THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

English paradise and the precise date of its loss, even if his definition began as little more than a debating point. The
largely self educated Cobbett learned his politics through his personal experience of the corruptions of the ruling class
and through a wide knowledge of the peopled, working landscape of England. He was a passionate patriot, but his
patriotism, which embraced a dislike of Scots theorists as much as of foreign wickedness, derived from a deep faith in
the virtues of the cottage economy and the old collaborative relationship between those who owned the land and those
who worked it. His vision of a dying co-operative order and of radical resistance to the ‘unnatural’ advance of the
machine and machine-oriented ways of thinking, which he consistently propagated through his vastly successful
newspaper the Political Register (founded in 1802), served to influence the countryman Clare and to provoke the now
metropolitan Coleridge (who in 1817 described Cobbett as a viper). Although he used London as his base, he insisted
that he loathed the city’s established social influence and its rapidly swelling physical proportions (he habitually uses
the shorthand term ‘the Wen’ — the wart — to describe it); in his Rural Rides, which began to appear in the Political
Register from 1821, he is vituperative about all the evidence of cockney ‘tax-eaters’ observed in his travels. Rural
Rides reveals Cobbett at his most typical: arrogant, intolerant, and controversial on the one hand; observant,
intelligent, and vigorous on the other. He confines his observations largely to the once rich agricultural lands of
southern England — preferring them to the scant farmlands and the burgeoning industry of the North and the
Midlands — but he makes them a vehicle both for a broad criticism of society and for often rapturous and detailed
descriptions of the land, its people, and its agricultural and social archaeology. He can dismiss the new spa towns as
resorts of ‘the lame and the lazy, the gourmandizing and guzzling, the bilious and the nervous’, but he can also wax
lyrical over sights as various as that of industrial Sheffield at night (‘Nothing can be conceived more grand or more
terrific than
[p. 397]
the yellow waves of fire that incessantly issue from the top of these furnaces’) or remains of Malmesbury Abbey.
At Malmesbury in 1826 Cobbett reiterated the theme which runs through much of his later work; the medieval
church in the town was built by happy, free, and prosperous Englishmen, ‘men who were not begotten by Pitt nor by
Jubilee George’. The English of the nineteenth century are a fallen race, ruled by inferior men and possessed of a
distorted view of their great historic inheritance. The Reformation, in dissolving and ruining the abbeys, destroyed
more than an architectural fabric; it wrecked what Cobbett sees as a perfected and heroic society. His rhetorical
insistence on this loss of grace is explicated in the series of pamphlet letters published between 1824 and 1827 and
provocatively entitled A History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’; in England and Ireland. Showing how that event has
impoverished and degraded the main body of the People in those Countries. The letters are addressed to ‘all sensible
and just Englishmen’ and attempt to demonstrate how ‘the happiest country, and the greatest country too, that Europe
had ever seen’ had fallen victim to the reforming vultures let loose by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Cobbett was no
Catholic, but his apology for a lost Catholic Merry England is as passionate as his distaste for the ‘bloody cruelty’ of
the ‘master-butcher’ Henry which reduced England to ‘a great human slaughter-house’, and the ‘pauper and rippingup
reign’ of the tyrannous Elizabeth (or ‘Betsy’ as he prefers to call her). Cobbett’s Protestant ‘Reformation’ is more
than simply a lament, it is a rumbustious outflanking of modern self-congratulatory readings of national history. For
all its distortions and inaccuracies the book popularly introduces the idea of a stark contrast between the illusion of a
medieval co-operative state, in which the rural poor were nourished by a Catholic Church and a Catholic nobility
alike, and the untidy modern world of sectarian Dissent, of poor-laws, game-laws, parliamentary commissions, urban
slums, and impersonal industrialists whom Cobbett had earlier characterized as ‘Seigneurs of the Twist, sovereigns of
the Spinning Jenny, great Yeomen of the Yarn’. If his battle to preserve a predominantly agricultural order of things
was doomed by the advance of industrialization, his vision of a simpler, devouter, united nation continued to carry
great political force as an alternative to the self evident confusion of Victorian England.
[end of Chapter 6]
[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]
[p. 398]
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