Young England Research Articles

Young England

Part One of this essay argued that the new field of juvenilia studies provides the explanatory framework that allows us to read what Young England does signify, and to indicate how the term “Young” signified in its time. More specifically, the recovery by juvenilia studies of the cultural presence of young people in Britain in the generation before Young England—its recovery of an active juvenile tradition of writers, simultaneous with and related to Romanticism—puts into context the self-fashioning and reception of this next post-Romantic generation: ambitious Young Englanders George Smythe (1818–57), John Manners (1818–1906), and Andrew Baillie-Cochrane (1816–90) in particular. Friends from boyhood, schoolmates at Eton and Cambridge, born into families of rank or on their way to titles, they looked to other bold young nobles who had made a splash before them—George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) and Percy Shelley (1792–1822). Those Romantics’ prior precocious fame provided the justification for believing that Young Englanders could make a splash too, and gave them the script for how to do so. Part Two focuses on Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), their political mentor, who used this script explicitly in his Coningsby novels about Young England, fusing the movement’s personalities with the characters of their meteoric Romantic predecessors.

The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre

The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre

Young England: Part One

“Young England: Part One” pursues central questions for juvenilia studies: how did the turn-of-the-century juvenile tradition influence succeeding generations of Victorian writers, and what new questions does scholarly understanding of juvenile writing in Britain allow literary critics to ask now? The Romantic-era juvenile tradition gets reconstituted through its influence on the 1840s Tory splinter movement, Young England. I argue that this contradictory, conservative group of titled young writers paradoxically reveals how the marginalized juvenile tradition calls its writers into being—and asks us to revise our ideas of literary traditions and of history in general. The young Romantics Byron and Shelley symbolized youthful writing to Young Englanders, but so did another lesser-known juvenile writer, Percy Smythe, Sixth Lord Strangford. That Strangford was father to a prominent Young Englander: George Smythe, later Seventh Lord Strangford. In recovering both Strangfords’ literary juvenilia, Part One considers the rethinking of genealogy and succession within writing by young authors—arguing it underlies Young England as youth movement, especially its sense of history as ultimately inaccessible but vital nonetheless in its construction. Part Two (JJS 3.2, June 2020) will look more closely at how Young England’s shaping fantasy of history depends on youth. It focuses on the self-fashioning within its contradictions of one-time juvenile writer and Young England’s mentor, Benjamin Disraeli (later Prime Minister and Earl of Beaconsfield)—contradictions employing signifiers of youth that were generative of his virtuoso performance as writer, celebrity, and statesman.

Refiguring the Donna Angelica in Benjamin Disraeli's SYBIL

In Sybil (1845), Benjamin Disraeli unfolds on behalf of the Young England movement a vision suggesting what England was, is, and could be.1 His novel implicitly but unmistakably proffers an account...

Past and Present: Young England and Industrial Medievalism

Past and Present:Young England and Industrial Medievalism Robert O’Kell (bio) Benjamin disraeli’s Vindication of the English Constitution in a Letter to a Noble Lord (1835) was a defence of what was called “the mixed Constitution” (Vindication passim), comprising the three limited estates of the realm: the Commons, the Lords Temporal, and the Lords Spiritual, each with its own duties and powers. Much of the Vindication was based on ideas that Disraeli had found in three works of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke: A Dissertation upon Parties (1733–34), A Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism (1736), and The Idea of a Patriot King (1738). From reading these works, in particular On the Spirit of Patriotism, which was addressed to the youthful Lord Cornbury, Disraeli came to believe that a revived idealism amongst the country’s young aristocrats was the best hope for the moral reformation of both the people and the government that was so desperately needed. Once it became clear that Disraeli would not be appointed to the Cabinet of Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative Government in 1841, he was in a mood of some desperation, feeling, as he wrote on 25 February 1842 to his wife, Mary Anne, “humiliated,” “solitary,” and “utterly isolated” (Benjamin Disraeli Letters 4 [no. 1217]: 17–18). But, on the strength of an impressive speech, attacking Lord Palmerston’s handling of the Foreign Office, Disraeli soon found himself “with[ou]t effort the leader of a party—chiefly of the youth, & new members,” as he explained to Mary Anne on 11 March 1842 (Letters 4 [no. 1229]: 31). That group was the embryo of Young England, a partie carrée composed also of George Smythe, Lord John Manners, and Alexander Baillie-Cochrane, who looked upon Disraeli as their spiritual and intellectual leader. They all shared a nostalgic perspective on the Tory Party, the Church, the monarchy, and the general progress of recent political events that was the antithesis of the liberal utilitarian spirit of the time. The bond that brought Young England’s foursome together was their patriotism that derived from their revulsion at the battle of warring factions that early nineteenth-century society seemed to have become and from their desire to restore what they conceived to be an ancient social harmony. Disraeli’s earlier identification with Bolingbroke and the Opposition Circle politics of the early eighteenth century now became transformed into a conscious adoption on Young England’s part of the role that Bolingbroke had urged Lord Cornbury and his circle of young aristocrats to play in the reform of the Tory Party and the country. Inherent in this posture was the idea that the Conservative Party in the hands of Sir Robert Peel and his moderate policy was unequal to the task of addressing the nation’s most pressing problems. It was in Paris, while Disraeli was there during the House of Commons fall recess of 1842, that the parliamentary identity of the Young England [End Page 9] movement took shape. Both Smythe and Baillie-Cochrane were also there, and the letters they wrote to Manners in London provide a “fascinating commentary” upon the role that Disraeli was beginning to envision for them all (Blake 174). Disraeli’s letters to his sister, Sarah, are full of reports of social encounters with dukes, duchesses, princes, counts, ambassadors, and influential politicians. In this heady atmosphere, and with a sense of recent parliamentary triumph, Disraeli began to imagine the possibilities of obtaining real political power. Something of the precise nature of the fantasy can be gauged from Smythe’s letter to Manners, dated 19 October 1842: “Most private. Dizzy has much more parliamentary power than I had any notion of. The two Hodgsons are his, and Quinton Dick. He has a great hold on Walter and ‘The Times.’ Henry Hope (who will come in soon) is entirely in his hands. He was in Paris, and I had an opportunity of judging” (Whibley 1: 143). Although the members of Young England did for the next few years continue to act as a ginger group in the House of Commons, with frequent criticisms of Peel’s Ministry, Disraeli’s grand plans did...

Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, by Robert O’Kell

Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, by Robert O'Kell, University of Toronto Press, 2013, xii, 595 pp. $95.00 US (cloth). Benjamin Disraeli was a phenomenally successful individual in nineteenth-century Britain. Without nobility (something he eventually gained in 1876 as Earl of Beaconsfield), and hampered by his Jewish origins colliding with the prejudices of the time, he nevertheless rose to be Prime Minster twice and, moreover, a successful novelist. He succeeded through a combination of extraordinary resilience, opportunism, risk-taking (debt almost derailed him on more than one occasion) and luck; his detractors continued to call him an adventurer throughout his career. Robert O'Kell's Disraeli: The Romance of Politics examines the relationship between Disraeli's life and writing and is the most thorough study to date of the relationship between Disraeli's political and literary careers. O'Kell's summaries of Disraeli's novels and other literary outputs are extensive, which is especially useful for the discussions of Disraeli's less well-known works. The novel as a form was helpful to Disraeli because the bedrock of its readership was the recently-enfranchised middle classes and thus Disraeli was able to get his political vision across to the public, something he achieved, O'Kell argues, with the first novel in his Young England trilogy, Coningsby (1844), which promotes an alternative Conservatism to that practiced by Robert Peel's Conservative government of 1841-46. Disraeli's vision of Conservatism comprised a kind of benign feudalism, at odds with Peel's pursuit of stability and a fiscal strategy in the face of rapid industrialization. Following the election of Peel's Conservative government and Disraeli's failure to gain ministerial office, Disraeli used the novel to present his own political philosophy, via the Young England trilogy (1844-1847). However, O'Kell argues that Disraeli was also constructing a self through his novels, as well as presenting a political alternative to Peel's creed. O'Kell further argues that Disraelian heroes in the novels undergo transformations of social identity, much as Disraeli did himself, thus underlining the relationship between the life and the literature. A number of Disraeli's early novels, for example The Young Duke (1831), feature Catholics in heroic roles. O'Kell argues that Catholicism was a cipher for Jewishness, that Disraeli used the Catholic faith, itself the subject of prejudice (Catholic Emancipation only having taken place in 1826) to explore his thoughts and feelings about Jewishness and his Jewish heritage. Subsequently, in Disraeli's political biography of 1852 Lord George Bentinck (itself a cipher for a self-justification of his own career to that point) and in Tancred, Disraeli's novel of 1847, Disraeli was confident enough, perhaps established enough, to present and advocate Judaism on its own terms, turning a negative (anti-Jewish prejudice) into a positive, primarily for the furtherance of his own political career. The fact that Tancred was written in four months demonstrates, O'Kell argues, that the work was important to Disraeli, or that, more prosaically, he needed the money, a concern which had certainly applied to some of Disraeli's earlier novels, for example Venetia (1837). …

Environmental Law-Making Public Opinion in Victorian Britain: The Cross-Currents of Bentham's and Coleridge's Ideas

It is increasingly clear that law and its enforcement in Victorian Britain was quite effective in tackling formative industrial environmental problems. What is unclear is the political philosophy, if any, underlying this achievement. Dicey’s analysis of nineteenth century law-making public opinion with reference to the ‘age’ of Coleridge being superseded by that of Bentham focused attention on factory safety regulation. It thus ignored exceptionally important common law and statutory provisions applicable to industrial pollution and nature conservation, through which the first industrial nation (Britain) established itself as the pioneer of modern environmental law. Those who have explored this lacuna have argued that environmental laws expose a fundamental weakness in Dicey’s historiography. Environmental statutes, it is claimed, show little evidence of being shaped by intellectual ideas of any kind. By contrast, in this article it is argued that Victorian-era environmental laws support Dicey’s thesis of ideas-driven legal intervention. However, some adjustment is needed in relation to the ideas that are to be understood as being dominant. Contrary to Dicey, the age of Coleridge was not eclipsed by that of Bentham; the two co-existed. The principal conduit through which Coleridge’s organic, natural law theory enjoyed its extended afterlife was Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ movement.

The Reformation and the Principles of the English Constitution in Disraeli‘s ‘Young England’ Novels

The article explores some aspects of the intellectual climate of the first half of the nineteenth century and the new ideas about race and national identity. These in turn help to explain contemporary changes in historical perspective, particularly in respect to the English Reformation. Disraeli‘s novels reflect the ideas of the time on the above topics and echo contemporary historians in their views on the Reformation, its causes, and the religious and social changes that it brought about.

Disraeli: the romance of politics

Acknowledgments Preface Introduction 1. Representative Affair 2. Byronic Legacy 3. Virtues and Vanities 4. Henrietta: A Love Story 5. What Is He? Crisis Examined 6. Prejudice 7. Vindication 8. The Arts of a Designing Person: Disraeli, Peel, and Young England / Coningsby or New Generation 9. Sir Robert Peel and Apotheosis of Young England 10. Sybil Two Nations, or One?: Disraeli's Allegorical Romance 11. Corn Law Debate of 1846 and Politics of Protection 12. Tancred: Principles, Expediency and Trust 13. Leadership 14. On Top of Greasy Pole: Disestablishment Crisis of 1868 15. Lothair: Politics of Love, Faith and Duty 16. The Family Romance: Politics, Power and Love in Disraeli's Endymion 17. Faery Queen, Arch Villain, and the Mephistopheles of Statesmanship 18. Conquering Hero / Falconet Bibliography Index

English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (review)

Reviewed by: English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Patrick Brantlinger English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Heidi Kaufman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 243 pp. $85.00. Heidi Kaufman has written a useful and consistently interesting book. She examines many of the complex ways that "Jewish discourse" is imbricated in nineteenth-century British fiction and culture. In doing so, she critiques Edward Said's Orientalism for its overly binaristic approach to Western depictions of the East. Christianity, after all, emerged from "the Holy Land" and ancient Jewish sources. Kaufman recognizes that Victorian novels are palimpsests, and that one of their underlying texts—more often than not the [End Page 192] principal one—is the Bible (p. 94). Jews also occupied an influential albeit liminal place in 1800s Britain. Among the novels that Kaufman analyzes is Tancred; or, the New Crusade (1847) by future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, hardly a minor figure in nineteenth-century British and, indeed, global history (pp. 82-92). Kaufman begins by analyzing Britain as a "nested nation" (pp. 1-26), meaning that it was never purely "English" but contained a mix of peoples, cultures, and religions, including, from the Middle Ages on, Jews and Judaism. Just as the Bible contains both Old and New Testaments, moreover, so Anglicanism contains and supposedly goes beyond Roman Catholicism, while all versions of Christianity are obviously indebted to Judaism. As Kaufman demonstrates, this indebtedness is acknowledged in a variety of ways in many Victorian novels, even when they express antisemitism. In her second chapter, she examines the depictions of the Gordon Riots of 1780 in Maria Edgeworth's Harrington and Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge. Both authors simultaneously express and struggle to overcome antisemitism. Harrington was Edgeworth's self-conscious albeit ambivalent attempt to deal with the antisemitism she had been criticized for in some of her earlier work. And in treating the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, Dickens invokes the story of Abraham and Isaac and shows both Gordon and Gashford fantasizing about becoming Jews. Gordon actually did convert to Judaism. "In the upside down world of the riots," Kaufman notes, "Gordon, the president of the Protestant Association, becomes a Jew while Jewish homes are marked as belonging to a 'True Protestant'" (p. 55) to escape the violence of the rioters. Chapter Three shows how Judah's Lion, an 1843 novel by evangelical Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, deals with a return to the Holy Land in a way comparable to the "new crusade" of Disraeli's aristocratic Young England hero, Tancred. Tonna's Anglo-Jewish protagonist Alick Cohen "watches British flags hoisted over Middle Eastern territories" (p. 60) and is proud to be both Jewish and British. Judah's lion, which Richard I supposedly added "to the English national flag on the occasion of its conquest over Jerusalem during the Third Crusade" (p. 60), symbolizes the historic and religious unity of England and Palestine, with British imperial expansion into the Middle East as the parallel to Alick's conversion to Christianity. Like other Victorian authors, however, Tonna runs into the difficulty that Jewishness had come to be understood as racial, and not just as cultural and religious: Alick converts, but biologically he will forever be Jewish—a stumbling block for those who considered the white, Anglo-Saxon race superior to all other races. In Tancred, Kaufman goes on to claim, "Christian culture is not defined against a Jewish other but as a product of Jewish origins" (p. 83). Disraeli was [End Page 193] less interested than Tonna in religion, however, and more interested in race, and particularly in reversing the standard racial polarities. Kaufman believes that Tancred meets his match in the Jewish Eva, and that her Judaism trumps or at least complements his Christianity, which is partially true. But she overlooks Tancred's friendship with the Young Syrian Fakredeen and also Tancred's encounter with "the Angel of Arabia" on Mt. Sinai, who tells him that "Arabian" or Semitic peoples have produced all of the world's great empires and religions. Fakredeen and the Angel add Islam to Tancred's melting pot, and Disraeli's term "Arabian" is more...

Medicine, the "Manufacturing System," and Southey's Romantic Conservatism

Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, Southey has traditionally been vulnerable to charge of political apostasy, and yet recent studies of his political writings emphasize consistency of his social thought. David M. Craig's 2007 monograph, Southey and Romantic Apostacy, claims strong continuities between Southey's 'radical' sympathies of 1790s and his of 1820s (215), which he suggests are mediated by a providentialist religious position akin to Unitarianism (125, 212). David Eastwood's useful survey in his 1989 article, Robert Southey and Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism, emphasizes kinship of Southey's repeated expressions of foreboding at high social costs of industrialism with mid 19th century Tory radicalism of Thomas Carlyle and Young England movement (315, 331), and identifies his with well-being of poor as a legacy of Southey's early Jacobinism (325). Whilst not taking issue with these accounts, in this essay I would like to draw attention to a strand in Southeyan social thought which seems to have been overlooked by modern commentators: Southey's deployment of a specifically medical vocabulary of stimulants, excitement and irritability in his analysis of social problems. Eastwood notes that Southey shared Coleridge's organic view of society (328), but full implications of this commonplace of 19th century intellectual history have not been adequately explored. Neil Vickers' 2004 monograph, Coleridge and the. Doctors, documents Coleridge's personal and intellectual preoccupation with medical thought without, however, undertaking critical reassessment of Coleridgean organicism which attention to its early 19th century medical context arguably makes necessary, an issue broached in my 2007 essay, Indigestion and Imagination in Coleridge's Critical Thought. The present essay extends this approach to Southey's social and political writing, suggesting that kind of Brunonian medicine represented by Thomas Beddoes underlies one of key features of Romantic organicism--its assertion of a relationship of continuity between body and mind in which one cannot simply be mapped onto other, as materialist determinism would demand. Mike Jay's recent biography has described Beddocs's friendship with and treatment of both Southey and Coleridge in their Bristol days. The significance of medical context for an under-Standing of Southey's Romantic conservatism can be illustrated by lengthy footnote included in version of Southey's well-known essay on manufacturing system which appears in 1832 collection, Essays, Moral and Political. Significantly expanded from three line footnote which appears in equivalent place in version published in 1812 in Quarterly Review (355 fn), this four-page note summarizes arguments from Dr Jarrold's Dissertations on Man to support claim that working classes reproduce more quickly than classes above them, key reason for which Southey identifies as greater mental demands life makes on upper classes, since the more mind is exerted, more body suffers (152 fn). In context of anit-Malthusian argument presented in essay, this invocation of a dualistic relationship in which development of mind uses up constitutional resources required to nourish animal passion (152 fn) constitutes a providentialist modification of Malthus's famous claim that vice and misery are only effective controls on population growth; coupled with Southey's advocacy of a national education system at end of essay, it suggests that, better education would naturally lead to a decline in population growth because it would constitute a diversion of bodily vitality which sexual activity requires. Southey's criticism of Malthus, then, invokes a medical model in which body's vital energy is subject to a limited economy in which high expenditure on one bodily function leads to inactivity, or even atrophy, in other functions. …

Robert Southey, Benjamin Disraeli and Young England

AbstractAlthough the ideology of the Young England movement has been traced to a variety of sources, the influence of Robert Southey on it has largely gone unnoticed. Yet he shared with the Young England group a penchant for the middle ages. Like them, he was not nostalgic for the medieval era just for its own sake but wished to revive its alleged sense of community to offset the perceived social alienation of the new industrial age. While a leader of the movement such as Lord John Manners openly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Southey, Benjamin Disraeli rarely did so. Yet, as this article shows, there was a link in that Disraeli and Southey were acquainted through Benjamin's father Isaac, and Southey's ‘radical Tory’ views can be detected in Disraeli's ‘Young England’ novels.

“DREAMING OVER AN UNATTAINABLE END”: DISRAELI'S TANCRED AND THE FAILURE OF REFORM

The “condition of England” in the middle of the nineteenth century was, for most Victorians (and is, indeed, for most modern scholars of the Victorian period), about as far removed from desert pirates and neo-Grecian queens as London from Jerusalem. But such was not the case in 1847 for the ambitious novelist-turned-politician Benjamin Disraeli, himself a mixture of political and social incongruities, who chose to conclude his political trilogy with a novel that bore greater resemblance to an Arabian Nights fantasy than to any mid-Victorian reform fiction. Contemporary readers of Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847) were understandably perplexed: “There is no principle of cohesion about the book, if we except the covers,” complained one reviewer (qtd. in Stewart 229). And, while critics have expanded upon this dismissive condemnation throughout the twentieth century, not much has changed regarding the general critical appraisal or thoughtful analysis of what Disraeli regarded as the favorite of his compositions (Blake 215). The least popular of the Young England novels both in its own day and in ours, Tancred has most frequently been viewed as an anomaly – an abandonment of the political manifesto Disraeli began in Coningsby and continued in Sybil.

"Mosaic Arabs": Jews and Gentlemen in Disraeli's Young England Trilogy

Though converted to Christianity at an early age, Benjamin Disraeli, the popular novelist and prime minister under Queen Victoria, was outspokenly philosemitic. Fueled by contemporary ethnology and race theories, Disraeli argued that the Jews were a superior, "aristocratic" race destined to become the spiritual and intellectual guide for modern Europe. Enabling such claims was Disraeli's skillful manipulation of Orientalist discourse, whereby he routinely reversed its stereotypical privileging of West over East. Following the example of Thackeray's "Codlingsby," however, this essay argues that Disraeli's "strategy of reversals" ultimately failed because it did not adequately comprehend traditional Western associations and meanings of "aristocracy," a fundamental misunderstanding that, for Disraeli's political enemies and critics, exposed him yet again as foreigner, Oriental, and Jew.

Paternalism, Public Memory and National Identity in Early Victorian Scotland: The Robert Burns Festival at Ayr in 1844

This article analyses an episode in which several major themes of Scottish (and British) cultural and political history intersected: the cult of heroes, romantic paternalism and the evolution of Scottish national identity. Departing from interpretations that have overemphasized the hegemony of an anti-aristocratic bourgeoisie, the article interprets the Burns cult as a contested site of memory. By explicating the dramaturgy of the Robert Burns Festival in 1844 it shows how this event interlocked with the Eglinton tournament, Young England, Queen Victoria's first visit to Scotland, and the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, to express a version of national identity that was intended to provide the cultural framework for an assertion of aristocratic paternalism in Scotland.

LITERACY DEVELOPMENT IN A MULTILINGUAL CONTEXT: CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES.Aydin Durgunoglu and Ludo Verhoeven (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998. Pp. xviii + 308. $29.95 paper.

Simultaneously theoretical and data-rich, this volume explores ways in which ethnic minorities grapple with conflicts related to the literacy practices of their home culture as well as those practices demanded by the dominant culture. Truly multicultural in nature, the book offers in-depth glimpses into a variety of teaching and learning contexts: how young Gujarati teenagers in England learn Gujarati (chapter 3), how Hmong parents wish their children to retain fluency in Khmer while also insisting that they attend “English only” schools (chapter 4), how Finns in Sweden and Karelias in Russia grapple with the literacy demands of the majority culture (chapter 1), how “usefulness” becomes the most crucial variable in determining the language of schooling in bi- and multilingual contexts (chapter 2), and how Vietnamese people wrestle with learning their mother tongue in Norway (chapter 8).

Designing Progress: The Architecture of Social Consciousness in Disraeli's "Young England" Novels

ARTICLES DESIGNING PROGRESS: THE ARCHITECTURE OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN DISRAELI'S "YOUNG ENGLAND" NOVELS KRISTINA K. DEFFENBACHER Hamline University "... in all forms of things there is a mind." — Wordsworth Alfoxden Note-Book "'Oh!' cried Mrs. Skewton, with a faded little scream of rapture, 'the Castle is charming! — associations of the Middle Ages — and all that . . ."' — Dickens, Dombey and Son Critics have well illuminated the political significance of symbolic representation in Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845). Catherine Gallagher argues that "synecdochal symbolism," the optimal example of which is the king's representation of both the nation and God's sovereignty, is a literary method as well as a political principle in Sybil, and that "[t]he simple device of making Walter and Sybil Gerard, the Chartist leader and his daughter, the descendants of Saxon aristocrats is the most obvious encoding of this ideology in the novel" (202). In Sybil Disraeli is, as Richard Stein asserts, "constructing a historical mythology" according to which symbolic characters such as Walter and Sybil Gerard can have meaning (282). But as such readings of the novel have brought the conceptual content of its symbols to the fore, they have tended to reduce the story's physical environment to mere background by not considering its specific role in the political process of mythmaking . Gallagher reads the passage in which Sybil's father explains that '"holy walls . . . have made her what she is'" as evidence that Sybil serves "as a symbol of the sacred" (Gallagher 214-5); taking such conclusions as my point of departure, I wish to return to the actions Victorian Review 24.1 (Summer 1998) Victorian Review performed by the walls themselves. In Disraeli's "Young England" novels, as in the architectural theories that informed them, certain walls engender specific ideals in their observers and inhabitants, and thereby help to shape social consciousness. My reading of these novels takes its impetus from Henri Lefebvre's declaration that social space is a social product (26), and that analysts of western cultural productions must examine the spatial practices inherent to the codes of capitalism (18). I do not, however, assume that these spatial/political practices were necessarily "hidden from critical view under thick veils of illusion" (Soja 50) until the forging of such interpretive frameworks in the 1970s. To do so would obscure the historically-specific nuances of the mid-nineteenth-century debate on the social significance of spatial design. In the 1830s and 1840s, the question of architecture's effects upon those who experience it was openly argued and directly linked to central political concerns in numerous public forums, but nowhere more significantly than in the intersection of architectural theory and novelistic discourse. Disraeli's engagement in this cultural debate pervades his "Young England" novels, in which the ideological is often bound up in certain styles of the material. Many critics trace the desire to revive aristocratic paternalism that recurs throughout his novels of the mid- 1840s to the influence of Thomas Carlyle, especially through Past and Present (1843). But this lineage does not fully account for the specific role that Disraeli came to believe architecture would play in the creation of a modern, feudal society. Disraeli's insistence upon the political significance of style and form can certainly be linked to Teufelsdröckh's theorem that '"Society is founded upon cloth'" (Carlyle, Sartor Resartus 41), but his concern with "Christian architecture" in Coningsby (1844) and its social effects in Sybil has another source, in the architectural theories of Augustus Pugin.1 For Pugin, as later for Disraeli, the architectural and the social were inextricably intertwined. In his writings of the 183Os and 1840s, Pugin bound "pointed" or Gothic architecture not only to the Christian (Catholic) faith, but also to the medieval social system that he believed it to embody (Contrasts 1-3). As James Stevens Curl notes, to Pugin "Gothic was not a style, but a principle, a moral crusade, and the only mode of building possible for a Christian nation" (37). By the time Disraeli wrote Sybil, he had come to assert that certain kinds of architecture would help to produce the social consciousness that would rebuild a Christian, or paternalistic, England. At the...

Experiment in Cambridge: 'A Manifesto of Young England'

Experiment in Cambridge: 'A Manifesto of Young England'

Mixed Messages: Authoring and Authority in British Boys' Magazines

Mixed Messages: Authoring and Authority in British Boys’ Magazines Claudia Nelson (bio) A number of editors of British boys’ magazines at the end of the last century were also well known as authors of fiction for boys and/or adults, among them Max Pemberton of Chums, W. H. G. Kingston and G. A. Henty of the short-lived Union Jack, R. S. Warren Bell of the Captain, and “Guy Rayner” (S. Dacre Clarke) of at least nineteen periodicals. 1 In their editorial capacity, however, they typically constructed themselves as a separate species, purveyors of story but not storytellers themselves. They thus qualify as “forgotten authors” in a dual sense, since not only have many of them fallen into obscurity today, but most of them also kept their names off the mastheads in their own day, acknowledging only their work as contributors. 2 Nevertheless, it is appropriate to consider here even editors who did not write fiction as full-fledged authors for boys, not only because of the regular columns that they produced but also because of the control that they exerted over the appearance, contents, and philosophies of their magazines. As Paul Ferris comments of Alfred Harmsworth in his role as publisher of the Halfpenny Marvel (founded 1893), “The voice of Alfred . . . coloured every issue” (61). What we might see as the double meaning inherent in editorship (is editing merely coordinating and blue-penciling, or is it a creative activity akin to, say, conducting an orchestra?) is mirrored by the polysemic appeal of the collaborative texts these editors produced. Although there were any number of topics on which the boys’ magazines of this period are deliberately ambiguous, in this essay I will focus on attitudes toward authority to be found in some representative periodicals. Examining the evolution of correspondence columns and editorials in boys’ magazines between 1824 and 1914, Diana Dixon detects a gradual movement away from authoritarianism and toward a sometimes overstated desire to be the “friend” of one’s young subscribers. Examining the narrower timespan from 1892 to 1910, I propose that in this liminal period, during which [End Page 1] editors and publishers were forced into an ascending spiral of competition for readers, we can see magazines endorse both authoritarianism and friendliness, both respect and contempt for authority figures. Given the state of the periodical-publishing industry of the day, this editorial inconsistency was an important survival strategy. In 1824 there were only five magazines for young people in England; in 1900 there were 160 (Dixon, “Instruction” 63). Kirsten Drotner counts no fewer than 307 commercial British boys’ magazines in existence between 1880 and 1918 (123). And if many of these titles quickly foundered, others as quickly arose to replace them. Hence it was difficult for any one magazine to distinguish itself from its competitors; for one thing, few could claim to have the exclusive services of a given writer. It was not merely that proprietors of multiple story papers would use the same writers for several magazines at once, although that was certainly the case; there was also significant cross-pollination. The public-school magazine the Captain (founded in 1899 by George Newnes), for instance, shared its contributors with rivals that included Chums, the Boy’s Own Paper, Young England, and the Boy’s Journal. Upon finishing a series of stories for one venue, an author might reuse distinctive settings and casts of characters in another series for another periodical, as in the case of Bell’s popular tales of Greyhouse School, which appeared over a decade or more in both the Captain (which Bell edited) and the Boy’s Journal. As Dixon comments, while Harmsworth, influential publisher of numerous boys’ papers, would denounce competitors’ writers in one breath as “drunken, sodden, creatures, whose lives have been one unbroken story of failure,” he would commission contributions from them in the next (qtd. in “Children” 136). In an apparent effort to suggest their difference from other strikingly similar weeklies, some Harmsworth products were even printed on pink or green paper instead of the conventional white (Drotner 127). Niche marketing, in other words, was not the strategy of the more important boys’ titles at this time, although certain...

Muscular Jews: Young England, gender and Jewishness in Disraeli's “political trilogy”

In Tough Jews, a recent study of the sexual politics of Zionism, Paul Breines describes the genesis of Jewish nationalism as uthe historic break with the culture of Jewish meekness and gentleness and the beginnings of a tough Jewish counterculture." Breines sees the context of "the emergence of a tough Jewish imagery at the turn of the century [as] an extension of the Jewish nationalist awakening of the period [and]... a logical outcome of the larger nationalist dynamic" sweeping contemporary Europe. He argues that it derives from a reaction against as well as a reflection of European nationalisms: "The racial and bodily dimension of much of turn-of-the-century nationalist anti-Semitism was a decisive factor in the emergence of Jewish ideals of toughness, courage and physicality. Modern, postreligious, racial anti-Semitism presented a double image of the Jew: first, as the wielder of immense economic power and, through it, of secret but extensive control of the world's political systems, and second, as physically weak, repulsive, and cowardly."1 Breines is right to locate the invention of a new masculinized Jewish body within the context of widespread aspirations towards the body politic at the end of the nineteenth century. In this essay, however, I would like to trace some of these currents back to an earlier moment in discussions about national identity in nineteenth-century England. Examining the writings of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1830s and 40s, and in particular his representations of "tough Jews," I will be looking at connections between masculinity, Jewishness and English national identity.