Transition

Abstract

Riding through southern England in the 1820s William Cobbett, sometime Tory pamphleteer against the ‘Horrid Barbarity’ of the French Revolution, now popular tribune, observed and commented volubly on the new social relationships induced by industrialisation and the adoption of the values of commerce. The fund-holders and stock-jobbers he assaulted played a considerable part in providing the capital for industrial investment out of income derived from interest on loans they made to the Government. The Government in its turn covered this by taxes which tended to be disproportionately sever on the poorer classes. Cobbett’s politics were a jumble of eccentric prejudice and humane perception. Seen from today, his clash with Macaulay in the Commons over the emancipation of the Jews does not show him in a pleasant light, his panacea of straw-bonnet weaving seems absurd, and the rural commonwealth to which he looked back a myth, but he sensed accurately the change in men’s relationships from those of obligation and custom to those determined by cash payment. Both his defects and his strengths proved persistent in radical social criticism throughout the century.