Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840
Cockney Adventures

This book examines the Cockney phenomenon of the late Romantic period - the new metropolitan art and literature of the 1820s and 1830s.

Gregory Dart (Author)

9781107024922, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 July 2012

320 pages, 15 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.64 kg

'This well-illustrated, interesting, and very thorough book looks at the Cockney as emergent in London urban culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. … Dart's book is an essential source for the culture of those very years.' Jeremy Tambling, Notes and Queries

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]