used to advance a religious thesis, as by Kingsley, Wiseman and Newman, or a social
reform, as by Dickens.Disraeli’s Sybil; or, The Two Nations
Disraeli is treated here on his own as a thesis novelist, by means of a single novel. He
began a trilogy of novels between 1844 and 1847, setting out his political beliefs with
Coningsbyand Sybil; or, The Two Nations; the third was entitled Tancred. The first
two were early examples of the ‘condition-of-England’ novels of the 1840s and
1850s. Disraeli’s essays in fiction are romances rather than novels; as Sybil’s ‘ Two
Nations’ subtitle suggests, they are also treatises of ideas, often by dialogue. They
criticize contemporary industrial practice and utilitarian theory, contrasting them
with the ideals and the best practice of the Middle Ages. They are fundamentally
opposed to the rule of the Whigs, who had been in power most of the time since
1688, except during the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Disraeli
advocates an alliance of the People (the nation of ‘The Poor’), the Crown and the
Church against the Whig oligarchy, the nation of ‘The Rich’.
Sybil addresses ‘the condition of the people’ in the decade of Chartism, but opens
by contrast in a London club, where gilded youths are gambling fortunes on the
results of the 1837 Derby. It focuses next on the owners of Marney Abbey.
The founder of the family had been a confidential domestic of one of the favourites of
Henry VIII, and had contrived to be appointed one of the commissioners for ‘visiting
and taking the surrenders of divers religious houses’. It came to pass that divers of these
religious houses surrendered themselves eventually to the use and benefit of honest
Baldwin Greymount.Early in the seve ntee nth century a Greymount was elevated to the peerage as Baron
Marney.
The heralds furnished his pedigree ... it appeared that they were both Norman and
baronial, their real name Egremont, which, in their patent of peerage, the family now
resumed.If ‘a Greymount’ can turn into ‘Egremont’, Marney can turn into Money, the love of
which motivates Egremont’s elder brother, Lord Marney. Egremont, the younger son
of the ‘lay abbots’ of Marney, first sees Sybil at sunset, after having first overheard a
lengthy discussion, between two speakers unknown to him, upon
‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant
of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or
inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a
different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’
‘You speak of–’ said Egremont, hesitatingly.
‘THE RICH AND THE POOR.’
At this moment a sudden flush of rosy light, suffusing the grey ruins [of Marney
Abbey], indicated that the sun had just fallen; and, through a vacant arch that
overlooked them, alone in the resplendent sky, glittered the twilight star ... when from
the Lady’s chapel there rose the evening hymn to the Virgin. A single voice; but tones of
almost super natural sweetness; tender and solemn yet flexible and thrilling ... in the
vacant and star-lit arch on which his glance was fixed, he beheld a female form. She was
apparently in the habit of a Religious, yet ... her veil ... had fallen on her shoulders, and
revealed her thick tresses of long fair hair.286 10 · FICTION
NovelistsBulwer Lytton (1803–1873)
Benjamin Disraeli
(1804–1881)
Mrs Gaskell (1810–1865)
William Makepeace Thackeray
(1811–1863)
Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855)
Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
George Eliot (1819–1888)