William Cobbett

William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and stopping the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly. He was also against the Corn Laws, a tax on imported grain.

He took to riding around the country on horseback making observations of what was happening in the towns and villages
At the time of writing in the early 1820s Cobbett was a radical anti-Corn Law campaigner, newly returned to England from a spell of self-imposed political exile in the United States. Cobbett disapproved of proposals for remedies for agricultural distress suggested in Parliament in 1821. He made up his mind to see conditions for himself, and to "enforce by actual observation of rural conditions", the statements he had made in answer to the arguments of the landlords before the Parliamentary Agricultural Committee.

He embarked on a series of journeys by horseback through the countryside of Southeast England and the English Midlands. He wrote down what he saw from the points of view both of a farmer and a social reformer. The result documents the early nineteenth century countryside and its people as well as giving free vent to Cobbett's opinions.

Some information about Industrial Revolution. You all probably know this stuff, but I thought it would be quite useful for me to have it here.

Industrial revolution

•Between 1815 and 1914, an industrial revolution took place. The industries in the cities eventually won the competition with the rural industries. Because of the industrial revolution that took place, urbanisation started in the 19th century.
•Grow of population
•Industrial revolution also effected transportation. In the 19th century bicycles, steamships and trains made it easier for people to move further away. In the 20th century, the explosion motor further accelerated this process. An ever-growing part of world population became subdued to market economy.
•a move away from farming into manufacturing.
•the revolution was something more than just new machines, smoke-belching factories, increased productivity and an increased standard of living.
•The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION can be said to have made the European working-class. It made the European middle-class as well. In the wake of the Revolution, new social relationships appeared. As Ben Franklin once said, "time is money." Man no longer treated men as men, but as a commodity which could be bought and sold on the open market. This "commodification" of man is what bothered Karl Marx -- his solution was to transcend the profit motive by social revolution
On this theme, his Rural Rides has proved his most enduring work. It is a collection of journals written during his tours on horseback between 1822 and 1826, observing rural conditions and discussing the political perceptions of the agricultural community.


Cobbett's effectiveness lay less in his theories about paper money, electoral reform, or whatever, than in his creation of a mythical, but not insubstantial, lost Eden of old rural England. Cobbett glorified agricultural labor in its hardihood, innocence, and usefulness—and by its associations with patriotism, morality, and the beauties of nature. Cobbett exaggerated the material comforts of laborers in Old England, but he did not exaggerate the beauty of the man-made (yet natural) landscape where they worked and the decency of a life regulated by the cycle of the seasons rather than the steam engine.

Cobbett's readers may have been mostly in the industrial towns, but many of them had only recently abandoned an agricultural way of life. Cobbett kept alive in the consciousness of urban workers a folk memory of rural beauty and seemliness, and an allied sense of lost rights in the land.