Rural Rides - Volume 2

by William Cobbett

I found the working people of Frome very intelligent; very well informed as to the cause of their misery; not at all humbuggered by the canters, whether about religion or loyalty. -from "Salisbury to Highworth, Saturday, 2 September" Son of an innkeeper, former soldier, champion of the working class, early anticorporate activist, and future Member of Parliament-Will Cobbett's unique eye offers us a perspective on 19th-century England we won't find anywhere else. Cobbett roamed Southern England on horseback in the years between 1821 and 1832, gathering his "economical and political observations relative to matters applicable to, and illustrated by, the state of" that charming part of the world, one in the throes of massive change in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. This is an extraordinary record of a world long gone, one very little documented when it existed, by a voice who was far ahead of his time. British journalist and radical WILLIAM COBBETT (1762-1835) is also the author of The Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament (1830).

328 pages, Paperback

First published September 12, 2013

About the author

William Cobbett (1763-1835) was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing 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. Early in his career, he was a loyalist supporter of King and Country: but later he joined and successfully publicised the radical movement, which led to the Reform Bill of 1832, and to his winning the parliamentary seat of Oldham. Although he was not a Catholic, he became a fiery advocate of Catholic Emancipation in Britain. Through the seeming contradictions in Cobbett's life, two things stayed constant: an opposition to authority and a suspicion of novelty. He wrote many polemics, on subjects from political reform to religion, but is best known for his book from 1830, Rural Rides, which is still in print today.