The life of Benjamin Disraeli, later Lord Beaconsfield, is a useful reminder to students of Victorian England that most generalizations about the period are worth questioning. It seemed impossible that a middle-class Jew given to endless debts, messy affairs, and outlandish costumes, possessing a messianic ambition and a Byronic sensibility should have become the grave frock-coated statesman of the Conservative party and the adored minister of Queen Victoria. Yet, there he was, leader of the opposition, chancellor of the Exchequer, and finally "at the top of the greasy pole" as prime minister. Lacking all of the usual requirements for power and influence, he achieved both through his stunning verbal gifts. Novelist, satirist, journalist, pamphleteer, political thinker, biographer, letter writer, and orator par excellence, he was, as even those who despised him had to admit, a rhetorical genius.

That Disraeli should have been highly literate is not surprising. Born...