Considering Disraeli's later respectability, when he became the favourite of Queen Victoria and was eventually ennobled as Lord Beaconsfield, the raffishness of his early career is quite striking. He was a public womaniser, a spendthrift, a speculator, a salon dandy, in short, a type of Regency buck and poseur taken to almost garish extremes. He turned to novel writing mainly as a quick way of making money, though from his cultured Jewish father he inherited a literary and intellectual bent, Disraeli's political rise was slow and irregular and would probably never have progressed very far except for his marriage to a wealthy widow, Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis, who was 46 at the time and 12 years older than he. This is the first part of a two volume biography.