Miles Taylor writes:

This volume of letters – the first of four – offers relief, if not complete protection, from such appropriation. Cobden is revealed as a man of his time, absorbed by mesmerism, phrenology and zoos. We see him as a family man – around a third of the letters are to and from his father, his brothers and his wife, Catherine. We are drawn into a Buddenbrooks world of kith, kin and commerce, in which his role as patriarch after the death of his parents is clearly the incentive for much of his early business success. What we see here are his political skills rather than his vision. Although studies of the Anti-Corn Law League have always suggested as much, the letters to and from all corners of the British Isles confirm that it was Cobden who was the brains behind the organisation and its frequent changes of strategy. He pushed to exploit the loophole in the 1832 Reform Act which allowed the League to purchase freehold property in the counties and add thousands of its own supporters to the franchise. He helped pioneer the campaign mailshot, as street-numbered houses appeared for the first time across the cities of the UK. He took the League into the rural districts, shattering the cap-doffing deference of the small farmers, and turned an ordinary item on the breakfast table – the penny loaf – into the most arresting political icon since the Jacobins’ red cap of liberty. And he brought the League to the West End, as theatres in Covent Garden and Drury Lane were turned over to monster meetings for the men and genteel bazaars for the ladies. As MP for Stockport, he worked away in the House of Commons with relentless logic at the case against protection. Eventually, he earned the respect of Peel, who surprised some and alienated even more by paying public tribute to Cobden’s role when repeal became law in 1846.

(LRB 12 March 2009)

Oxford | hardback 529 pp. |ISBN: 9780199211951