This is a bracingly adventurous book. Out of disparate materials, writers, and artists, Gregory Dart has constructed a previously unrecognized cultural period, the "Cockney Moment." It occurred over three decades in English metropolitan life, when a distinctively suburban literary and visual-arts formation took shape between the Regency and the early Victorian age. To show why Romantic-era Cockneyism "did not begin and end with the Cockney School" (25), Dart enlists a remarkable range of poets, periodical writers, editors, painters, and architects as a means to enlarge our sense of Cockneyism well beyond the fierce Tory-vs.-radical debates that Blackwood's conducted with Leigh Hunt's Examiner circle from 1817 to 1819. While Dart briefly recalls the latter polemic, as studied by Jeffrey Cox in Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School (1998) and by others, he is far more interested in the "suppleness" of a broader, aesthetically and socially inflected Cockney discourse that is in play even where the "accursed term" is not itself being used as a weapon or insult. The result, I think, is one of the richest and most illuminating books on Romantic metropolitan culture we have to date.

At the center of Dart's account is a topic that has been difficult to be persuasive about--the relation between aesthetics and social class--and it is no small achievement that he has written such a compelling account of "the missing link between Keats and Dickens" (25), a cultural formation rooted in a rapidly growing suburban lower-middle-class emerging all around London. These new suburbs stretched out beyond Cheapside (the Cockney's traditional home within "hearing distance of the Bow Bells," as the saying went) to fill Clerkenwell, Islington, Pentonville, and Camden Town after 1800 with the new English lower-middle classes: law clerks, school mistresses, white-collar apprentices, and other workers who commuted to the City. This "semi-professional class" effectively extended and changed the older social base of shopkeepers and small businesspeople among the English petite-bourgeoisie. "Neither entirely 'Respectable' nor straightforwardly 'Mechanical,'" Dart writes, "they were ... the social amphibians of their age" (113). But unlike their older shopkeeping counterparts in the lower-middle-class, they were hungry readers, and a great age of periodical writing, among other media Dart innovatively treats, gave them much to read and think about themselves. The "Cockney criticism" that developed in the early Regency and over the next two decades became "a way of thinking about an interstitial class...on the rise," and how what was emergent and interstitial or contradictory about this new class formation affected what was new in literary and arts production, particularly from 1815-30. Dart's book thus significantly accentuates the "urban turn" that has been taking place in Romantic studies for the past two decades. Though Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene in British Culture, 1780-1840 (2005), edited by James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, remains the landmark work in this field, it does not notably recognize a Romantic-age "suburbia."

A key aim of Dart's book is to make this "uneasy class" legible in terms that often elude discussions of class: aesthetics, fanciful imaginations, even when robustly fantastical and self-inflating, and what it meant for writers like Leigh Hunt, among those who recognized this audience most acutely, to speak as if he were "always addressing a culture-hungry but naïve public" (13). Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats were the conspicuous and most wounded targets of the Blackwood's Magazine assault on London's liberal writers and editors, but from these political debates Dart's project takes a different and rather unexpected turn into the realms of art and consumerism, guileless belief and pretentious visions, telling us why there was a real "Cockney imagination" and why it often ran more like a "go-cart," as Hazlitt put it, than like the sporty phaetons driven by gentlemen all over London. For Dart the Blackwood's attacks on London Cockney liberals were not only mean-spirited and class-snobbish, as other critics have noted: they were also a source of considerable insight into the Cockney condition. Finding them "suggestive and sociologically nuanced" (14), Dart shows persuasively that these attacks exposed something "artificial, consumeristic, fetishistic, in short modern" about Leigh Hunt's familiar, recreational writings, tendencies that would reappear in many later cases of Cockney discourse even without the identifying epithet (17). It is part of the book's dialectical subtlety, then, that the Cockney Moment can be grasped from so many contradictory sides, only some of which were defined by the paragons of security and gentility at Edinburgh. What mattered to cultural divisions of class was not least the line drawn between those who enjoyed a security that one was "quietly and invisibly coming into one's inheritance...a set of values that were fundamentally gentlemanly and polite" (23) and those who had to live with the anxiety that came from the discrepancy between their vaulting ambitions and their real material conditions. This condition of the lower-middle-class, while it has been registered before by social theorists from Marx to Bourdieu, is eloquently stated here as key to the Cockney position: "a terrible disjunction between ambition and actuality, form and subject matter, the artist's own perception of himself and his real position in the world" (27).

For all that anxiety, though, the Cockney condition was one that could pleasurably project alluring visions of itself into an imagined future. Historians like David Cannadine, Dart maintains, have provided important but often too "secular and rational" an account of class thinking in Britain, and not enough of the subjective or "metaphysical" dimension of class consciousness--especially not the "fanciful element in class thinking" (112) that defined the Cockney social imagination of mobility or even grandeur. As a remedy, Dart often accentuates a quasi-utopian if also practically misguided dimension of the Cockney imagination.

To make the Cockney Moment a major part of Romantic-age cultural production requires an exceptional scope. Chapters 1-3 offer fresh accounts of the specifically "Cockney School" writers Keats, Hunt, and Hazlitt, grounding the latter in the changing role of the periodical writers during these decades, a topic to which I'll return shortly. Then the book ventures, in chapters 4-8, into an impressive array of lesser-known or understudied writers, painters, and architects whose work became enmeshed in a wider Cockney discourse that was alternately critical and celebratory. No study of Romantic metropolitan culture could afford to overlook Pierce Egan, whose Life in London (1820) established a prose subgenre in the 1820s detailing all manner of urban escapade. But Egan's sporting London books seemed always to pummel the hapless Cockney from a posture well above him; Dart shows instead how much Egan's writing shares the supposed Cockney vices of pretense, performance, and disguise. Life in London, Dart proposes, can be seen as a truly Cockney text because of the way in which it "reinterprets the insecurity and isolation of the lower-middle-class London as an invitation to overleap all bounds" (131). From this "Tory Cockney fantasy" (28) in Egan's wildly popular books, Dart turns to their virtual opposite, Charles Lamb's much underread "alchemy of the streets" writing on the "Decay of Beggars," "Poor Relations," and other texts that walked a fine ironic line between making the penniless look noble ("a naïve figure for unadorned humanity" [157]) and undercutting that figure in a "half-put on" mode of Romantic irony.

The chapters on visual arts (6 and 7) make the furthest reach toward defining plausibly a Cockney Moment and are among the most rewarding in the book. The "Cockneyfication of form and genres" in Romantic art means that history-painting turned into the garish shapes of John Martin's canvases, the dialectic of political decision and the abject space of the prison in Benjamin Haydon, or John Soane's remarkably strange experiments in excessive space in urban architecture. (Notably, landscape painting was not among these Cockneyfied genres; to John Constable, Martin's gaudy ventures in the urban sublime were no more than "pantomimes" [171]). Dart gives ample attention to the outrageous John Soane, whose earlier neo-classical style was giving way to the baroquely imaginative constructs that have led some art historians to call him the "reluctant Romantic." While John Martin brought "the new aesthetic of the urban panorama to bear upon traditional history painting" (166), Soane's soaring constructions after 1820 promiscuously mixed other genres. An increasingly irritated art-critical press accused Soane and his well-nigh Gothic draughtsman Joseph Gandy of presenting impossible models (such as Architectural Visions [1820] below), "preposterous" and "overblown" in true Cockney self-aggrandizement, threatening to "transform architectural perspective drawing into a new category of picturesque painting" (177).

Dart's chapter on Haydon and debtor's prisons is framed by an absorbingly in-depth analysis of Haydon's The Mock Election (ex. 1828), which sets up a space of political decision in a prison yard:

If the prison itself is a place where "the distinction between public and private has all but ceased to exist" (214), Haydon theatricalizes that space in what Dart shows us was a characteristically Cockney way: facetious and deadly serious in the same discomfiting moment. Figures like Haydon also show why the Cockney phenomenon was not just about reaching an audience, though the public of City employees commuting to the 'burbs each day was surely a crucial consumer of these writings and pictures. It was also about its own production: Haydon, writes Dart, "celebrates not only the debtors' burlesque spirit but also the vulgar self-advertisement that he himself always relied upon as a tool to get out of trouble" (216). There is something reflexive about the Cockney gesture, though it is not a particularly reflective kind of reflexivity that would earn the Cockney philosophical credits. Hazlitt surely saw this, and Leigh Hunt makes a virtue of it as "recreational writing" that is glad to pass the time pleasurably and reflexively enough, but shows no interest in epistemology or ontology, as Coleridge would have demanded.

The book's periodizing of this "Cockney moment" comes to an end in the 1830s, after the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832 left the "interstitial" class with no sense of cultural place. Dart marks the sliding of Cockneyism from lower-middle class aesthetics and class anxiety to its more decisive (and permanent) Victorian home in the urban working class. The literary marker that this has happened would be Dickens's Cockneyite Sketches by Boz (1836), or the now downwardly mobile Sam Weller of The Pickwick Papers (1837). If figures like Weller exemplify the Cockney descent into the urban working class, the most telling case Dart presents is the predicament -- in Great Expectations (1861)--of Wemmick, the law clerk whose medieval-baroque "home" stands outside the City; it thereby marks a division of work and daily life which, as Dart might have added, becomes the ongoing divided condition for an increasing number of workers over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Wemmick's character, readers find effectively a "synthesis between Romantic conservative and liberal views of the Cockney" (249) as Dickens--who both was a Cockney and then again was not--was "forced to pay tribute to the emergent bourgeois norm" (249).

To return to periodical writing, the medium Dart's book treats more extensively than any other, I can register one mild complaint about a generally powerful argument. Among writers, Dart thinks it was especially the periodical journalist who registered the Cockney's sense of discrepancy between ambitions and real conditions, security and social anxiety, flights of mind and the stubborn resistance of material life. In the midst of a fine chapter on Hazlitt, who wrote most penetratingly of the Cockney figure in "On Londoners and Country People" (1823), Dart strikingly distinguishes between two kinds of journals: those like Blackwood's or the Edinburgh Review, print organs secure in their authority and their writer's expectation of "coming into [their] inheritance," and the most characteristically Romantic journals in London, New Monthly Magazine (as edited by Thomas Campbell after 1821) and the London Magazine. According to Blackwood's, the London Magazine crew was shot through with Cockneyism, "chattering away fluently enough about various small matters" (qtd. 67). Dart extends this point to the New Monthly Magazine as well, citing P.G. Patmore's dyspeptic reflections on the way periodical writing had descended in the 1820s to the level of the "confectionary...full of 'intense and genial dallyings' "--ultimately a style Dart identifies as "obsessed with its own surface novelty, luxuriating in its status as a commodity" (69). He also thinks this insight into two of London's most fashionable monthly magazines points up a fallacy in my own argument about "middle-class" periodicals in The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790-1832. In his own words, Dart says I argued there that such periodicals sought "to construct a readership by dramatizing the self-conscious abstraction of the mind from matter" (69). But I actually made this point about Blackwood's in particular, not all "middle class periodicals," and by contrast I argued that the New Monthly featured "all the social signs of a world organized into ranks, degrees or social classes," and that it was fascinated to the point of absorption by fashion itself. "Look to the advertisements," New Monthly writers told their readers in my account, "where popular wants and popular desires are best indicated" (Making 61-62). That said, though, Dart's keen discrimination of class positions and degrees of security or insecurity among these periodical writers would have made accounts like mine less willing to characterize "middle class" cultural production too broadly or to underestimate the currents of lower-middle-class anxiety about where it fit in the cultural order of things.

A broader question concerns the way Dart occasionally steps out of his well-disciplined historical scenario to gesture toward the "modernity" of the Cockney Moment. "Hunt's and Keats's vision is a vision of the future of modern culture," he proposes, then adding that it's "our vision" too (53). Or more strikingly: "Nowadays we are all Cockneys." I take this to mean not only that we now read these Cockney writers far more sympathetically and with keener historical senses than perhaps past readers have done. Dart also seems to allegorize the Cockney Moment as proleptic of a now general position among cultural producers of many kinds, and especially academics. The painful disjunction between intellectual or artistic ambition and material actualities is felt with special acuteness in the humanities, which is rapidly passing beyond a chronic state of "crisis" to a more alarming state of disaggregation by economic force. Crises in the hiring market for new PhDs, the publishing market, and more generally the corporatizing of the university all entail the downsizing of the humanities to sometimes disappearingly small dimensions, particularly at the public universities. A better way of stating Dart's point, then, might be that we recognize in Romantic Cockneyism something ancestral to our moment, despite a vastly different conjuncture of material forces that are creating it now. As the so-called "middle class" disappears from major metropolises around the world, more of us today seem to find ourselves occupying an interstitial class. But the "Cockney" phenomenon was contingently related to the "interstitial" lower-middle-class (or petit-bourgeois if you will) position, and the significance of the "Cockney Moment" was to have been historically delimited. Class persists, but the cultural formations that become legible or urgent at a particular historical conjuncture don't seem to me to justify the claim that "nowadays we are all Cockneys." Given the keen focal power of Dart's own historical and aesthetic lens in this book, I am not fully convinced by his somewhat anxious effort to make the analysis of the Cockney Moment pay off as a precursor to our own experience of modernity.

Taking "modernity" in a more specific sense, we might think that what separates us from the Romantics (Cockney or otherwise) is the great and troublesome moment of Modernism with its dialectical twin, kitsch. I was reminded of that later term more than once while reading this book. What Dart says about Cockney aesthetics, that "familiarity was a technique for coming to terms with past high culture" (11), has been a defining mark of we call kitsch in any number of astute twentieth-century cultural critiques. Since the fading of modernism itself, kitsch has seemed a more many-sided popular phenomenon than it may have appeared in the heyday of high modernism.

Such reservations aside, the high accomplishment of this book is to make its eight-chapter study of the Cockney "moment" continually clarifying and illuminating, historically innovative. The book not only bristles with fresh insights into the reach of the Cockney phenomenon across class and aesthetic as well as political lines, but also extends its complexity by effectively rethinking two decades of Romantic cultural production as central to a wider period of cultural transformation.

Jon Klancher is Professor of English and Director of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University.