PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Gregory Dart is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department of University College London. His research, both current and prospective, is centrally concerned with the modern city, as a cultural and material phenomenon. His first monograph, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge, 1999), examined the influence of the French Revolution on English Romantic writers. Since then he has published widely on Romantics and the city, edited two selections of Hazlitt's writings and written a short book on the relationship between unrequited love and stalking.
'The venturesomeness of the book is in keeping with its subject, and the study often finds original ways to get topography and text to shed light on one another.' London Review of Books 'Challenges us to reconsider our prejudices about the prejudicial slur, 'Cockney' and to accord it the gravity of a significant genre.' The Times Literary Supplement '… a fresh, wonderfully interesting, lucidly written book. Dart's style is a model of accessibility and is unceasingly engaging. He is a fine writer and [this book] is a testament to his wide-ranging abilities as a researcher and critic. This book reaches further into the Victorian period than the title suggests and is superb reading for anyone interested in Romantic and Victorian period cultures …an affectionate, interesting and generative study of Cockneyism, and how it engages with, among other things, architecture, art, city planning, fashion, literature, politics and suburban gardens. Dart's achievement is that he extends debates on Cockneyism out of the tight timeframe of 1812–20, that previous academic studies have largely held them in and, in doing so, expands the cultural spheres that Cockneys engaged with.' Journal of Victorian Culture 'Romanticists are familiar with the Cockney School attacks on the Leigh Hunt circle mounted by J. G. Lockhart in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine beginning in 1817. Gregory Dart offers a fine-grained analysis of deployments of the term 'Cockney' after the attacks, and in so doing manages to cover a remarkable swathe of London's cultural landscape.' Thora Brylowe, BARS Bulletin and Review 'This is a bracingly adventurous book. Out of disparate materials, writers, and artists, Gregory Dart has constructed a previously unrecognized cultural period, the 'Cockney Moment' … the high accomplishment of this book is to make its eight-chapter study of the Cockney 'moment' continually clarifying and illuminating, historically innovative. The book not only bristles with fresh insights into the reach of the Cockney phenomenon across class and aesthetic as well as political lines, but also extends its complexity by effectively rethinking two decades of Romantic cultural production as central to a wider period of cultural transformation.' Jon Klancher, Review 19 (nbol-19.org) 'This well-illustrated, interesting, and very thorough book looks at the Cockney as emergent in London urban culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. … Dart's book is an essential source for the culture of those very years.' Jeremy Tambling, Notes and Queries
