The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. Richard Ingrams

best likenesses of Cobbett confirm the picture given by these two acute observers. The cartoonist John Doyle, who did many drawings of him – they are not really caricatures – shows him (in old age) a kindly-looking, half-smiling, slightly stooping figure. No one looking at these drawings or reading the descriptions quoted would guess that this ‘sweet old boy’ was one of the most extraordinary characters in English history, the most effective, most savage and most satirical political journalist of his or any other age.

      

      Cobbett himself is almost our only source for his earliest years. In 1796, when he was living in Philadelphia, he wrote an account of his origins to counter allegations being put about by his enemies that he was a British spy. Though the memoir had a political purpose, it is an honest, straightforward story, as one would expect from someone who always considered himself to be a happy man. There may be some omissions, but there are no deliberate falsehoods.

      William Cobbett was born at Farnham in Surrey in March 1763, the third of four sons of George Cobbett, a farmer (and at one time the landlord of the Jolly Farmer Inn, which still stands on the A289 road, now renamed the William Cobbett). He never met his paternal grandfather, but one of his earliest memories was of staying with his widowed grandmother: ‘It was a little thatched cottage with a garden before the door. It had but two windows; a damson tree shaded one, and a clump of filberts the other. Here I and my brothers went every Christmas and Whitsuntide to spend a week or two and torment the poor old woman with our noise and dilapidations. She used to give us milk and bread for breakfast, an apple pudding for our dinner and a piece of bread and cheese for supper. Her fire was made of turf, cut from the neighbouring heath, and her evening light was a dish dipped in grease.’

      Cobbett’s physical and mental energy, his eagerness to be always doing something, would seem to have been with him from the beginning. ‘I do not remember the time,’ he writes, ‘when I did not earn my living. My first occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip seed and the rooks from the peas. When I first trudged a field with my wooden bottle and my satchel swung over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles and at the end of the day to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty. My next employment was weeding wheat and leading a single horse at harrowing barley. Hoeing peas followed and hence I arrived at the honour of joining the reapers in harvest, driving the team and holding the plough. We were all strong and laborious and my father used to boast that he had four boys, the eldest of whom was but fifteen years old, who did as much work as any three men in the Parish of Farnham. Honest pride and happy days.’

      Cobbett was not quite such an obedient and dutiful son as this account suggests. His elder brother Tom, who later recounted his memories to Cobbett’s third son James Paul, remembered him as a lively, rather rebellious boy – ‘the foremost in enterprise when anything was on foot, not remarkable for plodding, but rather the contrary, with great liveliness of spirit having a proneness to idle pursuit and to shirk steady work and an obstinate resolution for what he was bent on … He must have promised to turn out rather an ungovernable than a tractable youth. When sent to mind the pigs he would throw off a part of his upper clothes and stray away after some business that better suited his taste.’³

      Tom also remembered that Bill (as he called him) used to like listening to their father reading bits out of the newspaper of an evening. Cobbett’s daughter Anne records: ‘It was tiresome for the other three boys to have to keep quiet the while but Bill used oftentimes to listen and pay attention to the reading and the others wondered how he could do it. And I’ve often thought it all very dull work, sitting there in their chimney corner obliged to refrain from their own fun.’ Bill was especially interested in speeches from Parliament, and would remind his father of who the various speakers were. Anne also remembered her father telling her how he used to make speeches aloud when by himself, ‘And go out after dark and do so. He said he recollected being on the Common, waving his arms about, and making speeches to the furze bushes.’⁴

      It is tempting to read something into the fact that in his own account of his boyhood Cobbett makes scarcely any mention of his mother. The explanation is that to an exceptional degree Cobbett was from the beginning self-centred and self-sufficient. Most of us rely on others close to us, whether friends or family, for help, advice and support. But even as a boy Cobbett did not seem to need other people. Throughout his life he depended almost entirely on his own impressions, his own judgement, his own researches and conclusions. So, in his little autobiography Cobbett is the only character in full colour; the others are monochrome, sometimes not even named. The fact that he makes no mention of his mother and cannot remember his three brothers’ ages is an indication of how little they impinged on his thoughts and needs.

      Cobbett left home three times in the course of his boyhood, according to his own account, from no other motive but a love of adventure. His brother Tom, however, suggested that their father was partly to blame. ‘George Cobbett,’ James Paul recorded, ‘was not of a gentle disposition, but subject to violent fits of temper, and we have reason to believe that the harshness of the parent was the cause of the son’s first quitting home.’ More than once in Rural Rides Cobbett refers, in a light-hearted way, to his father’s having beaten him – he told how once, as ‘a very little boy’ he had seen a cat ‘as big as a middle-sized spaniel dog go into a hollow elm tree, for relating which I got a great scolding, for standing to which I at last got a beating, stand to which I still did’. (It seems as if the father had got into the habit of picking on Bill, perhaps because he was the most daring of the four brothers. ‘One summer evening,’ James Paul writes, ‘he and his brothers being all together in their sleeping room, one of them noticed the figure of a crocodile printed in the corner of a large map which their father had hung against the wall and exclaimed “How ugly he looks”. William said “Aye, don’t he? I’ll cut his head off.” The others called out “No, Bill, don’t, father will be so angry.” But that did not stop him. He jumped out of bed, took his knife from his pocket and made a dash at the map, cutting into it right across the crocodile’s neck. Their father, when he came to see, said whichever of them did the mischief he was sure “Bill had a hand in it.”’)

Cobbett was only eleven when, inspired by what a fellow gardener told him while they were working together in the grounds of Farnham Castle, he set off on foot to see Kew Gardens ‘with only thirteen half pence in his pocket’. It was as he was trudging through Richmond on his way to Kew that he caught sight of Swift’s Tale of a Tub (price 3d^*) in a bookseller’s window. ‘The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the 3d, but, then, I could have no supper.’ He bought the book, went without his supper and read on until it grew too dark. There was something about it which made an indelible impression upon him, so much so that he carried it with him wherever he went, and when he lost it some years later in a box that fell into the sea on his way to North America, the loss gave him ‘greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds’. Why should this satire of Swift’s, directed at the various Christian Churches, have made such an impact on this half-educated farmer’s son, aged only eleven? It is, like all Swift’s work, highly sophisticated – even abstruse – full of subtleties, Latin tags and literary allusions which must have gone over the boy’s head. One can only surmise that what so impressed him, causing what he later called ‘a birth of intellect’, was simply the flow – even the flood – of words, phrases piled on top of one another, broken up with digressions and parentheses, all producing a kind of verbal intoxication, the effect of which was later to bear fruit in Cobbett’s own writing, similarly vigorous and fluent but more direct and down-to-earth, unencumbered by Swift’s vast baggage of learning.

      Did Cobbett remember in later life one particular passage from this book which had such a special bearing on his own career?

      It is but to venture your lungs, and you may preach in Covent Garden against foppery and fornication, and something else; against pride and dissimulation, and bribery, at Whitehall; you may expose rapine and injustice in the inns of court chapel; and in a city pulpit be as fierce as you please against avarice, hypocrisy and extortion … But on the other side,