In 1825, at twenty, Benjamin Disraeli wrote pamphlets puffing Mexican silver mines he had never seen, talked John Murray into a newspaper that lost him twenty-six thousand pounds, and turned the wreck into Vivian Grey. Looking back, he says what that year taught him: a story is more powerful than an argument only while something stands under it.
by Benjamin Disraeli, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
There is a pamphlet in the libraries, printed by John Murray of Albemarle Street in 1825, called An Inquiry into the Plans, Progress, and Policy of the American Mining Companies. It went into a third edition within the year, "with considerable additions." Its first sentence reads: "Among the undertakings of the present age, paramount in importance for the magnitude of the interests, which are involved in their management, may be ranked the American Mining Companies."
I wrote that sentence. I was twenty years old. I had seen the Rhine, but I had never crossed the Atlantic or gone down a mine of any kind, let alone one in Mexico. I did not know what a Cornish engine looked like, though I recommended it warmly. Of the mines it described, the pamphlet assured the reader that "the principal one" of the improvements they would admit "will be the application of the steam engine." It is a sound opinion. I held it on the authority of men who had a financial interest in my holding it.
My biographers pass over this pamphlet quickly, as a family passes over the uncle who was in trade. I propose to linger on it, because everything I afterwards knew about the uses of a story I learned in the twelve months that began with it, and I learned it the only way a young man learns anything worth knowing: by being ruined.
In 1821 my father articled me to a firm of solicitors in the City, Swain, Stevens, Maples, Pearse and Hunt. It was a respectable house and a respectable future. I had some scruples about it, since even then I dreamed of Parliament, but a solicitor's office teaches one thing a novelist needs. It shows how money actually moves: it moves on paper, by signatures, between men who have never seen the goods.
By 1824 I had left the law and the whole City had gone mad for America. Spain's colonies had broken away, and each new republic had silver in its hills and no capital to get it out. London had capital and no silver. A company was floated for every mountain range. The shares were sold part-paid, a few pounds down and the rest to be called later, and the price of the few pounds went up and up as the next man bought. I did not think of this as gambling. It seemed to me that I was reading the age correctly. With a friend or two, and with money I did not have, I bought.
By the spring of 1825 we were in deep, and the prices had begun to waver. By June we had lost seven thousand pounds between us. I still think that a very large sum for young men to lose. A duke might lose that at cards in a season and his family would talk of it for a generation. We lost it in a few months on paper, and the paper had been borrowed too.
A sensible young man, when the prices first wavered, would have sold what he had and gone back to his desk. I went to see Mr John Diston Powles.
Powles was a merchant of the old kind, which is to say the genuine kind. His house dealt with South America, he was concerned in a loan to Gran Colombia, and he had organised a Colombian Mining Association. He was not a promoter selling shadows. He had ships, correspondents, contracts and ore. What he lacked, in the spring of 1825, was a pen. Parliament was growing uneasy about the companies, and Lord Eldon was talking of the old Bubble Act. The public needed telling, calmly and with an air of research, that the American mines were the great opportunity of the century.
I told them. Murray published three pamphlets: the Inquiry, then Lawyers and Legislators, which answered the Chancellor, and then a translation on the present state of Mexico. None of them carried my name. Read the Inquiry today and you will find that it is not a bad piece of work. It has the manner of a Quarterly article and the arithmetic of a prospectus. It knows the names of the mines and the costs of carrying water to them ("two streams, which pass near, could be brought to the mines at the estimated expense of £800"). It opens in the high style, with the Elizabethan buccaneers, "blazing cities and affrightened Viceroys," so that the investor in a part-paid share might feel himself the heir of Drake.
That opening is the whole trick, and I knew it even then. An investor who is told that a Mexican silver company is a sound speculation will ask for the accounts. Tell him instead that he is completing what the buccaneers began, and he stops asking. He has a part in a story, and people do not audit their own parts.
But I must be honest about what the trick rested on. Powles's mines were real. Real men were sailing from Cornwall with real engines. The pamphlet was a story laid over a thing, and when the thing failed the story failed with it. I had not yet learned that a story works only while something stands under it.
In the summer of 1825 I thought of something larger than a pamphlet. John Murray was the first publisher in England: Byron's publisher, the Quarterly's publisher. He had a drawing-room in Albemarle Street where the literary world came to be seen. He was also, I discovered, a man who could be excited. I proposed to him a morning newspaper, a Canningite paper that would stand for Mr Canning's liberal Toryism and for the American mines, and would beat The Times.
He agreed. On the third of August 1825 a memorandum was drawn: "Mr. Murray One-half. Mr. Powles One-quarter. Mr. Disraeli One-quarter." I had lost seven thousand pounds by midsummer, and in August I contracted for a quarter share of a London daily. At twenty that did not strike me as a contradiction. Capital, I thought, was only what a story made of itself once enough people believed it.
The paper needed an editor, and the man we wanted was John Gibson Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott's son-in-law. In September I went to Scotland to get him. In my first letters from Scotland I gave Murray a key of code names, so that nothing indiscreet would lie open on a table. Scott was "the Chevalier." Lockhart was "M., from Melrose." "X." stood for "a certain personage" who lived a little way out of town and was then unwell, "O." for "the political Puck," and "Mr. Chronometer," I told Murray, would speak for itself. I wrote to Murray from Edinburgh that it was "certainly the most beautiful town in the world." I was very happy. I was conducting a secret embassy on behalf of a newspaper which did not exist, financed partly by money I did not have.
At Chiefswood, his cottage on the Abbotsford estate, Lockhart had expected my father, whose Curiosities of Literature he knew. Instead he got the son, twenty years old, unknown, and dressed a good deal too carefully for the Borders. I reported to Murray that "in a few hours we completely understood each other, and were upon the most intimate terms." Perhaps we did. Scott, when he was consulted, was generous. He wrote that he knew nothing against me "but his youth—a fault which a few seasons of experience will infallibly correct." He was right, although the seasons were more expensive than he could have guessed.
Lockhart did not take the newspaper. Murray offered him the Quarterly Review instead, and he took that, which was the wiser choice. Meanwhile, in the City, the story under all our stories was coming apart. The mining shares fell through the autumn. In December the country banks began to fail and the panic reached the Bank of England itself. By then I had no quarter share to pay for anything with. Neither, it turned out, had Powles. Murray was left holding the whole of a newspaper that two of its three proprietors had promised and never funded.
The Representative came out on the twenty-fifth of January 1826, at sevenpence. It was badly edited. The town called it the demi-Rep, a joke about a woman of doubtful reputation, and the joke was better than the paper. It closed on the twenty-ninth of July. Murray lost, by his own reckoning, not less than twenty-six thousand pounds, and he never touched a newspaper again. He wrote of my part in it to my father, which was a cruel way to write of it and also a fair one: "my fault was in having loved, not wisely, but too well."
What does a young man do who has lost other men's money and his own, and his father's friend's goodwill, and his reputation in the only drawing-room that mattered to him? If he is a certain kind of young man, he writes it down and sells it.
Mrs Sara Austen, the wife of a family friend, encouraged me. She read the manuscript and copied it out in her own hand, so that my handwriting would not betray me at the publisher's. Henry Colburn, the most shameless puffer in London, brought it out in 1826 as Vivian Grey, anonymously, and gave the town to understand that it was the work of a man of fashion who knew everybody. The town read it to discover who everybody was.
The book is the story of a brilliant youth who sets out to build a political party around a great nobleman of no ability, the Marquess of Carabas. The name comes from Puss in Boots: Carabas is the master who owes everything to his cat's inventions, and in the novel Vivian is the cat. "My Lord, union is strength," he tells the Marquess, and a little later, "give me your Lordship's name, and your Lordship's influence, and I will take upon myself the whole organisation of the Carabas party." Anyone in Albemarle Street could see whose drawing-room this was, and whose son had talked like this in it. Lockhart is in the book as Cleveland. Powles and his wife appear as Mr and Mrs Millions.
It was an unkind book. When the author was found out, and found to be no man of fashion but a former solicitor's clerk of one-and-twenty, of a Jewish family, whose father wrote literary anecdotes, the reviews were savage. Blackwood's told its readers that the author was an obscure person and that nobody need care about him. That was accurate on the evidence of 1826, and it hurt precisely because it was accurate. That summer I went abroad with the Austens, which is what young men do when they have run out of everything else. Afterwards I was ill for a long time, and I did not come back quite the same.
Yet I will say this for Vivian Grey, and it is the reason for this essay. The novel was the first honest thing I had written about the American mines. The pamphlet had claimed there was silver under the story. The novel admitted there was only the story, and that the young man telling it did not know what he had set in motion until it fell on him. Early in the book there is a passage on the old quarrel between wealth and mind: "Riches are Power, says the Economist; and is not Intellect? asks the Philosopher." I believed the Philosopher when I wrote it. I had just spent a year proving the Economist right.
It would be comfortable to end this as a confession, with the sinner reformed and the rhetoric put away. That is not what happened. I never put the rhetoric away; it was the only capital I ever truly had. What changed was that I learned where rhetoric stands in the order of things.
In 1825 I had the story and nothing else. I had no money, no name, no seat, no office, no mines. A story told from that position is only a pamphlet, which is to say a request. It asks the audience to supply everything the teller lacks: the money, the confidence, the patience to wait for the silver. Audiences will do this for a surprisingly long time. But the moment they begin to doubt, they stop, all together and without warning, and there is nothing beneath the teller's feet.
A story told by a man who holds something is a different instrument. It does not ask for the substance. It dresses a substance that is already there, and it makes a crowd feel the substance as its own. That is why I have always said that the story is more powerful than the argument, and that is also the condition I have always left off. It is more powerful only while the ground holds. Gladstone never understood the first half of that sentence. The young man who wrote the Inquiry never understood the second half, and I paid for him. The last of those debts was not cleared until 1849, when I was already sitting on the front bench. For twenty-four years the Carabas party sent me its bills, and I did not forget it.
Many years later, as Prime Minister, I borrowed a great sum overnight to buy shares in a company abroad, without waiting for Parliament. People said it was the young speculator coming out again, and they meant it as an insult. They were half right. It was the same appetite for the grand stroke done in a single night. The difference was that this time the lender asked what my security was, and I could name one. I had spent half a century acquiring the right to make that gesture. The pamphlet of 1825 made the same gesture on credit.
The silver was there. Some of it came out, for the men who stayed long enough and paid for enough engines, and many of the London companies never returned a shilling to anyone. I was not among the men who stayed. The Inquiry is still in the libraries, third edition, with considerable additions, and nobody reads it. If I could take it down once more, I would read the first sentence aloud, to hear again how certain I sounded.
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Benjamin Disraeli, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Kalendās Octōbrēs (28 September 2026), ā Beniāminō Disraelī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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