ABSTRACT
This fine parodic send-up of ‘Cockney’ poetry was published in Gold and Northhouse’s London Magazine and Monthly Critical and Dramatic Review in September 1820 1 . Unlike the more notable London Magazine and Review (at this point in time owned by Robert Baldwin, but sold in the following year to Keats’s publishers Taylor and Hessey) which included the likes of Hazlitt, Hunt and Reynolds amongst its contributors, Gold’s London traded in enthusiastic ‘Cockney-bashing’. ‘Evening’ is part of this aspect of the magazine’s character. It is most probably the work of William Frederick Deacon, later to become the author of Warreniana, who contributed the majority of Gold’s parodic writing in this period. As Warreniana demonstrates, Deacon was an attentive reader of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and, though it lacks Maga’s vitriol, ‘Evening’ rehearses the journal’s critical perspective on the ‘Cockney crew’: its taste for immodest mutual congratulation, its bathetic location of the sublime in suburbia, the impertinent pretensions of the ‘cit’ to Greek culture. ‘Cornish Columbus’, an aspirant member of the ‘Cockney Poetical Club’, ranges across the metropolitan terrain celebrated in the work of of the London muse (the Regent’s canal, Hampstead, Primrose Hill), studying his well-thumbed volumes of Cockney verse and rejoicing in the fact that he is participating in a poetic renaissance led by Hunt, Procter and Keats which is set to rival, nay, even exceed, the glory of Greece. The parody is formally sophisticated; the poem’s bouncy alexandrines militate against the stillness and ‘deep silence’ of the scene described and the insistent end-stopping of the verse allied to the use of a stanzaic form which employs a final couplet sees the prosody of the first four stanzas working against the narrative voice’s attempt to achieve a reflective tone.
