ABSTRACT
This is a sure-footed imitation of William Cobbett in rabble-rousing mode. Drawing on the Rural Rides essays which began in the Political Register in 1822, Patmore mines Cobbett’s vein of tub-thumping satirical polemic against the land-owning aristocracy. Also hovering behind the imitation is Cottage Economy (1821-2), Cobbett’s treatise on self-sufficiency (or the ‘spirit of independence’ as the imitation calls it). Patmore’s Cobbett offers the customary eulogistic treatment of the sturdy English yeoman (and his wife) and engages in ritual assaults on paper money, high taxation and the establishment (‘rich parsons and parliament-men’). The Register’s bêtes noires are cudgelled (The Times, Turnpike Trusts and Jewish financiers) and ‘W. C.’ settles personal scores with journalistic rivals: James Perry and Cobbett’s quondam friend William Clement. Cobbett’s artfully artless conversational prose style is ably captured and Patmore catches the typographical manner of the Register with paragraph numbering allied to a jumble of small caps, exclamation points and emphatic italicisation. Here Cobbett is sometimes portrayed in a rather unflattering light; Patmore wields the Register’s blunter weaponry, notably its brand of enthusiastic anti-Semitism, self-congratulatory bombast and appeals to class enmity. The adjective applied to Clement in the imitation, ‘bull-necked’, characterises the Cobbett evident in ‘Rich and Poor’.
