PORTRAIT OF THE YOUNG DISRAELI

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 154, 27 March 1937, Page VIII (Supplement)

PORTRAIT OF THE YOUNG DISRAELI

“Young .Mr. Disraeli,” by Elswyth Thane. (London: Constable.) Tlie author who has given us this brilliant and .sympathetic study of the early life of Benjamin Disraeli explain? that.:—

In this book there has been no tampering with time and character. The story moves chronologically, and the people in it appear as nearly themselves as contemporary diaries, their own letters and the considered estimate of political historians can show them. No novelist could possibly improve on the drama of Dislacli'fc life exactly as he lived it.

The story opens when Disraeli, a lawyer's clerk of 20, dreams over his work of his hero Byron as he plans ■the novels that are to burst on a surprised and admiring world, and scribbles snatches of poetry on the firm’s notepaper. It. ends when at 34 he stands waiting outside Mary Anne’s door "ready for the greatness he was ultimately to achieve.” In the interval against the inevitable political background, the reader watches all the outstanding and interesting characters of the period move and act out their share of life’s drama. With them appears the pale, dark, tempestuously beautiful youth at whom even his friends at times look askance, unable to decide whether he be genius or charlatan. Exquisite in his dress with a certain flamboyance expressive of his race and exotic personality, he invites love, scorn or hates, but he connot be overlooked. His own ideas of his future were large and confident. "I want to be Prime Minister,” was his astoundingly simple reply to Lord .Melbourne’s more or less polite inquiries as to his youthful ambitious. Disraeli’s love for his sister Sarah and her tenderly adoring, almost maternal, feeling for the brilliant, troublesome, lovable young brother, are treated with a delicate charm that pervades t lie whole of his youthful story and persists through his stormy love affairs, his disappointments, and despairs, and her broken-hearted grief over the loss of her own lover. The characters in this entertaining work are presented from an intimate and domestic as well as a public, point of view, and come vividly to life as human beings, rather than as historical personages. The young Queen and Lord Melbourne “roaring with laughter over anything,” while he “pruned his jokes to "her almost school-room humour.” reel, “tall, fair, long-faced and stiff of manner.” Henrietta who •• — cou jd laugh. One felt that it had not been an altogether proper joke.” Bulwcr, Lady Blcsslngton, D’Orsay and a host of others actually live for the moment as wc meet them in these pages. Tiie closing chapter, which marks the end of Disraeli’s courtship of Mrs. Lewis, and the beginning of one of the notable love-stories of history, is among the most charming in the book. BIRMINGHAM HANDBOOK “City of Birmingham Handbook,” a publication of the city of Birmingham Information Bureau. The 1937 “City of Birmingham Handbook" contains a history of the town from the time of the Roman occupation —from when it wa< a market town. Every type of industry carried on i< Ipferest ingly described. The book is v ell illustrated throughout.