26, and it was the story of a clever but ambitious young man who tries to rise in society but finds only unhappiness as a result (Blake 342).
It was common in the England of the time for Victorian Englishmen to work simultaneously in several fields, and there were numerous opportunities for such diversification:
The nineteenth century in England was, for the most part, not a calm age; it was an age of anxiety, an age of flux. Traditional institutions--religious, social, and political--were challenged from every corner. Individual man's relationships to his church, class, and government were coming under a new scrutiny (Levine 16-17).
Disraeli's literary career was both prolific and diverse. He wrote novels, a biography, a play, poems, short stories, essays, and political commentary. Virginia Grey caused a sensation because it contained a number of flimsily disguised portraits of real members of fashionable society (Levine 23).
An important political group developed early in Disraeli's political career, and at first he watched them as an outsider, considering the strength of their movement and his own advantage in becoming part of it. This was made up of a small number of young men who were quite vocal. They had been returned to Parliament at a recent election in the Tory interest, but they seemed to hold strange views on English history. The group, known as the Young England Movement, consisted of George Smythe, Lord John Manners, and Alexander Baillie Cochrane, all of whom had been at Eton and Cambridge together. They had developed a common point of view:
They were romantic in spirit and opposed to the utilitarianism of the time with its worship of wealth, its imagination stultified by a love of machines. They believed in monarchy as a principle, not a mere instrument. and wished to restore the throne to its ancient authority. They considered that the
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