Thus John Gibson Lockhart's famous vitriol directed at Leigh Hunt, in the review which coined the epithet ‘Cockney School’. The passage reveals this critique as formed not only around class, but also through constructions of proper and improper British masculinity. Leigh Hunt is presented here in terms of the foppish masculinity which, in the decades after the French Revolution, was associated with popular Romanticism, and the threat of national social disintegration through class contamination. Here, I want to examine the manner in which, through the literary afterlife of John Keats, the Victorian imaginary retains this picture of the socially/nationally disruptive, improperly gendered, male body, and its associations with both illness and visionary sensibility. In the 1870s and 1880s, George Eliot and Henry James draw on six decades of popular associations linking aesthetic sensibility, masculine dissent and the wasting, youthful, tubercular male body to trouble the fixed boundaries of national identity and robust Anglo masculinity.

It is a critical commonplace that Victorians saw consumption as a female illness, a pathological, but also purifying expression of feminine virtue and gentleness. This feminising of consumption extends even to the reading of male characters in Victorian fiction. Katherine Byrne, in her thorough study Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination, reads Ralph Touchett, hero of James’ The Portrait of a Lady, as ‘feminised’ by tuberculosis. Byrne concludes her chapter on Portrait by reiterating a common biographical reading which sees James’ tubercular characters (in The Wings of the Dove and Portrait) as transpositions of his real life friend Minnie Temple. Reading by substitution, she concludes that, ‘the portrayal of a male consumptive in The Portrait of a Lady emerges as a portrayal of a female consumptive after all’ (Byrne 2011: 169), thus maintaining the unity of her argument that ‘with some significant and usually emasculated exceptions […] the classic literary consumptive is inevitably a woman in the Victorian era’ (ibid.: 6).