Rural Rides: Two Volumes in One

There is no better way of rediscovering a lost but still not forgotten England than to turn to the colourful pages of William Cobbett's Rural Rides. Already when Cobbett began to write the accounts of his journeys in 1829, the England which he had known as a boy was beginning to look and feel different. The landscape was changing as a result of the double impact of agricultural enclosure and the growth of towns: society too was changing as a result of the combined influences of industry, finance and war. To many of Cobbett's contemporaries the changes were good, visible signs of the "march to improvement" ; to Cobbett and his followers they were bad, but it still seemed that there was time enough to reverse them. "Events are working together," Cobbett wrote in 1825, "to make the country worth living in which, for the great body of the people, is at present hardly the case." It was for the sake of discovering the true state of affairs and appealing to others to help promote the proper remedies that Cobbett began to travel round England. The text follows the edition o 1853, with Note by James Paul Cobbett.