ABSTRACT
William Cobbett was one of the most inuential and singular English writers of the past three centuries. His talents as a journalist, political agitator, and commentator on the changing face of the country have earned him a place which remains unique both in the range of his subjects and the breadth of his admirers. Fresh from a career in the army where he had largely educated himself, he cut his journalistic teeth as the hammer of the radicals, the early supporters of the French Revolution, pursuing them with almost unrivalled venom and ferocity. Before long, however, his vehement prose found its targets in government corruption and its conduct of the Napoleonic Wars. For a period at least, his most potent vehicle, the Political Register, was read by high and low alike, his opinions reaching the village tavern, the cabins of men o’war and the drawing rooms of politicians. Such inuence created powerful enemies drawing upon Cobbett’s head prosecution, imprisonment and temporary exile as well as direct attacks in print and caricature. Nonetheless, Cobbett the ‘Great Agitator’ was credited by contemporaries with turning distressed labourers from riot and machine-breaking to the petitions and meetings which helped to bring about the Great Reform Act of 1832. But reform politics was only part of his remit. He inveighed against the poverty and degradation he believed had developed amongst the common labourers since the time of his youth and the taxes and corruption which he believed produced them; he defended the poor against grasping parsons, beguiling Methodists and ‘Scotch feelosophers’, while oering them advice on bettering their own lives through self-help and careful ‘cottage economy’. His views and opinions ranged as widely as his readers, on everything from growing melons to choosing a wife, expressed with a vigour and style all his own. Undoubtedly Cobbett was a great bundle of opinions and prejudices, inevitably oen contradicting himself, but always retaining the unmistakable stamp of the man. As his rst serious biographer G.D.H. Cole remarked: ‘Cobbett the Anti-Jacobin and Cobbett the Radical Reformer were denitely the same person. e opinions change, the attitudes remain at bottom the same.’1
