Articles with the Tag William Cobbett

The art of reviewing

"Literature", Art & Criticism, politics
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No matter how crap I find my reviews the next day, I can’t help but think that at least I’m still doing reviews, rather than ill-disguised hitpieces. The English socalled quality newspapers especially have a nasty habit of abusing their bookreviews; here are two from the supposedly liberal Observer that annoyed me today

The first comes via commenter Dearkitty and is an Observer review of Richard Ingrams’ The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. What annoyed me especially here was the opening paragraph:

If William Cobbett hadn’t existed, few people today would feel the need to invent him. Best known for Rural Rides, his socio-lyrical tour of England in the 1820s, Cobbett’s early life is a chaos of politics, tangled up in the kind of issues which are world-shattering to those who live through them but forgotten in a generation.

I can’t stand the jocular matey tone in which Cobbett is dismissed here. It also shows an uncanny lack of history to dismiss the cause of parliamentary reform and extended voting rights for the common man as “the kind of issues” that are “forgotten in a generation”. The rest of the review is almost as awful, written to template: “catchy” opening, some discussion of the subject of the book done with not too much accuracy, with less than half the review actually talking about the book itself and never actually coming out in judgement of it.

The other review is more vile and more dangerous, a hatchet job on Noam Chomsky, which “Lenin” neatly dissected.
Here it is the last two paragraphs that got on my tits:

But what I find most noxious about Chomsky’s argument is his desire to create a moral – or rather immoral – equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history. Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: ‘Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters – Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others – have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.’

Which leads to a question: is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it? The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world’s greatest – if flawed and selfish – democracy going to the polls.

There are several things to object to here: the deliberate and stupid misreading of Chomsky’s argument in the worst possible light, the histrionic fashion in which he accuses Chomsky of hypocrisie –“is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky” — “Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River?” — “Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it?” and finally, the great slobbering sucking up of those last two sentences. It fair turns the stomach.

It turns the stomach even more so, because it is the Blair defence. Everytime Blair has been confronted by angry members of the public and is held accountable for his actions towards Iraq, he comes out with the same old line, that you are allowed to your opinion because you are living in a country, in which you have the right to criticise your government (nervous hand gesutre, sweaty forehead) and should the people of Iraq not have that right?

Not that anyone is ever convinced by this pap, but it is a nice way to claim the moral high ground and any misdeeds are swept under the carpet – never mind Iraq is in a perpeptual civil war and embassy employees cannot reveal who they work for without being killed, at least the Iraqies are free now. In the same way, as long as Chomsky is not dragged from his office and burned in front of M.I.T., clearly his criticisms of the United States are without ground. Because this great United States is still a democracy and that excuses any and all misdeeds, which will anyway surely be resolved by the voters in the next elections.

Rural Rides

books and books review, history, UK politics
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William Cobbett – 542 pages – published in 1830

Cover of Rural Rides

If you’ve read any of China Miéville’s New Crobuzon novels, like Perdido Street Station, you’ve got some idea of what pre Parliament reform England was like in the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth century. It may have had a parliament and some semblance of a constition, but it was far from a democracy and it ruthlessly repressed any political movement that attempted to change things. Despite this repression there was a long and diverse tradition of reform and in the early nineteenth century there were few more impressive figures within the radical reform movement than William Cobbett.

Cobbett started his professional life by taking the stagecoach to London on a whim, spending several months as a clerk before becoming a soldier. In the army he got disgusted with the endemic corruption, brought charges against his officers and had to flee to France just as the revolution there broke out. He then spent time in the United States, until bankruptcy forced him back to England. At this point he was pretty much still a monarchist Tory in his political outlook, but this slowly changed towards Radical, especially after his conviction for treasonous libel after he protested the flogging of local militiamen by Hanovarian mercenaries.

In 1802 Cobbet founded his own newspaper, the Political Register, which ran until his death in 1835. During this entire time it was one of the most well known and consistent Radical publications, with a popularity unmatched by any other. In it, Cobbett agitated for Parliamentary reform and an end to the rotten boroughs and corruption, against the tax eaters, the clergy with their tithes and in favour of the honest working folk of England getting a decent living for their labours.

His politics in short were a mixture of genuine radicalism coupled with a nostalgia for a bygone England, where there were masters and labourers, but both with rights and duties towards one another. His ideal was an England of smallholders, small independent craftsmen and masters, each trading with another directly, without interference by capitalist middlemen. His sympathies lay mostly with rural England, rather than the cities.

Rural Rides is the logical outgrowth of Cobbett’s politics and sentiments, an attempt to discover the real state of the English countryside. Originally published in the Register, it covers a period of four years, from 1822 until 1826. Its strength, the reason why it is still in print is that it is not just a political examination, but a portrait of a countryside now long gone, still partway in its transformation from the medieval to the modern.

Cobett has a real love for this landscape, and a real hatred for the pressures that are transforming it or have transformed it. Furthermore this love is coupled with an admiration for the people who inhabit it. Time after time in his descriptions the condition of the people in a given town or county is as much a reason as its natural beauty for Cobbett to praise it.

You can therefore not read Rural Rides properly if you discount its politics, decouple it from its context. Cobbett was a partisan observer at a time of deep political turmoil, with the forces of capitalism –the owners of great estates, the new factory masters, the free trade ideologues– were mounting their assaults on the ancient priviledges and rights of the English country people, when people like Cobbett were not only defending these ancients rights but were attempting to extend them. There’s a deep anger in Rural Rides, an anger at the changes happening in England, a very personal anger.

His egotism is delightful, because there is no affection in it. He does not talk about himself for lack of something to write about, but because some circumstance that has happened to himself is the best possible illustration of the subject and he himself is not the man to shrink from giving the best possible illustration from a squamish delicacy. He likes both himself and his subject too well“. It is this personal feeling that keeps Rural Rides in print, because his anger, his despair and his joy are still palpatable more then 170 years after first publication

Also published at my booklog.