Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- Introduction
- 1 Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism
- 2 Domesticating the Flâneur: Coleridge, De Quincey and the Forms of Metropolitanism
- 3 The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic
- 4 Utility and Pity: Wordsworth, Blake and Egan, and the Act of Charity
- 5 Lamb, Theatricality and the Fool
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- Introduction
- 1 Consuming the Periodical Text: Hunt, Hazlitt and the Anxiety of Cockneyism
- 2 Domesticating the Flâneur: Coleridge, De Quincey and the Forms of Metropolitanism
- 3 The Great Wen and the Rural Gothic
- 4 Utility and Pity: Wordsworth, Blake and Egan, and the Act of Charity
- 5 Lamb, Theatricality and the Fool
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Cockney [is a] nick name given to the citizens of London, or persons born within the sound of Bow bell … The king of the cockneys is mentioned among the regulations for the sports and shows formerly held on Childermass Day, where he had his officers, a marshall, constable, butler, &c.
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811)The Cockney School attacks, as Jeffrey Cox has observed, cleverly invert the elaborate mock court of the Cockney king in order to identify literary affectation and presumption. The burlesque pomp and ceremony of the Cockney ritual is generally appropriated to the provincial mindset and egoistic character of the Cockney author. Lamb's ludic and self-denigrating persona appears closer in spirit to the carnivalesque festival described in the Dictionary than to the derogatory term that appropriates it. The periodical conditions of commodification and the anonymous, corporate identity simultaneously seem to inspire the Elian self, and cause the magazine in which Elia appears to be damagingly embroiled within the Cockney dispute, as an expression of anxiety over metropolitan culture. Both of Lamb's metropolitan peers in this chapter, Hunt and Hazlitt, identify what are essentially Elian characteristics in their respective attempts to find a mode of periodical writing which is not synonymous with the all-pervasive, demonizing Cockney label. Because Lamb's former editor and fellow periodical-writing Londoner Hunt is derided as the archetypal Cockney author he represents the prime agent of this anxiety, yet this is a position from which he offers a perceptive analysis of Lamb's timely qualities as an antidote to Cockneyism. Responding in more ambivalent fashion to the rise of periodicals than the protagonists of the Cockney dispute and complicating the demonized figure of the Cockney itself, the foremost critic of the age, Hazlitt, tentatively gestures towards the irony-based defusion of metropolitan anxiety uniquely engineered by Lamb. Lamb writes not against Cockneyism or Hunt, therefore, but the virulent anxiety that gathers around the Cockney figure.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Charles Lamb, Elia and the London MagazineMetropolitan Muse, pp. 19 - 54Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014