“The next day after Gibbs, Ellenborough, and their associates, had got me safe in Newgate, an American friend of mine, who had the clearest and soundest head of almost any man I ever knew in my life, and for whom I had and still have a very great personal regard, came to see me in a very miserable hole, though better than that to which I had been sentenced, and from which I finally ransomed myself at the expense, for lodging alone, of 1200l. Being seated, one of us on each side of a little bit of a table, he said, looking up into my face, with his arms folded upon the edge of the table, ‘Well! they have got you at last. And now, what will you do?’ After a moment or two I answered, ‘What do you think I ought to do?’ He then gave me his opinion, and entered pretty much into a sort of plan of proceedings. I heard him out, and then I spoke to him in much about these words: ‘No, Dickins, that will never do. This nation is drunk, it is mad as a March hare, and mad it will be till this beastly frolic (the war) is over. The only mode of proceeding, to get satisfaction, requires great patience. The nation must suffer at last, and greatly and dreadfully suffer, and in that suffering it will come to its reason, and to that justice of sentiment, which are now wholly banished. I shall make no immediate impression by tracing the paper-system to its deadly root. The common people will stare at me, and the rich ruffians will swear; but the time must come when all will listen; and my plan is to write that now which I can hold up to the teeth of my insolent enemies, and taunt them with in the hour of their distress.…’ I then described to him the outline of what I intended to do with regard to the paper-system; and after passing a very pleasant afternoon, during which we selected and rejected several titles, we at last fixed upon that of Paper against Gold, which I began to write and to publish in a few weeks afterwards, and which, at the end of thirteen years, I hold up to the noses of the insolent foes who then exulted over me, and tell them, ‘This is what you got by my having been sentenced to Newgate: this was the produce of that deed by which it was hoped and believed, that I was pressed down never to be able to stir again.…’ This was a new epoch in the progress of my mind. I now bent my whole force to one object, regarding everything else as of no consequence at all. The pursuits of agriculture and gardening filled up the moments of mere leisure and relaxation. Other topics than that of paper-money came now and then to make a variety; but this was the main thing. I never had any hope in anything else; and nothing else was an object of my care.”
So the attempt to crush him was a failure. Rather, they read defiance in every page; and, as time wore on, it was seen that the silence of defeat was on the side of Mr. Cobbett’s foes. The Press ignored him; that Press which had, from envy at his superior talents and his unexampled success, ransacked the vocabulary of Billingsgate in order to abuse a man they could not answer; which had so goaded and inflamed the persecuting spirit of the time, that none dared speak or write who were not sheltered by privilege, or who had not bartered independence for the favour of those in power. Not for several years after this date was there much desire shown, on the part of a ministerial writer, to attract the glance of this rampant lion.
And they might well be quiet. If this imprisonment had neither killed nor cured him, Mr. Cobbett came out of Newgate an altered man. He was now fifty years of age, and a few grey hairs were just appearing. The enormous expenses which he had been put to (amounting, from first to last, to more than six thousand pounds), and the discovery that his business affairs were hopelessly involved, made up a bundle of difficulties which began to tell upon his temper. Good-natured sarcasms made place for bitter ones; and an air of spitefulness would come over his writings when there was more than ordinary cause for resentment. His essays were, albeit brilliant as ever, sometimes marred by the introduction of coarse epithets; and, during the remainder of his career, this cause alone sufficed to estrange many of his friends, and to put a stone into the hand of opponents.
Mr. Cobbett’s writing must be considered as at its very best during the years 1810-12. He probably gave some time to revision; a point which he had been inclined to neglect, and a matter concerning which he seemed utterly heedless in later years; the exclusive devotion to his pen, now so far removed from rural distractions, necessarily produced better work.
But it cannot be said that there was any deterioration in Cobbett’s literary style, beyond the warmth of expression engendered by fiercer animosity. The best known works of William Cobbett belong to the last twenty years of his life; and if they are painfully full of personal hatreds, it must be recollected that those were, indeed, times to try men’s souls; the oppressor and the oppressed had seldom been, in England, in such close conflict; and a leader and guider of men, on the side of the latter, had need to be fierce and uncompromising. The soldier, foremost of your storming-party, has little time to spare for consideration of the personal merits of the foe, whose gunstock is swinging o’er his head.
The more serious result, personally, of the sentence pronounced upon Mr. Cobbett, was the utter collapse of his pecuniary fortunes. The enormous profit derived from the publication of the Register might have been sufficient to cover even the profuse expenditure of Botley House, with its hospitality and its planting experiments, but Mr. Cobbett was eminently a person who (as the Hebrew poet has it) earned money to put it into a bag with holes.
This matter, however, might be passed over with light notice, but for its interference with Cobbett’s public services. His is not a solitary instance of a useful life being marred, and its efficiency hindered, by an ignorance of the value of money; and there could hardly be a more decisive evidence of the disastrous results of such ignorance than is presented by this man’s career. Plutus is the most exacting of deities; his votaries must be whole-hearted; let Fortuna come and cast off her shoes as she may.…
It was never Cobbett’s aim to get rich. He had, indeed, hoped to provide a snug competence for his children; but for plans of amassing wealth he had supreme contempt. To earn by labour, and to circulate the proceeds, was his economy; and it cannot be denied that, with proper prudence, that is the right economy. The greatest enemy to national prosperity is the plutocrat; and the next greatest is he who can afford, in the prime of life, to live without labour, through the mistaken munificence or benevolence of another.