The conclusion of the previous chapter was that the manipulation of the ‘mock-reader’ radicalized the methods and assumptions of the History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, and constituted the main literary interest and achievement of the text. In this chapter I want to begin from the issue of mock-reader as I approach Cobbett's teaching texts. While concentrating on Advice to Young Men as one of his most enduring successes, and The Poor Man's Friend as his personal favourite among his works, this chapter will also touch upon the Monthly Sermons, Cottage Economy and the Grammar of the English Language. It will be my aim to show how the status of the pupil Cobbett imagines he is addressing affects the manner of teaching, and how the choice of mock-pupil affects the political significance of the literary methods of the texts. These contentions will be established by a comparison between Advice to Young Men and Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts, and by a comparison between Advice to Young Men and The Poor Man's Friend. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of Cobbett's pastoral autobiography, which we will see is crucial to both texts in question and to his rhetorical strategies as a whole.

Critics of Cobbett often note the pre-Victorian prudery of some aspects of his thought, such as his arguments in Advice to Young Men against the use of male midwives and his respect for female chastity even to the point of condemning a widow's remarriage.