Leigh Hunt's Cockney School: The Lakers' 'Other'

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. 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." 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. 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 …