There are certain people who have exerted considerable significance in the history of letters without having been great writers themselves: Gertrude Stein, for instance, and in our own era, George Plimpton. They have served as a species of facilitator, encouraging young talent, gathering writers around them, creating a cross-germination of ideas and styles. Such a person was James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784–1859). Of his more than eighty published works, only two short poems remain in general currency: “Abou Ben Adhem” and “Jenny Kissed Me,” both of which turn up frequently in popular anthologies. The rest of his poetry has turned to dust, for it exemplifies the superfluities of its age: Hunt had all the affectation of Browning and the sentiment of Dickens, but the genius of neither. His passionate political journalism, famous in its day, has lost its urgency along with its topicality, and is now of interest only to the historian. Only as a critic has Hunt retained an eminent place in nineteenth-century literature. His genius was not for original imaginative work, but for recognizing that originality in others.

But Leigh Hunt had a tremendous personality which lives on through the diaries and letters of his famous friends—Byron, Shelley, Carlyle, and countless others—and in the great fictional character that Dickens made of him, Harold Skimpole of Bleak House. In fact if one were to try to describe Hunt one could not do better than to call him “Dickensian”: his character and life were extravagant in exactly the manner we have come to associate with that novelist.

Posterity has given Hunt mixed reviews as a personality and literary arbiter. Virginia Woolf saw him as “our spiritual grandfather, a free man … a light man, I daresay, but civilized… . These free, vigorous spirits advance the world.” Peter Quennell, writing in 1940, was more damning. Hunt had admirable qualities, he acknowledged, but

wherever they grew … into his public life, they were apt to fritter themselves into gush and artifice. Thus, for social purposes, his real devotion to a host of friends was transmuted into sentimentalism and vapid coterie-talk, while his knowledge and intense love of art and literature tailed off in the attitudinizing of a suburban petit maitre.

After having read Anthony Holden’s new biography of Hunt, The Wit in the Dungeon, I am more inclined toward Woolf’s opinion than Quennell’s.[1] Not that Quennell’s observations and judgments are untrue: it is just that when everything is taken into account, Hunt’s infinite enthusiasm can only be seen as a force for good. He appreciated talent, beauty, and quality, and nurtured these wherever he found them. He might have been a bad husband and an improvident father, but these faults should lie between him and his family, not between him and posterity.

Nicholas Roe has recently produced a fine study, The Fiery Heart, but it covered Hunt’s life only up to Shelley’s death in 1822. The sole full-length life of Hunt until now has been Edmund Blunden’s 1930 Leigh Hunt: A Biography, so Holden’s effort is very welcome. It was an absolutely fascinating life, irresistible, one would think, to an imaginative biographer. Hunt was born the year Samuel Johnson died and died the year A. E. Housman was born; his life spanned two entirely distinct periods in English literature, the Romantic and the Victorian. As Holden says, “He was poet, critic, editor, essayist, novelist and playwright, the mentor and friend of Keats and Shelley, colleague and sparring partner of Byron and Hazlitt, intimate of Lamb and Carlyle, Browning and Dickens. Alongside Wordsworth, who largely eschewed literary London, Hunt’s was the longest nineteenth-century literary life, with the widest circle of acquaintance and as large a claim as any to the shaping of literary opinions.”

Even Hunt’s childhood was Dickensian: his first memory was of the jail cell where his father, Isaac, had been imprisoned for debt. Isaac and his wife were Americans—Mary a Philadelphian, Isaac a Creole from Barbados—who had remained loyal to the English crown during the Revolution and were accordingly compelled to move to England, Isaac having been literally tarred and feathered for his outspoken support for the monarch. Back in England Isaac decided to devote his considerable theatrical gifts to a career in the pulpit. It was an unfortunate choice, according to his son, who felt that he “should have been kept at home in Barbados” where “he might have preached, and quoted Horace, and drunk his claret, and no harm done.” Isaac Hunt passed on to his son not only his profligacy but some desirable qualities as well: a love of literature and “a remarkable capacity to remain cheerful in adversity.”

The intellectually precocious Hunt attended the charity school at London’s Christ’s Hospital. He left at the age of fifteen without having been chosen to go on to university, but he was already an enthusiastic and promising poet whose proud father arranged for his juvenilia to be published by subscription. But this quick start seemed to lead nowhere, and “for the next four years Hunt would do little but write more derivative, unoriginal verse.”

It was his older brother John Hunt, a printer, who finally provided direction. John wished to become a publisher specializing in the sort of radical journalism pioneered in William Cobbett’s Political Register; in 1805 he launched an eight-page weekly paper called the News, taking his younger brother on as drama critic. In this new capacity Hunt proved a surprising success—although “How hard it goes with one who would like to have been known as a poet to concede that he has more of a hand for prose,” he ruefully admitted. He began to earn a reputation as a lively commentator on the theatrical scene and a refreshingly unbiased critic, in the eyes of one contemporary “the greatest dramatic critic of that day” whose judgment “was universally sought and received as infallible by all actors and lovers of the drama.”

The clever and versatile Leigh was clearly John Hunt’s greatest asset, and the two brothers now embarked on a fruitful journalistic partnership. Both were liberal Whigs with a strong faith in liberty and human rights, and were prepared to risk not only their reputations but also their persons and livelihoods in these causes. Hazlitt described John Hunt as “the tried, steady, zealous and conscientious advocate of the liberty of his country, and the rights of mankind,” and the painter Benjamin Haydon was just as adulatory, calling him “As noble a specimen of a human being as ever I met in my life.” In 1808 the brothers launched the Examiner, a reformist journal “upon Politics, Domestic Economy and Theatricals,” with John as the publisher and Leigh the editor and chief contributor; his byline was the “indicator” symbol of a little pointing hand, and over the years “Indicator” became his nickname and nom de plume.

Leigh Hunt’s front-page editorials were, as Holden tells us, “almost recklessly outspoken from the first” in their defense of the Hunt brothers’ favorite causes: parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation, and the abolition of the slave trade. When reminded that slavery was indispensable to Britain’s imperial ambitions Hunt famously replied that “it will be more glory to England to have abolished the Slave Trade than if she had conquered the universe.” Needless to say he quickly became unpopular with the government, which made numerous attempts to suppress the brothers’ publications on charges of libel—especially when Hunt, in a spirited critique of the military practice of flogging, compared the British army unfavorably to that of Napoleon.

These jibes continued in the pages of the Reflector, a quarterly the Hunts founded in 1811 that, along with its political content, relaunched the occasional essay, publishing now-classic pieces by Charles Lamb, Hunt, and William Hazlitt. The beginning of the Regency later that year provided the Reflector and the Examiner with an irresistible target in the person of the fat and dissipated Prince Regent (later King George IV), who once he had gained power immediately turned his back on his longtime Whig supporters and become an arch-Tory. Hunt’s front-page “Princely Qualities” of 1812 and Lamb’s anonymous poem “The Triumph of the Whale” were particularly damaging to the Prince’s image.

The Tory press went completely over the top on the occasion of the Prince Regent’s half-century, with the Morning Post extolling him as the “Glory of the People … the Protector of the Arts … the Maecenas of the Age. … Wherever you appear, you conquer all hearts, wipe away tears, excite desire and love, and win beauty towards you… . You breathe eloquence—You inspire the Graces—You are an Adonis in Loveliness!” How could Hunt resist this? Far from being an “Adonis in Loveliness,” Hunt wrote, the Prince was in fact a “corpulent gentleman of fifty … a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.”

This is going a little far even by modern standards, and the Hunt brothers were now called up on libel charges. The publicity was embarrassing to the Crown and the Tory administration, and the Hunts were offered clemency if they would agree to launch no more attacks on the royal family, but they declined and went to trial. Found guilty, they had to wait six weeks for sentencing, during which period they bravely continued their assaults on the Regent from the pulpit of the Examiner. Leigh Hunt remained defiant: “Rhetoric has weapons,” he wrote, “which nothing can either escape or arrest. A prison will only give us double leisure to polish them.”

Arguing that he was a political prisoner and therefore deserved privileges denied to mere criminals, Hunt managed to secure comfortable rooms that he could decorate to his own satisfaction and arranged that his wife, Marianne, and their young family should be able to join him there. He then proceeded to create “a salon unique in either literary or penal history”:

Its walls were papered with a trellis of roses, its ceiling painted as a cloud-speckled sky and the barred windows hidden behind Venetian blinds. While the carpenter built him some bookshelves, in came as much of his furniture as the larger of the two rooms would accommodate, plus a piano, a lute and busts of the great poets.

His portrait of Milton hung on one wall, another of brother John in pride of place above the fireplace. There was “not a handsomer room on that side of the water,” declared Hunt himself, while one of his first and most constant visitors, Charles Lamb, mused that “there was no other such room except in a fairy tale.”

The small prison yard outside Hunt meanwhile converted into a pastoral bower, shut it with green palings, his own prison version of his Arcadian Hampstead. This time the trellised plants, flowers, and small trees were real, as were a neatly manicured lawn and an apple tree which eventually provided enough fruit for an apple tart, served by the maid also allowed to complement the Hunt ménage… . He would make a point of “dressing myself as if for a long walk; and then, putting on my gloves, and taking my book under my arm, stepped forth, requesting my wife not to wait dinner.”

It soon became quite the fashion among the Whig literati to visit the poet in his dungeon. Longtime friends like Haydon, Lamb, Hazlitt, Thomas Moore, and Henry Crabb Robinson gathered frequently in the prison salon, and new friends, attracted by the renegade’s glamour, came to call, including Jeremy Bentham and Lord Byron. Byron found the prisoner extremely congenial. “Hunt is an extraordinary character, and not exactly of the present age. He reminds me more of the Pym and Hampden times—much talent, great independence of spirit, and an austere, yet not repulsive aspect.” Byron allowed that “He is, perhaps, a little opinionated, as all men are who are the centre of circles, wide or narrow—the Sir Oracles, in whose name two or three are gathered together—must be, and as even Johnson was; but, withal, a valuable man, and less vain than success and even the consciousness of preferring ‘the right to the expedient’ might excuse.”

From prison Hunt continued his attacks on the Regent in his Examiner column, but after his release in 1815 his principal activities shifted from the political to the aesthetic, “playing Addison to Hazlitt’s Steele.” He championed Byron, earning for his pains a reputation as a social climber. This was unfair, as Byron himself pointed out: “When party feeling ran high against me,” he later wrote, “Hunt was the only editor of a paper, the only literary man, who dared say a word in my justification. I shall always be grateful to him for the part he took on that occasion.” Hunt actively promoted the career of Shelley and of the younger, unknown Keats. His essay “Young Poets” in the Examiner of December was the first to recognize and comment upon “a new school of poetry”: Shelley, a “very striking and original thinker,” Keats and his “ardent grappling with nature,” and John Hamilton Reynolds. The same issue published a new poem, Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”; Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Ozymandias” appeared in later numbers of the magazine.

The young poets were very grateful for such attentions. Most of Keats’s biographers have agreed that Hunt’s article was the making of his career, and Keats dedicated his first volume of poetry to his benefactor with this sonnet:

Glory and loveliness have pass’d away;
For if we wander out in early morn,
No wreathed incense do we see upborne
Into the east, to meet the smiling day:
No crowd of nymphs soft voic’d and young, and gay,
In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,
Roses, and pinks, and violets, to adorn
The shrine of Flora in her early May.
But there are left delights as high as these,
And I shall ever bless my destiny,
That in a time, when under pleasant trees
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please
With these poor offerings, a man like thee.

Shelley and Hunt soon became bosom friends. They had a good deal in common: high spirits, generosity, a passion for poetry and language, and a tendency to financial recklessness. “Hunt and Shelley shared an unconventional (to say the least) attitude to money,” Holden writes, “which was to cause both lifelong difficulties. Their mutual version of the redistribution of wealth was to share money when it was in plentiful enough supply, with mutual feelings of gratitude rather than obligation.”

Hunt’s outspoken radicalism brought him enemies as well as friends, and he now became the target of almost insane attack by one John Gibson Lockhart, the assistant editor of the high Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Playing on his readers’ basest snobbery, Lockhart attacked Hunt’s circle as the “Cockney School” of poets and Hunt himself as its “chief Doctor and Professor,” an “underbred” fellow rotten through with suburban vulgarity. Lockhart’s venemous rhetoric still has the capacity to shock:

One feels the same disgust at the idea of opening [Hunt’s book-length poem The Story of Rimini], that impresses itself on the mind of a man of fashion, when he is invited to enter, for a second time, the gilded drawing-room of a little mincing boarding-school mistress, who would fain have an At Home in her house. Everything is pretence, affectation, finery and gaudiness… .

The extreme moral depravity of the Cockney School is another thing which is forever thrusting itself upon the public attention, and convincing every man of sense who looks into their productions, that they who sport with such sentiments can never be great poets. How could any man of high original genius ever stoop publicly, at the present day, to dip his fingers in the least of those glittering and rancid obscenities which float on the surface of Mr. Hunt’s Hippocrene? His poetry resembles that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. His muse talks indelicately like a tea-sipping milliner girl.

Lockhart claimed that Hunt’s friendship with the lordly Byron could only have been won through tireless tuft-hunting.

Lockhart then turned his attention to Hunt’s “younger and less important auxiliaries” like Keats, Shelley, and Hazlitt, “the Cockney Aristotle.” Hazlitt successfully sued for damages and eventually the assault died down, but it did permanent damage to Hunt, who is still frequently referred to as the leader of the Cockney School. Holden tells us that Lockhart’s attacks “have often been used to portray Hunt as a malign influence on early Keats, and to a lesser extent on Shelley and Byron. But a recent, historicist school of thought takes them rather to confirm Hunt’s role at the center of a literary and political group so ambitious and effective that conservative forces could not let it go unchallenged.”

In the meantime Hunt had launched one of his most interesting ventures, a weekly called the Indicator. Although it lasted less than a year and a half it made a permanent mark on English literature: as Holden says, “With Keats and Shelley, Hazlitt and Lamb all among its contributors, the Indicator would have earned its place in literary history solely for the first appearance of the original version of Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’” But Hunt’s own contributions were also important, for in the Indicator he revived and promoted the old personal essay in the style of the Spectator and Tatler.

In 1822, Shelley concocted a scheme for Hunt and his burgeoning family to join him and Mary in Italy. He, Hunt, and Byron would collaborate on a periodical, to be called the Liberal: the rich Byron could provide the cash, Hunt the sweat equity. Byron found the idea interesting since his publisher, John Murray, had refused to publish his most recent work. The Liberal seemed the answer to everyone’s problems, though Shelley doubted whether Hunt and Byron would prove congenial: “How long an alliance between the wren and the eagle may continue, I will not prophesy,” he said nervously.

The prospect of the trip excited Hunt for he had long yearned to lay eyes on the fabled Mediterranean, but like so much else in his life the trip seemed cursed from the very beginning. Encountering storms off the coast of England, the Hunts were marooned for almost six months in Plymouth and then spent a miserable seven weeks in their sea-crossing. Shelley was delighted to get them settled in, but then, only a month after their arrival, he embarked on his fateful sailing trip: after ten days missing at sea, his body was washed up at Viareggio. Hunt and Byron were present at the funeral pyre, and Hunt’s description of it helped to immortalize the scene for a generation of readers, writers, and painters.

The feckless Hunt was lost in Italy without Shelley, and soon his relationship with the narcissistic Byron soured just as Shelley had feared it would: as Byron’s friend Edward Trelawney observed, there was “not a single subject on which Byron and Hunt could agree.” The Liberal limped along, but Byron withdrew his support after only four issues and in 1823 departed on his own fateful trip to Greece, leaving the Hunt family stranded and broke. Sweltering in the Italian heat, at a loss as to how to support his children, Hunt began to hate the country. But after Byron’s unexpected death Hunt was finally rescued from his Italian exile by an enterprising publisher on the condition that he produce a gossipy, realistic biography of Byron to offset all the gush and idolatry that was being written about him. The book that resulted, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries; with Recollections of the Author’s Life, and of his Visit to Italy, was condemned by Hunt’s contemporaries as tasteless and ill-bred, but it is now generally agreed to have provided a healthy corrective to the Byromania that overtook Europe at the time.

By this time over forty, the father of eight children, and with his associates Keats, Shelley, and Byron all dead, Hunt entered a new circle and began to assume the persona that would eventually find fictional form in Dickens’s Mr. Skimpole. Holden writes that “the coming three decades would increasingly see Hunt’s literary character and reputation all but identified with his attitude to money”—with good reason perhaps, for as his son Thornton Hunt recollected, “he had no grasp of things material, but exaggerating his own defects, he so hesitated at any arithmetical efforts that he could scarcely count.” His alcoholic wife was even less capable than he was of controlling the children or making ends meet. Thomas Carlyle, a new friend, described their household vividly:

His house excels all you have ever read of—a poetical Tinkerdom, without parallel even in literature. In his family room, where are a sickly large wife and a whole school of well-conditioned wild children, you will find half a dozen rickety old chairs gathered from half a dozen different hucksters, and all seeming engaged, and just pausing, in a violent hornpipe. On these and around them and over the dusty table and ragged carpet lie all kinds of litter-books, paper, egg-shells, scissors, and last night when I was there, the torn half of a quartern-loaf.

His own room above stairs, into which I alone strive to enter, he keeps cleaner. It has only two chairs, a bookcase and a writing-table; yet the noble Hunt receives you in his Tinkerdom in the spirit of a king, apologizes for nothing, places you in the best seat, takes a window-sill himself if there is no other, and there folding closer his loose-flowing “muslin cloud” of a printed night-gown, in which he always writes, commences the liveliest dialogue on philosophy and the prospects of man (who is beyond measure “happy” yet); which again he will courteously terminate the moment you are bound to go.

Always short of cash, plagued by indifferent health and numerous obligations, Hunt could no longer afford to brave the libel courts, and he tried to confine himself to what Holden calls a “cheerful sentimentalism.” He proved as firm and supportive a friend to the rising generation of writers as he had to their elders, encouraging, among others, Browning, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Tennyson, Bulwer-Lytton, Landor, Rossetti, and Macaulay. He continued to write criticism and poetry, and also tried his hand at the drama, penning one “torrid melodrama,” A Legend of Florence, that scored quite a hit. He campaigned rather abjectly for the job of Poet Laureate but lost out twice, first to Wordsworth and then to Tennyson.

Hunt became particular friends with Dickens, who provided much-needed financial support by contributing the proceeds of plays and public readings to him. But Hunt’s demands always exceeded reasonable bounds, and Dickens finally became irritated by his improvident friend. His brutal lampoon of Hunt in Bleak House, then, should not come as a complete surprise to those aware of the novelist’s personal failings.

In the case of Hunt/Skimpole, Dickens was even more than usually delighted with his own mimetic prowess.

Skimpole… . I suppose he is the most exact portrait that ever was painted in words! I have very seldom, if ever, done such a thing. But the likeness is astonishing. I don’t think he could possibly be more like himself. It is so awfully true that I make a bargain with myself never to do so, any more. There is not an atom of exaggeration or suppression. It is an absolute reproduction of a real man. Of course I have been careful to keep the outward figure away from the fact; but in all else it is the Life itself.

The novelist’s friends, reading early drafts, were nervous about the obvious resemblance, with John Forster objecting that it was “too like.” Dickens responded by directing “Phiz,” his illustrator, to made Skimpole short and tubby so as to differentiate him as far as possible from the tall and willowy Hunt, but otherwise he altered very little in the portrait. When Hunt read it and declared himself “pained and perplexed,” Dickens denied everything hotly. Skimpole, he wrote, “is not you, for there are traits in it common to fifty thousand people besides.” In any case, he continued—transparently giving away the truth—“I did not fancy you would ever recognise it.”

Why did Dickens do it? Why depict Hunt, essentially a benign and good-spirited man, as an unscrupulous sponger and fraud? The real response is probably the simplest: he did it because he could. Hunt was a superb comic figure who had been handed to Dickens on a silver platter, and it would have been hard to resist the temptation. As for making Skimpole a sort of con man, Dickens simply drew out and exaggerated one strand of Hunt’s character for the thematic purpose of the novel.

Skimpole sadly turned out to be Hunt’s most lasting claim to fame, though it was certainly not his greatest one. At the time of his death in 1859 he was the grand old man of English letters (if, as Holden points out, a rather moth-eaten one), but most of the obituaries seemed obsessed by his fictional alter-ego. It colored his image for posterity too, stressing the comic side of his character (which was certainly evident enough) and turning attention away from the very real services he performed for English literature as critic, editor, journalist, poet, nurturer of talent, and fighter in the cause of freedom of speech. For too long now he has been seen merely as a chapter in the lives of his more famous friends. Holden’s biography fills a real void—which is seldom the case, any more, with literary biographies—and it is also smooth, well-written and often funny, full of apt quotations and anecdotes.

Hunt was both noble and ridiculous, in almost equal measure. Keats glorified him in the grand style as “wrong’d Libertas”; but perhaps we should let Thomas Carlyle have the last word. Hunt, he wrote,

turned up at his house often, always neatly dressed, was thoroughly courteous, friendly of spirit, and talked—like a singing bird. Good insight, plenty of a kind of humour, too; I remember little warbles in the turns of his fine voice which were full of fun and charm… . [His talk was] often enough (perhaps at first oftenest) Literary-Biographical, Autobiographical, wandering into Criticism, Reform of Society, Progress, etc. etc.—on which latter points he gradually found me very shocking I believe—so fatal to his rose-coloured visions on the subject. An innocent-hearted, but misguided, in fact rather foolish, unpractical and often much-suffering man.

Notes
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1. The Wit in the Dungeon: The Remarkable Life of Leigh Hunt, by Anthony Holden; Little, Brown, 448 pages, $29.95. Go back to the text.