William Cobbett: Patriot or Briton?

Abstract

Cobbett remains best known to historians and to a wider audience as one of the two or three major figures in the popular radicalism of the early nineteenth century: one of the leading actors in the agitations which eventually led to the Great Reform Act of 1832 and a persistent tribune of the people at a time of profound economic and social change. Fundamental to his influence and reputation was his career as a popular journalist, in his own time regarded as a phenomenon and capable of almost single-handedly turning the labouring poor from machine-breaking and insurrection into more peaceful and productive paths. Famously, Cobbett was envisaged in Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical as the instrument whereby the disturbances of the post-war years were channelled into parliamentary reform. Opening his account of 1816 with a great litany of riot, insurrection and distress, Bamford noted that it was also in 1816 that Cobbett wrote his Address to the Journeymen and Labourers, published in November 1816 as the sole contents of the first cheap edition of the Register, priced at twopence. Cobbett's linking of ‘our present miseries’ to the need for parliamentary reform had an immense circulation, reaching an estimated 200,000 within two months. Its effects were no less dramatic according to Bamford:… the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of ‘South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns.