To include Cobbett in a book on imagination might seem surprising. So much of his writing is contingent and of practical intent that its relationship to an aesthetic sense seems remote, for all his preoccupation with happiness, and his eulogising of the English countryside. Our sense of remoteness here is itself, of course, a measure of historical distance and of our dominant cultural inheritance from the last two centuries which, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, has dissociated aesthetics and utility in this way. Just as twentieth-century accounts of Cobbett's politics need to be self-conscious about how his kind of political writing has, unlike Paine's, been discontinuous with progressive political histories, so too appreciating Cobbett's aesthetics must also involve, in part, an act of historical recovery.

Recent studies have significantly altered our perception of Cobbett as a writer by analysing the complexly strategic nature of his texts, the heterogeneous nature of his language, and the specifically rural nature of his cultural identity. It is no longer possible to see Cobbett as some kind of literary primitive or ingenu who became one of the most influential and certainly voluminous publishers of his day almost despite himself. A new picture is beginning to emerge of a writer who successfully and intelligently exploited the new possibilities in audience and print culture. He is not simply ‘authentic’ or naive. As a consequence of such work, it is also no longer possible to take at face value the truth claims of his texts.