Maga as Medium: Cockneys in Context

Abstract

This essay examines the renowned Cockney School attacks within their most immediate context: the pages of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. It argues that the textual dynamics of Maga are more fundamental to understanding this campaign than either politics or class animus, although these are deeply implicated. Blackwood’s, over time, developed a series of rules of reading for its implied audience, a set of protocols that governs the interpretation of both the formal Cockney School series as well as the occasional references to Hunt, Keats and Hazlitt in other articles. Read against other contributions to the magazine and in terms of the individual numbers in which they emerge, the attacks on Hunt and Keats take on meaning less critical or political than institutional. The writers of Blackwood’s, at least over the course of the magazine’s first hundred numbers, created an idiosyncratic textual dynamic, which employed dialogism, self-consciousness, contradiction, performative rhetoric, hoaxing and what contributors term ‘bam’. The Cockney School articles, like another infamous extended series in Blackwood’s—the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’—are a performance best judged by the peculiar textual rules of this magazine.