Gregory Dart is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department of University College London. His research, both current and prospective, is centrally concerned with the modern city, as a cultural and material phenomenon. His first monograph, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge, 1999), examined the influence of the French Revolution on English Romantic writers. Since then he has published widely on Romantics and the city, edited two selections of Hazlitt's writings and written a short book on the relationship between unrequited love and stalking.

• Introduction: the Cockney moment; 1. Leigh Hunt, John Keats and the suburbs; 2. William Hazlitt and the Periodical Press; 3. Liber Amoris and lodging houses; 4. Pierce Egan and life in London; 5. Charles Lamb and the alchemy of the streets; 6. John Martin, John Soane and Cockney art; 7. B. R. Haydon and debtors' prisons; 8. Charles Dickens and Cockney adventures.

'The venturesomeness of the book is in keeping with its subject, and the study often finds original ways to get topography and text to shed light on one another.' London Review of Books