Spaces and places (I): the four nations

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.022

20 - Spaces and places (I): the four nations

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012

Deborah Nord

Edited by

Robert L. Caserio and

Clement Hawes

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Robert L. Caserio: Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Clement Hawes: Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Summary

In the most often cited passage from Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845), the hero, Egremont, encounters two strangers in the ruins of an abbey. The younger of the two describes the lamentable state of England, in which men live in isolation and mere “contiguity” rather than community and cooperation. When Egremont demurs that they inhabit “the greatest nation that ever existed,” the stranger inquires which of two different nations he means:

Two nations: between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.

(96)

Though the two nations the stranger evokes are “THE RICH AND THE POOR,” his description of the tenuous connection between them might apply to numerous social divisions within England or to the relationship between the typical novel-reader – English, middle or upper class, situated in the south of England and especially London – and the many “others” who populate the British Isles.

Disraeli refers to the estranged groups as “nations,” a word that captures the cultural, linguistic, and sometimes geographical differences between them. The unknown others are both external and internal to England.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the English Novel , pp. 325 - 340

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.022 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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