ABSTRACT
Young England's reputation was and is out of proportion to its actual accomplishments in Parliament, mainly due to the idealized depiction in Disraeli's novels Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845). The movement embodied on a political level much of the romantic medievalism that infused literary and religious movements of the time. Its sources were diverseSamuel Taylor Coleridge's social theory, the Oxford Movement, the novels of Walter Scott, and Kenelm Digby's moralizing treatise, The Broad Stone of Honour (1822), which sought to revive medieval notions of chivalry. Young England was innovative in diagnosing the ills attendant upon unchecked economic individualism, but nostalgic in the cure it prescribed. The restoration of a benevolent hierarchy, a central tenet of Young England, was to be realized in a neofeudal coalition of aristocracy and (as Disraeli liked to call it) peasantry under the guidance of a resuscitated monarchy with the Church of England as "the spiritual and intellectual trainer of the people."
