Favourite Books: William Cobbett's Rural Rides

 

I have just started reading "Cobbett's Rural Rides", which Cro had often recommended, and I have found this cantankerous, provocative but also principled man to be extremely interesting. 

He was born in 1769, the son of a farmer and publican, began as a rural labourer but was educated in reading and writing by his father to the extent that at the age of 20 he went to London to work as a lawyer's clerk. Next, he joined the Army and was shipped to Canada where in 5 years he rose to the rank of Sergeant Major.

On his return to England his first brush with publishing (and libel) came about, when he published The Soldier's Friend, complaining about the poor treatment of enlisted men in the Army. Realising he was likely to be arrested for sedition, he fled first to France (and into six months in the middle of the French Revolution) and then on to Philadelphia, where after teaching for a while, he found his true metier as a political pamphleteer. An early reviewer compared him to a prickly porcupine so soon his daily newspaper was published as Porcupine's Gazette. In this very early USA he was not at all careful to hide his own prejudices/beliefs. One of the two parties in the US was pro-French at the time, so Cobbett put a large portrait of George III in the window of his newly opened bookshop and a copy of a large painting of a British victory over the French on the wall inside. You have to applaud the cut of his jib.

Cobbett came back to England in 1800 and, in good odour from the loyal support that he had shown his native country in the USA, was asked by the government to consider publishing a political newspaper. Not a good idea, if you really knew Cobbett. He said he would keep it private and thereafter published the Political Register pretty much weekly from 1802 till his death in 1835. It wasn't long till he was criticising the government in it, and not long till the libel lawyers were after him again. 

Cobbett was, really, a ruralist who hated to see what was happening to his own country, of which he was very proud, as the Industrial Revolution took hold. He was an opponent of Wilberforce, the great slavery abolitionist, but his argument was that how could you fight for the plantation slave and ignore the increasing millions of 'factory slaves' just about surviving in England.

He also - and this is the book for which he is best known and which I am now reading - wrote Cobbett's Rural Rides. This is an account of various rides that he made on horseback around much of the South of England from 1822 onwards. His idea was to see the condition of the rural poor at a time when there was a collapse of wages and a collapse of the old Poor Law system which at least provided a form of safety net. His observation is first-hand and acute and his analysis is, unsurprisingly, scathing. 

His greatest contempt was reserved for the 'Stock-Jobbers', as he refers to them, who were making money out of money, or out of thin air, and at the same time impoverishing the people of the countryside who were at least making something that you could see. 

I'm enjoying the Rural Rides a lot, and even more for knowing they were written by someone who would not take a step backward when he thought something was wrong. A party apparatchik he was not, and would have been disgusted by some of the 'politicians' that our countries are currently run by. He may not have worked well with any focus groups, but by God you knew what he believed!