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William Cobbett recalls his first taste of classic literature, for which he had to go without his supper.
At eleven, William Cobbett’s (1763-1835) ambition was to be a gardener at Kew. It would be a step up from clipping hedges and weeding flower beds for the Bishop of Winchester back home in Farnham, but it meant walking all the way to Richmond, a distance of nearly thirty miles as the crow flies, and with threepence all his wealth.
William Cobbett gives his son James some helpful examples of collective nouns.
In 1818, William Cobbett MP published some letters written to his son James, in which he had developed a thorough introduction to English grammar. Cobbett was a man of strong opinions, and more than happy to illustrate his remarks on good, plain English with some good, plain speaking on corruption in the House of Commons.
Governments must not use ‘the good of society’ as an excuse to run our lives.
In 1803, William Wilberforce threw his weight behind compuslory vaccination for smallpox, declaring that those who refused it were endangering society. William Cobbett replied with an open letter, in which he wondered whether any Government could resist applying the same logic to every habit, preference or opinion they could label as a social menace.
Faced with a choice between silence, dungeon or exile, William Cobbett chose exile — and then had to make sense of it.
In March, 1817, English radical William Cobbett fled to the US, in the belief that he was about to arrested for his cheap, popular and highly critical digest of Parliamentary news, the Political Register. A few months later, he wrote back home to his supporters from his Long Island farm explaining how, as an expat, he would balance his divided loyalties.
When William Cobbett told his son James to be conscientious about his grammar lessons, he was drawing on hard-won experience.
In one of his letters on English grammar written to his son James, William Cobbett recalled his own quest to learn French many years before. It is not enough, he said, when learning a language to flick casually through a textbook. It is necessary to take each lesson and learn it by heart with absolute precision. The labour would be well rewarded.
On a countryside ramble in West Sussex, William Cobbett finds the weather turning against him.
William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) was a best-seller in its day, a travelogue of his wanderings through England’s green and pleasant land, and a diary of his meetings with farmers and their families. August 2nd, 1823, found William atop Duncton Hill as he made his way across the South Downs from Petworth to Singleton in West Sussex, looking up at an ominous sky.
William Cobbett was delighted with one young woman’s protest against Mr Pitt’s ingenious ways of raising money.
In 1784, the use of a horse for purposes other than farming was subjected to tax, one of Prime Minister William Pitt’s many ingenious tax-grabs. William Cobbett (who blamed the taxes on the national debt racked up by unnecessary wars) chuckled with delight nearly forty years later, when he stumbled across a farmer’s wife making a gentle protest.