Cobbett—‘the last man of the old England and the first man of the new’, said Marx—crusaded to change the society as a whole; Jane Austen tried to discover enclaves for the life of the virtues within it. Cobbett looked backward to the England of his childhood, beyond that to England before the oligarchical settlement of 1688 and yet further to England before the Reformation, seeing each stage as one in a decline towards his own day.
