The Patriotic Poetess: Nation and Empire in Eliza Cook’s Poetry

Despite a renewal of scholarly interest in the life and writings of Victorian working-class poet and journalist Eliza Cook (e.g., Robinson 2001; Smith 2005; Easley 2016; Moine 2016; Boos 2024), her more overtly patriotic poetry has remained unduly neglected by Victorianists. Building upon previous research into ‘the political Poetess’ (Lootens 2017), my paper will argue that Cook’s popular poetic voice complicates historical accounts of early Victorian poetry as a ‘non-imperial form of literature’ (Porter 2004, 140) by challenging gendered expectations governing poetic expression and political engagement in the period. To this end, I will combine textual analysis with historical contextualisation and provide a critical discussion of Cook’s overlooked patriotic poetry. First, I will close-read texts such as ‘England’ and ‘The Englishman’ (Cook 1838, 87–88 and 147–49), showing how these poems collapse the distinction between ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ in an attempt to make the case for regarding their patriotic construction of (English) national superiority as the grounds on which (British) imperial expansion may be justified. Having unpicked the ideological implications of the strategic conflation of the national and imperial dimensions in Cook’s poetic output, I will conclude by reconstructing and discussing the gendered reception of ‘The Englishman’, a boldly patriotic poem that – Cook was reportedly told – ‘a feminine pen should never have traced’ (Cook 1845, vii)