The Young Duke

Orphaned young and heir to an enormous fortune, George Augustus Frederick comes into the dukedom of St James with a guardian he has no intention of obeying: Mr Dacre, his father’s Catholic friend and neighbour. The duke sets about gambling, entertaining, and being admired, drifts into an entanglement with a married woman, and only starts to reckon with duty once the money runs out and he has to go back to Dacre for help. Disraeli wrote it across 1829 and 1830 to pay for his own Grand Tour, following the silver-fork formula while mocking the idle aristocracy he was cataloguing. The politics underneath give it weight: the Dacres are drawn with warmth just after the 1829 Catholic Relief Act, and critics read that sympathy as cover for Disraeli’s position as a Jewish outsider in English public life.