Disraeli’s Disciple: The Scandalous Life of George Smythe (review)

This volume is a must read and a most enjoyable one for anyone interested in the nineteenth century, especially for those who still think of Victorian piano legs being garbed in pantaloons. Mary Millar has worked for many years at Queen’s University with Mel Wiebe editing the Disraeli Letters. Dr Millar has contributed to several introductions to the eight volumes so far published, as she has to the exhaustive footnotes covering people, places, and events documented in this superb edition. As a result, she is thoroughly steeped in the years of George Smythe’s life, 1818–57. So thoroughly at ease in those years is she, that she can allow herself moments of light-hearted prose. ‘His [Smythe’s] most serious mistake was to outlive his brilliant youth.’ He not only out-lived it; he squandered it.

I believe Dr Millar when she tells me that he was a brilliant, witty youth, but being told is not the same as being there. He certainly seems to have charmed people, especially women young and old. His pictures show a very handsome young man. His education in the classics at Tonbridge public school was traditional, thoroughly filled with translation and rote learning; he assured his father that ‘a commerce with the writers of antiquity raises and purifies the mind.’ Millar adds, ‘[T]hough even then the theory’s applicability to himself is doubtful.’ And over the years it had less applicability. This is my one reservation in my wholehearted recommendation of this book. The biographer is brilliant, but the subject is not worthy of her. ‘I adore all old women as you know,’ he once wrote to Manners, mischievously referring to his first adult love affair, a distinctly Oedipal passion for a beautiful émigrée countess literally old enough to be his grandmother. He continued a life of debauchery despite ill-health. From 1827 on, the young boy was suffering from the coughs and persistent fevers that were to plague him all his life. He was also suffering from the wayward behaviour that led one lady where he had stayed to tell him later, ‘I used to look at you with awe not unmingled with horror.’ Millar adds to her biography a comparison with Coningsby. She leaves one in no doubt that Disraeli had based much of Coningsby’s character and life on George Smythe.

At Cambridge, ‘acting the enfant terrible part in which he had cast himself at the age of ten, [he was] alternately flattering and shocking the authorities, brilliantly provocative in Union debates but consistently disappointing the forecasts of academic glory with which he had come up.’ His father wanted him to have a political career. Disraeli was trying to forge a career, but although the two became friends at this time, it was several years before they connected politically when Smythe brought the Young England group into Disraeli’s orbit. ‘Together they turned Young England from an earnest trio of imprecise idealists, Smythe, Manners and Alexander Cochrane into a political splinter group, a new generation expressing their disillusion with the old leaders and resolving to reshape the Conservative party.’ Smythe meant more to Disraeli than a political ally; Disraeli wrote, ‘[H]e rendered the most interesting period of my life more delightful by the splendour of his cultured & imaginative intellect & by his vivid and impassioned friendship. He absorbs a great part of my memory.’

If only Smythe had had more ambition and self-control, the history of the 1840s would have been very different. He showed what he could do, what he might have been, when he campaigned in Canterbury for a seat in the House of Commons and won. But his maiden speech in the House of Commons was a bigger disaster than Disraeli’s. This brilliant young debater froze. ‘When he did rise, he was so nervous that reporters could hardly hear him . . . Faltering and repeating himself . . . After nine or ten sentences, completely demoralized, he could do...