Benjamin Disraeli served as the Prime Minister of England in 1868 and again from 1874 to 1880. He was also a novelist of some note in his time, though his works have been all but forgotten in this century. He was also known as the Earl of Beaconsfield and the Viscount of Hughenden. He was a member of the Conservative Party and provided the party with a policy of Tory democracy and imperialism. He was of Italian-Jewish descent. When Disraeli was a boy, his father quarreled with the synagogue of Bevis Marks, and this led to the decision in 1817 for the children to be baptized as Christians. Until 1848, Jews were excluded from Parliament, for members had to take an oath of office "on the faith of a true Christian" (Blake 341), and had his father not made the decision to baptize his children, Disraeli's political career could never have started as it did.
Disraeli's family was financially comfortable, and after an inheritance the family moved into a large house in the Bloomsbury section of London, where many lawyers and financiers lived. The British Museum was nearby, and young Disraeli visited it often. He preferred to spend his time among the books in his father's library, though, and later would remember that he liked to "play" at being a member of Parliament. The boy attended small private schools, including a Unitarian school. There are conflicting stories about what sort of student he was. His father pressured him to become a lawyer, so Disraeli accepted his first job as a clerk in a law firm when he was 17 years old, and he deliberately attracted a good deal of notice in that job by wearing outlandish clothing. Disraeli became known as a fop and regularly appeared at fashionable parties, where he was a popular figure. He tried to establish a new daily newspaper named the Representative, and this brought him financial losses. He gained a minor literary reputation with the publication of his novel Vivian Grey in 18...