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William Cobbett (1763-1835)
was born in Farnham, Surrey, the son of a farmer. He
taught himself to read and write, and while serving
as a sergeant-major in the army studied rhetoric, geometry,
logic and French. He was a great political writer and
champion of the poor, and was MP for Oldham from 1832
- 1835. His most famous work is probably ‘Rural Rides’
published in 1830, in which he paints a picture of a
vanishing world as the agricultural based economy of
England gave way to the Industrial Revolution. He visited
Dover and below are some extracts from his entry written
on Wednesday, 3 September 1823.
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“The town of Dover
is like other sea-port towns; but really much more clean,
and with less blackguard people in it than I ever observed
in any sea-port before. It is a most picturesque place,
to be sure. On one side of it rises, upon the top of
a very steep hill, the Old Castle,
with all its fortifications. On the other side of it
there is another chalk hill, the side of which rises
up from sixty to a hundred feet higher than the tops
of the houses, which stand pretty close to the foot
of the hill.”
“I got into Dover rather late. It
was dusk when I was going down the street towards the
quay. I happened to look up, and was quite astonished
to perceive cows grazing upon a spot apparently fifty
feet above the tops of the houses, and measuring horizontally
not, perhaps, more than ten or twenty feet from a line
which would have formed a continuation into the air.
I went up to the same spot, the next day, myself; and
you actually look down upon the houses, as you look
out of a window upon people in the street.”
“On the south side of the town the
hill is , I believe, rather more lofty than that on
the north side; and here is the cliff
which is described by Shakespeare in the play of ‘King
Lear’. It is fearfully steep, certainly. Very nearly
perpendicular for a considerable distance. The grass
grows well, up to the very tip of the cliff; and you
see cows and sheep grazing there with as much unconcern
as if grazing in the bottom of a valley.”
Much as he apparently liked the town
Cobbett was unimpressed by the recently built fortifications
on the Western
Heights:
“…I went to see, with my own eyes,
something of the sorts of means that had been made use
of to squander away countless millions of money. Here
is a hill containing, probably, a couple of square miles
or more, hollowed like a honeycomb. Here are line upon
line, trench upon trench, cavern upon cavern, bomb-proof
upon bomb-proof; in short the very sight of the thing
convinces you that either madness the most humiliating,
or profligacy the most scandalous must have been at
work here for years. The question that every man of
sense asks is : What reason had you to suppose that
the French would ever come to this hill to attack it,
while the rest of the country was so much more easy
to assail?”
“This is, perhaps, the only set
of fortifications in the world ever famed for mere hiding.
There is no appearance of any intention to annoy an
enemy. It is a parcel of holes made in a hill, to hide
Englishmen from Frenchmen.”
A view of Dover in 1804, which would have changed
little when Cobbett saw it 20 years later.
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