Cockney School

John Wilson Croker perpetuated the term "Cockney School" beyond the pages of Blackwood's in 1818 when he attacked Keats's Endymion in the Quarterly Review.

Lockhart shared in the caustic and aggressive articles that marked the early years of Blackwood, but his biographer Andrew Lang denied he was responsible for the virulent articles on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and on "The Cockney School of Poetry" of Leigh Hunt, Keats and their friends.

The political, reformist agenda and the democratic ideology of Hunt and Hazlitt were offensive to the Blackwood's review staff, and the cultural and class background of the authors was introduced as a mechanism.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was accused of being similarly offensive politically, but the reviewers excused him for his genius (and, of course, his high birth).

The second generation of the Romantic movement was as politically and economically revolutionary as it was aesthetically challenging to the status quo, and the controversy and partial reviewers responsible for the creation of the "Cockney School" epithet foreground how offensive it was to the establishment that lower class persons might emerge.