William Cobbett died as he had lived – arguing. His final illness didn’t prevent him from dictating angry letters to newspaper editors, and his last recorded words were reportedly complaints about the incompetence of his doctors. It was, in its way, a perfect end to a life spent in perpetual combat with the world.. But

For many people even getting elected to Parliament is not enough to make a name. Most MPs who are famous are famous as a result of being elected. Cobbett’s dealings with and in the House are pretty much the least interesting of his activities and among the least successful in a life already well supplied with failures.

Autodidacts tend to have a lot of self-confidence and will often be prepared to take positions that are a long way from the mainstream. Cobbett saw things his way. And that way was often completely wrong. One of his theories was that clouds originate as fog. He claims to have seen a cloud forming on

# Blog Excerpt: William Cobbett and the Great Population Conspiracy

We all know somebody who is confident that they know how the world works but fails to predict what will happen next Tuesday. William Cobbett possessed an almost supernatural ability to get the big picture spectacularly wrong, insisting Britain’s population was plummeting whilst it was actually exploding in the most remarkable demographic boom in world history.

I first discovered Cobbett in the local history section of my local library. His travels took him across a big chunk of the country, but focused on the south east of England. Initially I thought I was simply getting the recollections of a Victorian traveler, the interest being comparing what he saw with the current

Long before Tony Robbins discovered the power of positive thinking, before Jordan Peterson began lecturing young men about cleaning their rooms, and centuries before the internet spawned an army of life coaches promising to unlock your potential, there was William Cobbett – dispensing advice with the confidence of a man who’d never met a problem