In advance of a brief piece I’m writing for the Second Pass, I’ve spent much of the past week reading cover-to-cover a book I’ve been dipping into for a couple of years, Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1791). The print-on-demand paperback edition I have is unattractive and has little to recommend it, but it does at least include the introduction written in 1848 by the author’s son, novelist and prime minister of England Benjamin Disraeli. This affectionate, if a bit puzzled, account of his father’s life and work features a scene that will be familiar to almost any contemporary reader who remembers the moment when he confessed to his parents that he had chosen to major in English literature:

The crisis arrived, when, after months of unusual abstraction and irritability, my father produced a poem. For the first time, my grandfather was seriously alarmed. The loss of one of his argosies, uninsured, could not have filled him with more blank dismay. His idea of a poet was formed from one of the prints of Hogarth hanging in his room, where an unfortunate wight in a garret was inditing an ode to riches, while dunned for his milk score.

An understandable reaction for a serious businessman such as Isaac D’Israeli’s father. His remedy, however, is positively mind-boggling, at least from our vantage of two hundred years hence:

Decisive measures were required to eradicate this evil, and to prevent future disgrace–so, as seems the custom when a person is in a scrape, it was resolved that my father should be sent abroad, where a new scene and a new language might divert his mind from the ignominious pursuit which so fatally attracted him.

Seriously? Your son evinces poetic tendencies, so you send him abroad? To Europe? And his natural English stolidity is going to be drawn out by this, um, how?