I spent ten happy, if often exasperated, years in the company of William Cobbett, a bombastic and irrepressible journalist, who learned his trade in America, and more or less invented the popular press in England. He was a passionate believer in the ‘Ancient Constitution’, looking always backwards for his idea of an equitable society. He did not question the existence of social hierarchies (which he saw as natural) but instead wanted each rank in society to be as well respected as any other. Or, to be more accurate, he wanted everyone to accept that everything good sprang from the labouring class! His Twopenny Trash radicalised the poor, and on his death the Times called him ‘a kind of Fourth Estate in the politics of the country.’

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      William Cobbett: The Politics of Style

        Cambridge University Press, 1995

‘[This] valuable book makes it possible even for those who find Cobbett’s ideas in themselves too often naïve, wrongheaded, or repellent, to continue to admire his art. It also goes far to account for Cobbett’s undoubtedly enormous influence in his day.’

James Sambrook, Romanticism

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         William Cobbett: Selected Writings

6 vols. Pickering and Chatto, 1998

 ‘These six volumes of some of Cobbett’s most influential work are … welcome … Leonora Nattrass, who in the past has written sensitively on Cobbett’s style, has chosen to omit some of his better-known works (such as Rural Rides), and concentrated on those political texts that were widely read in his lifetime, but are much less well known and less easily accessible today … sterling work.’

London Review of Books