Condition-of-England question

The historian John Prest has written that the early 1840s witnessed "the middle of structural changes in the economy, which led many to question whether the country had taken a wrong turning.

[4]: 96 The phrase "Condition-of-England Question" was first used by Carlyle in Chartism (1839), which significantly contributed to the emergence of a series of debates about the spiritual and material foundations of England and had a great effect on a number of writers of fiction in the Victorian era and after.

In June 1829, the Edinburgh Review published Carlyle's "Signs of the Times", in which he anticipates the Condition-of-England Question he raised a decade later in Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843).

He expressed his distrust of the spirit of the "mechanical age", which was manifested not only in the technical progress of English society but also in an overwhelming feeling of lack of mental or spiritual vigour and enthusiasm: "The King has virtually abdicated; the Church is a widow, without jointure; public principle is gone; private honesty is going; society, in short, is in fact falling to pieces; and a time of unmixed evil is come on us."

The essay was aimed to draw the attention of the reading public to the spiritual price of social change, caused particularly by the frenetic industrialisation.

In "Signs of the Times", Carlyle warned that the Industrial Revolution was turning people into mechanical automatons devoid of individuality and spirituality.

For Carlyle, machine and mechanisation had double meaning: they meant literally new technical devices, but also metaphorically mechanistic thought that suppresses human freedom.

Carlyle raised the condition-of-England question in Chartism, in which he expressed his sympathy for the poor and the industrial class in England and argued the need for a more profound reform.

He noticed a discrepancy between a new form of economic activity called "industrialism", which promised general welfare, and a dramatic degradation in the living conditions of the urban poor.

For him, the latter was a time of uncontrolled industrialisation, worship of money, exploitation of the weak, low wages, poverty, unemployment and riots, which would bring England to self-destruction.

Carlyle argues that a new "Aristocracy of Talent" should take the lead in the country, and the English people must themselves choose true heroes and not sham-heroes or quacks.

In the third chapter of the fourth book of Past and Present, Carlyle makes three practical suggestions for the improvement of social conditions in England.