Chapter 2: Adventures at home and abroad, 1824-31

 

Item 19
Ancestral Voices
Letter from Disraeli to his mother, 1 Aug. 1830, reproduced from Benjamin Disraeli Letters, Volume I: 1815-1834
(Toronto, 1982), pp. 140-1
X. 12. 200 DISRAELI 2/1
Reproduced by permission of the University of Toronto Press

Disraeli's relations with his mother are often described as difficult but the surviving letters suggest that it improved with distance. Here in a letter written from Granada in August 1830, he writes at length about Spanish women: 'There is a clam voluptuousness about the life here that wonderfully accords with my disposition so that if I were resident and had my intellect at command, I do not know any place where I could make it more productive'. By contrast, he describes 'the sounds and sights, those constant cares and changing feelings...' of England. Some indication of his growing identification with Spain would weave itself into a fantastical recreation of his paternal family's origins. They were cast as aristocratic Jews driven out in the great exodus and finally coming to rest in Venice (here there is a modicum of truth but the location is more ghetto than palazzo).