Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School

¹ Sidney Colvin, Keats (1887, rpt. London: Macmillan, 1961), states that poems by the sonnet’s author, Cornelius Webb, make one think of Hunt or of Keats "in his weaker moments" (p. 38). close window

² See George L. Marsh, "A Forgotten Cockney Poet – Cornelius Webb," Philological Quarterly 21 (July 1942), 323–33; Edmund Blunden, "The Obscure Webb(e)," TLS, 18 December 1959,p. 748; and, for a less sympathetic account of Webb and Cockneyism, Donald Reiman, "Introduction," in Webb’s Sonnets and Summer (New York: Garland, 1978), pp. v–xii. close window

³ Webb’s other surviving works are The Absent Man (1857), Lyric Leaves (1832), The Man about Town (1838), and The Posthumous Papers, Facetious and Fanciful, of a Person Lately about Town (1828 for 1827). Neither Heath Flowers nor The Reverie, announced in New Monthly Magazine 7 (1 February 1817), 57, and 8 (1 January 1818), 536, has been located. close window

⁴ Marsh cites H. Buxton Forman, Keats’s Works, Glasgow edition (1901), IV: 41–42, on the presentation copy of Poems (owned by Dykes Campbell) having an inscription apparently in Webb’s handwriting stating that it was given to him by Keats. Marsh also gives (pp. 332–33) Webb’s poem published in Literary Speculum 2 (1822), 368. close window

⁵ Webb is linked to Hunt and Keats in two anonymous letters, "To the Editor of the Anti-Gallican Monitor" (8 June, 16 July 1817), reprinted in Schwartz, KR, pp. 77–83, where John Wilson (according to Schwartz) says that Keats is "the worst of the whole fry" of poets around Hunt; "His dedication is almost as bad as that of another youth who patronized Mr. Hunt’s school. – (I think I saw a sonnet of his lately in the Anti-Gallican,) and is as perfectly incomprehensible." Schwartz identifies the other mem-ber of Hunt’s school as Webb, since a sonnet by "C." (for Cornelius perhaps) appeared in the Anti-Gallican for 16 March 1817. If Schwartz is correct, then perhaps the so far undiscovered Heath Flowers, announced for February 1817, contained as its dedication the poem later used by Blackwood’s to open the Cockney School attacks. Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 129n, suggests that Blackwood’s was quoting from a lost "Epistle to a Friend" sent to Maga by Webb with three sonnets in a letter of September 1817 (National Library of Scotland MS 4002). close window

⁶ Clarke, like Keats, was ushered into print by Hunt, with his first publications, "Walks round London" and a verse piece, "On Visiting a Beautiful Little Dell near Margate," appearing in the second volume (for 1820) of the pocket book. close window

⁷ Roe, Keats and the Culture of Dissent, pp. 274–75, transcribes from National Library of Scotland MS 4009, "Blackwood Papers 1822." close window

⁸ See Susan Egenolf’s "Varnished Tales: History and Artifice in the Novel, 1789–1830," Ph.D. dissertation, Texas A&M University (1995), p. 145. close window

⁹ McGann, "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism" (1979), The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 17–65; Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 1–38. close window

¹⁰ Lockhart was not even the first to use the Cockney designation; the Satirist (13 [1 October 1813], 302–3) called "Mr. Examiner Hunt" the "Bard of Horsemonger Lane" (where Hunt was in prison for seditious libel) and noted that his attempts "to save Hampstead from oblivion" had managed to relieve all "cockney apprehensions on this head." On Blackwood’s, see Margaret Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and His Sons, Their Magazine and Friends, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1987); Alan Lang Strout, "Maga, Champion of Shelley," Studies in Philology 29 (1932), 95–119; Strout, "Lockhart, Champion of Shelley," TLS, 12 August 1955, p. 468; Strout, A Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–1825 (Lubbock: Texas Tech, 1959); and Charles E. Robinson, "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Ollier, and William Blackwood: The Contexts of Early Nineteenth-Century Publishing," in SR, pp. 183–226. Kim Wheatley, in "The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt," Nineteenth-Century Literature 47 (June 1992), 1–31, counters readings of Lockhart as making either personal or class-based attacks, arguing for the extemporaneous literary quality of his reviews, as Lockhart creates Hunt and Z. within a self-deconstructing Gothic fiction that ends up writing him as much as he writes the reviews. I would stress that Blackwood’s launches a political attack upon an ideological enemy. close window

¹¹ Reprinted in KR, pp. 77–80 (p. 78). close window

¹² Hunt also started the polemical battle with his political enemies. As early as his Feast of Poets (1811 in the Reflector; reprinted in an expanded version in 1814 and again in 1815), he had attacked many of his contemporaries, heaping abuse particularly upon Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review. On the role of the Feast in the Cockney controversy, see Barnette Miller, Leigh Hunt’s Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats (New York: Columbia University Press, 1910), pp. 121–58. close window

¹³ Keats’s attack on the French School and particularly Pope would infuriate Byron; members of the group did not always agree. P. M. S. Dawson’s interesting "Byron, Shelley, and the ‘New School,"’ in SR, pp. 89–108, discusses Byron’s and even Shelley’s difficulties with Keats’s poetry insofar as it was committed to the "system" of poetry set forth by Hunt, though their target is ultimately not Hunt but Wordsworth. close window

¹⁴ Hunt refers to part of this definition in his Autobiography, pp. 493–94: "The Cockney school of poetry is the most illustrious in England; for, to say nothing of Pope and Gray, who were both veritable Cockneys, ‘born within the sound of Bow Bell,’ Milton was so too; and Chaucer and Spenser were both natives of the city." close window

¹⁵ Geoffrey Bullough, "The Later History of Cockaigne," Wiener Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie 75 (1973), 22–35, finds Blackwood’s establishing the link between the use of "Cockaigne" – originally an imaginary country marked by luxury and idleness – as a nickname for London and "Cockney" as a label for residents of part of London, a link already suggested in Johnson’s Dictionary (1785 ed.). close window

¹⁶ Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 1–25. Hunt also was the target of such attacks; writing of his piece "The Florentine Lovers" published in the Liberal, Blackwood’s asks, "But is there not something effeminate, Cockneyish, and Sporus-like, in a male writer speaking so of male lips? If Leigh Hunt be indeed an unfortunate woman, disguised in yellow breeches, this slaver about lips may be excusable; but if he really be of the sex assumed, nothing can be more loathsome" (12 [December 1822], 774). Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 170–71, and Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy (London: Associated University Presses, 1994), pp. 25–37, note the connections between the Cockney School attacks and assaults on women writers. Susan Wolfson has done essential work on how Keats was "feminized" by the attacks in "Feminizing Keats," in Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hermione de Almeida (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), pp. 317–56, and "Keats and the Manhood of the Poet," European Romantic Review 6 (Summer 1995), 1–37. Mary Wilson Carpenter has argued that attacks on Hunt’s handling of sex might suggest a radical feminist potential in his writings: "The Hair of Medusa: Leigh Hunt, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, and the Criticism of Female Beauty," in LT, pp. 17–40. close window

¹⁷ McGann, Beauty of Inflections, pp. 29–30. close window

¹⁸ Jones, "The ‘Cockney’ and the Nation, 1780–1988," in Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800, ed. David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 280–81. Jones is primarily interested in the way the twentieth century draws on and manipulates an image of the cockney constructed during the 1890s. close window

¹⁹ McGann, Beauty of Inflections, p. 31. See also Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); John Bayley, "Keats and Reality," Proceedings of the British Academy, 1962, pp. 91–125; William Keach, "Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style," SiR 25 (Summer 1986), 182–96; and Nicholas Roe, "Keats’s Lisping Sedition," Essays in Criticism 52 (January 1992), 36–55. Edgecombe offers an interesting connection between the Cockney style and the rococo in Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy, pp. 17–50. close window

²⁰ Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 9. close window

²¹ As a number of scholars have pointed out, there is a tension between the attempts by Blackwood’s to link the Hunt circle to a dangerous urban radical tradition and its efforts to dismiss the group as petty and marginal, as "suburban" poets; see Elizabeth Jones, "The Suburban School: Snobbery and Fear in the Attacks on Keats," TLS, 27 October 1995, pp. 14–15, and "Keats in the Suburbs," KSJ 45 (1996), 23–43; Wheatley, "The Blackwood’s Attacks"; and Roe, "Keats’s Lisping Sedition." close window

²² Hunt had already criticized the Lake School for parochialism and narrow-ness in the notes to his Feast of Poets (1814), where he speaks of their "affectation of universal superiority" (p. 77), argues that their government offices have robbed them of independence (p. 78), urges society and city life on Wordsworth (p. 107), and praises Byron as the cosmopolitan poet (p. 125); Byron’s assault on the Lakers in Don Juan would seem to owe quite a bit to Hunt’s position. close window

²³ R. H. Horne, in an essay comparing Wordsworth and Hunt, argued that "Cockney" meant "pastoral, minus nature": A New Spirit of the Age (London: Smith, Elder, 1844), p. 316. close window

²⁴ Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 114. close window

²⁵ Reiman, "Introduction," p. viii. close window

²⁶ J. W. Polidori, M.D., Ximenes, The Wreath, and Other Poems (London: Long-man, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Bentley, 1819), p. ii. close window

²⁷ Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 195–226. close window

²⁸ Blunden, Leigh Hunt: A Biography (1930, rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String, 1970), p. 47. close window

²⁹ While Keats’s interest in politics has long been questioned, it has recently been demonstrated how closely interwoven his poetry and politics are; see McGann, Beauty of Inflections; Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory; Roe, Keats and the Culture of Dissent; the volume Keats and History; and the special issue of SiR (25 [Summer 1986]) edited by Susan Wolfson. On the move to historicize Keats, see Grant Scott, "Tabloid Keats," European Romantic Review 6 (Summer 1995), i–xii. close window

³⁰ There were counterattacks by the group, mainly by Hunt in the Examiner, but also by Reynolds in the Alfred, West of England Journal and General Advertiser (6 October 1818, rpt. Examiner, 11 October 1818), and in a letter, probably by John Scott, to the editor of the Morning Chronicle (3 October 1818) which notes that Keats was being attacked because of the "war" being waged by the Quarterly against Hunt. Hazlitt penned a "Reply to ‘Z."’ after Blackwood’s (3 [1818], 550–52) issued "Hazlitt Cross-Ques-tioned, " but he did not publish it, since he instead brought suit against Blackwood. On the group’s response to the attacks, for example, see Herschel Baker, William Hazlitt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 370–81; Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 224–26, 366–68; John O. Haydon, The Romantic Reviewers (University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 176–215; and Alan Lang Strout, "Hunt, Hazlitt, and Maga," English Language Notes 4 (June 1937), 151–59. close window

³¹ On the project of the Liberal, see William Marshall, Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and the "Liberal" (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960). close window

³² 21 November 1822: Huntington Library MS 6601. See also Keats’s letter to Woodhouse (21, 22 September 1819), where he speculates that someone is detaining and opening his mail. close window

³³ Though as late as 1821 in his Letter to John Murray Esq., Byron, while raising questions about the Cockney School, still praises Hunt as a man and a poet, though disagreeing with him on Pope and poetic theory: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 156–57. close window

³⁴ See, for example, Lockhart’s first Cockney School attack, in Blackwood’s 2 (October 1817), 38–41, where he exclaims, after noting that Hunt asserted a connection with Byron, "How must the haughty spirit of Lara and Harold contemn the subaltern sneaking of our modern tufthunter"; Lockhart’s review of The Revolt of Islam in Blackwood’s 4 (January 1819), 475–82, where he, noting that Shelley "is of the ‘COCKNEY SCHOOL,’ so far as his opinions are concerned," also states that "Mr Shelly, whatever his errors may have been, is a scholar, a gentleman, and a poet; and he must therefore despise from his soul the only eulogies to which he has hitherto been accustomed – paragraphs from the Examiner, and sonnets from Johnny Keats"; and Lockhart’s review of Prometheus Unbound in Blackwood’s 7 (September 1820), 679–87, where he defends his attack on Keats, saying, "The truth is, we from the beginning saw marks of feeling and power in Mr Keats’ verses, which made us think it very likely, he might become a real poet of England, provided he could be persuaded to give up all the tricks of Cockneyism, and forswear for ever the thin potations of Mr Leigh Hunt." Hunt would later write caustically to Clarke, "The other day, there was an Ode in Blackwood in honour of the memory of Shelley; and I look for one to Keats. I hope this will give you faith in glimpses of the golden age" (11 February [no year], in Recollections, p. 224). Even Cornelius Webb could be partially rescued from the Cockney label in a review of his Glances of Life in, of all places, the Quarterly Review (57 [September 1836], 223–29). Blackwood’s was particularly at pains to separate Byron from Hunt. In its review of the Liberal (12 [December 1822], 700), it called on Byron to "cut the Cockney." When Byron continued to work with Hunt, Blackwood’s responded with an attack that recalls its most vicious assaults on Keats: Byron is "so enervated by the unworthy Delilahs which have enslaved his imagination, as to be reduced to the foul office of displaying blind buffoon-eries before the Philistines of Cockaigne . . . I feel a moral conviction that his lordship must have taken the Examiner, the Liberal, the Rimini, the Round Table, as his model . . . Indeed there are some verses which have all the appearance of having been interpolated by the King of the Cockneys" (14 [July 1823], 88–89). As always, the ultimate target is Hunt. close window