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Poetry and Politics in the Cockney Schoolby Jeffrey N. Cox | |
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But why Cockney School? It was, in fact, a brilliant choice; for as we can see from the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811 edition), the word cockney provided Lockhart not only with a place name for the new school ? useful in contrasting it with the Lake School ? but also with the suggestions of sexual libertinism and effeminacy that would be a major part of the assault upon Hunt, Keats, and their colleagues: ?? Cockney?? is a
nick name given to the citizens of London, or persons born within the sound of Bow bell . . . The king of the cockneys is mentioned among the regulations for the sports and shows formerly held in the Middle Temple on Childermas Day, where he had his officers, a marshal, constable, butler, &c. . . . Ray says, the interpretation of the word Cockney, is, a young person coaxed or conquered, made wanton; or a nestle cock, delicately bred and brought up, so as, when arrived at man?s estate, to be unable to bear the least hardship.[14] |
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The Cockney School attacks use all of the elements found in this definition. For example, Hunt?s detractors named him the ?? King of Cockaigne,??[15] presumably referring to the carnivalesque tradition of
naming a Cockney King of London, though Blackwood?s may also have taken its inspiration from Hunt and Hazlitt?s collaborative project the Round Table, for in the first number of the Cockney series, Z. ? quoting Hunt?s introduction to their essays ? states that when Hunt ?? talks about chivalry and King Arthur, he is always thinking of himself, and ?a small party of friends, who meet once a-week at a Round Table, to discuss the merits of a leg of mutton, and of the subjects upon which we are to write??? (2 [October 1817], 39). In any event, Hunt is seen presiding over a court or coterie, as in this letter from Z. to Hunt, ?? King of the Cockneys??:
Your Majesty, the King of the Cockneys, having signified your royal resolution to preserve an inviolable silence towards me, the unfortunate Z., who am said to ?? think the green leaves black,?? and to be ?? ignorant of all noble theories,?? (I refer your Majesty to one of your late edicts in the Cockney Court-gazette,) I shall notwithstanding, as it becomes a good and faithful subject to do, continue to pay a little further homage to your Majesty; and I therefore now seek, with a fitting tribute, once more to approach your throne. In the first place, then, I humbly suggest, that you give yourself too many of those regal airs so natural to a crowned head, and that you conduct yourself, at your court at Lisson Grove, with a stateliness and hauteur that may be considered, by the youthful nobility of Cockaigne, a perfect model of monarchical dignity, but is, in fact, risibly characteristic of your plebeian origin and education. (3 [May 1818], 196) |
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Recognizing that there is in fact a circle around Hunt, these attacks attempt to denigrate it. We get a mock court, with the Examiner as court gazette, Hunt?s home at 13 Lisson Grove as the castle, and such figures as Keats and Hazlitt as courtiers. Blackwood?s seeks to make the Hunt circle, portrayed as a sycophantic and subversive cabal, into a kind of demonic parody of the very court life which Hunt and his fellow writers frequently criticized in the pages of the Examiner. Of course, Blackwood?s is also mocking what it sees as the pretensions of the Cockney group, its assault upon what it claims to be the social climbing of a ?? lower??-class coterie being a major part of its satiric campaign.
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In the link of the word cockney to wantonness and weakness, we have two more features of the Cockney attacks: that Hunt and his circle are libertines and that they are also weak, ?? effeminate.?? (Of course, one wonders why anyone would question the potency of an opponent unless that opponent?s power was in fact feared.) We see the first charge levelled repeatedly against Hunt, whom Blackwood?s once described as ?? the most irresistible knight-errant erotic extant?? (12 [December 1822], 775): ?? The extreme moral depravity of the Cockney School is another thing which is ever thrusting itself upon the public attention . . . [Hunt?s] poetry resembles that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses?? (Blackwood?s 2 [October 1817], 40); Hunt?s ?? politics were debased by a noxious and disgusting mixture of libertinism and jacobinism?? (Gazette 4 [25 May 1822], 49); Hunt was affected with ?? a most depraved taste?? (De?jeune?, or Companion for the Breakfast Table, 27 October 1820,p.47); another attacks ?? the nauseous overflowings of Mr. Leigh Hunt?s perverted imagination?? (Honeycomb 5 [15 July 1820], 36). Keats is a particular recipient of the second attack, as Marjorie Levinson has shown;[16] for example, she quotes the claim by Blackwood?s that
Keats ?? outhunted Hunt in a species of emasculated pruriency, that . . . looks as if it were the product of some imaginative Eunuch?s muse within the melancholy inspiration of the Haram?? (18 [ January 1826], 26). Levinson works from such comments on the sexual quality of Keats?s poetry to develop her astonishing account of the implicit difficulties Keats faced in social and sexual self-fashioning, but I am more interested in the way these attacks point to an explicit erotic ideology that Keats espouses in conjunction with Hunt, Shelley, and others in the group. While the Cockney School attacks seek to make sex into a private problem for Keats, it was of course a public issue open to varying ideological constructions; and the vision of sexuality offered by the Hunt circle ? in poems ranging from Hunt?s Story of Rimini to Keats?s Endymion, Shelley?s Epipsychidion, and Horace Smith?s Amarynthus, the Nympholept ? was seen as dangerous by Blackwood?s and its ideological companions.
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Levinson connects the attack on Keats?s ?? masturbatory exhibitionism?? (an assault also made by the aristocratic Byron in his epistolary comments on Keats) with the class-based insults directed by Blackwood?s towards both Keats and Hunt; McGann too reminds us of the class significance encoded in the word cockney and its use by Blackwood?s and others to suggest that those in the lower classes should not be suffered to write poetry.[17] While Gareth Stedman Jones, in an important survey of
successive constructions of the cockney from the eighteenth century onwards, reminds us that in the early nineteenth century the category of the ?? cockney?? was formulated to emphasize ?? a difference not between middle and lower, let alone working, class, but between the citizen and the courtier, the plebeian and the patrician, the vulgar and the genteel, ??[18] we can locate in these attacks an attempt to isolate the Hunt
circle as an other in terms of status, rank, and cultural literacy. We have already seen the reference to Hunt?s ?? plebeian?? background; and in the attack on Keats there are the infamous lines on the impact of the success of Burns and Baillie which ?? has had the melancholy effect of turning the heads of we know not how many farm-servants and unmarried ladies;
our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behind her in her band-box?? (Blackwood?s 3 [August 1818], 319). As one sees particularly in reviewers? attempts to detach Shelley and Byron, the aristocrats in the group, from the rest of the circle, there is behind the Blackwood?s assaults a premise that poetry is best left to gentlemen. They are disturbed by what appears to them as a democratization of literature. The attacks are again reactionary, for their fear seems to be generated by what they see as the group?s considerable success in coming together across social rank and despite class tensions (discussed in the next chapter), in capturing an audience (there are constant admissions that Hunt has a following), and in defining contemporary literature.
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Jones suggests that various constructions of the cockney reflect ?? cultural and aesthetic notions of inclusion and exclusion?? (p. 279), with Blackwood?s in particular using the term for the purposes of both aesthetic and political expulsion: cockneys as the ?? vulgar spoke ?cant? because they thought ?cant? and they thought ?cant,? not least because they possessed no yardstick of comparison [outside of London life]. They were hence incapable of art and not fit members of the political nation?? (p. 284). The Cockney style was a sign for both aesthetic and political inadequacy. McGann, too, links issues of class or rank to questions of style (as does Levinson in a different way), but he shows us how the Cockney School designation points to something admirable about the style of a Keats. He quotes from a review of Keats?s 1817 volume found in the Edinburgh [Scots] Magazine (2nd ser., 1 [October 1817], 254? 57), which identifies Keats as ?? a particular friend of Messers Hunt, the editors of the Examiner, and of Mr Hazlitt?? and describes Hunt?s and Keats?s style as ?? vivacious, smart, witty, changeful, sparkling, and learned.?? As McGann points out, where we find the early Keats to be ?? self-indulgent, mawkish,?? early reviewers found him and his school to be mannered, ?? too full of conceits and sparkling points.??[19]
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