Note 5 — Chapter XX · “TO PUT A MAN IN PRISON FOR A YEAR OR TWO DOES NOT KILL HIM.”
Reading edition
This work was begun shortly after Cobbett’s arrival in Newgate. His contention was that the Bank could never again pay in specie or in paper at par, unless the interest on the Funds was reduced. The loans having been contracted to a large extent in paper, this seemed reasonable enough; and the idea was generally accepted among the classes who suffered so severely from monetary pressure during subsequent years, although others thought it was “sapping the foundations of public morality,” and so on.
The first letter appeared in the Register of Sept. 1, 1810, under the title of “Paper against Gold; being an Examination of the Report of the Bullion Committee; in a Series of Letters to the Tradesmen and Farmers in and near Salisbury.” It was afterwards reprinted in full, with additions, under the title of “Paper against Gold, and Glory against Prosperity” (retail price, twenty shillings, in paper money).
During the remainder of Cobbett’s life, he was always at battledore and shuttlecock over the Currency question. A passage from one of his American Registers was one that he was especially fond of sending up, in which he declared that it would be impossible to carry Peel’s Bill of 1819 into full effect, and wound up with an offer to Castlereagh to have leave “to lay me on a gridiron and broil me alive, while Sidmouth may stir the coals, and Canning stand by and laugh at my groans.” The Bill did take effect, after a fashion, but with tremendous difficulties in its train; and the feast of the gridiron came off at last, on the 9th of April, 1826, not in the style that was originally proposed, but in the shape of a dinner at the London Tavern. For a full account of it see the Morning Herald of the following day.
Another bit of humour was an attempt in verse:—
“Of paper coin how vast the pow’r! It breaks or makes us in an hour. And thus, perhaps, a beggar’s shirt, When finely ground and clear’d of dirt, Then recompress’d by hand or hopper, And printed on by sheet of copper, May raise ten beggars to renown, And tumble fifty nobles down!”
When Cobbett took the house at 183, Fleet Street, he prepared a big gridiron as a shop-sign, and also headed his journal with a woodcut of that utensil.