Book dossier

William Cobbett

by Leonora Nattrass

This book offers the first thoroughgoing literary analysis of William Cobbett as a writer. Leonora Nattrass explores the nature and effect of Cobbett's rhetorical strategies, showing through close examination of a broad selection of his polemical writings (from his early American journalism onwards) the complexity, self-consciousness and skill of his stylistic procedures. Her close readings examine the political implications of Cobbett's style within the broader context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political prose and argue that his perceived ideological and stylistic flaws - inconsistency, bigotry, egoism and political nostalgia - are in fact rhetorical strategies designed to appeal to a range of usually polarized reading audiences. Cobbett's ability to imagine and to address socially divided readers within a single text, the book argues, constitutes a politically disruptive challenge to prevailing political and social assumptions about their respective rights, duties, needs and abilities. This rereading revises a prevailing critical consensus that Cobbett is an unselfconscious populist whose writings reflect rather than challenge the ideological paradoxes and problems of his time.