Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), who served as British Prime Minsiter twice (1868 and 1874-80), is best remembered for his vehement clashes with the Liberal leader William Gladstone, the social legislation that he passed to improve the living conditions of the poor at home and the determination with which he pursued British imperial interestes abroad. His spirited foreign diplomacy was informed by his earflier travels to the Mediterranean and the Middle East in 1830-31, as a young man torn between political ambitions and literary aspirations. This internal struggle that led to a nervous breakdown, his upbringing as an Anglican by a Jewish-Italian family in London, his foreign adventures and his popularity in London’s high-society circles all furnished material for Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Autobiography. Romantic literature, notably Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), was equally influential in focusing the novel, in Disraeli’s words, on ‘the development and formation of the poetic character’. First published anonymously in 1832, Contarini Fleming was Disraeli’s third and most popular novel. The author’s identity was only revealed in the third edition of 1846.

This is the autograph manuscript of Contarini Fleming. Disraeli gave it to his sister and upon her death it passed to their brother who sold it at Christie’s in 1881 together with other Disraeli material. The hammer price for the manuscript was £210, a considerable sum at the time. The buyer was Sir Theodore Martin (1816-1909), a lawyer, poet, translator of Dante and Schiller, Prince Albert’s biographer and a close friend of Queen Victoria. Martin’s note, preserved inside the covers of Contarini Fleming, records that he purchased the manuscript for Her Majesty. Disraeli had been Queen Victoria’s favourite Prime Minister. Appreciative of his service as well as his sharp intellect, wit, charm and poetic flair, the Queen had made Disraeli 1st Earl of Beaconsfield in 1879. Their monograms – the crowned VRI and the B with an earl’s coronet - are tooled in gold on the vellum binding.