Abstract
After the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in March 1817, Cobbett feared that he would soon be reimprisoned without trial. By the end of the month, he had sailed for America, where he would remain for the next two and a half years. He continued publishing the Political Register, just as he had done from Newgate, but exile imposed a new set of constraints on his journalism. He worried about the effect it would have on his circulation and his position within the reform movement: Thomas Wooler, the editor of a new radical weekly, the Black Dwarf, accused him of deserting the cause, while the Tory Quarterly Review suggested that he was simply fleeing his debts.1 The six-week transatlantic crossing added a lag-time of several months to his journalism, first as he waited for news of events in England, and then as his articles travelled back. His audience had the novel experience of reading an English newspaper written in America, while Cobbett had to find an alternative to his weekly commentary on events.
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Notes
George Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. 2, pp. 357–8.
Clare Pettitt, ‘“The Annihilation of Space and Time”: Literature and Technology’, in Kate Flint (ed.), The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 550–72
William Hazlitt, ‘Character of Cobbett’, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–4), vol. 8, p. 53.
James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 468.
Elizabeth Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 118.
Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 181.
Cobbett to Mr Tipper, North Hempstead, Long Island, 20 November 1817, in Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Cobbett in England & America, 2 vols (London: John Lane, 1913), vol. 2, p. 104.
Quoted in John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), p. 139.
William Wordsworth, Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill, World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 597
Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 215.
‘To Lord Viscount Folkestone’, PR, 8 November 1817 (col. 970). As John Bew writes, ‘the Whigs would pass the long hours of business in Parliament by collating records of the mixed metaphors and grammatical enors which arose in Castlereagh’s speeches’, and the Irish poet Thomas Moore described him as the ‘Malaprop Cicero’ (Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny (London: Quercus, 2011), pp. 528–9).
G. D. H. Cole, The Life of William Cobbett (London: Collins, 1924), p. 233.
M. L. Pearl, William Cobbett: A Bibliographical Account of His Life and Times (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 106.
David Reynolds, America: Empire of Liberty (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 85
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© 2014 James Grande
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Grande, J. (2014). Long Island Pastoral. In: William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380081_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380081_5
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