Introduction

This volume opens with Cobbett imprisoned in Newgate for two years. He had been convicted of seditious libel for criticising the flogging of soldiers at Ely who had ‘mutinied’ over a minor issue concerning pay. Cobbett’s period of incarceration turns him irrevocably against the Establishment, and during this period of enforced sequestration from daily life he finds the intellectual framework within which to develop his own form of radicalism. The central figure in this process is Thomas Paine.