1. See Fiona Stafford, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Chapter 2.
2. William Cobbett, Rural Rides, ed. by Ian Dyck (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), p. 268–9. Further references to Rural Rides are in the text. David Simpson’s astute analysis of the passage emphasises Cobbett’s ambivalence: ‘he has a commitment to the local but the habits of a cosmopolitan’: The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 141.
3. A useful recent account of the politics of Rural Rides is Alex Benchimol’s ‘William Cobbett’s Geography of Cultural Resistance in Rural Rides’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 26 (2004), 257–72.
4. For Cobbett’s attachment to hunting, see Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 44–8.
5. Leonora Nattrass, William Cobbett: The Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 206–7. See Rural Rides, pp. 154–5.