141-) English Literature
Leigh Hunt
Literary
Career
Leigh
Hunt, prolific poet, essayist, and journalist, was a central figure of the
Romantic movement in England. He produced a large body of poetry in a variety
of forms: narrative poems, satires, poetic dramas, odes, epistles, sonnets,
short lyrics, and translations from Greek, Roman, Italian, and French poems.
His vivid descriptions and lyrical quality are noteworthy, as is his keen
delight in nature, and he is a master of mood and atmosphere. As a poet, he
played a major role in freeing the couplet from the rigidity of neoclassical
practice. He had remarkable insights as a literary critic and discovered and
introduced the public to many poets, among them John Keats, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, Robert Browning, and Alfred Tennyson. He encouraged many other
writers, such as Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Walter Savage Landor, and
Charles Dickens. He was a journalist of note and was editor of the influential
Examiner from its inception in 1808 to his departure for Italy in 1821. He was
also the author of a novel and several plays, two of which, A Legend of
Florence (1840) and Lovers' Amazements (1858), were produced during his
lifetime.
He
was born James Henry Leigh Hunt on October 19, 1784 to, Isaac, a lawyer from
Barbados, and Mary Shewell Hunt, the daughter of a wealthy merchant of
Philadelphia. As staunch Tories, they were fled from Philadelphia to England at
the beginning of the Revolutionary War. There, Isaac became a popular Anglican
preacher but was so impractical and improvident that he spent a good deal of
time in debtor's prison, of which Hunt has some of his earliest memories. Isaac
Hunt did manage, though, to find his son a place in Christ's Hospital school in
1791. There, Hunt received all his formal education, staying until 1799
Hunt's
first volume of poems, Juvenilia, was written at school and published by
subscription in 1801 through the auspices of his father, who was able to amass
a long list of notable subscribers from the United States as well as England.
The volume contains translations, sonnets, pastorals, elegies, and hymns
imitating Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and William Collins. It was an instant
success, going through four editions by 1804 and was praised by leading
literary reviews as showing promise for such a young poet.
After
his schooling, Hunt served an apprenticeship as clerk to his barrister brother,
Stephen, but disliked the work intensely. In 1805 his brother John started a
weekly paper, The News. As drama critic for it, Hunt gained a reputation for
being perceptive and impartial at a time when impartiality was rare. In fact,
he was so intent upon being impartial that he refused the acquaintance of any
actor whom he might have to review, lest the acquaintance color his criticism.
His critical essays in The News were sufficiently popular that in 1807 he was
able to publish a selection of them as Critical Essays on the Performers of the
London Theatres. Hunt's real career as a journalist, however, began in 1808
when he became editor of The Examiner with his brother John as publisher. Very
shortly after entering on the editorship, he felt it necessary to resign his
clerkship in the war office, which he had held since 1803, because of a
possible future conflict of interest with his liberal editorials. The Examiner
became an influential weekly, and Hunt developed a wide reputation not only for
his literary criticism but for his political essays. On July 3, 1809, after
several years of courtship, Hunt married Marianne Kent, daughter of a court
milliner.
In
1811, Hunt began editing the first of his many journals, The Reflector, a
political magazine that includes essays and poetry. Hunt's satirical "The
Feast of the Poets" was first published in the March 1812 issue of The
Reflector. It is an attempt, with copious notes, at poetical criticism. In it
Apollo descends for a feast with the chief contemporary poets but dismisses,
with varying degrees of contempt, all except four—Thomas Campbell, Robert
Southey, Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Moore. In the 1814 edition, which was
much altered from the original, William Wordsworth is hailed as "Prince of
Bards" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Gordon, Lord Byron, are
given places. This change caused apparent consternation among some reviewers
since these poets had been summarily dismissed in the earlier version of the
poem. Actually, however, most reviewers, whether writing favorably or unfavorably,
seemed to be moved more by politics than critical judgment, the reason being
that as outspoken liberal editor of The Examiner, Hunt had won many admirers
but also many political enemies. Consequently, at least as long as he was
editor, his literary works tended to be praised or damned according to the
politics of the reviewer. Thus, on the one hand, Feast of the Poets was
condemned "as despicable a performance as could well be produced. It is
flimsy, feeble, unsustained and impertinent" (Satirist, April 1814) and on
the other as a "lively" and "sublime" poem (Eclectic
Review, June 1814; Champion, February 20, 1814).
On
March 22, 1812 Hunt, in an Examiner editorial and as a part of an ongoing
attack on the Prince Regent, slandered him as a fat "Adonis" of 50.
As a result he and his brother John spent two years (February 3, 1813 to
February 2, 1815) in prison and paid fines of £500 each. Hunt's was an unusual
incarceration. He was permitted to continue editing The Examiner from prison,
which he did with little change in the tone of his editorials. During his
prison stay Hunt wrote his first long narrative poem, The Story of Rimini. It
was particularly praised by Byron, who read drafts of the poem as it progressed
and to whom it was eventually dedicated. Based on the few lines about Francesca
di Rimini in Dante's Inferno, The Story of Rimini tells of the fatal passion
between Paulo and Francesca, whom Paulo escorted from her home in Ravenna to
Rimini, where she was to be married to his brother, Prince Giovanni, and the
tragedy that follows the revelation of their love.
In
1816 Hunt made friends with Keats and renewed his friendship with Shelley, whom
he had first met briefly in 1811. In December 1816 he introduced them and their
poems to the public in the Examiner. Not long thereafter, John Gibson Lockhart,
in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (October 1817), began his anonymous, bitter
attacks on Hunt and his friends, whom he scornfully dubbed the "Cockney
School." Lockhart, whose criticism of Keats and Hazlitt was particularly
sharp, was shortly joined by the Quarterly Review, under the editorship of
William Gifford. The attacks continued for several years, but except for a
fruitless demand in the Examiner at the outset that the anonymous writer of the
attacks in Blackwood's reveal his identity, Hunt did not answer save in defense
of Keats and Shelley. Not only did Hunt, Keats, and Shelley visit frequently,
but in 1817 Hunt and his entire family stayed in Marlowe with Shelley for
several months, and in 1820 Keats, mortally ill with tuberculosis, stayed with
Hunt for several months in his cottage at Hampstead Heath. During the many
visits poetic skills were honed with poetry-writing competitions, and the heady
relationships resulted in publication of several volumes of poetry by the three
before Shelley and Keats went to Italy for their health in 1818 and 1820
respectively.
Hunt's
most prolific period of poetic activity occurred in the years 1812 to 1820. In
1818 Hunt published Foliage, his first volume of poetry since Juvenilia, which
includes one of his best poems, "The Nymphs." Hunt not only continued
editing the Examiner, but also two more journals: The Literary Pocket Book,
begun in 1818, and The Indicator (1819-1821), which contains essays full of
good cheer, on literature, life, manners, morals, and nature. Lamb was so
enthusiastic about it that he hailed it with a sonnet. In 1819, Hunt published
two more narrative poems: "Hero and Leander," which retells the
familiar story of Leander swimming the Hellespont to visit Hero, and
"Bacchus and Ariadne," which describes the procession of Bacchus
toward Ariadne, who has just been abandoned by Theseus on the isle of Naxos.
Though shorter, they are like The Story of Rimini in their slight action but considerable
lavish description and frequent appreciation of the physical. Peter George
Patmore, the reviewer of these two poems for the London Magazine (July 1820),
praised at length Hunt's delicate verse, love of nature, and originality. Also
in 1819 The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt was published in three volumes
including all the poems he had published to that time with the exception of his
juvenile poems. Another narrative poem, Hunt's translation of Torquato Tasso's
Amyntas, a Tale of the Woods, was printed in 1820.
In
the fall of 1821 Shelley and Byron persuaded Hunt to come to Italy and edit a
literary journal, eventually called The Liberal, that the three of them would
write. Hunt set out on November 15, 1821 with his family, but frightful winter
storms forced the ship to turn back. Because of further delays, he did not sail
until May 13 ,1822 and arrived on July 1. Within days of Hunt’s arrival,
Shelley drowned in a sudden squall during his return home to Lerici. Shelley's
death not only shattered Hunt emotionally, but put him in a particularly
difficult financial situation. He and his family of seven were destitute and in
debt for the trip to Italy. Hunt had planned to live on the generosity offered
by Shelley until The Liberal was established, but Shelley's death threw him on
the mercy of Byron, who did not like Hunt much and detested his family.
Furthermore, Shelley had been the chief spirit behind The Liberal, and his
death left the uneasy partnership of Byron and Hunt to produce the journal.
They held together barely long enough to publish four issues. The majority of
each issue was written by Hunt with Byron contributing and Mary Shelley
providing some previously unpublished short poems by Shelley. Other
contributors included Hazlitt, Mary Shelley, Horace Smith, Charles Armitage
Brown, and Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Among the poems Hunt published in The Liberal
was "The Dogs," a political satire suggesting that Arthur Wellesley,
Duke of Wellington, treated his dogs better than his men and concluding that,
if dogs are to be treated better, they should be put in the aristocracy and go
to heaven. The Liberal, though one of the highest quality periodicals of the
early 19th century, did not last long. While the first issue sold a very
encouraging four thousand copies, a tremendous sale for the time, the second
number lost money because of higher costs and smaller sales, and the third and
fourth numbers barely covered costs. Also, Byron's interests soon shifted to
Greece, where he went in 1823 to help fight Turkey (and to die in 1824),
leaving Hunt and his family stranded in Italy with little means of support.
Hunt
was unable to return to England until September 1825, when publisher Henry
Colburn sent him a sufficient advance on a work to be written about Byron to
cover expenses. Shortly after his return he published another narrative poem,
the rollicking Bacchus in Tuscany (1825), translated from the Italian of
Francesco Redi. The work which provided the means for him to return to England,
Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, was not published until 1828. It
aroused a considerable stir because of Hunt's less-than-flattering statements
about Byron, saying that he was, among other things, ill-tempered,
ill-educated, superstitious, ungenerous, and lacking in taste. The public's
general reaction was adverse, accusing Hunt of distorting the picture of Byron
out of pure opportunism. His comments about Byron years later in his
Autobiography (1850) were considerably more tolerant.
The
1830s were most difficult for Hunt. His influential days as editor of The
Examiner were past as were his heady days with the great Romantic poets, and
his reputation was at its lowest ebb. He lived through the decade in poverty
and poor health. During the decade Hunt was forced by his debts to write
constantly. In 1830 he started a new journal, The Chat of the Week, which
shortly metamorphosed into The Tatler when the post office required too much
postage because of its shape. The Tatler, which was devoted to literature and
the stage, was something of a tour de force. For the 17 months of its existence
Hunt wrote almost every word of the daily four folio pages. In 1832 he
published two distinctive prose works. The first was a distillation of his
religious philosophy in a book of exercises and meditations titled
Christianism: or, Belief and Unbelief Reconciled, which was revised and
enlarged in 1853 as The Religion of the Heart. The second was his sole novel,
Sir Ralph Esher, a fictitious autobiography of a nobleman in the time of
Charles II, which went through three editions in four years. He also edited two
more journals: Leigh Hunt's London Journal (1834-1835), which was one of his
best and most successful, and The Monthly Repository (1837-1838). The decade
was not all work, however. He befriended Thomas Carlyle, whose wife was the
inspiration for Hunt's often-anthologized, simple, and charming rondeau,
"Jenny Kiss’d Me" (first published in the Monthly Chronicle, November
1838):
In
1835 Hunt published the intensely antiwar poem Captain Sword and Captain Pen.
Notable primarily for its vivid descriptions of the horrors of war, the poem
consists of six descriptive sections beginning with Captain Sword and his army
marching to battle, the battle, a victory ball, the battlefield at night, the
loss of Sword's reason and the rise of Captain Pen, and, finally, the
nonviolent combat of Pen leading to a Romantic apocalypse. The 1830s also saw
the publication of one of his best-remembered poems, "The Glove and the
Lions," (May 1836) first published in the New Monthly Magazine. In it, a
lady, as a love test, drops her glove among lions for her lover to retrieve; he
does so and throws it in her face. Perhaps Hunt's own favorite, "Abou Ben
Adhem," first published in S. C. Hall's Book of Gems (1838), is a simple
poem bearing the theme that to love man is the same as to love God. It also
includes the line used as Hunt's epitaph: "Write me as one who loves his
fellow men." In the July 1837 issue of the Monthly Repository Hunt
published a kind of companion poem to The Feast of the Poets, "Blue
Stocking Revels," a criticism of many contemporary women writers.
The
1840s began on an exultant note for Hunt with the successful production of his
poetic drama A Legend of Florence at the Covent Garden theater . The decade
also saw publication Hunt’s long poem, The Palfrey: A Love Story of Old Times,
published in 1842. In this nine-hundred-line poem Hunt transforms a medieval
French fabliau into a sunny romantic world full of animal spirits and warm
humor, as two old men, Sir Guy and Sir Grey, plot the marriage of Sir Grey to
Sir Guy's daughter. During this time, he also edited two anthologies of poetry:
Imagination and Fancy (1844), a collection of his favorite poems with a
critical essay on his philosophy of poetry, and Wit and Humour (1846), a
selection from English poets with critical comments. His remaining publications
of the decade were prose works though he also edited one last journal, the
weekly Leigh Hunt's Journal (December 1850-March 1851). Toward the end of the
decade Hunt finally became somewhat more secure financially. In 1844 he had
begun receiving a £120 annuity promised by Shelley before he died but delayed
until the death of Shelley's father. To this was added in 1847 a Civil List
Pension of £200 annually from the government for his services to literature.
By
the last decade of his life, Hunt's literary activities and reputation had
changed. He was no longer the vigorous reformer of The Examiner but a gentle
essayist, poet, and critic. His reputation in the United States was at its
height, as evidenced by the several editions of his works published there
during the 1850s and the visits paid to him by American authors such as
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The 1850s were also a time of
grief: In 1852 Hunt's youngest son, Vincent, died of tuberculosis; Charles
Dickens, though a friend of Hunt's, satirized him as Skimpole in Bleak House
(1853); and his wife died in 1857.
His
final decade saw the publication of Hunt's Autobiography (1850), perhaps his
best work and arguably the best autobiography of the century. It concentrates
on the early years, using as a basis the material from Lord Byron and Some of
His Contemporaries. The Autobiography is filled with portraits of the famous
and the ordinary, and Hunt comes through as cheerful, optimistic, generous, and
impulsive. Tolerance and lack of rancor are typical of the book, and especially
notable are the mild comments where one might have expected sharper criticism,
on the Prince Regent, Byron, Dickens, and old enemies. On the whole the work is
vivacious, graceful, and interesting, and marked throughout by Hunt's modesty.
In 1855 Hunt wrote and published one last volume, Stories in Verse, and edited
selections from the works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. In 1858 his
second poetic drama, the comedy Lovers' Amazements, was produced. It was
received warmly, reviewed handsomely, and bid fair to become popular, but, at
the moment of triumph, the manager, Charles Dillon, went bankrupt, and the play
and theater closed together. Hunt continued his literary activity to the end,
publishing poems and essays in Dickens's journal Household Words, The Musical
Times, Fraser's Magazine, and the Spectator. He died on August 28, 1859 while
visiting a friend in the country.
Final
years
In
1844 Mary Shelley and her son, on succeeding to the family estates, settled an
annuity of £120 upon Hunt (Rossetti 1890). In 1847 Lord John Russell set up a
pension of £200 for Hunt.
With
his finances in better shape, Hunt published the companion books Imagination
and Fancy (1844) and Wit and Humour (1846). These were two volumes of
selections from English poets, which displayed his refined, discriminating
critical tastes. Hunt also published a book on the pastoral poetry of Sicily, A
Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla (1848). The Town (2 vols., 1848) and Men, Women
and Books (2 vols., 1847) are partly made up from former material. The Old
Court Suburb (2 vols., 1855; ed. A Dobson, 2002) is a sketch of Kensington,
where Hunt long resided.
In
1850 Hunt published his Autobiography (3 vols.). It has been described as a
naive and affected, but accurate, piece of self-portraiture. Hunt published A
Book for a Corner (2 vols.) in 1849 and Table Talk appeared in 1851. In 1855,
he published his narrative poems, both original and translated, under the title
Stories in Verse.
Hunt
died in Putney in London on 28 August 1859. He was buried at Kensal Green
Cemetery. In September 1966, Christ's Hospital named one of its houses in the
memory of Hunt. Today, a residential street in his birthplace of Southgate is
named Leigh Hunt Drive in his honour.
Depiction
by Charles Dickens
In
a letter of 25 September 1853, Charles Dickens stated that Hunt had inspired
the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House; "I suppose he is the most
exact portrait that was ever painted in words! ... It is an absolute
reproduction of a real man". A contemporary critic commented, "I
recognized Skimpole instantaneously; ... and so did every person whom I talked
with about it who had ever had Leigh Hunt's acquaintance." G. K.
Chesterton suggested that Dickens "May never once have had the unfriendly
thought, 'Suppose Hunt behaved like a rascal!'; he may have only had the
fanciful thought, 'Suppose a rascal behaved like Hunt!'" (Chesterton
1906).
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