Popular Imperialism in Victorian Women’s Poetry: Nation and Empire in Eliza Cook’s ‘The Englishman’

This paper builds upon previous studies on ‘the political Poetess’ (Lootens 2017) and on the intersections of poetics and politics as exemplified by patriotic and imperial poetry, and it similarly focusses on Victorian women’s public writing. More specifically, I aim to analyse the relationship between nation and empire in Eliza Cook’s popular ‘The Englishman’ (1837), which was set to music by John Blockley and inspired parodies such as ‘Punch’’s ‘The Jingo-Englishman’ (1878). As I will show in my close reading, the fourth stanza of Cook’s poem strategically collapses the distinction between ‘English’ and ‘British’, as the text attempts to make the case for regarding its patriotic construction of English national superiority as the grounds on which British imperial expansion may be justified. What is more, as noted by Cook herself, ‘The Englishman’, written by ‘a feminine pen’, challenges contemporary gender norms. Therefore, in my contextualisation and analysis of Cook’s poem, I will also pay attention to how the text alternatively re-establishes or redraws the boundaries between feminine and masculine places as well as those between domestic and colonial spaces. Popular poems such as Cook’s, I will argue, complicate misguided and simplistic but still predominant accounts of the interplay between poetry and the British Empire in the long nineteenth century