SOURCE: "Advice to Young Men," in The Life of William Cobbett, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1924, pp. 306-18.

Cole wrote extensively on Cobbett's life and work and was the author of a Cobbett biography long considered definitive. In the following excerpt, he comments on Advice to Young Men.

[Advice to Young Men] was not intended mainly for a working-class public. The advice was addressed "to young men and (incidentally) to young women in the middle and higher ranks of life." It took the form, a favourite form with Cobbett, of letters to "a Youth, a Bachelor, a Lover, a Husband, a Father, a Citizen or a Subject." Its purpose was not primarily political, though it contains many political allusions. It is, in fact, a series of straight talks on the various concerns of life, simply and directly written, and plentifully illustrated with incidents from Cobbett's own life. It is egotistic...