ABSTRACT

First published in The Examiner, X, 14 December 1817, p. 788. There was an earlier ‘Note: To Z’ in The Examiner, 16 November 1817, p. 729. These are the first responses of Hunt to the anonymous (‘Z’ was the pseudonym of John Gibson Lockhart) Cockney School attacks, which began in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ii (October 1817) and would be followed not only by additional numbered pieces in this series but by a much larger number of pieces treating the Cockneys in Blackwood’s and elsewhere. The labelling of the Hunt circle, and thus of figures such as Hazlitt, Keats, Horace Smith, Vincent Novello, Haydon and even Byron as members of the Cockney School – in part a response to Hunt’s announcement of a ‘new school’ of poetry (see headnote above, pp. 72–3) and in part an attempt to distance these radical London writers from the increasingly conservative Lake Poets – was a key act of definition for the poets we call second generation romantics, an attempt to write them out of culture as lower class, radical and licentious. These attacks would launch a ‘culture war’ between the Hunt circle and its conservative opponents in the press. Hunt notes two early defences below; for Keats’s first reply to these attacks, see his letter to Benjamin Bailey of 3 November 1817. On the Cockney School attacks, see Roe, especially pp. 1–26, 202–29, and Cox, especially pp. 16-37.