A mining-share bubble left young Disraeli in debt for a quarter century
In 1825, barely twenty, Benjamin Disraeli gambled on shares in South American mining companies during a speculative boom. When the bubble burst he and his partners had lost £7,000, and he did not finish paying off those debts until 1849, by which time he was a leading figure in Parliament.
Desperate for money, and keen to settle scores with people he felt had slighted him, he turned to writing novels, a habit he kept for the rest of his life. His first appeared in 1826, and his last completed one, Endymion, came out shortly before he died. The mining venture had also dragged in the publisher John Murray, whom Disraeli had talked into launching a daily paper, The Representative, to rival The Times; it promoted the mines and failed.
Law had been the family's plan. Articled to a City firm of solicitors in 1821, he changed his name from D'Israeli to Disraeli the next year, possibly to avoid confusion with his father, the critic Isaac D'Israeli. On a trip down the Rhine in 1824 he resolved that he would not be a lawyer. An earlier family decision mattered more: after a quarrel with the Bevis Marks Synagogue in 1813, his father had the children baptised as Anglicans. Until 1858 MPs had to swear an oath on the true faith of a Christian, so conversion opened a political path.
It still took several failed attempts before he entered the House of Commons in 1837. He made his reputation attacking Robert Peel over repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, served three times as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Derby, and became prime minister briefly in 1868 and again from 1874, sparring for decades with the Liberal William Gladstone.
Close to Queen Victoria, he was made Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876 and arranged Britain's purchase of a major stake in the Suez Canal Company. Wars in Afghanistan and South Africa and a farming slump helped Gladstone defeat him in 1880. Born in Bloomsbury on 21 December 1804, he died on 19 April 1881, aged 76.
Source: Benjamin Disraeli
