chaworth, even fewer by name. Philip Guedalla, who edits the 1926 Bradenham edition of Disraeli’s novels, says Byron’s “moods, his mother, and his Muse all make their appearance with Plantagenet Cadurcis” but does not specify who his muse is. He presumably means Chaworth, who inspired multiple poems including “The Dream.” More recently Ann R. Hawkins, who edited the 2004 Routledge edition (the best way to read the book by far), quotes the Colburn blurb mentioning Chaworth by name in her December 2004 paper "Evoking Byron from Manuscript to Print." But even Hawkins only covers Chaworth as one of several influences and does not interpret the novel through the lens of Chaworth’s story. The most extensive mention of Mary Chaworth appeared first in 1868: Teresa Guiccioli's memoir of a life her time as Byron's mistress, My Recollections of Lord Byron. But that fascinating account emphasizes that the character of Venetia also represents other figures from Byron's life, which as we shall see it did. None of these sources interpret the novel with Chaworth as the central figure, as I do here. 

The parallels between Chaworth’s story and Venetia’s are easy to tick off. She is born in a country estate called Cherbury that is described in a detail that allows us to see how clearly it is modeled after Chaworth’s home Annesley Hall. (“Annesley” incidentally is a name that Disraeli used for one of his characters in The Young Duke several years before, showing perhaps how long Chaworth’s story had moved this young author). The estate is near a vast, almost-abandoned abbey that is clearly based on the abbey in which Byron grew up. Like Chaworth, Venetia meets the lord of the abbey when he is but 10 years old. Lord Byron and Lord Cadurcis have both become lords without much money, parented by a single parent with whom they are in continual conflict. That Byron had such a conflict with his mother was so notorious that his key 20^th Century biographer, Leslie Marchand, had to refute it thusly:

“Mrs. Byron was not always in a tantrum, and there is ample evidence that she loved her son and that she sacrificed her own comfort to give him every advantage her poverty permitted. The chronological vagueness of early accounts of Byron's childhood has left the impression that his mother habitually threw the fire tongs at her son's head or broke dishes over it. But most of these spectacular performances belong to the period of his obstreperous youth in England.”

Disraeli didn’t have Marchand to inspire his novel. But he did have Thomas Moore’s biography of Byron, and the relationship of Cadurcis to his mother follows almost precisely its depiction. Both Byron’s mother and Cadurcis’s mother die while their sons are away from home. Both say that “God gave me one friend,” and that this friend is now gone. Meanwhile, both couples fall in love, with the female character rejecting the young male in both cases. Both young lords go on to become famous poets and scandalous Whig libertines. The parallels go on and on.

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One reason critics have de-emphasized the Chaworth connection, it would seem, is that Disraeli did not only use the character of Venetia to represent Mary. Venetia is also based on Ianthe Shelley, who was abandoned by her father Percy Bysshe Shelley along with her mother, Shelley’s first wife Harriet Westbrook, when Ianthe was very young. Venetia also represents Ada Byron, the daughter of Lord Byron. Disraeli named the character's mother Annabell, presumably after Lady Annabell Byron.

The novel tells the stories of Byron and Shelley in so fragmented a way that many early critics rejected the book altogether. Blake said the book was “fatally marred by its whole concept — a fictionalized account of Byron and Shelley put back in the period of the American War of Independence.” This is indeed a hard move to account for, as Byron and Shelley helped make the 19^th Century what it was. “It as if someone had produced in recent times a book about TE Lawrence or Rupert Brooke in the setting of the Crimean War.”  What does anything mean in a particular historical moment, if the central icons of that time are dislocated? Probably one of Disraeli’s motivations for changing the chronology of the story was the fact that Byron had died only 13 years before the book was published, and his use of Byron’s life story was still sensitive. In reviewing the novel, The Edinburgh Review refused to go into the details of the novel on the grounds that it was too intrusive.

However, the reason for the alteration has a purpose beyond mere legal defense. In moving the pair backwards in time, Disraeli seems to be asking how radical they really were. In the moment he wrote the book, the pair were remembered for the scandal of their personal lives and political persuasions. John Wilson Croker, a Tory politician, once observed in a letter to Byron (and Disraeli’s) publisher John Murray that Byron was feared by conservatives as a political threat: “It was only yesterday at dinner that somebody said that he had read or seen a letter of Lord Byron's to somebody, saying that if the Radicals only made a little progress and showed some real force, he would hasten over and get on horseback to head them,” Croker wrote. (This is quoted in Falluga’s 2005 The Perversity of Poetry.) Croker downplayed the notion of Byron as a Radical leader, but the threat seemed real enough to someone that he felt the need to reject it. Associated inevitably with Byron already, Disraeli had to persuade readers that neither the sins nor the politics of the notorious poet would have been so radical in the 18^th Century. Surprisingly, this motivation has not been suggested by any of the analysts of the novel that I’ve read.

This interpretation is backed up by the fact that when Disraeli gives us philosophical and literary discussions between the two poets, he draws from sources in the 18^th century rather than the 19^th. For example, Hawkins’ footnotes in the Routledge edition point out that Cadurcis’ views on Shakespeare are drawn from Enlightenment scholars, not Byron or anyone of the era of the Romantic poets:

"And who is Shakspeare?" (sic) said Cadurcis. "We know of him as much as we do of Homer. Did he write half the plays attributed to him? Did he ever write a single whole play? I doubt it. He appears to me to have been an inspired adapter for the theatres, which were then not as good as barns. I take him to have been a botcher up of old plays. His popularity is of modern date, and it may not last; it would have surprised him marvellously. Heaven knows, at present, all that bears his name is alike admired; and a regular Shaksperian falls into ecstasies with trash which deserves a niche in the Dunciad. For my part, I abhor your irregular geniuses.”

Had Disraeli been merely pressed for time when he chose the 18^th century as his setting, as some critics allege, he would probably have located his characters’ discussion in the present day. It is more work to carefully place the philosophy back several decades.  

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Thus, confusing as it may seem at first blush, one must ask why Disraeli made his choices as he did rather than simply dismissing them hastily. The same question applies to his choice to name the novel Venetia. The fact is, Disraeli is not the only Victorian novelist to use the Mary Chaworth episode to somehow domesticate or comment upon Lord Byron. Andrew Elfenbein in his book Byron and the Victorians does not mention Chaworth in his excellent discussion of Venetia, but he does mention her in discussing Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle. Caworth’s story was relatable to persons who found Byron’s sex life to be off-putting. Byron was known to contemporaries to have had homosexual affairs, had a child with his half-sister, and to have claimed to have slept with 200 women in one three year period in Vienna. This was scandalous in the time of the Regency and was positively contrary to the spirit of the Victorian age. But the Caworth story was redemptive: He was really at heart with one sweetheart from childhood, and Victorians may have perceived that had she accepted him he would have been a model citizen.

As Disraeli plotted damage control for a career in Parliament, he had to straddle a line. He had openly courted attention to his affair with the married Lady Henrietta Sykes, naming his prior novel Henrietta Temple for her. Elfenbein points out that such a Byronic image had advantages. But the affair also had costs: As Blake describes, he was dogged for decades by those who found it too much that Disraeli brought both Henrietta and his Tory patron Lord Lyndhurst home to his father’s house – at the time that she was sleeping with both. To this day questions remain about whether Disraeli was allowing Henrietta to sleep his way to the top. Arguments may be made on both sides, as it’s unclear Disraeli knew about Henrietta and Lyndhurst. Biographer John Vincent wrote in 1990:

“Byron and Shelley were, in Tory eyes, men of the left. Moreover, their private lives were hardly conventional. To write about them was only to advertise to the world, and especially to the Tory world, all that was suspect about Disraeli. Where [the semiautobiographical hero of Henrietta Temple] Armine had debts, Marmion Herbert (Shelley) had a mistress. Disraeli had had both; but why draw attention to the fact? Yet in his introduction Disraeli boldly commended Shelley and Byron as ‘two of the most renowned and refined spirits that have adorned these, our latter days.’”

However, Disraeli distanced himself from Byron at the same time he lauded him. Disraeli does this explicitly once the once-soaring reputation of Lord Cadurcis, who is described in the book as a libertine but whose crimes are left almost entirely to the imagination, succumbs at last to scandal. As his character’s presence at the House of Lords causes a riot, Disraeli pauses both to defend and distance himself from his hero. First, Disraeli copies almost verbatim (says Hawkins) a paragraph straight out of Thomas Babbington Macauley’s review of Moore’s biography:

“It has been well-observed, that no spectacle is so ridiculous as the British public, in one of its periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces. and family quarrels, pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years, our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be violated. We must make a stand against vice. We must teach libertines that the English people appreciate the importance of domestic ties. Accordingly, some unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than hundreds whose offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out as an expiatory sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from him. If he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by the higher orders, and hissed by the lower.”

Interestingly, it is not Byron's libertine ways that Disraeli criticizes in this moment, it is his literature:

“But Lord Cadurcis had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is punished most severely; Lord Cadurcis had been overpraised. He had excited too warm an interest: - and the public, with its usual justice, was resolved to chastise him for its own folly.”

Still, Disraeli was one of Byron’s biggest fans. He is blaming the public more than Byron for their overestimation of him. This distinction helps explain an ambivalence that is apparent in the letter with which I opened this article. It reveals a conflicted young man who had enjoyed the company of the literary radicals and maybe even one who is anxious about leaving them to join the Tory party. Beckford, the author of the novel Vathek, was himself a radical who was approached by Utilitarian writer Jeremy Bentham to make a case for abolishing the death penalty for “buggery.” He also had fled England, much like Byron, because of rumor and scandal. Disraeli obviously wished to avoid Byron and Beckford's fate. He may have wished to show he understood Byron without being identified with him. However, Disraeli had originally built for himself a reputation as a Radical, having secured letters of endorsement for Parliament in his first election in 1832 from two of the major Radicals of the day, thanks to his Radical friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a fellow novelist, dandy and man of letters. Those Radicals were appalled to see how conservative Disraeli was in the end, and one of them withdrew his endorsement. However, Disraeli’s wishing to write a novel in Beckworth’s “way” might highlight the extent to which his heart was still in radicalism, even as his father’s Toryism won the day. Thus, Venetia is less a rejection of Lord Byron than a protection and a transformation. Disraeli’s domestication of Byron, through the story of Mary Chaworth, can even be read as a hint that at least to his radical friends Disraeli was going into Tory politics as something of a Trojan horse, a conservative concealing the sometime liberal within. Disraeli strongly valued the conservation of institutions like the monarchy, the church and the aristocracy. But he was after all only a few years older than he’d been when he championed the democratic ideal over the aristocratic one. When he named his novel Venetia, Disraeli was using a story of lost idyllic domesticity to bring his Byronic hopes for social justice with him into the world of Tory conservatism.

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