ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Cobbett's version of the plebeian cultural vision that animated the writings of the two other radical intellectuals. The distinctive cultural context of the radical plebeian public sphere was both the setting and the springboard for this new expression of radical cultural politics. The plebeian cultural life world in the taverns and alehouses of radical London exhibited practices like group drinking and toasting, and the singing of seditious ballads, as symbolic public acts of rebuke to the new ethic of puritanical morality promoted by the contemporary social institutions of industrial capitalism. The spaces of radical sociability in the Spencean underground, and the forms of democratic fellowship they promoted, are implicitly equated with the popular celebrations of Biblically-sanctioned holidays. Cobbett's work is perhaps the most coherent literary expression of an oppositional-residual cultural politics in the Romantic period, illustrating how a serious reform programme in the present can be constructed around an imaginative re-conception of the moral past.
