the course of an evening at Bulwer’s,’ Disraeli told Sarah, ‘I stumbled over Tom Moore, to whom I introduced myself…“I have heard of you, as everybody has,” he said. “Did we not meet at Murray’s once?”’12
He went on to talk about London’s gentlemen’s clubs, membership of which Disraeli was finding it difficult to acquire. He would have liked to join White’s which, founded at White’s Chocolate House in 1693 on the site of what is now Boodle’s, was the oldest and grandest of the St James’s gentlemen’s clubs; but its members were most unlikely to support the candidature of a prospective member of Disraeli’s background, appearance, race and manner, not to mention his authorship of Vivian Grey. Much the same objections would be raised by the members of Boodle’s, a large proportion of whom were country gentlemen of decidedly conservative views, and of Brooks’s, membership of which was described in 1822 by John Campbell, later Lord Chancellor, as a ‘feather in [his] cap’ since it consisted of ‘the first men of rank and talent in England’.
Disraeli then thought of the Travellers’ Club, founded in 1819 for gentlemen who had travelled abroad for at least five hundred miles from London in a straight line; and, since he had travelled further than most, he was qualified on that score. But its members did not want him; most particularly the Whig Lord Auckland, whose influence with other members of the committee was paramount, did not want him, and so he was blackballed. This was no disgrace, he assured Sarah. ‘These things happen every night and to the first people.’
He would, he decided, join instead the Athenaeum, of which his father had been a founding member. This, the most intellectually élite of London’s clubs, had been founded as recently as 1824 for artists, writers and scientists, almost singlehandedly by John Wilson Croker, the Irish politician and essayist whom Lord Macaulay detested ‘more than cold boiled veal’. Membership of this club was more likely for Disraeli to achieve than that of the Travellers’, although its members did not take kindly to the young man when they heard that he had ignored the club’s rules by walking upstairs to talk to his father in the library. However, his friend, Edward Lytton Bulwer, undertook to support his candidature. Disraeli had grown very attached to Bulwer, his one close friend in the literary and publishing world and, so he said, one of the few men with whom his intellect came ‘into collision with benefit’. He invited him to stay at Bradenham, telling Sarah that he was to do there ‘just what he liked’; and he went with Bulwer for a short holiday to Bath where they arrived late one evening at a public ball in all their extravagant finery and, as he was delighted to record, ‘got quite mobbed’.
Bulwer thought it as well to warn him, however, that he might well be blackballed at the Athenaeum, as its members would have reason to fear that he would ‘clap them into a Book…These quiet fellows have a great horror of us Novel writers,’ Bulwer explained. ‘For my part, if I had not got into all my Clubs (at least the respectable ones) before I had taken to Authoring I should certainly be out of them all at this time.’13
While waiting for his election to the Athenaeum, Disraeli was advised to try for membership of the recently founded Conservative Club; but he thought it unwise to join a club so obviously associated with the Tories; and it was not until 1836 that he joined a club with a less identifying name, the Carlton.
By this time the committee of the Athenaeum had made up their mind; and Disraeli was blackballed as he had been by the Travellers’. His family believed that John Wilson Croker was to blame; and in his novel, Coningsby, Disraeli was to caricature Croker as Rigby, a man ‘destitute of all imagination and noble sentiments…blessed with a vigorous, mendacious fancy, fitful in small expedients, and never happier than when devising shifts for great men’s scruples’.*
Denied membership of both the Athenaeum and the Travellers’, Disraeli joined a less prestigious club, the Albion, which few had heard of and which did not long survive.* However, it turned out to be ‘a very capital club’, so he was to say. ‘Few in number, but not at all the set I anticipated – a great number of M.P.s and tho’ not fashionable, distinguished. The grub and wines the best in London, and all on a finished scale.’14
Those who saw Disraeli for the first time in the reception rooms of private houses were not surprised by the difficulties he encountered in finding a gentlemen’s club which would have him as a member, since the young man with the lustrous black curls would stride about in clothes which seemed almost to excite ridicule, suits of satin-lined black velvet with embroidered waistcoats, rings on his gloved fingers, gold chains round his neck. ‘He wore waistcoats of the most gorgeous colours and the most fantastic patterns with much gold embroidery, velvet pantaloons and shoes adorned with red rosettes,’ wrote one observer. ‘His black hair pomaded and elaborately curled and his person redolent with perfume.’15
The beautiful, eccentric and quarrelsome Irishwoman, Rosina Bulwer – for whose extravagances her husband had to pay by his writings – did not at all care for him. One day in her house, wearing his exotic green velvet trousers, he rose from a cane chair to stalk about the room with his coat-tails over his arms, revealing the marks of the chair imprinted on his seat. Who is that? asked Samuel Rogers. Rosina, violently anti-semitic, answered, ‘Oh! Young Disraeli, the Jew.’ ‘Rather the Wandering Jew,’ said Rogers, ‘with the mark of Cane upon him.’16
A pretentious woman, who appeared at her husband’s parties in a ‘blaze of jewels’ and carrying about with her a tiny dog named Fairy, with which she seemed besotted, Rosina Bulwer did not trouble to conceal her dislike of Disraeli, of whom she was to draw an unpleasant portrait in her novel, Very Successful (1856), in which he appears as Jericho Jabber, the ‘Jew d’Esprit’ who marches about the room, ‘ostentatiously admiring the ceiling’. Nor, indeed, did she get on well with her husband, who appears as the villain in her novel, Chevely, or the Man of Honour, which was published soon after she had consented to a legal separation. Nor did Disraeli try to hide his dislike of Rosina Bulwer and of the Irish generally: ‘I never see her’, he said, ‘without thinking of a hod of mortar and a potato. Nature certainly intended that she should console her sorrows in Potheen.’*17
Unsuccessful in obtaining membership of a good London club, Disraeli was also initially unsuccessful in his attempt to get into Parliament. He had publicly announced his desire to do so at a party given by Caroline Norton, in whose house he met Lord Melbourne. ‘Well, now, tell me, what do you want to be?’ Melbourne asked him after they had been talking together for some time. ‘I want’, the young man replied, ‘to be Prime Minister.’ ‘Melbourne gave a long sigh.’18
It was, perhaps, on this occasion at Mrs Norton’s that Disraeli threw across the table to Melbourne a letter from Paul Emile Botta, the Italian doctor and archaeologist, describing Arab sexual practices. The painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, was of the company and was shocked. Talking ‘much of the East’, Disraeli seemed to Haydon ‘to be tinged with a disposition to palliate its infamous vices. I meant to ask him if he preferred Aegypt, where sodomy was preferment to England where it very properly was Death.’ Referring later to Disraeli’s behaviour, Haydon commented, ‘I think no man would go on in that odd manner, wear green velvet trousers and ruffles, without having odd feelings. He ought to be kicked. I hate the look of the fellow.’19
Although he had already decided to offer himself as a candidate at High Wycombe, he had not yet made up his mind which party to commit himself to. He had an instinctive dislike of the Whigs, but had not yet otherwise developed any strong political inclinations. In any case, he felt drawn to Westminster not, it seems,