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“... and the beginnings of adult education. The narrative includes a public meeting addressed by William Cobbett, and a letter from New Harmony, Indiana, giving a graphic account of jealousies and discords in the Owenite model community. John Wroe himself is the sort of preacher whose divinations and vaticinations were denounced by Carlyle, and at the ...”

“... he only needed control of the Channel for six hours to effect an invasion of England. After all, William of Orange had managed it in the autumn of 1688; and Bonnie Prince Charlie had got as far south as Derby with his ragamuffin army in December 1745. The notion of an impregnable island fortress was less convincing when 1688 and 1745 remained fresh in the ...”

“... and focusing the discontent of the country at large. In this they were immensely successful. Soon William Cobbett was writing Caroline’s propaganda and she was receiving numerous ‘addresses’ or petitions of support from the ‘loyal voices of Suffolk’, the people of Sunderland and many more. To Sunderland she – or rather ...”

“... was agreed that England’s competitive advantage could not be allowed to depend on their labour. William Cobbett spoke with an ironic edge in the House of Commons in 1833: A most surprising discovery has been made, namely, that all our greatness and prosperity, that our superiority over other nations, is owing to 300,000 little girls in Lancashire. We ...”

“... three weeks; a second and third followed rapidly. ‘Holy Hannah’, as Horace Walpole called her (William Cobbett called her ‘the Old Bishop in petticoats’), was already a celebrity. William Roberts, the family friend entrusted with the task of producing the book, made her into a saint. He presented her as a vessel ...”

“... William Rubinstein is an expatriate New Yorker who has spent his academic life investigating wealth and the wealthy in modern Britain and overturning cherished ideas by looking at the British from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Who Were the Rich?, compiled from probate records, will identify everyone who died in Britain between 1809 and 1914 leaving personal assets of £100,000 or more – which is equivalent to between £8 and £10 million today ...”

“... fiercest vilifier. Somewhere in the course of this ideological journey, incidentally, he passed William Cobbett travelling in the opposite direction, from his original Napoleon-hating conservatism to an endpoint of Napoleon-loving radicalism. By September 1815, Cobbett was publishing odes in the exiled emperor’s ...”

“... densely informative in a very particularised way. Its heroes are the popular rhetoricians Paine, Cobbett, Spence and Hone; its leading theorist, John Horne Tooke. A book concerned with so many minor figures may seem discouragingly narrow, not perhaps to political and social historians, but to most critics, even those who specialise in Romanticism or in ...”

“... the Tory radical, Carlyle, could not make up his mind one way or the other; the radical populist, William Cobbett, was unequivocally opposed, on the grounds that the new law took away the last property rights of its intended beneficiaries; the Poor Man’s Guardian and the Chartists subsumed poverty in more general considerations about the political and ...”

“... during the wars against the French. Portsea’s fortunes followed those of the navy. When William Cobbett surveyed ‘that hellish assemblage’ of Portsmouth, Gosport and Portsea on one of his rural rides a few years after the peace of 1815, house-lettings had already dropped to rock bottom and an ‘absolute tumbling down’ was taking ...”

“... the fundholders who had financed the war. Taxpayers suffered badly in the post-war depression, and William Cobbett led a bitter national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed to be the most ...”

“... the Utilitarians, when we think of the period as an era of freedom. There is the great anarchist William Godwin, whose treasured insight it was that our impulses are the artefacts of society and who didn’t hesitate to carry that insight into the sexual domain. His feminist partner Mary Wollstonecraft applied the same thought to women’s sexual ...”

“... from significant sections of the English population, including some working- class radicals. William Cobbett, one of the most popular journalists of the day, was also one of the most virulent racists. His Political Register echoed the themes that preoccupied Edward Long, and which have been staples of racist discourse ever since. Black people were ...”

“... had control over their own destinies. If they were governed by that ‘enemy of the human race’, William Pitt, this was not their misfortune, but their fault. They had earned the right to extermination. The motion carried by the Convention illustrates the resemblance between Anglo-French relations and the sort of marriage-gone-sour in which the partners ...”

“... methods of painting trees, but has surprisingly little to say about Constable. He reveals William Cobbett to be an old curmudgeon who ‘viewed trees much as he did cabbages . . . as utility vegetables’. Mabey misses a trick, being a very southern South Briton, in not giving an account of the rise of the beech as a tree of choice for ...”