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The English Fix

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Patrick Wright examines the long history of anxiety over threats to English identity.

The English Fix: Series 1

The English Fix: Series 1: Riding with Cobbett

Documentaries

06/02/2017

Riding with Cobbett

Series 1

BBC Radio 4 - The English Fix, Series 1, Riding with Cobbett

In the first of three programmes Patrick Wright challenges the new threats to English Identity by tracing similar fears back to the 19th century and the ideas of William Cobbett.

Patrick Wright has spent much of his career thinking about English identity - a question which has become more pressing in recent years.

He argues that no one has cared much about Englishness unless they could define it as a settled, organic way of life threatened by external beastliness: England, in other words, as a realm that tends to be imagined most fiercely when it is threatened by an encroaching modern force. 

In three programmes, Patrick argues that the shaping of English identity as a reaction to threat goes back, at the very least, to the writings and rants of William Cobbett. Combating land enclosure and surging capitalism Cobbett identified a pressure on English values and an English rural way of life as being THE THING which threatened to undermine all that was precious about his native land.
Patrick sets out on a Rural Ride, one of the journey's that Cobbett himself took in the 1820s, to explore the resonances his fears, hates and passions have for today's nation which seeks to free itself from the trammels of the EU and the control of Global capitalism. He speaks to scholars, Cobbett enthusiasts and those who now live in the quiet backwaters where Cobbett sought to reveal the virtues of the real England he sought to protect.

Producer: Tom Alban.

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Series 1

Riding with Cobbett

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