Authorship of a ‘Leigh Hunt?’ Satire

Abstract

In 1855, William Bates1 submitted a Query, consisting of eight ‘Anonymous and Pseudonymous Works’, proposing that, if ‘those possessed of such information would spontaneously contribute it, a valuable nucleus might be formed for a future dictionary’,2 following Barbier’s French example. Bates’s list included ‘The Rebellion of the Beasts, or the Ass is dead! Long live the Ass!!! By a late Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. London, J. & H.L. Hunt. 12 mo. 1825’, which has spent most of the intervening period attributed, with varying degrees of conviction, to the publisher’s brother, Leigh Hunt. Barnette Miller maintained that ‘There is every reason to believe that it was by [Leigh] Hunt, although he does not mention it elsewhere. It is an exceedingly clever satire on monarchy and far surpasses anything else of the kind that he ever did’.3 While Luther Brewer noted that ‘The [British] Museum lists the book under Leigh Hunt but questions the authorship. The work is a satire well written. It contains many passages of a Hunt flavor’.4 In his 2004 edition of The Rebellion of the Beasts, Douglas A. Anderson acknowledged uncertainty over the usual attribution, but concluded that ‘Leigh Hunt remains a reasonable candidate and at present the only one’,5 so the edition was published under Hunt’s name. Hunt’s biographer, Nicholas Roe, was more sceptical, arguing that, since Hunt had been in Italy from 1822 and ‘Not one of his letters refers to The Rebellion, and there is no surviving letter from or to Hunt in Italy (1822–1825) in which the pamphlet is mentioned’, and since ‘Once he had surrendered his interest in the Examiner, Hunt had quarrelled bitterly with John’, so that ‘The two brothers were estranged for years’, it therefore ‘seems unlikely that Leigh Hunt was the author of The Rebellion of the Beasts published by John Hunt and his son in 1825’.6 As alternative candidates, Roe suggested Thomas Wooler, whose Secret History of the Radical Era was advertised in the back of the first edition of The Rebellion of the Beasts, and Richard Porson, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, whose A New Catechism for the Use of the Natives of Hampshire: Necessary to be Had in All Sties may have provided the model for a similar passage in The Rebellion of the Beasts.