Abstract
Cobbett is now virtually synonymous with Rural Rides, a work that first appeared in serial form in the Political Register, often at the back of the paper and at a time when its circulation had been greatly diminished by the Six Acts. His tours of the southern counties followed the disintegration of metropolitan radicalism at the end of the Queen Caroline affair and his bankruptcy in 1820. Having lost the farm at Botley, the family were now living in greatly reduced circumstances on the edge of the ‘Great Wen’ at Kensington, their extensive estates replaced by a four-acre seed farm. While this change signalled the end of Cobbett’s large-scale farming ambitions, it also sent him out on the road, where he would produce an unrivalled portrait of rural England in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
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Notes
Richard Hoggart describes Orwell’s journey as part of a line of “condition of England” books that runs from Cobbett and Carlyle to our time’ (Introduction, in George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. v–xii
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As Helsinger observes, this phrase is an ‘ironic appropriation from Burke’ (Elizabeth Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 136.
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David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 91.
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Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967, first published 1958), p. 37.
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© 2014 James Grande
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Grande, J. (2014). Rural Rides and the 1820s. 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_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380081_7
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