ABSTRACT
On May Day 1845, nearly at the close of the half-century of hunger, Benjamin Disraeli's political novel Sybil, was published with the famous sub-title The Two Nations. The theme was boldly stated -a gilded society, light-minded politicians, and a young queen called to reign over
As a comment on the new social relationships created by the Industrial Revolution, Disraeli's view was naive and inadequate. Certainly since the Norman Conquest, and probably since a good deal further back, English society had consisted of the two sharply divided 'nations' of which he wrote - of prosperous landowners on the one hand and poor, propertyless peasants on the other. There was more in common, it has been said, between the medieval English serf and his counterpart in France or Germany than between the serf and his own lord. Disraeli's comment was, in fact, more true of feudal than of industrial society, where the new feature was the multiplication of social classes and sub-classes and the blurring of the formerly sharp lines between 'the rich and the poor'. We have already discussed the impossibility of treating the town worker as a homogeneous class at a time when the economic and social differences between a craftsman and an unskilled worker were much greater than they are today, and the barriers more difficult to surmount. The differences within the ranks of 'the rich' were greater still. Between the great landed magnate with an income of £1 0,000 a year and the little, back-street shopkeeper with £150, between the small tenant-farmer who employed two labourers and the manufacturer who employed 2,000, there was, outwardly at least, next to nothing in common. We treat them together in this chapter for only one reason - that they all enjoyed some margin of income
over necessary expenditure and were all able to make some choice in their selection of food.
