Sybil: Or, the Anti-Communist Manifesto

Jeffery L. Butts, Jr.

Scholars have described Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil variously as a political, social, or allegorical romance that serves as a statement about the condition of working class people in England and as a conservative response to Chartism. The novel graphically, and some would say exaggeratingly, describes the conditions under which the working class of England must survive in 1845 England. As noted by Robert O’Kell, Patrick Brantlinger and Daniel Bivona, Sybil details Disraeli’s stance on the Chartist movement, and its ideology advocates an alliance between the aristocracy and the working class as a response to Chartism.

What many critics seem to have missed, however, is the timing of Sybil’s composition. Disraeli wrote the novel over a short period of time in 1845, not long after the first texts of the Communist movement were published in Europe. The novel was published soon after Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England and Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and the embodiment of socialist ideals within the character of Stephen Morley make it clear that Sybil is also a response to Engels’s and Marx’s burgeoning communist theories.

This paper examines the ways in which Disraeli’s novel responds to and counters not only Chartism but also communism and socialism. Drawing from the text of Sybil as well as the writings of Marx and Engels during the timeframe within which Sybil was published and widely read, I compare and contrast the messages embedded within the various texts. In addition to an examination of the critical literature examining this issue, I draw on the writing of Isaiah Berlin to compare the character and upbringing of Disraeli and Marx and responses by Engels and Marx to the Young England movement Disraeli helped found and desired Sybil to represent.