William Cobbett: Patriot or Briton?

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 123-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
Post War ◽  
William Cobbett

Cobbett remains best known to historians and to a wider audience as one of the two or three major figures in the popular radicalism of the early nineteenth century: one of the leading actors in the agitations which eventually led to the Great Reform Act of 1832 and a persistent tribune of the people at a time of profound economic and social change. Fundamental to his influence and reputation was his career as a popular journalist, in his own time regarded as a phenomenon and capable of almost single-handedly turning the labouring poor from machine-breaking and insurrection into more peaceful and productive paths. Famously, Cobbett was envisaged in Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical as the instrument whereby the disturbances of the post-war years were channelled into parliamentary reform. Opening his account of 1816 with a great litany of riot, insurrection and distress, Bamford noted that it was also in 1816 that Cobbett wrote his Address to the Journeymen and Labourers, published in November 1816 as the sole contents of the first cheap edition of the Register, priced at twopence. Cobbett's linking of ‘our present miseries’ to the need for parliamentary reform had an immense circulation, reaching an estimated 200,000 within two months. Its effects were no less dramatic according to Bamford:… the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of ‘South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns.

scholarly journals “The Great End of All Government…”: Working People's Construction of Citizenship Claims in Early Nineteenth-Century England and the Matter of Class

1995 ◽  
Vol 40 (S3) ◽  
pp. 19-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc W. Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Manual Labour ◽  
Working People ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
The Right ◽  
William Cobbett ◽  
A Share

In the heat of the battle for parliamentary reform William Cobbett preached to the working people of England in his inimitable blustery dictums. “[I]f you labour honestly,” he counselled, “you have a right to have, in exchange for your labour, a sufficiency out of the produce of the earth, to maintain yourself and your family as well; and, if you are unable to labour, or if you cannot obtain labour, you have a right to maintenance out of the produce of the land […]”. For honest working men this was part of the legacy of constitutional Britain, which bequeathed to them not only sustenance but, “The greatest right […] of every man, the right of rights, […] the right of having a share in the making of the laws, to which the good of the whole makes it his duty to submit”. Nonetheless, he warned, such rights could not legitimately negate the toiling lot that was the laborer's fate: “Remember that poverty is decreed by the very nature of man […]. It is necessary to the existence of mankind, that a very large proportion of every people should live by manual labour […]”.

The Languages of Petitioning in Early Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Levels

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.

The pastor and the babalawo: the interaction of religions in nineteenth-century Yorubaland

Africa ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 338-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. D. Y. Peel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Unique Position

1. The Priority of the EncounterThe system of divination called Ifa is among the most elaborate of African systems of divination and occupies a unique position in what is often called ‘Yoruba traditional religion’. That it is inappropriate simply to regard it as part of Yoruba traditional religion indicates the nature of our problem. For its saliency in Yoruba religion, as that has been conceived by commentators both Yoruba and non-Yoruba since the early nineteenth century, has precisely been because of its capacity to ‘ride’ social change, to detach itself from much of what Muslims and Christians call paganism, and to impose itself on the respectful attention of the modern educated.

The Theology of the Scottish Protestant Missionary Movement

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-63
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Post War

In any survey of influential British missionary thinkers, Scottish names would occupy a prominent place. The Scottish contribution was not confined to those who served with the missions of the Presbyterian churches: some influential Scottish missionaries served with English societies, and some were not even Presbyterians. Nevertheless, five generalizations can be offered: (1) Scots Presbyterians opted to do mission through ecclesiastical structures, rather than through voluntary societies. (2) Scottish Presbyterian missions aimed to bring the entire life of Christian communities under the rule of Christ. (3) Scottish missionaries tended to insist that education was integral to the missionary task. (4) Scottish missionaries trained in the early nineteenth century drew deeply from the Scottish Enlightenment. (5) From the late nineteenth century, Scottish (like English) missionary theology was affected by philosophical idealism, though the mid-twentieth-century ascendancy of Barthianism may have helped to sustain the Scottish missionary movement in the turbulent post-war environment.

Chronological Problems in C.G. Okojie's Esan Narrative Traditions

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 345-362
Author(s):  
James B. Webster ◽  
Onaiwu W. Ogbomo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Edo State

The Esan who presently inhabit four local government areas of Edo State, Nigeria, share an exclusive feeling of being one people. In language and custom they are akin to the Edo people of Benin. The name “Esan” is an Edo word meaning “jump” or “flee,” which explains the manner in which they departed the Benin kingdom. The Esan region is divided roughly into the plateau—about one-third the total area but containing three-fifths of the people—and the lowlands. The plateau chiefdoms, originally seven of them, have been classed as Esan ‘A’ and include Irrua, Ekpoma, Uromi, Ewu, Ubiaja, Udo, and Ugboha. The lowland chief doms, originally eight, are known as Esan ‘B’ and consist of Ewohimi (Orikhimi), Ohordua, Emu, Ebelle, Okalo, Amahor, Ezen, and Okaigun.According to Esan traditions all the ancestors of the people, royal and commoner alike, came from Benin, the first groups being escapees and pioneers, the royal groups coming into the region later, during the reign of Ewuare, ca. 1455-82. Closer interviewing of clans, neither royal nor holding titles, demonstrates that many do not hold to this popular tradition, claiming either to be indigenous or to have migrated from elsewhere. Even in the intelligence report on the Esan, a significant number of clans reported origins other than in Benin. It seems that Esan ‘A’ chiefdoms on the plateau were the earliest established, and paid tribute to Benin through the Onojie (chief) of Irrua, who was therefore roughly the paramount of the Esan province of Benin. As the chiefdoms grew in numbers and spread on to the lowlands, he remained their overlord or governor. However, by the early nineteenth century the Oba of Benin installed the chief of Ewohimi as paramount over the lowland or Esan ‘B’ chiefdoms. By the advent of the British in the 1890s the earliest fifteen chiefdoms had grown to thirty.

A Powerful Sympathy: Terror, the Prison, and Humanitarian Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 312-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall McGowen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Moral Taste

It is felt that men are henceforth to be held together by new ties, and separated by new barriere; for the ancient bonds will now no longer unite, nor the ancient boundaries confine. [J. S. Mill, “The Spirit of the Age” (1831)]I“The punishment of death shocks every mind to which it is vividly presented,” wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1832. It “overturns the most settled notions of right and wrong.” H. G. Bennet announced in Parliament in 1820 that he thought an execution “weakened the moral taste or sensibility of the people.” Such high-minded but platitudinous phrases frequently recurred in the early nineteenth-century debate over the criminal law, though historians have had a difficult time knowing what to make of them. Yet for all their vagueness such expressions do reveal a sensibility whose outline we can trace and whose influence we can measure. In drawing a connection between feeling and morality Wakefield appealed to social assumptions and values that were popular among humanitarians. Criminal law reformers proposed a new and exacting standard for the administration of justice: “Punishment,” argued James Scarlett, “ought to be consonant to the feelings and sympathies of mankind; and … those feelings ought to be enlisted on the side of the administration of justice.” They argued that the heavy reliance on the death penalty was a mistaken policy. The gallows aroused dangerous passions that signaled the existence of intractable social antagonism. They opposed such a spectacle with reforms that aimed at the promotion of a social union founded on shared feeling.

The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Way

When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.

Elections and Democracy in France, 1789–1848

2013 ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Malcolm Crook
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Direct Election ◽  
The People ◽  
Complex Picture

When French revolutionaries abolished privilege, they undermined the traditional basis for representing society. Elections acquired a central role in the new political order, because they could be seen as expressing its fundamental legitimating principle: the sovereignty of the people. But what forms could elections appropriately take in a post-privilege society? The French experimented with answers to this question through the revolutionary and Napoleonic years, across the Restoration and liberal eras, into the Second Republic and beyond. Changes from time to time in who was allowed to vote provided only one element in a complex picture. Following a traditional model, revolutionary elections to national bodies were usually indirect, though in the early nineteenth century direct election came to be preferred. The physical and social context of the voting process provided another focus for experimentation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document