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A reviewer in the Satirist complained of a new work that it was produced by a member of a "school of sentimental whiners—or affectors of babyish simplicity—of amateurs of pretty touches of nature—of descriptive bardlings." Another, commenting on the same work, contends that the author "combines in a pre-eminent degree the various peculiarities and absurdities of the school of poetry, that his exertions first contributed to establish; his images are in general unnatural and incongruous; his diction uncouth, pedantic, and obscure: he mistakes abruptness for force, and supposes himself to be original only when he is absurd." For one reviewer, the author "is one of a school whose conceptions scorn the bounds of humbler taste," and another calls the poet and his allies "vicious and pedantic." The work is accused of "profaness and absurdity" and of having dangerous moral and religious tendencies. [1]

These might well be reviews of Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini or Keats's Endymion, but they are in fact all commentaries on Coleridge's Remorse, performed and published in 1813. In fact, there is a surprising degree of similarity between the terms used to abuse the Lakers and those later used against the Cockneys. Southey had long been attacked for verse that was seen as marked by the "deprivation of language . . . and . . . the debasement of all those feelings which poetry is designed to communicate," by "perpetual artifice," by "conceit and bad taste," and by "childishness." [2] The Edinburgh Review had, of course, repeatedly chastised Wordsworth, saying of Lyrical Ballads, that key act of anonymous collaborative work that gave substance to the notion of the Lakers as a group, that they were marked by "Childishness, conceit and affectation," "perverseness and bad taste" (11 [October 1808]: 214); of Wordsworth's Poems in Two Volumes that they demonstrated that the "new poets" are "mannerists" who raid "vulgar ballads and plebeian nurseries for their allusions" (224); and of the 1814 Excursion that it proved that Wordsworth was "incurable" and that the only thing left for criticism was to protect "against the spreading of the malady" (24 [November 1814]: 1).

Childishness and vulgarity, affection and artificiality, perversity and plebeian inspiration, blasphemy and disease—these were to be some of the key terms used by Blackwood's and others as they attacked the Cockney School. [3] The first link between the Cockneys and the Lakers is that, when they were considered as schools, they were abused in the same terms. However, one function of the Cockney School attacks, begun in 1817 in Blackwood's and echoed elsewhere, is to transfer the terms of censure from the Lakers to the Cockneys, as "Z." opens his first attack, published in October 1817, with an explicit contrast between the two groups: "While the whole critical world is occupied with balancing the merits, whether in theory or in execution of what is commonly called THE LAKE SCHOOL, it is strange that no one seems to think it at all necessary to say a single word about another new school of poetry which has of late sprung up among us . . . it may henceforth be referred to by the designation of THE COCKNEY SCHOOL" (2 [October 1817]: 38). "Z." interpellates the Cockneys, calls them into critical being, as antagonists to the Lakers. More than that, he works to rescue Wordsworth from the criticisms that had been lodged against the Lakers so that these terms of invective will be available for his attack on the Cockneys. If Wordsworth had been accused of offering emotionally immature poetry, of being childish, babyish, a ransacker of plebeian nurseries, he is now seen as embodying a "patriarchal simplicity of feeling" (2 [October 1817]: 40) so that Hunt, Johnny Keats and Corny Webb can be infantilized. Where Lake poetry had been found to be vulgar, degrading, and possibly impure and blasphemous, Z. proclaims that "One great charm of Wordsworth's noble compositions consists in the dignified purity of thought" (40); the Cockneys will now be seen as the only peddlers of vulgarity, blasphemy, and voluptuousness. And if the Lakers had been repeatedly taken to task for adopting a mode of poetic experimentation that broke with the canons of poetry, Z. in his later attack upon Keats would proclaim Wordsworth not only the "purest" and "loftiest" but also "the most classical of living English poets" so that he can be contrasted with Hunt, "the meanest, the filthiest, and the most vulgar of Cockney poetasters" (3 [August 1818]: 520). Wordsworth and the Lake School must be praised so that Hunt and the Cockneys can be ridiculed. While one can make the positive assertion that there would have been no Cockney School without the Lake School in the sense that Hunt and his circle are all deeply indebted to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, it is also the case that the Cockney School is rejected by Blackwood's not as the inheritors but as the opponents of the Lakers. Thus, one way in which the Cockneys are the Lakers' other is that the Lakers are rehabilitated by Blackwood's so that the Cockneys can be othered.

The links between the Lakers and the Cockney School attacks are, however, more complicated than simply Z.'s decision to change the target of critical invective. We can understand Blackwood's sudden desire to embrace Wordsworth, who up to that point had been a somewhat risky cultural investment, if we look at the context Z. invokes for his attack on the Cockneys. Arguing that "the whole critical world is occupied with balancing the merits . . . of . . . THE LAKE SCHOOL," he must surely be alluding most immediately to the debate aroused by the publication of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria: Hazlitt attacked the piece in the Edinburgh Review in August 1817 while others such as the Tory and High Church British Critic (November 1817) sided with Coleridge in his complaints against the Scotch Reviewers. More generally, Z. must have had in mind what was at this point a more than yearlong attack on the Lake School by the group of writers gathered around Leigh Hunt. While Coleridge himself would continue to trouble the Blackwood's crew—the Biographia received particularly harsh treatment in the same issue as the first Cockney School piece—Blackwood's editors seem to decide that if the gathering of liberal and radical intellectuals around Hunt criticized Wordsworth and the Lakers, then Blackwood's would defend them: if you are my enemy's enemy, then you must be my friend.

The more immediate object of contention, Coleridge's Biographia, was published, after long delay, in July of 1817. In his opening account of the "motives of the present work," Coleridge complains that he has been misrepresented in literary and political commentary:

It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation, and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both from the literary and political world. Most often it has been connected with some charge, which I could not acknowledge, or some principle which I had never entertained. [4]

As the Biographia progresses, it becomes clear that this complaint centers on his objection to being grouped as a "Lake Poet," of having his poetical doctrines identified with the Wordsworth of the preface to Lyrical Ballads and his political positions identified with the poet laureate, Southey; as he puts it, "The solution" to the attacks he has suffered is that "I was in habits of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey!" (1: 55). As he works to castigate reviewers, to defend Southey, to distance himself from Wordsworth's views on poetic diction and the poet, Coleridge clearly has as one of his main goals to establish himself apart from any school, to assert his uniqueness and originality. In his view, he has been criticized unfairly because he has been identified with a group—this "fiction of a new school of poetry" as he calls it (1: 69)—in which he claims no membership.

Since the bulk of Coleridge's attacks on reviewers were apparently written in 1815, [5] they would seem to be most directly a rebuttal to the disparagement referred to before that Remorse had received in 1813. However, when published in 1817, his comments must have struck readers as a rejoinder to the more recent assault launched against Coleridge and his fellow Lakers by the Hunt circle through the Examiner, and Coleridge's conclusion to the Biographia (2: 241-46) gave credence to this by responding directly to Hazlitt's critiques of his most recently published work, the Lay Sermon, The Statesman's Manual or The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight. Hazlitt had ridiculed Coleridge's pamphlet and its use of the Bible to endorse the powers-that-be even before it saw print (Examiner, 8 September 1816) and then attacked it in both the Examiner (29 December 1816) and the Edinburgh Review (27 [1816]).

When it was published in 1817, the Biographia was clearly going to be read by Hazlitt, Hunt, and their circle in relation to the Lay Sermons and to the other products of the Lakers during this period, including Wordsworth's "Thanksgiving Ode" volume of 1816 and Southey's The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo, also in 1816, along with his earlier Carmen Triumphale: For the Commencement of the Year 1814 and Carmen Aulica: Written in 1814, on the Arrival of the Allied Sovereigns in England. The Hunt circle had always been ready to tweak the Lakers, even while admiring their poetry; Southey's assumption of the laureateship brought on ridicule, Wordsworth's position as Stamp Distributor was commented on, and a recent work such as the Excursion was seen as both poetically powerful and politically retrograde, both as one of the three works of the age Keats would glory in and as a piece that for Mary Shelley revealed its author to be "a slave." [6] It was, however, the body of work issued by Lakers in 1816 that finally produced a concerted antagonistic response from the Hunt circle, for these poems and pamphlets not only seemed to gloat over Napoleon's defeat—about which Hunt, Hazlitt, and their allies had much more ambiguous feelings—but also to propose that this military victory should announce as well a rout of all the social and cultural forces of the left—much as modern reactionary forces might see the fall of the Berlin Wall as grounds for declaring the entire project of the left illegitimate.

The Hunt circle clearly felt that these works had declared a cultural war, and they responded in kind. In a sense, the Hunt circle becomes a coherent group through its collective engagement with, and ultimately its collaborative attack upon, the Lake School; it is not just Blackwood's that defines the Cockneys in opposition to the Lakers, but they themselves who—while admiring the verse produced by the Lake School—would contest their cultural, social, and political vision. For example, when Wordsworth's sonnets on Waterloo appeared in the Champion in February of 1816, they immediately called forth a "Political Examiner" by Hunt attacking the fact that Wordsworth had "Heaven Made A Party To Earthly Disputes" (18 February 1816: 97-99), as he provides a foretaste of his circle's response to Wordsworth's "Thanksgiving Ode" volume with its infamous call to carnage as God's daughter. Hunt here also covers some of the same ground that Hazlitt would canvass more thoroughly in his vigorous response to the Lay Sermons. Hazlitt would follow his attacks on Coleridge with ridicule of Southey during the Wat Tyler affair (Examiner, 9, 30 March, 4, 11, and 18 May 1817), and Wordsworth would also appear at key moments in his essays—for example, his review of Coriolanus—as an emblem of what is wrong with the poetry of the day. Hunt, too, would continue to use the Examiner to question the cultural politics of the Lakers, for example seeing Coleridge and Southey as "advocates of Fire, Slaughter, and Famine" who can support government terror while crying over the Spa Fields Meeting (8 December 1816), and arguing that the message of the Lay Sermons is "Hopelessness;—for such is the sum and substance of [Coleridge's] late pamphlet" (Examiner, 12 January 1817). [7] We can also see the Hunt circle contesting the vision of the Lakers in their poetry of this period from "Alastor" with its critique of the Wordsworthian poet of the Excursion to Childe Harold III with its rejection of the Lakers' version of Napoleon and revolutionary history, from the satire on Southey, "The Laureate Laid Double," published in the Examiner (4 August 1816) to Keats's querying of Wordsworth in poems such as "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill." As I have argued elsewhere, [8] we can think of "Alastor," Childe Harold III, Endymion, Reynolds's "Romance of Youth," Laon and Cythna and its prototype, Peacock's "Arimanes," Hunt's mythological poems such as "The Nymphs" and "Bacchus and Ariadne," and Horace Smith's Amarynthus, the Nympholept as all part of a collective rewriting of the Excursion. For the circle around Hunt, the work of the Lakers published in the wake of Napoleon's defeat marked a conservative effort to demarcate the shape of culture for the post-Napoleonic age, and thus for the younger writers the Lake Poets came to be reidentified as a group not because of their early poetic revolution but because of their current reactionary politics. In the increasingly polarized cultural scene that was one aftermath of the end of the nation's united effort against Napoleon, the Cockneys come together as a group in opposition to what they see as the older group of poets' betrayal of revolutionary ideals.

It is in this highly contested context that the term "school" is introduced into the argument. Hazlitt's review in the Edinburgh Review and a note appended to it by Francis Jeffrey responded to Coleridge's complaints against reviewers in the Biographia and more indirectly to his claim to stand apart from the other Lakers. In the midst of answering the charge that Coleridge in particular but also Southey and Wordsworth had been handled badly by the Edinburgh Review, Hazlitt uses, for the first time according to the OED, the term the "Lake School"—as opposed to simply the Lakers or the Lake poets (28 [August 1817]: 511). While Hazlitt uses the term rather neutrally—simply to designate Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey as a group—it is presumably put forward in full knowledge that Coleridge will be offended by the designation, since the Biographia exists to deny the existence of such a school. It is, then, the man whom Blackwood's (5 [April 1819]: 97) would call the "Cockney Aristotle" who first labels his opponents as a "School." Simply put, there would have been no Cockney School designation had Hazlitt not insisted against Coleridge that there was a Lake School, and the Lake School would have been conceived differently at the time had it not been for the response to their work by the Cockneys.

Blackwood's would respond to Hazlitt's evocation of the Lake School two months later with its assault on the Cockney School, and many similar attacks would follow; within six months, the Literary Gazette (4 [April 1818]: 210), would object to the very idea of a poetic School, "whether . . . the watery, cockney, be-natural, or sentimental Bards of these times." Why does the word "school" figure so centrally in these critical exchanges? Why did Coleridge wish to avoid being part of one and why did Blackwood's think it important to attack the idea of a Cockney School rather than, say, the individuals Hunt and Hazlitt, in fact the main targets of their fulminations?

What is at issue here is an attempt to designate collective literary activity as somehow tainted, as can also be seen in other terms used to designate literary groups such as "sect" and "coterie." While the term "school" had, for at least a century, been used as a positive term to name movements within the visual arts—e.g. the Roman, Venetian, Tuscan, or Flemish Schools—it was not so readily applied to literary movements—we might have the "Sons of Ben" or the Scribblerians but not a School of Jonson or Pope. Since a school is meant, the OED tells us, to indicate a "body of persons that are or have been taught by a particular master . . . hence, in a wider sense, a body or succession of persons who in some department of speculation or practice are disciples of the same master" (my emphasis), the term seems to have been less contentious in describing visual art—where there was a recognition of the need to study certain techniques and styles—than in the verbal arts, where author-ity and thus originality were more central. "School" seems to be used in literary reviewing during the romantic period almost always in a negative way—beyond the Lake School and the Cockney School, there is the Satanic School and also the "Della Cruscan" school for those who want to attack Merry and his fellow writers; later, there would be the Spasmodic School and the Fleshly School of Poetry.

Each round of abuse evidences a fear of a poetic, cultural, and at times political avant-garde, but more than that, I think, there is a desire that the literary be identified with the individual. While one can repeatedly point to the collaborative and collective nature of much romantic poetry—we need only think of the collaboration on Lyrical Ballads or the Fall of Robespierre, of the interconnections between the writings of Dorothy and William Wordsworth or the conversations going on between various poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, or again of Hunt's sonnet contests, Keats and Reynolds's planned collaboration on a Boccaccio volume, or the work of Byron, Hunt, the Shelleys, and others on The Liberal—there was then, as now, an attempt to define romantic poetry as the product of the isolated genius. The idea of culture as a group project stood in opposition to the institution of literature as it was coming to be organized in the nineteenth century with the creation of a distinct canon of British literature where presumably authors were admitted as individuals rather than because of their status as a member of this or that group, class, or category, with the arrival of a full fledged culture of reviewing where books being reviewed rather than simply attacked are usually listed singly by author, and with a focus on reform of the copyright laws that strengthened the sense of the individual ownership of the literary text. [9] Like much else, literature was being defined as a private enterprise, both an endeavor pursued alone and a cultural product the value of which was defined by the authority of the individual creating it. This concern about the communal and the collective in cultural production, this turn against sociality in order to protect authority, can be found not only in critical name-calling but also in Coleridge's insistence in the Biographia that he be read by himself, in Wordsworth's movement away from the communal practice of the Lyrical Ballads to the concern with the individual's ownership through copyright, and in Keats's desire to establish himself as a free-standing poet, having his "own unfettered scope" (letter to Benjamin Bailey, 8 October 1817, Letters 1:170) independent of the influence of Shelley and avoiding being categorized as Hunt's "élève." There seems to be a concern that while one may be praised as an individual writer, one only gets attacked as a member of a cultural group.

There was one person, at least, who celebrated the sociability one can find in a school, and that is the person at the center of the Cockney School, Leigh Hunt. As I have argued elsewhere, and as others such as Nicholas Roe have worked to show, [10] there was an actual Cockney School, an actual gathering of poets and intellectuals around Leigh Hunt that needs to be rescued from both the calumnies of Blackwood's and the desires of later romantic scholars to separate Keats and Shelley from Hunt. Hunt had announced the arrival of this movement or school a year before the Cockney School attacks, in his "Young Poets" review (Examiner, 1 December 1816). It is a typically generous definition that he gives to this school, for it is to include Shelley, Keats and John Hamilton Reynolds along with Byron and even Byron's old enemies at the Edinburgh Review. When Hunt again takes up the theme of the new school in his review of Keats's poems (1 June, 6 & 13 July 1817), he makes it clear that he also wishes to include the older generation of Lake Poets in his new school—even if this inclusion is, as he admits, made "grudgingly . . . on some accounts." The inclusion is grudging not because of poetic differences—though there are some of those—but because of the increasingly strong sense of ideological opposition between Hunt's London circle and the Lakers. Hunt's inclusive school would soon collapse under the weight of his group's attacks upon the Lakers and of Blackwood's very successful campaign to isolate the London radical writers as the Cockney School. Rather than Hunt's broad new school, we get the opposition between Hazlitt's Lake School and Z's Cockney School.

One can imagine it having worked out otherwise. While the Cockneys become the Lakers' other, they might have been their brethren. After all, one of the poets often identified as a Laker—Charles Lamb—was by 1816 one of the central members of Hunt's circle. Hazlitt and Godwin were other living bridges between the two groups. Hunt and Wordsworth shared many friends—for example, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Thomas Noon Talfourd and Barron Field—and all the young poets included in Hunt's review, even Byron, would echo again and again their older contemporaries. Hunt and Wordsworth had been on good enough terms that Wordsworth would visit Hunt in 1815, shortly after he was released from prison, in order, Hunt tells us, "to thank me for the zeal I had shown in advocating the cause of his genius." [11] Poetic debt and personal connection might have brought the Lakers and the Cockneys together, but a strong sense of the importance of their ideological differences drove them apart, so that Wordsworth would view the work of his admirer Keats as subversive "pretty pieces of paganism" and Hunt would come in 1819 to see Peter Bell as "another didactic little horror of Mr. Wordsworth's, founded on the bewitching principles of fear, bigotry, and diseased impulse" (Examiner, 2 May 1819).

In this review of Peter Bell and in a linked piece on Shelley's Rosalind and Helen, Hunt attempts to define the difference between his circle and the Lakers as arising exactly over the issue of sociability. Where Wordsworth's poem preaches "the philosophy of violence and hopelessness," Hunt praises Shelley for speaking "in behalf of liberality of sentiment and the deification of love." Hunt contrasts the self-enclosed Laker Wordsworth with Shelley as "our Cosmopolite-Poet":

The object of Mr. Wordsworth's administrations of melancholy is to make men timid, servile, and (considering his religion) selfish;—that of Mr. Shelley's, to render them fearless, independent, affectionate, infinitely social. . . . The Poet of the Lakes always carries his egotism and "saving knowledge" about with him, and unless he has the settlement of the matter, will go in a pet and plant himself by the side of the oldest tyrannies and slaveries;—our Cosmopolite-Poet would evidently die with pleasure to all personal identity, could he but see his fellow-creatures reasonable and happy. . . . he wants others happy, not himself privileged.—But comparisons are never so odious, as when they serve to contrast two spirits who ought to have agreed. Mr. Wordsworth has become hopeless of this world, and therefore would make every body else so;—Mr. Shelley is superior to hopelessness itself; and does not see why all happiness and all strength is to be bounded by what he himself can feel or can affect.

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Hunt would continue to see Shelley as a key embodiment of the philosophy of cheer Hunt espoused, and he would thus include several of Shelley's poems in his Religion of the Heart. Wordsworth has betrayed a cosmopolitan sociality of philosophical reform that Shelley, Hunt, and their circle still endorse. Throughout the Hunt circle's disagreements with the Lakers and with Wordsworth in particular—from Keats's critique of the "Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime" and Hazlitt's arguments that lay behind it to Byron's desire that the Lake Poets exchange the "narrowness" of their "lakes for ocean"—the final apostasy of the Lake Poets is the rejection of collective cultural and social action, what Wordsworth himself in the Excursion identifies as his "loss of confidence in social man" (4. 261). [12] The real Cockney School, the circle gathered around Hunt, offered itself through its collective, collaborative work as a kind of prefigurative community; they sought an image in their circle of the reformed world they imagined. Against the violence of a society long devoted to war and the cultural despondency they saw embodied in the Lakers, the Cockneys pitted sociability: the bonds between them offered the hope for a society unbound. As Hunt argued then, and as we perhaps should argue now, the best hope for what he calls the liberally minded—that is, those who are both left leaning and engaged in liberal learning—lies in a communal stand against both the isolating impulses of a privatizing enterprise and the divisive attacks of conservative censors. As we gather together in pursuit of collaborative scholarly effort—whether in the real space of our schools and conferences or in the virtual space of electronic publications such as Romanticism on the Net—we, hoping to defend the liberal arts against claims they are economically useless and culturally suspect, could do worse than to celebrate Leigh Hunt and his attempt to forge a collective cultural effort, the Cockney School.