[1] For the most part, its unofficial membership was confined to a splinter group of Tory aristocrats who had attended Eton and Cambridge together, among them George Smythe, Lord John Manners, Henry Thomas Hope and Alexander Baillie-Cochrane.
Disraeli had outlined the principles of Young England in The Vindication of the English Constitution (1835), which characteristically opens with an attack on utilitarian beliefs, but Lord John Manners and George Smythe more widely disseminated its neo-feudal ideals in verse and narrative forms.
Fighting against the New Poor Law with the Social Tories, they also at times sided with the Benthamites, as in 1844, when Young England helped the radicals defeat a bill which would have strengthened the powers of magistrates dealing with labour disputes.
Attesting to its fragile and narrow political base, Young England died with scarcely an obituary some few years after 1847, when Disraeli effectively withdrew from the Parliamentary coalition.
Disraeli's disagreements were chiefly with his longtime conservative rival, Peel, although a tempering of his unqualified support for Young England's social-political ideals surfaces in his novel Tancred, or the New Crusade.
At its best, Young England influenced mid-Victorian reform legislation but never came close to gaining the popular support required to realise even partially its deeply conservative social vision.