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chapter 9 Four years after the appearance of Sybil, Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow: A Tale of the Nineteenth Century began serial publication in the Northern Star.1 Wheeler, a longtime Chartist activist, had been awarded one of the Land Plan allotments at O’Connorville, and it was there that he wrote Sunshine and Shadow. While Disraeli appeared on the title pages of his novels as “B. Disraeli, M. P.,” the weekly numbers of Sunshine and Shadow designate Wheeler “Late Secretary to the National Charter Association and National Land Company” (72). As we have seen, Disraeli’s novels seek to persuade a readership of enfranchised citizens that the nation will be best served by a Parliament controlled by a reformed aristocracy with Disraeli, MP, at its head. Sybil in particular makes the claim that this Parliament will solve the problem of Chartist social unrest by taking responsibility for the condition of the lower classes. By contrast, when Wheeler designates himself “late secretary” to the Land Plan, he lays claim to a position of authority within the Chartist movement, but his novel does not envision that he, or the hero who serves as his proxy, will lead the movement for reform. Written in 1848, when, as the novel itself would acknowledge, the “tide of popular support” for the Land Plan had begun to recede and the final attempt to present the Chartist petition had turned into a debacle, his novel instead seeks to sustain his readers’ confidence that the only way to address the condition of the working classes is to obtain parliamentary representation for them (34.177–78).2 While it makes no explicit allusions to Disraeli’s novels, Sunshine and Shadow does appear to echo—and radically revise—the national narratives of Coningsby and Sybil.3 Just as Coningsby is “the favourite” and “hero” of Eton (1.9.71, 72), Walter North is the “leader” of “every frolic and school-boy enterprise” at ColThe Land Plan, Class Dichotomy, and Working-Class Agency in Sunshine and Shadow 114 land ownership as political reform, 1842 –1848 lege House Academy (2.75), and the bond formed between Walter North and Arthur Morton closely resembles the friendship of Coningsby and Millbank at Eton.4 Both novels depict idyllic schooldays giving way to conflict, but whereas Coningsby and Millbank remain friends and the conflict is displaced to the older generation, in Sunshine and Shadow a permanent rift arises between North and Morton. When North seeks to gain parliamentary power in order to obtain a peerage , he comes to resemble not Coningsby but his grandfather Monmouth, while Morton, having become a Chartist, in turn comes to resemble the hero of Sybil when, in an inversion of the moment when the aristocratic Egremont persuades the Chartist Sybil that the aristocracy are the “natural leaders of the people,” he convinces North’s sister, who is married to a baronet, that the “redemption of the working classes must spring from themselves alone” (Sybil 4.15.334; Sunshine and Shadow 13.108). Whereas the Disraelian national narrative depicts the marriage of an aristocratic hero uniting social classes and thus resolving class conflict by establishing a finely graded hierarchy, Walter North’s marriage produces disunion and class dichotomy, the schoolboy friends and social equals set on opposite trajectories with the one becoming a peer of the realm and the other an impoverished Chartist . Like Disraeli’s heroes, North unites his landed property with his wife’s, but he does not do so, like Coningsby and Egremont, in order to provide for the nation as a whole but, like Monmouth, to serve his own interests. Consequently, Morton becomes a Chartist and unites not with the upper classes but with a fellow Chartist, Mary Graham. He takes part in advancing the Land Plan, which does not seek to combine estates for the sake of a single individual but subdivides the land among members of the working class as a means of obtaining the franchise for his entire class. Sunshine and Shadow thus depicts as romance the national narrative in which marriage consolidates the power of the upper classes and excludes the lower classes, rejecting it in favor of the historical narrative in which the lower classes exercise social agency. As the narrator explains in the novel’s final paragraph, “We might have made our tale more interesting to many, by drawing more largely from the regions of romance, but our object was to combine a History of Chartism, with the...

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