Anyone who has ever read E P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) will come away from
that book with a determination to read more about, and more written by, the
main characters in Thompson’s drama: Samuel Bamford, Francis Place, William
Lovett, and probably the best known of all, William Cobbett. Unlike the others
mentioned, Cobbett is still remembered for a specific title, Rural Rides. Many years after reading
Thompson, I finally got round to Cobbett. Rather than Rural Rides, I
encountered a copy of his autobiography, wonderfully subtitled “The Progress of
a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament”.
The first surprise was that there is no real autobiography
of Cobbett. For a man who wrote so much, you would expect at the very least he
would write the story of his astonishing life. That he did not is quite
revealing. He always intended to write it, and the subtitle is Cobbett’s own,
but the demands of journalism and other books always took precedence, so
William Reitzel, the editor, assembled biographical sections from Cobbett’s
other writings.
This method proves workable, in that Cobbett seems to have written
something about most periods of his life, but the result I found somewhat
incomprehensible. It soon becomes clear, as Cobbett reaches adulthood, that the
reader is only given part of the story. Partly the problem is that Cobbett did
not assemble the sections here collected with an overall structure, and partly,
perhaps mostly, because Cobbett was such an opinionated curmudgeon that although
he had no difficulty writing polemical tracts and even whole books of argument,
he was not particularly good at describing dispassionately a life that ended
with him not on speaking terms with anyone in his own family. You get the
impression, not admittedly from the autobiographical writing, but from Richard
Ingrams’ marvellous The Life and
Adventures of William Cobbett (2006), that Cobbett was not an easy man to
live with. Having read both Cobbett and Ingrams, I think you start to get an
idea of the man’s strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths there are without doubt. Cobbett was clearly a
wonderful journalist, able to seize on a theme and exploit small details of his
victims’ case or even their appearance, and by repeating these details
mercilessly, turn them into figures of fun. Thus, defending Queen Caroline
against the campaign of persecution against her by the Government, Cobbett
writes an open letter to Canning:
She has been pursued by a spirit of persecution of the
lowest and yet the most malignant description. A nasty, envious, jealous,
grudging, bitter, venomous, grovelling, hate-engendered, soul-degrading spirit
seems to have hunted her spirits as the dark and deadly minded polecat pursues
the traces of the pheasant or the hare. [Letters
to Grenville, 1819, quoted by Ingrams]
Queen Caroline was by no means blameless in this affair, but
Cobbett’s relentless focus on those who condemned her produced an upsurge in
feeling to defend, as depicted here, a poor woman who had been wronged. By focusing
on a part rather than the whole, Cobbett succeeds in turning the argument
around. It is not surprising that he successfully defended himself against a
charge of seditious writing.
But Cobbett’s defects! Most importantly, Cobbett depicted
himself as a simple agricultural labourer, and never really recognised the
Industrial Revolution. He remained throughout his career a monarchist, a kind
of radical Tory, a man who would happily put the clock back to a mythical
pre-lapsarian agricultural paradise that can never have existed. As Stefan
Collini pointed out, Thompson is not averse at times to this kind of
wish-fulfilment. Then, if you add the quirks and oddities that seem to be
peculiar to many self-made men: Cobbett’s obsessions about potatoes, paper
money, Lord Brougham, and getting out of bed late, as well as his monstrous
egotism, are enough to convince me that his family was completely justified in
breaking off relations with him.
So
a fascinating story, and an astonishing man, but Cobbett should be enjoyed for
his polemics and for his striking phrases, not for his very partial and unstructured thinking, and certainly not for his autobiography.
Note: astute readers will notice that no travel was involved in the writing of the above post. However, Cobbett was a great believer in going to see things for himself, so I feel entirely justified in including the life of a traveller in this blog, even if I never got out of my armchair in my reading of him. I was with him everywhere he went, in the United States, in Ireland, yes, even in Farnham, his birthplace (where I stood respectfully in front of what was The Jolly Farmer pub, owned by his father).
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