The English have had a penchant for the most unlikely heros, heros they’ve honored more—in the classical meaning of that much abused phrase—in the breach than in the observance. Carlyle was one such hero. The names of his admirers are a roll call of the Victorian greats. Yet he was the least representative thinker of his time, the most heretical, the most outrageous and outlandish. Damning all the “mud-gods” of his age-liberalism, rationalism, utilitarianism, materialism, individualism, laissez-fairism—he was read and revered by those who made that age what it was. Emerson said of Past and Present that it was “as full of treason as an egg is full of meat.” Even its style was treasonable. The era of Macaulay, Hazlitt, Mill, and Dickens, of writers distinguished for their lucidity, urbanity, and wit, lavished praise upon a critic whose prose was tortuous and turgid, full of neologisms and solecisms, expletives and invectives, capitals and italics, labored metaphors and German phrases. It is as if Carlyle appealed to the “underside” of the culture, the self-doubt and self-denial, even self-hate, that lingered just beneath the surface, a rebelliousness that never quite broke out and yet was never quite pacified.

So it was with another hero of the time, the Grand Old Man of English radicalism, William Cobbett (1763-1835). Cobbett was, one might say, the poor man’s Carlyle. He was to the working classes what Carlyle was to the intellectuals, a man more often praised than heeded, a maverick without party or