Who Was William Cobbett?
Today, if you were to mention the name, “William Cobbett,” to a group of people, the majority of them would have no idea who you were talking about. It’s hard to believe that he was once the Federalists’ more effective journalist and one of the most popular journalists in the late 1700s and early 1800s. He can even be described as the best writer of the period. Along with being a journalist, Cobbett also worked as an author, pamphleteer, soldier, and farmer. There were many reasons that Cobbett was such a successful writer. He was very outspoken and he didn’t care about who he angered. He spoke for those who didn’t have a voice and he wrote from his reader’s viewpoints, not to them. He took a lot of risks and always accepted the consequences for his actions. These are a lot of important qualities that a good journalist should have and William Cobbett was probably the first journalist to have them most of them. William Hazlitt, a writer during Cobbett’s time, wrote an essay on Cobbett. Hazlitt said, “he is not only unquestionably the most powerful political writer of the present day, but one of the best writers in the language. He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright English.” Like many other writers during that time, Cobbett wrote in a simple language so that more people would be able to read and understand his writing. He was an incredibly gifted writer who was able to influence a lot of people with his work.
William Cobbett had a lot of other jobs before finally becoming a journalist. He was born on March 9, 1763, in Farnham, England. Since he lived in a rural community, he started out as a farmer. He had very little formal education. He learned how to read and write from his fa...
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...bett did manage to make several enemies and he started a lot of feuds. Even when the majority of Americans did not agree with his work, he still stood by his opinions.
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Bain, Robert, Joseph M. Flora, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., eds. Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.