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We normally associate writing about the city with a line of continental writers from Baudelaire to Benjamin and beyond. However, there was an earlier account of the city in the writers identified with the Cockney School and in particular Leigh Hunt. Hunt’s Wishing Cap Papers are a striking instance of an attempt to write about the city from the perspective of someone who is, on the one hand, below the circles that control the city, and, on the other hand, capable of imagining a world beyond the city as it exists in the present. While our image of Hunt in the city might begin and end with Dickens’ Skimpole, we can recover behind that savage portrait an engaged city-dweller trying to imagine the urban space remade by pleasure. This is part of the Cockney attempt to create a cosmopolitanism that moves from the local to the global in order to bypass the nation.

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This essay examines Leigh Hunt’s attitude towards sport, a subject about which he had mixed feelings. On the one hand Hunt strongly denounced violent and death-dealing sports such as boxing, shooting and angling, and on the other he idealised those pastimes which seemed to him to call back a lost world of ‘Merry Old England’: cricket, quarterstaff and bowls. Hunt saw sports as ethics-in-action; to him they offered moral lessons, some malign (the corrupting effects of pugilism) others benign (the healthy influence of the sports of the village green). The essay also examines how Hunt’s examination of sport was made in gendered terms of ‘manliness’ and ‘effeminacy’, and concludes by arguing that Blackwood’s attack on Hunt and the so-called ‘Cockney’ school might usefully be read in the context of the contemporary satirical tradition of the ‘Cockney sportsman’.

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This essay reads Hunt’s Foliage alongside works by three members of his circle: John Keats, Elizabeth Kent and Mary Novello. It argues that the work of all three is inflected by Foliage and Hunt’s philosophy of sociability, and it suggests that Hunt himself is not diminished when his work is contextualised by that of his friends. Rather, friendship is so central to his sociable aesthetic that we diminish his achievements when, in an attempt to free him from the shadows cast by his contemporaries, we critically render him in isolation. It represents Hunt as a man who was made by his friends, and whose friends were made by him.

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This article situates the genesis of second generation Romanticism around the writing, publication, and reception, of Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini. It will focus on the period 1814-1816, to find the first expressions of the experimentation which characterise this group. This development has been analysed in Jeffrey Cox's influential Hunt-centred work. Taking a later chronology for his study, Cox claims that these writers were “questing for a position beyond the hegemony of the official culture”. This article disagrees with Cox's positioning of these poets, their works, and “hegemony” (Cox 12). I do not view the poetical works questing for a position “beyond the hegemony”, because of the separation from “official culture” which this articulates. I instead believe that in 1814-1816 Hunt and Byron were constructing poems to confront official culture. Byron's neglected Parisina was written at the same time as Rimini, and I believe that this work was influenced by Hunt. It is a relationship about which criticism is conspicuously silent, preferring instead the “Turkish” tales and Childe Harold. This influence provides a reason for Byron's move from the successful tales, to the more formally and thematically radical work of his exile. There will then be a close-reading of both poems’ experiments in genre (the metrical romance) and form (the heroic couplet). The aim is to view Hunt's poem as a confrontation with two established, and establishment, literary modes while appreciating the social repercussions of such a move. The final section will analyse the organs of “public opinion”, by studying the works’ reception in conservative periodicals. The aim of this analysis will be to challenge critical praxis and appreciate the texts, rather than just their authors' politics, as a threat to the newly formed “public mind”.

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In 1834, Leigh Hunt launched the Leigh Hunt's London Magazine with the express purpose of "bringing into public intercourse the same candour and simplicity that are practised between friends in private." While this goal could be considered to be entirely apolitical, this essay suggests that Hunt's desire to establish a close, intimate relationship with his readers is actually an attempt to resist what he felt was the degraded and impersonal nature of periodical literature. By creating a public space in his publication—a coffee-house in print, if you will—Hunt hoped to revitalize the periodical literature that he loved and, by extension, reinvigorate the public discourse that he felt had become stale and unproductive.

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Plymouth poet Nicholas Carrington's poem of bon voyage for Leigh Hunt, 'To a Friend, On His Approaching Voyage to Pisa' (1822), marks the beginning of Hunt's journey to join Lord Byron and P. B. Shelley in publishing  the Liberal  magazine. The poem offers a sidelight on some iconic events of Anglo-Italian Romanticism, and suggest that Carrington's other works deserve more attention than they have so far received. 

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This article assesses the meaning of the phrase “the religion of art” in the nineteenth century, taking “art” to denote literature, painting and sculpture, and focuses this question in relation to two central ideas: to the Coleridgean “Symbol” (his famous tautegorical figure), and to the conceptual provenance and meaning of the phrase “art for art’s sake” (an apparent tautology). From the former it traces contrasting paths for the idea of the “translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal” (The Statesman’s Manual 30). One is via the “art for art’s sake” movement and aestheticism (with close attention to Walter Pater’s writings), drawing upon Romantic Hellenism in order to challenge Christian ideas of transcendence. The other is through the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in which a relationship is posited between the Victorian poet and his Catholic antitype. The religion of art as it manifested itself in the 1840s and 50s is, I shall argue, significantly different from the religion of art as it emerged in Paterian aestheticism later in the century.

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In the 1860s and 1870s Charlotte Riddell was well-known as the “novelist of the City” of London. Too Much Alone (1860), her first narrative foray into the world of commerce and finance, is both a business novel and a novel of adultery. Focusing on how the text configures the emotional regimes of capitalism, this essay examines Riddell’s representation of irregular desires and capricious feelings in relation to what she sees as endemic in commercial society: not fraud, but insecurity and uncertainty, whether “glorious” or dreary. The experience of uncertainty, I argue, provides the point of intersection between the two narrative strands of business and adultery. Explicitly addressed to business people, the novel offers a lesson in sentimental education, a type of training in the ability to tolerate the uncertain, repackaged as an intense emotional experience.

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This article contextualizes Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel in relation to an Edinburgh literary milieu influenced by some the most famous progenitors of Scottish Enlightenment historical theory. After a preliminary survey of the intellectual landscape out of which Scott's poem comes, the discussion is orientated specifically around the influence, on Scott, of Adam Ferguson's seminal conjectural history, the Essay on the History of Civil Society. Oral poetry is integral to Ferguson's nuanced deteriorationist narrative of human development, and it is my central contention that The Lay is the apotheosis of a Romantic anxiety over the representation of preliterary verse. This article's primary area of interest is not the poetry of The Lay itself but the discourses of history, historicity, verse and versification to which Scott, Adam Ferguson, Francis Jeffrey and several others contributed before, during and after the poem's publication.

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This essay examines Thomas Carlyle’s painful struggle to write a book on Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan era in the years 1838 to 1845, and seeks to discover why this otherwise prolific author found it so difficult to produce a history of the man who occupied the central place in his pantheon of heroes. It does so by examining his metaphoric conception of the past as a body that could, if treated correctly by the historian, be presented “alive” rather than “dead,” and his feeling that the past and the voices of its “dead heroes” were haunting him like ghosts. The metaphoric construction and progress of this haunting is explored using critical approaches derived from Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. By placing Carlyle’s crisis of authorship in conversation with these thinkers, I attempt to cast a new light on his relationship to the past and his sense of the difficulties involved in giving voice to the dead. It was only through a subjugation of his own authorial voice to that of his dead subject that Carlyle was able to bring an end to the haunting that had threatened to silence him in the early 1840s.

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In The Book of Urizen, Blake’s subversion of authoritative discourses includes a critique of Enlightenment aesthetics, and in particular a parody of the contemporary conception of the sublime. At the same time, however, the aesthetics of terror are displaced onto new grounds, as the artist draws attention to creative anxiety and the endless and laborious production process. This new emphasis, we show, is one of Blake’s most significant contributions to the debate on the sublime. As the self-reflexive dimension of The Book of Urizen attests, it is anchored in his own practice and in his awareness of the incommensurability of formal intentions and execution.

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Apropos of the title, this essay traces the surprising connections between the eighteenth-century pornographer and the contemporary Latina superstar’s portrayals of eroticized torture, as well as elucidates the cultural significance of what I am calling a legacy of tortured sensibility. By illuminating how the gendered spectatorial politics of sensibility—particularly in its fetishization of the (female/feminized) body in pain—continues to inform the numerous interlocking discourses of race, gender, and sexuality we have inherited from Sade’s Europe, and especially from the early sentimental novel, this paper demonstrates how the transnational artist taps into a Sadean resistance to figurations of distressed hearts and flayed skin as sites of geopolitical and individual transcendence. Finally, examining 120 Days of Sodom and “La Tortura” side by side revitalizes attention to the ethical crisis surrounding aesthetic voyeurism: where does the anguish of reading Sade—with his relentless scenes of corporeal torment—go?