Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance by Daisy Hay
| Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance by Daisy Hay | |
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| Category: Biography | |
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Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
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| Summary: In 1839 the flamboyant yet impecunious novelist and rising young Member of Parliament Benjamin Disraeli married Mary Ann Lewis, the rich widow of one of his late Westminster colleagues. She was twelve years older than him, and though contemporaries thought it was an 'absurd' union, the odd couple proved very well-matched and supremely happy, and he became an unexpected yet very successful Prime Minister. This biography paints a vivid portrait of 'the odd couple'. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 320 | Date: January 2016 |
| Publisher: Vintage | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-0099597445 | |
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In theory, it seemed an unlikely pairing when in the 19th century a debt-ridden dandy and moderately successful novelist married a rich widow twelve years older than him. But this odd couple proved to be well-matched, and not only rose to the pinnacle of Victorian society, but he also became an unexpected yet very successful Prime Minister.
Mary Anne Evans, the lively but impoverished daughter of a Devon sailor, married Wyndham Lewis in 1815. He was a wealthy major shareholder in a Welsh ironworks who later entered Parliament, where he led a relatively undistinguished career. When he died suddenly from a heart attack in 1838 Benjamin Disraeli, who had been elected to Parliament the previous year as one of two Conservative members for Maidstone (Lewis having been the other), began wooing the childless wealthy widow. Having written several 'silver-fork' novels, or romantic stories about the aristocracy, he had set his heart on a political career. First of all, though, he needed a wife, and in view of his precarious finances, preferably a wealthy one. They were married in August 1839.
As Ms Hay shows, both partners, colourful characters in their own right, initially regarded it as a marriage of convenience. In later years Mary Anne said her second husband had married her for his money, but if he had the chance again, he would undoubtedly marry her again for his love. She claimed that she had worked as a milliner and in a factory before marriage, while he said that he came from an ancient family that fled Spain for Venice and subsequently England, but none of this was true. When they married he had been deeply in debt for some years, and was rumoured to be having affairs with other women, one of which had resulted in the birth of a child. At the same time, some of his letters revealed rather intense feelings for good-looking young men.
His wife, he once remarked rather condescendingly, was a 'pretty little woman, a flirt and a rattle', while Queen Victoria initially thought she was sometimes embarrassingly overdressed and 'vulgar', though she soon revised her opinion for the better. While he suffered some political setbacks, and was occasionally the butt of criticism because of what contemporaries called this 'absurd' marriage as well as through anti-Semitic prejudice, it appears that he was spurred on to greater things and for a while led an extraordinarily charmed life, contented at home and a much-admired Prime Minister, beloved by the public at large as well as being a particular favourite of the Queen.
Mary Anne had no great enthusiasm for politics herself, and had very mixed feelings about her husband's career. Once she complained about having to 'write his stupid letters'. Moreover, she was sorry when he was in office, 'because then I lose him altogether, and though I have many people who call themselves my friends, yet I have no friend like him.' When she became ill and died, her widower was truly bereft. After returning to their home at Hughenden, Buckinghamshire, and sorting through her papers, he was astonished to discover that she had never destroyed 'a single scrap' he ever wrote to her, or even cut his hair, 'without garnering the harvest'.
Although the title of the book suggests it is basically a dual biography, we are treated to the full picture, with the background of mid-Victorian politics and society sketched in more than adequately. While it is obviously not meant to serve as a political account of the Prime Minister (Robert Blake and Jane Ridley, to name but two, have done the job perfectly in recent years), the ups and downs of a chequered career in and out of the highest office in the land are woven very skilfully into the narrative, as are some interesting facets of family and married life. An interesting comparison is made between the unions of the Disraelis and of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in that the wealthy widow and the young German prince were both regarded by some as outsiders who never quite belonged or were accepted into the society into which they married. Mention must also be made of the author's extensive research into previously unpublished letters from the Bodleian Library and elsewhere.
The result is a thoroughly entertaining, not to say enchanting period piece of a love story.
For further reading, we recommend Pistols at Dawn: Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown by John Campbell includes a chapter on Disraeli and Gladstone, and Victoria: A Life by A N Wilson, the most recent of several comprehensive lives about the sovereign whom Disraeli called his 'Faery Queen'
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You can read more book reviews or buy Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance by Daisy Hay at Amazon.com.
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