The journalist, politician, and social activist William Cobbett (1762-1835) undertook his rides through rural England – mostly the southern part – between 1822 to 1826. Among many other qualities, they give an opportunity to understand what travel at this time was like and what Britain in its provincial centres was socially, culturally and politically. To an extent, as the great historian E P Thompson pointed out in his `History of the Working Class in Britain’, Cobbett’s work gives voice and visibility to many who were otherwise voiceless and invisible. That gives his work its enduring power and relevance today.
The son of an agricultural labourer, he initially served as a soldier, fleeing to France when he accused fellow officers of dishonesty, and afterwards to America. Such high handed manners seem to have been typical of his behaviour in other areas. He was not someone to bear fools gladly! Initially politically a conservative, he became progressively more radical. His work on his return to Britain in the early 1800s is distinctive for the way in which he writes against what he called `The Thing’ – the establishment. As George Woodcock wrote in his introduction to `Rural Rides’ (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967) Cobbett `saw a system aligned against him, the system of authoritarian government by reactionary politicians in London and by game-preserving magnates in the country’ (23). He was more than just a passive observer – if such a thing is even possible in the matters about which he was writing. Imprisoned for his political views in 1809, and then exiled for economic reasons to America in 1816, he was finally elected member of parliament for Oldham in 1832.
Cobbett was a prolific writer, and `Rural Rides’ covers an area far larger than Kent. Even so, when placed beside similar works of travel writing such as those by Leland, Lambarde, or Defoe (see their entries), it offers something distinctive and unique – a very human record of parts of the country at a time of significant social and political change, just before the great Reform Act of 1832 which delivered almost universal adult male suffrage. Cobbett delivers a powerfully written eye-witness record of a place undergoing the immense physical and social impact of the industrial revolution – a country through which railways would soon be erected. He himself, with his assistant, rode by horse. This did not prevent him undertaking punishing itineraries.
Cobbett’s eye was an informed one. He was a writer sensitive to not just the physical details of what he saw but also their human implications. In what is today the quaint village of Benenden he noticed stocks in the centre, and was struck by how a bench had been furnished, so the person being punished `while he is receiving the benefit of the remedy, is not exposed to the danger of catching cold by sitting, as in other places, on the ground, always damp, and actually sometimes wet.’ However, Cobbett continues, sharpening his tone: `I would ask the people of BENENDEN what is the use of this humane precaution, and indeed, what is the use of the stocks themselves, if, while a fellow is ranting and bawling in the manner just described, at the distance of hundred yards from the stocks, the stocks (as is here actually the case) are almost hidden by grass and nettles?’ (Ibid, 182).
`Rural Rides’ describes a Kent where there are `rich lands and poor labourers’ (191). New Romney, which Cobbett labels ` rotten borough, on Romney Marsh is surrounded by Martello Towers, built to fight off an expected French invasion at the start of the century. The invasion never happened. But the costs of both the construction of these, and of the Military Canal were things that most struck him. `All along the coast there are works of some sort of other; incessant sinks of money; walls of immense dimensions; masses of stone brought and put into piles’ (Ibid, 193). Dover, at least, gets a more positive response:
`The town of Dover is like other sea-port towns; but really much more clean, and with less blackguard people in it than I ever observed in any sea-port before. It is a most picturesque place, to be sure. On one side of it rises, upon the top of a very steep hill, the Old Castle… Here is that cliff which is described by Shakespeare in the Play of King Lear.’ (198)
It is good to know that even in the mid-1820s, visitors to Kent were attentive to its literary connections! Even so, for all the warm words about the appearance of Dover, Cobbett has harsher things to say about the purpose of these impressive looking fortifications: `This is, perhaps, the only set of fortifications in the world ever framed for mere hiding’ (199). Deal, a little further north along the coast gets somewhat rougher treatment:
`A most villainous place. It is full of filthy-looking people. Great desolation of abomination has been going on here; tremendous barracks, partly pulled down and partly tumbling down, and partly occupied by soldiers’ (203)
On the Isle of Thanet, things don’t improve: `The people [are] dirty, poor-looking; ragged but particularly dirty. The men and boys with dirty faces and dirty smock-frocks and dirty shirts’ (206). All this in a place where the land itself was clearly well tended and the farming profitable. `Invariably, I have observed, that the richer the soil, and the more destitute of woods; that is to say, the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the labourers’ (206).
For the rest of his journeys in Kent, through Canterbury, Faversham (where `the trees grow finely, the fruit is large and of fine flavour’ (209)), Merryworth (today’s Mereworth, `the finest seven miles that I have ever seen in England or anywhere else’), through Tonbridge, Westerham, Sevenoaks and back up to Kensington, Cobbett’s eye is kinder. It is ironic that of the peregrinations through the county, the one that is the most famous – that of Chaucer (see entry for him) is the one that takes least heed of the environment through which it’s tale-tellers go. But for Cobbett, the tale he tells is less fanciful, and far less richer – but that does not make its observations of poverty, inequality and injustice any less potent when reading them today.