POETRY AND POLITICS INTHE COCKNEY SCHOOL

Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle

Jeffrey N. Cox refines our conception of ‘‘second-generation’’romanticism by placing it within the circle of writers around LeighHunt that came to be known as the Cockney School. Offering atheory of the group as a key site for cultural production, Coxchallenges the traditional image of the romantic poet as an isolatedfigure by recreating the social nature of the work of Shelley, Keats,Hunt, Hazlitt, Byron, and others as they engaged in literary con-tests, wrote poems celebrating one another, and worked collab-oratively on journals and other projects. Cox also recovers thework of neglected writers such as John Hamilton Reynolds, HoraceSmith, and Cornelius Webb as part of the rich social and culturalcontext of Hunt’s circle. This book not only demonstrates convinc-ingly that a Cockney School existed, but shows that it was commit-ted to putting literature in the service of social, cultural, andpolitical reform.

. is Professor of Comparative Literature at theUniversity of Colorado, Boulder, where he is also Director of theCenter for Humanities and the Arts. His In the Shadows of Romance:Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France () wasfollowed up by an edition of Seven Gothic Dramas – ();with Larry J. Reynolds he coedited New Historical Literary Studies:Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History ().

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General editors

Professor Marilyn Butler Professor James ChandlerUniversity of Oxford University of Chicago

Editorial boardJohn Barrell, University of York

Paul Hamilton, University of LondonMary Jacobus, Cornell University

Kenneth Johnston, Indiana UniversityAlan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara

Jerome McGann, University of VirginiaDavid Simpson, University of California, Davis

This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fieldswithin English literary studies. From the early s to the early s aformidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, notjust in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modesof writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers,and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Words-worth called those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’:the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization,industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reformmovement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretendedotherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literaturewere reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; genderrelations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism byCobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and theCockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing hasproduced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses ofmodern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of thosenotions of ‘literature’ and of literary history, especially national literary history,on which modern scholarship in English has been founded.

The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged byrecent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with achallenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criti-cism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published byCambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and moreestablished scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.

For a complete list of titles published see end of book

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POETRY AND POLITICS INTHE COCKNEY SCHOOL

Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle

JEFFREY N. COX

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge , United Kingdom

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, , United Kingdom http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk

West th Street, New York, -, USA http://www.cup.org Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne , Australia

© Jeffrey N. Cox

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevantcollective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without

the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeset in Baskerville /. pt []

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Cox, Jeffrey N.Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and their Circle / by

Jeffrey N. Cox.p. cm. – (Cambridge studies in Romanticism: )Includes bibliographical references and index.

(hardback). English poetry – England – London – History and criticism. . Politics and literature –

England – London – History – th century. . Shelley, Percy Bysshe, – – Political andsocial views. . Hunt, Leigh, – – Political and social views. . Keats, John, – –Political and social views. . English poetry – th century – History and criticism. . London

(England) – Intellectual life – th century. . Political poetry, English – History and criticism. .Hunt, Leigh, – – Friends and associates. . Romanticism – England – London. .

Authorship – Collaboration. I. Title. II. Series..

'. – dc -

hardback

To IGHLS

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Contents

List of illustrations page xiAcknowledgments xiiiList of abbreviations xvii

Introduction: or, The Visionary Company, Inc.

The Cockney School attacks: or, the antiromantic ideology

The Hunt era

John Keats, coterie poet

Staging hope: genre, myth, and ideology in the dramas of theHunt circle

Cockney classicism: history with footnotes

Final reckonings: Keats and Shelley on the wealth of theimagination

Notes Index

ix

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Illustrations

. The Portland Vase. Reproduced by kind permissionof the British Museum page

. Charles Grignion after Edward Francis Burney, The Portland

Museum, frontispiece to Mr. Skinner and Co.’s sale catalog, April – June . Etching and engraving. April .Reproduced by kind permission of the Victoria and AlbertPicture Library

. Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Bacchante couchee. Also known asEmma Hart, the Future Lady Hamilton, as Ariadne. Oil on canvas.. Reproduced by kind permission of the WallaceCollection

. Thomas Rowlandson, Modern Antiques. Drawing. ?.Reproduced by gracious permission of Her Majesty TheQueen

. Thomas Rowlandson, Lady Hxxxxx Attitudes. Etching. ?.Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum.

. James Gillray, A Cognocenti Contemplating ye Beauties of ye Antique.

Etching. February . Reproduced by kind permissionof the British Museum

. James Gillray, Dido in Despair! Etching. February .Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum

. Thomas Rowlandson, Pygmalion and Galatea. Etching.Ca. . Reproduced by kind permission of Anne Quigley,Proprietor, Bibliophile Books, from Amorous Illustrations of

Thomas Rowlandson, ed. William G. Smith (London:Bibliophile Books, )

. James Gillray, Midas, Transmuting All into Gold Paper. Print. March . Reproduced by kind permission of the BritishMuseum

xi

. William Hone, Bank Restriction Note. Engraving by GeorgeCruikshank. January . Reproduced by kindpermission of the Beinecke Rare Book and ManuscriptLibrary, Yale University

. William Hone, The Bank Restriction Barometer. Engraving byGeorge Cruikshank. January . Reproduced by kindpermission of the Beinecke Rare Book and ManuscriptLibrary, Yale University

xii List of illustrations

Acknowledgments

The production of this book, like that of all cultural artifacts, is over-determined, and thus it is difficult, perhaps particularly for its author, toidentify the various sites – ideological, cultural, institutional, personal,and social – from which it arises. It is now clear to me that this project ona group of early-nineteenth-century writers would not have taken theshape it did if it were not for the presence of a group of late-twentieth-century scholars as its context: the Interdisciplinary Group for Histori-cal Literary Study at Texas A&M University. It now seems almostinevitable that I, as a member of the group and as a firm believer in itscommunal goals, would write a book arguing that we can best under-stand the work of a Shelley or a Keats in the context of an intellectualcircle. It is certainly the case that I have learned firsthand how muchone’s work is shaped by the day-to-day exchanges and interactions withthe members of one’s group, in my case from living life with such finescholars and friends as David Anderson, Donald Dickson, Mary AnnO’Farrell, James Rosenheim, Howard Marchitello, Steve Daniel, Den-nis Berthold, Paul Parrish, J. Lawrence Mitchell, Pamela Matthews,Lynne Vallone, Susan Egenolf, David McWhirter, Melanie Haw-thorne, Mark Lussier, Kenneth Price, Samuel Gladden, Robert New-man, John O’Brien, Charles Snodgrass, and Terence Allan Hoagwood.

Three members of the group who are in their own right importantvoices in contemporary scholarship’s larger turn to history have had aparticularly strong impact on my work: Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe –whose important work on the material basis of Anglo-Saxon culture andits transmission has influenced my thinking in many ways – helped tocreate the Interdisciplinary Group and continues to inspire those she leftbehind at Texas A&M University; Margaret J. M. Ezell – who hasinfluenced this book from its first conception to its final revisions – hasled the way in her work to an understanding of collective and communalliterary production and has through her everyday exercise of her intelli-

xiii

gence, wit, and simple kindness demonstrated what it means to collabor-ate; and Larry J. Reynolds, first intellectual and administrative leader ofthe group, whose own work is an example of brilliant historicist scholar-ship and committed professionalism and whose now decade-long dis-cussion with me has shown me what the shared vision and simple talk ofa group can mean. It is also true that the Interdisciplinary Group is, asSartre says of all group affiliations, both a clearly defined group and anundefined group, both a circle at Texas A&M and part of a broadmovement towards historicizing. We have had many opportunities tocatch sight of that larger movement as we have invited distinguishedguests to visit with us; and if routine interchanges within the Interdisci-plinary Group shaped the intellectual life of this book, so did theextraordinary visits and work of scholars such as Jerome McGann,Stephen Greenblatt, Marilyn Butler, Marjorie Levinson, HaydenWhite, Lawrence Buell, Ralph Cohen, Terry Castle, J. Paul Hunter,Robert Darnton, Seyla Benhabib, Michael Rogin – the list is muchlonger and just as illustrious. It is simply the case that this book wouldnot have existed without the support and inspiration of the Interdisci-plinary Group, both its A&M Fellows and its many friends from otherinstitutions.

As I complete this book, the Interdisciplinary Group for HistoricalLiterary Study is undergoing its own historical transformation into theInterdisciplinary Group for Humanities Studies, on its way to becomingthe Texas A&M Center for Humanities. Soon there may be no officialInterdisciplinary Group, and thus I dedicate this book to the Group, tothe lives and work of its members.

It hardly needs to be said that this project would never even haveoccurred to me were it not for the brilliant historicist work that has beentaking place in romantic studies. I have received important help andencouragement from many contributors to this work, including (beyondthose already named) Catherine Burroughs, Stuart Curran, WilliamGalperin, Michael Gamer, Gary Harrison, John Kandl, Greg Kucich,Thomas McFarland, Anne Mellor, David Pirie, and Nicholas Roe; inparticular, I thank Paul Hamilton and Kevin Gilmartin for their insight-ful and generous readings of this book and Marilyn Butler for support-ing my efforts. At Texas A&M University, I have benefited from thesupport of two department heads, Hamlin Hill and J. LawrenceMitchell, and two deans, Daniel Fallon and Woodrow Jones, Jr.; I havereceived research support for this project from the Department ofEnglish, the Interdisciplinary Group for Historical Literary Study, and

xiv Acknowledgments

the Office of the Dean. I offer my thanks to all these friends at A&M andalso to the staffs of the following libraries and collections: Sterling EvansLibrary, Texas A&M University; Humanities Resource Center, Univer-sity of Texas; Special Collections, University of Iowa, particularlyRobert McCown; the Huntington Library; the Beinecke Rare Book andManuscript Library at Yale University: the Wallace Collection; theVictoria and Albert Museum; The Royal Collection of Her MajestyQueen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle; the New York Public Library;the Library of Congress; the British Library; the British Museum: theBristol Central Library; and Keats House, Hampstead, particularly thecurator Christina Gee and Roberta Davis. Jane Van Tassel, my copyeditor, has been wonderfully helpful. Josie Dixon at Cambridge Univer-sity Press has offered invaluable support and guidance as this book hasdeveloped.

Several pieces of this book have appeared in earlier versions else-where: a version of chapter appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and

Language (Fall–Winter ), –, and is reprinted here withpermission; a shorter version of chapter appeared in Studies in Romanti-

cism (Fall ), –, and appears with the permission of theTrustees of Boston University; and portions of the argument in chapters and appeared in Romanticism . (), –, and this material isused here by permission.

My final thanks are to Amy, Julia, Emma, and Claire, the circleclosest to my work and heart.

xvAcknowledgments

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Abbreviations

While I have usually worked from texts as they first appeared in thework of the Cockney School, I have for the reader’s convenience citedmodern editions where available. Unless otherwise indicated, I haveused:

Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Jerome J. McGann andBarry Weller. vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, –.

The Poetry of Leigh Hunt. Ed. H. S. Milford. London: Oxford UniversityPress, .

Complete Poems of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, .

Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B.Powers. New York: Norton, .

Wordsworth: Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest deSelincourt. Oxford University Press, .

Allot The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Miriam Allot. London:Longman, .

Autobiography The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. Ed. Edmund Blunden.Oxford University Press, .

Correspondence The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt. Ed. Thorton Hunt. vols. London: Smith, Elder, .

CWH The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. P. P. Howe. vols. London: Dent, .

Diary The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Ed. Willard BissellPope. vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,–.

Journals The Journals of Mary Shelley. Ed. Paula R. Feldman andDiana Scott-Kilvert. , rpt. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, .

KC The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers –. Ed. Hyder

xvii

Edward Rollins. vols. Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, .

KH Keats and History. Ed. Nicholas Roe. CambridgeUniversity Press, .

KL The Letters of John Keats –. Ed. Hyder EdwardRollins. vols. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, .

KR Lewis M. Schwartz. Keats Reviewed by His Contemporaries.Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, .

KSJ Keats–Shelley Journal

KSR Keats–Shelley Review

LB Leigh Hunt. Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries;

With Recollections of the Author’s Life, and of His Visit to

Italy. London: Henry Colburn, ./ Leigh Browne-Lockyer Collection at Keats House,

HampsteadL&J Byron’s Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand.

vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,–.

LT The Life and Times of Leigh Hunt: Papers Delivered at a

Symposium at the University of Iowa, April , . Ed.Robert A. McCown. Iowa City: Friends of theUniversity of Iowa Libraries, .

Recollections Charles Cowden Clarke and Mary Novello Clarke,Recollections of Writers. London: Sampson, Low,Marston, Searle, & Rivington, .

SC Shelley and His Circle –. Ed. Kenneth NeillCameron and Donald H. Reiman for Carl H.Pforzheimer Library. vols. Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, –.

SiR Studies in Romanticism

SL The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, .

SR Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference. Ed.Kelvin Everest. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble,.

TLS Times Literary Supplement

xviii List of abbreviations

Introduction: or, The Visionary Company, Inc.

I

A few years ago, when I was attending a conference in Florida, I decidedto take an afternoon off to visit a local state park which featured a‘‘restored’’ section of a swamp – I was intrigued by the notion ofrepairing a swamp. Upon arriving at the park, I entered a stylishadministration building which featured, as its back wall, a two-storyplate-glass window overlooking the swamp. From this vantage point, Iwas told by the park’s information, I could look out at a piece of Floridarestored to look the way it had appeared to the first European visitors tothis part of the state; the guidebook went on to talk about the worknecessary to this restoration, such as the removal of several centuries ofaccumulated human junk on the site and the nurturing and sometimesthe reintroduction of animal populations. I was to be privy here to‘‘natural’’ Florida.

What interested me about these pronouncements was less the clearlyEurocentric desire behind this project or even its unacknowledged turnto a textualized nature – one reason the landscape could be ‘‘restored’’to the way it looked to Europeans was that those Europeans wrote anddrew descriptions of it – than the way in which this attempt to recover apast involved a conscious effort to remove everything that stood be-tween us and that moment. That is, those behind this park projectconstructed the past in the present by attempting to remove the inter-vening history of this particular place, both its accretions and its losses.Oddly, this place was to become the site of a kind of time travel, a spot oftime through which we could be transported back to that moment whenEuropeans first walked on Floridian soil.

Of course, this project announces through its very self-description itsinability to give us the past immediately, a lesson learned – perhaps toowell – by various recent historicisms. While the presuppositions of this

project – that one is interested in Florida as it appeared to Europeans,that the nature found in key verbal or pictorial descriptions is ‘‘natural,’’and so on – were perhaps unconscious ones, it has become a rigorousritual of historicizing criticism that it announce its preconceptions,define the positionality of its author, sometimes proclaim our inability toknow the past in the very act of writing about it. Such confessions areimportant, but so too is the work undertaken both in attempting toremove the accumulations of temporal junk, the material and mentalbarriers between us and the past, and in seeking to reintroduce to oursense of the past lost populations, lost groups. On the one hand, we mustrealize, for example, that the very turn to this swamp as a ‘‘natural’’backdrop to history depends upon a specific historical intervention –European colonization – which construes life prior to European con-quest as ‘‘prehistory,’’ as ‘‘natural’’; since that spot already and alwaysexists in other times, the decision to return from the ‘‘now’’ of our latestlook at the swamp to the ‘‘then’’ of a ‘‘first’’ European gaze reenactsintellectually the colonization that brought the swamp into Europeanhistory in the first place. On the other hand, our very self-consciousnessabout this putting into history might enable us truly to see – if not the‘‘prehistory’’ we eradicate in the very act of distinguishing ‘‘history’’from some ‘‘natural’’ land before time – at least the past moment thatinaugurates our historical investment in this place: we cannot findbehind the murk of history the ‘‘swamp’’ as thing-in-itself, but we canperhaps, avoiding the bog of presentism, discover at least a past to thisplace. Our inability to tell the total history of this spot does not mean wecannot tell a history of it. We may not be able to know a ‘‘nature’’independent of our constructions of it, but we may still be able to know ahistory precisely because we recognize, after Vico or Marx, that it issomething we have made.

That is, admitting our preconceptions is not enough, since what wemust then do is attempt to see beyond them; after all, the point ofrecognizing our own historicity lies in the hope that by doing so we canthen self-consciously see the past as something more than a projectionfrom the present. Even if we are finally trapped in some sort of modernhistorical amusement park, looking through windows of our own devis-ing on pasts at least in part of our own construction, I would still argue,beyond the epistemological issues, that the attempt to know the past hasan ethical claim upon us; we must try to know the past just as we must tryto know the Other – or, less pretentiously, just as in life we try to let otherpeople be themselves and not just some projection of our fears and

Poetry and politics in the Cockney School

desires. As the example of the restored swamp was meant to suggest, thisturn to the past is not an act of wise passiveness, not some naive hope thatthe past will speak for itself if only we suppress our own point of view.The turn to the past is an act in the present determined by a particularhistory, but we can, in remaining historically self-conscious, attempt tomake it an act of clearance and reclamation rather than an act ofcolonizing the past by the present. In this book, I attempt to clear fromour view of the cultural landscape of post-Napoleonic England some ofthe critical ‘‘debris’’ that has masked its contours and to reintroduce intoour sense of the scene some ‘‘lost’’ figures, while remaining aware thatwhat is debris for me may be a rich tradition to others, who may also wishthat the figures I work to recover would remain forever lost.

The drive of historicisms, new and old, has been to let the past be thepast not only so that we can recognize the lives of others different fromus but also so that, if even for only a self-conscious moment, we can liftourselves from our embeddedness in the present and thus perhapsglimpse a potential future also different from our time. Even if thesearch for such glimpses is like the work of those reclaiming the swamp –a turn to a particular past over against others because it serves presentneeds – it still might enable us to make our future, to convert the swampinto the utopian space of the park. We are in need of such glimpses andthe hope they offer just now, when a ‘‘postcommunist,’’ ‘‘postideologi-cal,’’ ‘‘postmodern’’ world seems to offer only more selfishness, greed,oppression, bigotry, and obscurantism. For me, at least, such glimpsescome in trying to re-present the work of writers at a ‘‘post-Napoleonic,’’‘‘postrevolutionary,’’ ‘‘postclassical’’ moment, writers who, unlike toomany today, did not fall prey to cynicism and despair – ‘‘despondency’’in the Wordsworthian terminology of their day – but who bandedtogether as a group opposed to the powers-that-be and their embrace ofthe ‘‘spirit of money-getting,’’ ‘‘superstition,’’ and outmoded culturalvisions. These writers formed the group around Leigh Hunt, the grouplabelled in conservative attacks as the Cockney School.

II

‘‘I propose an association’’ – with these words Percy Shelley opens hisProposals for an Association of Philanthropists Who Convinced of the Inadequacy of

the Moral and Political State of Ireland to Produce Benefits Which Are Nevertheless

Attainable Are Willing to Unite to Accomplish Its Regeneration (). While thistitle suggests a very particular mission for the association, Shelley makes

Introduction: or, The Visionary Company, Inc.

it clear that it will have a much wider scope: ‘‘I conceive that anassembly of men meeting to do all the good that opportunity will permitthem to do must be in its nature as indefinite and varying as theinstances of human vice and misery that precede, occasion, and call forits institution.’’ Certain that such an association will be opposed by thegovernment, the aristocracy, and the priesthood, Shelley still believesthat a group provides the best vehicle for cultural and political reform.In fact, it is in the freely associating group that Shelley sees the best hopeof resisting such institutionalized associations as state, church, and class.

Shelley was not alone in desiring a group. Keats wrote to BenjaminRobert Haydon ( January , KL, : ), ‘‘I will be with you earlynext week – to night it should be, but we have a sort of a Club everySaturday evening,’’ a reference to a group that gathered around JamesRice. Rice was part of another group which included John HamiltonReynolds and Benjamin Bailey and a group of young women in Essex.Reynolds, Rice, and Bailey were also members of the ZetosophianSociety, ‘‘a literary, cultural, and social club composed of fourteenyoung men, most of them ‘of very considerable genius.’’’ Reynolds hadearlier been part of the Breidden Society in Shropshire, which held anannual festival on Breidden Hill with feasting, poetry, singing, anddancing – and the crowning of the poet ferneat, there being ferns but nolaurels available. We could continue to multiply the groups. Keats wasonce a member of a circle around George Felton Mathew. HoraceSmith was part of an expatriate group at Versailles similar to the oneShelley attempted to create at Pisa when he sought to bring togetherByron, Hunt, and even the ill Keats. Benjamin Robert Haydon, thepainter of the group, wrote at the time Keats, Shelley, and Hunt cametogether, ‘‘My great object is to form a School’’ ( October , Diary,: ). Byron and Hobhouse once proposed a ‘‘Couplet Club,’’ andByron belonged to the Whig Club and the Hampden Club. Keats’ssupporters Richard Woodhouse and John Taylor at one time founded aPhilological Society. These men all turned to associations as a means ofcultural production and also as a site of opposition. They sought in agroup both an immediate audience not unlike earlier manuscript circles,where one could share one’s thoughts and ideas with a coterie, and acultural, social, and political project not unlike that pursued by laterexplicitly avant-garde movements. It will be the argument of this bookthat what we call the second generation of romantic poets is not merelya temporal gathering of distinct voices but a self-consciously definedgroup, an association of intellectuals that centered on Leigh Hunt and

Poetry and politics in the Cockney School

that came to be known as the Cockney School. The visionary companyof Shelley, Byron, Keats, Hunt, Reynolds, Smith, Hazlitt, and othersmay never have formally incorporated itself, but it was defined bothinternally and externally as a group working to reform culture andsociety.

What is a group? While I recognize that it is for me in part astrategically slippery site for analysis, it is certainly the case that Iassociate it with certain words – circle, coterie, even clique – and notwith others – corporation, organization, establishment. It appears thatthe use of the word group in relation to an assemblage of persons arisesin the eighteenth century (the OED cites as its first such use) at themoment when modern forms of collective association such as ‘‘party’’were being defined. It is also interesting that the first uses of ‘‘group ofpeople’’ appear to suggest ‘‘confused aggregation.’’ This is, of course, incontrast to the earliest sense of the word in English, where ‘‘group’’ isused in the fine arts to designate a composed gathering of figuresforming a design. On the one hand a formal design and on the other ahuman happening, a group might appear as a spatial order – as in agroup photograph – but is more a temporal project – as in the develop-ment of Surrealism.

What is clear to me is that I deploy the concept of a group to avoidcertain other locales from which to begin the study of literary culture.To emphasize the group as the site of literary production is, of course, tomove away from the idea of the abstract individual as the producer ofliterary texts; it is even to move away from the more complicatedintersubjective model of creation that arises when one discusses closepartnerships – Wordsworth and Coleridge, in particular, but also Shel-ley and Byron or, to use a far less well-known example, James andHorace Smith. Pairs do not comprise groups. Again, while it may makesense to talk about Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and the Shelleys as part of afamily of writers, family units, in which relations are a given, do notnecessarily form groups in my sense. To begin at the opposite pole fromthe individual, we also need to see that certain key categories in ourcontemporary analysis of literature such as race, class, and gender alsodo not define groups. If it is true that one can betray one’s class but neverleave it, then ‘‘class’’ does not define a group in my sense; for ‘‘class’’points to a subject position always already given, whereas the groupdefines an intersubjective collectivity always in the process of beingimagined. Again, there certainly are gendered groups, but there is nogroup comprising all women or all men. It is not simply or definitively a

Introduction: or, The Visionary Company, Inc.

matter of scale, though I do think that size matters when one isdiscussing a group as supporting literary production. It is also a questionof one’s relation to the collectivity under consideration. One findsoneself already part of a race, a class, a gender; these may very well behumanly constructed categories, but they are certainly not constructedby me when I find myself placed in this or that category. The group, onthe other hand, is constructed by those who are affiliated with it. WhenShelley sees his association opposed by the government (the nation), thearistocracy (class structure), and the priesthood (religion), he also posesthe group against such given, institutionalized affiliations. He refuses tobe defined by his nationality, class, or religious upbringing; he willchoose with whom he will associate. The group names an ‘‘electiveaffinity.’’ Goethe’s use of the phrase suggests two linked aspects ofbelonging to a group. First, one’s membership in a group is self-conscious; it is an act of willed identification – one elects to be part of agroup. Second, however, one is also elected to a group, selected by bothits members and by one’s preexisting affinities. Becoming part of agroup is an act of self-fashioning that necessarily occurs through theother. It is, in fact, through such affiliations, such self-conscious identifi-cations, that one creates an identity beyond that set by the givencategories into which one is cast. It is in the group, in this subjectivityin/as collectivity, that we can find a sense of personhood and thepersonal that is reduced to neither an empty autonomy nor an abstractdifference. While we must never forget that groups are also defined byexclusion – that for there to be a group of ‘‘us,’’ some ‘‘you’’ has to be leftout – and while (as is clearly the case in the Hunt circle) the dynamicnature of a group means that individuals join and leave, are includedand expelled, find themselves sometimes attached to the group, some-times disgusted with it, finally, for me, the group embodies a project,perhaps utopian, in which a community is both imagined and livedbeyond the limits of given collectivities such as those of family or nation.

The suggestion that we examine romantic poetry as a group activitywill not sound so strange as it once might have. Given the work ofscholars as different as Jerome McGann and Donald Reiman, JackStillinger and Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Butler and Stuart Curran,Nicholas Roe and Susan Wolfson, we no longer necessarily view theromantic poet as the solitary singer declaiming alone on the mountain-top or sitting in isolation, pondering a bird’s song. We have come to seethe poetry of the romantic period as being a social product, with the textbeing forged by a collaborative process involving author, editor, type-

Poetry and politics in the Cockney School

setter, publisher, critic, and reader, and the author herself being con-ceived as a nexus of interpersonal, cultural, social, and economic forces.I am interested in this book in poetry as a social product in a quitemundane – ordinary and worldly – way; that is, I see the poetry ofsecond-generation romanticism arising from the social interchange of aparticular group of men and women. This group I will refer to not by themore usual names of the Keats Circle or the Shelley Circle but as theCockney School or the Hunt circle, for it was Leigh Hunt who wasactually at the center of the group – though, of course, by center I do notmean a fixed point equally distant from all the points on the spatialfigure of a circle but a moving person unequally close to all of the peopleinvolved in the temporal project of a circle.

Hunt himself clearly saw writing as a social activity or even what wewould call an ideological activity. In ‘‘Politics and Poetics,’’ first pub-lished in Hunt’s journal the Reflector (. []) and reprinted in thesecond edition of The Feast of the Poets (), Hunt offers a socializedscene of writing. He depicts himself writing not in splendid isolation,alone with nature, but at a desk in the city surrounded by historical andpolitical texts. While he might long for a quiet tete-a-tete with his muse,he finds his writing shaped by many external pressures: by financialconcerns, as ‘‘the punctual fiend, that bawls for copy’’ (l. ), waits forhim to finish the journalism he writes to earn a living; by politicalworries, as he remains aware that the government watches, ever readyto prosecute anything it can label seditious or libellous; even by physicalpressures, as exhaustion, headaches, and the ‘‘Blue Daemon’’ (l. ) ofdepression threaten him. As he places himself (in the original version) inthe company of such public and politicized writers as Gifford, Sheridan,Canning, and Scott, Hunt sees his writing being shaped as much byeditors’ pens and government writs as it is by some internal muse.

For Hunt and for poets such as Shelley and Keats who entered hiscircle, poetry was a social activity in an immediate way, as they wrote forthe highly politicized Examiner, as they penned occasional verse to oneanother, and as they participated in Hunt’s much-maligned sonnet-writing contests. The Examiner is, in a sense, the textual home of thegroup, setting forth common ideological positions and publishing theverse of the circle’s members; it also defines the project of being a group,distinguishing the Examiner’s writers and readers from organization byparty – the weekly’s motto is ‘‘Party is the madness of many for the gainof a few’’ – and suggesting that while the opponents of the group may betagged by reductive because collective names – i.e., ‘‘borough mon-

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gers,’’ ‘‘pensioners,’’ ‘‘apostates,’’ and ‘‘toad-eaters’’ – those within thegroup are both so particularized and so fully integrated within the circlethat one can allude to them without naming them, certain that they willbe recognized by the ‘‘knowing ones.’’ Later chapters will attempt todetail the work of this circle. At this point, I want to suggest why Iconceive of the group as an important focus for an attempt to constructa literary history.

III

Historical thinking works against abstraction; literary history worksagainst abstracting literary texts from the larger range of human activ-ities of which they are a part. As that old historicist Hegel notes,abstraction is a process of isolation, of drawing something away. Ab-straction is often defined in opposition to particularity – the abstractionis too far removed from the rich details of life. Hegel sees it in oppositionto totalization – the abstracted detail has been removed from the richtotality of which it is a part. Historicist resistance to abstraction and itsattendant reductionism follows both paths, towards the particularity of‘‘thick’’ description and towards the totality summed up in FredricJameson’s account of ‘‘Hegel’s great dictum, ‘the true is the whole,’[which] is less an affirmation of some place of truth which Hegel himself(or others) might occupy, than it is a perspective and a method wherebythe ‘false’ and the ideological can be unmasked and made visible.’’

Abstractions can be dissolved into details that escape containmentwithin the abstraction, or abstractions can be seen as strategies ofcontainment that can be revealed as limited only from the perspective ofa totality that escapes containment. Abstractions can be shatteredagainst the particular or the whole. Either way, they are found to beprocrustean resting points for the mind.

While the move towards detail and that towards the whole seemopposed, we ideally want a method that will unite the quiddity of theparticularized with the perspective of the totalized. We gesture towardssuch a method in, for example, discussing the merger of psychoanalysisand Marxism, in proclaiming that the ‘‘personal is the political,’’ infinding the transcendent in the local, in identifying history as ‘‘ground’’and ‘‘horizon.’’ As Jameson suggests, no one can keep in mental play thevast dialectical power that would be needed to pay attention to all thedetails and to forge them into ever fuller approximations of the totality,to fill our abstractions with ever more particulars while opening them up

Poetry and politics in the Cockney School

to ever larger constructions of the whole. The truth of the matter is thatin practice we tend towards one or the other pole; in simple terms, whenwe do literary history, we are likely to move, on the one hand, towardsthe biography of discrete individuals and the anecdote (the biography,as it were, of the discrete event) and, on the other, towards an analysisbased on extremely large categories such as class or race or gender.When one makes the move towards the particular individual, theunique text, the striking event, one can be accused of replacing historywith biography, of offering another formalism, or of hiding grandnarratives within only seemingly random stories. When one movestowards totalization, one is likely to be seen running roughshod over theminutiae of the event, the text, the individual and thus of being nottotalizing but totalitarian. And these are the objections that historicalscholars themselves bring against historicist work, including their own:no one is harder on historicizing than historicists. In a real sense, whathistorical scholarship teaches us is skepticism, a doubt of grand narra-tives and a concern that in fact the devil is in the details and he is doingsomething we do not like.

It strikes me that there is a certain plausibility in starting somewherein the middle, with neither the supposedly individual subject, individualfact, or individual text nor the hypothetically totalized community,history, culture. Alan Liu, in critiquing the ‘‘romanticism of the detail,’’has suggested that ‘‘what may be the single most promising, if alsoproblematic, front of cultural criticism [is] its exploration of the commu-nally ‘parochial,’ ‘local,’ and ‘regional’’’; he offers ‘‘ ‘localism’ as theunderexplored zone between the discretely individual and the massivelycollective.’’ There are clearly many entry points into this middleground, as we can see in studies ranging from the collective institution ofthe Renaissance theater to printing houses in the nineteenth century,from women’s coterie circles to the construction of the institution ofslavery and thus of ‘‘race.’’ For me, the best way into this ‘‘underex-plored zone’’ when discussing the second generation of romantics isthrough the notion of the group. Of course, this middle ground of thegroup – located somewhere between, say, the biographical subject and,say, the nation – occupies conceptually the same place as does abstrac-tion lying between the particular and the whole. However, I wouldpropose the group as a dynamic position and project that through its tiesto both the individual and the collective, the particular and the whole,stands in for abstraction in order to allow us to stand beyond it. Putanother way, any formulation of a group may itself be an abstraction,

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but thinking through the group, as it now presents highlighted subjectsand now suggests widening associations, offers tactics for resisting evenone’s own abstractions.

Offering a model of such an approach, Jean-Paul Sartre, in Search for a

Method, sought in the notion of a group a point of mediation between aclass-based definition of an ideology and an individual’s espousal of thatideology. Using the example of the idea of nature in the eighteenthcentury, Sartre explains the relationship between an idea as it is heldwithin a general cultural moment and the same concept as it is held byan individual defined as a member of a group:

Outside of precise acts of ideation, of writing, or of verbal designation, the Ideaof Nature has no material being (still less an existence) in the eighteenthcentury. Yet it is real, for each individual takes it as something Other than hisown specific act as reader or thinker insofar as it is also the thought of thousandsof other thinkers. Thus the intellectual grasps his thought as being at once his andother. He thinks in the idea rather than the idea being in his thought; and thissignifies that it is the sign of his belonging to a determined group (since itsfunctions, ideology, etc., are known) and an undefined group (since the individ-ual will never know all members nor even the total number).

Keats, for example, is both part of a particular group – the Hunt circle –and of a series of ever larger undefined groups – writers, students ofmedicine, the ‘‘middle’’ class, men. When he engages a particularideological issue – say, attitudes towards sexuality – he is not merelyexpressing a personal position but espousing notions that can be tied tothe interests of both his particular group and other larger groups. Wemay never be able to reconstruct in full detail what the individual Keatsthought about sex or usefully totalize the ideology of sex held byearly-nineteenth-century bourgeois men, but we can come to under-stand the collective position affirmed by Keats and those with whom heallied himself as they define themselves in opposition to others withintheir historical moment, as they identify themselves as part of a groupby, for example, espousing a particular sexual ideology. RememberingSartre’s warning about the status of the idea of the group – ‘‘the group

never has and never can have the type of metaphysical existence whichpeople try to give it. We repeat with Marxism: there are only men andreal relations between men’’ (p. ) – we can still work towards a fullerunderstanding of Keats’s texts by placing him and them within theconcrete network of human (which, of course, includes intellectual andliterary) relations and oppositions surrounding Hunt.

Whether or not groups are a significant feature of differing historical

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moments as we find differently configured coteries, schools, movements,cenacles, and simply collections of friends, there were certainly preced-ents, including relatively immediate ones, for the gathering aroundHunt. This gathering of writers and artists who at times imaginethemselves the ‘‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’’ echoes thedream of a ‘‘republic of letters’’ that moved many in early-modernEurope, as Donald Dickson reminds us, from the famous AcademiaPlatonica organized around Ficino at the Medici villa to the Society ofAntiquaries founded in by William Camden and Robert Cottonunder the patronage of Matthew Parker, the archbishop of Canter-bury. From learned organizations such as the Royal Society to gather-ings of antiquarians and collectors such as the Society of Dilettanti andon to secret societies, we repeatedly find collectivities devoted to culturalwork. Margaret J. M. Ezell has reminded us of the importance of coteriecircles to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature. Followingupon Habermas’s interest in them as the foundation of a ‘‘publicsphere,’’ eighteenth-century coffee houses, salons, and periodicalshave attracted considerable interest. Hunt, at times, seems to drawdirectly upon such traditions: he named his journal the Examiner afterthe early-eighteenth-century periodical; his uncle Benjamin West pro-vided a link to the traditions of the Royal Academy; Hunt was asometime member of the gathering that had been Joseph Johnson’scircle in the s – and his friends such as Hazlitt, Godwin, and HoraceTwiss provided other links to earlier radical and dissenting groups.

Still, there is a different relationship between the Hunt circle andmany earlier sites for cultural production, a difference marked, forexample, in their mocking designation as the Cockney School, with theidea of the School paralleling them to older centers of cultural power butwith the Cockney label attempting to deny them any cultural capital.

Where learned societies stood at the center of established culture, whereeighteenth-century gatherings of writers such as the Scribblerians or theKit-Cat Club offered themselves as competitors for the heart of Lon-don’s public life, the Hunt circle was seen as more localized or particu-larized, as embodying only Cockney culture or literally marginalized inHampstead. For the defenders of official culture, the Cockney Schoolseemed less like the Kit-Cats than like Grub-Street hacks who, no longerthe subject of high cultural disdain, have instead organized themselvesinto a powerful literary movement; again, they might appear to threatenthe ideal of the ‘‘republic of letters’’ by insisting upon its radical democ-ratization. The Cockneys occupied an interesting space, usefully

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thought of through their sometime designation as sub-urban, for whilethe Cockney label (not to mention the office of the Examiner and otherhaunts) tied them to urban London, they were both removed from theestablished centers of London’s power and considered beneath theurbane culture of the elites. Of course, for Hunt and his group, thisapparent marginalization was a guarantee of their resistance to estab-lished power, as Hunt defined the Examiner apart from all party politicsand as the Cockneys conceived of themselves as opposed to the Lakers‘‘in and out of place,’’ as Byron put it; they participated in both theisolation and the liberation that marks an avant-garde. Like variousearlier cultural gatherings, the Hunt circle conceived of itself as a modelfor society as a whole, but this was an oppositional model; that is, theirgroup becomes a site not for the identification with conventional cultureand the society it supports but for the struggle to create a reconfiguredsocial space built upon a new – Cockney – cultural literacy.

Thus, while it may seem odd to turn to the group in a period that isconventionally designated as alternatively the Age of the Individual andthe Age of Nationalism, the group offers a way of thinking beyond suchcliched formulations in order to reconceptualize second-generationromanticism. I have already tried to suggest the desire for a group on thepart of writers such as Shelley and Keats, a longing not surprising giventhe status of those writers called ‘‘romantic’’ as a cultural avant-garde,both distant from large portions of the public’s taste and questing for aposition beyond the hegemony of official culture. It is also important, asI will argue most fully in chapter , that they were defined by others asbeing part of a coterie, the Cockney School; and it is significant thatboth their self-definition and the attacks by their enemies defined themas a group in opposition to other groups, particularly the Lake School.By studying a group rather than individual writers, we see literary andother intellectual work not as unique, isolated objects but as the prod-ucts of forces of both affiliation and cultural warfare. The work weidentify with Keats or Shelley defines not abstract sensibilities but livedpositionalities. Put simply, Keats will be understood better when readthrough Hunt, Shelley, Reynolds, and Byron and through Lockhart,Wordsworth, or Southey as well. The text is an act within a collectivepractice defined as it enters into an arena of competing practices. Thehope is that in examining the work of a group, defining individuals asthey are part of collective practices and the group itself as only one set ofpractices within a larger cultural repertoire, one avoids both abstractparticulars and too easily achieved totalizations.

Poetry and politics in the Cockney School

This book is an essay at defining the work of the Hunt circle. I beginwith an account of the group’s definition, both their internal sense ofthemselves as a group and their opponents’ assault upon them as acoterie, as the Cockney School. My goal is to retrieve the group and itscollective practice from both the negative formulation offered by Black-

wood’s and the defensive reaction of romantic scholars who have soughtto isolate the poets so as to negate the force of the earlier attacks. Thefirst chapter attempts to decenter our standard notions of the secondgeneration of romantics by insisting that we read them as a group andby recentering their network of interrelations on Leigh Hunt. Thesecond chapter offers a fuller portrait of the group’s activities, its sharedpractices and positions. I am also concerned here with defining themode of literary production in the circle as collective and collaborative;examining the group’s collective work in commonplace books, collab-orative projects, and ‘‘contest’’ poems, as well as in their major efforts, Idraw upon the work of seventeenth-century scholars on coterie litera-ture to show how the mode of literary production in the Hunt circle isbound up with manuscript circulation, with the ‘‘interactive,’’ collab-orative nature of coterie writing described by Margaret Ezell. We canfind the traces of the group’s communal project in the very ways inwhich they create texts.

Drawing upon this working definition of the group and arguing thatwe should see the group not so much as a context lying outside canonicalworks as the site within which they are produced and which they in turnproduce, I turn in the third chapter to Keats’s Poems of , which canbest be understood once it is situated firmly in the collective project ofthe Hunt circle, once it is seen as an exemplar of the group’s stylistic andideological practices and as a manifesto issued in the culture warsfollowing the fall of Napoleon. The chapter ends with an account of ‘‘Istood tip-toe upon a little hill,’’ the opening to Poems, which I argue isalso an opening salvo in a battle with Wordsworth as Keats, Hunt,Hazlitt, Byron, and Shelley all contest the vision of the Excursion.

These first three chapters provide a sense of the Hunt circle throughits affiliations and its oppositions. The final three chapters demonstratemore particularly how reading their poetry in the context of the group’sproject adds to our understanding and appreciation of the work ofShelley, Keats, and others. Chapters and offer two attempts to usethe idea of the group to explore the literary work of the period. Chapter takes up a particular genre, the experimental plays penned by Hunt,Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Horace Smith. In a sense, the chapter

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offers a simple point: a work such as Prometheus Unbound, when consider-ed apart from the work of the Hunt circle, is likely to be seen as auniquely original poem, comparable – despite its dramatic form –perhaps only to Blake’s visionary epics; however, when Shelley’s play isplaced within the project of the circle, we suddenly realize that it is partof a set of generic experiments and ideological arguments he shares withwriters such as Hunt and Smith. Chapter discusses the style andsubject matter usually defined as romantic classicism; here I want toshow that what might be seen as a turn away from both contemporarysubject matter and the ‘‘modern’’ style – a turn often defined throughKeats’s ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’ – is in fact the epitome of Cockneypoetics and polemics. The final chapter not only returns to some of thevexing relations within the group – in particular, problems with money– but also reads Adonais – and other poems on the death of Keats,Shelley, and Hunt – as first attempts to write a history or offer asummary vision of the Hunt circle.

There is clearly much else in the work of the Hunt circle that could beexplored: the group’s Italianate work from Hunt’s Story of Rimini toKeats’s and Reynolds’s abandoned Boccaccio project and even Byron’sDon Juan; the circle’s collective efforts with the essay, literary, occasional,and political; the considerable accomplishments of the women in thecircle that might lead through Mary Shelley to a consideration of thenovel, to which Peacock, Horace Smith, and even Hunt (Sir Ralph Esher,

or Adventures of a Gentleman of the Court of Charles II ) contributed, or thatmight take us via Elizabeth Kent and her Flora Domestica to new insightsinto the poetry of a group that produced Hunt’s Foliage and the flower-filled verses of Keats. My book will have accomplished its purposes ifothers come along to flesh out our account of the Hunt circle, thusrevealing how finally abstract my study, like any other, necessarily is.

Of course, I like to think of this book as avoiding some of abstraction’spitfalls in order to move us closer to understanding the ways in which aliterary work is a complex social act as both a product and producer of aweb of human relations, relations that are both local and wide-ranging,from the personal link a seduction poem may both draw upon and forgewith the person being seduced to the more distant connection a textmakes when a reader, contemplating the work long decades after it waswritten, is himself or herself moved to write about it. I am mostinterested in how and why particular literary texts arise in particularizedinterpersonal circumstances and how these texts gain the cultural powerto engage ever widening circles, ever changing affiliative groups includ-

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ing those of which I am a part. Put simply, I believe that if we attend tothe Hunt circle the individual works produced within it will speak to usmore fully as we hear them speak to and for the group.

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