Book contents
4 - Representing Old England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2009
Summary
Part I has chronologically explored the rhetorical strategies deployed in Cobbett's writings until 1816, and has noted the changes in discursive practice demanded by his changing political aims during that period. In the Introduction I asserted that an understanding of this rhetorical self-consciousness puts a question mark over traditional critical tendencies to view Cobbett as a hot-headed combatant who writes with instinctive power, but whose instincts also lead him into regrettable intellectual nostalgia and bigotry. I have already explored the contemporary meanings and polemical usages of nostalgia at length. Part II will similarly find itself recurrently preoccupied with his populist rhetoric. I want to end Part I in this chapter by breaking away from chronology in order to suggest some ways in which Cobbett's egoistic persona – the third recurring problem identified in his prose – can be fruitfully related to the discourse of the ancient constitution and can be similarly seen as evidence of his sophisticated rhetorical strategy.
The passage of autobiography from Advice to Young Men with which this book began provides an example of Cobbett's problematic egoism, which is compounded as he adds
If such a man be not, after he has survived and accomplished all this, qualified to give advice to young men, no man can be qualified for that task. There may have been natural genius: but genius alone, not all the genius in the world, could, without something more, have conducted me through these perils … [T]hough I do not affect to believe, that every young man, who shall read this work, will become able to perform labours of equal magnitude and importance, I do pretend, that every young man, who will attend to my advice, will become able to perform a great deal more than men generally do perform…
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- Information
- William CobbettThe Politics of Style, pp. 119 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995