SOURCE: "The Climactic Years," in Great Cobbett: The Noblest Agitator, 1983. Reprint by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1985, pp. 423-54.

In the following excerpt, Green discusses Cobbett's skill as a writer and the characteristics of his thought, touching on a wide range of Cobbett's writings.

Because Cobbett's most enduring achievement was to turn author at a comparatively late stage in his career, it is, in the end, not his politics nor his journalism nor even his character that we have to examine, but his books. There is more of the real William Cobbett in them than there was in the ageing, failing and increasingly erratic man who finally achieved what contemporaries considered to be his greatest political success at a time when his fortunes and his happiness had most completely failed. His joumalism, to a certain extent, reflected both his successes and his failures, but neither, it would seem, influenced...