Benjamin Disraeli's most lasting legacy to the rhetoric of British politics is the phrase ‘the two nations’. It served originally as the subtitle to his novel Sybil (1845) and readers were alerted to its significance in a now famous dialogue between the aristocratic hero, Egremont, and the Chartist agitator, Morley:

Disraeli's capital letters here clearly indicate that this is a debating point. Indeed, his novel as a whole is an attempt to open up the debate concerning what contemporaries called ‘the condition of England question’. Thanks to the influence of Thomas Carlyle, the idea of the potential conflict between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ was particularly current in early Victorian political and social discourses, concerned as those discourses were with the increasingly unsettling impact of industrialization and urbanization. The medieval division of the kingdom into three estates was no longer either readily acceptable or particularly feasible. Moreover, the idea of the representation of the three estates in Parliament, as the Houses of Lords and Commons, was increasingly questioned in the debates which attended the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill. Disraeli's bipartite division also effectively dispensed with the well-established assumption that there were upper, middle (or ‘middling’), and lower classes (not yet uniformly referred to as ‘working’ class or classes). His redefinition of the nation as starkly divided into the rich and the poor, and therefore into those who owned property – and hence exercised power – and those who were propertyless and powerless, cut across the old estates and assumed that a substantial, generally mercantile, section of the old middle-class ‘commons’ had moved up into the ‘ruling’ class.