His nibs
ROBERT BLAKE
Isaac D'Israeli James Ogden (ouP 35s) Isaac D'Israeli, a celebrity in his day, is now remembered less in his own right than as the father of a famous son. This decline in his repute is comparatively recent. His most famous book, The Curiosities of Literature, was first published in 1791 when he was twenty-five. It was an instant success. He constantly revised it and brought out new editions. It continued to have wide sales well beyond his death in 1848. I have before me, as I write, a copy of the 1881 edition, given as a school prize in 1896. It is printed in that repulsive double column form which, though one of the more odious features of Victorian publishing, is a sure sign of popularity.
Very soon afterwards the vogue for The Curiosities began to wear off. No new edi- tion appeared between 1889 and 1927, by which time there was a revival of interest, albeit esoteric, in Victoriana. In 1932 there was another edition, but nothing further came out until the publication of a selection in 1962. These vagaries of taste would in themselves make an intriguing subject of study, but they do not lie in Mr Ogden's province. In this scholarly and perceptive study he is concerned with bringing to life and reassessing a forgotten literary figure who, in so far as he is known at all by modern readers, is known through his son Benjamin's hastily written memoir which first appeared in 1849 as a preface to the fourteenth edition of The Curiosities.
Benjamin Disraeli was not the most accurate of biographers. Not only is his account of the family's genealogy wildly in- accurate, as has been conclusively demon- strated by Lucien Wolf and Cecil Roth, but his characterisation of his father was by no means beyond criticism. Mr Ogden shows well enough that the benevolent hermit of his library, and learned denizen of the British Museum, depicted by Benjamin, was far from being the whole truth. Isaac much enjoyed social life, and he was a ferocious controversialist who gave as good as he got in the wars of pamphlets frequently waged in those days by scholars and literary men. See for example the exchange with Bolton Corney, an acidulated antiquary who in 1837 wrote The Curiosities of Literature by I. D'Israeli Illustrated, to which the angry author riposted with The Illustrator Illustrated.
Corney's original attack had been sharp. 'Every glance detected some misrepresenta- tion or error'. But Isaac's reply was even sharper. He did not, he unconvincingly averred, mind corrections, but `it is loath- some to pick them out of a filthy platter heaved at us by the hoof of a literary Yahoo'. It is hardly surprising that Corney riposted with a second edition 'revised and acuminated, to which are added, Ideas on Controversy, deduced from the practice of a Veteran and adapted to the meanest capa- city'. Nor was this an exceptional episode. When the Gentleman's Magazine adversely reviewed Isaac's Dissertation on Anecdotes he accused the editor in An Epistle, Familiar and Panegyrical, to Richard Gough, Esc, of being like 'a Mole; a diminutive and grubbing animal which fears the light, and exhausts its feeble and industrious malice, by injuring the grounds of everyone'.
Isaac D'Israeli tried his hand at many forms of literature. He wrote a novel Vaurien which in some respects anticipated the technique of Peacock and of the only important nineteenth century novelist to have much affinity with him—Benjamin Disraeli. His other novels were less success- ful. Benjamin for example wisely does not mention in his memoir Flim-Flams! Or the Life and Errors of My Uncle, and the Amours of my Aunt. It was said to have all Sterne's indecency and none of his wit. Longman, the bookseller, refused to have it in his shop for fear of libel actions from the thinly disguised originals of its charac- ters. Isaac also wrote poetry of a very feeble nature. His taste may be judged by his high praise of the poet, Pye. More successful were his efforts as a historian. His Com- mentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First would not be read today by a serious searcher for knowledge, but it repre- sented at the time an advance in methods of historical investigation and earned its author an honorary degree from the university of Oxford.
Isaac's merits lay in his powers as an anthologist and a literary critic. The Curio- sities remains a fascinating quarry for curious stories, anecdotes, episodes, etc. The Literary Character and The Amenities of Literature are interesting fragments of a great history of English literature which he hoped to write one day, but never managed to complete. They are full of good things and suggest that, although like so many critics he made some quaint misjudgments of contemporary literature, he had a shrewd and discerning appreciation of the past.
Mr Ogden has written an excellent book. lie is most unlikely to be superseded either in his assessment of Isaac's literary status or in his account of Isaac's career and rela- tions with his family. On one matter I have mixed feelings. As a biographer of Benja- min, I have always wanted to discover just what his father's financial resources amounted to. We know that Isaac inherited enough from his grandmother to become independent in his early twenties. We know that his father left £26,000. We know that Isaac lived for the last twenty years in much comfort at Bradenham Manor, a beautiful Queen Anne house near Wycombe. We also know that, when he died, he left only £10,000 in cash plus an unspecified amount in land. How much? I hunted in vain at Hughenden among the Disraeli papers to find out, and I always hoped that some- one more assiduous and efficient would eventually succeed. It seems, however, from Mr Ogden's search that the relevant docu- ments are genuinely missing. No doubt from one point of view this is comforting, but I would love to know what the truth really was.
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