William Cobbett, the son of a tavern
owner, was born in Farnham, Surrey, on 9th March 1763. Taught to read
and write by his father, Cobbett worked as a farm labourer until 1783
when he moved to London and found work
as a clerk. A year later Cobbett joined the army and eventually achieved
the rank of corporal. While his regiment was in Canada, Cobbett discovered
that the quartermaster was stealing from army funds. When he attempted
to expose this scandal he was accused of being a troublemaker. Cobbett,
who had recently married, decided to flee to France with his new bride.
After seven months the couple moved to the United States where Cobbett
taught English to French refugees.
In 1799 William Cobbett returned to England. Three years later he
started his newspaper, the Political Register.
At first he supported the Tories but he
gradually became more radical. By 1806 he was a strong advocate of
parliamentary reform. An unsuccessful attempt to be elected as M.P.
for Honiton convinced him of the unfairness of rotten
boroughs.
William Cobbett was not afraid to criticise the government in the
Political Register and in 1809
he attacked the use of German troops to put down a mutiny in Ely.
Cobbett was tried and convicted for sedition and sentenced to two
years' imprisonment in Newgate Prison.
When Cobbett was released he continued his campaign against newspaper
taxes and government attempts to prevent free
speech.
By 1815 the tax on newspapers had reached 4d. a copy. As few people
could afford to pay 6d. or 7d. for a newspaper, the tax restricted
the circulation of most of these journals to people with fairly high
incomes. Cobbett was only able to sell just over a thousand copies
a week. The following year Cobbett began publishing the Political
Register as a pamphlet. Cobbett now sold the Political
Register for only 2d. and it soon had a circulation of 40,000.
Cobbett's journal was the main newspaper read by the working class.
This made Cobbett a dangerous man and in 1817 he heard that the government
planned to have him arrested for sedition. Unwilling to spend another
period in prison, Cobbett fled to the United States. For two years
Cobbett lived on a farm in Long Island where he wrote Grammar of
the English Language and with the help of William
Benbow, a friend in London, continued to publish the Political
Register.
William Cobbett arrived back in England soon after the Peterloo
Massacre. Cobbett joined with other Radicals in his attacks on
the government and three times during the next couple of years was
charged with libel.
In 1821 William Cobbett started a tour of Britain on horseback. Each
evening he recorded his observations on what he had seen and heard
that day. This work was published as a series of articles in the Political
Register and as a book, Rural Rides, in 1830.
Cobbett continued to publish controversial material in the Political
Register and in July, 1831, was charged with seditious libel
after writing an article in support of the Captain Swing Riots. Cobbett
conducted his own defence and he was so successful that the jury failed
to convict him.
Cobbett still had a strong desire to be elected to the House
of Commons. He was defeated in Preston
in 1826 and Manchester in 1832 but
after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act
Cobbett was able to win the parliamentary seat of Oldham.
In Parliament Cobbett concentrated his energies on attacking corruption
in government and the 1834 Poor Law.
William Cobbett died on 18th June
1835.
(1)
William Cobbett, The
Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament
(1830)
I enlisted in 1784, and, as peace had then taken place, no great haste
was made to send recruits off to their regiments. I remember well
what sixpence a day was, recollecting the pangs of hunger felt by
me, during the thirteen months that I was a private soldier at Chatham,
previous to my embarkation for Nova Scotia. Of my sixpence, nothing
like fivepence
was left to purchase food for the day. Indeed not fourpence. For there
was washing, mending, soap, flour for hair-powder, shoes, stockings,
shirts, stocks and gaiters, pipe-clay and several other things to
come out of the miserable sixpence! Judge then the quantity of food
to sustain life in a lad of sixteen, and to enable him to exercise
with a musket (weighing fourteen pounds) six to eight hours every
day.
The best battalion I ever
saw in my life was composed of men, the far greater part of whom were
enlisted before they were sixteen, and who, when they were first brought
up to the regiment, were clothed in coats much too long and too large,
in order to leave room for growing.
We had several recruits
from Norfolk (our regiment was the West Norfolk); and many of them
deserted from sheer hunger. They were lads from the plough-tail. I
remember two that went into a decline and died during the year, though
when they joined us, they were fine hearty young men. I have seen
them lay in their berths, many and many a time, actually crying on
account of hunger. The whole week's food was not a bit too much for
one day.
(2)
William Cobbett, Political
Register
(November 1816)
You have been represented by the Times newspaper, by the Courier,
by the Morning Post, by the Morning Herald, and others,
as the scum of society. They say that you have no business at public
meetings; that you are rabble, and that you
pay no taxes. These insolent hirelings, who wallow in wealth, would
not be able to put their abuse of you in print were it not for your
labour.
(3)
William Cobbett, Thirteen
Sermons (1822)
All property has its origin in labour. Labour itself is property;
the root of all other property; and unhappy is that community, where
labourer and poor man are synonymous terms. No man is essentially
poor: poor and rich are relative terms; and if the labourer have his
due, and be in good health, in the vigour of life, and willing to
labour, to make him a poor man there must be some defect in the government
of the community in which he lives. Because the produce of his labour
would of itself produce a sufficiency of every thing needful for himself
and family. The labouring classes must always form nine-tenths of
a people; and what a shame it must be, what an imputation on the rulers,
if nine-tenths of the people be worthy of the name of poor! It is
impossible that such a thing can be, unless there be an unfair and
an unjust distribution of the profits of labour. Labour produces every
thing that is good upon the earth; it is the cause of every thing
that men enjoy
of worldly possessions; when, therefore, the strong and the young
engage in labour and cannot obtain from it a sufficiency to keep them
out of the ranks of the poor, there must be something greatly amiss
in the management of the community; something that gives to the few
an unjust and cruel advantage over the many; and surely, unless we
assume the character of beasts of prey, casting aside all feelings
of humanity, all love of country, and all regard for the ordinances
of God, we must sincerely regret, and anxiously endeavour to remove,
such an evil, whenever we may find it to exist. The man who can talk
about the honour of his country, at a time when its millions are in
a state little short of famine; and when that is, too, apparently
their permanent state, must be an oppressor in his heart; must be
destitute of all the feelings of shame and remorse; must be fashioned
for a despot, and can only want the power to act the character in
its most tragical scenes.
(4)
William Cobbett, Political
Register
(August 1830)
I perceive that you want very much to be enlightened on the state
of our press, which you appear to regard as being
free, and which, as I am going to prove to you, is the most enslaved
and the vilest thing that has ever been heard of ii
the world under the name of press. I say, that I am going to prove
this; and proof consists of undeniable facts, and not of vague assertions.
Advertising is the great
source of revenue with our journals, except in very few cases, such
as mine, for instance, who have no advertisements. Hence, these journals
are an affair of trade and not of literature; the proprietors think
of the money that is to be got by them; they hire men to write them;
and these men are ordered to write in a way to please the classes
who can give most advertisements. The Government itself pays large
sums in advertisements, many hundreds a year, to some journals. The
aristocracy, the clergy, the magistrates (who are generally clergy
too) in the several counties; the merchants, the manufacturers, the
great shopkeepers; all these command the press, because without their
advertisements it cannot be carried on with profit.
(5)
Archibald Prentice, Historical Sketches
and Personal Recollections of Manchester (1851)
In the first week of l830
William Cobbett delivered four lectures in Manchester to crowded audiences.
Ten years before, on his return from the United States, the authorities
notified to him that he should not be permitted to pass through the
town. Many of his hearers were persons, who, at the former period,
approved of that extraordinary exercise of power. His leading propositions
were, that lessening the quantity of the currency had increased its
value; that the increase in the value of money had increased the claims
of all creditors, especially the public creditor; and that the fall
in the price of every commodity, without a correspondent reduction
of taxes, had occasioned intolerable distress. His wonderful power
of illustration, on these few propositions, engaged the deep attention
of crowded audiences every night, and the thunders of applause, with
which he was greeted at the close of the course, must have made some
amends to him for his scurvy non-reception in December, 1819. Two
omissions, however, were remarked upon by even his ardent admirers,
the monopoly of the corn growers, and the want of an adequate representation
in the House of Commons, His
then rival Hunt, a man of far inferior abilities, even as a speaker,
had much sounder notions on the corn laws; and Cobbett
seemed less anxious to have parliamentary reform than that he himself
should be a member of parliament.
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