This book offers the first thoroughgoing literary analysis of William Cobbett as a writer. Leonora Nattrass explores the nature and effect of Cobbett's rhetorical strategies, through close examination of a broad selection of his polemical writings from his early American journalism onward. She examines the political implications of Cobbett's style within the broader context of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century political prose, and argues that his perceived ideological and stylistic flaws--inconsistency, bigotry, egoism and political nostalgia--are in fact strategies designed to appeal to a range of usually polarized reading audiences.