Cobbett, William

(1763–1835) journalist, publicist; born in Surrey, England. After exposing corruption in the British Army, he fled in 1793 to the U.S.A. to avoid a court-martial. There he opened a bookshop, displayed royalist and Federalist sympathies, and under the pen name Peter Porcupine sharply attacked opposing politicians and journalists in a publication called Porcupine's Gazette. Often assailed by libel actions and threats of deportation, he overreached himself in attacking the influential Dr. Benjamin Rush for treating yellow fever through bleedings and purges; he lost a libel suit brought by Rush and was assessed $5,000, but fled before the verdict had been delivered. Back in England in 1800, he published a reform-minded newspaper, the Register. Returning to America in 1817, he farmed on Long Island and avoided political journalism; in 1819, after his house burned down, he again sailed to England, where he became an extremely influential voice for reforms to help the working class.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Cobbett, William

Born Mar. 9, 1762, in Farnham, Surrey; died June 18, 1835, near Guildford. English publicist and historian. The son of a small-scale farmer.

Until Cobbett was 19 he worked as a farmer and then held a series of jobs. After coming to the USA in 1794, he began his journalistic career there with attacks on the ideas of the Great French Revolution. He returned to his native land in 1800 and began publishing the Weekly Political Register in 1802. In vivid articles he was sharply critical of the British social and political system, gaining enormous popularity and influence in democratic circles. He was repeatedly persecuted by the government. In 1832 he was elected to Parliament. It was on Cobbett’s initiative that the minutes of Parliament began to be published in 1804 and the proceedings of the most important court trials in 1809. In his principal historical work, History of the Protestant Reformation, Cobbett came to the conclusion that the chief cause of the English Reformation was the attempt of the king and his close associates to gain control of the Catholic Church’s wealth. Cobbett noted the major role played by the state in driving the masses from the land, and he linked the development of capitalism with the worsening of the position of the masses. However, the positive side of his program was reactionary and Utopian, since he looked to the Middle Ages for his ideal of a social order.

WORKS

Selections From Political Works, vols. 1–6. London, 1835.
The History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, vols. 1–2. London, 1824–27.

REFERENCES

Marx, K., and F. Engels. Soch., 2nd ed, vol. 9. (See the index of names.)
Cole, G. D. H. The Life of W. Cobbett. London, 1947.

N. A. EROFEEV

References in periodicals archive

Hence, it could be argued, whatever its other merits, that Rural Rides, as a project, exists in a curious political, rhetorical, but also, legal gap--a curious lapse in the suspension of Habeas Corpus which allowed William Cobbett to return to England with a strange cargo in tow, delivering another, more literal body, as it were, to pun on the Latin.

"Booked for passage" on Cobbett's Rural Rides: ecology as revolution

In 1825, the first documented sighting was by aFarnhamman called William Cobbett who claimed to have seen a large grey cat the size of a spaniel atWaverley Abbey.

4 unsolved Surrey mysteries that made our heads spin; From a mysterious 'puma' to a grizzly murder in a train tunnel, there are some cases that have become local legends

1763: William Cobbett, political journalist and author of Rural Rides, was born in Farnham, Surrey.

on this DAY

A Matthew Corbett B Simon Cobbett C William Cobbett D Michael Corbett 12.

General Knowledge Quiz

Radical political writer and pamphleteer William Cobbett turned bodysnatcher to dig up Common Sense author Thomas Paine from his humble final resting place in America in 1819 with the intention of reburying it in a lavish tomb in England.

GRAVE CONCERNS; ago. MARION MCMULLEN looks back on infamous bodysnatchers and grave robbers who have dared to disturb final resting places

It was William Cobbett, he of Rural Rides fame who in the 1820s dubbed London 'The Great Wen'.

Karachi - a filthy disgrace

William Cobbett, farmer and Member of Parliament, who died in 1835.

Exhibition shows how reformers left their mark on Tyneside; STREETS NAMES REFLECT OUR HISTORY

She explores comments that writers, politicians and philosophers such as Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart and John Thelwall make about crowd behaviour and sympathy but the book also substantially deals with radical print culture and writers such as William Cobbett, William Hone, Thomas de Quincey and William Hazlitt.

Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture

William Cobbett, described by Thompson as "the 'free-born Englishman' incarnate" and credited with having created radicalism's intellectual culture, repeatedly denounced the "negrophile" hypocrisy of British abolitionism.

Exploitation: a useful category of historical analysis?

William Cobbett, who saw it in 1823, thought it 'the most singular looking thing I ever saw.' What made it remarkable was the exaggerated vertical feature added after 1835 by May's son, Walter Barton May, clearly inspired by Wyatt's tower at Fonthill which had disappeared only a decade earlier.

Architecture