Cockney School (act. c. 1816–1822), was the mocking name first given in 1817 by the conservative Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine to a group of writers and intellectuals who gathered in London around the poet, journalist, and critic Leigh Hunt. While the label was meant to deride innovative artists and thinkers as plebeian dilettantes, it also points to the existence of a self-conscious circle around Hunt that included key poets and writers of what is called second-generation romanticism. The principal figures brought together in Hunt's inner circle were John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, William Hazlitt, and the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon; Lord Byron—a friend of both Hunt and Shelley—functioned as a kind of corresponding member of the group from continental Europe. The vision of this group was promulgated through his journals (primarily The Examiner, but also The Indicator and The Liberal), volumes such as Keats's Endymion and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound that arose from the group's collective vision, and the criticism and essays of Hunt, Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb, as well as Haydon's art and contributions to debates surrounding the Elgin marbles.

While the ‘Cockney School’ attacks largely focused on this inner circle, Hunt stood at the centre of a wider cultural network that argued for innovative art and political reform. This wider network included writers from an older generation, like Lamb and William Godwin, along with such less well-known contemporaries of Keats and Shelley as the writers John Hamilton Reynolds, the brothers James Smith and Horace Smith, Charles Cowden Clarke, Bryan Waller Procter (who adopted the pen-name Barry Cornwall), Charles Wells, Cornelius Webb, and Charles Dilke. Hunt's circle also included the painter Joseph Severn, the musician Vincent Novello, the lawyers Henry Brougham and Basil Montagu, and the journalists Thomas Alsager and Thomas Barnes (respectively financial writer and editor of The Times), and John Scott, editor of The Champion. Another associate was the cricketer John Nyren, as were Mary Sabilla Novello (1789?–1854)—wife of Vincent Novello, and described by Hunt's friend Horace Twiss as 'the next among women to Mary Wollstonecraft' (Clarke and Clarke, 25)—and Elizabeth Kent, Hunt's sister-in-law, whose Flora domestica (1823) and Sylvan Sketches (1825) were filled with quotations from works by members of the circle.

The ‘cockney’ designation was intended to ridicule what the Blackwood's editors, their allies at the Quarterly Review, and other cultural conservatives saw as the threat posed by Hunt's circle. Its critics associated the group with political reform, anti-clericalism, and paganism; members themselves consciously promoted their status as outsiders, at odds with prevailing élite and urbane culture. Hunt himself was seen as a particular danger. Already the leading voice of the radical intelligentsia through his popular and independent journal The Examiner, Hunt became a martyr for members of the opposition when he was imprisoned in February 1813 for lampooning the prince regent. During his two-year imprisonment, when he ruled his cell as Byron's 'wit in the dungeon', he was visited by a pantheon of radical intellectuals: Byron and Thomas Moore, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, William Hazlitt and Maria Edgeworth, Charles and Mary Lamb, and Henry Brougham. In prison he completed his controversial verse experiment, The Story of Rimini, reviled by Blackwood's but admired by Byron and influential on Keats, Shelley, and other contemporary poets. The subsequent identification of and attacks on the Cockney School were both a mark of conservatives' concerns over the group's gathering cultural authority and an attempt to destroy their influence.

In the first instance the cockney label—like other more neutral attempts to identify the group as the 'metropolitan' or 'city poets'—sought to locate these writers in London, in opposition to an older generation of poets comprising William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, and known as the Lake School. According to the 1811 edition of The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, the simplest meaning of 'cockney' was a 'nick name given to the citizens of London, or persons born within the sound of Bow bell'. The definition went on to highlight various attributes that became part of the attack on Hunt's circle:

The king of the cockneys is mentioned among the regulations for the sports and shows formerly held in the Middle Temple on Childermas Day … Ray says, the interpretation of the word Cockney, is, a young person coaxed or conquered, made wanton; or a nestle cock, delicately bred and brought up, so as, when arrived at man's estate, to be unable to bear the least hardship.

Blackwood's and others ridiculed Hunt as the king of the cockneys, with Hazlitt and Keats seen as courtiers; on another occasion Hazlitt was the 'Cockney Aristotle' (Blackwood's, 5, April 1819, 97) while Lamb and Haydon were respectively dubbed the 'Cockney Scribbler' and 'Cockney Raphael' (5, Nov 1820, 208; 5, April 1819, 97). Links to the imaginary kingdom of Cockaigne, known for its luxury and idleness, also proved useful. Hunt and Keats in particular were attacked as devotees to libertinism and as effeminate: thus Blackwood's described Hunt as 'the most irresistible knight-errant erotic extant' (12, Dec 1822, 775) and found Keats to have 'outhunted Hunt in a species of emasculated pruriency, that … looks as if it were the product of some imaginative Eunuch's muse within the melancholy inspiration of the Haram' (18, Jan 1826, 26). Beyond such personal insults, conservative critics accused the cockneys of embracing radicalism. Hunt was variously attacked for a politics that was 'debased by a noxious and disgusting mixture of libertinism and jacobinism' (Gazette, 4, 25 May 1822, 49), for a religious scepticism that offered 'a poor tame dilute of the blasphemies of the Encyclopaedie' (Blackwood's, 2, Oct 1817, 40, 39), and for a suspect poetics, 'new-fangled style of poetry, facetiously yclept the Cockney School' (Gold's London Magazine, 1, April 1820, 401).

These attacks on the aesthetics and politics of Hunt's circle were powerful then and have remained so, as scholars continue, for example, to separate Keats from his allegiances to Hunt and his 'school'. None the less, while the cockney label was not of its members' devising, its use should not obscure the existence of a self-aware intellectual community organized around the Hunt household.

What came to be known as the Cockney School coalesced after Hunt had been freed from prison (3 February 1815) and settled at the Vale of Health in Hampstead. In October 1816 Keats was introduced to Hunt by Cowden Clarke, a friend to both and the son of Keats's schoolmaster; Keats wrote to Clarke of the impending meeting, ''t will be an Era in my existence' (9 October 1816, Letters of John Keats, 1.113). Shelley appeared at Hunt's cottage that December to renew a brief acquaintance first made in 1811; Hunt perhaps became Shelley's dearest friend, with the poet dedicating The Cenci to Hunt as the most 'gentle, honourable, innocent and brave' of his acquaintance and as a man in 'patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political tyranny' (Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 237–8). As these young poets arrived, they were introduced to, among others, Hazlitt—the leading theatrical critic of the day and the period's most acute critical mind—Godwin, a leading political philosopher and novelist, Haydon, who linked them into the world of art, and Vincent Novello, who helped foster the 'school's' delight in Mozart. Cowden Clarke described the gatherings of the group as:

Evenings of Mozartian operatic and chamber music at Vincent Novello's own house, where Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Keats, and the Lambs were invited guests; the brilliant supper parties at the alternate dwellings of the Novellos, the Hunts, and the Lambs, who had mutually agreed that bread and cheese, with celery, and Elia's immortalized ‘lutheran beer’ were to be the sole cates provided; the meetings at the theatres, when Munden, Dowton, Liston, Bannister, Elliston and Fanny Kelly were on the stage; the picnic repasts enjoyed together by appointment in the fields that lay spread in green breadth and luxuriance between the west end of Oxford Street and the western slope of Hampstead Hill—are things never to be forgotten.

Members of Hunt's circle shared common enthusiasms for the works of Edmund Spenser, classical myth, and Italian culture, and they vied with one another in poetry, performing in sonnet contests when they would write to a set topic. Keats, describing life at Hunt's cottage in 'Sleep and Poetry', celebrated:

ll. 317–22The circle also engaged in intellectual debates—Mary Shelley recalled discussing monarchy and republicanism with Hazlitt until 3 a.m. (Journals, 163)—which Bryan Procter noted were not arguments for 'the sake of conquest, but to strip off the mists and perplexities which sometimes obscure truth' (Procter, 125). It was this environment that nourished some of the greatest art of the period.

Though the notion of a Cockney School is today most closely associated with its critics, it was in fact Hunt who first signalled the group's existence, in his review 'Young poets', published in The Examiner (1 Dec 1816). Here he argued that Shelley, Keats, and John Hamilton Reynolds, along with Byron, marked 'a new school of poetry rising of late', characterized by an 'aspiration after real nature and original fancy'. Evidence of this new school appeared in Hunt's Examiner and later in The Indicator, which featured poetry and favourable reviews. Volumes such as Hazlitt and Hunt's collaborative essay series The Round Table (1817), and Hunt's Foliage (1818), which contained occasional poems celebrating members of the group, were other public declarations of the group's existence and vision. Literary dedications also marked affiliative connections: Hunt inscribed Rimini to Byron and dedicated Amyntas to Keats, while Keats's Poems and Shelley's The Cenci were dedicated to Hunt. Adonais, Shelley's elegy for Keats, is simply the most famous poem by one member of the group about another. Other instances include Keats's poem on Hunt's release from prison; Hunt's poems to Keats, Shelley, Haydon, Novello, and Horace Smith; Reynolds's responses to poems by Keats and Hunt; or Smith's sonnet written after reading Shelley's 'Ozymandias'.

As with any network there were internal tensions and quarrels. Later scholars have more often remembered these divisions than the continuing solidarity of individual members of the group (for example Keats—supposedly estranged from Hunt—went to live with him during his illness in 1820). Members of Hunt's circle also continued their communal cultural work. The project of The Liberal, a collaborative effort by Hunt, Byron, and Shelley taken up in Italy after Hunt's arrival there in 1822, was a later flowering of the group's collective vision. This, coupled with Shelley's invitation to Keats and Horace Smith to come to Italy, can be seen as an attempt to recreate the Cockney School overseas—an attempt frustrated by the deaths of Keats and Shelley in 1821 and 1822 respectively. Following the circle's fragmentation the Cockney School endured as a negative label deployed by critics seeking to highlight individualism at the expense of a cultural network that has come to be recognized as a means by which individual talent was nurtured and that became an embodiment of Hazlitt's 'spirit of the age'.