William Cobbett

William Cobbett (March 9, 1763 - June 18, 1835) was a radical agriculturalist and prolific journalist. He thought that the reform of Parliament and the abolition of the rotten boroughs would help cure the poverty of the farm labourers. Cobbett constantly attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and tax-eaters. He opposed the Corn Laws, a tax on imported grain.

Through the many apparent inconsistencies in Cobbett's life, one strand continued to run: an ingrained opposition to authority and a suspicion of novelty. Early in his career, he was a "loyalist" supporter of King and Country; later, he joined (and arguably helped inspire) the buregeoning radical movement. His suspicious character became more pronounced towards the end of his long life. Fearing arrest for his arguably seditious writings, he fled to the United States in the late 1810s. A plan to return to England bearing Tom Paine's bones--so that they might have a suitable burial--led to the loss of his predecessor's remains.

Cobbett met John 'Mad Jack' Fuller at a public meeting in Battle, East Sussex in 1822. His most famous book, Rural Rides, was published in 1830, an account of his travels on horseback in southern England in the 1820s. Cobbett was elected a Member of Parliament for Oldham in Lancashire in 1832. Macaulay, a fellow member, remarked that his paranoia had developed to the point of insanity.

He was a gifted journalist, though later generations have taken offence at his some of his apparently anti-Semitic and racist views. He provides an alternative view of rural England in the age of an Industrial Revolution with which he was not in sympathy.