Invader
Linda Colley, 9 July 1987
Richard Cobden: A Victorian Outsider
by Wendy Hinde.
Yale, 379 pp., £14.95, April 1987,0 300 03880 1 Show More
by Wendy Hinde.
Yale, 379 pp., £14.95, April 1987,
Richard Cobden: Independent Radical
by Nicholas Edsall.
Harvard, 479 pp., £23.95, February 1987,0 674 76879 5 Show More
by Nicholas Edsall.
Harvard, 479 pp., £23.95, February 1987,
“... Richard Cobden is not a man for all seasons, but his life, career and values have been interpreted in widely different ways at different times. When he died in 1865, he was mourned by many as a secular saint. The majority remembered his leadership of one of the most triumphantly successful pressure groups in British history, the Anti-Corn Law League; and a minority honoured his uncompromising and frequently unpopular opposition to war: ‘seldom has hero rested, stained by so superb a fault ... ”