Rural Rides

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I found the working people of Frome very intelligent; very well informed as to the cause of their misery; not at all humbuggered by the canters, whether about religion or loyalty. -from "Salisbury to Highworth, Saturday, 2 September" Son of an innkeeper, former soldier, champion of the working class, early anticorporate activist, and future Member of Parliament-Will Cobbett's unique eye offers us a perspective on 19th-century England we won't find anywhere else. Cobbett roamed Southern England on horseback in the years between 1821 and 1832, gathering his "economical and political observations relative to matters applicable to, and illustrated by, the state of" that charming part of the world, one in the throes of massive change in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. This is an extraordinary record of a world long gone, one very little documented when it existed, by a voice who was far ahead of his time. British journalist and radical WILLIAM COBBETT (1762-1835) is also the author of The Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament (1830). --This text refers to the Paperback edition.