Young England was a Victorian era political group. The group was born on the playing fields of Cambridge and Eton. For the most part, its unofficial membership was confined to a splinter group of Tory aristocrats who had attended public school together, among them George Smythe, Lord John Manners, Henry Thomas Hope and Alexander Baillie-Cochrane. The group's leader and figurehead, however, was Benjamin Disraeli, who bore the distinction of having neither an aristocratic background nor an Eton or Cambridge education.
Richard Monckton Milnes is credited with coining the name Young England, a name which suggested a relationship between Young England and the mid-century groups Young Ireland, Young Italy, and Young Germany. However, these political organizations, while nationalistic like Young England, commanded considerable popular support and were socially liberal and politically egalitarian.
Young England promulgated a conservative and romantic species of Social Toryism. Its political message described an idealized feudalism: an absolute monarch and a strong Established Church, with the philanthropy of noblesse oblige as the basis for its paternalistic form of social organization.
Read more about Young England: Expansion, Literature, Political Role, Decline, Legacy
Famous quotes containing the words young and/or england:
“Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage. That is all true. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul a people.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)
“Forced from home, and all its pleasures,
Afric’s coast I left forlorn;
To increase a stranger’s treasures,
O’er the raging billows borne.
Men from England bought and sold me,
Paid my price in paltry gold;
But, though theirs they have enroll’d me,
Minds are never to be sold.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)