Cosmopolitan "Flânerie": Leigh Hunt as Literary Cartographer

Abstract

Imagination enriches everything. ... Even brick and mortar are vivified, as of old at harp of Orpheus. A metropolis becomes no longer a mere collection of houses and trades. It puts on all grandeur of its history and its literature. (On Realities of Imagination) A map of fictitious, literary, and historical London, would, of itself, constitute a great curiosity. (The World of Books) Leigh Hunt's career was as long as his personae were various. Child prodigy, theatrical critic, editor of Examiner, the wit in dungeon, poet of Rimini, head of Cockney School, Hampstead host, friend of Shelley and Keats, expatriate liberal, friendly essayist, the Companion, avuncular man-of-letters, model for Dickens's Skimpole, Victorian autobiographer ... list goes on and on. Nowhere, however, is he cast as a flaneur. Or as a cartographer. Yet it is in these two related guises--principled idler of and literary map-maker--that he did some of his most sustained, most characteristic, and most important work. Without Hunt's literary rambles, that is to say, maps of both British literature and British literary history would be significantly different. Throughout latter half of his long career, Hunt can often be found at work surveying expanding territory covered by his maps of metropolis as well as of world of books. From 1820s through 1850s, Hunt wrote over 100 essays, under such headings as Townsman and Streets of Metropolis, in which he chronicled his musings on a London at once urban (the contemporary signs of steam omnibuses, gas illuminations, and waterworks) and pastoral (an idealized realm of literary associations, allusions, and memories). Whether walking in City, strolling through Chelsea, or lounging in Kensington, Hunt increasingly styled himself as sole cicerone to a London no one other than he seemed to have charted. Ultimately, this literary cartography yielded two distinctive results: most concretely, it produced three-volume atlas or physiology of London comprised of The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events (1848); The Old Court Suburb; or, Memorials of Kensington, Regal, Critical, and Anecdotal (1855); and A Saunter Through the. West End (1861). More pervasively, Hunt's promenades created him as English literature's most convivial flaneur. Hunt's idiosyncratic map consists of a seemingly inexhaustible collection of cultural, topographical, architectural, historical, and literary anecdotes, all conversationally related to reader along course of a promenade through a London which is equal parts evidence and evocation. Read individually or collectively, these musings inspired by of London present Hunt's readers with a singular brand of British panoramic literature as well as of British literary history. Oddly enough, they have received next to no critical attention. Though these writings are amongst Hunt's least well-known, they exemplify his greatest strengths as an amateur belletrist and a professional man-of-letters. As Hunt meanders from, say, Regent's Park to Finchley or rambles through Chelsea--musing on how ought to have been named, or what sort of books night-watchmen favor, or why it was that Johnson was so fond of Fleet Street--the man-of-letters effortlessly metamorphoses into man-about-town, an unrivaled literary flaneur who assures his readers that streets shall bud with pleasant memories, like old walls with ballads (The Townsman 251). His persona in these writings is both recognizably romantic and conspicuously modern: he reads London both as an elysian fairyland, populated by spirits of departed writers, and as a modern metropolis, punctuated by its bustling crowds and industrial innovations. Hunt's highly literary flanerie conjures two writers in particular: his attention to material details of and phenomenality of walking echoes Gay's instructions along same lines in Trivia, or The Art of Walking Streets of London (1716), while his cultivation of persona of one who abandons himself to impressions of moment resembles Baudelaire's idler in arcades in The Paris of Second Empire in Baudelaire (1938). …