Vivian Grey

Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield)

Century Company, 1906 - Fiction - 479 pages

Disraeli was barely twenty-one when he published "Vivian Grey," his first work of fiction; and the young author was at once hailed as a master of his art by an almost unanimous press. In this, as in his subsequent books, it was not so much Disraeli's notable skill as a novelist but rather his portrayal of the social and political life of the day that made him one of the most popular writers of his generation, and earned for him a lasting fame as a man of letters. In "Vivian Grey" is narrated the career of an ambitious young man of rank; and in this story the brilliant author has preserved to us the exact tone of the English drawing room, as he so well knew it, sketching with sure and rapid strokes a whole portrait gallery of notables, disguised in name may be, but living characters nevertheless, who charm us with their graceful manners and general air of being people of consequence. "Vivian Grey," then, though not a great novel is beyond question a marvelously true picture of the life and character of an interesting period of English history and made notable because of Disraeli's fine imagination and vivid descriptive powers.

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Review: Vivian Grey

User Review  - Cera - Goodreads

Disraeli's first novel, which is perhaps why the book is structured so very strangely; he seems to have thrown in every plot token he can think of: sudden death, political misfortune, making fun of ...

Contents

• Section 1: 5
• Section 2: 12
• Section 3: 18

About the author

A great master of the political novel, Disraeli may be said to have originated the genre. Disraeli's early books were all romans a clef, novels in which he introduced real personages who were easily recognizable beneath fictitious names. With Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847), Disraeli produced his best work. All of them are political novels and more or less comprise a trilogy, since the same characters appear and reappear. In these novels Disraeli dramatized ambition, romantic egoism, and the role of the outsider, particularly the Jew, and revealed a strong sense of the social and economic problems of mid-Victorian Britain. He then gave up writing temporarily, gradually rose to be chancellor of the exchequer, and finally, prime minister from 1867 to 1868 and again from 1874 to 1880. During his second term of office, when he was knighted, he took a name from his first novel and became the first Earl of Beaconsfield. In his later years, he resumed his writing and became an intimate friend of Queen Victoria, who referred to his death as "a national calamity.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Vivian Grey; First Novel Library,15; The English Comédie humaine, 2d series
• Author: Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield)
• Publisher: Century Company, 1906
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Aug 29, 2005
• Length: 479 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General