John Dunn

First posted on Saturday, 11 May 2013 at 21:12





William Cobbett circa. 1830













2013 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Cobbett (1763-1835), a radical traditionalist if ever there was one. I’m reading a short biography of him at the moment, by G. K. Chesterton.

Chesterton had the measure of Cobbett’s significance, unlike those who would neutralise the venom of Cobbett’s attacks on the political sleaze of his day with a conspiracy of silence, or worse, making him ‘acceptable’ as a left-wing radical.

Chesterton knew that Cobbett had been removed from the ‘respected club’ of history...

..."like the enfant terrible, kicking and screaming, lest he should say something dreadful in the drawing-room. Hence the big secret with which he was bursting has actually been too big to be uttered".*

"He was most immediately concerned, in the conditions of the hour, with what he regarded as the fugitive and wasteful paper chase of paper money. But what he was at once predicting and denouncing, like a small cloud that had not yet become a universal fog, was that vast legal fiction that we call finance."*

“And when he looked for the cause of this, he thought he had found it in the new fluctuation of prices and even of the value of money; in the paper money that symbolised to him such insecurity and shuffling and sharp practice. It meant the destruction not only of the old sort of yeoman but of the old sort of squire. Stockbrokers and Jews and jobbers from the town were driving out the national gentry.”*

“If ever men were responsible for handing the country over to cads, it was the party of gentlemen who waved the Union Jack after Waterloo.”*