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John Keats
 William A. Ulmer

John Keats
Reimagining History
William A. Ulmer
University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-47083-2 ISBN 978-3-319-47084-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47084-9

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 PREFACE

John Keats: Reimagining History originated as an attempt to understand

the literariness of Keats’s poetry. Even if intertextuality is a feature of most
culturally ambitious poetry, the traditionalism of Keats’s work had long
struck me, as it has others, as especially pronounced and significant—an
attribute implicated in his sudden stride to greatness, a clue to the
fundamental way he imagined. And I had long been dissatisfied with
reigning conceptions of poetic influence, which framed it as a dark agon
over poetic priority, an idea that seemed melodramatic and unconvincing
even in the case of a poet willing, at least in one phrase in one letter, to
associate Milton and death. My Keats is subject merely to passing moods
of intertextual or class anxiety. His retentive memory resulted in phrases
from his reading coming unbidden during the process of composition.
But he invoked the British literary canon so persistently as he wrote
because his writing represented a conscious effort to reclaim the canon
for the alternate cultural and political values that he and his fellow
Cockneys endorsed; so I came to believe and so this study contends. It
should come as no surprise, then, that I depend on the important scholar-
ship done on Leigh Hunt’s Cockney circle in recent years, or that the
book refers repeatedly to Hunt, Hazlitt, Haydon, Reynolds, and at times
even Regency journalism. My interest in Keats’s Cockneyism led also to
related scholarship stressing the centrality and method of Romantic his-
toricism, especially the tendency of historicist texts to interrogate their
own modernity from a historical vantage point. As it drew on these
resources, John Keats: Reimagining History came to argue that in
Keats’s imaginative retrospection we witness his native bookishness

v
vi PREFACE

taking strategically historicist form to become the vehicle of a cultural

polemics, Keats’s means of engaging Regency political issues.
This organizing argument comes accompanied by several recurrent
motifs. One is a commitment to close reading, an approach virtually
demanded by texts as ore laden as Keats’s most considered efforts. If there
were ever a poet whose work made justification of close reading superfluous,
surely that poet would be John Keats. The other recurrent motifs involve
interrelated aspects of Keats’s oppositional viewpoint. The critical consensus
has agreed upon a secular, humanistic Keats since the first ascendancy of the
Harvard Keatsians—but I credit the poetry with an even greater worldly
realism at moments. Still influential readings of the odes have them disciplin-
ing and finally rejecting visionary nostalgia, as their lyrical plots chart the
speaker’s progressive, hard-won understanding of the dangers of idealizing
aspiration. Yet a poem such as “Ode to a Nightingale” can dramatize that
ostensibly progressive understanding only because Keats himself, in control
from the onset, already understands full well the delusions attendant upon
idealism: it is no accident that the poem’s opening mixes longing with loss.
In the odes as I read them, and throughout Keats’s mature work, the
rejection of idealism is ultimately neither progressive nor particularly hard
won: the poems expose ideal plenitude as an illusion right from the start,
when they are not in truth preoccupied with wholly other issues. And of
course Keats was no more sympathetic to religion than he was to idealism.
He may avow his faith in personal immortality or speculate about a “vale of
Soul-making” in his correspondence, but the poetry waves off consolations
based even on a revisionist theology, and deplores Christianity’s alliance with
political reaction both at home and abroad. Keats’s oppositional viewpoint
also bears, notoriously so, on another issue noticed recurrently here: his
attempt to construct a successful career amid the heated partisanship of
Regency cultural and political contention. My book submits the issue of
career to the poetry itself by following critics who see the poems proleptically
incorporating the problematics of reception and modeling the kind of read-
ing that Keats wanted for his work. Here too Keats’s historicism produces an
interplay of tradition and modernity. His pursuit of professional success
shows him invoking the past to secure his place among key figures on the
present scene: Shelley, Byron, Hunt, and especially Wordsworth.
My attention to these recurrent motifs produces yet another “story of
Keats,” in Jack Stillinger’s phrase, one that takes the poems in chronological
order so as to reconstruct the poet’s development. My first chapter sets forth
my approach by reviewing Keats’s Romantic historicism in Cockney context,
 PREFACE vii

his poetics of literary history, and the (cultural) politics to which he char-
acteristically dedicates his poems. Thereafter the book’s chronological orga-
nization can assist readers to the issues and poems of particular interest to
them. My second and third chapters concern the early Keats. Chapter 2
focuses on Poems (1817) for Keats’s gestures of poetic self-validation: first,
his presentation of himself as the heir to a vocationally legitimating tradition;
and secondly, the volume’s coterie aspect, as extended by Keats’s historicism
beyond Hampstead to a broader canonical community of supportive “pre-
siders.” Here discussion addresses Keats’s construction of a Spenserian line-
age for his work; his deference to history in the volume’s two framing poems,
“I stood tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry”; and his awareness of both the
imaginative uses and fugitive irretrievability of the past, as shown in the
famous Chapman’s Homer sonnet. Chapter 3 reads Endymion as a venture
in Cockney Elizabethanism that discloses Keats’s growing restiveness with
the personalities and values of Hunt’s circle. The influence of Alastor on
Endymion has long been acknowledged. Elaborating on that recognition, I
argue that Endymion embodies a more acerbic and thoroughgoing denun-
ciation of Shelleyan idealism than has been previously realized. When
Endymion’s reawakening of the drowned lovers in Book 3 gives way to his
love for the Indian maiden in Book 4, and to a conclusion that numerous
readers find unconvincing, we see Keats’s turning from Hunt and rejecting a
Marlow-and-Hampstead paganism that celebrated sexual passion for its
power of social liberation. The claim makes for an easy transition to my
subsequent chapter. Chapter 4, devoted to Keats’s medieval romances,
begins by reading Isabella as a rejection of Hunt’s recasting of Dante’s
Inferno in the amatory sentimentality of The Story of Rimini. For Keats’s
obverse optimism about love there is The Eve of St. Agnes. I interpret The Eve
of St. Agnes in light of Hazlitt’s praise of Shakespeare’s depiction of first love
in Romeo and Juliet—and against Stillinger’s classic account of its skeptical
irony—so as to present the poem as Keats’s celebration of Madeline and
Porphyro’s imaginatively constructed passion. The chapter concludes by
adding “The Eve of Saint Mark” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” to
Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes as texts lamenting the problem of poetry’s
public reception.
Chapters 4 and 5 address the great odes. My historical reading of “Ode on
a Grecian Urn,” which dominates Chapter 4, privileges the notion of prox-
imate context and refers the poem to the aesthetic controversy that swirled
around Robert Benjamin Haydon, particularly although not exclusively his
defense of the Elgin Marbles. I argue that Haydon’s undervalued influence
viii PREFACE

explains why Keats’s poetry, and certainly “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” pre-
supposes a naturalistic reclamation of neoclassical universalism. Great art,
“Grecian Urn” insists, both emerges from but also ramifies beyond a local
historical and cultural ground, in that way becoming an invaluable “friend to
man.” As with The Eve of St. Agnes, my account of “Grecian Urn” demotes
critical emphasis on the text’s supposedly ironic conclusion. In my view, the
Urn’s assurance that the identity of Beauty and Truth is “all you need to
know” is not a bit of dramatic irony functioning as self-undermining over-
statement, but, rather, an affirmation of the mesmerizing intensity of aes-
thetic experience merely while such experience is in progress. So the closing
lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” proclaim Keats’s genuine faith in the
consolatory potential of poetry—although it is a potential that often mis-
carries due to the marginalization of literary culture in modern Britain. With
Chapter 5 the book turns to Keats’s exploration of aesthetic consolation in
three additional odes: “Psyche,” “Nightingale,” and “Autumn.” I stress the
secularism of these three richly intertextual meditations: “Psyche” does not
recuperate traditional notions of an immortal soul; “Nightingale” is best
understood as a dramatic soliloquy rather than a sublime quest, and as a
poem that exposes visionary havens as antithetically constituted contradic-
tions; and “Autumn” offers readers a quietly moral response to natural
temporality. My final chapter follows this trajectory into the Hyperion
project, Keats’s culminating consideration of the purpose of poetry. His
devotion of Hyperion to a historicist dialogue between the canonical and
the contemporary is clear from his opening conflation of Paradise Lost and
The Excursion, with its famous Prospectus: Milton is not available for appro-
priation, readers are to understand, except as mediated by Wordsworth’s
prior appropriation. And to Keats, Wordsworth’s enlistment of Milton
remains deeply unacceptable for sanctioning the Pedlar and Pastor’s spiritual
justifications of political reaction. Declining theodicy for tragedy, and
attempting to think beyond Wordsworth’s Miltonism, the Keats of
Hyperion also thinks beyond the merely political to the historical principles
that determine particular political events, and that both Hyperion texts
associate with existential tragedy. The book concludes by following this
interest in tragedy to Keats’s 1819 experiments with the tragic drama and,
briefly, to his despairing epitaph.
It has been a pleasure to write on Keats; it is a pleasure also to acknowl-
edge the debts I have incurred in doing so. Keats has been fortunate in his
modern academic critics, and I have tried to take full advantage of the
excellent scholarship available on his poetry, at least through 2014,
 PREFACE ix

although I occasionally manage to cite some later work. I have made a

particular effort—in keeping with my book’s attention to the interplay of
present and past in Keats—to accommodate both recent scholarly innova-
tion and the best, occasionally even magisterial, accomplishments of pre-
vious decades. As always, my immediate and extended family has been
wonderfully supportive, my wife Kelly Brennan above all. At the
University of Alabama, Deborah Weiss, Albert Pionke, and Phil Beidler
all contributed to my formulation of my project; with my fellow
Romanticist Steve Tedeschi I have discussed Romantic literature and the
current state of Romantic studies on an almost daily basis for the last
several years. I am also immensely indebted to Susan Reynolds for her
expert proofreading. A version of my reading of “Ode to a Nightingale”
from Chapter 6 appeared previously in Studies in Romanticism 55.4
(Winter 2016) 449–469; for permission to reprint it here I am grateful
to the Trustees of Boston University, and to Deborah Swedberg and
Charles Rzepka for their generous collegiality. Turning to Palgrave, I am
delighted to thank my learned outside reader, whose discerning responses
saved me from errors and allowed me to improve my argument at several
points; Jayanthi Senthil and the superb Palgrave production team; and my
editor, Ben Doyle, who has proven a model of supportive and respectful
professionalism throughout the editorial and production process. If it was
enjoyable to write on Keats’s poetry, it is of course enjoyable also to see
the book finished. My best thanks again to all who helped—and now to
Keats.
 CONTENTS

1 Keats and Romantic Historicism 1

2 History and Vocation in Poems (1817) 39

3 The Idealism of Endymion 75

4 Keats’s Medieval Romances 111

5 Beauty and Truth in Regency Britain 147

6 Secularism and Consolation in Three Odes 179

7 High Tragedy in the Hyperion Project 217

Select Bibliography 253

Index 263

xi
 ABBREVIATIONS

Poems by such well-known writers as Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,

Wordsworth, and so on are not referred to any specific edition unless
there is a textual issue. Keats’s poems are cited from the Stillinger edition
listed below (Poems) unless otherwise noted.

Barnard Barnard, John. John Keats. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

CCK The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Chandler Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture
and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1998.
Cox Cox, Jeffrey N. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley,
Hunt and Their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
CWH The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. P. P. Howe. 21 vols.
London: J. M. Dent, 1930–1934.
ELH English Literary History
JKCD Roe, Nicholas. John Keats and the Culture of Dissent. Oxford:
Clarendon P, 1997.
KC The Keats Circle. Ed. Hyder E. Rollins. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1965.
KCH Keats: The Critical Heritage. Ed. G. M. Matthews. New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1971.
KCP Keats: The Complete Poems. Ed. Miriam Allott. Longman Annotated
English Poets. London: Longman, 1970.
K&H Keats and History. Ed. Nicholas Roe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1995.

xiii
xiv ABBREVIATIONS

KL The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821. Ed. Hyder E. Rollins. 2 vols.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.
KSJ The Keats-Shelley Journal
NCE Keats’s Poetry and Prose. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Jeffrey N.
Cox. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.
Poems The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1978.
Sperry Sperry, Stuart M. Keats the Poet. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973.
SIR Studies in Romanticism
Stillinger Stillinger, Jack. “The Hoodwinking of Madeline” and Other Essays on
Keats’s Poems. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971.
SWLH The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox, Greg Kucich,
Charles Mahoney, John Strachan. 6 vols. London: Pickering and
Chatto, 2003.
Watkins Watkins, Daniel P. Keats’s Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination.
Madison: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1989.
Wolfson Wolfson, Susan. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the
Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
 CHAPTER 1

Keats and Romantic Historicism

For the past several years, Romantic scholarship has seen the name John
Keats and the term “history” paired frequently. My book focuses on
Keats’s reinvention of history in an effort to indicate the mutual implica-
tion of two aspects of his poetic practice. For my appreciation of the first of
those aspects, I am indebted to critics such as Nicholas Roe and Jeffrey
Cox, who have reconstructed the place of Cockneyism in Regency literary
culture. The Cockney ethos personified by Leigh Hunt, confirmed by the
artists and critics gathered around him, and disseminated through
Regency print culture into the political and literary life of the time, served
Keats as the milieu within which he conceived and pursued his career as a
poet. Finally, my Hunt tends to be the figure familiar from traditional
criticism, the dubious influence fortunately outgrown. Yet the fact remains
that the important recent work done on Hunt and Cockneyism has
bequeathed Keats studies an enhanced appreciation of the contemporane-
ity of the poet’s writing. My book attempts to extend that understanding
by attending to the ways in which specific texts are situated by issues in
Regency cultural and political debate. But I argue further that to address
those issues Keats typically looked to the past: the various retrospective
gestures of his poems represent the second way, for me, in which they
presume a poetics of history. Here the paramount critical influence on my
reading of Keats is James Chandler, whose admired study England in 1819
establishes not only the historicist affinities of British Romanticism but
also, more specifically, the historicist strategies of Keats’s odes, the

© The Author(s) 2017 1

W.A. Ulmer, John Keats, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47084-9_1
2 JOHN KEATS

“Ode to Psyche” in particular. On this front too I try to extend an

established perspective. Romantic critics will recall that Chandler’s
presentation of Keats features a poet whose periodic need to reinvent
himself results in a “new historicist understanding” for the poetry of
1819 (394–402, quotation 395). The Keats familiar to me, conversely,
was from the beginning of his career “in love with the real living Spirit of
the past,”1 in Joseph Severn’s phrase. In Keats’s most characteristic
poems, past and present serve as the continually renegotiated ground of
each other’s intelligibility, with the claims of each acquiring its dialogic
meaning only in relation to the other; even the early efforts of Poems
(1817) qualify as one more case of Romantic historicism.

COCKNEY TRADITIONALISM
Keats developed his poetics of history and began to professionalize himself
as a writer at a time when British literature, Katie Trumpener justly
observes, was “obsessed with the problem of culture: with historical and
cultural alterity, with historical and cultural change, with comparative
cultural analysis, and with the way traditional customs and values shape
everyday life.”2 The Regency years witnessed an explosion of verse—in
patronizing terms the “Metromanie” of which one of Keats’s reviewers
infamously complained—and therefore also witnessed intensified contro-
versies of literary reception and evaluation.3 These controversies were
distant, localized effects of the large-scale modernization of British society
and culture, and in their complexity they produced battle lines formed “on
the mixed grounds of aesthetics, morality, religion, ideology, and political
efficacy.”4 Yet on the grounds of history too, I would add, for an idea of
history recurrently underwrote Regency obsessions with the problem of
culture and emerged into plain view in the polemics they occasioned.
Historical precedent is often invoked in arguments. If it tended to be
invoked more frequently in Regency literary arguments, that happened for
many reasons, but one reason lies surely with every faction’s proprietary
investment in some notion of Britain as a national entity and legacy. The
Regency culture wars were fought to forge British cultural identity, to
shape the future of Britain by defining the nature and prospective destiny
of the national character. Motivated by widespread appreciation of the
civic and political agency of print culture and elite literature, Regency
disputes over poetry addressed the question of extending (or withholding)
a central, authority-confirming canon to new constituencies who wanted
 1 KEATS AND ROMANTIC HISTORICISM 3

their class values represented in the nation’s leading public model of its
cultural past, even as they wanted representation in Parliament. It is typical
and revealing that in one of his more hopeful moods, Keats, convinced
that his poetry had risen to greatness, ventured the opinion “I think I shall
be among the English Poets after my death” (KL 1.394), with greatness
envisioned as membership in a national historical community.
“English nationalism,” Chandler remarks, “intensified dramatically in
the decades that lead from the age of the Wartons to the 1820s.”5
The response of the British establishment to the French Revolution—
invigorated by the contrasts with France so memorably drawn by Burke’s
Reflections—encouraged patriotic pride on an unprecedented scale.
Later, as Napoleon triumphed and Regency Britain struggled through
fifteen years of unremitting war with France, nationalist sentiment consis-
tently defined British virtue against French fashion, atheism, and militar-
ism. With Keats, the contested questions of British tradition and
patriotism, of who spoke for the nation, organized Regency literary culture
in ways vitally important for his career. An obvious example lies with the
notorious Cockney school reviews of his first two books, reviews that
maligned him as a cultural outsider and upstart. Yet an arguably greater
influence on Keats’s career, an influence on the creation rather than
reception of his work, rested with the Regency’s eager interest in the
national literary canon. Regency Britain inherited its stake in a British
canon from the eighteenth century.6 Upon the return of Charles and his
exiled court from France, the Restoration had witnessed the predomi-
nance of an aristocratic culture based on French neoclassical taste, result-
ing in a large-scale dismissal of older British literature. It may well be, as
Maximillian Novak argues, that “by 1715 Shakespeare had already
assumed the role of the national poet and an incomparable genius,” and
that Addison’s praise of Paradise Lost had similarly shored up Milton’s
claims to greatness at the beginning of the eighteenth century.7 But the
French perspective continued to orient discriminating Enlightenment
readers; and from that viewpoint Britain’s poetic legacy—including
Shakespeare himself, both Voltaire and Boileau continued to insist—
could easily seem like the barbarous product of a barbarous age, a body
of work unschooled in the unities and overly deferential to the populace.
A version of this enduring viewpoint may survive, faintly, in Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets, which permits itself to open with Milton. And as the
example of Johnson may remind us, this same complex of values elevated
Dryden and especially Pope as the figures in whom English verse first
4 JOHN KEATS

achieved a truly correct and refined accomplishment. What then happened

as the eighteenth century waned and the Romantic period began was the
progressive marginalization of this consensus.
“English Romanticism,” Harold Bloom once quipped, “was a renais-
sance of the Renaissance.”8 Just so, both the scholarship and poetry of the
Romantic period continued the work of Warton, Gray, Percy, and others
by resurrecting and championing a national literary tradition centered on
the monumental achievements of the British sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The nationalist agenda of this many-sided intervention can be
seen in the common willingness to conceive of British neoclassicism as an
unfortunately imposed “French School,” a willingness shared by writers
ranging from Warton and Gray to Coleridge, Jeffrey, and Hunt—and on
to Keats himself in “Sleep and Poetry.”9 However, this willingness hardly
resulted in a definitive British canon. For Keats and his contemporaries,
the effort “to rediscover, analyse and imitate native literature, to locate in
the past an authentic national identity that its proponents wished to
project into the future,” in Kathryn Prince’s phrase, was emphatically an
unfinished cultural project: a project requiring further development and
subject to energetic contestation during the Regency years, as various
constituencies tried to advance their claims on Britain’s present and future
by promoting their particular version of past greatness (282). As I will
discuss subsequently, claims that the work of a contemporary poet either
upheld or betrayed British tradition arose frequently in the reviews; the
criticism of Hunt’s and Keats’s enjambed, feminine couplets for their lax
departure from Pope provides merely one conspicuous example. On a
more fundamental level, disputes continued as to which older poets
properly deserved a place in the canon at all. Spenser’s reputation had
ebbed and flowed throughout the eighteenth century: How should his
status be regarded? Which lesser figures deserved to be edited or anthol-
ogized? Circumstances had conspired to decrease Pope’s eminence mark-
edly by the early nineteenth century, but he still had his partisans: what
Chandler terms “the Pope Controversy”—in which Byron, Bowles, and
Campbell were the main disputants—flared up as late as 1819 and grew
remarkably heated. The evaluative issues raised throughout all of these
arguments, in any event, depended on the principal questions prompted
by Regency disputes over the British literary canon. The issues of how to
interpret and then rank the great names and masterworks of the British
tradition suffused the field of Regency literary polemics. They remained
questions of paramount importance for the artists and writers gathered
 1 KEATS AND ROMANTIC HISTORICISM 5

around Leigh Hunt in Hampstead. William St Clair has shown not

only that less expensive editions of older British writers formed the main-
stay of the British public’s access to literature, but also that the importance
of respectability to sales—the importance of texts fit for ladies, capable of
being read aloud in the family circle, and safe for the schoolroom—meant
that most of the widely available books espoused conservative social and
religious values.10 It was in the face of considerable obstacles, then, that
Hunt and his allies promulgated their own sense of the British canon and
the national ideology it encoded, all in support of the countercultural
values they advocated.
In fact, one of the more remarkable features of the writings and
intellectual development of both Hunt and Hazlitt was the extent to
which both men were engaged, early and repeatedly, with revisionist
constructions of literary history. Invocations of tradition recur in Hunt’s
poetry, starting with The Feast of the Poets, in which Apollo undertakes
to determine which living writers rank with “the bards of Old
England”; moving on to The Story of Rimini, which famously recasts
an incident from The Inferno as a cautionary romance; and proceeding
to Foliage, the 1818 volume that celebrated Hunt’s taste for Greek
mythology and Italian tales and featured his translations of touchstone
passages from such Classical poets as Homer, Anacreon, and Theocritus.
Hunt’s early critical writings, such as the “Young Poets” article and
preface to Foliage, celebrate the revitalizing return of British genius to
its national matrices in the Elizabethan age. Hazlitt’s career as a literary
historian began with the overview of Italian literature featured in his
Edinburgh Review essay on Sismondi’s Littérature du midi de l’Europe
and continued, during the early years of his career, in his theatrical
reviews, book reviews, the essays on Milton and Shakespeare included
among his Round Table contributions, and such major efforts as his
Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, Lectures on the English Poets, A View of
the English Stage, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, and Lectures on
the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth—all of these works
completed by 1819 and most known to Keats. The other major critical
talent associated with the Cockney circle, Percy Bysshe Shelley, would
wait until 1821 to unfold his own understanding of literary history,
when the Defence of Poetry turned from the psychology of inspiration to
a survey of the western tradition from Homer through Dante,
Shakespeare, and Milton, and on to the unacknowledged legislators of
the current day. And again, this persistent concern with the literary
6 JOHN KEATS

canon on the part of liberal and radical poets indicates a self-legitimat-

ing attempt to claim canonical authority for their own purposes. To
their adversaries, the Cockneys were vulgar upstarts, uneducated social
arrivistes who above all lacked a sense of tradition—but such dismissals
plainly beg the question of tradition. The literary histories constructed
by Hunt and Hazlitt in truth represent a form of Cockney traditional-
ism in which the appeal to alternately conceived traditions, to tradition
understood in a finer tone, justifies alternate coterie values.
As part of a program to reclaim the national culture for reformist
politics and emergent class interests, the Cockney canon was naturally
focused on the British situation, but not restricted to it. The filiations
linking British literature to other cultures were unexceptional facts of
literary history, after all, and Hunt especially eagerly acknowledged the
influence on British poetry of the Classical and Italian traditions.
Moreover, Pope had reigned over the Augustan culture of Britain as the
emissary of a literary cosmopolitanism harking back to Homer, Athens,
and Rome. The demotion of Pope consequently required either relin-
quishing the Classical to him or wresting it from his control; Hunt pre-
ferred the latter option and pursued it by working to disassociate the
Classical and the heroic. Among the translations in Foliage were four
Homeric passages, true enough, and Keats’s 1817 volume would contain
the famous sonnet on Chapman’s rendering of Homer, with its implicit
denigration of Pope’s Augustan translation. For the most part, though,
Cockney poets privileged the Classical idyll and pastoral, preferring
Catullus to Horace, and identifying more with Ovid’s amorous, polymor-
phous version of the epic, seemingly, than its Homeric and Virgilian
alternatives, if only because the Metamorphoses represented so splendid
an archive of Greek mythology. When Blake snarled “The Classics, it is the
Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars,” he
was expressly indicting both the poems of Homer and Virgil’s epic paean
to Roman imperialism, The Aeneid.11 Similarly disposed to lament the
connection of warfare and poetry, Hunt conceded the sublimity of
Homer, but preferred the erotic blandishments of his own bevy
of nymphs. “The crucial fact about the classicism of Shelley and
Peacock,” Marilyn Butler once wrote—her gaze turning from
Hampstead to Marlow—“is that it does evolve into paganism.”12 And so
it did with that visitor to Marlow, Leigh Hunt. Humanistic, naturalistic,
and secular, the fanciful Greek literature that Hunt most valued was
devoted to love rather than war, Epicurean indulgence rather than Stoic
 1 KEATS AND ROMANTIC HISTORICISM 7

restraint (and to sociality, cheerfulness, and a taste for nature), and his case
for that literature amounted to a revisionist perspective on Britain’s
Classical legacy.
With the Classical tradition reoriented, Hunt, Hazlitt, and later Shelley
could downplay the theological allegory and heroic religious quest of
Virgil and Dante in the Divina Commedia, and offer a different genealogy
for the rise of western vernacular literature, especially in Italy—an issue all
the more important due to the acknowledged influence of the “Italian
School” on Chaucer and Elizabethan poetry. The progressive dissemina-
tion of Christian egalitarianism in the medieval period led to the emanci-
pation and social empowerment of women, Shelley would claim, and the
“freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love” that spread like a
counter-religion from Provençal to the Dante of the Vita Nuova and the
“apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise,” from there to Petrarch, Boccaccio,
Ariosto, and Tasso, and onwards to Renaissance and modern Europe
(A Defence of Poetry, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 525). The reverence that
second-generation British Romanticism felt for this body of writing
belongs to what Butler calls the “Cult of the South.” Averse to German
Romanticism and the British writing ideologically allied to it—much of
that writing Christian, autobiographical, introspective, and given to
“exalting privacy and withdrawal from society”—Cockney writers and
their ideological allies turned to “the classical and Mediterranean
South,” Butler notes, for politically accommodating literary models.13
Above I mentioned Hunt’s recourse to Dante for the narrative premises
of The Story of Rimini and Hazlitt’s early review of Sismondi’s Littérature
du midi de l’Europe. Yet the Cult of the South can be seen also in Byron’s
shift from the Faust-like Manfred to the Italianate Beppo, in Peacock’s
debts to Tasso for Melincourt, and the book of adaptations of Boccaccio—
a figure stoutly championed by Hazlitt—that Keats and his friend John
Hamilton Reynolds planned in 1818. Cockney taste for, and creative
recourse to, Italian literature was variously motivated: Keats and
Reynolds hoped that a Boccaccio volume would sell. Both comic and
idealizing texts from the Italian tradition were frequently concerned with
erotic passion, however. As a result, they provided conveniently adaptable
vehicles for second-generation Romantic poets who, unlike Coleridge and
especially Wordsworth, celebrated sexual love as a crucial criterion of
human freedom.
From the Italian tradition it was a brief step back to Britain and the
spuriously Chaucerian “The Floure and the Leafe,” a medieval love
8 JOHN KEATS

allegory that Hunt and his circle delighted in, and also to Spenser’s
Amoretti and The Fairie Queene.14 For Cockney literary history, the pre-
eminent poets of the national canon were the familiar Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakespeare, and Milton—but now subject to Cockney reinterpretation.
Hunt and Hazlitt emphatically defended Spenser’s claims to greatness,
with Hunt, as he recalled Spenser’s supposed victimization by establish-
ment authority, viewing his own incarceration as a similar instance of
genius mistreated and maligned.15 The leading poets of the second
Romantic generation repeatedly enlisted the indirections of Spenserian
romance in order to negotiate the problems of a politically activist poetry.
Among the attractions of Spenserian dualism as the Romantics construed
it were several advantages stemming from the status of The Faerie Queene
as a political allegory: here were quests directed by Arthur’s dream of
Gloriana that worked to define the various virtues necessary for a gentle-
man; that is, for the exemplary civic defender of the British nation and
empire. And yet, Spenser’s text was a sustained exercise in otherworldly
vision conveyed by knightly adventure and, above all, by luxuriously
sensuous description. So The Faerie Queene modeled a politics of romance
at a time when the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and even the threat
of trial for sedition, made direct political commentary a dangerous activity.
While the eighteenth century certainly produced its share of Spenserian
poems, the Regency years saw the Spenserian stanza deployed for such
ambitious efforts as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Revolt of Islam, and
Reynolds’s The Romance of Youth—the first two alternately meditative
and visionary commentaries on the contemporary political scene, the third
content to invoke Spenser simply for his sunny romance associations, more
in the manner perhaps of Keats himself in The Eve of St. Agnes. For all of
these poets, Spenser was an anti-establishment figure—as Hunt above all
insisted—and a poet of capacious imaginative freedom and sensuous
delight. Spenser the moral allegorist they placed to the side; Spenser the
servant of authority they declined to recognize.
For the Cockney Shakespeare we must look primarily to the criticism
of Hazlitt. To some extent, Hazlitt’s Shakespeare was a simply a version
of the Romantic Shakespeare, a dramatic poet whose powers of empathy
resulted in a genius for characterization and profound illumination of
human interiority. The individual signature of Hazlitt’s work as a
Shakespeare critic, taken as a whole, was his effort to democratize
Shakespeare. The Bard’s emergence from eighteenth-century critical
controversy—from Voltaire’s dismissal and the partisan defenses it
 1 KEATS AND ROMANTIC HISTORICISM 9

prompted—with unrivaled claims as Britain’s national poet lent unrivaled

visibility to the question of how properly to understand him. Regency
culture wars over the correct political interpretation of Shakespearean
drama had generated enough public interest in early 1818 that
Coleridge, Hazlitt, and the notorious John Thelwall were all delivering
rival lectures on Shakespeare in London (J. Bate, Shakespearean
Constitutions 176). Here debate centered on Coleridge’s Tory Bard: his
praise of Richard II for its patriotism and, even more so, his apparent
reading of Caliban as a prophetic satire on Jacobinism.16 Scholars of
British Romanticism know well that, in one of the most brilliant chapters
in The Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, the analysis of Coriolanus, Hazlitt
had adduced affinity with power as virtually “the original sin” of imagina-
tion, declaring it an intrinsic corruption that rendered poetry right-royal
and anti-leveling, a validation of aristocratic individualism against the
interests of the anonymous masses.17 With this view of Shakespearean
tragedy, Hazlitt followed a particular, almost defiantly demystified train of
thought about the deep structural logic of imaginative sympathy, how-
ever, and did so in 1814 when he was just entering the critical lists. By
1818–1819, he was prepared to champion a Shakespeare who possessed a
profoundly democratic imagination and wrote as a man of the people.
Hazlitt’s efforts to construct this Shakespeare began by defending
the aesthetics of dramatic presentation. In agreement with Lamb,
Coleridge had criticized the staging of Shakespeare’s plays because
theatrical performance supposedly could not convey the nuanced com-
plexity of Shakespearean characterization: to grasp Shakespeare’s reve-
lations of human interiority, one must read him. To the Hazlitt who
championed Kean, such reading seemed an elitist activity, something
reserved for private and cultivated leisure, while the public theatricals
were attended by a broader, more democratic swath of the British
public. So Hazlitt’s defense of the staging of Shakespeare vindicated
a venue, and a public enjoyment of Shakespeare, aligned with the
interests of the people; and his defense of Kean’s boldly expressive
representations of tragic emotion suggested powerfully that
Shakespearean interiority could be represented and relished in a public
forum associated with British democratic patriotism—a position that
enjoyed confirmation of a sort, at least, when the French booed
performances of Shakespeare in Paris for their ostensible glorification
of British nationalism.18 But further, Hazlitt’s Cockney Shakespeare
presupposed a politics of Negative Capability, of chameleonic empathy
10 JOHN KEATS

as opposed to the self-centeredness of “the wordsworthian or egotis-

tical sublime” (KL 1.387). For Hazlitt, the principle of sympathy that
he had long considered fundamental to human cognition, and certainly
to human morality, was intrinsically populist by its other-directedness.
That revelation of the human for which Hazlitt valued Shakespeare was
in its own right powerfully democratic in tendency, involving not
social manner or generic type, but an existential condition at once
individuated and collective. Tragedy may give us the extraordinary
individual, Hazlitt agreed, but in doing so it also “gives us a high
and permanent interest, beyond ourselves, in humanity as such. . . . It
makes man a partaker with his kind. . . . It opens the chambers of the
human heart” (“Othello,” CWH 4.200). It is easy to reconcile the
Hazlitt who “valued actors because he believed that they embody the
principle of empathy,” as Jonathan Bate remarks, with the Hazlitt who
deemed Kean “one of the people, and what might be termed a radical
performer.”19
Hunt, Hazlitt, and Shelley similarly stressed Milton’s unwavering radic-
alism. As with Shakespeare, Milton’s canonical stature was never at issue:
his greatness had proven axiomatic from the time of Marvell and Dryden
on to Addison’s Spectator panegyrics; even Voltaire, who found so much
of Shakespeare distasteful, conceded the sublimity of Paradise Lost. In the
latter decades of the eighteenth century, however, Milton’s reputation
underwent a jarring setback when Johnson criticized the poet’s domestic
behavior, doctrine of divorce, and revolutionary politics in the Lives of the
Poets. The defenses of Milton that resulted tended to normalize and
conventionalize him. Having undertaken his 1796 biography of Milton
to vindicate the poet’s republicanism against Johnson’s strictures, William
Hayley offered the Regency a Milton who hated tyranny but was by no
means uncritically or staunchly anti-monarchical: Hayley’s Milton “was a
friend to good sovereigns, though an enemy to tyrants” (109). It is exactly
this Milton reclaimed for respectability that Shelley declines in cautioning
readers that “the sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a
Republican and a bold enquirer into morals and religion” (“Preface to
Prometheus Unbound,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 208). The Cockneys
preferred their Milton dangerous. They also wanted him disassociated
from Christian dogma as much as possible, and from the appropriations
of Lake School conservatism. In some ways, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s
public acknowledgments of Milton’s towering genius no doubt struck
Hampstead as unexceptional and even helpful. The essential distinction
 1 KEATS AND ROMANTIC HISTORICISM 11

between Shakespeare and Milton drawn by Hazlitt in his Round Table essay,
for example, elaborates obviously on Coleridge’s generalization in the
Biographia Literaria:

While the former [Shakespeare] darts himself forth, and passes into all the
forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the
flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his
own IDEAL. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the
being of MILTON; while SHAKESPEARE becomes all things, yet for ever
remaining himself. (2.27–28)

Yet Coleridge had struck a moralistic and orthodox note in passing refer-
ences to Milton in The Statesman’s Manual, a book sufficiently obnoxious
to Hazlitt that he pilloried it in three separate reviews (one that he
published, in his zeal, before he read the book). Here Coleridge argued
that Milton’s Satan epitomized a corruption of the will that “Redemption
by the Blood of Christ” alone could palliate:

But in its utmost abstraction and consequent state of reprobation the Will
becomes satanic pride and rebellious self-idolatry in the relations of the spirit
to itself, and remorseless despotism relatively to others. . . . This is the
character which Milton has so philosophically as well as sublimely embodied
in the Satan of his Paradise Lost. . . . these are the qualities that have con-
stituted the COMMANDING GENIUS! these are the Marks, that have
characterized the Masters of Mischief, the Liberticides, and mighty Hunters
of Mankind, from NIMROD to NAPOLEON. (Lay Sermons 65–66)

Hazlitt famously revered Napoleon, praising him as the heroic heir and
vindicator of the French Revolution. His unavoidable objections to
seeing Satan patronized as an easily seen-through epitome of the will
to power could only have intensified with Coleridge’s subsequent coup
de grâce allusion to Napoleon. In a similar vein, Wordsworth had in
1814 enlisted Milton on behalf of the conservative apologetics of The
Excursion—a poem famously reviewed by Hazlitt, of course, and cor-
dially loathed by Hunt’s Hampstead set—when the Prospectus lines
included in his Preface introduced The Recluse as an adventurous con-
tinuation of Milton’s own epic project. One aspect of that continuation
was the respect that Wordsworth paid to Christian orthodoxy in the
person of the Pastor and his “Churchyard in the Mountains” moralizing.
England’s laureate enlisted Milton for orthodoxy even more obviously,
12 JOHN KEATS

and objectionably: “Mr. Southey,” Hazlitt complained of the Vision of

Judgment, “has thought proper to put the author of Paradise Lost into
his late Heaven, on the understood condition that he is ‘no longer to
kings and to hierarchs hostile.’”20
With the installation of Milton read as a poet of both supreme inten-
sity and sensuous lyricism, but read above all for his for heroic radicalism,
the Cockney canon reached functional completion. Many of its emphases
were entirely conventional. As a reconstruction of British literary history,
it depended and elaborated on a cultural politics familiar from the
nationalistic mythmaking of eighteenth-century poetry. From the era
of Dryden on, Lawrence Lipking observes, British poets “lost no oppor-
tunity of reminding their readers that the progress of poetry had led to
the shores of their native land,” and most of the more prominent poets of
the mid-eighteenth century in particular, he adds, “wrote variations on
the mythopolitical theme of Milton: sweet Liberty, the nymph who had
freed English pens to outstrip the cloistered conservative rule-bound
verses of less favored nations.”21 Cockney apologists strengthened the
mutual dependence of genius and freedom by emphasizing the point,
mentioned occasionally in poems such as Gray’s “Progress of Poetry,”
that the great tradition originated in Greece, the homeland of democ-
racy; and of course they extended the range of associated secondary
values to include sociality, cheerfulness, freedom in sexual conduct,
sympathy with the plight of the lower classes, and appreciation of nature.
They also consistently slighted traditional religious orthodoxy, even
Milton’s Christianity: as Hampstead escorted the moral allegory of The
Faerie Queene to the margins of the text, so did they demote the
theology and supernaturalism of Paradise Lost. The result was a recon-
struction of European literature and of the British poetic tradition that
possessed enormous usefulness for Regency political controversy—a
reconstruction allowing Hazlitt, with an obvious eye to Lake School
apostasy, to sneer for example that Milton “did not retract his defence
of the people of England; he did not say that his sonnets to Vane or
Cromwell were meant ironically; he was not appointed Poet-Laureat to a
Court which he had reviled and insulted; he accepted neither place nor
pension” (“Comus,” CWH 5.233). During the Regency culture wars,
different versions of the canon served as so many clubs with which armed
reviewers, liberal and conservative, could beat each other. It is not just
that the reviews customarily drew comparisons between present and past
poetry—a common enough practice—but that to an unusual extent,
 1 KEATS AND ROMANTIC HISTORICISM 13

contributing on occasion to duels and death, the comparisons were

unabashedly political and polemically aggressive.
The rhetorical use to which Regency reviewers could put the canon
acquires exemplary clarity and interest, predictably, in attacks on Hunt
himself. As Keats scholars will recall, Lockhart’s “On the Cockney School
of Poetry. No. 1” was headed by this epigraph:

Our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on)

Of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron,
(Our England’s Dante)—Wordsworth—HUNT, and KEATS,
The Muses’ son of promise; and of what feats
He yet may do.
CORNELIUS WEBB22

The presumptuousness of the Cockneys in enlisting themselves among the

great figures of British literary history, and even in associating Byron with
Dante, obviously helped fuel Lockhart’s ire. He finds no fault with
Cockney identifications of “the great poets of our country,” but flatly
rejects the claim that Hunt and his circle are the heirs of canonical values
and accomplishments:

He [Hunt] speaks well of nobody but two or three great dead poets, and in
so speaking of them he does well. . . . He pretends, indeed, to be an admirer
of Spenser and Chaucer, but what he praises in them is never what is most
deserving of praise—it is only that which he humbly conceives, bears some
resemblance to the more perfect productions of Mr. Leigh Hunt: and we
can always discover, in the midst of his most violent ravings about the Court
of Elizabeth, and the days of Sir Philip Sidney, and the Fairy Queen—that
the real objects of his admiration are the Coterie of Hampstead and the
Editor of the Examiner.23

Even Hunt’s mannered Italianism, Lockhart complains, is theatrically

specious. The second Cockney School article emphasizes Hunt’s immor-
ality by censuring his handling of incest in The Story of Rimini. Here too,
Lockhart invokes canonical precedent—Sophocles, Euripides, Alfieri,
Schiller, Dante, Ford, and now Byron as well—to contend that Hunt’s
insidiousness in presenting “a tale pregnant with all the horrors of most
unpardonable guilt” under the guise of “a pleasant romance” rests on his
crass departures from literary tradition.24 Just so, the measure of Hunt’s
pernicious influence on Keats can be seen in Keats’s linking of Hunt and
14 JOHN KEATS

Haydon with Wordsworth, “the most classical of living English poets,”

and in Hunt’s encouragement to Keats “and Cornelius Webb, and a few
more city sparks” to regard themselves “as so many future Shakespeares
and Miltons!”25 Needless to say, criticism of Hunt for his illegitimate
extensions of the canon, his invocations of canonical precursors for
debased revisionist purposes, had tolled through negative reviews of The
Story of Rimini.26
Hunt for his part had no scruples about turning the tables and using the
canon for his own purposes. His Examiner essay, “Heaven Made a Party
to Earthly Disputes—Mr Wordsworth’s Sonnets on Waterloo,” for
instance, shows him putting both the English and Italian traditions to
good use in disparaging Wordsworth’s theology and politics. Wordsworth
had published three political sonnets—the second of which declares
Spenser the only Bard fit to celebrate the “victory sublime” of Waterloo,
while the third asks for the inspiration of the Italian poet Filicaia so as to
present Waterloo as God’s triumph through the (apparent) intervention of
Wellington. Hunt’s critique begins with literary tradition. Observing that
“Poetry has often been made the direct vehicle of politics,” Hunt first cites
the examples of Homer, Virgil, Tyrtaeus (who supposedly “beat up for
recruits with the lyre”), and Dante.27 He then adds,

MILTON, besides his political sonnets, took an opportunity in his Paradise

Lost of insinuating some lessons to Kings, which it might not be amiss to
recollect now-a-days;—the political wits of their respective ages, the Andrew
MARVELLS, DRYDENS, THOMAS MOORES, have most of them done
great as well as lively service to their respective political creeds.

So we see that poetry has unquestionably undertaken political advocacy at

times. But his specific precedents notwithstanding, Hunt declares—turning
to contemporary politics—that “it would be monstrous, in our opinion, if a
Poet like Mr WORDSWORTH (the SCOTTS and SOUTHEYS we do not
care for) could accompany such men as the Allied Sovereigns and their
Ministers in all their destitutions of faith and even common intellect,” and
then remarks further,

As to the Battle itself, in which “The strong-armed English spirits

conquered France”—DRAYTON—there can be but one opinion about
it among those who really wish and know how to make the proper
compliment to their countrymen, and who do not confound with it a
 1 KEATS AND ROMANTIC HISTORICISM 15

counter-setting up on one general to another. It was won by the English

literally speaking,—by that national spirit, character, and physical
strength, which such politicians would have done away with long before
this, had the precursors of Mr WORDSWORTH’S youth, the MILTONS
and MARVELLS, suffered it.

Thus Wordsworth’s ill-considered ideological allegiances, and betrayal of

the republican sympathies of his “youth,” are framed by comparison with
canonical figures who truly respected the partnership of poetry and liberty.
The review proceeds to criticize Wordsworth’s effort to enlist the Italian
poet Filicaia on the side of legitimacy, adding Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso to
Milton as figures whom Wordsworth politically forgets or misinterprets.
For Hunt, then, much is at stake in questions of literary history: for the
great poetry of the past, if properly understood, can guide political
responses to England’s post-Napoleonic national crisis.

THE POETICS OF LITERARY HISTORY

Turning from Cockney cultural polemics to Keats himself, what can we say
about his own views and use of literary tradition? His one extended
reflection on British literary history, coming in the context of a well-
known comparison of Milton and Wordsworth, I will take up momenta-
rily. Keats’s sense of the canon was thoroughly conventional and centered
on the major figures. Given his working involvement with technicalities of
language, Chaucer’s Middle English was no great resource to Keats,
although he liked the supposedly Chaucerian “Floure and the Leafe”
immensely. On the other hand, he plainly arrived in Hampstead as a
devotee of Spenser, whose “sea-shouldering whale” and powers of ima-
gery in general he found enthralling.28 In his first volume of poems Keats
mentions numerous poets, typically, but relies on Spenser above all for the
book’s vocational genealogy—in part because of personal affinity for
Spenser’s romance sensibility as he understood it, but in part simply
because Spenser was the canonical poet he knew best, the poet who had
in truth influenced him the most extensively. Keats’s first known poem was
the “Imitation of Spenser.” As my second chapter will discuss, Poems
(1817) aligns itself with Hunt by honoring Spenser for the imaginative
freedom his visionary imperative yielded, for the chivalric ethos his poems
celebrate, and for the gorgeousness of his descriptive style. When Keats
subsequently attempted to separate himself from Hunt by writing a long
16 JOHN KEATS

poem, his first effort, Endymion, was a Cockney version of Elizabethan

verse narrative that avoided Spenser’s stanza form, but remained heavily
indebted to the episodic plot and sensuous imagery of The Faerie Queene.
When Keats later tried his hand at epic with the Hyperion project, it was of
course not to Spenser but to Shakespeare and Milton, and to Dante also,
that he turned.
Keats’s letters are filled early on with quotations from Shakespeare; but he
apparently was led towards a deeper appreciation of Shakespeare by the
example of Hazlitt. In the 1817 letter to Haydon in which he
hesitantly claims Shakespeare as a “Presider” for his poetry, Keats declares
revealingly, “I am very near Agreeing with Hazlit that Shakespeare is enough
for us” (KL 1.142, 143). Keats would have verged on this agreement from
his familiarity with Hazlitt’s conversation and theatrical reviews, his
Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, and his praise of Shakespeare’s comprehen-
sive dramatic empathy in the essay “On Shakespeare and Milton.” The
Shakespeare who mattered most to Keats, who venerated King Lear above
all plays, was Shakespeare the tragedian. In adopting Hazlitt’s view of
Shakespeare as a playwright with protean powers of recreating human
inwardness—an idea so appealing that he took from it his fundamental
understanding of imaginative psychology—Keats appears also to have
acquired his basic understanding of tragedy. Like others of his time, Keats
was fascinated by the ways in which a character’s fall in social station—his or
her extrinsic fall, so to speak—precipitated corresponding emotional uphea-
vals that clarified the human capacity to feel deeply, and forced characters to
psychologically renegotiate their sense of reality in the face of traumatic
change. That, at least, is how R. S. White construes Keats’s later reference
to his “first Step towards the chief Attempt in the Drama—the playing of
different Natures with Joy and Sorrow” (KL 1.218–219).29 A legacy of
Hazlitt’s character-based analyses of the great tragedies, this understanding
of tragic experience accounts for Keats’s admiration of Edmund Kean’s
acting, another taste he largely owed to Hazlitt. Keats revered Kean’s ability
to convey emotional and psychological depth of character on stage, and he
would later write Otho the Great convinced that no one but Kean could
manage the principal role of Ludolph. His greatest poetic debt to Hazlitt’s
explanation of tragic form, however, may occur in Hyperion, a text that
reveals Keats integrating scenes dependent on Paradise Lost with an effort
to reimagine King Lear. For his portrayal of the fallen Titans’ markedly
different responses to loss—their own playing “with Joy and Sorrow”—
recalls the Hazlitt who, as Jonathan Bate comments, “wrote not only of
 1 KEATS AND ROMANTIC HISTORICISM 17

particular characters but of how similarities and antitheses between charac-

ters are a formative structural principle in the plays” (Shakespearean
Constitutions 144).
As with Shakespeare, Keats possessed a passing familiarity with Milton
before arriving in Hampstead. His close study and growing enthusiasm for
Milton were encouraged by Benjamin Bailey and perhaps Charles
Wentworth Dilke, but took their bearings, again, from Hazlitt. To recon-
struct Keats’s appreciation of Milton we have not only his letters, some of
them among his best known, but the marginalia in his copy of Paradise Lost.
And in her careful study of this marginalia, Beth Lau shows that “a number
of Keats’s notes and marked passages are similar to comments made and
passages quoted by Hazlitt” in his “Shakespeare and Milton” lecture and
Round Table essays (Keats’s “Paradise Lost” 26). For the issues that strike me
as most relevant to Keats’s later imaginative use of Milton, we have Keats’s
appreciation of Miltonic intensity depending on Hazlitt’s analysis of
Milton’s gusto; his admiration of Milton’s spatial positioning of his figures,
his “stationing or statuary,” recalling Hazlitt’s remark that Milton’s char-
acters “convey to us the ideas of sculpture”; and his recognition of the
combination of heroic self-aggrandizement with the pathos of conscious
loss in Milton’s characterization of Satan (“Milton was godlike in the sub-
lime pathetic,” Keats wrote), which was certainly suggested by Hazlitt’s
discussion of the “mingled pathos and sublimity” to be found in Paradise
Lost.30 Because Milton influenced Keats’s poetry so profoundly, the issue of
Keats’s attitudes towards Milton acquires an enhanced complexity. Certainly
he admired Miltonic prosody and rhetoric and venerated the poet as a
powerfully individualistic defender of political freedom: “How noble and
collected an indignation against Kings,” he declares of one passage from
Paradise Lost (Lau 85). Beyond that, what he seems to have found most
moving in Paradise Lost originates, again, in a humanistic responsiveness to
character and narrative, especially that combination of grandeur and pathos
in the face of irreversible loss that seemingly aligned Milton’s chief charac-
ters, Satan above all, with Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists.
Milton was also implicated in Keats’s most sustained reflections on
literary history and—Hazlitt again setting the terms of debate—on the
issue of intellectual and cultural progress. One of the greatest influences
on Keats’s attitudes towards the European and British literary canons was
Hazlitt’s “Why the Arts Are Not Progressive.” Hazlitt’s insistence on the
supervening decadence of art lies behind Keats’s 3 February 1816 frustra-
tion with the narrowed scope of modern poetry, of Hunt and Wordsworth
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shoes, stockings, and underclothes are comparatively unknown.
Only upon dress-up occasions does a man or woman put on
slippers.
The cooking and housekeeping are done entirely by the women.
The chief food is a coarse bread made of corn or millet baked in
thick cakes. This is broken up and dipped into a kind of a bean stew
seasoned with salt, pepper, and onions. The ordinary peasant
seldom has meat, for it is only the rich who can afford mutton or
beef. At a big feast on the occasion of a wedding, a farming nabob
sometimes brings in a sheep which has been cooked whole. It is
eaten without forks, and is torn limb from limb, pieces being cut out
by the guests with their knives.
 Next to the market where sugar cane is sold is the “Superb Mosque,” built by
Sultan Hassan nearly 600 years ago. Besides being a centre for religious
activities, it is also a gathering place for popular demonstrations and political
agitation.
 Cairo is the largest city on the African continent, and one of the capitals of the
Mohammedan world. Its flat-roofed buildings are a yellowish-white, with the towers
and domes of hundreds of mosques rising above them.

Of late Egypt has begun to raise vegetables for Europe. The fast
boats from Alexandria to Italy carry green stuff, especially onions, of
which the Nile valley is now exporting several million dollars’ worth
per annum. Some of these are sent to England, and others to Austria
and Germany.
As for tobacco, Egypt is both an exporter and importer. “Egyptian”
cigarettes are sold all over the world, but Egypt does not raise the
tobacco of which they are made. Its cultivation has been forbidden
for many years, and all that is used is imported from Turkey, Greece,
and Bosnia. About four fifths of it comes from Turkey.
Everyone in Egypt who can afford it smokes. The men have pipes
of various kinds, and of late many cigarettes have been coming into
use. A favourite smoke is with a water pipe, the vapour from the
burning tobacco being drawn by means of a long tube through a
bowl of water upon which the pipe sits, so that it comes cool into the
mouth.
The chicken industry of Egypt is worth investigation by our
Department of Agriculture. Since the youth of the Pyramids, these
people have been famous egg merchants and the helpful hen is still
an important part of their stock. She brings in hundreds of thousands
of dollars a year, for her eggs form one of the items of national
export. During the last twelve months enough Egyptian eggs have
been shipped across the Mediterranean to England and other parts
of Europe to have given one to every man, woman, and child in the
United States. Most of them went to Great Britain.
The Egyptians, moreover, had incubators long before artificial egg
hatching was known to the rest of the world. There is a hatchery
near the Pyramids where the farmers trade fresh eggs for young
chicks at two eggs per chick, and there is another, farther down the
Nile valley, which produces a half million little chickens every
season. It is estimated that the oven crop of chickens amounts to
thirty or forty millions a year, that number of little fowls being sold by
the incubator owners when the baby chicks are about able to walk.
Most of our incubators are of metal and many are kept warm by oil
lamps. Those used here are one-story buildings made of sun-dried
bricks. They contain ovens which are fired during the hatching
seasons. The eggs are laid upon cut straw in racks near the oven,
and the firing is so carefully done that the temperature is kept just
right from week to week. The heat is not gauged by the thermometer,
but by the judgment and experience of the man who runs the
establishment. A fire is started eight or ten days before the eggs are
put in, and from that time on it is not allowed to go out until the
hatching season is over. The eggs are turned four times a day while
hatching. Such establishments are cheaply built, and so arranged
that it costs almost nothing to run them. One that will hatch two
hundred thousand chickens a year can be built for less than fifty
dollars, while for about a dollar and a half per day an experienced
man can be hired to tend the fires, turn the eggs, and sell the
chickens.
 CHAPTER VI
THE PROPHET’S BIRTHDAY

Stand with me on the Hill of the Citadel and take a look over Cairo.
We are away up over the river Nile, and far above the minarets of
the mosques that rise out of the vast plain of houses below. We are
at a height as great as the tops of the Pyramids, which stand out
upon the yellow desert off to the left. The sun is blazing and there is
a smoky haze over the Nile valley, but it is not dense enough to hide
Cairo. The city lying beneath us is the largest on the African
continent and one of the mightiest of the world. It now contains about
eight hundred thousand inhabitants; and in size is rapidly
approximating Heliopolis and Memphis in the height of their ancient
glory.
Of all the Mohammedan cities of the globe, Cairo is growing the
fastest. It is more than three times as big as Damascus and twenty
times the size of Medina, where the Prophet Mohammed died. The
town covers an area equal to fifty quarter-section farms; and its
buildings are so close together that they form an almost continuous
structure. The only trees to be seen are those in the French quarter,
which lies on the outskirts.
The larger part of the city is of Arabian architecture. It is made up
of flat-roofed, yellowish-white buildings so crowded along narrow
streets that they can hardly be seen at this distance. Here and there,
out of the field of white, rise tall, round stone towers with galleries
about them. They dominate the whole city, and under each is a
mosque, or Mohammedan church. There are hundreds of them in
Cairo. Every one has its worshippers, and from every tower, five
times a day, a shrill-voiced priest calls the people to prayers. There
is a man now calling from the Mosque of Sultan Hasan, just under
us. The mosque itself covers more than two acres, and the minaret
is about half as high as the Washington Monument. So delighted
was Hasan with the loveliness of this structure that when it was
finished he cut off the right hand of the architect so that it would be
impossible for him to design another and perhaps more beautiful
building. Next it is another mosque, and all about us we can see
evidences that Mohammedanism is by no means dead, and that
these people worship God with their pockets as well as with their
tongues.
In the Alabaster Mosque, which stands at my back, fifty men are
now praying, while in the courtyard a score of others are washing
themselves before they go in to make their vows of repentance to
God and the Prophet. Not far below me I can see the Mosque El-
Azhar, which has been a Moslem university for more than a
thousand years, and where something like ten thousand students
are now learning the Koran and Koranic law.
Here at Cairo I have seen the people preparing to take their
pilgrimage to Mecca, rich and poor starting out on that long journey
into the Arabian desert. Many go part of the way by water. The ships
leaving Alexandria and Suez are crowded with pilgrims and there is
a regular exodus from Port Sudan and other places on this side of
the Red Sea. They go across to Jidda and there lay off their costly
clothing before they make their way inland, each clad only in an
apron with a piece of cloth over the left shoulder. Rich and poor
dress alike. Many of the former carry gifts and other offerings for the
sacred city. Such presents cost the Egyptian government alone a
quarter of a million dollars a year; for not only the Khedive but the
Mohammedan rulers of the Sudan send donations. The railroad
running from far up the Nile to the Red Sea makes special rates to
pilgrimage parties.
Yet I wonder whether this Mohammedanism is not a religion of the
lips rather than of the heart. These people are so accustomed to
uttering prayers that they forget the sense. The word God is heard
everywhere in the bazaars. The water carrier, who goes about with a
pigskin upon his back, jingling his brass cups to announce his
business, cries out: “May God recompense me!” and his customer
replies, as he drinks, by giving him a copper in the name of the Lord.
The lemonade peddler, who carries a glass bottle as big as a four-
gallon crock, does the same, and I venture to say that the name of
the Deity is uttered here more frequently than in any other part of the
world. It is through this custom of empty religious formulas that I am
able to free myself of the beggars of the city. I have learned two Arab
words: “Allah yatik,” which mean: “May God give thee enough and to
spare.” When a beggar pesters me I say these words gently. He
looks upon me in astonishment, then touches his forehead in a polite
Mohammedan salute and goes away.
On my second visit to Egypt I was fortunate in being in Cairo on
the birthday of the Prophet. It was a feast day among the
Mohammedans, and at night there was a grand religious celebration
at the Alabaster Mosque which Mehemet Ali, that Napoleon of Egypt,
built on the Citadel above Cairo. Its minarets, overlooking the Nile
valley, the great deserts and the vast city of Cairo, blazed with light,
and from them the cry of the muezzins sounded shrill on the dusky
air: “Allah is great! There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the
Prophet of Allah! Come to worship! Allah is great! There is no God
but Allah!”
As this call reverberated through the city, Mohammedans of all
classes started for the Citadel. Some came in magnificent turnouts,
bare-legged, gaudily dressed syces with wands in their hands
running in front of them to clear the way. Some came upon donkeys.
Some moved along in groups of three or four on foot. The Khedive
came with the rest, soldiers with drawn swords going in front of his
carriage and a retinue of cavalry following behind.
The Alabaster Mosque covers many acres. It has a paved marble
court, as big as a good-sized field, around which are cloisters. This is
roofed with the sky, and in the midst of it is a great marble fountain
where the worshippers bathe their feet and hands before they go in
to pray. The mosque is at the back of this court, facing Mecca. Its
many domes rise to a great height and its minarets seem to pierce
the sky. It is built of alabaster, but its exterior has become worn and
pitted by the sands of the desert, which have been blown against its
walls until it has nothing of the grandeur which it must have shown
when its founder worshipped within it.
 The interior, however, was wonderfully beautiful that night, when
its gorgeous decorations were shown off by the thousands of lights
of this great service. Under the gaslight and lamplight the tinsel
which during the day shocks the taste was softened and beautified.
The alabaster of the walls became as pure as Mexican onyx, and the
rare Persian rugs that lay upon the floor took on a more velvety tint.
See it all again with me. In the eye of your mind cover an acre field
with the richest of oriental rugs; erect about it walls of pure white
alabaster with veins as delicate as those of the moss agate; let these
walls run up for hundreds of feet; build galleries around them and
roof the whole with great domes in which are windows of stained
glass; hang lamps by the thousands from the ceiling, place here and
there an alabaster column. Now you have some idea of this mosque
as it looked on the night of Mohammed’s birthday.
You must, however, add the worshippers to the picture. Thousands
of oriental costumes; turbans of white, black, and green; rich gowns
and sober, long-bearded, dark faces, shine out under the lights in
every part of the building. Add likewise the mass of Egyptian soldiers
in gold lace and modern uniforms, with red fezzes on their heads,
and the hundreds of noble Egyptians in European clothes. There are
no shoes in the assemblage, and the crowd moves about on the
rugs in bare feet or stockings.
What a babel of sounds goes up from the different parts of the
building, and how strange are the sights! Here a dozen old men
squat on their haunches, facing each other, and rock back and forth
as they recite passages of the Koran. Here is a man worshipping all
alone; there is a crowd of long-haired, wild-eyed ascetics with faces
of all shades of black, yellow, and white. They are so dirty and
emaciated they make one think of the hermits of fiction. They stand
in a ring and go through the queerest of antics to the weird music of
three great tambourines and two drums played by worshippers quite
as wild looking as themselves. It is a religious gymnastic show, the
horrible nature of which cannot be described upon paper.
When I first entered the mosque, these Howling Dervishes were
squatted on the floor, moving their bodies up and down in unison,
and grunting and gasping as though the whole band had been
attacked with the colic. A moment later they arose and began to bob
their heads from one side to the other until I thought their necks
would be dislocated by the jerks they gave them. They swung their
ears nearly down to their shoulders. The leader stood in the centre,
setting the time to the music. Now he bent over so that his head was
almost level with his knees, then snapped his body back to an erect
position. The whole band did likewise, keeping up this back-breaking
motion for fifteen minutes. All the time they howled out “Allah, Allah!”
Their motions increased in wildness. With every stoop the music
grew louder and faster. They threw off their turbans, and their long
hair, half matted, now brushed the floor as they bent down in front,
now cut the air like whips as they threw themselves back. Their eyes
began to protrude, one man frothed at the mouth. At last they
reached such a state of fanatical ecstasy that not for several minutes
after the leader ordered them to stop, were they able to do so. The
Howling Dervishes used to cut themselves in their rites and often
they fall down in fits in their frenzy. They believe that such actions
are passports to heaven.
 A great occasion in Cairo is the sending of a new gold-embroidered carpet to the
sanctuary in Mecca, there to absorb holiness at the shrine of the Prophet. The old
carpet is brought back each year, and its shreds are distributed among the
Faithful.
 The mosque of the Citadel in Cairo was built of alabaster by Mehemet Ali, the
“Napoleon of Egypt.” When Mohammed’s birthday is celebrated, its halls and
courts are choked with thousands of Moslem worshippers and are the scene of
fanatical religious exercises.

In another part of the room was a band of Whirling Dervishes,

who, dressed in high sugar-loaf hats and long white gowns, whirled
about in a ring, with their arms outstretched, going faster and faster,
until their skirts stood out from their waists like those of a circus
performer mounted on a bareback steed, as she dances over the
banners and through the hoops.
There were Mohammedans of all sects in the mosque, each going
through his own pious performances without paying any attention to
the crowds that surrounded him. In his religious life the Mussulman
is a much braver man than the Christian. At the hours for prayer he
will flop down on his knees and touch his head on the ground in the
direction of Mecca, no matter who are his companions or what his
surroundings. He must take off his shoes before praying, and I saw
yesterday in the bazaars of Cairo a man clad in European clothes
who was praying in his little box-like shop with his stocking feet
turned out toward the street, which was just then full of people. In the
heel of each stocking there was a hole as big as a dollar, and the
bare skin looked out at the crowds.
The Moslems of Egypt, like those elsewhere, have their fast days,
during which, from sunrise to sunset, they do not allow a bit of food
nor a drop of water to touch their lips. Some of them carry the fast to
such an extent that they will not even swallow their saliva, and in this
dry climate their thirst must be terrible. The moment the cannon
booms out the hour of sunset, however, they dash for water and
food, and often gorge themselves half the night. You may see a man
with a cigarette in his hand waiting until the sun goes down in order
that he may light it, or another holding a cup of water ready while he
listens for the sound of the cannon. This fasting is very severe upon
the poor people of Egypt, who have to work all day without eating.
The rich often stay up for the whole night preceding a fast day, and
by going to bed toward morning they are able to sleep the day
through and get up in time for a big meal after sunset.
The poor are the best Mohammedans, and many of the more
faithful are much alarmed at the laxity in religious duty that comes
through contact with Europeans. A missionary friend told me of a
Moslem sheik who was offered a glass of cognac by a brother
believer on a fast day. Shortly after this he met my friend and spoke
of the incident, saying: “I don’t know what we are coming to. Good
Mohammedans think they can drink without sinning, and this man
laughed when I told him it was fast day and said that fasts were for
common people, and that religion was not of much account, anyhow.
We have many infidels among us, and it seems to me that the world
is in a very bad way.”
The Moslems have many doctrines worthy of admiration and the
morals of the towns of Egypt which have not been affected by
European civilization are, I am told, far better than those of Cairo or
Alexandria. A traveller to a town on the Red Sea, which is purely
Mohammedan, says that the place has had no litigation for years,
and there is no drunkenness or disorder. The people move on in a
quiet, simple way, with their sheik settling all their troubles.
Mohammedan Cairo is quite as orderly as the part in which the
nobility and the Europeans live. It contains the bazaars and the old
buildings of the Arabian part of the city, and is by all odds the most
interesting section.
 CHAPTER VII
IN THE BAZAARS OF CAIRO

Cairo is the biggest city in Africa. It is larger than St. Louis and one
of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Orient. The Christians and the
Mohammedans here come together, and the civilizations of the East
and the West touch each other. The modern part of Cairo has put on
the airs of European capitals. It has as wide streets as Paris, and a
park, full of beautiful flowers and all varieties of shrubs and trees, lies
in its very centre. Here every night the military bands play European
and American airs, and veiled Mohammedan women walk about with
white-faced French or Italian babies, of which they are the nurses.
People from every part of the world listen to the music. The
American jostles the Englishman while the German and the
Frenchman scowl at each other; the Greek and the Italian move
along side by side, as they did in the days when this country was
ruled by Rome, and now and then you see an old Turk in his turban
and gown, or a Bedouin Arab, or a white-robed, fair-faced heathen
from Tunis.
The European section of Cairo now has magnificent hotels. It is
many a year since the foreign traveller in Egypt has had to eat with
his fingers, or has seen a whole sheep served up to him by his
Egyptian host as used to be the case. To-day the food is the same
as that you get in Paris, and is served in the same way. One can buy
anything he wants in European Cairo, from a gas-range to a glove-
buttoner, and from a set of diamond earrings to a pair of shoestrings.
Yesterday I had a suit of clothes made by an English tailor, and I
drive about every day in an American motor car. There are, perhaps,
fifty thousand Europeans living in the city, and many American
visitors have learned the way to this great winter resort. The bulk of
the Europeans are French and Italian, and the Mouski, one of the
main business streets, is lined for a mile with French and Italian
shops. There are thousands of Greeks, and hundreds of Jews from
Palestine, the states of southern Europe, and Asia Minor. One sees
every type of Caucasian moving about under dark red fezzes and
dressed in black clothes with coats buttoned to the chin.
The foreign part of Cairo is one of great wealth. There are
mansions and palaces here that would be called handsome in the
suburbs of New York, and property has greatly risen in value. Many
of the finest houses are owned by Greeks, whose shrewd brains are
working now as in the classic days. The Greeks look not unlike us
and most of them talk both English and French. They constitute the
money aristocracy of Alexandria, and many of the rich Greek
merchants of that city have palatial winter homes here. As I have
said, they are famed as bankers and are the note-shavers of Egypt.
They lend money at high rates of interest, and I am told that perhaps
one fifth of the lands of the country belong to them. They have
bought them in under mortgages to save their notes. The lower
classes of the Greeks are the most turbulent of Egypt’s population.
 FROM CAIRO TO KISUMU

Embraces the right shoulder of Africa which for centuries withstood the attempts
of rulers and traders to establish their dominion over the continent

The tourist who passes through Cairo and stays at one of the big
hotels is apt to think that the city is rapidly becoming a Christian one.
As he drives over asphalt streets lined with the fine buildings of the
European quarter, it seems altogether English and French. If he is
acquainted with many foreigners he finds them living in beautiful
villas, or in apartment houses like those of our own cities. He does
his shopping in modern stores and comes to the conclusion that the
Arab element is passing away.
 This is not so. Cairo is a city of the Egyptians. Not one tenth of its
inhabitants are Christians and it is the hundreds of thousands of
natives who make up the life blood of this metropolis. They are
people of a different world from ours, as we can see if we go down
for a stroll through their quarters. They do business in different ways
and trade much as they have been trading for generations. Their
stores are crowded along narrow streets that wind this way and that
until one may lose himself in them. Nearly every store is a factory,
and most of the goods offered are made in the shop where they are
sold.
Although the foreigner and his innovations are in evidence, native
Cairo is much the same now in characters, customs, and dress as it
was in the days of Haroun Al Raschid. Here the visionary Alnaschar
squats in his narrow, cell-like store, with his basket of glass before
him. He holds the tube of a long water pipe in his mouth and is
musing on the profits he will make from peddling his glass, growing
richer and richer, until his sovereign will be glad to offer him his
daughter in marriage and he will spurn her as she kneels before him.
We almost expect to see the glass turned over as it is in the story,
and his castles in the air shattered with his kick. Next to him is a
turbaned Mohammedan who reminds us of Sinbad the Sailor, and a
little farther on is a Barmecide washing his hands with invisible soap
in invisible water, and apparently inviting his friends to come and
have a great feast with him. Here two long-gowned, gray-bearded
men are sitting on a bench drinking coffee together; and there a
straight, tall maiden, robed in a gown which falls from her head to
her feet, with a long black veil covering all of her face but her eyes,
looks over the wares of a handsome young Syrian, reminding us of
how the houris shopped in the days of the “Thousand and One
Nights.”
Oriental Cairo is a city of donkeys and camels. In the French
quarter you may have a ride on an electric street car for a few cents,
or you may hire an automobile to carry you over the asphalt. The
streets of the native city are too narrow for such things, and again
and again we are crowded to the wall for fear that the spongy feet of
the great camels may tread upon us. We are grazed by loaded
donkeys, carrying grain, bricks, or bags on their backs, and the
donkey boy trotting behind an animal ridden by some rich Egyptian
or his wife calls upon us to get out of the way.
The donkeys of Egypt are small, rugged animals. One sees them
everywhere with all sorts of odd figures mounted on them. Here is an
Egyptian woman sitting astride of one, her legs bent up like a spring
and her black feet sticking out in the stirrups. She is dressed in
black, in a gown which makes her look like a balloon. There is a long
veil over her face with a slit at the eyes, where a brass spool
separates it from the head-dress and you see nothing but strips of
bare skin an inch wide above and below. Here is a sheik with a great
turban and a long gown; his legs, ending in big yellow slippers, reach
almost to the ground on each side of his donkey. He has no bridle,
but guides the beast with a stick. A donkey-boy in bare feet, whose
sole clothing consists of a blue cotton nightgown and a brown
skullcap, runs behind poking up the donkey with a stick. Now he
gives it a cut, and the donkey jerks its hinder part from one side to
the other as it scallops the road in attempting to get out of the way of
the rod. Here is a drove of donkeys laden with bags for the market.
They are not harnessed, and the bags are balanced upon their
backs without ropes or saddles.
The ordinary donkey of Egypt is very cheap indeed, but the
country has some of the finest asses and mules I have ever seen,
and there are royal white jackasses ridden by wealthy
Mohammedans which are worth from five hundred to a thousand
dollars per beast. The best of these come from Mecca. They are
pacers, fourteen hands high, and very swift. The pedigrees of some
of them are nearly as long as those of Arabian horses. It is said that
the Arabs who raise them will never sell a female of this breed.
But to return to the characters of the bazaar. They are of the
oddest, and one must have an educated eye to know who they are.
Take that man in a green turban, who is looked up to by his fellows.
The dragoman tells us that he has a sure passport to Heaven, and
that the green turban is a sign that he has made the pilgrimage to
Mecca and thus earned the right to the colours of the Prophet.
Behind him comes a fine-featured, yellow-faced man in a blue gown
wearing a turban of blue. We ask our guide who he may be and are
told, with a sneer, that he is a Copt. He is one of the Christians of
modern Egypt, descended from the fanatical band described by
Charles Kingsley in his novel “Hypatia.” Like all his class he is
intelligent, and like most of them well dressed. The Copts are among
the shrewdest of the business Egyptians, and with prosperity they
have grown in wealth. They are money lenders and land speculators.
Many of them have offices under the government, and not a few
have amassed fortunes. Some of them are very religious and some
can recite the Bible by heart. They differ from their neighbours in that
they believe in having only one wife.
The crowd in these streets is by no means all men, however.
There are women scattered through it, and such women! We look at
them, and as their large soulful eyes, fringed with dark lashes, smile
back at us, we wish that the veils would drop from their faces. The
complexions which can be seen in the slit in the veils are of all
colours from black to brunette, and from brown to the creamy white
of the fairest Circassian. We are not particularly pleased with their
costume, but our dragoman tells us that they dress better at home.
The better classes wear black bombazine garments made so full that
they hide every outline of the figure. Some of them have their cloaks
tied in at the waist so that they look like black bed ticks on legs.
Here, as one raises her skirt, we see that she wears bloomers falling
to her ankles, which make us think of the fourteen-yard breeches
worn by the girls of Algiers. The poorer women wear gowns of blue
cotton, a single garment and the veil making up a whole costume.
Astride their shoulders or their hips some of them carry babies, many
of whom are as naked as when they were born.