Young England
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The Victorian era political group Young England was born on the playing fields of Cambridge and Eton, and for the most part, its unofficial membership was confined to a splinter group of Tory aristocrats who had attended public school together, among them George Smythe, Lord John Manners, Henry Hope and Alexander Baillie-Cochrane. Its chief protagonist, however, was Benjamin Disraeli who, as the group's leader and figure-head, had the distinction of attending neither Eton nor Cambridge, and indeed was not a graduate or from an aristocratic background.
Young England promulgated a conservative and romantic species of Social Toryism, and its political message described an idealized feudalism: an absolute monarch and a strong Established Church, with the philanthropy of noblesse oblige as the basis for its paternalistic form of social organization.
Through countryside speech-making and pamphleteering, Young England attempted sporadically to proselytize the lower classes. However, the few tracts, the poetry, and the novels that embody the social vision of Young England were directed to a "New Generation" of educated, religious, and socially conscious conservatives, who, like the inner circle of Young Englanders, were appalled at the despiritualizing effects of industrialization and the perceived amorality of Benthamite philosophy, which they blamed equally for Victorian social injustices. Thus Young England was inspired by the same reaction to individualistic and rationalistic Radicalism that engendered the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical movement, and the Social Toryism of Robert Peel and Lord Ashley which Young Englandism most closely resembled.
The association of Young England with Tractarianism can be traced to the early influence upon Lord John Manners and George Smythe of Frederick Faber (1814-1863), a follower of John Henry Newman (Mitchell 818).
Like the founders of the Oxford Movement who ardently opposed the Victorian Radicalism centered in competitive economic self- determination and who, "in retracing their steps to the origins of the Church . . . rediscovered also the primitive Christian social and democratic spirit, the quasi-sacramental character of poverty, and the stigma of wealth" (Beer 178), so the founders of Young England rejected utilitarian ethics, blamed the privileged class for abdicating its moral leadership, and blamed the church for neglecting its benevolent duties to the poor, among them alms-giving. Expanding the Tractarians' reverence for the religious past to include a reactionary political agenda, Young England claimed to have found the model for a new Victorian social order in England's Christian feudal past.
Like Evangelicalism, Young England reflected the enthusiasm for confronting the middle-class crisis of Victorian conscience. In their advocacy of an exclusive, though tolerant, ecclesiastical authority, Young England's plan for a revitalized state church followed Coleridge's conception of an English clerisy.
In their political activities, Young England relied on the effectiveness of their alliance-building in Parliament, and as a small but vocal Tory faction headed by Disraeli, Young England made itself heard politically in the 1840's. If "Young England's reputation was and is out of proportion to its actual accomplishments" (Mitchell 884), nonetheless their concern for "the condition of England" contributed to the passage of some significant social legislation.
Richard Monckton Milnes is credited with coining the name Young England (Stewart 180), a name which suggested a relationship between Young England and the mid-century groups Young Ireland, Young Italy, and Young Germany.
However, these political organizations, while nationalistic like Young England, commanded considerable popular support and were socially progressive and politically egalitarian. Once considered a candidate for admission into Young England's inner circle, Milnes later joined in satirizing the Young Englandites with his parody of Lord Manners' "Lines to a Judge":
Oh! Flog me at the old cart's tail!
I surely should enjoy
That fine old English punishment
I witnessed when a boy!
I should not heed the mocking crowd,
I should not feel the pain,
If one old English custom
Could be brought back again.
Disraeli had outlined the principles of Young England in The Vindication of the English Constitution (1835) which characteristically opens with an attack on utilitarian beliefs, but Lord Manners and George Smythe more widely disseminated its neo-feudal ideals in verse and narrative forms. n its romantic fervor for re-instituting feudalism in England, Cazamian observes that Young Englandism, "opposes radicalism like poetry confronting prose" (181). Of course, the significance of the confrontation was always qualified by Young England's small, elite number, and the nostalgic poetry offered only wistful simplifications of the past.
Lord Manners' England's Trust, and Other Poems (1841) describes how the poet, "falls into a reverie before St Albans Abbey. Reflecting on episodes from the early days of Christianity in England, he regrets the passing of the ancient Church.. . . and sees rationalism as a spiritual sickness of modern times" (Cazamian 98).
The poet repines the loss of values and disruption of social order that he attributes to the absence of a strong monarch and Church, and he finds hope for England's future in its fictional medieval past when,
Each knew his place king, peasant, peer, or priest
The greatest owned connexion with the least;
From rank to rank the generous feeling ran,
And linked society as man to man.
Manners' goes on to condense the political vision of Young England into a heroic couplet that would encourage much ridicule:
Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die
But leave us still our old Nobility.
Like Lord Manners' England's Trust and Plea for National Holy-days (1843), George Smythe's Historical Fancies (1844) earnestly imagines a revival of feudalism, but the solutions both Manners and Smythe offer for industrial disorder are, in spite of the increasingly urban character of Victorian society, chiefly agrarian.
Typically, one of Smythe's "fancies" concerns the reinstitution of "the royal custom of touching sick people for the King's Evil as a symbolic manifestation of the closer relation between the Throne and People" (Slater qtd. in Dickens 248).
What such a custom would or would not do for the endemic dysentery and typhus of industrial centers like Manchester, Smythe does not touch upon, and the blindly anachronistic daydreaming of Young Englandism quickly came under fire in the Liberal press.
Young England's romantic and medieval idealism did not simply reflect an uncritical reading of Scott's novels, nor was the sincerity of their social commitment best gauged by the Young England poetical banalities of Lord Manners and George Smythe.
Disraeli's trilogy Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847) details the intellectual arguments of Young England while showing an informed sympathy for England's poor. Tancred, however, noted a move away from the ideals of Young England and was published at a time when Young England as a political group was largely defunct.
The three novels respectively elaborate the political, social, and religious message of Young England, which included reform of industrial working conditions and, along with a strong Established church, the religious toleration of Catholics and Jews.
In constructing his fiction, Disraeli, unlike Elizabeth Gaskell, depended on a reading of the Blue books and a brief walking tour of Yorkshire (with Manners and Smythe) to familiarize himself with the miserable conditions at Manchester.
But Disraeli accurately perceived the adversities of the industrial poor, and, like Mrs Gaskell, he believed that an authentic portrayal of the social realities he found at Manchester would produce incredulity among the class he called on for leadership in reform.
Despite Disraeli's condemnation of the dehumanization caused by the factory system, in turning to medieval England for a model, Disraeli and the Young Englanders showed a general misunderstanding of the class of workers their policies were to benefit, the urban industrial workers.
In Parliament, Young England maneuvered its limited political force wisely, and most of what Young England accomplished in the House of Commons was accomplished through temporary coalitions with both the Social Tories and the Radicals. Fighting against the New Poor Law with the Social Tories, they also at times sided with the Benthamites, as in 1844, when Young England, "helped the radicals defeat a bill which would have strengthened the powers of the magistrates dealing with labour disputes" (Cazamian 99).
In regard to Young England's political clout, Somervell says that Young England was responsible for the passage of the Ten Hour Bill in 1847 (178). The measure did pass with the support and approval of Disraeli's Young England faction but, typically, only "after the tenacious parliamentary work of Ashley and Fielden," two philanthropically-minded Social Tories (Cazamian 104).
Attesting to its fragile and narrow political base, Young England died with scarcely an obituary some few years after 1847 when Disraeli, its main spokesman and only intellect, effectively withdrew from the Parliamentary coalition. Disraeli's disagreements were chiefly with his longtime conservative rival Peel, although a tempering of his unqualified support for Young England's social-political ideals surfaces in the third novel of his trilogy, Tancred or The New Crusade.
At least two years earlier, Disraeli's political opportunism already had damaged Young England's credibility. In 1845, Disraeli opposed the Maynooth Grant Bill, a legislative act that permanently increased the funding of the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth in Ireland.
Further, Disraeli's opposition to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, "had tied him more closely to the landed aristocratic interests, and his open break with Peel had made him the effective leader of the opposition. Now that power was nearly in his grasp, he was more acutely aware of the chimeric nature of some of Young England's plans. (cf. Cazamian 201).
Unlike Social Toryism which it resembled philosophically, Young England did not survive to confront and oppose the socialist revival of the eighties. At its best, Young England influenced mid-Victorian reform legislation but never came close to gaining the popular support required to even partially realize its deeply conservative social vision. Yet, "imaginatively, Young England symbolized the desire for a unified and ordered society, an ideal community able to withstand the pressures that would separate the social and religious sensibility" (Mitchell 884).
The utopian, neo-feudal dreams of Manners, Smythe, and Disraeli reflect the same crisis of Victorian conscience that inspired the similarly utopian Owenite socialism of the political left. Like Owenism, Young England soon failed, but too ambitiously conservative in a new democratic era, it quietly failed without experiment.
[edit] References
Cazamian, Louis. The Social Novel in England 1830-1850. Trans. Martin Fido. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
Beer, M. A History of British Socialism. New York: The Humanities Press, 1940.
Dickens, Charles. The Christmas Books. Vol 1, Ed. Michael Slater. London: Penguin Books, 1971.
Disraeli, Benjamin. Coningsby or The New Generation. London: Peter Davies, 1927.
Somervell, D. C. English Thought in the Nineteenth Century. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1929.
Speare, Morris Edward. The Political Novel: Its Development in England and America. New York Oxford UP, 1924.
Stewart. R. W. Disraeli's Novels Reviewed, 1826-1968. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 1975.
