Portrait of Richard Cobden, MP (1804-1865) by

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Description: Richard Cobden, 1804-1865, statesman, was born on 3 June 1804, in an old farmhouse in the hamlet of Heyshott, near Midhurst, on the western border of Sussex. He came of an ancient stock of yeomen of the soil, for several centuries rooted in that district. William Cobden, his father, was a small farmer. The unfavourable circumstances of agriculture at the peace were too strong for him, and the farm was sold. Relatives took charge of his eleven children, and Richard, who was fourth among them, was banished for five miserable years to one of those Yorkshire schools whose brutalities were afterwards exposed in Dickens's famous picture of ‘Dotheboys Hall.’ In 1819 he became a clerk in his uncle's warehouse in Old Change, and in due time went the circuits as commercial traveller, soliciting orders for muslins and calicoes, collecting accounts, diligently observing whatever came under his eye, and impressing everybody with his power of making himself useful.

In 1828 Cobden determined to set up in business on his own account. He and a couple of friends raised a thousand pounds among them, most of it by way of loan; they persuaded a great firm of calico-printers in Lancashire to trust them with the sale of their goods on commission in London; and they quickly established a thriving concern. In 1831 the partners leased an old factory at Sabden, a village between Burnley and Clitheroe in Lancashire, and began to print their own calicoes. Cobden himself took up his residence at Manchester (1832), the great centre with which so much of his public activity was afterwards identified. The new venture prospered, Cobden prints won a reputation in the trade for attractive pattern and good impression, and the partners appeared to be destined to accumulate a large and rapid fortune. Cobden felt himself free to give some of his time to wider concerns. He was constitutionally endowed with an alert and restless intelligence, and in the hardest days of his youth he had done what he could to educate himself. He taught himself French, practised composition in the shape of two or three very juvenile comedies, took an ardent interest in phrenology, and was profoundly and permanently impressed by George Combe's views on education. He read some of the great writers, and picked up a fair idea of the course of European history. His practical and lively temperament combined with his position to fix his interest in the actualities of the present, and though he was always a reader, and always very ready to admire men whose chances of scholarship and science had been better than his own, he knew that he must look for the knowledge that his purposes made necessary, in the newspapers, in blue-books, in Hansard's reports, and perhaps, above all, in frequent and industrious travel. In 1835 he made his first rapid visit to the United States (June-August), and in the autumn of the next year he went for six months (October 1836-April 1837) to Constantinople, Greece, Egypt, and the western shores of Asia Minor.

To the same time belong the two remarkable pamphlets in which he practically opened his public career: ‘England, Ireland, and America’ (1835), and ‘Russia’ (1836), ‘by a Manchester Manufacturer.’ He had already tried his hand in print in letters on economic subjects, which had been published in the ‘Manchester Examiner,’ and had attracted considerable attention by their firmness of thought and clearness of expression. He exhibited the same qualities still more conspicuously in the two pamphlets. Briefly stated, the argument is as follows: America must at no distant date enter into serious competition with our products; in this competition we shall be heavily handicapped, first by protection, secondly by the load of taxation and debt incurred in needless intervention in continental wars. From these propositions he drew what, if they were true, was the irresistible inference, that the sound policy for Great Britain lay in the direction of free trade and non-intervention. Ireland constituted another national danger, hardly less formidable than the debt or the tariff, and was another reason why we should attend more steadfastly to our own affairs. In the second pamphlet the writer shows that the case of Russia, on which David Urquhart was then successfully endeavouring to kindle alarmist opinion, is no exception to his principle as stated above, and that we were not called upon to interfere by arms between Russia and Turkey, either for the sake of European law and the balance of power, or for the security of British interests. The doctrine which he thus preached at the beginning of his public life, was the substance of his policy and object of his urgent exhortations down to its close.

At the general election which followed the accession of Queen Victoria, Cobden was the defeated candidate for Stockport, polling 412 votes out of a total poll of less than nine hundred, in a constituency which to-day has upwards of nine thousand voters on the register. His defeat did not for an instant damp his concern in public affairs. He was interested in what was then the obscure field of national education, and he was active in the municipal work of Manchester, which received its charter of incorporation in 1838. He was one of the first aldermen, holding office till 1844. In 1838, too, he went for a month to Germany, w he perceived the future political effects of the new Zollverein.

Sources Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, edited by John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers, 1870; The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, 1867; Morley's Life of Richard Cobden, 1881; Ashworth's Recollections of Richard Cobden and the Anti-Cornlaw League, 1876; Madame Salis Schwabe's Cobden, ses voyages, correspondances et souvenirs, 1879; Sir Edward Watkin's Letters and Reminiscences of Cobden, 1891; Cobden as a Citizen, a chapter in Manchester History, with a Cobden bibliog. by W. E. A. Axon, 1907; The League: the Anti-Cornlaw League Organ, Sept. 1843 to 4 July 1846.

Contributor

J. M-y. PUBLISHED 1887

Status: For Sale	Reference#: 3051a
Condition: Good	Year: 19th Century
Country: UK	Maker: English School
Height: 20.60 in. (52.32 cm)
Width: 16 in. (40.64 cm)
Title: Portrait of Richard Cobden, MP (1804-1865) by English School	Style: Traditional
Materials: oil on canvas

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