It wouldn’t be uncharitable to say that the literature and ambition that came out of the Young England movement was more important than the movement itself. Essentially nostalgic in outlook, it provided a group of young Tories with the opportunity to make their names known in the 1840s, and situate themselves publicly between the aristocracy and the working class. In the 1841 general election, Disraeli gained a Tory seat for Shrewsbury. While his voice grew steadily among the backbenchers, it resounded poetically in the Young England newspaper and the political novels he published from the forefront of the movement. Aspiring to old-fashioned values and pre-industrial pastoralism, Young England envisaged a broadly feudalistic relationship between the landed and the lower classes.

For Disraeli, landed interest involved the farmers and land labourers as well as the aristocratic and comfortably well-off landowners. Disraeli was not, of course, born to the same privileges as George Smythe or Alexander Baillie-Cochrane, son of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Thomas Cochrane, or indeed many of the other men who joined Young England in 1842. At the age of 13, he had converted to Christianity, conscious that as a Jew he would have been unable to sit in the House of Commons. Life experience had taught him that there was little to be gained from social segregation. The aristocracy needed reforming, not watering down, and he believed that establishing connections between it and the lower orders would be a more effective policy for social change than simple economic reform. England had become, as Disraeli subtitled his 1845 novel Sybil, “Two Nations”. It was at Deepdene that he began to dream of what England might look like as one nation.

Disraeli’s Sybil was the second political novel in a trilogy. The third was Tancred (1847). The first, Coningsby, was “conceived and partly executed amid the glades and galleries of Deepdene”. It could hardly have been otherwise. Away from the smog and the traffic and the mayhem of the cities, Deepdene must have given the Young Englanders the space to reflect upon the cost of industrialisation. If even obliquely, Deepdene provided an impetus to Disraeli’s burgeoning ideas of One Nation Conservatism. The pastoral visions of other Young England members might have bordered on the twee. John Manners, son of the Duke of Rutland, for instance, could not keep quiet about parish churches and “the merry green, where youth shall disport itself, and old age, well pleased, look on”. Disraeli, however, kept his head — even while drawing on Deepdene dreamer George Smythe as his inspiration for the character of Coningsby: “In the hurry-scurry of money-making, men-making, and machine-making, we had altogether outgrown, not the spirit, but the organization, of our institutions”. No Arcadia could cloud Coningsby’s manifesto for a new England. 

It is significant that the novel begins in 1832, the year of the Reform Act, which increased the electorate to around 650,000 and strengthened the representation of industrial cities in particular. To Disraeli, it was a disappointment. His own Reform Act of 1867 would enfranchise a million working-class men. The recent Act also struck a significant blow to the aristocracy by abolishing a number of England’s rotten boroughs. Many a young gentleman before now had secured his entry to politics through election to one of these, not least Henry Thomas Hope, dedicatee of Coningsby and owner of Deepdene.