The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett
Richard Ingrams HarperCollins, 333pp, £20
ISBN 0002558009
When William Cobbett arrived in Liverpool from exile in 1819, the Manchester magistrates ban-ned him from entering their city. Hussars were stationed along the road. Cannon were brought into the market place. A town crier was hauled before the court for mentioning his name. I can see why Cobbett appealed to the Private Eye founder Richard Ingrams as a subject for biography. In those days, journalists were titans.
Tall, handsome and blessed with phenomenal energy, Cobbett lived from 1763 to 1835. He was a farm boy-turned-soldier, barrack-room lawyer, reporter, editor, rabble-rouser and politician. Three times the government prosecuted him for seditious libel. He was regularly bankrupt and twice had to flee to America. He refused all government bribes to stay silent and edited his campaigning journal, the Political Register, even from prison. Though he finally became an MP, "The Thing", as he called the establishment, never captured him. He deserves the title of "first modern journalist", and perhaps also "greatest".
My favourite Cobbett moment is when the House of Commons, to which he had just been elected, went up in flames in 1834. He responded by wondering at the "savage shout of exultation" with which the event must have been greeted by the honest men of England, knowing "the sufferings we undergo" at its hands. He proceeded to list every unjust law it had passed, as if the very stones were guilty.
The historical background - Pitt, Liverpool, Napoleon and reform - is sketchily depicted, but Ingrams does full justice to Cobbett's professional career and to his cantankerous relationship with the whole world (including his poor wife). Were Cobbett alive today, he would be a hero of High Tory nostalgia and doubtless editor of Private Eye. But he would also have written a column in the Guardian.
The man was a paradox sitting astride the revolution that took Britain from its rural past into the Victorian age. His heart was in the former, but his head was a driving force behind the latter. No writer was so influential over public and political opinion in Britain as it staggered uncertainly towards the Reform Act 1832.
Cobbett was never grand. He was al-ways farming or gardening, and showed no interest in industry or commerce. His wife could not read and he did not mind. As the owner of a small estate, he dressed his labourers in smocks and gave them free board and lodging. To him, the only art was nature; the Romantics were over-educated wimps. Education was gained from hard work. Every evil could be attributed to the invention of paper money. England's salvation lay in sticking to roast beef and the peasantry.
Yet this same Cobbett was a firebrand champion of the working class. He hurled himself at British politics at a time of its greatest insecurity. Ingrams makes too little of how threatened Britain felt by the terrors of the French revolution and by the outcome, Napoleonic dictatorship. It had just lost the American colonies to rebellion. The monarchy was in disarray and popular unrest seemed endemic. Politics was aristocratic and corrupt, yet reform appeared to carry unknown horrors.
The Political Register, almost all written by Cobbett at his most vituperative, was the one serious publication beyond government control. It was hugely popular, even at a (taxed) shilling an issue. In 1816, amid riot and turmoil, it provocatively appeared as a single sheet at tuppence, praising workers and journeymen and calling for immediate reform. That edi-tion sold 200,000 copies, and even those reading it were arrested. The long Tory government of 1807-27, which was the making of Cobbett's reputation, suspended habeas corpus and passed law after law to suppress him.
To those in authority, Cobbett was maddeningly readable. Books on every subject poured from his pen - on grammar, agriculture, teaching French, the history of England and, my favourite, a gloriously egotistical Advice to Young Men. Satirists even today might baulk at his language. When Castlereagh cut his own throat, Cobbett rejoiced, writing to a jailed reformer: "Let the sound reach you in the depths of your dungeon; and let it carry consolation to your suffering soul!" His pet hate, Lord Chancellor Brougham, was not simply unjust, he was "the weazel . . . the nightmare . . . the indigestion . . . Lord Crackskull". The "Bloody Old Times" was not just a government lackey, but "the most infamous piece of printing that ever disgraced ink and paper".
When the Whigs celebrated the Reform Act, which Cobbett championed, he ridi-culed their London banquet by staging one of his own for his "chopsticks" (farmworkers). Well-publicised in advance in the Register, the dinner was besieged by thousands of Cobbett fans. Even at the end of his career, crowned with every success, he was writing a play called Bastards in High Life.
At his death, Cobbett was hailed by one and all as an English genius. His life had been a long and often dangerous struggle. While his contribution to politics has since merged into the warp of history, it is ironic that he is best remembered for his most conservative and Romantic work, Rural Rides. What was the stuff of radical politics is now read as a cry of nostalgia for an England past - and still passing.
Ingrams tells all this with gusto. He has done his hero proud.
Simon Jenkins is a columnist on the Guardian
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