Some ten years before the revolt of our American colonies, there was situate in one of our midland counties, on the borders of an extensive forest, an ancient hall that belonged to the Herberts, but which, though ever well preserved, had not until that period been visited by any member of the family, since the exile of the Stuarts. The story of Venetia begins with an exquisite description of the Herberts’ family mansion at Cherbury, where the eponymous heroine is brought up by her mother in an idyllic surrounding, far away from the memories of her father. Disraeli may have been inspired to write about Byron’s and Shelley's lives after reading two contemporary books: Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830) and Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828). In his ninth novel, Disraeli used for the last time the silver-fork genre in order to present an odd reconstruction of the lives of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who appear in the novel as exiled poets, Lord Cadurcis and Marmion Herbert. Although Byron exerted influence on young Disraeli’s extravagant conduct and his early fiction, particularly on The Rise of Iskander, in Venetia the would-be MP began to distance himself from his great Romantic idol. In 1837, he perceived the incongruity of Byronic political radicalism and decided to become a progressive Tory in order to enter Parliament. During the Wycombe campaigns, the young Benjamin imitated Byron’s dandyish appearance and behaviour without any avail. In the early 1830s, Disraeli stood in several parliamentary elections as an independent Radical, but was each time defeated. Venetia is the last of Disraeli’s exalted early novels and marks symbolically his rejection of Byron’s Whiggish radicalism and his sexual ambivalence. At first glance, it seems that Venetia does not contain any political themes or hidden autobiographical details, except for reverence for Lord Byron, but when one takes a closer look at the plot and the authorial commentary, it appears that Disraeli still writes in a veiled way about himself and his changing political loyalties. Henrietta Temple, although his most successful novel since Vivian Grey, did not produce anything like the revenue he required to pay his debts’ (58). Schwartz has remarked, ‘Disraeli was in desperate financial straits when he wrote Venetia, in part because Venetia or the Poet's Daughter was published in May 1837, in the year of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne and Disraeli’s first election to Parliament.
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