Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Figures

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

A biographical sketch

Between the acts: 1824–40

Horrid Hood: the grotesque and its mirrors

The paradox of comic poetry: the familiar and the marginal

Notes

1: Material backgrounds: print, dissent, and the social society

A world of print

A culture of dissent

The social society

Notes

2: Hood and the minor: at the London Magazine and after

Hood at the London Magazine

‘The Lion’s Head’

Loss and imposture: ‘The Sea of Death’ and ‘Faithless Sally Brown’

Poetic transportation: ‘The Literary Police Office’ and ‘The Stag-Eyed Lady’

Mermaids and fishwives: Lamb and Hood

Later ‘Last Man’: an insolent subject

Losing Keats: Hood and the annual

Conclusion

Notes

3: Performing the city: the audience as subject

Green Room colleagues

Odes and Addresses to Great People

Reviews and polymonologues

Viewing the viewer

Class acts

Dramatic monologue and illegitimate theatre

Speech and social protest

Notes

4: A common centaur: Hood and the grotesque

The grotesque tradition in the early nineteenth century

‘In the Husk of a Brute Eternally Inhumed’: Hood and the boundaries of the human

The revenge of the reified: Hood and the grotesque market

Conclusion

Notes

5: Pun and pleasure: Hood’s tied trope

Opposition to punning: a cultural history

Punning and the ‘Cockneys’

Civil war: negotiating social and anti-social impulses

Punning as a grotesque art

Punning and pluralism

Levelling puns: the ‘House of Commons’

Conclusion

Notes

6: Sine qua non-sense: work, play, and criticism

Labour, discipline, and entertainment: sanitizing the street

Anti-Sabbatarianism and protecting play

Writing childhood: play and protest

The working writer and the rights of labour: ‘Copyright and Copywrong’

Work songs: consolation and complaint

Mass appeal: intimacy and influence

Notes

Select bibliography

Index