William Cobbett

Extract

This is an age of revivals, and many of the minor writers of the past were never more appreciated than they are to-day. The Restoration dramatists are read in preference to the Elizabethans, and Mr. John Gay walks, where Wordsworth fears to tread. It is not merely a revolt against accepted standards that we are witnessing, it is rather a fresh outbreak of the adventurous spirit and that insatiable curiosity and methodic doubt, which serve to distinguish man from the beasts.

So much is, perhaps, needed as an apology for voicing the desire for a fuller measure of recognition for the works and, above all, for the personality of William Cobbett. Those who know his name are not iare, but those who have read him are probably very few.

Cobbett was a self-made man, by which I do not mean that he was a blackguard, but that, being born the son of the innkeeper of the ‘Jolly Farmer’ at Famham, he became an educated country gentleman a member of Parliament, and a prolific journalist. At the age of sixteen he enlisted as a private on the pay of sixpence a day, and, as he himself tells us, taught himself English grammar in spite of every adverse circumstance.

‘To buy a pen or a sheet of paper I was compelled to forego some portion of food, though in a state of half-starvation ; I had no moment of time that I could call my own; and I had to read and write amidst the talking, laughing, singing, whistling and brawl-'ng of at least half a score of the most thoughtless of men, and that, too, in the hours of their freedom from all control ...