ABSTRACT
DISRAELI STOOD right outside the classical tradition of élite education, but he was from the start marinated in Eng. Lit. His father Isaac had moved from orthodox Jewry to become a literary historian and even —some have claimed-a sociologist of an erudite and unsystematic sort, and young Benjamin was let loose in his 25,000 volume library.1 Isaac was a Tory, and contributed to the anti-Jacobin cause a novel, Vaurien, ‘a smart and libellous Invective on the Leaders of the Democratick and Philosophick Partys’ which has some of the marks of his son’s style —mysterious revolutionists, ramifying conspiracies, and so on-but as a friend of Godwin and Blake he was less a Burkian ‘organic conservate’, than a remnant of Enlightenment intellectualism.2
