5 - Dialogue and debate
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2009
Summary
With the birth of the twopenny Register of 1816, Cobbett's characteristic urge towards the written reproduction of demotic language is confirmed and extended. Lynne Lemrow has made close observations about Cobbett's style in this period. She identifies as standard the retention of spoken word-order – subject, verb, object – and the breakdown of complex sentences into simpler clauses linked by colons or semicolons. Other common features, though ones which as we know are also characteristic of Cobbett's earlier conservative writings, are ‘repetition, anaphora … parallel structures … and the rhetorical question …’ By the time of the letters ‘To Journeymen and Labourers’ and, here, in the ‘Letter to Luddites’, this increasingly demotic usage is apparent:
Friends and Fellow Countrymen,
At this time, when the cause of freedom is making a progress which is as cheering to the hearts of her friends as it is appalling to those of her enemies, and, when it is become evident that nothing can possibly prevent that progress from terminating in the happiness of our country, which has, for so many years, been a scene of human misery and degradation; when it is become evident that so glorious a termination of our struggles can be now prevented only by our giving way to our passions instead of listening to the voice of reason, only by our committing those acts which admit of no justification either in law or in equity; at such a time, can it be otherwise than painful to reflect, that acts of this description are committed in any part of the kingdom, and particularly in the enlightened, the patriotic, the brave town of Nottingham?
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- William CobbettThe Politics of Style, pp. 135 - 156Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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