From the Soldier’s Friend to Peter Porcupine

Abstract

Cobbett made his name as a journalist three thousand miles from ‘Old England’, in post-revolutionary Philadelphia. While he would dramatically revise his views after his return to England in 1800, his writing remained indebted to the colloquial, intensely partisan and thoroughly undeferential political culture of 1790s America. Admirers of his later career have often glossed over his formative period as an anti-Jacobin journalist, while accounts of his early writings have failed to tie these years to his later radicalism. One exception is David Wilson’s important study of Cobbett and Paine. As Wilson argues,

Cobbett’s American experience was central to his career as a political writer. Not only did he establish himself as one of the most widely read pamphleteers and journalists in the Anglo-American world, he also acquired his characteristic writing style and his distinct political mentality during these years.¹