The bursting of the mining bubble was ruinous for Disraeli. By June 1825 he and his business partners had lost £7,000. Disraeli could not pay off the last of his debts from this debacle until 1849. He turned to writing, motivated partly by his desperate need for money, and partly by a wish for revenge on Murray and others by whom he felt slighted. There was a vogue for what was called "silver-fork fiction"—novels depicting aristocratic life, usually by anonymous authors, read avidly by the aspirational middle classes. Disraeli's first novel, "Vivian Grey", published anonymously in four volumes in 1826–27, was a thinly veiled re-telling of the affair of "The Representative". It sold well, but caused much offence in influential circles when the authorship was discovered. Disraeli, then just 23 years old, did not move in high society, as the numerous solecisms in his book made obvious. Reviewers were sharply critical on these grounds of both the author and the book. Furthermore, Murray and Lockhart, men of great influence in literary circles, believed that Disraeli had caricatured them and abused their confidence—an accusation denied by the author but repeated by many of his biographers. In later editions Disraeli made many changes, softening his satire, but the damage to his reputation proved long-lasting.