SOURCE: "The Earlier Writings" in Disraeli, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 57-80.

[In this excerpt, Vincent surveys Disraeli's early novels, concluding that they have little literary value.

Disraeli's novels have never lacked intelligent, if unlikely, admirers, The great Victorian critic Sir Leslie Stephen, inventor of muscular atheism, warmly approved. The equally austere Dr Leavis, in the least damnatory footnote in The Great Tradition, singled out Disraeli as a supreme intelligence. In youth, Disraeli was saluted by Heine; in age, Henry James wrote in his defence. The reviewer and Labour leader Michael Foot (who called his dog Dizzy) has argued brilliantly that Disraeli's novels were a magnificent denunciation of the cold, dull, purposeless, unimaginative Tory world. Only Trollope, a Liberal and a keen partisan of Thackeray (so maliciously attacked in Endymion), jealously denounced Disraeli's novels as flashy frippery.

Yet Disraeli wrote much trash, and much of his trash is bad...