| Abstract | The concerns of the working people of Britain found little voice in the early 19th century. Though the visionary poet William Blake wrote verse about such figures as "The Chimney Sweeper" (1789), this was an era before Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto and Charles Dickens' Hard Times fixed popular attention on the plight of the working classes. In this context, one English newspaper editor and pamphleteer in the first few decades of the 1800's stood as a precursor to the subsequent and revolutionary history of working-class literature. William Cobbett (1763-1835) wrote for and about the British working people, championing the cause of the common people in his pamphlets and newspapers. While most historical scholarship on Cobbett has focused on his later years as a prominent radical author and politician, this paper focuses instead on Cobbett's early life and his evolution into becoming a radical. Further, this paper analyzes Cobbett's unique radical politics around government reform, emphasizing the importance of his support for gradual political change to address the concerns of the working people in the aftermath of the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic world. |
