SOURCE: A chapter in William Cobbett, Penguin Books, 1949, pp. 180-85.

Below, Pemberton summarizes Cobbett's accomplishment as a rough-hewn thinker and his significance to the future of English culture.

With the death of William Cobbett it was as if a blustering gale from off the saltings had ceased abruptly. It had been a gale which, according to the politics of a man, intoxicated him like wine or doubled him up as with a blow in the pit of the stomach. In either case it had been a gale to which all had become accustomed and when it blew no more it was as if a familiar sound had ended. With his Weekly Political Registers, his rural ridings, his lectures and speeches and prodigious literary output Cobbett had engrossed the attention of the country; he had become an institution, a national habit. The question 'What does Cobbett say about it...