SOURCE: "Tory Radicalism and 'The Two Nations' in Disraeli's Sybil," The Victorian Newsletter, No. 41, Spring, 1972, pp. 13-17.

In the following essay, Brantlinger explores the political theory expressed in Sybil, focusing on Disraeli's Tory-Radicalism and analyzing his purported acceptance of the "two-nations" theory of the Chartists.

Despite F. R. Leavis' praise of Disraeli's neglected maturity in a footnote to The Great Tradition, there has been no revival of interest in his novels. And rightly so, if only because Disraeli's three most important novels, Coningsby Sybil and Tancred espoused a cause that was more laughed at than respected even in the 1840s. "Young Hengland," as Thackeray's C. Jeames De La Pluche called it, was an attempt to bring people and aristocracy together under a single "Tory-Radical" banner; it was therefore open to censure by Tories, by Radicals, and of course also by Whigs. As Marx and Engles put it, the...