Week 5 - Lecture - A Tale of Two Revolutions

This lecture discussed two people; Charles Dickens and William Cobbett. We talked about their ideas, their writing and why they were the 'Champions of the Countryside/Urban'.

Here were the other topics which we discussed, relating to Dickens and Cobbett:
The French Revolution
The English became very curious with the French Revolution, they were scared that the same thing would happen to them. People have different reasons as to why they think it didn't happen in England, perhaps it was that they experienced a snippet of the potential violence at the Peterloo Massacre.
It was expensive, income tax was created to pay for the war effort.

The Corn Laws
Products from other countries became more expensive, the products from your own area were cheaper so that you would only buy goods from your own area - keeping profit inside the country. Although there were downsides to this, it made the cost of bread even more expensive and the workers wages didn't go up - so they were earning the same but having to pay more. Making the poor, poorer.
People began looking for different new jobs, a lot of people fled to the cities.

The Poor
The Speenhanland System - aimed to take away the stresses of high rising prices.
It created the workhouses; men women and children were separated and made to work all day everyday. The conditions were beyond poor, the people who ran the workhouses had worked out how much they could feed the poor to keep them alive but at the same time slowly kill them. It criminalised the poor.

William Cobbett
The Champion of the Country.
Cobbett was an anti-radical who became a radical...the plight of the farm workers was what changed him in the 19th century.
Cobbett spent 20 years away in America, when he returned to England he was shocked at the state of the country side. Due to the Corn Laws and several other reasons people have fled the country side to find jobs else where. Cobbett believed that the countryside should be filled with people/communities all the time.
He was a very passionate man, writing 'Rural Rides' at nearly 60 shows how he continued to be passionate right through his life. Rural Rides was written about the country side, he rode around the country for a long time taking in the new countryside which he was faced with.

Charles Dickens
The Champion of the City.
He was a campaigning journalist, he wrote a lot of his books in series's within newspapers (sort of the Eastenders of his time!)