Cobbett was required reading for all the great writers of his age, whether or not they agreed with him. His political trajectory from Tory to Radical was the reverse of writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the latter described Cobbett as, ‘this political Rhinoceros, with his Coat-armour of dry and wet Mud and his one Horn of brutal strength on the Nose of Scorn and Hate – not to forget the fleaing Rasp of his Tongue!’1 Cobbett was read more sympathetically by younger poets such as Percy Shelley, who had back numbers of the Political Register and A Year’s Residence in the United States sent to him in Italy. During this period of increasing political unrest in Britain, Shelley’s enjoyment of Cobbett was still tinged with anxiety: ‘Cobbett still more and more delights me, with all my horror of the sanguinary commonplaces of his creed. His design to overthrow Bank notes by forgery is very comic.’2 Of Shelley’s companions, Claire Clairmont wrote in her diary, ‘Read Cobbett, which is a strange book to read with one’s head full of the ruins of Rome’, and Mary Shelley went on to create a character based on Cobbett – Ryland, a popular leader who becomes Lord Protector of England – in her 1826 novel The Last Man.3 The letters of John Keats contain enthusiastic responses to Cobbett’s political progress (at the 1820 Coventry election, ‘Cobbett is expected to come in. O that I had two double plumpers [votes] for him’), while Keats’s friend William Hazlitt, who had published his 1807 attack on Malthus in the Political Register, included an astute ‘Character of Cobbett’ in The Spirit of the Age (1825).4 This collection of pen portraits identifies Cobbett as one of 25 writers and thinkers who had defined the age, part of a list that also includes Bentham, Godwin, Coleridge, Scott and Byron.
However, the writers who most influenced Cobbett were not his contemporaries but the satirists and novelists of the early eighteenth century, including Defoe, Dryden, Pope and, above all, Swift. He described reading A Tale of a Tub, aged 11, as a defining experience of his early life, and Swift’s style became an important influence on his prose. By contrast, Cobbett’s disregard for the writers later canonised as the Romantics reflects his distance from a literary culture based on the avant-garde and his suspicion of literature that did not carry an overt political purpose. However, he had more in common with his contemporaries than he was prepared to admit, from the autobiographical basis of much of his writing to the importance accorded to landscape, memory and place. Despite his bluff persona, Cobbett’s writing also contains many of the effusive displays of emotion that characterised the age of Sensibility. This late eighteenth-century phenomenon had an important effect on Cobbett, and he often presented himself as the new cultural type of the ‘Man of Feeling’: not a dry rationalist or utilitarian, like the political economists he despised, but an all too human collection of sympathies, antipathies, memories and affections.
During his unsuccessful campaign for parliamentary election at Coventry in 1820, Cobbett wrote about his first experience of reading Jonathan Swift, almost half a century earlier. Swift became one of his political and literary heroes; here, the memory of reading Swift’s Tale of A Tub becomes a way of proclaiming his self-education and continued independence, at a time when he was being viciously assailed by the ministerial press.
At eleven years of age my employment was clipping of box-edgings and weeding beds of flowers in the garden of the Bishop of Winchester, at the Castle of Farnham, my native town. I had always been fond of beautiful gardens; and, a gardener, who had just come from the King’s gardens at Kew, gave such a description of them as made me instantly resolve to work in these gardens. The next morning, without saying a word to any one, off I set, with no clothes, except those upon my back, and with thirteen half-pence in my pocket. I found that I must go to Richmond, and I, accordingly, went on, from place to place, inquiring my way thither. A long day (it was in June) brought me to Richmond in the afternoon. Twopenny worth of bread and cheese and a pennyworth of small beer, which I had on the road, and one half-penny that I had lost somehow or other, left three pence in my pocket. With this for my whole fortune, I was trudging through Richmond, in my blue smock-frock and my red garters tied under my knees, when, staring about me, my eye fell upon a little book, in a bookseller’s window, on the outside of which was written: “TALE OF A TUB; PRICE 3d.” The title was so odd, that my curiosity was excited. I had the 3d. but, then, I could have no supper. In I went, and got the little book, which I was so impatient to read, that I got over into a field, at the upper corner of Kew gardens, where there stood a hay-stack. On the shady side of this, I sat down to read. The book was so different from any thing that I had ever read before: it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark, without any thought about supper or bed. When I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket, and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awaked me in the morning; when off I started to Kew, reading my little book. The singularity of my dress, the simplicity of my manner, my confident and lively air, and, doubtless, his own compassion besides, induced the gardener, who was a Scotsman, I remember, to give me victuals, find me lodging, and set me to work. And, it was during the period that I was at Kew, that the present king and two of his brothers laughed at the oddness of my dress, while I was sweeping the grass plat round the foot of the Pagoda. The gardener, seeing me fond of books, lent me some gardening books to read; but, these I could not relish after my Tale of a Tub, which I carried about with me wherever I went, and when I, at about twenty years old, lost it in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of Funday in North America, the loss gave me greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds.
[‘To the Reformers’, Political Register, 19 February 1820.]
Cobbett identified strongly with the Augustan tradition of satire, invoking Alexander Pope during the 1809 scandal surrounding the Duke of York, who was implicated in the sale of army commissions by his former mistress, Mary Anne Clarke. The Duke was forced to resign as commander-in-chief of the army, but was reinstated two years later.
The writers of former times; times when not a thousandth part of the present corruptions prevailed; the writers (from some of those works I am forming a collection to be published hereafter) who, in those times of comparative purity, surpassed in boldness, the writers of the present day; the bare name of those writers would fill a volume. I will, however, content myself with some extracts from POPE, who was one of the greatest scholars, the most acute reasoners, the most independent and virtuous men, and, without exception, the brightest genius that England ever produced. When he wrote, in the last reign, and in the year 1738, the laws and constitution of England were as well understood as they now are, and loyalty was not less a virtue than it now is. Corruption (under the administration of sir Robert Walpole) was only in its infancy. Now, then, let us hear how this accomplished scholar, this great genius, whose works are read with such admiration, and which make a part of the library of every man of sense who has the means of procuring books; let us hear how this all-accomplished writer expressed himself upon the subject of the then prevailing vice and corruption.
Lo; at the wheels of her triumphal car,
Old England’s Genius, rough with many a scar,
Dragg’d in the dust! his arms hang idly round,
His flag inverted trails along the ground!
Our youth, all liv’ry’d o’er with foreign gold,
Before her dance: behind her, crawl the old!
See thronging millions to the pagod run,
And offer country, parent, wife, or son!
Hear her black trumpet thro’ the land proclaim,
THAT NOT TO BE CORRUPTED IS THE SHAME.
In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in pow’r,
’Tis av’rice all, ambition is no more!
See, all our nobles begging to be slaves!
See, all our fools aspiring to be knaves!
The wit of cheats, the courage of a whore,
Are what ten thousand envy and adore:
All, all look up, with reverential awe,
At crimes that ‘scape, or triumph o’er the Law;
While truth, worth, wisdom, daily they decry—
Nothing is sacred now but villainy.
Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain)
Shew there was one who held it in disdain.5
This is only one instance. In many others he named the corrupt persons. But, POPE was called a “libeller;” and, in his preface to that part of his inestimable works, from which the above extract is made, he observes, that “there is not in the world a greater error, than that which fools are so apt to fall into, and knaves with good reason to encourage, the mistaking a satyrist for a libeller.” He says, that the clamour raised on some of his former writings, induced him to bring before the public the writings of HORACE and Dr. DONNE. With a similar view I now appeal to him, who exceeded them both in genius, and yielded to neither in any estimable quality. […] In another poem, and that, too, the most admirable of all his admirable works, he has these verses.
A nymph of quality admires our Knight;
He marries, bows at court, and grows polite;
Leaves the dull cits, and joins (to please the fair)
The well-bred cuckolds of St. James’s air:
First for his son a gay commission buys,
Who drinks, whores, fights, and in a duel dies:
His daughter flaunts a Viscount’s tawdry wife;
She bears a coronet and p—x for life.6
If any of us were to publish, from our pens, a story like this, it would be produced as a certain proof of our intention, of our settled design, or our deliberate scheme, for overturning the privileged orders, and with them the whole of the establishments of the kingdom. Yet, in the days of POPE, that man would have been laughed to scorn, who should have attempted to set up such a clamour; though despotism was much less prevalent in that day, throughout the whole of Europe, than in the day in which we live.
[‘Duke of York’, Political Register, 4 February 1809.]
The idolatry shown towards Shakespeare and Milton made them a tempting target for Cobbett’s iconoclasm. The following passage associates their writings with one of his other pet hates – the potato – draws attention to the apparent absurdities of Paradise Lost and takes great delight in the Ireland Shakespeare forgeries of the 1790s.
It has become, of late years, the fashion to extol the virtues of potatoes, as it has been to admire the writings of Milton and Shakespear. God, almighty and all fore-seeing, first permitting his chief angel to be disposed to rebel against him; his permitting him to enlist whole squadrons of angels under his banners; his permitting this host to come and dispute with him the throne of heaven; his permitting the contest to be long, and, at one time, doubtful; his permitting the devils to bring cannon into this battle in the clouds; his permitting one devil or angel, I forget which, to be split down the middle, from crown to crotch, as we split a pig; his permitting the two halves, intestines and all, to go slap, up together again, and become a perfect body; his, then, causing all the devil host to be tumbled headlong down into a place called Hell, of the local situation of which no man can have an idea; his causing gates (iron gates too) to be erected to keep the devil in; his permitting him to get out, nevertheless, and to come and destroy the peace and happiness of his new creation; his causing his son to take a pair of compasses out of a drawer, to trace the form of the earth: all this, and, indeed, the whole of Milton’s poem, is such barbarous trash, so outrageously offensive to reason and to common sense, that one is naturally led to wonder how it can have been tolerated by a people, amongst whom astronomy, navigation, and chemistry are understood. But, it is the fashion to turn up the eyes, when Paradise Lost is mentioned; and, if you fail herein you want taste; you want judgment even, if you do admire this absurd and ridiculous stuff, when, if one of your relations were to write a letter in the same strain, you would send him to a mad-house and take his estate. It is the sacrificing of reason to fashion. And as to the other “Divine Bard,” the case is still more provoking. After his ghosts, witches, sorcerers, fairies, and monsters; after his bombast and puns and smut, which appear to have been not much relished by his comparatively rude contemporaries, had had their full swing; after hundreds of thousands of pounds had been expended upon embellishing his works; after numerous commentators and engravers and painters and booksellers had got fat upon the trade; after jubilees had been held in honour of his memory; at a time when there were men, otherwise of apparently good sense, who were what was aptly enough termed Shakespear-mad. At this very moment an occurrence took place, which must have put an end, for ever, to this national folly, had it not been kept up by infatuation and obstinacy without parallel.7 Young IRELAND, I think his name was WILLIAM, no matter from what motive, though I never could see any harm in his motive, and have always thought him a man most unjustly and brutally used. No matter, however, what were the inducing circumstances, or the motives, he did write, and bring forth, as being Shakespear’s, some plays, a prayer, and a love-letter. The learned men of England, Ireland and Scotland met to examine these performances. Some doubted, a few denied; but, the far greater part, amongst whom were Dr. PARR, Dr. WHARTON, and Mr. GEORGE CHALMERS, declared, in the most positive terms, that no man but Shakespear could have written those things. There was a division; but this division arose more from a suspicion of some trick, than from any thing to be urged against the merit of the writings. The players went so far as to be ACTED. Long lists of subscribers appeared to the work. And, in short, it was decided, in the most unequivocal manner, that this young man of sixteen years of age had written so nearly like Shakespear, that a majority of the learned and critical classes of the nation most firmly believed the writings to be Shakespear’s; and, there cannot be a doubt, that, if Mr. Ireland had been able to keep his secret, they would have passed for Shakespear’s ’till the time shall come when the whole heap of trash will, by the natural good sense of the nation, be consigned to everlasting oblivion; and, indeed, as folly ever doats on a darling, it is very likely, that these last found productions of “our immortal bard” would have been regarded as his best. Yet, in spite of all this; in spite of what one would have thought was sufficient to make blind people see, the fashion has been kept up; and, what excites something more than ridicule and contempt, Mr. Ireland, whose writings had been taken for Shakespear’s, was, when he made the discovery, treated as an impostor and a cheat, and hunted down with as much rancour as if he had written against the buying and selling of seats in Parliament. The learned men; the sage critics; the Shakespear-mad folks; were all so ashamed, that they endeavoured to draw the public attention from themselves to the young man. It was of his impositions that they now talked, and not of their own folly.
[A Year’s Residence in the United States of America (London, 1819), para. 270.]
As he grew older, Cobbett also became increasingly intolerant of fiction, associating novels such as Tom Jones with frivolity, immorality and middle-class pretension.
I deprecate romances of every description. It is impossible that they can do any good, and they may do a great deal of harm. They excite passions that ought to lie dormant; they give the mind a taste for highly-seasoned matter; they make matters of real life insipid; every girl, addicted to them, sighs to be a SOPHIA WESTERN, and every boy, a TOM JONES. What girl is not in love with the wild youth, and what boy does not find a justification for his wildness? What can be more pernicious than the teachings of this celebrated romance? Here are two young men put before us, both sons of the same mother; the one a bastard (and by a parson too), the other a legitimate child; the former wild, disobedient, and squandering; the latter steady, sober, obedient, and frugal; the former every thing that is frank and generous in his nature, the latter a greedy hypocrite; the former rewarded with the most beautiful and virtuous of women and a double estate, the latter punished by being made an outcast. How is it possible for young people to read such a book, and to look upon orderliness, sobriety, obedience, and frugality, as virtues? And this is the tenor of almost every romance, and of almost every play, in our language. In the “School for Scandal,” for instance, we see two brothers; the one a prudent and frugal man, and, to all appearance, a moral man, the other a hair-brained squanderer, laughing at the morality of his brother; the former turns out to be a base hypocrite and seducer, and is brought to shame and disgrace; while the latter is found to be full of generous sentiment, and Heaven itself seems to interfere to give him fortune and fame. In short, the direct tendency of the far greater part of these books, is, to cause young people to despise all those virtues, without the practice of which they must be a curse to their parents, a burden to the community, and must, except by mere accident, lead wretched lives. I do not recollect one romance nor one play, in our language, which has not this tendency. How is it possible for young princes to read the historical plays of the punning and smutty Shakspeare, and not think, that to be drunkards, blackguards, the companions of debauchees and robbers, is the suitable beginning of a glorious reign?
There is, too, another most abominable principle that runs through them all, namely, that there is in high birth, something of superior nature, instinctive courage, honour, and talent. Who can look at the two royal youths in CYMBELINE, or at the noble youth in DOUGLAS, without detesting the base parasites who wrote those plays? Here are youths, brought up by shepherds, never told of their origin, believing themselves the sons of these humble parents, but discovering, when grown up, the highest notions of valour and honour, and thirsting for military renown, even while tending their reputed fathers’ flocks and herds! And, why this species of falsehood? To cheat the mass of the people; to keep them in abject subjection; to make them quietly submit to despotic sway. And the infamous authors are guilty of the cheat, because they are, in one shape or another, paid by oppressors out of means squeezed from the people. A true picture would give us just the reverse; would show us that “high birth” is the enemy of virtue, of valour, and of talent; would show us, that with all their incalculable advantages, royal and noble families have, only by mere accident, produced a great man; that, in general, they have been amongst the most effeminate, unprincipled, cowardly, stupid, and, at the very least, amongst the most useless persons, considered as individuals, and not in connexion with the prerogatives and powers bestowed on them solely by the law.
[Advice to Young Men (London, 1829), paras 311–12.]
Cobbett’s description of teaching his youngest son, Richard, echoes the pedagogical practice of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed in the primacy of education by nature. Cobbett even echoes Rousseau’s choice of reading matter: in Rousseau’s educational treatise Émile, Robinson Crusoe is the only book that the young Émile is given to read.
He began to talk in anticipation of the sport he was going to have, and was very inquisitive as to the probability of our meeting with fox-hounds, which gave me occasion to address him thus: ‘Fox-hunting is a very fine thing, and very proper for people to be engaged in, and it is very desirable to be able to ride well and to be in at the death; but that is not ALL; that is not every thing. Any fool can ride a horse, and draw a cover; any groom or any stable-fellow, who is as ignorant as the horse, can do these things; but, all gentlemen that go a fox-hunting (I hope God will forgive me for the lie) are scholars, Richard. It is not the riding, nor the scarlet coats, that make them gentlemen; it is their scholarship.’ What he thought I do not know; for he sat as mute as a fish, and I could not see his countenance. ‘So,’ said I, ‘you must now begin to learn something, and you must begin with arithmetic.’ He had learned, from mere play, to read, being first set to work of his own accord, to find out what was said about THURTELL, when all the world was talking and reading about THURTELL.8 That had induced us to give him Robinson Crusoe; and that had made him a passable reader. Then he had scrawled down letters and words upon paper, and had written letters to me, in the strangest way imaginable. His knowledge of figures he had acquired from the necessity of knowing the several numbers upon the barrels of seeds brought from America, and the numbers upon the doors of houses. So that I had pretty nearly a blank sheet of paper to begin upon; and I have always held it to be stupidity to put book-learning into children who are too young to reason with.
[Rural Rides, ed. I. Dyck (London, 2001), pp. 259–60 (20 November 1825).]
On his first visit to Selborne in Hampshire, Cobbett referred in passing to Gilbert White, naturalist and author of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). However, ‘at that time, the THING was biting so very sharply that one had no attention to bestow on antiquarian researches’. In the extract below, he describes his return to the village the following year. Raymond Williams suggestively compares Cobbett, White and Jane Austen in ‘Three Around Farnham’, from The Country and the City (1973).
At Tisted I crossed the turnpike-road before mentioned, and entered a lane which, at the end of about four miles, brought me to this village of SELBORNE. My readers will recollect, that I mentioned this Selborne when I was giving an account of Hawkley Hanger, last fall. I was desirous of seeing this village, about which I have read in the book of Mr White, and which a reader has been so good as to send me. From Tisted I came generally up hill till I got within half a mile of this village, when, all of a sudden, I came to the edge of a hill, looked down over all the larger vale of which the little vale of this village makes a part. Here Hindhead and Black-down Hill came full in my view. When I was crossing the forest in Sussex, going from Worth to Horsham, these two great hills lay to my west and north-west. To-day I am got just on the opposite side of them, and see them, of course, towards the east and the south-east, while Leith Hill lies away towards the north-east. This hill, from which you descend down into Selborne, is very lofty; but, indeed, we are here amongst some of the highest hills in the island, and amongst the sources of rivers. The hill over which I have come this morning sends the Itchen river forth from one side of it, and the river Wey, which rises near Alton, from the opposite side of it. Hindhead which lies before me, sends, as I observed upon a former occasion, the Arun forth towards the south and a stream forth towards the north, which meets the river Wey, somewhere above Godalming. I am told that the springs of these two streams rise in the Hill of Hindhead, or, rather, on one side of the hill, at not many yards from each other. The village of Selborne is precisely what it is described by Mr White. A straggling irregular street, bearing all the marks of great antiquity, and shewing, from its lanes and its vicinage generally, that it was once a very considerable place. I went to look at the spot where Mr White supposes the convent formerly stood. It is very beautiful. Nothing can surpass in beauty these dells and hillocks and hangers, which last are so steep that it is impossible to ascend them, except by means of a serpentine path. I found here deep hollow ways, with beds and sides of solid white stone; but not quite so white and so solid, I think, as the stone which I found in the roads at Hawkley. The churchyard of Selborne is most beautifully situated. The land is good, all about it.
[Rural Rides, ed. I. Dyck (London, 2001), pp. 112–13 (7 August 1823).]
Having left Selborne, Cobbett’s description of the surrounding landscape brings together folklore, childhood memory, topographical and geological detail with a vivid sense of wonder. Such passages suggest Cobbett’s common ground with the Romantic writers he affected to despise. However, feelings of wonder are always carefully grounded in the empirical details of the landscape and the popular traditions associated with it.
From Selborne, I had first to come to Headley, about five miles. I came to the identical public-house, where I took my blind guide last year, who took me such a dance to the southward, and led me up to the top of Hindhead at last. I had no business there. My route was through a sort of hamlet called Churt, which lies along on the side and towards the foot of the north of Hindhead, on which side, also, lies the village of Thursley. A line is hardly more straight than is the road from Headley to Thursley; and a prettier ride I never had in the course of my life. It was not the less interesting from the circumstances of its giving me all the way a full view of Crooksbury Hill, the grand scene of my exploits when I was a taker of the nests of crows and magpies. At Churt I had, upon my left, three hills out upon the common, called the Devil’s Jumps. The Unitarians will not believe in the Trinity, because they cannot account for it. Will they come here to Churt, go and look at these ‘Devil’s Jumps’, and account to me for the placing of these three hills, in the shape of three rather squat sugar-loaves, along in a line upon this heath, or the placing of a rock-stone upon the top of one of them as big as a Church tower? For my part, I cannot account for this placing of these hills. That they should have been formed by mere chance is hardly to be believed. How could waters rolling about have formed such hills? How could such hills have bubbled up from beneath? But, in short, it is all wonderful alike: the stripes of loam running down through the chalk-hills; the circular parcels of loam in the midst of chalk-hills; the lines of flint running parallel with each other horizontally along the chalk-hills; the flints placed in circles as true as a hair in the chalk-hills; the layers of stone at the bottom of hills of loam; the chalk first soft, then some miles farther on, becoming chalk-stone; then, after another distance, becoming burr-stone, as they call it; and at last, becoming hard, white stone, fit for any buildings; the sand-stone at Hindhead becoming harder and harder till it becomes very nearly iron in Herefordshire, and quite iron in Wales; but, indeed, they once dug iron out of this very Hindhead. The clouds, coming and settling upon the hills, sinking down and creeping along, at last coming out again in springs, and those becoming rivers. Why, it is all equally wonderful, and as to not believing in this or that, because the thing cannot be proved by logical deduction, why is any man to believe in the existence of a God any more than he is to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity? For my part, I think the ‘Devil’s jumps’, as the people here call them, full as wonderful and no more wonderful than hundreds and hundreds of other wonderful things. It is a strange taste which our ancestors had, to ascribe no inconsiderable part of these wonders of nature to the Devil. Not far from the Devil’s jumps, is that singular place, which resembles a sugar-loaf inverted, hollowed out and an outside rim only left. This is called the ‘Devil’s Punch Bowl’; and it is very well known in Wiltshire, that the forming, or, perhaps, it is the breaking up of Stonehenge is ascribed to the Devil, and that the mark of one of his feet is now said to be seen in one of the stones.
I got to Thursley about sunset, and without experiencing any inconvenience from the wet. I have mentioned the state of the corn as far as Selborne. On this side of that village I find it much forwarder than I found it between Selborne and Ropley Dean. I am here got into some of the very best barley-land in the kingdom; a fine, buttery, stoneless loam, upon a bottom of sand or sand-stone.
[Rural Rides, ed. I. Dyck (London, 2001), pp. 116–17 (7 August 1823).]
1 E. L. Griggs (ed.), Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume V: 1820–1825 (Oxford, 1971), p. 115.
2 R. Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London, 2005; first pub. 1974), p. 522.
3 M. K. Stocking (ed.), The Journals of Claire Clairmont (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 100, 13 March 1819.
4 J. Mee (ed.), John Keats: Selected Letters (Oxford, 2002), p. 340.
5 Alexander Pope, Epilogue to the Satires. Written in 1738. Dialogue I, ll. 151–72.
6 Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle III. To Allen Lord Bathurst’ (1733), ll. 385–92.
7 In 1795, the printmaker and writer Samuel Ireland (?-1800) announced the discovery by his son, William Henry Ireland (1775–1835), of a lost cache of Shakespearean manuscripts, including two lost plays. The papers were put on display and, at first, widely believed to be genuine. However, they were later exposed as fakes and the younger Ireland confessed to the fraud.
8 John Thurtell (1794–1824), son of the Mayor of Norwich, Royal Marine, failed manufacturer, prize-fighter, hanged for the murder of William Weare.