William Cobbett, Romanticism and the Enlightenment by James Grande

Author:James Grande [Grande, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Literary Criticism, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh
ISBN: 9781317317081
Google: 2nBECgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-06T16:11:39+00:00

7

‘The Feast of the Gridiron is at Hand’: Chartism, Cobbett and Currency

Matthew Roberts

On 20 October 1838 the north-east based Chartist newspaper the Northern Liberator published an imaginary account of a meeting held in the future entitled ‘Anticipation. – A.D. 1900’. The meeting was for the purposes of commencing a subscription for a national monument in honour of William Cobbett, and was chaired by John Fielden – a ‘lineal descendent of the John Fielden who had been a close friend of Cobbett’s’. Also present were Sir Robert Peel (the great grandson of the famous statesman), Wolverley Attwood Esq. MP, and Julius Praed, Esq. ‘the great bankers’. The presence of these latter gentlemen, whose forebears had, in their various ways, been opponents of Cobbett in his own lifetime – signalled their belated conversion to Cobbett’s views, particularly in relation to public finance. Even the future king, we are told, had taken out a subscription to the monument, enclosing his contribution in an old report of the Commissioners for paying off the National Debt. In the utopian society of ‘A.D. 1900’, government was small and cheap; high taxation, which had been necessary to pay the interest to the insatiable ‘fundholder’, who had lent money at exorbitant rates of interest to the government, was a thing of the past. So too was the National Debt and paper money, the ‘filthy rags’, in Cobbett’s words, which had proliferated as a means of paying off the interest on the National Debt. We learn that one of the first actions of the ‘Convention Parliament’ – a reference to the first Chartist Convention – was to implement Cobbett’s financial reforms: the abolition of paper money, equitable adjustment, wiping offthe National Debt, reducing taxation and the size of the civil list. The real achievement of Cobbett, according to Peel’s great grandson, was putting ‘the science of money in a light clear and intelligible’.1

Why the Northern Liberator felt the need to indulge its utopian fantasies is not entirely clear, though it does illustrate that some Chartists had more than a vague idea about what the lineaments of a post-Charter world might look like. That such an article appeared in the Northern Liberator is hardly surprising. This newspaper was owned and edited by Robert Blakey (with Thomas Doubleday), who had been a friend and disciple of Cobbett.2 As an editorial, espousing the principles of the Liberator, confessed: ‘ours are easily defined, they are, as nearly as possible, those of the late Wm. Cobbett’.3 While few other organs of Chartism were as reverential towards Cobbett as the Liberator, there can be no doubt – as this chapter will show – that Cobbett’s views on public finance were widely shared by many Chartists throughout Britain. Earlier biographies of Cobbett and histories of Chartism oft en played down the influence of Cobbett – a result, perhaps, of a desire to distance Chartism from the ‘Tory-Radicalism’ that came to be associated with Cobbett.4 More recent accounts, on the other hand, have at least implied that

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