‘Cockney Aristotle’: Hazlitt’s Second Nature

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, to insult someone as a ‘Cockney’ (before the term had accrued more cheerful, salt-of-the-earth associations of the Dickensian Sam Weller type) was to cast aspersions not only on their origins, but on their very state of mind. ‘Nature must conspire with accident to make a true Cockney’, Blackwood’s declared in 1823. ‘It is the littleness of soul, the mechanism and mannerism of mind and body contracted from a certain Londonish character, common to all the objects with which they are conversant, that make Cockneys of a description of persons reared in London.’1 This was one of numerous attacks on the Cockney milieu contained in the pages of the conservative Edinburgh magazine, and none were more targeted than the members of what its writers labelled the Cockney School, with particular ridicule directed towards William Hazlitt, the ‘Cockney Aristotle’ or, as he came to be known, ‘pimpled Hazlitt’.2 Mocking his popular lecture series, Blackwood’s commented that ‘Mr Hazlitt cannot look round him at the Surrey, without resting his smart eye on the idiot admiring grin of several dozens of aspiring apprentices and critical clerks.’3 By the time John Gibson Lockhart published ‘Hazlitt Cross-Questioned’ against the ‘ex-painter, theatrical critic, review, essay, and lecture manufacturer [of] London’, the embattled target was ready in the response, penning an unpublished ‘Reply to Z’ in 1818 – in which he protested that ‘I am not pimpled, but remarkably pale and sallow’ – and threatening to sue Blackwood’s for libel in 1823.4