Leigh Hunt to Lord Byron: Eight Letters from Horsemonger Lane Gaol

Abstract

I On 3 February 1813 Leigh Hunt was sentenced to two years in the Surrey Gaol in Horsemonger Lane for libelling the Prince Regent, while his brother John, joint proprietor and printer of the Examiner, was simultaneously committed to the Middlesex House of Correction in Coldbath Fields for the same offence. During the period of his imprisonment, Leigh Hunt radically and imaginatively transformed his prison cell and the adjoining garden and frequently held what was effectively a salon, attended by friends and supporters and by contemporary celebrities, including Henry Brougham, Benjamin Robert Haydon and Jeremy Bentham. Perhaps his most famous visitor was Lord Byron, four years his junior, who was introduced by Thomas Moore and who anticipated the occasion with some verses which were characteristically insouciant: 'Tomorrow be with me, as soon as you can, sir, / All ready and dress'd for proceeding to spunge on / (According to compact) the wit in the dungeon'.1 Moore himself had told Hunt in a letter postmarked 2 April 1813: 'I was well aware that, on the first novelty of your imprisonment you would be over-whelmed with all sorts of congratulations & condolences, and therefore resolved to reserve my tribute both of approbation & sympathy till the gloss of your chains was a little gone off, and both friends & starers had got somewhat accustomed to them.' Excusing himself by a reference to 'true Irish phrase and spirit', he exhibited a confused emotional licence that is almost Huntian, while also acknowledging the significance of the absent John Hunt: 'my heart takes you by the hand most cordially, and [...] I only wish heaven had given me a brother, whom I could think so well of & feel so warmly about'. He concluded this part of his letter by promising a visit: 'I hope to be in London in about four or five weeks, when one of my first visits shall be to Horse-monger Lane, and I trust I shall find your restrictions so far released as to allow of my not merely looking at you, but passing an hour or two with you in your room.'2 Almost three years later, Hunt remembered the occasion when he publicly reminded Byron how 'MOORE and you / Came to my cage, like warblers kind and true, / And told me, with your arts of cordial lying, / How well I looked, when you both thought me dying'.3 For his part, Moore admitted that he 'regarded the fate of Mr. Hunt with more than common interest' and that he was gratified by the initial social arrangements. In the opening stages, the only other guest was Hunt's old schoolfellow Thomas Mitchell, but for Moore this comfortable circumstance quickly changed for the worse: 'Soon after dinner [...] there dropped in some of our host's literary friends, who, being utter strangers to Lord Byron and myself, rather disturbed the ease into which we were all settling.'4 One of these visitors was John Scott, known to Hunt as a fellow-editor and once (whatever Moore might say or misapprehend) Byron's fellowpupil at Aberdeen Grammar School. In spite of such awkwardness and the unfortunate personal encounter, Byron (like Moore, who had the advantage of a previous correspondence) seems to have been impressed by Hunt. Over the next few months, he called on 'the wit in the dungeon' and brought him presents. Hunt was confined to Horsemonger Lane Gaol but he reciprocated by writing Byron a number of letters, eight of which have survived in the Murray Archive and seven of which are here published in full for the first time. The eighth letter, which is also printed here, was published over a hundred years ago in an Appendix to Prothero's edition of Byron's letters and journals. Although Prothero's transcription is verbally exact, and provides a suggestive cross-reference to the 'Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte', it ignores larger questions of Byronic and Huntian contexts and necessarily neglects the interpretative framework provided by the other seven prison letters.5 Since all eight letters are fully available, they can now be related to a series of letters from Byron to Hunt, and help to provide new and sharper contexts both for Byron's writing and for Hunt's other letters to Byron, together with which they can be read for the first time. …