ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the place of the mail-coach in the political culture of the 1820s, to close with the radical journalist, William Hazlitt's, last 'The Letter Bell'. The communication locality preoccupied Hazlitt's posthumously published work, where the national mail is at the heart of a fine web of associations between Utilitarian radicalism, local belonging and constancy of the self. For many of Hazlitt's fellow radicals and journalists, not least Cobbett, the mail-coach system, and the Government regulation of circulation of knowledge, had been the subject of a long struggle for freedom from the turn of the century. William Cobbett's decision to turn off the turnpike roads in his 'Rural Rides' during the 1820s is, in this context, a decidedly political gesture. Cobbett's Rural Rides, as a result, are one long reflection on the value of going off-road and finding what gets left out of modernity's systems of progress and improvement.
