If Part I of this study was mainly concerned to identify and interpret Cobbett's rhetorical pragmatism and politically-motivated self-presentation, Part II has explored the polyphonic nature of his mature Radical style. We have noted the recurring incorporation of conflicting political voices within his texts in a dialogue which is conceived in relation to a clearly-realized range of similarly polarized readers.

In previous chapters I have explored the enabling nature of this polyphony and manipulation of mock-readers for a linguistically insecure working-class audience, and the potentially alienating nature of the same tactics for readers used to literary dominance. Most of all I have stressed the radically enabling and alienating effects of addressing such polarized readerships simultaneously. In Advice to Young Men and in various other moral tracts, we have seen how Cobbett confounds class difference by stressing the shared values and needs of audiences widely separated by wealth and position. In his influential History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland we have seen the same tactic as a means of dramatizing the riven social realities of the nineteenth century where the ‘few’ stand for the ‘all’, where the biological nation is detached from the political one.

It is with this tension between different senses of nationhood – of obvious and urgent relevance to Cobbett as politician and Radical leader – that I shall conclude. As with Chapter 4, which ended Part I, this chapter will move away from detailed chronological study towards a broader assessment of the aims and effects of Cobbett's polyphonic style, arguing that this literary practice reconstitutes and redefines Cobbett's ‘Old England’ in ways which both reflect and attempt to resolve the anxieties of political and discursive disen-franchisement which have dominated this study.