William Cobbett Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on William Cobbett

Blunt, forthright, and insufficiently refined to please some contemporaries, William Cobbett continues to challenge modern assumptions. Some readers, regarding his style more highly than his politics, have detached Cobbett from his historical context and treated him as an emblem of Old England. Variously labeled conservative and radical, naive and visionary, Cobbett provides evidence in his voluminous writings for strikingly different interpretations of his life and work. E. P. Thompson responds to critics of Cobbett by conceding that his influence went beyond his achievement as a systematic thinker. This is consistent with Raymond Williams's view that Cobbett's insights and convictions went further in their implications than Cobbett seems to have realized. Through a long, varied career Cobbett retained the concrete, particular focus of the observer: noting the differences between the remembered world of his childhood and the poverty and misery he recorded in the first decades of the nineteenth century, he demanded change in the relations between employers and employed and between government and governed, believing that such change could be effected through parliamentary reform, not revolution.

Read the rest of this Biography with our William Cobbett Access Pass.