Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T15:20:19.687Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

William Cobbett: Patriot or Briton?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

John Stevenson
John Stevenson
Affiliation:
The University of Edinburgh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Cobbett remains best known to historians and to a wider audience as one of the two or three major figures in the popular radicalism of the early nineteenth century: one of the leading actors in the agitations which eventually led to the Great Reform Act of 1832 and a persistent tribune of the people at a time of profound economic and social change. Fundamental to his influence and reputation was his career as a popular journalist, in his own time regarded as a phenomenon and capable of almost single-handedly turning the labouring poor from machine-breaking and insurrection into more peaceful and productive paths. Famously, Cobbett was envisaged in Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical as the instrument whereby the disturbances of the post-war years were channelled into parliamentary reform. Opening his account of 1816 with a great litany of riot, insurrection and distress, Bamford noted that it was also in 1816 that Cobbett wrote his Address to the Journeymen and Labourers, published in November 1816 as the sole contents of the first cheap edition of the Register, priced at twopence. Cobbett's linking of ‘our present miseries’ to the need for parliamentary reform had an immense circulation, reaching an estimated 200,000 within two months. Its effects were no less dramatic according to Bamford:

… the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of ‘South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 6 , December 1996 , pp. 123 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bamford, S., Passages in the Life of a Radical (Fitzroy edn, Dublin, 1967), 13Google Scholar.

2 Endpiece, to Cobbett's Two-Penny Trash or Politics for the Poor (London, 1831), 262–3Google Scholar.

3 For a recent review of Cobbett's literary output, see Nattrass, L., William Cobbett: The Politics of Style (Cambridge, 1995), 1–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spater, G., William Cobbett: The Poor Man's Friend (2 vols., Cambridge, 1982), II, 443–5Google Scholar; Altick, R., The English Common Reader (London 1957)Google Scholar, Appendix B. The last reference I owe to F.G.A.M. Aarts, ‘William Cobbett: Radical, Reactionary and Poor Man's Grammarian’, Neophiklopus, LXX (1986), 606Google Scholar.

4 Nuffield College Library, Cole Collection, Cobbatt Papers, Vol. XXIX, Letters 1806–1812Google Scholar.

5 Hazlitt, W., ‘Character of Cobbett’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Howe, P.P. (21 vols., London, 1931), VIII, 50Google Scholar.

6 Hunt, Leigh, White Hat, 13 11 1819Google Scholar, quoted in Wickwar, W.H., The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819–1832 (London, 1928), 52–3Google Scholar; cited by Nattrass, , William Cobbett, 5Google Scholar.

7 Political Register, 11 Feb. 1816.

8 Cole, G.D.H., The Life of William Cobbett(3rd edn, London, 1947), 11Google Scholar.

9 See Stevenson, J., ‘Social Aspects of the Industrial Revolution’, in O'Brien, P. and Quinault, R. (eds.), The Industrial Revolution and British Society (Cambridge, 1993), 229–32, 249– 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See Wiener, M.J., English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar.

11 Cole, , Cobbett, 19Google Scholar.

12 The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Waller, A.R. and Glover, A. (12 vols., London, 1902), II, 156Google Scholar.

13 Rubinstein, W.D., ‘British Radicalism and the “Dark Side” of Populism’, in Elites and the Wealthy in Modem British Society (Bighton, 1987), 339–73Google Scholar; see also Schweizer, K.W. and Osborne, J.W., Cobbett in his Times (Leicester, 1990), 70–7Google Scholar.

14 Reitzel, W. (ed.), The Autobiography of William Cobbett (London, 1957), 193Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., 190.

16 See Green, D. (ed.), Cobbett's Tour in Scotland by William Cobbett (Aberdeen, 1957), 193Google Scholar.

17 Reitzel, , Autobiography, 194–5Google Scholar.

18 Best, G., ‘The Making of die English Working Class’, Historical Journal, VIII (1965), 278Google Scholar.

19 See Rubinstein, ‘Dark Side’, passim.

20 Speck, W.A., Society and Literature in England, 1700–60 (Dublin, 1983), 1–13Google Scholar. For the fullest exposition of ‘Country Ideology’ see Dickinson, H.T., Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), 153–92Google Scholar.

21 Speck, , Society and Literature, 6–7Google Scholar.

22 Dickinson, , Liberty and Property, 169–70Google Scholar.

23 Reitzel, , Autobiography, 89Google Scholar.

24 Political Register, 7 June 1806.

25 Reitzel, , Autobiography, 214Google Scholar.

26 Huntingdon Library, letter to Mr. John Tredwell, 28 March 1832.

27 See Eastwood, D., ‘Patriotism and the English State in the 1790s’, in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Philip, M. (Cambridge, 1991), 146–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Colley, L., ‘Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830’, Past and Present, CXIII (1986), 97–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Nattrass, , William Cobbett, 21–2Google Scholar.

30 See Dyck, I., William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge, 1992), 21Google Scholar.

31 See Stevenson, J., ‘The Queen Caroline Affair’, in London in the Age of Reform, ed. Stevenson, J. (Oxford, 1977), 123, 134Google Scholar; also Nuffield College, Cole Collection, vol. XXX, William Cobbett to Samuel Clarke, 17 Aug. 1821.

32 Colley, L., Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Havenand London, 1992), esp. 1–9Google Scholar.

33 Political Register, 11 March 1834.

34 For Cobbett's use of Lingard, see Nattrass, , William Cobbett, 157–82, esp. 172 ffGoogle Scholar.

35 See Stafford, W., Socialism, Radicalism, and Nostalgia: Social Criticism in Britain, 1775–1830 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 264CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Cobbett, W., Advice to Young Men (1829), para. 44Google Scholar.

37 Cobbett, W., Advice to a Lover (London, 1937), 60–1Google Scholar.