The Cockney Politics of Gender—the Cases of Hunt and Keats

The Romantic period was a time of unprecedented social mobility when a newly forged class of people —the middling sort—attempted to move up the professional and political ladder. With their growing economic power and presence, the affluent commercial middle classes had been struggling for hegemony throughout the eighteenth century. Their social ambition was, not surprisingly, met with furious objections from the established strata of society. While the new middling and mercantile people laid claim to political and cultural legitimacy, the old gentry and aristocracy loudly denounced them as parvenus. In the first age of an information explosion when an increasing number of books, journals, pamphlets and newspapers were published daily, the ideological battle for cultural supremacy between the upwardly mobile new middle class and the traditional elite took the form of paper warfare. Such a war of words was impregnated, almost without exception, with a particular language—that is, gendered language. Take, for example, the eighteenth-century controversy over the idea and ideology of luxury. As the locus of the fierce ideological class struggle, the concept of luxury had then undergone a drastic revaluation. Whereas luxury was identified with sin and depravity in the classical and early Christian paradigm, it came to be regarded as a positive good in eighteenth-century England. As the nation changed into a modern consumer society with the expansion of the capitalist mode of production, the meaning of luxury became divested of its associations with degeneracy, and transformed to an admirable end in itself. Defenders of luxury, including Daniel Defoe, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume and Adam Smith, tried to downplay the moral dangers of luxury to foreground its economic and thus public benefits, arguing that luxury could increase and redistribute wealth, and ultimately contributed to the prosperity of the nation. Since the dramatic rise in luxurious consumption throughout the eighteenth century was predominantly a bourgeois phenomenon, those defenders of luxury were also defenders of the commercial ethos of the new middle class. However, the classical ethics of luxury did not by any means become extinct. In classical and Christian thought, luxury was indicted for fostering effeminacy and thus undermining individual morality and social order. According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the first woman Eve committed the archetypal sin of luxury (that fatally led to the Fall of Man). Thus gendered as feminine and identified with transgression, luxury was considered to corrupt, indeed effeminise, moral, military and masculine virtue. In order to curb the surge in the pecuniary and political power of the mercantile middle class, upholders of the traditional social order fully exploited this moralistic view of luxury, attacking the trading people for their excessive luxury and the consequent effeminacy. Thus while the concept of luxury was changing 'from an essential, general element of moral theory to a minor, technical element of economic theory' (Sekora 112), luxury's associations with effeminacy, enervation, envy and all sorts of evils continued to be widespread. In his English Malady (1833), George Cheyne argued that the middle and upper classes were equally afflicted by the peculiarly English—luxury-induced —disease consisting of such nervous disorders as madness, melancholia, weakness and effeminacy. Indeed, the political struggle between the traditional ruling class and the upwardly mobile middle class was often conducted as 'a moral debate in which each attacked the other for its ''luxury''' (Sekora 113). Defoe, champion of the mercantile middle class, censured 'the upper Part of Mankind' for its 'Pride, Luxury, Ambition and Envy'. In the eyes of Defoe, the gentry and aristocracy were debased and debilitated by the luxury of land and leisure. From the viewpoint of landed men, however, tradesmen were effeminised and corrupted …