3 - Trollope and Class
Summary
Benjamin Disraeli's most lasting legacy to the rhetoric of British politics is the phrase ‘the two nations’. It served originally as the subtitle to his novel Sybil (1845) and readers were alerted to its significance in a now famous dialogue between the aristocratic hero, Egremont, and the Chartist agitator, Morley:
‘Well society may be in its infancy,’ said Egremont slightly smiling; ‘but, say what you will, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed.’
‘Which nation?’ asked the younger stranger, ‘for she reigns over two.’
The stranger paused; Egremont was silent but looked inquiringly.
‘Yes,’ resumed the younger stranger after a moment's interval.
‘Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other 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’.
Disraeli's capital letters here clearly indicate that this is a debating point. Indeed, his novel as a whole is an attempt to open up the debate concerning what contemporaries called ‘the condition of England question’. Thanks to the influence of Thomas Carlyle, the idea of the potential conflict between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ was particularly current in early Victorian political and social discourses, concerned as those discourses were with the increasingly unsettling impact of industrialization and urbanization. The medieval division of the kingdom into three estates was no longer either readily acceptable or particularly feasible. Moreover, the idea of the representation of the three estates in Parliament, as the Houses of Lords and Commons, was increasingly questioned in the debates which attended the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill. Disraeli's bipartite division also effectively dispensed with the well-established assumption that there were upper, middle (or ‘middling’), and lower classes (not yet uniformly referred to as ‘working’ class or classes). His redefinition of the nation as starkly divided into the rich and the poor, and therefore into those who owned property – and hence exercised power – and those who were propertyless and powerless, cut across the old estates and assumed that a substantial, generally mercantile, section of the old middle-class ‘commons’ had moved up into the ‘ruling’ class.
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- Anthony Trollope , pp. 38 - 51Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1998