ABSTRACT
George Bernard Shaw, renowned for his own scathing wit, once declared Karl Marx, John Ruskin and William Cobbett the three masters of nineteenth-century invective. Cobbett certainly deserves inclusion among such an august trio and was unsparing in his often highly personal attacks on individuals and institutions. Cobbett, however, levelled a more specific charge at the 'parson' and his followers, one which many others before him had made and which Thomas Robert Malthus himself, as early as 1807 in his Letter to Whitbread, had described with some anguish, as 'accusations of "hardness of heart"'. In addition, the following analysis seeks to improve on the historiography concerning these two figures and especially to give Malthus a more central place in Cobbett's thought. Cobbett, like Harriet Martineau, was very conscious of his audience and was determined, moreover, that his works reached the non-literate and semi-literate.
