On Seeing the Price of Keats’s Bread: or John Bull Buying the Elgin Marbles in a Time of Climate Crisis, 1816

Abstract

This article situates John Keats’s 1817 sonnet ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ within the context of 1816–1819’s climate catastrophe and subsistence crisis. Countering received readings of Keats’s sonnet as about artistic vocation; I argue that it is more about the opportunity cost of expending public funds on ancient art during a climate-exacerbated economic crisis. This reading emerges by placing the poem in dialogue with a political cartoon by George Cruikshank, ‘ The Elgin Marbles! or John Bull buying stones at the time his numerous family want bread!!’ that critiques the British Government’s purchase of the Parthenon sculptures in these terms. I contend that both sonnet and cartoon stage the purchase of the sculptures not in terms of their artistic merits, but instead in terms of the opportunity cost of public relief and the potential ‘waste’ status of art in the face of a depressed labour market and skyrocketing grain prices.