Everybody’s Friend

D.A.N. Jones

  • William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend by George Spater
    Cambridge, 318 pp, £15.00, March 1982, ISBN 0 521 22216 8

When William Cobbett was about forty he brought out a weekly paper that has dictated the style and shape of British and American journalism ever since. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register came out almost every week from 1802 until his death in 1835. According to George Spater, this once powerful paper is now largely forgotten ‘except by historians who occasionally take a hasty glance here and there into its vast bulk of some 42,000 pages’. The existence of that bulk represents part of the difficulty in writing a fullscale biography of this brilliant and influential journalist. One needs to know about all the things Cobbett wrote about.

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