Leigh Hunt Research Articles

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN STYLE AND ABILITY

In the sea of literature every part communicates with every other part; there are no land-locked lakes. It was with an eye to this system that I originally recommended you to start with Lamb. Lamb, if you are his intimate, has already brought you into relations with a number of other prominent writers with whom you can in turn be intimate, and who will be particularly useful to you. Among these are Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt. You cannot know Lamb without knowing these men, and some of them are of the highest importance.

Beyond Christ's Hospital: Five Letters from Thomas Mitchell to Leigh Hunt (1810–1816)

This article prints five new letters from Thomas Mitchell (1783–1845), classical scholar and translator of Aristophanes, to reforming journalist Leigh Hunt. Written between 1810 and 1816, these letters illuminate a creatively significant period for both authors, whose intimacy dates to their student days at Christ's Hospital. While Mitchell's early friendship with Hunt has long been recognised by Hunt scholars, his wider place within Hunt's circle of friends and the extent of his literary collaboration with the editor of The Examiner are still largely unknown. As such, this newly published selection of Mitchell's correspondence allows us to revisit his relationship with Hunt in a fresh light, in the years beyond Christ's Hospital, while providing an opportunity to recover details about the development of Mitchell's career as a Romantic author and translator.

Snug Retreats: The Romantic Essay’s Grammar of Domesticity

ABSTRACT The history of the essay as a genre notoriously began in a very peculiar room: the library of Michel de Montaigne’s estate near Bordeaux. After many centuries, the form has passed through many other rooms, such as Robert Burton’s and Sir Thomas Browne’s libraries or the apartments of Sir Isaac Bickerstaff and Mr. Spectator, retaining an undeniable conjunction to the lodgings of its author. The house of the essayists has always been a place to which their readers were granted a special right of entry. This article aims to reflect on the spatial dimension of the English Romantic familiar essay as exemplified by the writings of Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb. In particular, I will discuss the importance both writers attributed to the domestic interior as the most congenial scenario in which the essayistic act should be performed. Romantic essayists seemed to be more attuned with the early modern model of Montaigne. This allegiance is striking as the most frequent outlet through which essays in early nineteenth-century England were published was the same periodical press that during the eighteenth century seemed to have repudiated the private space of the parlor in favor of the socialized communal dimension of the coffee house.

A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850, by Paul Keen

Reviewed by: A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800–1850 by Paul Keen Kimberly J. Stern (bio) A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800–1850, by Paul Keen; pp. xi + 171. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $99.99 paper, $79.00 ebook. We know the arguments all too well. Faced with budget cuts, diminishing enrollments, and a socio-political climate that demands real action, humanists are on the defense. Some claim that the humanities are valuable because they yield concrete learning outcomes and transferable skills. Others suggest that while the humanities may garner such results, their real value lies in providing access to specialized knowledge that is, as John Henry Newman observes, "an end in itself" (The Idea of a University [Yale UP, 1996], 85). As I have said, we know the arguments all too well. But this is precisely Paul Keen's point in his new book, A Defence of the Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850. By interrogating the history of this debate, Keen proposes that we can become more informed participants in it. Although Keen's book immerses the reader in debates that transpired roughly two hundred years ago, this "factual revision of our received cultural history," to borrow the words of Raymond Williams, makes it possible to approach our contemporary predicament with fresh eyes (Culture and Society [Columbia UP, 1983], viii). How can we do the vital work of interrogating the history and practice of humanistic study while also defending it? How can we advocate for the relevance of the humanities while admitting its failings? "To put this more constructively," Keen writes, "how might we begin to theorize a new 'new humanism' . . . that takes an honest engagement with these tensions as its starting point without abandoning the political impulse that helped to fuel critiques of humanism in recent decades?" (15). For Keen, the humanities are distinguished less by a stable archive of knowledge than by a willingness to probe the limits of what is known. In this spirit, this volume examines early nineteenth-century debates about the utility of the [End Page 461] humanities—in the public sphere and in education—in order to unsettle the claims that have defined this debate in our own time. As Keen illustrates in chapter 1, these claims do not always align with the political or rhetorical positions we might expect. It was Robert Southey, a "hardened Tory," who promoted in his Colloquies on Society (1829) a "model version of the public role of the humanities as a discursive space in which larger questions about human freedom and social justice could be negotiated" (37). Thomas Macaulay, an outspoken Whig, refused such a model on the grounds that the Poet Laureate had ventured into questions of economic policy that could not be treated in strictly aesthetic terms. More strikingly, Macaulay's critique of Southey is underwritten by some of the very claims that continue to inform contemporary defenses of the humanities; the poet's vision was, he proposed, incoherent and thus "provided those who were already inclined to dismiss the arts with all of the ammunition they needed" (30). Nineteenth-century thinkers did not always treat the arts and the humanities in binary terms—as a choice between applied and pure knowledge, conservatism and reform. Indeed, in chapter 2, Keen tracks the efforts of nineteenth-century thinkers to promote an "anti-sectarian" approach to the humanities, citing William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and John Stuart Mill as noteworthy advocates for "embracing literary and instrumentalist approaches as mutually enriching elements of any struggle to mobilize knowledge in the cause of reform" (80). Keen touches on many familiar thinkers and texts here. He notes, for instance, that famous passage in Mill's Autobiography (1873) where Mill locates his shifting views on utility in his reading of William Wordsworth. Yet Keen's account enables us to see Mill's mental crisis with new eyes, as less a repudiation of utility than an awakening to the political possibilities of poetry. It is a notion Mill pursues more explicitly in his 1832 essay "On Genius," which...

"Keep[ing] the Outward Figure Away from the Fact": Reading Harold Skimpole as a Person of Color in Bleak House

Despite Charles Dickens's 1859 protestations in "Leigh Hunt: A Remonstrance" (1859), scholars argue that he parodied Hunt as the indolent, selfish Harold Skimpole due to irritation with Hunt's financial issues, uneasy recollections of John Dickens's financial woes, or capitalist idealization. Although Bleak House (1853) contains multiple allusions to African missions and philanthropy, Skimpole has never been critiqued in relation to Hunt's reputed African ancestry, an open secret in literary circles. In a parody intended for mutual literary friends, Dickens may have concealed Hunt's racial heritage in "Phiz's" illustrations of Skimpole, while textual allusions suggest Hunt's moral (and hereditary) similarity to the "idle Black man" of the 1848–1849 British Guiana labor strike denounced by Thomas Carlyle in "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" (1849, 1853) and Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850).

Keats’s Vanishing Books

Keats’s poems written in the years leading up to his annus mirabilis, 1819, frequently feature books, but those references and images vanish from his poetic production in 1819 and the subsequent publication of that verse in his 1820 volume. This essay attempts to account for that shift in his poetics by exploring Keats’s relation to his friend and mentor Leigh Hunt, proposing that this poetic shift attends Keats’s political departure from Hunt’s privatised, metropolitan imagination in favour of a more public and egalitarian poetics of dispossession.

Leigh Hunt’s Aesthetics of Suburban Nature: Focusing on Hunt’s Prison Garden

This essay re-examines the significance of the aesthetics of Hunt’s suburbanism by focusing on his suburban gardening in a London jail in terms of the urban middle classes’ suburban culture during the Romantic period. Although Hunt’s suburbanism was seen as an ideological and cultural encroachment in a political aspect, this essay argues that the cultivation of Hunt’s suburban gardening embodies the notion of well-being with cheerfulness that reflects the cultural values of the rapidly growing urban middle classes as one of the aesthetic cultural pheonmena of the early nineteenth century. To acknowledge the significance of Hunt’s suburbanism, this essay first examines how Hunt practically performed his domesticated suburban gardening with his prison garden in a London jail along with an examination of “Songs and Chorus of the Flowers” and “Song of the Flowers.” It then turns to how Hunt cultivated his poetics of suburbia by analyzing Francesca’s bower of bliss in The Story of Rimini. Although Hunt was generally located at the edge of the aesthetic cultural context of the Romantic period, this essay suggests that he was at the center of the flourishing of a new kind of middle class aesthetic culture as a proponent of suburban living.

Annotated Copies of Early Editions of Johnson's Dictionary: A Preliminary Account

Abstract Early responses to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language included manuscript annotations, sometimes very extensive, in copies of the dictionary. This article surveys twenty-one copies of eighteenth-century editions of the dictionary with critical or informative annotations, bearing on etymology or usage, adding new words or senses, or improving the supply and referencing of quotations. Some of these copies are extant in institutional or private collections, and others are unlocated. The annotators include Johnson himself; members of his circle including Edmund Burke, Samuel Dyer, Edmond Malone, Hester Piozzi, and George Steevens; and other readers including Leigh Hunt, Horne Tooke, Noah Webster, and John Wilkes.

The Symbiosis of Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Haydon: Focusing on an Argument about Blacks

This essay examines the symbiotic relationship between Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Haydon within the context of the aesthetic cultural phenomenon in the early nineteenth century. By paying special attention to the Examiner used as their debate table, this essay investigates how these Cockneys’ independent voices about blacks were against, but also nurtured and advanced, each other. First, this essay explores how Hunt and Haydon constructed a friendship based on their passion for the arts. Afterward, it examines how Hunt argued against Haydon’s anatomical sketch method based on the racial hierarchy in accordance with Hunt’s humanitarian interests in blacks. Subsequently, the essay goes on to look at how Haydon defended himself against Hunt’s attack by asserting his artistic point of view about blacks. Although re-examining the very private story of friendship between Hunt and Haydon can be viewed as narrow, this essay certainly shows us a picture of the most sociable and aesthetic cultural view of the period through their friendship.

"The Production of Space: Leigh Hunt’s Social Space, Hampstead Cottage"

"The Production of Space: Leigh Hunt’s Social Space, Hampstead Cottage"

The Gendering of Rhyme: Leigh Hunt’s Effeminate Poetics in The Story of Rimini

ABSTRACT Critics such as Samuel Johnson viewed heroic couplets as logical, rational, and masculine; others, however, imagined alternative structures in the rhyming couplet, including romance couplets and feminine rhyme, which were derided by their critics as feminine, luxurious, and perverse. Leigh Hunt’s use of feminine rhyme in the early 1800s, as well as critics’ responses to his feminine and open couplets through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provides an exemplary location for considering how gendered expectations appear in poetic form. Responses to Hunt’s The Story of Rimini reproduce and extend gendered discourse on the couplet form from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. At each point, even reviewers sympathetic to Hunt describe luxuriousness, self-indulgence, and “looseness” in his poetics and his use of rhyme. This article explores both how Hunt constructs alternative gender poetics throughout his poetry, and the extent to which gender and gender expectations affected the construction and reading of rhymes over the last three hundred years.

Public confidences: Hazlitt’s “Table-Talk” and the Romantic familiar essay

ABSTRACTThe familiar essay is one of the most neglected genres of Romantic prose. Recent criticism of the essays of Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt, the familiar style’s most articulate defender, has sought to assimilate the genre into a tradition rooted in the periodical essays of Addison and Steele. Yet Hazlitt’s more immediate influence was Michel de Montaigne, who modeled sincere self-revelation as a means to ease readers’ objections. This article examines Hazlitt’s “Table-Talk” essays for the London Magazine and his collected volumes of Table-Talk—two series that present the writer differently to different groups of readers despite sharing a title and method. Hazlitt’s search for an authentic style that suggested greater sincerity is evidence of his efforts to initiate a mutually beneficial relationship with readers. In Hazlitt’s hands, then, the familiar essay should be seen as a strategy for intervening in Romantic reading practices.

Elizabeth Kent’s New Tales of Botanical Friendship

Elizabeth Kent’s New Tales of Botanical Friendship Leila Walker (bio) When leigh hunt finally arrived at livorno nearly eight months after setting out with his family to join Shelley and Byron in Italy, he took the earliest possible opportunity to write to his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent—better known as “Bess Kent” or “Bessy Kent.” It had been a terrible journey, and the bulk of Hunt’s July 2, 1822 letter describes the arduous sea voyage that frightened even experienced sailors, the lightning that bent like “the leg of a god,” and the turmoil of the Byron household upon the Hunts’ arrival. In a postscript, however, Hunt turns from his recent adventures to comment on Kent’s most recent literary effort: “I must not forget to say,” he writes, “that I liked your New tales extremely, & that they get better & better towards the conclusion.”1 For those of us familiar with Kent’s work, this postscript presented the kind of mystery that sends shivers down the spine, for Kent’s first known work, Flora Domestica, was not published until the following year. Although scholarly rumors of a collection of children’s tales can be traced back at least to 1930, the dismissal of this collection as lost or forgotten has followed nearly the same history. Now, however, I have been able to identify these “New tales” as New Tales for Young Readers, Elizabeth Kent’s first book, published anonymously in May 1822.2 Although Kent has received recent attention for her botanical works, her collection of children’s tales remained a scholarly rumor as efforts [End Page 329] to locate the book were hampered by longstanding confusion regarding the title and publication date. Most sources continue to rely on Edmund Blunden’s 1930 assertion that in addition to her to major works, Kent “prepared a book on British Birds, but I cannot identify it; and in 1831 she published a collection of New Tales for children.”3 Molly Tatchell takes Blunden’s description for the work’s title and accepts his publication date, writing that “[i]n 1831 [Kent] published a collection of New Tales for Children. But this, like her other works, is now forgotten.”4 Blunden may have taken the 1831 publication date from notices in the March and April 1831 issues of The Tatler directing “young ladies” interested in botanical lessons to inquire after Kent at her stepfather Mr. Hunter’s, “where may be had Miss Kent’s ‘New Tales for Young Readers.’”5 However, as Daisy Hay recently observed, Kent herself tentatively gave 1818 as the publication date in her application to the Royal Literary Fund in the late 1850s. Hay, who correctly identifies the book’s title as New Tales for Young Readers, surmises from an 1822 notice in The Monthly Review that Kent may have misremembered the publication date three decades later, but like Tatchell, Hay presumes the text lost to historical neglect. “This work,” she writes, “like many children’s books of the period, does not appear in library catalogues, and is unlikely to have survived.”6 At least one copy, however, did survive, and is held in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida, allowing us to confirm Hay’s speculative 1822 publication date and make new sense of Kent’s literary contributions to the Cockney School.7 New Tales for Young Readers, “By A Lady,” must have been published in the first two weeks of May, 1822: after May 5, when The Examiner announced the publication “in a few days,” but before Leigh Hunt left England on May 13, bringing a copy with him. It is a slim book, numbering 117 pages, [End Page 330] printed by C. H. Reynell for Bowdery and Kirby.8 The printer helps confirm Kent’s authorship, as Carew Henry Reynell was related to the Hunts by marriage and was John Hunt’s regular printer. The subscription list provides further evidence of the book’s authorship. Major supporters include “Mrs. Hunter,” Kent’s mother; “Lady Knighton,” wife of Sir William Knighton, to whom Kent dedicated her Flora Domestica; “Mr. Kent,” Kent’s brother; and “Mrs. Novello...

Charles Dickens’s Realism and the Romantic Essayists

Through a series of textual comparisons between Leigh Hunt’s essays and Charles Dickens’s early city sketches, this article uncovers a neglected genealogy for Dickens’s realistic depictions of the ordinary subject. From establishing Dickens’s debt to the Romantic essayists more generally, I go on to elicit a key distinction. In the essayists’ representations, detail conduces to the construction of a self; in Dickens’s, it signals a close attention to the other. Detail, then, is the marker of the ethical relation modeled in Dickens’s style of ordinariness. Foregrounding this style, I reassert Dickens’s contribution to the developing realism of the mid-nineteenth century.

The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens by Peter Cook

Reviewed by: The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens by Peter Cook Justin H. Thompson Peter Cook. The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xiii + 276. $64.99. ISBN 978-3-319-96790-5. Writing for The Listener in 1954, the critic and writer V. S. Pritchett notes that while Charles Dickens's most obvious literary predecessors were Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, "Sterne and the romantic movement have taught [Dickens] the value of pathos, tears, changeableness, and the gestures against an unjust world" (28). Like other critics who have remarked upon Dickens's Romantic inheritance, Pritchett then moves on without much further clarification. These kinds of critical moves leave readers guessing at the connection between the most famous Victorian novelist and the Romantics, such as William Wordsworth, Mary and Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and John Keats. It is precisely this ongoing gap in the scholarship that Peter Cook attempts to fill in his recent monograph, The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens, in which Cook announces he wants "to substantiate the assertion that Dickens was indeed an important legatee of the Romantic movement" (2). Cook's monograph is an important and necessary contribution to the field that should prompt more such scholarship. Cook's text, however, is not bibliographic detective work; rather he works to find the "parallels, echoes, [and] allusions" between Dickens and the [End Page 195] Romantics (255). As Cook summarizes in his conclusion, "Charles Dickens's debt to his Romantic Period predecessors is far more extensive and significant than has previously been recognised" (255). To show this, Cook reads eight of Dickens's novels against his Romantic predecessors in chapters structured around childhood, time, progress, and alienation. The book is most successful when Cook provides exceptional close readings of Dickens paired with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Romantics. He argues persuasively, for example, that "The Romantic roots of Dickens's exploration of progress in Bleak House are clear, and his conclusions unequivocal" (163). He then provides a convincing case that Harold Skimpole, the financially ignorant but charming painter in Bleak House generally considered to be modeled on Leigh Hunt, actually represents an older Samuel Taylor Coleridge who "never finishes his poems and sketches" (163). In such moments, Cook asks us to not only reconsider Dickens but also to rethink how the images of the Romantic poets passed from one generation to the next. Of the four chapters, Cook's strongest argument is Dickens's inheritance of the Romantic view of childhood, itself a monumental intellectual break. Cook argues convincingly that Dickens inherited this view and expanded it beyond what the Romantics could have imagined, particularly in his two first-person novels. It is an impressive argument that forces readers to question how much of our discourse on childhood is influenced by Dickens's portrayals of David and Pip. Cook then connects both novels back to the Romantics, summarizing, "If Steerforth is the Byronic hero of David Copperfield, then it is Joe, the hard-working, steadfast countryman, who is the Wordsworthian hero of Great Expectations, descendant of the Leech-gatherer, the shepherd Michael and the Solitary Reaper" (67). Even in such astute observations, Cook reveals a limitation of his study: the Romantics were never a monolith with a single aesthetic or political heuristic, so finding the "parallels, echoes, [and] allusions" to them feels almost inevitable. Cook is not the first to argue for such a relationship: he cites Iain Crawford's argument that Great Expectations (1860–61) is something akin to a reimagining of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). And Jeremy Tambling, in his notes for the Penguin edition of David Copperfield, observes that David has certain parallels to the Romantics. Cook's addition to Dickens scholarship is broader. He argues that in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) Dickens begins to ask questions "around the nature of human relationships and human interaction, and the relationship between human beings and their environment, in a post-revolutionary world: the kind of questions that Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Mary Shelley had asked during the birth pangs of the political and industrial revolutions" (222). The problem with such an assertion, however, is its generality. One...

The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt by David Stewart

 Reviews e Form of Poetry in the s and s: A Period of Doubt. By D S. (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . ix+ pp. £.. ISBN –– ––. In this wide-ranging and meticulously researched book, David Stewart offers a reconsideration of ‘the time between Romanticism and Victorianism in which little happened’ (p. ). Building upon the work of Richard Cronin, James Chandler, Michael Bradshaw, Emily Rohrbach, and others, he explores, through subtle and convincing close reading, the poetry which was actually produced, published, and read in the –s by both canonical and largely forgotten or marginalized writers. He argues for a reconsideration of how we in turn read these writers, or, indeed, reframe our own inability to do so. Stewart’s thesis is that a ‘culture of doubt prompted poetic creativity of a new kind’ (p. ). He sees this creativity as marked by reflexiveness and a fascination with canon-forming in the mania for lists of ‘living poets’, balanced by a preoccupation with death, and a sense of already being dead. In a favourite and recurring word, he ‘traces’ this doubt specifically through responses to, and publication in, the annuals of the period. He identifies three kinds of poetry, or at least claims about the nature of poetry, both at the time and in recent criticism, which he argues in fact collapse into each other: a kind of transcendent aestheticism, poetry concerned with its immediate point of publication and appeal, and light verse which is both apparently superficial and yet formally sophisticated. He notes, with typical perceptiveness, of the first group: eir focus upon aestheticism as a means of reaching beyond their age is oen curiously dependent on the instantiation of that aestheticism in the form of pointedly material books available for sale, beautifully bound in fashionable bookshops. (p. ) is general argument has one particularly fascinating focus in the interest in the use of the trope of the apparition which is shared by Hemans and Beddoes, who are otherwise ‘fixed’ (p. ) as very different kinds of poet by their prospective contemporary critical champions. Of course, an irony not lost here is that many of the writers considered are grouped around the tension between those who might be firmly in our own canons and those who still tend to be excluded or are part of a special pleading—omas Moore, Landon, Hemans, Beddoes, and in a different way Clare, and even less familiar writers such as Darley, J. H Reynolds, and Praed. Although the emphasis here is on what otherwise might be considered to be late, or in some cases not even late, Romantic poets, it also suggests a reconsideration of Browning and Tennyson. Leigh Hunt is seen ‘as a model for the aesthetic’ (p. ) considerations of other writers here—underplaying perhaps the politics of the Cockney Hunt. And here, too, Byron is a key figure, if only brought into play in the Conclusion. In offering a reconsideration of ‘light verse’ and the use of the pun in particular, Stewart notes, through McGann, that we might simply not know how to read this stuff. is is a fair point but it might also be true that some of it is just superficial—as opposed MLR, .,   to Stewart’s view that superficiality is its own positive end (p. )—or, worse yet, simply bad. roughout, Stewart asks how ‘the confluence of poetry, commerce and gender’ might be ‘read securely’ (p. ) not only in this period but more widely. He speculates (another key repeated word) both about how reading took place at the time and more recently in critical accounts of the reading process offered by key figures such as McGann and Ross. at such reading is possible through close attention to detail and a sophisticated sense of competing critical and ideological frames is admirably demonstrated here. at the work examined suggests ‘poetic creativity of a new kind’ (p. ) in an absolute sense is less clear. U  W T S D P W Editors Construct the Renaissance Canon, –. By P S. (Early Modern Literature in History) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . ix+ pp.£.. ISBN ––––. is short book...

‘A voice from over the Sea’: Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, Peterloo, and the English Radical Press

Abstract Shelley’s poetic response to the Peterloo massacre, The Mask of Anarchy, was crucially informed by printed news sources relating to the momentous events in Manchester of 16 August 1819. Hitherto our knowledge of those sources has been confined to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner newspaper. This article re-examines the available evidence and argues that Shelley may well also have drawn on the accounts of Peterloo written by the radical journalist and freethinker, Richard Carlile. It traces the connections between Carlile and the Shelley circle in London during 1819 (including Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, William Godwin, and Thomas Jefferson Hogg), and identifies a number of suggestive verbal parallels between Shelley’s Mask and Carlile’s prose. But there were also important political differences between the two men; an appreciation of those differences throws new light on the Mask’s ambivalent attitude to the prospect of revolution, and Shelley’s strident advocacy of non-violent resistance to state-sponsored oppression.

The Harvard Manuscript of Keats's ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer’, Joseph Severn, Leigh Hunt, and its Transmission into Print

The recent discovery that Harvard's manuscript of ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer’ was in Joseph Severn's possession at his death questions the usual assumption that it was probably the manuscript Keats sent to Cowden Clarke. It further prompts a fresh consideration of the sonnet's manuscript circulation and Leigh Hunt's role in its transmission into print

A Missing Letter from Leigh Hunt to Byron

A Missing Letter from Leigh Hunt to Byron

Authorship of a ‘Leigh Hunt?’ Satire

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.