COBBETT, WILLIAM

COBBETT, WILLIAM (1763–1835), English journalist and essayist known as the "poor man's friend."

William Cobbett, a plowboy turned self-taught writer, achieved enduring fame and transient fortune through the power of his brilliant and vitriolic pen, publishing some thirty million words over the course of forty years. Having come to notice for his vigorous defense of the British establishment under the pen name Peter Porcupine, Cobbett changed his politics but not his unbuttoned style and converted to radicalism in horror at the scandals and incompetence revealed during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1802 he established the weekly Political Register to expose the workings of "the Thing," the war-einflated rentier culture of political corruption and financial plunder that imposed an intolerable tax burden on the poor. The first periodical to introduce a leading article as a regular feature, the Register was to run for eighty-nine volumes, or some 402,000 pages, until his death. Cobbett also undertook other major publishing ventures linked to his commitment to open access to public information, which he saw as the necessary first stage in political education toward the panacea of parliamentary reform: these included the publication of a complete collection of state trials and the collecting and printing of parliamentary debates, a project he was soon forced to sell to the printer T. C. Hansard, who was to gain eponymous credit for this enduring and indispensable public service. No less important were Cobbett's efforts to broaden the audience by a number of innovations and exercises (including self-help spelling and grammar guides) in cheap publication. Here the agenda extended no further than the political basics: no space was allowed for the theoretical stuff and nonsense of those he termed (with characteristic prejudice) "Scottish feelosofers." The self-proclaimed "poor man's friend," Cobbett brought out a special cheap broadsheet edition in 1816 of his weekly Register, promptly dubbed by opponents "two-penny trash," a title he was delighted to appropriate. This was to prove a vital contribution to what historians have called the politicization of discontent: throughout the land, impoverished workers, thrown into dire distress by the transition to peace without plenty after Waterloo, took heed of Cobbett's advice not to riot but to agitate instead for parliamentary reform, their only guarantee of economic amelioration.

When the government shortly afterward introduced special legislation to curb the exponential growth of the radical movement, Cobbett left for the United States, a controversial course of action that allowed him to continue publishing but provoked censure from other radical leaders who remained to contest (and endure) repression. Cobbett returned in late 1819, bearing with him the bones of the republican revolutionary Tom Paine, hallowed testimony, as it were, of his radical credentials. But his reputation remained in question until his whole hearted support (and speechwriting) for Queen Caroline in the unseemly divorce proceedings instigated by George IV on his accession to the throne. When public interest in the affair waned, Cobbett, having established himself as a successful experimental farmer, turned his attention to the depressed state of English agriculture. Relishing the opportunity to escape London, "the Great Wen," he toured his beloved southern England, raising the standard of parliamentary reform at county meetings and conversing on diverse topics with rural laborers, or "chopsticks," the "very best and most virtuous of all mankind." Published in 1830 as evocative travel literature, these Rural Rides, with their occasional detours into the alien North and beyond, have retained a powerful appeal to those whose imagined sense of Englishness centers on an idyllic, preindustrial, anti-urban, southern pastoral. The image was to be complemented by Cobbett's portrayal of social Catholicism, a nostalgic reconstruction (subsequently echoed by late Victorian socialists) of inclusive welfare and care in preindustrial merrie England—a damning benchmark by which to expose and condemn the harsh utilitarianism of the Whig and Benthamite reforms of the 1830s.

Ironically, when Cobbett was able to fulfill his long-held ambition to enter Parliament after the Reform Act of 1832, his constituency, Oldham, was located in the industrial North. By no means the high point of his lengthy public career, his spell in the Commons was also a time of difficulty on his farm in Surrey, which he was compelled to leave to his wife and seven children as a bankrupt estate. This unfortunate ending notwithstanding, Cobbett's reputation has remained high among succeeding generations. The personification of the English yeoman, Cobbett the radical reformer embodied the English sense of fair play, old-time hospitality, and manly sports, hence his continuing appeal across the political spectrum.

See alsoCorn Laws, Repeal of; Great Britain; Press and Newspapers; Trade and Economic Growth.

bibliography

Dyck, Ian. William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

Spater, George. William Cobbett: The Poor Man's Friend. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1982.

John Belchem