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
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—D.H. (David Herbert)
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