Chapter 5: II. Young England

 

Item 53
George Smythe
Letter to Disraeli from George Smythe, 14 Nov. 1842
Dep. Hughenden 144/1, fols. 227r-8r

George Smythe, later 7th Viscount Strangford (1818-57), was the highly idealised model for the eponymous hero in Coningsby and Waldershare in Endymion. Here Smythe writes in November 1842 with youthful exuberance, and more than a hint of delight in the chase and in backbench intrigue, about the prospects for damaging Peel, urging Disraeli to write 'something presuming a split in the ranks of the Ministerialism [sic] ... don't let us lie behind our ancestors in courage or wit!' But when Disraeli destroyed Peel in 1846 Smythe, by then a junior minister in the Foreign Office, remained a Peelite supporter. Disraeli, alive to Smythe's limitations, had nevertheless encouraged him as a potential leader and as a writer but it was as a leader writer for the Morning Chronicle that he later excelled before dying young. (Of the five volumes of Smythe correspondence mentioned by Disraeli in 1873 (Blake, Disraeli, p. 170) only five letters now survive. Smythe fought Col. Romilly - fellow MP for Canterbury - in the last duel in England in 1852.)