Abstract
The tours of northern England, Scotland and Ireland that Cobbett made in the final years of his life revealed a paradox that was only confirmed by his election to Parliament in 1832 for the newly created industrial borough of Oldham. While his writings had often been based around his identification with a southern, agrarian readership, his audience had long been spread throughout the United Kingdom. At the beginning of the first tour, his progress to Birmingham in the snow produces a series of autobiographical reflections:
As we advanced on the way, the snow became deeper on the fields; and I really longed to be out in it, and thought much more, for the time, about the tracking of hares than about the making of speeches; and I could not help reflecting, and mentioning to my daughter, who was sitting with me, how strangely I had been, by degrees, pulled along, during my whole life, away from those pursuits and those scenes which were most congenial to my mind.1
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Notes
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967 (1958)), p. 37.
G. D. H. Cole, The Life of William Cobbett (London: Collins, 1924), p. 268.
John M. Ulrich, Signs of Their Times: History, Labor, and the Body in Cobbett, Carlyle, and Disraeli (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002)
J. H. Stonehouse (ed.), Reprints of the Catalogues of the Libraries of Charles Dickens and W. M. Thackeray etc. (London: Piccadilly Fountain Press, 1935), p. 21
George Walter Thombury ‘Old Stories Re-Told’, All the Year Round, Vol. XVI, p. 563 (22 December 1866).
George Augustus Sala, ‘Quite Alone’, All the Year Round, Vol. XI, p. 243 (23 April 1864).
J. B. Priestley, English Journey (Illkley: Great Northern Books, 2009 (1934)), p. 337.
Raymond Williams, Cobbett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 76–7.
Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem (London: Nick Hem, 2009), p. 57.
David Gervais writes about ‘the pressure of the past, our proneness to nostalgia, the difficulty we have in imagining how a future can grow out of the memory-soaked present’ (Literary Englands: Versions of ‘Englishness’ in Modern Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 274). For a trenchant critique of ideas of national heritage, see Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985).
Michael Gardiner, The Return to England in English Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)
Linda Colley, ‘I am the Watchman’, review of William Cobbett, Selected Writings, ed. Leonara Nattrass, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998)
Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 254–6.
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© 2014 James Grande
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Grande, J. (2014). Postscript: Cobbett’s Legacies. 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_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380081_9
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