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Elfinspell’s Introduction to the Online Text of
The Infernal Marriage
by Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield



After reading, and putting online, the excerpt subtitled A Sublime Elopement, of course I had to look for the rest. Here it is.

According to Philip Guedalla, in the preface to the edition, the complete story was printed over a few years, written by Disraeli when a young man, in a magazine called the Bulwer’s New Monthly. The last part was added a few years later in the year 1834.

Mr. Guedalla states, on pp. vi-vii of the prefatory Note, regarding the The Infernal Marriage:

“. . . . this time his mythology was strongly tinged with mortal affairs, although the topical element is largely to be found in the latter portions, which the author added in 1834 after a delirious London season with Count D’Orsay and Lady Blessington. The Chancellor bore a strong likeness to Lord Brougham; and who could fail to see Talleyrand and Madame de Dino in the sage Tiresias with his diplomacy and his slightly equivocal attendant? The deities had even been reading Ixion [A novel published by Disraeli a year earlier], and expressed divine opinions of the author and his talent for the extravagant. The Great War was now the Trojan War; the exiled Saturn had a look of Charles X. at Holyrood, with his anecdotes of the ancien régime, while triumphant Jupiter, his perfidious and usurping relative, disclosed King Louis Philippe with an Olympian juste milieu.’ The Titans by a shift of the kaleidoscope, were all Tories, ‘a subverted Faction destroyed by the admission of the Olympians to power by Reform. Enceladus, their leader, mirrored the Duke himself, hook nose and all; and old Oceanus, ‘seated by the margin of the pool, and weeping with the crocodiles,’ was surely the easily prostrated Goderich. Hyperion was a graceful compliment to Peel, and the mocking Rhœtus with his project for a pasquinade was young Disraeli, a Tory now, secure among the Titans. For his Elysium the author went to London once again — London in 1834, with echoes of D’Orsay and his Blessington. It was a gay farrago; and the dancing prose seems to move brightly among the gods and goddesses to an air of Offenbach.




Begin, and enjoy, this amusing story for yourself, here.






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