caa a22 4500 388100923 CHVBK 20180307125320.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199904 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0956793300001709 doi S0956793300001709 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0956793300001709 Griffiths Clare Wadham College, Oxford, UK. G.D.H. Cole and William Cobbett [Elektronische Daten] [Clare Griffiths] William Cobbett was, during his own lifetime, a highly controversial figure who often found it necessary to defend himself against supposed misrepresentation. His historical persona remains no less controversial. The complexities of Cobbett's career and character have supported a variety of interpretations, and many writers this century have felt the need to define ‘the real Cobbett'. Modern misrepresentations have arisen less from false stories invented to damn him than from the misleading emphases employed to praise him, with both Left and Right seeking in their different ways to appropriate what they see as his legacy. For conservatives, he has been an essentially timeless figure, standing for Old England and all that may have made such a place great. Writers on the Left have treated him rather as a figure of the past, rationalised to fit into the rise of working-class consciousness and organisation, and divested of some aspects unseemly in an early representative of ‘the cause'. Cobbett has been adopted as an important figure for the Left, but readings based on the assumptions about working-class radicalism held by the modern British Labour movement have often found it necessary to exclude aspects of his writings as inconsistent, or at least idiosyncratic. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999 Rural History Cambridge University Press 10/1(1999-04), 91-104 0956-7933 10:1<91 1999 10 RUH https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793300001709 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793300001709 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Griffiths Clare Wadham College, Oxford, UK NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Rural History Cambridge University Press 10/1(1999-04), 91-104 0956-7933 10:1<91 1999 10 RUH CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge