RETROSPECT
By George Dyson
Cottage Economy
Pamphleteer William Cobbett launched the sustainability movement — in 1821.
“The word Economy, like a great many others,
has, in its application, been very much abused,”
explained William Cobbett, the irrepressible British
(and at times North American) radical agitator and
pamphleteer, in the introduction to Cottage Economy.
Cobbett (1763–1835) was one of the leading
social commentators of the post-Revolutionary
period in England and the United States, when the
business of today’s bloggers was conducted by
pamphleteers. Cobbett’s Political Register was pre-Victorian England’s Huffington Post. But the stakes
were high, and a charge of sedition over one of his
postings, exposing corruption in the military, earned
him two years in Newgate Prison.
Cobbett took advantage of his imprisonment to
write one of his more inflammatory monographs,
Paper Against Gold; or, The History and Mystery of
the Bank of England, of the Debt, of the Stocks, of
the Sinking Fund, and of all the other tricks and contrivances, carried on by the means of Paper Money.
“There was, to be sure, when people looked into
the matter more closely,” he observed, “something
rather whimsical in the idea of a nation’s paying
interest to itself; something very whimsical in a
nation’s GET TING MONEY by paying itself interest
upon its own stock.”
Cobbett, who was born into a family of rural farmers and began working in the fields at the age of 6,
grew increasingly enraged over the mistreatment
and growing impoverishment of the working poor,
who, in the shift from agriculture to industry, were
being forced to buy (and pay heavy taxes on) things
they had formerly been able to make, and grow, for
themselves. Cottage Economy, written as a series
of pamphlets and later assembled into a book, was
an attempt to shift the trend the other way.
“I propose to treat of brewing Beer, making Bread,
keeping Cows and Pigs, rearing Poultry, and of other
matters; and to show that while from a very small
piece of ground a large part of the food of a considerable family may be raised, the very act of raising it
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will be the best possible foundation of education of
the children of the labourer,” Cobbett wrote. “And is it
not much more rational for parents to be employed
in teaching their children how to cultivate a garden,
to feed and rear animals, to make bread, beer, bacon,
butter, and cheese, and to be able to do these things
for themselves, or for others, than to leave them to
prowl about the lanes and commons, or to mope at
the heels of some crafty, sleek-headed pretended
saint, who while he extracts the last penny from their
pockets, bids them be contented with their misery,
and promises them, in exchange for their pence,
everlasting glory in the world to come?”
To Cobbett, who estimated “that we use, in my
house, about seven hundred gallons of beer every
year,” the demise of home brewing epitomized the
subjugation of the working class. In former times,
he wrote, “to have a house and not to brew was
a rare thing indeed,” whereas workers were now
forced to purchase beer instead of making it.
“The causes of this change have been the lowering of the wages of labour, compared with the price
of provisions, by the means of the paper money;
the enormous tax upon the barley when made into
malt; and the increased tax upon hops,” Cobbett
explained. “These have quite changed the customs
of the English people as to their drink. They still
drink beer, but, in general, it is of the brewing of
common brewers, and in public houses, of which
the common brewers have become the owners, and
have thus, by the aid of paper money, obtained a
monopoly in the supplying of the great body of the
people with one of those things which, to the hard-working man, is almost a necessary of life.”
Cottage Economy offered practical and detailed
instructions to “prepare for the making of beer in
our own houses, and take leave of the poisonous
stuff served out to us by common brewers.” This
included a diatribe against the evils of tea, arguing
at length “that tea has no useful strength in it; that
it contains nothing nutritious; that it, besides being
