Longmans, Green and Co. first edition - 1935
I found this an interesting biography of Cobbett in that it appeared (to me, at least), that the author, Marjorie Bowen, started off with quite a flattering angle on the great man but became increasingly aware of his deficiencies as she went on! Her Preface (most Prefaces are written after a book has been written) sums up this slightly ambiguous approach to her subject:
William Cobbett was such a vital human being; he lived through the War of American Independence, the first French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England, and these events did not seem to him as they seem to us in text-books, but were part of the rich, bewildering, exasperating pattern woven as a background to his own robust and honest personality, in which he was, with such simple egotism, absorbed...it was a bold and vigorous life, full of adventure, of action, of wholesome fights, of generous friendships, of patient and skilful labours, of delight in nature and man's honest handiwork; it was a life illumined by a steadfast love given and taken and an unselfish purpose steadfastly followed.
Bowen takes the reader through a straightforward chronology of Cobbett's life: Farmer's Boy from Farnham; private soldier to Sergeant-Major based in Nova Scotia; the emergence of the pamphleteer and, after a brief interlude in France, a return to the 'New World'. Back in England in 1800, his outspoken views in print got him a two-year jail sentence in Newgate and an even more rebellious attitude; another retreat to America and more vituperative pamphleteering; a return to England to support the estranged Queen Caroline; more controversial pamphleteering and election to the House of Commons.
The early years seem to be a period when Cobbett knew nothing or very little of affairs beyond his own environment - unaware of the insidious and underground progress industry was making in England...unaware of the gradual rise of the trading class, those Indian adventurers and Nabobs...did not know that these same [self-interested] traders and their interests really ruled England...was not concerned with the French Revolution, nor indeed with politics at all, nor cognizant of, nor interested in, and possible scheme for reform...
What Cobbett was doing, from an early age, was building up a bank of hatreds: for the incompetent, rapacious, drunken and ignorant officer class; Dr. Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine (for a while), Talleyrand, The French Revolution, Napoleon, Pitt the Younger, Castlereagh, Canning, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice, Rev. Thomas Malthus, Bingham Baring of the House of Baring, representatives of Mammon; foreigners in general, negroes, Jews (Jews, jobbers and usurers), stock-jobbers, place-men, bankers, London (which he named 'the Wen'), the Board of Agriculture. A fiery editor and pamphleteer, Cobbett managed to annoy and anger nearly everyone of importance - such as George IV - even his erstwhile allies, Sir Francis Burdett and Henry Hunt. Finally, achieving his long-held desire of becoming an M.P., the irony was that Cobbett was a perpetual irritant in the House but not very effective.
He had an ingrained dislike for Shakespeare (bawdy talk, bad grammar...condemned for his dubious moral teaching) and Milton - Paradise Lost ("barbarous trash") was as offensive to his common sense as was Methodism or the "enthusiasm" of the Wesleys. He even hated tea ("slops")!
Cobbett comes across as insensitive, self-satisfied - even his most famous book, Rural Rides, is less a picture of England than of William Cobbett. It is no surprise to read the sub-title - With Economical and Political Observations. He was fighting a losing battle against the (inevitable) forces of change: farm machinery, the development of steam on the railways and factories, the steady move from the countryside to the towns and cities. the rise of the political middle class... Interestingly, Bowen does not mention Cobbett's estrangement from his devoted wife near the end of his life.
Marjorie Bowen's Summary was probably not what she would have written whilst studying Cobbett's early life:
[it] can hardly be denied that few works shot with fierce prejudices, bitter hatreds, and furious invective, have much chance of survival; irony, the rapier of the gentleman, is always keen and elegant - the crude sarcasm of the peasant, as heavy as a quarter-stick wielded on the village green, soon becomes an obsolete weapon. Cobbett's self-satisfaction, so continually and so flatly expressed, also spoils his work - such noisy vanity can be as assailing to the subtle-minded as the cool, silent arrogance of Lord Castlereagh was to the simplicity of William Cobbett. Very well put.
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