The Life of Benjamin Disraeli - Earl of Beaconsfield

Volume II: 1860-1881

By William Flavelle Monypenny & George Earle Buckle (see below for more detail).

Revised Edition, Volume II (of two-volume set).

London: John Murray, 1929.

Hardback. No dust jacket. 1622 pages. Fair condition. Some discolouration and marks to spine and boards but binding tight. Some light foxing to front and back pages, otherwise fine clean text.

William Flavelle Monypenny (1866-1912) was an experienced newspaper journalist and editor, who had worked for The Times in London between 1893-1899 and then from 1903 onwards (spending the interlude as a journalist and then a soldier in the Boer War). It was his work with The Times which led the directors to offer to him the opportunity to write the definitive biography of the former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, using the papers Disraeli had bequeathed to his former secretary Lord Rowton. Though Monypenny's relative obscurity led some to question his selection, the first volume was critically praised upon its publication in October 1910. Monypenny only completed one more volume before dying of heart failure in 1912; the project was completed by his Times colleague and editor, George Earle Buckle, who wrote an additional four volumes.

In 1929 John Murray Ltd published a revised edition that collapsed the original six volumes into a new two-volume set of which the second volume is listed here.