Disraeli: A Picture of the Victorian Age was published in 1927, four years after Ariel had established Maurois as the leading popular biographer in Europe. Where Shelley had been a natural subject for a romantic treatment — young, beautiful, doomed — Disraeli offered Maurois a different challenge: a long, complex life spanning nearly the entire nineteenth century, involving not just literature but politics, finance, love, race, and the machinery of empire. The result is arguably Maurois’s most ambitious biography, and certainly his longest.
Benjamin Disraeli’s life was genuinely astonishing. Born in 1804 to a Jewish family (his father, Isaac, had the children baptized as Anglicans when Benjamin was twelve), he started as a dandy and novelist, writing flashy “silver fork” fiction like Vivian Grey while drowning in debt from speculative ventures. He entered Parliament in 1837 after multiple failed attempts, endured decades of mockery for his exotic appearance and manner, married a wealthy widow twelve years his senior (a genuine love match, as it turned out), and climbed the greasy pole of Conservative politics to become Chancellor of the Exchequer and, twice, Prime Minister. Along the way he purchased the Suez Canal for Britain, made Victoria Empress of India, and waged a lifelong rivalry with Gladstone that defined Victorian politics.
Maurois was particularly good at the psychological dimensions. His Disraeli is driven not just by ambition but by the need to prove that a Jew could reach the summit of the most class-conscious society in Europe — and that he could do it without concealing his origins, flamboyance, or intellectual brilliance. The relationship with Victoria is beautifully handled: the aging queen and the aging prime minister, each genuinely devoted to the other, exchanging primroses and flattery in a friendship that transcended political utility.
The political analysis holds up less well. Maurois, a French liberal, was not deeply versed in the internal dynamics of British Conservative politics, and his account of Disraeli’s legislative program is thinner than his treatment of the personal drama. Later biographies — Robert Blake’s Disraeli (1966), Stanley Weintraub’s Disraeli (1993), and Douglas Hurd and Edward Young’s collaborative study — have been more thorough on policy. But Maurois captured the man as no subsequent biographer quite has: the wit, the loneliness, the theatrical self-presentation that masked real feeling, the extraordinary marriage to Mary Anne Lewis.
Collecting Disraeli
First edition (D. Appleton, New York, 1927): Published simultaneously in England by John Lane. Both editions were large-format books with photographs.
Market values:
- First American edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- First English edition in jacket: $40–$100
- Later reprints: $5–$15
This was a major bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and copies are common. The jacket, which typically shows a portrait of Disraeli, adds significant value when present and in good condition.