The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. Richard Ingrams

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘The Frenchmen who were my scholars, used to laugh at me exceedingly on this account; and sometimes when I was making an appointment with them, they would say, with a smile and a bow, “Sauve la Tonnerre toujours, Monsieur Cobbett.”’⁵

      Such devotion to his wife’s needs was all the more commendable in someone who was, as always, intensely active. Cobbett was now doing so well from his journalism and teaching that he decided to set up on his own as a publisher and bookseller. In May 1796 he moved with wife and baby into a house-cum-shop at 25 North Second Street, opposite Christ Church and near the terminus for the coaches to Baltimore and New York. He was taking a considerable risk. For the first time he was emerging in public from the cloak of anonymity, and setting up shop in the centre of town. ‘Till I took this house,’ he wrote later, ‘I had remained almost entirely unknown as a writer. A few persons did, indeed, know that I was the person, who had assumed the name of Peter Porcupine: but the fact was by no means a matter of notoriety. The moment, however, that I had taken a lease on a large house, the transaction became a topic of public conversation, and the eyes of the Democrats and the French, who still lorded it over the city, and who owed me a mutual grudge, were fixed upon me. I thought my situation somewhat perilous. Such tracts as I had published, no man had dared to utter, in the United States, since the rebellion. I knew that those truths had mortally offended the leading men amongst the Democrats, who could, at any time, muster a mob quite sufficient to destroy my house, and to murder me … In short, there were, in Philadelphia, about ten thousand persons, all of whom would have rejoiced to see me murdered: and there might, probably, be two thousand, who would have been very sorry for it: but not above fifty of whom would have stirred an inch to save me.’

      As the bookshop’s opening day approached Cobbett’s friends, from among the fifty, urged him to be cautious, to do nothing to provoke retaliation. He, however, like Nelson, decided that the bravest course was also the safest. His shop had large windows, and on the Sunday prior to opening he filled them with all the prints he possessed of ‘Kings, Queens, Princes and Nobles. I had all the English ministry; several of the bishops and judges; the most famous admirals: and in short, every picture that I thought likely to excite rage in the enemies of Great Britain. Never since the beginning of the rebellion, had any one dared to hoist at his window the portrait of George the Third.’

      On Monday morning Cobbett took down his shutters and opened the shop. Although a large crowd collected, nothing happened. The only threat of violence came in the form of an anonymous letter to his landlord John Oldden, a Quaker merchant of Chesnut (sic) Street:

      Sir, a certain William Cobbett alias Peter Porcupine, I am informed is your tenant. This daring scoundrell [sic] not satisfied with having repeatedly traduced the people of this country; in his detestable productions, he has now the astonishing effrontery to expose those very publications at his window for sale … When the time of retribution arrives it may not be convenient to discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. Your property may suffer. As a friend therefore I advise you to save your property by either compelling Mr Porcupine to leave your house or at all events oblige him to cease exposing his abominable proclivities or any of his courtley [sic] prints at his window for sale. In this way only you may avoid danger to your house and perhaps save the rotten carcase of your tenant for the present.

      Cobbett used the letter as the pretext for another fiery pamphlet, ‘The Scarecrow’ (1796). But although he affected great indignation he actually enjoyed engaging in controversy with his opponents. There was to be more than enough of this now that he had come out into the open and revealed the true identity of Peter Porcupine. Several pamphlets resulted: Cobbett was accused of being a deserter, a British government spy and a criminal who had fled to America to escape the gallows. They said he had been whipped when he was in Paris – hence his hatred of the French.

      Cobbett was astute enough to realise that all such attacks were not just good for business but a tribute to the success of his campaign. He also knew that he was a better writer than any of his critics. In reply to them he quoted a letter to his father: ‘“Dear Father, when you used to get me off to work in the morning, dressed in my blue smock-frock and woollen spatterdashes, with my bag of bread and cheese and bottle of small beer slung over my shoulder on the little crook that my old god-father Boxall gave me, little did you imagine that I should one day become so great a man as to have my picture stuck in the windows and have four whole books published about me in the course of one week” – Thus begins a letter which I wrote to my father yesterday morning and which, if it reaches him, will make the old man drink an extraordinary pot of ale to my health. Heaven bless him. I think I see him now by his old-fashioned fire-side reading the letter to his neighbours’ – an unlikely scenario, in view of the fact that George Cobbett had been dead for four years. It would have been most unlike Cobbett to deceive his readers about this, and the assumption must be that, having been out of the country since early 1792 he had not been in touch with his family. This in turn suggests that, contrary to the impression he liked to give, Cobbett had never been close to either his father or his three brothers.

      In 1796, as part of his continuing campaign to answer his critics, Cobbett published his short autobiography The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, in which he gave the Americans a vivid and appealing account of his boyhood in Farnham, his escape from home and his army career. It is one of his best pieces of writing, and served its purpose in showing that he was not just a hack pamphleteer but a writer with a genuinely independent spirit. The following year, 1797, he launched a daily newspaper, Porcupine’s Gazette, and closed down his monthly periodical the Political Censor. The paper was an immediate success, Cobbett claming in the first issue that he already had a thousand subscribers. By November three thousand copies were being printed. The paper flourished for the simple reason that, as the sales figures suggest, the American public, even though they might disagree with Cobbett’s views, enjoyed his writing – the robust straightforward style, the knockabout, the jokes and the nicknames.

      As a journalist Cobbett was at his best when he could focus his animosity on a particular individual rather than a set of principles or ideas. This is not to say that he was uninterested in ideas, only that he needed someone, like Dr Priestley, to personify the particular variety of political hypocrisy he was attacking at any time. Labelled with appropriate nicknames, these favoured targets (mentioned at every opportunity) lent a powerful spice to his political journalism, making it compulsive reading even for his enemies. Many of the victims of his most savage attacks were not necessarily his political opponents, but had aroused his indignation by being humourless, puritanical in their attitude to morality or, above all, vain. Priestley was one such. William Wilberforce would later be another. A third was Noah Webster (1758–1843) of Webster’s Dictionary fame, a lexicographer, a grammarian, the author of a spelling book for American schools and the man responsible for the differences between American and English spelling (‘color’ for ‘colour’, etc.). Webster came from a family of strict Puritans and was highly industrious in any number of fields – though Jefferson called him ‘a mere pedagogue of very limited understanding’. Cobbett was even ruder, despite the fact that Webster supported the federalists, and missed no opportunity to call him names:

      despicable creature … viper … mean shuffling fellow … were this man indeed distinguished as being descended from a famous race, for great learning and talents, for important public services, for possessing much weight in the opinions of the people, even his vanity would be inexcusable but the fellow is distinguished, amongst the few who know him, for the very contrary of all this. He comes of obscure parents, he has just learning enough to make him a fool, his public services have all been confined to silly, idle projects, every one of which has completely failed, and as to his weight as a politician, it is that of a feather, which is overbalanced by a straw, and puffed away by the gentlest breath. All his measures are exploded, his predictions have proved false, not a single sentiment of his has become fashionable, nor has the Federal Government ever adopted a single measure which he has been in the habit of recommending.⁶

      Webster СКАЧАТЬ