“’Let us be patient a little longer, lads, surely God Almighty will help us.’  ‘Talk no more about thy Goddle Mighty,’ was the sneering reply; ’there isn’t one.  If there was one, He wouldn’t let us suffer as we do.’”

The Chartists were opposed to the Anti-Corn Law party, for they thought that the cry of ‘cheap bread’ meant simply ‘low wages,’ and was a trap set to catch them unawares.

The Young England party believed in themselves as the leaders of a movement which should save England through its youth.  They were, however, known in Parliament in their early days as “young gentlemen who wore white waistcoats and wrote spoony poetry.”

‘Young England’ wished for a return of the feudal relations between the nobility and their vassals; the nobles and the Church, as in olden days, were to stretch out a helping hand to the poor, to feed the hungry, and succour the distressed.  National customs were to be revived, commerce and art were to be fostered by wealthy patrons.  The Crown was once more to be in touch with the people.  “If Royalty did but condescend to lower itself to a familiarity with the people, it is curious that they will raise, exalt, and adore it, sometimes even invest it with divine and mysterious attributes.  If, on the contrary, it shuts itself up in an august seclusion, it will be mocked and caricatured . . . if the great only knew what stress the poor lay by the few forms that remain, to join them they would make many sacrifices for their maintenance and preservation."[6]

[Footnote 6:  George Smythe, Viscount Strangford, Historic Fancies.]

It was to lay the views of his party and himself before the public that Disraeli published the three novels, Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred. Coningsby deals with the political parties of that time, and is full of thinly-disguised portraits of people then living; Sybil, from which a quotation is given elsewhere, is a study of life among the working-classes; Tancred discusses what part the Church should take in the government of the people.

Though the life of the ‘Young England’ party was short, it succeeded by means of agitation in and out of Parliament in calling public attention to the harshness of the New Poor Law and the need for social reform.

Carlyle was again the writer who influenced the young Disraeli, for the latter saw that to accomplish anything of real value he must form his own party and break loose from the worn-out beliefs and prejudices of both political parties.  Though in later days he will be remembered as a statesman rather than as a novelist, it is necessary to study those three books in order to understand what England and the English were in Victoria’s early years.

Each of these Reform parties had rendered signal service in their own fashion:  Church, Government, and People were no longer disunited, distinctions of class had been broken down, and with their disappearance Chartism came to an end.  The failure of the “physical force” Chartists in 1848 had served to enforce the lesson taught by Carlyle and Kingsley, that the way to gain reform was not through deeds of violence and bloodshed.  Each man must learn to fit himself for his part in the great movement toward Reform.  Intelligence, not force, must be their weapon.