INTRODUCTION WILLIAM COBBETT:

CALF OF JOHN BULL, OR CHILD OF THE

ENLIGHTENMENT?

James Grande and John Stevenson

2013 witnessed the 250th anniversary of Cobbetts birth and the occasion for a
reassessment of one of the most protean figures in British life and letters. Cobbett was a phenomenon, one of the most influential and singular English writers
of the past three centuries. His many roles as a journalist, political agitator
and commentator on the state of the country, during a period of transformative change, have earned him a place which remains unique both in the range
and volume of his writings and the great variety of his admirers. The former is
reflected in the sheer quantity of his output: an estimated twenty million words
over his career, a figure unrivalled in the history of English letters. The latter in
that he has attracted more than a dozen biographies and interest from a distinguished body of thinkers and writers, including persons as diverse as Karl Marx,
William Hazlitt, Harriet Martineau, Matthew Arnold, G. K. Chesterton, G. D.
H. Cole, A. J. P. Taylor, Raymond Williams, Lord Grimond, Michael Foot, E. P.
Thompson, A. H. Halsey and Richard Ingrams. How so?
In part, the great appeal of Cobbetts writing rests upon the range of topics upon which he expressed his opinions and the forcefulness with which he
delivered them. Cobbetts output was prodigious. For over thirty years, starting
in 1802, he produced his Political Register week in week out, almost without
interruption, whether in prison, in exile or at home, contributing several thousand words each week, until his death in 1835, totalling eighty-nine volumes of
some 42,000 pages. M. L. Pearls bibliographical account of Cobbetts life and
times, produced in 1953, runs to over two hundred and fifty pages and contains
over two hundred separate printed items.1 Indefatigable takes on a new meaning with Cobbett. A measure of what we are dealing with can be found in the
last year of his life, when he was undoubtedly suffering from the general breakdown of his health, which eventually led to his death in June 1835. In those last

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twelve months he published his swingeing attack on the New Poor Law of 1834,
Cobbetts Legacy to Labourers (141 pages), a pamphlet attacking the Whigs for
retaining the Malt Tax, prepared for publication Letters of William Cobbett to
Charles Marshall on the abject state of the Irish peasantry, organized a tour of
his anti-Malthusian comedy, Surplus Population, through the southern counties
of England (only to be frustrated by local magistrates) and published Cobbetts
Legacy to Parsons (192 pages), his assault on the tithe system and the complicity
of the clergy with the New Poor Law and a call for the separation of Church and
State. The last, published two months before his death, proved the most popular
of his Legacy series. Six editions as well as a translation into Welsh were issued
before the end of the year. The first edition (of 5,000) was said to have sold out in
nine days, and a second (of 10,000) was called for three weeks later.2
He produced more than twenty books, many of them serialized in the Register
in whole or in part, five of which appear in Richard Alticks list of nineteenthcentury best-sellers.3 His range is illustrated by an advertisement for his works
in 1831: it itemized fifteen titles under four sub-heads: first, books for teaching
languages, including Cobbetts English and French grammars; second, books on
Domestic Management and Duties, including Cobbetts Cottage Economy and
Advice to Young Men; third, books on Rural Affairs, which included Cobbetts
English Gardener and Cobbetts Woodlands and, lastly, his works on the Management of National Affairs, Paper Against Gold, Rural Rides and the Poor Mans
Friend.4 Even this formidable list of works in print excluded a mass of earlier projects set down or sold to others to meet debts and obligations, including his earlier
long-standing journalistic incarnation in the United States, during the 1790s, as
Peter Porcupine: Cobbetts Complete Collection of State Trials, his Parliamentary
Register, which became Hansard, and his separate Parliamentary History, which
was intended to include parliamentary debates from the Norman Conquest
onwards. Moreover, it did not include the work Cobbett himself regarded as one
of his most successful publications, his History of the Protestant Reformation in
England and Ireland, first published in letter form in 18247.5 Hugely popular
in its day, Cobbett claimed that only sales of the Bible outstripped it. Although
Cobbett may well have been tempted to hyperbole, his most diligent biographer,
the late George Spater, puts the sales figures for this work within two years of
publication at 700,000 copies.6 In addition it has remained in print almost continuously up to the present day, along with several other of Cobbetts works, most
prominently Rural Rides, The English Gardener and Cottage Economy.
Cobbett is most commonly remembered today as one of the leading proponents of parliamentary reform in the years leading up to the Great Reform Act of
1832 and a tireless advocate of the rights of the poor during the great economic
transformations of the period in which he lived. His concerns with the rural
world he had known from his boyhood, as a small yeomans son in Farnham,

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were carried into the post-Napoleonic War period as he campaigned on many

fronts against government corruption, in favour of reform and in opposition
to any measures or rival nostrums which he saw as harmful to the way of life
which he believed his beloved labourers were entitled to and had once enjoyed.
Although trained as a soldier, his chosen weapon was the pen and Cobbett was
the greatest and most effective political journalist of his day.7 His most influential period began as the reform movement revived, in the latter years of the
Napoleonic Wars, as first Pitts government and then its successors came under
attack for their conduct of the war and its fiscal and political repercussions for
the country at large. Cobbett was a long-standing and unashamed patriot, a
self-proclaimed calf of John Bull, who as Peter Porcupine had set himself up
as the scourge of the French revolutionaries and those he saw as their British
fellow-travellers.8 But even at the high point of popular support for the struggle
against Napoleon during the invasion scares of 18035 a struggle to which he
was deeply committed, having risked popular opprobrium for his opposition to
the short-lived Peace of Amiens and written a nationally-distributed pamphlet
on anti-invasion preparations Cobbett evinced growing disquiet with the
consequences of war finance and increasing disillusion with the corrupt nexus
between government and those financing the war. Cobbett swung the Register
into opposition, finding the second Pittadministration (18046) and the broadbased Ministry of the Talents (18067) equally culpable for the parlous state
of the country. It was during this period that Cobbett became committed to an
anti-corruption platform, even considering standing for parliament himself in
1806 on a pledge neither to bribe or be bribed in getting elected and supporting
a group of reformers, independents and radical Whigs, including Francis Place,
Sir Francis Burdett and Admiral Cochrane, who were prepared to take up similar positions and achieved success in the 1807 Westminster Elections.9
It was in this period that Cobbett developed his critique of the Thing, the selfreinforcing system of Old Corruption in which an unholy alliance of financiers,
debt holders and politicians were manipulating the, by now enormous, requirements of war finance to enrich themselves and remain in power.10 In doing so, they
were not only impoverishing the country but hindering an effective war effort as
peculation and corruption reached into both army and navy, the very issue on
which Cobbett had made his first stand on his discharge from the army in 1791
2.11 Based on the traditional Country Party critique of governments throughout
the eighteenth century, one familiar to Cobbett from his mentor, Jonathan Swift,
who had made similar criticisms of government during the latter years of the War
of the Spanish Succession almost exactly a century earlier, Cobbetts patriotism
was now directed to what he saw as the serious wrongs being inflicted on the
country and the sufferings of the labouring poor with whom he always identified.
In doing so, he was influenced by the state of the country, which had endured

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one of the worst harvest failures in a hundred years in 18001, with widespread
price riots and calls upon public charity and the poor law to prevent outright famine.12 When Swift had written his famous criticism of government war policy, The
Conduct of the Allies, in 1711, the Bank of England and the National Debt were
just over a decade old; by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the sinews of
war had been hugely expanded to fight the earlier rounds in the Second Hundred Years War with France. Even so, Pitt and his successors were forced into
unprecedented financial and fiscal measures to maintain a generation of almost
uninterrupted warfare between 1793 and 1815. It was against this background
that Cobbett inveighed against policies which were in the process of quadrupling
the National Debt, flooding the country with paper money and immiserating the
poor through high taxes. High profile examples of corruption, such as the Duke of
Yorks mistress selling army commissions, military failures such as the Walcheren
expedition and a long period of all but hopeless war without victory, between the
defensive triumph of Trafalgar and Napoleons first abdication, contributed to the
revival of demands for parliamentary reform, for which Cobbetts Register became
the principal voice. But this increasingly radical voice, now denouncing Whigs
and Tories alike as essentially enemies of the people and enjoying a circulation
which outstripped any other oppositionist periodical, soon brought Cobbett into
conflict with the government. Both press and caricatures were brought into play
to undermine Cobbetts influence and to attack him personally even before 1810,
when Cobbetts denunciation of the flogging of English militiamen brought
down upon his head a prosecution for sedition which landed him in prison for
two years and exacted very heavy financial penalties.
Cobbetts treatment at the hands of government propelled him along a trajectory which gave his patriotism an ever more radical edge, more than ever
convinced that government needed root-and-branch reform. The years following
the final victory over Napoleon only reinforced his opinions. Post-war discontent with high prices, trade dislocation, unemployment and continued heavy
taxation saw Cobbett proposing far more radical reform of parliament than he
had considered, even as late as 18067. Purity of election and no bribery gave
way to universal suffrage and annual parliaments as the solution to the countrys
ills. The immediate post-war years saw the appearance of the cheap version of
the Register, the Twopenny Trash, first produced at the very height of post-war
discontent in 1816, a year marked by riots, a renewal of machine-breaking and
tumultuous mass meetings. Read, it was alleged, by high and low alike, Cobbetts
device of reducing his newspaper so that it could be sold without a government
stamp and at a reduced price brought him a genuinely mass audience. His first
leading article or Letter, To the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales,
Scotland, and Ireland, sold as many as 200,000 copies.13 His message was at once
direct and disconcerting. Cobbett linked the distresses of the people directly to

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the corruption of parliament and the baleful working of the Thing. The remedy
was thoroughgoing parliamentary reform to be achieved by means of petitions.
According to Cobbett, rioting was futile and machine-breaking was directed at
the wrong target, telling would-be Luddites that the real cause of their distress
was not machinery but a corrupt parliament.
Contemporaries vied to give testimony to his role as the greatest and most
effective political journalist of his day. Hazlitt, who had written for the Register,
summed up his influence most pithily when he called Cobbett a virtual Fourth
Estate in the politics of the country.14 In a famous passage Samuel Bamford
wrote of his effect in the tense atmosphere after Waterloo :
the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read
on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire, in
those of Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns. Their influence was speedily visible. He directed his readers to the true
cause of their sufferings misgovernment; and to its proper corrective parliamentary reform. Riots soon became scarce, and from that time they have never obtained
their ancient vogue with the labourers of this country.15

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Moreover, if his influence was ever in doubt, the attention government devoted
to silencing him was evidence enough. No other radical had eight caricatures
commissioned from Gillray to belittle and undermine his career or had individual journals specifically designed to combat his writings. Cobbetts controversial
decision to flee the country in 1817 followed the vengeful prosecution which
had imprisoned and nearly ruined him in 181012. If it was only Tory mobs
he had to face when he contested Coventry in 1820, in 1831 he barely escaped
conviction on a charge of sedition for his campaigns amongst the rural labourers
in the run up to the Reform crisis. That last failed attempt by the government
to silence him was the culmination of a decade in which Cobbett had increasingly devoted himself to the cause of the agricultural labourers, whose worsening
plight in the post-war years was to explode in the great wave of rick-burnings,
machine-breaking and demonstrations, which swept through the southern
counties of England in the Captain Swing disturbances.16 His tours of the agricultural areas, recorded in his best-known work, Rural Rides, denounced the
deterioration in the condition of the labourers, from the time when he was a
youth, and confirmed his reputation as the Poor Mans Friend. It was enhanced
during the reform struggle when he took the case for reform directly to the rural
labourers. His election to the new seat of Oldham in the reformed parliament
brought little respite; as we have seen above, whatever his status at Westminster, he remained one of the most prominent campaigners for the full reform
programme of universal suffrage and annual parliaments, a renunciation of the
Debt, opposition to tithes and vehement opposition to the New Poor Law.

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Cobbetts place in the history of the campaign for reform and its immediate aftermath was assured by the time of his death and, to the Chartists, he was
one of the pioneers of popular radicalism. Moreover, as Bamford indicated, he
received accolades as a pacifier; for all the vehemence of his prose, his efforts
were directed towards reform rather than revolution, seeking to deflect genuine
distress into constructive paths of reform. For Harriet Martineau, part of a later
generation of middle class reformers, this was what led her to hail Cobbett for
his genius while condemning Henry Hunt out of hand as a dangerous demagogue.17 But Cobbetts reputation goes further, not only for what he said, but
how he said it Cobbett was the pioneer of popular journalism. Leigh Hunt,
for one, eulogized his role:
The invention of printing itself scarcely did more for the diffusion of knowledge and
the enlightening of the mind than has been effected by the Cheap Press of this Country. Thanks to Cobbett! The commencement of this twopenny register was an era in
the annals of knowledge and politics which deserves eternal commemoration.18

In 1834 a compendious biographical Memoirs of the Georgian era considered

both his style and his influence:

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As a writer, Cobbett is among the most forcible and original this country has produced no one demonstrates a proposition with more powerful simplicity. Despising
the elegancies, and sometimes the proprieties of language, he nevertheless wields his
pen with all the might of a giants club and all the keenness of a Damascus blade.
When he is vituperative, it may be compared to the effect of a plough or a harrow; he
lacerates without mercy, and wounds with all the roughness and indifference of those
instruments By one authority he has been called the sledgehammer writer; and Mr
Hazlitt compares his pen to a flail.19

Reflecting on his wider effects, the entry continued: His works have unquestionably done more to open the eyes of the poorer classes of this country to
their political condition, than any previous or subsequent publications.20 E. P.
Thompson, who devoted more pages in The Making of the English Working Class
to Cobbett than any other individual, took up this theme when he described
Cobbett as a writer who exerted more influence, week after week for thirty
years, than any journalist in English history. The emergence of a radical press
after the Napoleonic Wars was, he argued, his personal triumph: it was Cobbett
who created this Radical intellectual culture.21
Traditionally, Cobbetts wider significance lay as a commentator upon the
changes being wrought during his lifetime, the period of the agricultural and
first industrial revolutions, as described by the Hammonds, T. S. Ashton, G. D.
H. Cole and R. Postgate, amongst many others. It was Cole, a devotee of Cobbett and his first major biographer, who claimed him as the spokesman of the
first generation of industrial workers torn from the land and flung into the fac-

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tory.22 Right up to the present, Cobbetts most famous work, Rural Rides, has
been seen as one of the classic contributions to the debate on the transformation of Britain from a rural, agricultural society to an urban and industrial one.
Cobbetts lament for a lost Golden Age enjoyed by the labourers and yeomen
in his youth provided a rural idyll, an ideal of social harmony and good living,
against which the new world of urban and industrial living and commercialized
agriculture represented a disastrous falling off in the lives of the common people.
Cobbett became a key witness in the debate about the nature and consequences
of economic transformation a witness for the prosecution, of a land lost and
scarred, blighted forever by the rise of commerce and industry. There was a time
when Cobbett was staple fare for the academic debate on Britains great transformation; an essential element for countless University Extension courses and
Workers Educational Association classes of the kind with which an earlier generation of socialist and socially concerned scholars were all too familiar.
There is, however, little doubt that the visibility of Cobbett and the issues
with which he wrestled has faded. A less exclusive focus on British history in
schools and universities means that many of the key areas to which his arguments
were directed are no longer part of the common stock of knowledge. The history
of the industrial and agricultural revolutions is less commonly taught and there is
less attention to the domestic political history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, as new topics crowd onto the curriculum. Cobbett has
been bypassed, not only by Hitler and Stalin, but by the new agendas of social and
cultural history, womens studies and world history. It is certainly the case that
many British University students of History or English can pass through their
entire courses without encountering Cobbett or the issues to which his opinions
were once considered relevant. Even in an exclusively British context it is telling
to compare Cobbetts treatment with that of other near contemporaries in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published in 2004 and largely prepared
in the last decades of the twentieth century. Cobbett merits just over four pages,
compared with over seven for both William Godwin and for Mary Wollstonecraft; Hazlitt too merits seven pages, as does Harriet Martineau. Cobbett would
have been particularly annoyed to find his frequent target, the evangelical Bishop
in Petticoats Hannah More, allotted fifty per cent more space than he was.
Cobbett has also proved difficult to pin down. An avowed patriot who
became a leading radical, a voluminous journalist and agitator over more than
forty years on a wide range of topics, many have struggled to define him: Tory
radical, romantic radical, radical populist and utopian reactionary are just
some of the formulations applied to him.23 Often apparently contradictory and
a good hater, some of his pettier prejudices, such as tea-drinking, Shakespeare,
London or the classics, pursued with a ferocity which he applied to great matters
of state, can simply make him appear a crank. His racial and national prejudices,

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whether directed against Scots or Jews, his wholesale condemnation of whole

religious groups, Quakers, Methodists or Evangelicals, and his frequent bouts
of what looks like anti-intellectualism have not assisted his reputation.24 Cobbetts writings, often swept along in reaction to the events of the day, make him
easy to underestimate, not least for their unsystematic nature. Unlike Paine or
Godwin, there was no substantial treatise setting out his political beliefs. Rather
like Burke, Cobbetts position on some fundamental issues, such as religion
or the monarchy, have to be teased out of works which were the products of
particular circumstances. As a result, Cobbett seemed to offer little that was
coherent to many of the major intellectual currents that were to flow into the
nineteenth century and it is no accident that his expositors have often chosen to
represent his views as a series of Opinions.25 His forthright condemnation of the
Scotch feelosofers and political economy hardly made him a forerunner to the
utilitarians, even though some, such as Martineau, found something to praise
in his condemnation of a bloated National Debt.26 Cobbett presented similar
difficulties for the socialist and Marxist traditions. Marx recognized Cobbetts
contribution, but saw him as rooted in eighteenth-century patterns of thought,
and Cobbetts attachment to private property was already drawing criticism
from agrarian radicals by the 1820s.27 For those looking for a more thoroughly
class-based, socialist analysis, Cobbett looked increasingly irrelevant. Cobbetts
focus on the plight of the rural labourer, his condemnation of commerce and
industry even to the point of arguing that the country should subsist solely
through agriculture made him appear to belong to the world of the cottage and
the farm rather than that of the industrial town. The deathless phrase backward
looking was almost sufficient in itself to deny Cobbett much direct purchase on
the later history of the labour movement, trade unionism and the Labour Party.
As demonstrated below, even among those who regarded him as a champion,
some of Cobbetts specific prescriptions on issues such as currency and the Debt
were being abandoned by the 1840s.28 Compared with literary figures such as
Hazlitt, Cobbett has been somewhat sidelined as a journalist. Without novel or
political treatise to his name, he remains neither art nor smart.
The colloquium to which most of these essays belong seeks to remedy the
relative neglect into which Cobbett has fallen. Without anticipating them, it
can be suggested that a number of developments in both historical and literary
studies make such a reappraisal appropriate. First, the traditional focus on Cobbett as part of the history of British popular radicalism and the reform struggle
has tended to downplay the wider intellectual context in which Cobbett wrote
and his position within it, an area of interest that has attracted considerable
attention in recent years. Enlightenment studies have developed exponentially
in the literary, social, cultural and gender fields. John Robertson, for example,
has invited us to recognize that we are adopting a much broader concept of the

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Enlightenment than was formerly common.29 On the one hand, the study of the
Enlightenment has been extended far beyond a focus on the works of a small
group of philosophes, mainly French, to include a much wider range of literature
and journalism, including what has been dubbed the Grub Street Enlightenment. Extending the Enlightenment beyond a Francophone core implies not
only the examination of the Enlightenment in a variety of other national contexts, German, English, American, Scottish and so on, but also the recognition
(one familiar to earlier Atlantic World scholars such as R. R. Palmer) of the
transatlantic and international character of the Enlightenment. Finally, there is
the association of the Enlightenment with the emergence of the distinct public
sphere theorized by Jrgen Habermas; a widening social and often implicitly
political arena beyond the control of the governing authorities, characterized in
the rise of public opinion, the press, clubs and associations, and the culture of
sociability.30 In each of these areas, Cobbetts role was highly significant.
Cobbett was a child of revolutionary times and has some claim to be considered a child of the Enlightenment, a member of what Peter Gay called the party
of humanity.31 His writing may seem, on first acquaintance, to run counter to
what we know about the Enlightenment in its rational, progressive and universalizing tendencies, but his relationship to the major intellectual movement of his
age is much more complex. Contrary to common perceptions, he was remarkably
cosmopolitan, and his views were often put forward in the language of common
sense inherited from Paine and the philosophes. For all of his laments about a
lost age of good living and close-knit communities, Cobbetts style of journalism is recognizably modern and helped to create the popular press that we have
inherited. In this sense, his writings are part of a transformation from one kind
of community to another; an imagined community, to use Benedict Andersons
phrase, reliant on the mediations of print.32 There is evidence that Cobbett saw
himself as a figure of Enlightenment, proclaiming in 1819, it is very certain that I
have been the great enlightener of the people of England.33 In the first issue of the
Westminster Review, one of the leading organs of Philosophical Radicalism, W. J.
Fox reflected on this claim: It was impossible to avoid laughing at him, and yet at
the same time feeling, in our hearts, that the impudent fellow had some ground
for his boast.34 The following essays present Cobbett both as a great enlightener
and a writer shaped by the transatlantic Enlightenment.
Cobbett grew up in the period described by Palmer as The Age of the
Democratic Revolution and his boyhood coincided with the era of the Wilkite
agitation and the American Revolution.35 One of his earliest memories was of
attending the great hop-fair at Weyhill in the autumn of 1776 when news of the
British capture of Long Island was brought in, leading to a lengthy and acrimonious debate. Cobbett and his father were among that part of the company which
retired to an apartment where Washingtons health, and success to the Ameri-

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cans, were repeatedly toasted.36 Thus Cobbett was aware of the Atlantic world
and the events which were shaking it from an early age. He cut his journalistic
teeth in the United States during the 1790s, after an abortive attempt to live in
France in order to learn French. One of his earliest works Le Tuteur Anglais was
for teaching French people English, written at Wilmington and published in
Philadelphia in March 1795. He had certainly read Condorcet and Rousseau
and was to make his living as a journalist, editor and bookseller, with a sideline in farming and horticultural business. He was almost quintessentially part
of the transatlantic radical world and engaged for most of his life in relentless,
even manic efforts to represent his views in print and to communicate them to
the wider world. Insofar as the Enlightenment meant the application of critical reasoning to problems, in order to ameliorate conditions and create a more
harmonious, tolerant and virtuous society and government, then Cobbett lies in
the mainstream. Insofar as it depended on communication and the exchange of
ideas, it was his lifes work. He saw his role as educative and for all his crankiness
pursued causes which, in the main, formed part of what would later be called the
liberal agenda: the franchise, the defence of the rights of the poor, careers open
to talents, natural education, milder punishments and the freedom of the press.
Cobbetts political life revolved around writing and journalism and perhaps too
little attention has been given to the literary world he inhabited. His publishing
career was part of the explosion of literary activity and the reading public during
his lifetime. By the 1790s, there were nearly a thousand outlets for books in over
three hundred towns in Britain. Cobbett made a career in a booming but highly
competitive market. In the 1760s there were already thirty periodicals published
in London, by 1800 more than eighty. The Register, launched in 1802, was by no
means certain of success. That Cobbett was not only to compete but attained the
largest circulation by 1810 was no small achievement and one that remains somewhat underplayed. In a similar way, there has been little attempt to place Cobbett
within the great literary archipelago of late Hanoverian and Regency London, a
world which stretched from the genteel camp of liberal writers, populated by
men and women of large vision and good taste to the squalid and impecunious
quarters inhabited by authors of partial vision, venal aspiration, and grovelling
subordination.37 Cobbett knew both, having worked in the early 1790s with libellers and pornographers, such as James Ridgway, in producing The Soldiers Friend
and, on his own admission, narrowly avoided becoming a government-paid hack,
another distinct rung in the hierarchy of literary London.38 Instead, in maintaining
his independence after 1802, Cobbett rubbed shoulders with other more respectable members of the London literary world. He employed Hazlitt and was visited
by Godwin in prison. The Register was published alongside the Edinburgh Review,
The Examiner and Quarterly Review, as well as the long-established, older monthly
periodicals like the Gentlemans Magazine. Cobbett outsold them all. Not enough
attention has been devoted to what he actually did for long periods of his life, the

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11

practical business or the weekly chore of writing and editing the Register, turning
out books and pamphlets and engaging with his rivals in print. Much of Cobbetts
writing was directed not only at expressing his own views but also a continuous and
sometimes wearying war of words with the ministerial press and any opinions other
than his own. Its character was often forensic and practical; Cobbett cited statistics,
often copiously drawn from government reports. Facts, where he could find them,
were deployed in support of his views in almost every argument he conducted. He
believed himself a shrewd man of business who could deal with the nations finances
on equal terms with anyone and also knew the best way to construct a farm gate.
This obsession with information and facts exists alongside a more sentimental
side to his character, which is less well-known. He often wrote in the language of
sensibility; Cobbett the man of feeling was represented in the young husband
recalled with exquisite self-consciousness in his Advice to a Lover, the father who
was happy to write at the kitchen table with young children about him and the chivalrous defender of Queen Caroline in 1820, who took up her cause because she was
an injured woman.39 Indeed, Cobbetts journalism responds to the events of the
day in a way that is at once practical and sentimental. He had little patience with the
view that the French Revolution had been caused by the writings of Enlightenment
philosophes, insisting that it was solely the product of material conditions:

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It has been the fashion to ascribe the French Revolution to the writings of Voltaire,
Rousseau, Diderot, and others. These writings had nothing at all to do with the matter: no, nothing at all. The Revolution was produced by taxes, which at last became
unbearable; by debts of the State; but, in fact, by the despair of the people, produced
by the weight of the taxes.40

At other times, however, he evinced an archetypal Romantic faith in the French

Revolution as a beacon of liberty. A few weeks after Waterloo, he published an open
letter to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, dismissing the triumphalism of the
loyalist press and moving from hard-headed realism, based on a bleak assessment of
national finances, to radical utopianism, founded on the French Revolution:
The Courier says: The play is over; let us go to supper John Bull has been made
to believe, that, if Napoleon could but be gotten rid of, England would be freed from
all the calamities which she feels; that she would once more come back to her former
state The play may be over; but oh! no! we cannot go to supper. We have something to do. We have forty-five millions a year for ever to pay for the play. This is no
pleasant thing. But, indeed, the play is not over. The first act is, perhaps, closed. But,
that grand revolution, that bright star, which first burst forth in the year 1789, is still
sending forth its light over the world. In that year, feudal and ecclesiastical tyranny,
ignorance, superstition, received the first heavy blow; they have since received others;
and in spite of all that can be now done in their favour, they are destined to perish.41

In the ensuing years, the focus of the Political Register, which had concentrated
on foreign affairs up to Waterloo, turned to domestic topics, and above all to

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the distress caused by demobilization, unemployment, high prices and heavy

taxation. The Twopenny Trash enabled Cobbett to address new sections of the
population and was continued from exile on Long Island in 181719 following
the suspension of Habeas Corpus.
Following his return to England, and in the wake of the repressive measures
of the Six Acts (1819) which trebled the price of the Political Register, Cobbett
produced an extraordinary series of books, including Cottage Economy (1822),
A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (18247), Advice
to Young Men (1829) and Rural Rides(1830). These books all explore, in practical and historical terms, and through vivid reportage, questions of community:
how is it created and destroyed, who does it include or exclude, is it still possible
in the modern world? These questions are variously pursued through a guide
to independent rural living, a history of pre-Reformation hospitality and poor
relief, a conduct book for those in the middle and higher ranks of life and a
series of fact-finding tours of southern England. The last of these, Rural Rides,
represents one of the lost landscapes of British Romanticism and one that was,
through Cobbetts voluminous journalism, as visible to contemporary readers as
Wordsworths Lakes or Scotts Borders. Unlike these more canonically Romantic
locales, Cobbetts is a southern and settled landscape, and his locus amoenus or
rural idyll is vividly conveyed in his descriptions of chalk land, open downs and
rich valleys: large sweeping downs, and deep dells here and there, with villages
amongst lofty trees, are my great delight.42 This cherished landscape combines
practical considerations about food, shelter and, crucially, the most hospitable
conditions for the rural poor, with an aesthetic and affective gravitation towards
the landscape of his childhood on the border of Surrey and Hampshire. He was
drawn back to this territory, but recognized that he was too restless to settle in
one place: as he wrote in one letter home, This sort of roving life seems to suit
me exceedingly.43 His tours were punctuated by Rustic Harangues, addresses
to farmers at public houses and county meetings. They were also framed as a
campaign against London, the city he now characterized as the Great Wen:
a swelling or sebaceous cyst on the body politic. This way of viewing Londons
rapid growth was a familiar trope from eighteenth-century newspapers, novels and poems. In Tobias Smolletts novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
(1771), Matthew Bramble describes how the capital is become an overgrown
monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities
without nourishment and support What wonder that our villages are depopulated, and our farms in want of day-labourers?.44 In Rural Rides, Cobbett took
this dystopian vision of London and made it famous.
By this time, Cobbetts concerns were in tune with a new generation gradually
awakening to the scale of the changes that were beginning to affect Old England.
Growing concern was increasingly voiced through comparisons with the Middle
Ages so often, that John Stuart Mill in 1831 considered it the dominant idea

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of the age.45 When Cobbett gazed at Salisbury Cathedral, the pinnacle of Early
English Gothic, and felt that he lived in degenerate times, he spoke for a whole
generation. A few miles away, the Accursed Hill of Old Sarum, a medieval
town that had deteriorated into the most notorious of rotten boroughs, with
only seven electors, symbolized the entire system of Old Corruption. When,
on his way across the fields to Salisbury, Cobbett met a man coming home from
work who told him they make it bad for poor people, he replied, it is not they;
it is that Accursed Hill that has robbed you of the supper that you ought to
find smoking on the table when you get home I gave him the price of a pot
of beer, and on I went, leaving the poor dejected assemblage of skin and bone
to wonder at my words. Salisbury itself, he reported, which is one of the rotten boroughs of Wiltshire, and which was formerly a considerable town, is now
but a very miserable affair.46 In this climate, Cobbetts History of the Protestant
Reformation struck a powerful chord, placing him in the Romantic context of
Pugins Contrasts, published the year after Cobbetts death, and Disraelis Young
England. Cobbett, like many others, found in medieval Catholicism a more harmonious social order than the world he saw about him. The destruction of the
charities and hospitals, with which the monasteries succoured the poor only in
order to enrich the Crown and its cronies was condemned out of hand as a disaster for the common people. Similarly, his opposition to the New Poor Law in
1834 was based on his view that it represented the ultimate abrogation by the
landed classes of their mutual obligations to the poor.47
After his death in 1835, Cobbetts writings became an important influence on
Chartism, as explored in the essays in this volume by Matthew Roberts and Malcolm Chase. Many Chartists described their first exposure to Cobbetts ideas as a
formative experience and were inspired by his example. His ideas were, however, a
decidedly mixed legacy for the radical movement and it is no coincidence that the
most Cobbettian title in the Chartist press, the Northern Liberator, was also the
most anti-Semitic. Cobbetts writings continued to influence a rural strain within
popular radicalism and would inspire leading figures in the labour movement. In
a Fabian Society pamphlet of 1925, Cole gave the following verdict:

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He had, in a sense, no message or gospel to proclaim. He is not, like his contemporary

Robert Owen, the father or founder of many of the movements of our time. He was
not a theorist; he could never form judgments that went beyond the lessons of his own
immediate experience But he was right about the main thing, that he saw the people
oppressed and degraded, and that he fought every oppressor with all his might, and
with a deep sagacity that struck down beneath the facile optimism of the political economists and the rising middle-class Cobbett is, indeed, the one British working-class
leader who has in him also the makings of a national hero. Would there were more!48

Post-war pioneers of cultural studies and popular history recognized Cobbetts

significance and identified with the idiosyncratic character that his writings convey. Richard Hoggart lived in and wrote about Cobbetts birthplace of Farnham,

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and acknowledged some of Cobbetts qualities in himself, notably his driven

puritanism.49 The patriotism, paternalism and puritanism of Cobbetts writing,
with its continual privileging of the empirical over the theoretical, has strong
affinities with the work of Hoggart, as well as that of E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, who both wrote extensively and perceptively about Cobbett.50
The contribution of these leading post-war public intellectuals played a key role in
sustaining and shaping Cobbetts reputation at the end of the twentieth century.
The essays that follow offer fresh perspectives on Cobbett from a broad range
of disciplines, including Romantic and Victorian literary studies, political and
social history, sociology and economics. Taken together, they present Cobbett as
a product of the Enlightenment and Romanticism and as a writer with a distinct
and diverse set of legacies in British culture and continued relevance for the present day. We have arranged them in broadly chronological order, examining new
contexts for Cobbetts work before engaging with his multifarious afterlives. The
first essay, by Gregory Claeys, situates Cobbetts lament for an idealized lost past
within the utopian tradition. The concept of utopia, defined as an imaginary
space of greater contentment and enhanced sociability, allows Claeys to explore
Cobbetts emphasis on mutual respect and a much more communal system of
production and social welfare. Cobbetts utopia, rooted in the hospitality of
pre-Reformation Britain, and the plain manners and plentiful living he recalled
from his youth, was a standard against which the present could be measured and
found wanting. Happiness, Cobbett wrote, is to be found only in independence. Claeys shows how, for Cobbett, independence required being able to live
upon little, to resist indulgence in those artificial wants which were created by
deleterious fashion, and bore little relation to later ideas of individual autonomy.
He concludes by reflecting on the continued relevance of Cobbetts utopianism.
The next two essays examine Cobbetts eighteenth-century inheritance, picking up themes in his early writing that continue to resonate through his later
career. John Stevenson explores the different dimensions of Cobbetts patriotism:
a concept fundamental to almost all his writings on politics and the general state
of the nation. This drove him to overt displays of patriotic identity in Philadelphia during the 1790s and, following his return to England, led him to oppose
the Peace of Amiens. On the resumption of hostilities, the government commissioned Cobbett to write a rousing call to arms that was sent to every parish
in England and Wales. Within a few years, however, Cobbetts patriotism was
directed against corruption in government and in defence of the rural poor. Stevenson reads Cobbetts oppositional patriotism as an extension of the Country
Party platform and discusses the complexity of terms such as loyalist and conservative in this period. Differentiating Cobbetts patriotism from Linda Colleys
seminal description of an anti-French and anti-Catholic Britishness, he shows
how Cobbett combined patriotism with support for parliamentary reform in

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Britain and the July Revolution in France. The following essay, by James Grande,
takes as its point of departure Cobbetts description of reading Jonathan Swifts
A Tale of a Tub, aged eleven: it produced what I have always considered a sort of
birth of intellect. Grande traces the changing place of Swift in Cobbetts work,
from his appropriation of Gullivers Voyage to Laputa to satirize what he saw as
the abstract intellectualism of Thomas Jeffersons Republicans, to the Swiftian
inspiration for his campaign against financial speculation and the National Debt.
The essay places Cobbetts reading within the broader Romantic period reception
of Swift and concludes by exploring the two writers intertwined critical legacies,
asking why such abrasive and often reactionary figures have remained so popular,
and particularly among writers on the progressive left.
The next group of essays show Cobbett at the height of his radical career.
John Gardner focuses on one of the most turbulent, complex and trying years in
Cobbetts life: from his arrival in England in November 1819, after self-imposed
exile in America, until his trial for libel in December 1820. Alongside Cobbetts
return to England with Paines bones, his campaign for parliamentary election
at Coventry and his support for Queen Caroline, Gardner illuminates some of
the more obscure alliances and fractures within the reform movement, including
accusations by William Hone that Cobbett was a government spy. Hones family
certainly believed that Cobbett tried to implicate Hone in the Cato Street conspiracy and such suspicions suggest the atmosphere of mistrust, even paranoia,
at this moment of political crisis. The events of this year also produced some
unlikely outcomes, including Cobbetts friendship with the surgeon Thomas
Wakley : a friendship that helped bring about the arrival of the journal The Lancet a Political Register for the medical profession. In the next essay, Ruth Livesey
explores the place of the mail coach in the radical imagination through Cobbett
and Hazlitts writings on communication networks and narratives of progress.
Livesey shows how, for Cobbett, mail coaches and turnpike roads are symbols
of corruption; in response, Rural Rides offers one long reflection on the value of
going off-road, reclaiming a landscape that was being cut across by lines of hard
macadamized roads, hard cash and high-speed travel. She contrasts this form of
radicalism, invested in an idea of localized common sense that was preyed upon
by national networks, with the representation of the mail coach in Hazlitts final
essay, The Letter Bell. Hazlitt gives a much more optimistic account of the mail
coach system, viewing it as a means to mobilize public opinion and construct an
affective community. Finally, in this section, Alex Benchimol focuses on a littleknown sequel to Rural Rides, Cobbetts Tour in Scotland (1833). In the context
of proposals to bring the English Poor Law in line with the system in Scotland,
where there was no right to able-bodied belief, Cobbetts Scottish tour takes
him to the heartlands of what he called the Scotch system, allowing him to see
for himself the material effects of liberal political economy on Scotlands labour-

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ing classes and report back to his English audience of what may lie in store for
them. This produces a description of the desperate conditions of Scottish farm
labourers and a trenchant critique of the steam-engine farm system of industrial agriculture. Scottish farms, Cobbett reports, are in fact, factories for making
corn and meat. In response, Cobbett appeals for an alliance between Scottish
and English labourers; an ideological gesture, Benchimol writes, that will recur,
with considerable resonance, in his 1834 Tour of Ireland.
Cobbetts legacy for Chartism has been all but ignored by historians of nineteenth-century radicalism; the two essays that follow take up this important and
neglected topic. The point of departure for Matthew Roberts is the year 1900, as
imagined by the Northern Liberator in 1838. In this millenarian vision, Cobbetts
prescriptions on public finance have prevailed: the National Debt and paper
money have been abolished, government is small and cheap and high taxation is
a thing of the past. Roberts argues that an evolving critique of Old Corruption
was central to early Chartist ideology and shows how hostility to paper money
was part of a wider radical critique of unequal exchange that helped to shape
working-class political economy. He argues that the importance of the currency
question only declined after the collapse of the first Chartist Convention and
then as a result of the fiscal reforms carried out by Robert Peels government: with
the Bank Charter Act of 1844, Peel had finally laid the ghost of the gridiron to
rest. Malcolm Chase examines Cobbetts position in a radical culture of tradition and commemoration before examining the much more equivocal role played
by his sons. While Anne Cobbett continued the family publishing business, her
brothers vacillated between trading-off their fathers illustrious reputation and
trying to establish themselves as political actors in their own right. Following his
election to the National Convention as a representative of Manchester, Richard
Cobbetts relations with Lancashire Chartists were stormy and he failed to take
up his seat, while James Paul Cobbett attended the Convention as a delegate
for the West Riding of Yorkshire but quickly resigned over the question of the
Conventions authority and proposals to move from moral to physical force. A
third son, John Morgan Cobbett, was elected to his fathers old parliamentary
seat of Oldham but crossed the floor of the Commons and later represented the
borough as a Conservative. Chase contrasts the careers of Cobbetts sons with
Cobbetts own, totemic status within the Chartist pantheon.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Cobbetts legacy underwent a transformation that was just as dramatic as the ideological revolution
that followed his return from America in 1800. While Victorian readers had
primarily remembered Cobbett as a popular tribune, in the twentieth century
he became known, above all, as a chronicler of rural England. Clare Griffithss
essay traces the course of his most famous work through the Everyman edition,
the Coles sumptuous centenary edition and tours of Cobbett Country by a

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galaxy of writers, journalists and broadcasters, including Edward Thomas, F. E.

Green, H. Rider Haggard, James Wentworth Day, Margaret Leigh and George
Winder. Rural Rides became indelibly associated with certain kinds of journeys,
landscapes and Englishness and was most often (but not exclusively) appropriated by figures on the conservative or libertarian right. No longer a trailblazing
radical, Cobbett was now celebrated as a great ruralist, who offered a nostalgic
evocation of the English countryside. These latter-day rural rides on horseback, bicycle or by car suggest that rural England may have been eclipsed as
a dominant way of life, but was taking on renewed significance in British culture. The final essay, by Craig Calhoun, argues that in order to understand the
relevance of Cobbetts writings for the present day, we must first recognize the
artificiality of the Left-Right spectrum. This continuum is in large part a product of nineteenth-century liberalism and distorts our reading of a figure such as
Cobbett, who was consistently out of step with each of the main emerging ideological positions that grew through the nineteenth century and dominated in
the twentieth. Cobbett, alongisde Burke, was one of the first great questioners
of the ideology of progress; he is also (this time with Paine) a reminder of how
capitalist transformation and economic dislocation have recurrently generated
populist rather than specifically class responses. For the last forty years, Calhoun writes, we have been living through transformations not altogether unlike
the era of the first industrial revolution. In this context, Cobbetts rallying cry of
1816 to the journeymen and labourers, we want great alteration, but we want
nothing new, takes on considerable resonance.

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