Dis vs. D'Is

While cheerfully toddling my way through the newest Flashman, I noticed in passing that the old scalawag is still calling Disraeli "D'Israeli."  So what's that about, you ask? You'll need to go back several novels for the "editor's" explanation: "His extravagances of dress and speech, his success as a novelist, and his Jewish antecedents combined to render him unpopular--Flashman, like Greville, insists on spelling him D'Israeli, although Disraeli had dropped the apostrophe ten years earlier" [1].  I've now and again stumbled across other writers who link the spelling of Disraeli's name to the speller's opinion of same.  There's just one problem: I'm not sure that this is the most logical explanation for the Great Spelling Crisis.  A few scattered reasons why, some empirical, some speculative:

• If T. A. Jenkins' transcription of Sir John Trelawny's diaries is accurate, Trelawny (a Liberal) spelled Disraeli's name both ways [2].  It's difficult to see a pattern.
• In the 1840s, Hannah Rothschild used the "D'Israeli" spelling in one of her letters [3].  It's a bit of a stretch to accuse a Rothschild of anti-Jewish sentiments, for reasons that I trust will be immediately obvious.
• In 1854, the fervently anti-Catholic journal The Bulwark happily notes that "Mr. D'Israeli" seemed to be leaning in their direction on the Maynooth Grant.  Nearly four years later, the Bulwark, now irritated with D, manages to spell his name correctly [4]. 
• For that matter, in 1858, Disraeli himself reverted to the earlier spelling at least once [5].
• It took some time for people to figure out how to pronounce Disraeli's name; in the signature to his first letter to Queen Victoria, for example, Disraeli indicated that it was to be pronounced with a diphthong [6].  Under the circumstances, we might speculate that people were also having  a hard time spelling it. 
• The twentieth- and twenty-first century reader may forget that, well into the 1850s, Benjamin was not the most famous Disraeli in the family.  That would have been his father, Isaac D'Israeli (who, incidentally, now has his own blog).  Under the circumstances, one would expect that most early and mid-Victorians would make the logical, if incorrect, assumption that the younger D spelled his surname like the older D.  In fact, it may be possible to check this assumption by looking at the fate of Isaac's surname.  My copy of the US "Standard Edition" of Isaac D's works, published in 1881, turns "D'Israeli" into "Disraeli"; in other words, the fame factor is operating in reverse [7].  It would be interesting to see how often Isaac D's surname was normalized in accordance with Benjamin D's.

Obviously, this is not yet sufficient evidence to prove matters one way or the other.  Still, I suspect that while it may not be possible to argue that the "D'Israeli" spelling was never an insult, it may be possible to argue that there was no necessary connection between the two things. 

[1]  George MacDonald Fraser, Flash for Freedom! (1971; New York: Penguin, 1985), 284 n. 7. 
[2]  T. A. Jenkins, ed., The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858-1865 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1990). 
[3]  Quoted in Richard Davis, The English Rothschilds (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 87. 
[4]  "Popish Plots and Protestant Prospects," The Bulwark or Reformation Journal 4 (Nov. 1854): 114; "Popish Tactics in Parliament," The Bulwark or Reformation Journal 7 (May 1858): 290.
[5]  Letter to Sir Frederick Pollock, 24 June 1858, Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1857-1859, ed. M. G. Wiebe et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 213. 
[6]  Letter to Queen Victoria, 15 March 1852, Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1852-1856, ed. M. G. Wiebe et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 38. 
[7] Isaac Disraeli [sic], The Calamities and Quarrels of Authors..., ed. B. Disraeli, 2 vols. in 1 (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1881).  The series title is also "Disraeli's Works," not "D'Israeli's Works."

Comments

[Bob]

Interesting. It's possible, too, that correct spelling didn't matter as much in the 19C (and earlier) as it does to us. Also, what did D mean by saying his name was pronounced with a dipthong? Would that be the long "a" sound we use today?

[Bob]

Well, not exactly a long "a." But do we think of our pronunciation of Disraeli as using a dipthong (if we think about dipthongs at all)? What I was thinking of was that were the "ae" a dipthong, it might be pronounced more like a long "i".

[Miriam]

According to the Disraeli Project editors (and where, I don't know--I'm still looking for the citation), Disraeli was trying to dissuade people from pronouncing his name as "Dis-ra-e-li"--as in, e.g., the text accompanying the famous Maclise sketch in Fraser's.

[Andre Mayer]

The last point (Isaac D.) seems to me very powerful, but the Hannah Rothschild one is very weak. The "D'Israeli" usage was antisemitic only in that it underlined D.'s Jewish origins -- which Rothschild might also have wished to do.

[B. McCarthy]

D'Israeli was, it has been speculated, originally Israeli, a common Jewish name referring directly to Semitic origins. Benjamin's grandfather presumably changed his name to D'Israeli on arriving in London, which designates 'Of Israeli' but distinguishes the name from a common Semitic one. Regardless of the Romantic origins which Benjamin gives the name 'Disraeli' in his memoirs on his father, Isaac D'Israeli, D'Israeli was an invention of his grandfather and Disraeli was his and his sister's invention. Benjamin's father never changed his name to Disraeli (he died in 1848), but was called that by people discussing Benjamin's life. In this swarm of name changes, it is no wonder a thousand biographers and critics have become a little confused.