This novel was the first of three which comprised Disraeli’s _Young England_ trilogy. In a somewhat unsubstantial way, the three books set forth the principles which were to create a revitalized Tory party. In _The Political Novel_ Morris Speare concludes that the four major points of the program deal with the nobility, the middle class, the working class, and the English church. The nobility was to reassume the leadership it held before patents of nobility were doled out freely to clever entrepreneurs and favorite retainers of great families. An aristocracy in function as well as name, it was to be assisted by the vigorous industrial and mercantile middle class which had arisen in England since the industrial revolution. The lot of the working class was to be bettered by a sympathetic government rather than by militant movements from within its own ranks. Moral and spiritual leadership was to be supplied by a revitalized church true to its fundamental religious tradition. Harry Coningsby, grandson of the dissolute and immensely powerful Lord Monmouth, is the personification of Young England. A hero at Eton and Cambridge, he returns from a year of travel on the continent to enter politics. Refusing to sit in Parliament for one of Monmouth’s rotten boroughs and act as a rubber stamp for old Tory policies, Coningsby is cut out of Monmouth’s will. Monmouth’s death and a neatly juggled legacy eventually pave the way for Coningsby’s entry into Parliament on his own terms. Patly, Coningsby of the nobility marries Edith Millbank, daughter of a middle class tycoon. A year later, _Sybil_ followed _Coningsby_. Like substitutes in a football game, Charles Egremont and Trafford go in for Coningsby and Millbank. Much of the book is concerned with the working class. Disraeli shows the reader the horrible conditions in which many of its members live and the violence of their attempts to better them. Bishop Hatton, barbarous ruler of the locksmiths of the mining district village of Wodgate, leads his “Hell-cats” in an assault upon ancient Mowbray Castle. Unions are presented as groups of violent men, cloaked and hooded. Supplementing this portrayal is one of a decaying and greedy aristocracy. One can perhaps imagine the reaction of the landed or moneyed English voter. He might well accept Disraeli’s opinion that something had to be done.