"Cobbett, the greatest tribune of the labourers... The emergence of an independent Radical press after the [Napoleonic] Wars was in great degree his personal triumph... It was Cobbett who created this Radical intellectual culture...in the sense that he found the tone, the style, and the arguments which could bring the weaver, the schoolmaster, and the shipwright, into a common discourse. Out of the diversity of grievances and interests he brought a Radical consensus... Cobbett did more than any other writer to preserve the Radicals and Chartists from becoming the camp-followers of Utilitarians or of Anti-Corn Law League. He nourished the culture of a class, whose wrongs he felt, but whose remedies he could not understand."
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E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; 1980), pp. 225, 627, 746, 762
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Cobbett
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William Cobbett
William Cobbett (9 March 1763 – 18 June 1835) was an English politician, agriculturist, journalist and pamphleteer, writing first in the Tory and then in the Radical cause.
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