‘Werry romantic…among these Mountains & Lakes’

My essay explores Keats’s ‘Cockneyism’ in the letters describing his six-week ‘northern tour’ in 1818 with Charles Brown in letters to his brother Tom and other family members, as well as to friends like Reynolds and Bailey. His tour letters and poetry are placed in the context of post-Waterloo travel accounts of Scotland, and of contemporary criticisms of the Highland tour as a commodified and Cockneyfied cliché, especially in the wake of the craze for Scott’s Highland romances. The essay considers the literary influence of Wordsworth, Burns, and Scott, although the latter is a conspicuous absence from Keats’s account. Keats’s pedestrian tour is interpreted as an exercise in masculine self-fashioning and social mobility, a distinctive cultural performance, rather than merely an episode in the poet’s creative development. Attention is paid to Keats’s accoutrements and itinerary, and new research identifies the guidebooks he consulted, as well as his relations with local people, especially in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands. Keats’s account of key sites, like Loch Lomond, Inveraray, Mull, Iona, Staffa, and Ben Nevis are explored in relation to the light-hearted tour poetry that they inspired. My essay explores how Keats negotiated this ‘beaten track’, both as a cultural and as a literary practice, anticipating the ironic sense of poetic identity that he developed in the poems of his last years.