ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 traces the legacy of William Cobbett. Cobbett has long been hailed as one of the foremost radical leaders of the early nineteenth century. Perhaps Cobbett’s greatest contribution to radicalism during his own lifetime and beyond was his demonology: a melodramatic cast of villains who were responsible for the ills of society, all part of the same system, or ‘the THING’ as he termed Old Corruption. Historians have long recognised that one of these villains was the financier and his paper money or ‘filthy rags’ as Cobbett dubbed them, explored most fully in his famous Paper Against Gold, a series of letters he began in 1811 whilst incarcerated in Newgate prison and eventually published as a volume in 1815. Yet there has been little discussion in the historiography on this key aspect of Cobbettite radicalism which has been too easily dismissed as one of his more eccentric and simplistic obsessions. By the time the Chartists came of age, the weight of opinion within Chartism was for gold rather than paper, and for both ideological reasons and strategic considerations. For reasons explored in this chapter, from being regularly discussed and debated in the late 1830s, by the mid-1840s the currency question featured much less often in Chartist discourse, and with it the influence of Cobbett also receded.
