The Blackwood's Attacks on Leigh Hunt

Abstract

H1 very Concubine of so impure a wretch as Leigh Hunt would be to be pitied, wrote John Gibson Lockhart in first number of Blackwood's Magazine in October 1817, but alas! for Wife of such a Husband! For him there is no charm in simple Seduction; and he gloats over it only when accompanied with Adultery and Incest.' The previous year Hunt had published his ambitious poem The Story of Rimini, based on Dante's tale of Paolo and Francesca, and he had subsequently claimed that he and his friends represented a new school of poets, following in footsteps of Lake School.2 In response, Lockhart, writing under pseudonym Z, had coined phrase the Cockney School of Poetry, and had set out to demolish Hunt in a series of articles on his poem that take to an extreme violent personal attacks of early-nineteenth-century reviewing. Critics both then and since have tried to account for Blackwood's reviewers' reliance on open character assassination. Contemporaries tended to