William Cobbett was born on 9th March 1763 in Farnham, Surrey. During his youth he worked as a farm labourer in Botley, Hampshire and this is where he learnt his trade, which would ultimately be the backdrop for his 1830 novel, Rural Rides.
However, before I go any further into explaining Rural Rides and it's importance, I am going to go back in time and give you a brief contextual history lesson. William Cobbett before he wrote Rural Rides had previously self-exiled himself to America from Britain because of fears of being imprisoned due to his revelations about corruption within the Army. He fled to France and then America and this is where he began to publish his journalistic views.
Cobbett was self-educated and it was this that helped him publish his Pro-British pamphlet, but brought upon a lawsuit from the American settlers and in fear of again being potentially imprisoned, Cobbett fled back to Britain. This is where the journalism of Cobbett started to take affect on society with the publication of The Weekly Political Register. The most significant thing about this was that to avoid stamp duty, Cobbett again published the register as a pamphlet and at it's peak had a circulation of 40,000, which was around the same number of copies being sold as The Times.
Cobbett was also an outspoken advocate of the abolition of Rotten Boroughs. Rotten Boroughs were political constituency that were controlled by single person, who would have control of over a very small electorate and would use this power to elect a person who could obtain the person undue power across government. Now this may still seem a little bit confusing, therefore I think I will leave it to the comical genius of Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis to further explain Rotten Boroughs;
Now that you have been given a brief background biography of William Cobbett and the chance for a mid-blog giggle, I think it is time we moved back onto the main topic of this blog post, Rural Rides.
Rural Rides was written about the journeys that William Cobbett had taken on horseback through the rural countryside of southern England. His main aim of this was to show how the working class, the farm labourers of the countryside were affected by the introduction of the Corn Laws and the affects brought upon by the Industrial Revolution.
The countryside was something close to the heart of William Cobbett, due to his past experience of working on the farm as a youngster. Cobbett's opinions base the core of his novel, which he relates to the greedy "tax-eaters" who were the land owners taking money from the farm labourers and not sharing the money evenly throughout the social scale. The damaging effect of this was that these "tax-eaters" were not based in the countryside and were obtaining additional wealth from the ever-growing populated industrial cities, such as Birmingham and Manchester.
The farmers had become increasingly unaware of the changes going on around them, according to Cobbett and in his first journey described this sense of unknown as the "fog" that was engulfing the countryside and stripping the labourers from it's foundations from the countryside into the smog and inhuman working conditions of the factories within the industrial cities.
This was brought upon by the Corn Laws; these laws were import tariffs to protect the price of corn in the United Kingdom. This stopped free trade between nations, but was seen as a way to enrich the landowners and the government, but this was not the case for the farmers and labourers. The increased competition meant that farmers had to cuts prices to increase demand, but at the same time were making an increasing loss due to the taxes they had to pay to their landowners.
Cobbett expressed how that the farm labourers were "different sorts of men", compared to their land owners and the people living in the industrialised cities and compared the labourers to dogs. He also described the grim livings conditions which the labourers had to live in and that he used this as an example of how they lived as on his travel Cobbett would wake up and would not eat until three in the afternoon when he would put bread and cheese off a labourer.
This reflected the lives of the labourers on a day-to-day basis and was one of the few examples where William Cobbett truly showed empathy towards the labourers of the countryside.
Cobbett was a radical who was ultimately fighting for the basic human rights of the labourers and was hoping that he could establish the ways, which had been before the introduction of the Corn Laws and The Enclosure Act. This saw the large strips of farmland being taken over by the landowners who would in turn sell the land to families at increased rates. These rates were too much and this was the main reason for the mass exodus of families and workers from the countryside into the cities to work in the industrial factory boom.
Rural Rides I feel can be seen as a propaganda against the Conservative government who had driven the countryside out of Great Britain. However if you look at the changes from the view of Hegel, he would argue that even though William Corbett is trying to preserve the foundations of the traditional countryside, the "Geist" of the time is changing the landscape of the British economy and that Cobbett is powerless in stopping this change as it is bound to continue and progress.
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