ABSTRACT
In his famous 1924 biography of Cobbett, G. D. H. Cole described A History of the Protestant Reformation as ‘to this day among the most widely known and read, though not among the best, of his books’. 1 In the late 1990s the first part of this judgement might be reversed: it is certainly now not the best known and read, having been out of print except in bowdlerized or abbreviated form for over a century. I would also argue, again in contrast to Cole, that it is in fact one of the most interesting and skilfully crafted of all Cobbett’s texts. Its contemporary success and importance especially to the struggle over Poor Law reform, is in part due to its exploitation of rhetorical techniques developed during the period of the twopenny pamphlets, rendering history, like politics, accessible to a newly literate audience while retaining its dialogue with the panoply of elite historical sources it marshals and sometimes distorts. 2
