Volume I of Cobbett's A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland was first published in parts between 1824 and 1826, and collected into book form in 1826, creating a publishing sensation. Cobbett claimed that only sales of the Bible outstripped those of his book, and George Spater's biography of Cobbett puts the English sales figure by 1828 at 700,000. Cobbett, recurrently seen as a ‘John Bull’, had taken a history written by a Catholic priest, John Lingard, and had cast it into accessible and popular forms. Characterized by recent critics and biographers as choleric, violent and inaccurate, it conforms to – and seems to exemplify – the stereotyped image of Cobbett from his day to ours. In this vein, for example, Osborne describes Cobbett's judgements in the History as ‘grotesque’. Other than in these broad terms, however, the text itself has suffered from critical neglect, and the reasons for its phenomenal success have not been satisfactorily addressed.

In view of the text's commercial success, broad stylistic criticisms – that, for example, the History is a didactic failure, or that its tone is ‘unremittingly shrill’ – must be unsatisfactory. For one thing, regardless of its historical accuracy, it is far more entertaining than is usually acknowledged. More importantly, as it will be the aim of this chapter to show, the History is a stylistically innovative text, in which Cobbett creates profoundly radical effects by the manipulation of genre, discourse and reader.