by Greg Kucich
[Kucich, Greg. "'The Wit in the Dungeon': Leigh Hunt and the
Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries." Romanticism On the
Net 14 (May 1999) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/cockneycoteries.html>]
When Leigh Hunt looked back upon the cultural scene of early-nineteenth-century
Britain in his 1850 Autobiography, he still
felt the intense grip of the Cockney/Laker school wars and proudly
declared his continuing membership in what he called the
'illustrious . . . Cockney school of poetry,' whose ancestry he traced
to Milton, Spenser, and Chaucer. (1) That recollection,
summoned long after the cessation of print hostilities and when most
of the figures once prominent in both so-called 'schools'
were deceased, reveals how deeply the concept and actual practices
of coterie dynamics conditioned the shape of
Romanticism's literary culture. Recent critiques of the Romantic ideology
of solitary genius have provoked a keen critical
interest in these communal modes of cultural fashioning, particularly
as they assembled around oppositional representations of
the Lake School and what we are beginning to identify as its Cockney
Other. Important new studies by Nicholas Roe and
Jeffrey Cox have demonstrated, in fact, that recognizing the Cockney
alternative as a forceful if loosely defined community
gathered around Hunt can substantially modify our understanding of
the overall formation of Romantic cultural history. Cox
expands considerably on his article discussions of the importance of
Cockneyism and Romantic coterie culture in his new book,
Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and
their Circle. Other useful recent studies of Hunt and
Cockney controversies, though not focused specifically on the politics
of Cockney coterie dynamics, include essays by
Wheatley, Wu, and de Montluzin. (2) Much as we are learning about the
significance of Cockney dynamics, however, many of
the group's material forms of interaction remain unexamined, prompting
Jeffrey Cox in a recent essay on 'Keats in the Cockney
School' to call for a 'Cockney class reunion'. (3) Notwithstanding
the uproarious disposition of such a prospect, Cox has
pointed out in another recent essay an intriguing scholarly focus for
this enterprise--the extravagantly decorated prison cell
where Hunt staged what might be considered the introductory sessions
of the Cockney School. (4) The outlandish coterie
gatherings in Hunt's cell during the two-year period of his incarceration
for political libel (3 February 1813-3 February 1815)
are usually dismissed as part of an amusing but rather trivial and
dilettantish literary legend. (5) I would like to reassess that
fantastic scene in the dungeon, suggesting how its activities helped
foster a group identity and a cultural project that strongly
affected the course of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century
while establishing an important model of progressive gender
relations among the period's second generation of writers.
Many students of British Romanticism will be familiar with the details
of Hunt's prison experience, but their incredible character
merits at least a brief rehearsal. (6) On 22 March 1812, Hunt culminated
a series of provocative attacks on the Tory
government in The Examiner with a scathing outburst against the flagrant
vices of the Prince Regent, who had just been
praised fulsomely by the Morning Post as a 'Conqueror of hearts' .
. . 'Exciter of desire,' an 'Adonis in loveliness.' In response
to this sycophantic excess, Hunt thundered:
What person, unacquainted with the true state
of the case, would imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies,
that this 'Glory of the People' was the subject
of millions of shrugs and reproaches! . . . this 'Exciter of desire'--this
'Adonis in loveliness', was a corpulent man
of fifty!--in short, this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable,
honourable, virtuous, true, and immortal prince,
was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in
disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the
companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a
century without one single claim on the gratitude
of his country, or the respect of posterity! (22 March 1812, p.
179) (7)
This memorable diatribe enabled the government, which had already brought
several ineffective prosecutions against The
Examiner, to engineer a successful case of political libel against
Hunt and his brother John, printer and co-proprietor of The
Examiner. With an egregiously biased Chief Justice, Lord Ellenborough,
presiding over the case, the Hunts were sentenced on
3 February 1813 to two years in separate prisons, commencing that very
day, and fined 500 pounds each along with an equal
amount as security against their good behavior for five years after
their release. The stiffness of the penalty genuinely shocked
Hunt, and he passed several agonizing weeks at the start of his incarceration
mostly alone in a dingy cell at Horsemonger Lane
Gaol in Surrey. By mid-March, however, he moved to a two-room suite
in the prison infirmary, where he was allowed to
resettle his family and receive visitors. This move inspired him to
become the Prospero of the Gaol, transforming his outer room
into an aesthetic bower of bliss featuring wall paper of trellised
roses, a sky-blue painted ceiling dotted with meandering clouds,
Venetian blinds over the barred windows, wall portraits of Milton and
John Hunt, a lute, a piano forte, busts of poets, multiple
bookcases, couches, and flowers, flowers everywhere. 'There was not
a handsomer room on that side the water,' Hunt
proclaimed, and Charles Lamb declared 'there was no other such room
except in a fairy tale' (Autobiography 243). To
complete the effect of enchantment, Hunt turned the small yard outside
of this room into a pleasure garden, bordered by green
palings adorned with a trellis and stocked profusely with scarlet-runners,
young trees, and what Hunt called the abundance of a
'flowery investment' (Autobiography 244). Thus ensconced in this improbable
haven of aesthetic delight, the 'amazing
prisoner,' as Hunt christened himself (Autobiography 246), took one
of his greatest pleasures in the flabbergasted looks of
nearly everyone who glanced in, including the head gaoler, Ives, who
repeatedly gaped at the entire astonishing scene and the
equally spectacular parade of visitors trooping into it.
They came in droves--relatives, friends, liberal sympathizers--partly
out of concern for Hunt's well-being and partly because his
fantastic cell quickly became something like the fashionable place
to be seen in reformist circles; and their antic behavior further
enriched the preposterous character of the scene. Prominent figures
like Bentham, Brougham, Byron, Haydon, Hazlitt, Moore,
Edgeworth, the Lambs, John Scott, and Sir John Swinburne regularly
joined Hunt's family members, various relatives, friends,
and former Christ's Hospital schoolmates in meals, conversation, children's
games, poetry readings, music, singing, and drinking
late into the night. Visitors often did not leave until the 10 PM curfew,
when they frequently went on to continue the soiree at
the nearby home of the journalist Thomas Alsager. It was not even uncommon
for some to spend the night, sprawling on the
sofas as if the cell were, in the words of a recent Hunt biographer,
'a tolerant lodging house'. (8) The pace of these prison revels
grew breathtaking at times, with multiple parties of visitors dropping
in throughout the day and Hunt presiding over it all with a
brilliant vivacity whose renown inspired Byron to dash off these epistolary
lines of doggerel to Tom Moore in anticipation of his
own first visit to Horsemonger Lane Gaol:
But now to my letter--to yours 'tis an answer--
Tomorrow be with me, as soon as you can sir,
Already dress'd for proceeding to sponge on
(According to compact) the wit in the dungeon.
(9)
With Byron, Moore, and so many other brilliant guests joining the sparkling
salon of this incarcerated 'wit'--while others, like
Shelley, participated vicariously through letters or, like a very young
Keats, by hearing about the phenomenon from friends and
reading about it in the Examiner pages--Hunt's outrageous dungeon brought
together some of the essential ingredients and
many of the core personalities of what eventually became known as the
Cockney School of Poetry and Politics. Accounts of
the prison ambience look remarkably similar, in fact, to the convivial
scene at Hunt's Vale of Health Hampstead cottage that
Keats memorably recorded several years later at the end of Sleep and
Poetry.
Now much as Byron and others admired 'the wit in the dungeon,' there
is more than a little dismissive irony in the moniker;
Byron also considered the incarcerated Hunt something of a dandified
charlatan, calling him 'Sir Oracle,' and it is not difficult to
see why generations of bemused scholars have passed over the dungeon
interlude lightly. For those suspicious of Romantic
ideology, Hunt's aesthetic frolics within the government's site of
discipline might seem like a primary embodiment of Romantic
escapism. There was much more substance and political self-consciousness
to Hunt's prison experience, however, than the
decorative excess and revelry might imply. Confinement also visited
great physical and emotional trauma upon him, which
moved him to make copious markings of descriptions of 'hard distresse'
in his copy of Spenser's Faerie Queene, now located
in the Victoria and Albert Museum Library. (10) The most heavily marked
sequences in these volumes trace Redcrosse's
miserable decay of body and spirit beginning in his 'dungeon deep'
(FQ 1.9.45) and worsening in the Cave of Despair. Hunt
never stopped blaming a viciously unjust government for his own sorrows
in prison, and his implacable determination to resist
political tyranny informed much of his prison experience, including
his most highly aestheticized indulgences. Although his love of
Spenserian luxuries was notorious by this time, inspiring Keats to
imagine him in prison dreamily straying through Spenser's
'bowers fair, / Culling enchanted flowers' ('Written on the Day that
Leigh Hunt left Prison' 9-10), he spent considerable time
making extensive notes in his Spenser volumes on the insidious despotism
of Queen Elizabeth's government. This preoccupation
with political malfeasance drove his weekly contributions to the Examiner,
which he poured out, remarkably enough,
throughout his incarceration in relentless attacks upon Britain's legal
and political institutions. It also helped motivate a striking
burst of poetic productivity sustained throughout the prison years,
much of which, like The Descent of Liberty and The Story
of Rimini, assails repressive social and political hierarchies. If
Hunt cultivated mirth and aesthetic luxury for his prison coterie,
he also integrated those pleasures into a 'culture of dissent,' as
that term is understood in Nicholas Roe's groundbreaking book
on Keats's political contexts. To trace the modes in which Hunt's prison
dissent took shape, particularly through its aesthetic
eccentricities, is thus to recover an important blueprint for the strategies
of Cockney poetry and politics.
The most characteristic attitude of dissent Hunt cultivated in prison
entailed a kind of gleeful, luxurious insolence toward Power
projected from margins that lay provocatively close to institutional
centers. Hunt was always attracted to the marginal status of
cultural outsiders, fascinated particularly by his own family's Caribbean
background and his father's renegade politics and
religion; and largely because hostile reviewers tried to exile him
to social and class hinterlands, we often identify him and
Cockney culture generally with distantly marginal spaces perilously
inhabited in an iron time of conservative political
retrenchment. But the kind of marginality Hunt cultivated, usually
with cocky, aestheticized impertinence, brought him right into
the centers of authority and establishment where he did not ostensibly
belong. (11) That sense of transgressive social positioning
may have originated with his childhood experience in debtor's prison,
which produced his earliest memories. But it certainly
took hold at Christ's Hospital school, where he developed early strategies
of insubordination, through aesthetic indulgence, to
the established practices of fagging and the prescribed regimens of
study. When his masters tormented him with dull translation
exercises and pompous lectures on 'pig iron,' he took 'comfort' and
'consolation,' as he later recalled, in furtive snatches of
Spenser, Collins, and Gray, which he deliciously consumed as if they
were 'buttered crumpets' (Autobiography 77). Christ's
Hospital, itself, as Hunt liked to regard it, was an upstart institution
in its own right, boasting a long heritage going back to the
reign of Edward the Sixth and a distinguished pedigree of graduates
yet historically chartered as a charity school and comprising
a student body of mostly poor, unprivileged boys. Hunt identified strongly
with the intermediate status of this institution,
intrigued by its physical proximity to Newgate Prison and its cultural
function as an entryway to university and professional
careers. He also linked himself to an imagined, highly cultivated community
of graduates who achieved a similarly liminal status
in their public careers, noting in his copy of The Faerie Queene, for
instance, that Spenser, as an impoverished child, had
probably gone to Christ's Hospital before acquiring fame within an
Elizabethan court that simultaneously honored and abused
him. (12) This type of sustained self-fashioning as a kind of insidiously
marginal insider became realized in a full-blown material
form of insolence with Hunt's first steady job, a clerkship in the
government's War Office, which he incredibly managed to hold
onto for a year while lambasting government policy in The Examiner.
Hunt's incarceration, then, undesirable as it may have been in some
ways, provided an opportunity for a broader, even more
dramatic realization of this identity as an insolent insider. Confined
within the bowels of government, he could mobilize
audacious excesses of aesthetic delight and raucous sociability to
push against the pressures of state discipline - a maneuver that
Roe and Cox have traced in the republican politics of his exuberantly
lush nature poetry, his 'leafy bowers.' That Hunt
self-consciously formulated this mode of impertinent dissent during
his years inside may be gathered from the Examiner essays
that punctuated and publicized his insolent stance in jail, of which
the following example is pointedly representative. Less than
two weeks after he entered prison, Hunt fired off another Examiner
attack on the venal excesses of the Prince Regent and the
corrupt protection afforded by his ministers, followed by this wonderfully
provoking allegory:
[In] the land of Geniie, where every living
creature was gifted with speech . . . there was a territory governed by
a
sultan of the name of Jee-Awj, who had under
him a counsellor . . . called El-En-Burrah. . . . [The sultan] was a
Raic [and] the counsellor a sycophant [who
promoted] this remarkable maxim above all others; that it was better
to poison than to say anything against poisoning.
Now the Prince unfortunately met him on this ground, for he had
a way of amusing himself with scattering a
certain strong poison called Badex-Ampel in a river near his palace, the
fishes of which were daily infected by it.
The effect at last became so violent, that two of them, who had a knack
of speaking their minds, could no longer forbear,
but rising on the surface of the water, delivered themselves after
this manner:-- '. . . if he goes on in this
manner, this whole territory may be infected, and he himself die by the
contagion. . . . [W]e think it necessary to
advise him ourselves, and do accordingly protest, as strongly as fishes
can, against his continuance of this fatal
amusement.' Jee-Awj was astonished at this remonstrance. . . . (14
February 1813, pp.98-99)
This extraordinary conceit of the piscatory Hunt brothers, eyes bulging,
rising from the deep to harangue Jee-Awj with eloquent
political protests, takes on the special character of the insolent
insider when linked to Leigh Hunt's previous Examiner critique
of a lavish banquet for the Regent featuring an elaborately constructed
display on the dinner table of a cascading rivulet stocked
with live fish. Such a play of allusions thus figures a shocked Regent,
amid all the appurtenances of royal splendor, getting hailed
as 'Jee-Awj' and then slimed by articulate Cockney fish. Add to that
Hunt's mock apology to Lord Ellenborough a few weeks
earlier for 'disturb[ing]' his Sunday breakfast with an Examiner attack
(6 December 1812, p. 769), and we can begin to see
how Hunt fashioned his prison cell, his political identity, and his
overall dissenting practices in terms of aesthetically fantastic,
mocking intrusions on the innermost centers, the stomach, of established
and astonished authority.
That the strategy caused various kinds of upset is evident from the
outraged responses to what Hunt's political enemies, from
Lord Ellenborough to Z, repeatedly decried as so many forms of impudent
intrusiveness: Hunt's 'audacious arrogance,' his
'shameless irreverence,' his 'vulgar insolence,' his 'pert' loquaciousness,'
his 'shocking levity,' his 'bold front,' his offensive
incursions into private spaces like the family home and the bedchamber
(R 84, 86, 85, 81, 51, 88, 84; The Examiner, 20
December 1812, p. 801). (13) Z clearly associated this insolent disposition
with Hunt's extravagant behavior in prison and the
aesthetic extremism of the poetry he produced there, repeatedly chastising
the 'indecent attitudes' of his poetry and his
vociferous refusal to keep quiet 'repentance' within 'the solitude
of a cell' (R 58, 83, 86, 81). The specific cultural threat posed
by this 'noisy' (R 82) intruder registers in Z's relentless harangues
against the very image of the flagrantly excessive, insolent
insider that Hunt had shaped for himself in Horsemonger Lane Gaol:
he appears variously in Blackwood's Cockney School
reviews as a 'vulgar man . . . perpetually labouring to be genteel';
a gawking subordinate who manages to 'look for a moment
from the antichamber into the saloon'; a 'puny drunkard at a village
wake, "shewing fight" to a sober man'; a 'wicked Cockney'
who insinuates himself into the pages of reputable journals; 'a city
lady looking down at a dinner from the gallery at Guildhall'; 'a
kept-mistress' putting on false airs amid respectable company (R 50,
82, 89, 57, 86). Despite the scornful tone of these
caricatures, Z's compulsive habit of imagining Hunt's ubiquitous and
seemingly uncontainable violations of social, class, and
sexual boundaries suggests just how deeply his brand of insider insolence--'ever
thrusting itself,' as Z complained, 'upon the
public attention' (R 51)--galled his political opponents.
What seemed to disturb them the most was the parodic manner of his insolent
intrusiveness, the insidious 'mockery' and
'sarcasms' denounced by Z (R 56, 83), which frequently closed the gap
with authority even tighter in order to undermine its
superiority and legitimacy. The kangaroo court in prison, with all
of its excesses, deliberately functioned as a parody of
Jee-Awj's court and ministry, a point Hunt emphasized in his many Examiner
critiques of government 'burlesque,' 'puns,'
'theatrical effort[s],' 'unwholesome shews,' 'licentious example[s]'
(20 December 1812, p. 802; 18 April 1813, p.241; 25 July
1813, p.467). His 'flowery investment' in prison, much as he may have
genuinely relished it, was strategically artificial, part of a
pattern of what he called 'ruralities' (14) that mocked the still greater
and even more artificial court extravaganzas. These
mockeries not only dissolved political distinctions and hierarchies,
they also implicitly highlighted critical differences between
court and Cockney revels, much to the disadvantage of the government.
For the prison shows were built out of music, painting,
poetry, and the heroic traditions of republican politics. At the bottom
of government theatricals, as Hunt portrayed them, lay
nothing but poisoned fish, cantankerous Cockneys, and a disenchanted
populace. It is probably because of these disturbing
insinuations that Z labored so intensively to restore the distinctions
that Hunt collapsed, pinning the very terms of the Examiner
critiques of government--'vulgar,' 'infected,' 'artificial,' 'licentious,'
'effeminate'--back on Hunt. (15) But Z's reliance on Hunt's
own language suggests, as Kim Wheatley insightfully argues, how difficult
it was to escape from Cockney parody. Calling Hunt
the 'King of the Cockneys' (R 80) only reinforced those dungeon mockeries
of legitimate royalty. And the powerful impact of
that doubling consequence, which Wheatley traces throughout Z's paranoid
rhetoric, suggests how politically unsettling Hunt's
mode of insider insolence could become.
Recognizing how pervasively that strategy informed the poetry as well
as the political journalism Hunt wrote in jail can help
resolve one of the most contentious issues in current debates about
Cockney aesthetics and second-generation
Romanticism--the degree to which Hunt's poetic eccentricities conduct
political critiques through interrelated subversive
strategies adapted by other members of his circle, particularly Keats.
Arguing for the disruptive political character of the
masque Hunt composed in prison, The Descent of Liberty, Jeffrey Cox
maps a series of poetic and political inversions very
similar to the kind of insider parodies I have outlined. Hunt inhabits
an aristocratic poetic genre, the masque, in order to unsettle
its hierarchical literary and political structures, making the antimasque
commoners--a group of shepherds--the dignified heroes
rather than the comic buffoons of the piece. He accomplishes these
reversals with high Cockney bravura, moreover, by
situating the fantastic machinery of the masque in a 'suburb[an] .
. . pleasure ground'--read Hampstead, or the prison
garden--while featuring himself as one of the principal shepherds,
Philaret, who bounds over a 'stile'--one of Hunt's favorite
Hampstead activities--to join the group celebrating the end of political
tyranny. (16) Hunt performs a similar kind of strategic
parody in the puns, jaunty rhymes, spry neologisms, and loosened couplets
of his other major prison poem, The Story of
Rimini, all of which excesses intrude upon the stateliness of the poem's
formal measure, the heroic couplet, while forwarding
various critiques of aristocratic hierarchy and established moral propriety.
Roe and Cox, following the earlier work of William
Keach, have made controversial arguments for the political substance
of these stylistic eccentricities and their strategic
incorporation into both early and later poems by Keats. If we trace
such practices back to the communal setting of Hunt's
prison, we can more fully appreciate their political vigor and better
determine how widely they infiltrated not only Cockney
coterie writing but also the defensive imaginations of Blackwood's
reviewers and government ministers.
Perhaps the most far-reaching theoretical implications of such a revisionary
approach to Cockneys in jail involves the way
Hunt's destabilizing methods also tested his era's conventional gender
boundaries--one of the major sources of uneasiness for
Z, as Susan Wolfson has recently argued, (17) manifested in recurrent
tirades against the effeminacy of Hunt and Keats. Now
Hunt's record on gender relations is far from unproblematic, given
his domineering treatment of his wife, his interests in other
women--particularly his sister-in-law--and his frequent recourse to
charges of effeminacy for his own political critiques of
aristocratic men. However, his general tendency in prison to confuse
divisions of rank and prestige included provocative
blurrings of gender distinctions. His published complaints of illness
and nervousness in jail, for instance, placed him in a
feminized position he always associated with his mother's frail bodily
constitution. His pronounced cultivation of family routines
in jail whose details of spousal affection, parental fondness, even
childbirth he assiduously featured in The Examiner, centered
him throughout his incarceration, despite all the Cockney revels, in
a feminized, domestic space. In fact, his strongest outcries
against the government arose from his initial anguish at the prospect
of enforced separation from his wife and children. To 'one .
. . who is accustomed to have his wife and children constantly with
him, hardly ever out of his sight,' he announced in his first
Examiner essay from prison, 'the very idea of solitary hours is a blow
that may reasonably shake the better part of his nature'
(7 February 1813, p. 83). Hunt's integrations of domestic concerns
with discussions of public policy in The Examiner became
habitual during the prison years, actually dominating the paper throughout
the 1813 crisis in the royal marriage and thus
establishing one of Romanticism's strongest working models for the
kind of family politic Mary Wollstonecraft had envisioned
back in the early 1790s. 'It should be the great end of the English
nation, and . . . it has always been the peculiar object of this
journal,' Hunt summarized on 13 June 1813, 'to keep the public interests
and the domestic feelings of the community identified
as much as possible' (p. 369). That object, lived out on a daily basis
in the editorial office of The Examiner at the Hunt family
home in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, put the Cockney School, whatever its
biases and limitations, near the vanguard of the
progressive gender politics of its time. How our recognition of that
positioning may affect our reading of the gender dynamics of
second-generation Romanticism on the whole, and particularly within
the Hunt-Shelley-Byron-Keats circles that grew out of
Horsemonger Lane, remains one of the most, among many, compelling incentives
to stage a Cockney class reunion in jail.
Notes
A print version of this essay will appear simultaneously in European
Romantic Review. I would like to thank the editors of
European Romantic Review and Romanticism on the Net for graciously
arranging this joint mode of publication.
(1) Leigh Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J. E. Morpurgo
(London: Cresset Press, 1949) p. 414; hereafter
abbreviated as Autobiography. (back)
(2) Kim Wheatley, `The Blackwood's Attacks on Leigh Hunt,' Nineteenth-Century
Literature, 47 (1992) 1-31; Duncan Wu,
`Leigh Hunt's “Cockney Aesthetics”,' The Keats-Shelley Review, 10 (1996)
77-97; Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, `Killing the
Cockneys: Blackwood's Weapons of Choice against Hunt, Hazlitt, and
Keats,' Keats-Shelley Journal, 47 (1998) 87-107.
(back)
(3) Jeffrey N. Cox, `Keats in the Cockney School,' Romanticism, 2.1 (1996) 36. (back)
(4) Jeffrey N. Cox, `Staging Hope: Genre, Myth, and Ideology in the
Dramas of the Hunt Circle,' Texas Studies in Literature
and Language, 38.3/4 (1996) 260. (back)
(5) James Thompson, Leigh Hunt (Boston: Twayne, 1977) p. 21. (back)
(6) For longer accounts of Hunt's prison experience, see Edmund Blunden,
Leigh Hunt and His Circle (New York: Harper,
1930), and Ann Blainey, Immortal Boy. A Portrait of Leigh Hunt (New
York: St. Martin's, 1985). (back)
(7) All citations from The Examiner are documented parenthetically by date of publication, followed by page number. (back)
(8) Ann Blainey, Immortal Boy, p. 68. (back)
(9) Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vol. (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1974) Vol. 3, p. 49. (back)
(10) Hunt owned John Henry Todd's 8-volume 1805 edition of The Complete
Works of Edmund Spenser. He annotated
these volumes heavily throughout his prison sojourn and continued to
read and annotate them throughout the rest of his life. All
eight volumes of Hunt's Spenser edition are included in the Victorian
& Albert Museum Library collection. (back)
(11) Roe and Cox have discussed the insolent bravura of Cockney self-fashioning
in detail, characterizing the mode as `urbane
arrogance' (Cox, `Keats in the Cockney School,' 33) and `insolent volubility'
(Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of
Dissent [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997] p. 13). My elaboration focuses
on the particular kind of marginal insider status that
Hunt self-consciously constructed to authorize and empower this form
of strategic insolence. (back)
(12) During his period of incarceration, Hunt was particularly insistent
about this identification with Spenser's liminality. He
annotated his copy of Todd's Spenser edition with a detailed account
of Spenser's probable affiliation with Christ's Hospital,
and he penned marginal comments aggressively repudiating Todd's claims
that Spenser had not suffered at all from court
hostility. (back)
(13) The abbreviation R refers to Donald Reiman's facsimile edition
of Romantic era periodical reviews, The Romantics
Reviewed (Part C: Shelley, Keats, and London Radical Writers. 2 vols.
[New York: Garland, 1972] vol. 1); hereafter
abbreviated as R. All citations from this source were originally published
in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. (back)
(14) Autobiography 244; Leigh Hunt, The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt,
ed. Thornton Hunt, 2 vols. (London: Smith,
Elder and Co. 1862) vol. 1, p. 90. (back)
(15) Hunt uses these terms in Examiner critiques of government, as follows:
14 April 1813, p. 211; 14 February 1813, p. 99;
28 March 1813, p. 194; 20 December 1812, p. 354; 6 June 1813, p. 211.
The same terms appear in Z's Cockney School
reviews, as follows: R 85, 50, 82, 83, 116. This pattern of Z's repetitions
and attempted reversals extends beyond specific
terms, encompassing as well sustained metaphors and argumentative strategies.
Hunt's famous attacks on the Prince Regent's
domestic infidelity and association with prostitutes, for instance
(22 March 1812, p. 179), become mirrored in Z's insinuations
of Hunt's own subversion of `domestic bliss' and companionship with
`kept-mistresses' (R 51). Z similarly attempts to reverse
Hunt's charges against ministerial hysteria and extravagant court adornments
(14 April 1813, p. 211; 4 July 1813, p. 467), by
accusing Hunt, in turn, of `unseemly fits of passion' and gaudy habits
of dress (R 80, 50). (back)
(16) Leigh Hunt, The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H.S. Milford (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1923) pp. 291, 295. (back)
(17) See her article `Feminizing Keats', in Critical Essays on John
Keats, ed. Hermione de Almeida (Boston: G.K. Hall,
1990) pp. 317-56. (back)
Greg Kucich
University of Notre Dame
Copyright (c) The Editor Romanticism On the Net 1999 - All rights reserved
Read / Send your comments to The Forum