Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840 Cockney Adventures Cambridge Studies in Romanticism Series

Gregory Dart expands upon existing notions of Cockneys and the 'Cockney School' in the late Romantic period by exploring some of the broader ramifications of the phenomenon in art and periodical literature. He argues that the term was not confined to discussion of the Leigh Hunt circle, but was fast becoming a way of gesturing towards everything in modern metropolitan life that seemed discrepant and disturbing. Covering the ground between Romanticism and Victorianism, Dart presents Cockneyism as a powerful critical currency in this period, which helps provide a link between the works of Leigh Hunt and Keats in the 1810s and the early works of Charles Dickens in the 1830s. Through an examination of literary history, art history, urban history and social history, this book identifies the early nineteenth-century figure of the Cockney as the true ancestor of modernity.

Introduction: the Cockney moment; 1. Leigh Hunt, John Keats and the suburbs; 2. William Hazlitt and the Periodical Press; 3. Liber Amoris and lodging houses; 4. Pierce Egan and life in London; 5. Charles Lamb and the alchemy of the streets; 6. John Martin, John Soane and Cockney art; 7. B. R. Haydon and debtors' prisons; 8. Charles Dickens and Cockney adventures.

Gregory Dart is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department of University College London. His research, both current and prospective, is centrally concerned with the modern city, as a cultural and material phenomenon. His first monograph, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge, 1999), examined the influence of the French Revolution on English Romantic writers. Since then he has published widely on Romantics and the city, edited two selections of Hazlitt's writings and written a short book on the relationship between unrequited love and stalking.