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| Biography: William Cobbett |
The English radical journalist and politician William Cobbett (1763-1835) was an advocate of parliamentary reform and a critic of the new industrial urban age.
William Cobbett was born at Farnham, Surrey, on March 9, 1763. His father, a small farmer, could afford him little schooling. Cobbett worked briefly with a copying clerk in London in 1783; he enlisted in the army in 1784 and served until 1791, mostly in Canada. In 1792 he wrote a pamphlet exposing military corruption but was unable to supply adequate evidence to press his case and fled to France and then to America.
Writing under the name of "Peter Porcupine" in Philadelphia, he attacked the French Revolution and defended England, then at war with France. During his American sojourn Cobbett wrote numerous pamphlets and founded and edited several small periodicals, including the Political Censor and Porcupine's Gazette. At this stage in his career he was clearly anti-Radical and anti-Jacobin (pro-Federalist and anti-Democrat in American terms). Cobbett savagely criticized the English scientist Joseph Priestley, who had also settled in Philadelphia, for his support of the French Revolution. But criticism of Dr. Benjamin Rush ended Cobbett's American journalistic career; he accused the famous physician and Democrat of killing patients (George Washington, among others) through his bleeding and purging technique. This brought a charge of libel against Cobbett, and he returned to England in 1800.
Britain's Tory government welcomed him as a literary asset in the struggle against republican France. He opened a bookshop in London and in 1802 began his famous Weekly Political Register. Gradually moving toward radicalism, he criticized the government's conduct of the long Napoleonic War. He was especially concerned about the war's economic repercussions on the home front. Because of his criticism of the government's handling of an army mutiny, in 1810 Cobbett was convicted of sedition and imprisoned for 2 years. Upon his release in 1812, he emerged as the great popular spokesman for the working classes. In his new, cheaper Register, he championed parliamentary reform and attacked the government for the high taxation and widespread unemployment of the postwar period.
Cobbett's newfound radicalism alarmed the government, and he went to America in 1817. On his return to England in 1819 Cobbett discovered a new enemy of the people - industrialism - and he repeatedly attacked this development in his famous Rural Rides. These essays, which praise old agricultural England, were first published in the Register and in book form in 1830.
Although his grand projects, the Parliamentary Debates and the Parliamentary History of England, were taken over by others while he was in prison, Cobbett never lost his interest in politics. He ran for Parliament unsuccessfully twice but was elected in 1832 from Oldham, following the acceptance of the Great Reform Bill. The parliamentary reform implemented by the bill fell far short of the demands of Cobbett and the Radicals, since the working class was still denied the vote. He opposed much of the legislation of the new Whig government in the reformed Parliament, especially the New Poor Law of 1834. He died on his farm near Guilford on June 18, 1835.
Cobbett has been praised as the prophet of democracy, but most of his writings look back to the old agrarian England of responsible landlords and contented tenants. He was not a profound thinker; his comments on economic matters were nearly always erroneous. Emotion rather than reason dictated many of his conclusions. But his passion for the interests of the common man and his ability to write in a jargon that was understood by the working class made him the leading English Radical of the early 19th century.
Further Reading
The range in the evaluation of Cobbett is suggested by the two standard biographies: G.D.H. Cole, William Cobbett (1925), views him as a Radical leader of the working classes, while G.K. Chesterton, William Cobbett (1925), considers him a Conservative. More recent biographies of Cobbett are William Baring Pemberton, William Cobbett (1949), and John W. Osborne, William Cobbett: His Thought and His Times (1966). Osborne more than the earlier biographers minimizes Cobbett's significance, calling him "a failure in politics … and of very limited influence in his lifetime." Mary Elizabeth Clark wrote a specialized study, Peter Porcupine in America (1939). There is a provocative chapter on Cobbett in Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1933).
Additional Sources
Booth, Simon, William Cobbett: an introduction to his life and writings, Farnham Eng.: Farnham Museum Society, 1976.
Clark, Mary Elizabeth, Peter Porcupine in America: the career of William Cobbett, 1792-1800, Philadelphia: R. West, 1977 1939.
Cole, G. D. H. (George Douglas Howard), 1889-1959., William Cobbett, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1976; Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.
Green, Daniel, Great Cobbett: the noblest agitator, Oxford Oxfordshire; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, 1983.
Osborne, John Walter, William Cobbett, his thought and his times, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981, 1966.
Schweizer, Karl W., Cobbett in his times, Savage, Md.: Barnes &Noble Books, 1990.
Spater, George, William Cobbett, the poor man's friend, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Williams, Raymond, Cobbett, Oxford Oxfordshire; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
| British History: William Cobbett |
Cobbett, William (1763-1835). Radical journalist whose Political Register (1802-35) was the most influential radical paper of its time. Week after week Cobbett thundered against the political system (‘Old Corruption’). Born and raised on a Surrey farm, Cobbett enlisted in 1784, served in Nova Scotia, and was promoted serjeant-major. On returning to England in 1791 he tried unsuccessfully to expose financial corruption in the regiment, and had to flee to France and then to America. In Philadelphia (1792-9) Cobbett patriotically defended Great Britain, and when he returned to England in 1800 was welcomed as a Tory supporter. However, he soon became disenchanted with what he called ‘The System’ and from 1806 demanded parliamentary reform. Sentenced in 1810 to two years in Newgate gaol for seditious libel, Cobbett was henceforth regarded as a dangerous radical, and when habeas corpus was suspended in 1817 he fled to America. On his return home in 1819 he resumed farming and also wrote some of his finest pieces, published as Rural Rides. He was MP for Oldham in the reformed Parliament of 1833.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: William Cobbett |
Bibliography
See biographies by G. D. H. Cole (3d. ed. 1947, repr. 1971), G. K. Chesterton (1926), J. Sambrook (1973), and G. Spatr (1982).
| Works: Works by William Cobbett |
| 1795 | A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats and A Kick for a Bite. The British journalist, having fled to Philadelphia to avoid a fraud charge, issues the first two in a series of Federalist pamphlets attacking the Republicans. It would be followed by The Scare-Crow (1796) and the scurrilous Life of Tom Paine (1796). |
| 1818 | A Year's Residence in the United States of America. This is the first of three parts of Cobbett's observations of American life (completed in 1819), combining an agricultural treatise, radical philosophy, and autobiographical reflections. The series would sell 100,000 copies by 1834. Cobbett would also write of his experiences on Long Island, New York, in The American Gardener (1821). |
| Quotes By: William Cobbett |
Quotes:
"It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants."
"It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense."
"Happiness, or misery, is in the mind. It is the mind that lives."
"The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people. have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty."
"It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world."
"To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous."
See more famous quotes by
William Cobbett
| Wikipedia: William Cobbett |
| William Cobbett | |
|---|---|
William Cobbett, portrait in oils, possibly by George Cooke, about 1831. National Portrait Gallery, London. |
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| Born | 9 March 1763 Farnham, Surrey, England |
| Died | 18 June 1835 (aged 72) Normandy, Surrey, England |
| Occupation | Pamphleteer, journalist |
| Notable work(s) | Rural Rides |
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William Cobbett (9 March 1763 – 18 June 1835) was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly. He was also against the Corn Laws, a tax on imported grain. Early in his career, he was a loyalist supporter of King and Country: but later he joined and successfully publicised the radical movement which led to the Reform Bill of 1832, and to his winning the parliamentary seat of Oldham. Although he was not a Catholic, he became a fiery advocate of Catholic Emancipation in Britain. Through the seeming contradictions in Cobbett's life, two things stayed constant: an opposition to authority, and a suspicion of novelty. He wrote many polemics, on subjects from political reform to religion, but is best known for his book from 1830, Rural Rides, which is still in print today.
Contents |
William Cobbett was born in Farnham, Surrey, on 9 March 1763, the son of a tavern owner. He was taught to read and write by his father, and first worked as a farm labourer.
On 6 May 1783, on an impulse he took the stagecoach to London and spent eight or nine months as a clerk in the employ of a Mr Holland at Gray's Inn. He enlisted in the British Army in 1784, and made good use of the soldier's copious spare time to educate himself, particularly in English grammar. His regiment was posted to New Brunswick and he sailed from Gravesend to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Cobbett was in Saint John, Fredericton and elsewhere in the province until September 1791, rising through the ranks to become Sergeant Major, the most senior NCO.
He returned to England with his regiment, landing at Portsmouth 3 November 1791, and obtained discharge from the army on 19 December 1791. In Woolwich on 5 February 1792 he married Anne Reid, whom he had met while serving in Canada.
Cobbett had developed an animosity towards some corrupt officers, and he gathered evidence on the issue while in New Brunswick, but his charges against them were sidetracked. Sensing that he was about to be indicted in retribution he fled to France in March 1792 to avoid imprisonment. Cobbett had intended to stay a year to learn the French language but he found the French Revolution in full swing and the French Revolutionary Wars in progress, so he sailed for the United States in September 1792.
He was first at Wilmington, then Philadelphia by the Spring of 1793. Cobbett initially prospered by teaching English to Frenchmen and translating texts from French to English. He became a controversial political writer and pamphleteer, writing from a pro-British stance under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine.
A successful lawsuit brought against him by the eminent physician and politician Dr. Benjamin Rush[1], led to his fleeing to England in 1800 to avoid punishment. He sailed from New York, via Halifax, Nova Scotia to Falmouth in Cornwall.
Cobbett was greeted warmly by the British Establishment on arrival but refused all offers of reward for his propagandising in the United States.
Two years later he started his newspaper, the Weekly Political Register.[2] At first he supported the Tories but he gradually became a radical. By 1806 he was a strong advocate of parliamentary reform.
He began publishing the Parliamentary Debates in 1802. This unofficial record of Parliamentary proceedings later became officially known as Hansard (see External link below).
Cobbett stood for Parliament in Honiton in 1806, but was unsuccessful for he refused to bribe the voters by 'buying' votes; it also encouraged him in his opposition to rotten boroughs and the very urgent need for parliamentary reform.
Cobbett was found guilty of treasonous libel on 15 June 1810 after objecting in The Register to the flogging at Ely of local militiamen by Hanoverians. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment in infamous Newgate Prison. While in prison he wrote the pamphlet Paper against Gold, warning of the dangers of paper money, as well as many Essays and Letters. On his release a dinner in London, attended by 600 people, was given in his honour, presided over by Sir Francis Burdett who, like Cobbett, was a strong voice for parliamentary reform.
By 1815 the tax on newspapers had reached 4d. per copy. As few people could afford to pay 6d. or 7d. for a daily newspaper, the tax restricted the circulation of most of these journals to people with fairly high incomes. Cobbett was only able to sell just over a thousand copies a week. The following year Cobbett began publishing the Political Register as a pamphlet. Cobbett now sold the Political Register for only 2d. and it soon had a circulation of 40,000.
Cobbett's journal was the main newspaper read by the working class. This made Cobbett a dangerous man and in 1817 he learned that the government was planning to arrest him for sedition.
Following the passage of the Power of Imprisonment Bill in 1817, and fearing arrest for his arguably seditious writings, he fled to the United States. On Wednesday 27 March 1817 at Liverpool he embarked on board the ship Importer, D. Ogden master, bound for New York, accompanied by his two eldest sons, William and John Cobbett.
For two years Cobbett lived on a farm in Long Island where he wrote Grammar of the English Language and with the help of William Benbow, a friend in London, continued to publish the Political Register.
Cobbett also closely observed drinking habits in the United States. In 1819 he stated "Americans preserve their gravity and quietness and good-humour even in their drink." He believed it "far better for them to be as noisy and quarrelsome as the English drunkards; for then the odiousness of the vice would be more visible, and the vice itself might become less frequent."[3]
A plan to return to England with the remains of the British radical pamphleteer, and revolutionary, Thomas Paine (died 1809) for a proper burial led to the ultimate loss of Paine's remains. The plan was to give Paine a heroic reburial on his native soil, but the bones were still among Cobbett's effects when he died over twenty years later. There is no confirmed story about what happened to them after that, although down the years various people have claimed to own parts of Paine's remains such as his skull and right hand.
Cobbett arrived back at Liverpool by ship in November 1819.
William Cobbett arrived back in England soon after the Peterloo Massacre. Cobbett joined with other Radicals in his attacks on the government and three times during the next couple of years was charged with libel.
In 1820 he stood for Parliament in Coventry but finished bottom of the poll.
Cobbett was not content to let the stories come to him, he went out like a modern reporter and dug them up, especially the story that he returned to time and time again in the course of his writings, the plight of the rural Englishman. He took to riding around the country on horseback making observations of what was happening in the towns and villages. Rural Rides, a work for which Cobbett is still known for today, first appeared in serial form in the Political Register running from 1822 to 1826. It was published in book form in 1830
While not a Catholic[4], Cobbett at this time also took up the cause of Catholic Emancipation. Between 1824 and 1826 he published his History of the Protestant Reformation, which challenged the traditional Protestant historical narrative of the British reformation, stressing the lengthy and often bloody persecutions of Catholics in Britain and Ireland. At this time Catholics were still forbidden to enter certain professions or to become Members of Parliament. Although the law was no longer enforced, it was officially still a crime to attend Mass or build a Catholic church.
In 1829, he published Advice to Young Men in which he heavily criticised An Essay on the Principle of Population published by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus.
Cobbett continued to publish controversial material in the Political Register and in July 1831, was charged with seditious libel after writing a pamphlet entitled Rural War in support of the Captain Swing Riots, which applauded those who were smashing farm machinery and burning haystacks. Cobbett conducted his own defence and he was so successful that the jury failed to convict him.
Cobbett still had a strong desire to be elected to the House of Commons. He was defeated in Preston in 1826 and Manchester in 1832 but after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act Cobbett was able to win the parliamentary seat of Oldham. In Parliament Cobbett concentrated his energies on attacking corruption in government and the 1834 Poor Law.
From 1831 until his death, he farmed at Normandy, a village in Surrey.
In his later life, however Macaulay, a fellow MP, remarked that his faculties were impaired by age; indeed that his paranoia had developed to the point of insanity.
He was a gifted writer, though later generations have taken offence at his some of his supposedly anti-Semitic and racist views. He is considered to have begun as an inherently conservative journalist who, angered by the corrupt British political establishment, became increasingly radical and sympathetic to anti-government ideals. He provides an alternative view of rural England in the age of an Industrial Revolution with which he was not in sympathy.
He was buried in the churchyard of St Andrew's Parish Church, Farnham.
In his lifetime Cobbett stood for parliament five times, four of which attempts were unsuccessful:
In 1832 he was successful and elected as Member of Parliament for Oldham.
Cobbett's birthplace, a public house in Farnham named "The Jolly Farmer", has now been renamed "The William Cobbett".
The Brooklyn-based history band Piñataland has performed a song about William Cobbett's quest to rebury Thomas Paine entitled "American Man".
A story by Cobbett in 1807 led to the use of 'red herring' to mean a distraction from the important issue.[5]
An equestrian statue of Cobbett is planned for a site in Farnham.[6][7]
Cobbett's sons were trained as solicitors and founded a law firm in Manchester, still called Cobbetts in his honour.
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| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| New constituency | Member of Parliament for Oldham 1832–1835 With: John Fielden |
Succeeded by John Fielden and John Frederick Lees |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
| Morris Birkbeck (literature) | |
| Porcupine's Gazette and Daily Advertiser (literature) | |
| Hansard |
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