Search Results

“... It is partly because so much appears to be known about William Cobbett (1763-1835) that he is insufficiently understood. Few political writers anywhere and at any time have been more prolific or had more impact on their contemporaries. His newspaper The Political Register, which appeared at intervals between 1802 and 1835, sold at its peak of popularity up to 70,000 copies an issue and was read by millions on both sides of the Atlantic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... That same summer George IV died, leaving the throne to his marginally more stable brother William. The death of the king brought a general election, and the Tories were replaced by the Whigs. The chief difference between the two parties was that the Whigs were more sensitive to the growing wrath of the unrepresented upper middle classes. They favoured ...”

“... of the mad perfectibilist schemes of the French Revolutionaries and their English confrères like William Godwin, and damned by others as hardheartedness incarnate. Marie Antoinette had just told the poor to go and eat cake: Malthus trumped her, apparently sentencing them to death by starvation – and all on the strength of the ‘facts’. No wonder Thomas ...”

“... comes into my mind, not perhaps the greatest Englishman, but certainly the runner-up. This is William Cobbett, the People’s Friend. Cobbett was not, like Johnson, a great conversationalist. His conversation must have been pretty boring, being entirely about himself and his achievements, from his political ...”

“... a bad thing, then certainly one not worth spending time acquiring, was the no-nonsense ruralist William Cobbett, who declared that ‘the differences’ in pronunciation ‘are of very little real consequence . . . though the Scotch say coorn, the Londoners cawn, and the Hampshire folk carn, we all know they mean to say corn.’ ...”

“... his mindset differs from that of most of the country writers who have stayed with me indelibly: William Cobbett of Rural Rides, a farmer’s son and himself a farmer from time to time; John Muir of My First Summer in the Sierra, a farmer’s son and farmer; and Lewis Grassic Gibbon of A Scots Quair, a farmer’s son from the Mearns in north-east ...”

“... paper chase at the British Library, where his archive arrived as late as 1995. In the early 1800s, William Bray, a solicitor and antiquarian, and William Upcott, a librarian whose address was Autograph Cottage and who was a notorious ‘collector’ of other people’s unconsidered trifles, arrived at Wotton and were invited ...”

“... a fault.’ A special train was laid on from London to take the great and the good to his funeral; William Gladstone helped to carry his coffin; statues were raised by public subscription; and the London and provincial presses enshrined his memory in laudatory poems and improving books for the young. But it was not to last. When John Morley published his ...”

“... in 1821 that the population had surged from ten to fourteen million over the previous two decades, William Cobbett responded that ‘a man that can suck that in will believe, literally believe, that the moon is made of green cheese.’ As late as 1931, it was discovered that one enumerator, committed to a mental hospital, had prepared fictitious returns ...”

“... productive Yorkshire visionary inspired intense admiration and loathing in roughly equal measure. William Hazlitt, no mean polemicist himself, judged Priestley ‘the best controversialist in his day, and one of the best in the language’. Youthful intellectuals of the Revolutionary epoch such as Coleridge saw him as their ‘patriot and ...”

“... that matter – spotting conspiracies where others see epidemics: no less a man of the people than William Cobbett was adamant that Asiatic cholera itself was a fiction invented by the powers-that-be to hold the masses in terror. Indeed, as Steve Watkins underlines in his book, the Left in many of its moods has traditionally suspected that the medical ...”

“... falling into contempt with the people.’ Taxes were high and times were bad, and journalists like William Cobbett were radicalising popular opinion by lambasting ‘Old Corruption’. Parliament, Cobbett stormed, was ruining the nation it no longer represented. An oligarchy of aristocrats and financiers, having ...”

“... Cromwell. His contemporary Cardinal Reginald Pole called him ‘an agent of Satan’, while for William Cobbett he was ‘the most mean and dastardly’ of ‘all the mean and dastardly wretches that ever died’. He had, after all, overseen the dissolution of the monasteries, whose absence from the landscape ...”

“... unhappiness of their readers. The Lancet, for example, modelled its aggressive style on that of William Cobbett, who constituted one quarter of its editorial board; perhaps for this reason, a libel lawyer constituted another quarter. The contentious columns of these publications were not, however, exclusively devoted to matters of class interest, at ...”