Novel
Sybil; or, The Two Nations
Benjamin Disraeli · 1845
Opening lines
“I’ll take the odds against Caravan.”
“In poneys?”
“Done.”
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Charles Egremont, younger brother of Lord Marney, has just been elected a Member of Parliament. In the ruins of an abbey, he meets a Chartist leader, Walter Gerard, his friend Morley and Gerard's daughter. He meets them again near Mowbray, a mill town, where he lodges under the name of Franklin and passes himself off as a journalist. He frequents their house while the Chartists prepare the national petition that a convention is to carry to Parliament.
Context
The book appeared in 1845, the second of a series of three political novels published from 1844 to 1847, when its author had sat in the Commons for eight years. It combines a love plot with a picture of the manufacturing towns of the North, which he had toured, and reuses passages from the reports of parliamentary commissions of inquiry. It appeared in the year a young German who had just spent two years in Manchester published his inquiry into the condition of the English working class. The idea of a country split in two was already found in Plato, and Tocqueville had spoken of two rival nations ten years earlier.
Who it is for
Nearly five hundred pages in the Oxford edition; two French translations in the nineteenth century, not reissued since 1881.
Prizes and reception
The subtitle has become a common metaphor in British politics, and “One Nation” conservatism still claims it.
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The pages consulted to check this page.