Leigh Hunt Research Articles

Three Unpublished Songs by Charles Lamb for Mary Shelley

Inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's tears on hearing a sad song, Charles Lamb composed three songs for her and sent them to his muse the next day with the injunction that she not offended. (1) Though Lamb did not date the songs, the watermark, J GREEN & SON / 1833 on the songs' bifolium reveals that they could not have been written before 1833, the year before Lamb's death on 27 December 1834. (2) Charles and Mary Lamb first met the young Mary Shelley when they became friends with her father, William Godwin, in 1800 (Marrs, 1, 27n, 185-6). Beyond family friendship, the Lambs played an significant role in her early education through their highly influential books for children, including Tales from Shakespear (1807) and Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808), published by M.J. Godwin and Co., William and MaryJane Godwins' Juvenile Library. Mary Shelley expressed her friendship and her admiration for the Lambs in various references to them in her letters (e.g., 1, 393). In addition, she also praised Charles Lamb's works in her professional writing, beginning with Frankenstein, in which she cited his 1798 poem, Old Familiar Faces (1, 31). In her 1823 essay Giovanni Villani she commented: I cannot help here alluding to the papers of 'Elia,' which have lately appeared in a periodical publication. When collected together, they must rank among the most beautiful and highly valued specimens of the kind of writing spoken of in the text (Liberal, 4, 281-97). In her 1830 Blackwood's review of her father's novel Cloudesley, she wrote: beautiful tale of Rosamond Gray, by Charles Lamb, occurs to us as the most perfect specimen of the species of writing to which we allude (XXVII [May], 711-16). The Lambs' letters indicate a mutual admiration and friendship for Mary Shelley. They also invited her to their parties, where she met a number of important figures in her life, among them the actor/playwright John Howard Payne and the publisher Edward Moxon. Charles Lamb demonstrated his admiration professionally as well. His biographer, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, remarked that Lamb made some amends for his indifference to Shelley, by his admiration of Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, which he thought the most extraordinary realisation of the idea of a being out of nature which had ever been affected (Lucas, 1, 488). Lamb also recommended Mary Shelley as an author to John Taylor and James Augustus Hessey, proprietors of the London Magazine, in September 1823 (Letters, 1, 394). Lamb's three songs, another token of his regard, are comparable to occasional verses he wrote to friends throughout his life, including Fanny Kelley, Samuel Rogers, and Barry Cornwall (Bryan Waller Procter). Perhaps his best known verse in this genre was addressed to Leigh Hunt's eldest child, Thornton Hunt, To T. L. H. a child (Examiner 1815; Shelley Journal, 1, 158-9). In Lamb's comments on his songs for Mary Shelley, he played his own critic through the kind of punning jokes that he abundantly incorporated in his personal and professional communications. Given the context, the A.S.S. below suggests the letters may stand for Author of Sentimental Songs. His Dogear appears to be a reference to his well-known habit of bending down the corners of book-pages, his own and those belonging to friends, as reminders. The following three songs, Pity's Tear, Beauty's Tear, and A Mother's Tear, would therefore dogear a party that Charles Lamb and Mary Shelley had both attended, as well as their genial and enduring friendship. …

William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt: The Continuing Dialogue (review)

William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt: The Continuing Dialogue (review)

"Cain": Lord Byron's Sincerity

BYRON'S 1821 CAIN: A MYSTERY ASKS SOME OBVIOUS AND IMPORTANT questions. At least, they are obvious and important if one takes the book of Genesis literally, as some of his readers then did, and a few still do. Why are the children of Adam and Eve condemned to die for sins they didn't commit? Wouldn't they have resented that? If Adam and Eve were the first who could their sons marry except their own sisters? (Was that all right, then? Why isn't it now?) Why did God reject Cain's offering? Why does God like animals being killed for sacrifice anyway? And was it really necessary for everybody to suffer, when God could prevent it? Why should knowledge be forbidden, really? It is possible to imagine, that is, that such questions might be disarming, or even liberating, for certain readers, confronting as they do gnawing problems these readers have been unable or unwilling ever to put into words. Such readers are not offended, exactly. Byron, for them, is a surrogate, an ally, almost a priest of a kind, mediating their experience of the increasingly troubling mysteries of their sacred book. (1) But for a range of fairly obvious reasons, amongst them embarrassment and the very inarticulateness that Byron was assuaging, these readers tend to be fairly quiet. To believers with a somewhat more figurative idea of their Bible, however, to be this obvious is to be naive, irksomely or suspiciously so. In a child, such queries might be endearing or irritating. In an intellectual-especially the author of such poems as Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement--one suspects irony, sarcasm, disingenuousness. Or a lapse into (or revelation of) culpable stupidity. From publication to the present the poem has often been characterized, by the relatively sophisticated, as a crude or wicked or calculating provocation, a blundering frontal assault on orthodoxy (2) or a mischievous taunt at belief with nothing behind it other than a rather frivolous impulse to be offensive. (3) These readers are considerably more voluble. They feel they can see through Byron's game. They are the ones--they feel--to whom offense is really intended. (Although this too is different from being offended, exactly.) These, at any rate, are two possibilities broadly described. The complexity of the poem's relationship with its doctrinally and otherwise plural audience does not even begin to end here, though. Audiences in any kind of pluralistic field, for example, are deeply interested in how other audiences are being addressed, and with what effect. The spokesmen of the religious establishment certainly worried that Byron was indeed usurping their own priestly function; as Peter T. Murphy notes, most reviewers feared not for themselves but for the always-vulnerable people, (4) and the many pulpit denunciations (5) suggest an attempt on the part of the parsons to seize back their role, a project perhaps shared by more recent critics who speak contemptuously of Byron's incapacity to deal with the theological and philosophical issues he raises. This objection--that Byron was crude, unequal to the task, and that his simplifications might seduce the ignorant and embarrass or appall the wise--in fact precedes and may be more important than any criticisms of Cain's dogmatic content. It was and still is unclear whether that content really did constitute a kind of theodicy-in-reverse. Sophisticated readers continued to quibble, deep into the twentieth century, about whether the poem is pious or not, orthodox or otherwise. (6) Certainly for liberals or atheists the poem's satisfactions would not arise from any priestly mediation. For them too the imagined discomfiture of enemies or the enlightenment of the darkling masses are what matter, not the posing of personally meaningful or troubling questions. The Shelleys, Leigh Hunt and others produced immediate and hyperbolic praise that now sounds suspiciously glib. …

A Romantic Technologist and Britain's Little Black Boys

On a warm autumn day in 1797, an expatriate Englishman, raised in America, was sweating. It was not the weather making Count Rumford so hot but the progress of an experiment he was conducting at the Bavarian arsenal. On his orders, two horses were turning a drill connected by gears to a newly cast metal cylinder. Rumford, it would have seemed to a casual onlooker, was simply supervising the production of cannon for use against the armies of revolutionary France. The onlooker would have been wrong, for Rumford's method differed from the standard process of cannon boring. Rumford had deliberately left the drill-bit blunt and encased the barrel in a tank of water. His apparatus was dedicated not to rearmament but to enlightenment--he was aiming not at France's soldiers but its scientists. (1) For several years, Rumford had been devising experiments to test the nature of heat, a subject of considerable dispute among scientists. According to Lavoisier, the eminent French chemist, heat was a subtle fluid (caloric) squeezed out of a body when mechanically acted upon. Compressing a gas pushed caloric out of it, giving off heat. Hammering an iron bar knocked caloric out of it by percussion; rubbing metals together produced heat by squeezing caloric from their surfaces. Lavoisier supposed heat to be a material that drained out of one body into another. Rumford was convinced that Lavoisier's supposition is quite unnecessary, and he set his horses to work to prove it (qtd. Brown 195). The gun barrel and the blunt drill would produce intense heat by friction. He would measure it by recording how long it took to boil the water in which the barrel was immersed. If heat really was a fluid, then over time the quantity present inside the barrel would begin to run out. Rumford put his horses and his thermometer into action and found that, however long they labored at the mill, the time taken to boil the water was the same. Far from running out, the heat produced by the rubbing of drill and barrel evidently to be inexhaustible. Heat, he concluded, cannot possibly be a material substance (qtd. Brown 198). Lavoisier was wrong; heat was no caloric fluid but a form of MOTION. On 25th January 1798 Rumford's findings were read to Britain's Royal Society and then published. Soon his work had been reported in Germany, Switzerland and France and Rumford had become the champion of anti-caloric scientists all over Europe. By the 1840s, it was accepted that heat was a form of energy or work, and Rumford was hailed as the great scientist who first demonstrated the equivalence of heat to work. While in Rumford's experiment two horses did the work to make the heat, on the other side of Europe, single boys as young as five labored to make others warm. As apprentice chimney sweeps--climbing boys--many were worse off than Rumford's ponies, for, as Leigh Hunt noted, they were Britain's own little boys--as much slaves as were the children on the West Indian sugar plantations: The progress of the poor child in sweeping the chimney closely engrossed her [a West Indian servant's] attention, and when she saw him return from his sooty incarceration, she addressed him with a feeling that did honour to her material tenderness, saying, 'child! come yaw, child,' (and without waiting any reply, and putting a sixpence into his hand;) 'Who you mammy? You hab daddy, too? Wha dem be, da la you go no chimney for?' and moistening her finger at her lips, began to rub the poor child's cheek, to ascertain, what yet appeared doubtful to her, whether he was really a buccara, (white.) I saw this woman some time after in the West Indies; and it was a congratulation to her everafter, that her 'children were not born to be sweeps.' (Hone I, 591) The rich and famous scientist and Britain's black slaves seem worlds apart. Rumford spanned Europe; climbing boys were a specifically English phenomenon. …

Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure. Ayumi Mizukoshi.William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt: The Continuing Dialogue. Payson G. Gates and edited by Eleanor M. Gates.

Previous articleNext article No AccessKeats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure. Ayumi Mizukoshi. William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt: The Continuing Dialogue. Payson G. Gates and edited by Eleanor M. Gates.John KandlJohn Kandl Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 32, Number 4Fall 2001 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044887 Views: 2Total views on this site © 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

John Keats, Barry Cornwall, and Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket-Book

John Keats, Barry Cornwall, and Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket-Book

Leigh Hunt's “Canterbury Tale”

Leigh Hunt's “Canterbury Tale”

Leigh Hunt's Melancholia and English Musical Theater

Leigh Hunt's Melancholia and English Musical Theater

Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters

Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters

A Revaluation of Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries

A Revaluation of Leigh Hunt's <i>Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries</i>

Leigh Hunt: a life in letters, together with some correspondence of William Hazlitt

Leigh Hunt: a life in letters, together with some correspondence of William Hazlitt

An Echo of Clarke's Address in Shelley'sDefence?

This essay finds an echo of a pamphlet written by Charles Cowden Clarke, An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer who Touched upon Mr. Leigh Hunt's "Story of Rimini" (1816), in Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry (1821). The discovery clarifies Shelley's involvement in a philologically informed Romantic project that sought to re-locate 'genuine', emphatic diction in modern poetry and thus resist inherited neoclassical literary values.

CULTURAL STUDIES, VICTORIAN STUDIES, AND FORMALISM

VICTORIAN STUDIES, in its longstanding resistance to the formalist study of Victorian literature, has to an extent been re-enacting the anxiety of mid-Victorian poets and novelists about being entrapped in a world of art. That anxiety notoriously defined the Victorian resistance to their Romantic forebears (think of Tennyson’s and Arnold’s well-documented, ambiguous attitudes toward Wordsworth and Keats or even Dickens’s satire of Leigh Hunt as Skimpole in Bleak House). And, predictably enough, it led to the backlash of the late-century aestheticism. If one positions the anti-formalism of the various genres of historicism and cultural studies now current in the study of Victorian literature as current versions of that Victorian anxiety at being hermetically enclosed in beautiful but empty forms, then surely an aestheticist and formalist backlash is more than overdue. And, rather than taking an analytical or neutrally critical response to this flux and reflux, I intend to espouse just such a backlash. If backlash implies partialness, the potential partiality of formalism is, I think, one of its less recognized values. Indeed, I will argue, a return to a consideration of aesthetic form may, in its recognition of its own limits, return a genuine interdisciplinarity to Victorian studies, if one intends by interdisciplinary studies not the work of literary scholars treating non-literary texts, but the participation of scholars from different disciplines with different and possibly conflicting grounding questions, concerns and modes of analysis in the study of the same subject matter.

“The wit in the dungeon”: Leigh Hunt and the insolent politics of cockney coteries

(1999). “The wit in the dungeon”: Leigh Hunt and the insolent politics of cockney coteries. European Romantic Review: Vol. 10, No. 1-4, pp. 242-253.

'The Wit in the Dungeon': Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries

(1999). “The wit in the dungeon”: Leigh Hunt and the insolent politics of cockney coteries. European Romantic Review: Vol. 10, No. 1-4, pp. 242-253.

Leigh Hunt's Cockney School: The Lakers' 'Other'

Leigh Hunt's Cockney School: The Lakers' 'Other'

Compassion for Animals and Radical Politics: Coleridge's "To a Young Ass"

Compassion for Animals and Radical Politics: Coleridge’s “To a Young Ass” David Perkins I In the autumn of 1794 Coleridge befriended a young ass that grazed the grass of Jesus College. 1 He would pet it and feed it bread, and when he appeared, the little creature would move toward him “askingly” (l. 23). Doubtless it activated the instinctively protective response that human beings have to mammalian young of whatever species. Moreover, Coleridge was moved, at least subliminally, by stories in high and popular culture that made the ass an emblem of spiritual merit, of a patience, humility, lowliness, and suffering that find favor in heaven. 2 He shared the compassion for animals of most middle-class intellectuals in the later eighteenth century. A few years later he mentioned in a notebook the pain he felt “from having cursed a gnat that was singing about my Head.” 3 Moreover, Coleridge was at this time a radical in politics, and was planning to found a utopian community or Pantisocracy in Pennsylvania. The ass’s mother was a prisoner, tethered to a log, and had eaten all the grass it could reach while plenty waved just beyond her chain. Asses were the work animals of the poor and shared their misery, so it was reasonable for Coleridge to fear that the ass’s master also lived “Half famish’d in a land of Luxury!” (l. 22). In early versions of the poem, the last line trumpeted Coleridge’s republican sentiments in the phrase a “scoundrel Monarch’s Breast.” 4 The words were restrained in comparison with some of Coleridge’s letters at this time: “The Cockatrice is emblematic of Monarchy . . . When Serpents sting, the only Remedy is—to kill the Serpent, and besmear the Wound with the Fat.” 5 “I hail thee Brother”: all Coleridge’s feelings I’ve mentioned converged in this notorious salutation addressed in the poem to the young ass (l. 26). Of all the English poems that sympathize with animals, this has been thought the most extreme. 6 The term “brother” encoded the Revolutionary ideal—liberté, égalité, fraternité. As a salutation, it replaced the society of politeness and hierarchy with one of warmly fraternal mutuality. A Mr. and Mrs. Scott extended their compliments to Coleridge. “Compliments!” cried Coleridge in 1794, “Cold aristocratic Inanities!—I abjure their nothingness. If there be any whom I deem [End Page 929] worthy of remembrance—I am their Brother. I call even my Cat Sister in the Fraternity of the universal Nature.” 7 Thus sympathy with animals and radical politics were intertwined in Coleridge’s mind. One might argue that Coleridge’s political enthusiasm overflowed into a metaphysical intuition or religious sentiment of the unity of all life. Or, starting with the latter belief, we might say that it entailed social leveling, the Revolutionary equality and fraternity among human beings. As Coleridge wrote in “The Eolian Harp” (though not until after 1796), the feeling of “one Life within us and abroad” makes it “impossible / Not to love all things” (ll. 26, 30–31). “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has now been interpreted so much and variously that it has reached classic omnisignificance. 8 But if one agrees with Leigh Hunt and many other readers that the “Rime” teaches “sympathy for all,” the poem has implications for human politics and social arrangements, even though it does not foreground these topics. 9 Depending on how it was interpreted, the concept of one life might have seemed somewhat unorthodox and pantheistic in Coleridge’s time, but sentiments of loving sympathy with all creatures had the strongest religious sanctions. These were derived from the famous argument from design, which proved the existence, intelligence, and benevolence of God from evidences of His care, as He fashioned the world, for the successful existence of all its inhabitants. According to Thomas Young, in his 1798 An Essay on Humanity to Animals, the “Rights of Animals” can be “deduced from the Light of Nature.” We see that animals feel pleasure and pain and that the natural environment of each species gratifies its senses. (Edward A. Kendall even suggested that animals have greater enjoyment than man of some natural beauties...

Print politics: the press and radical opposition in early nineteenth-century England

Print Politics was the first literary study of the culture of the popular radical movement for parliamentary reform in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The period was characterized by popular agitation and repressive political measures including trials for seditious and blasphemous libel. Kevin Gilmartin explores the styles and strategies of radical opposition in the periodical press, and in the public culture of the time. He argues that writers and editors including William Cobbett, T. J. Wooler, Richard Carlile, John Wade, and Leigh Hunt committed themselves to a complex, flexible, and often contradictory project of independent political opposition. They sought to maintain a political resistance uncompromised by the influence of a corrupt 'system', even while addressing and imitating its practices to further their oppositional ends.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy By RODNEY EDGECOMBE STENNING Pp 276Madison, Teaneck Fairley Dickinson University Press, London and Toronto Associated University Presses, 1994 £30 JOHN BARNARD JOHN BARNARD University of Leeds Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XLVIII, Issue 191, August 1997, Pages 409–410, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLVIII.191.409 Published: 01 August 1997

Charles Cowden Clarke and the Leigh Hunt Circle 1812–1818

The relationship between Keats and Charles Cowden Clarke, first his teacher and later his friend, was formative. It was particularly important in the years when Keats was apprenticed to Thomas Hammond in Edmonton between leaving Enfield School in summer 1811 and starting his medical studies in London in October 1815. Cowden Clarke's recollections of this period, written much later, are the main, indeed, apart from the poems, virtually the only evidence for Keats's biography in these years. Clarke was also responsible for Keats's introduction to Leigh Hunt in autumn 1816 and remained friendly with both. The Novello-Cowden Clarke Collection, in the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds, contains a significant body of either partially published, or wholly unpublished, material which adds to our knowledge of Clarke and his role in the Leigh Hunt circle between 1812 and 1818. One item, Clarke's substantial Commonplace Book, mainly filled in between 1810 and 1814, has been the subject of two essays,1 and was featured in the bicentenary Keats exhibition at Dove Cottage in summer 1995. Additional material in the Collection gives further information about Clarke's childhood, his early acquaintance with Charles Oilier, and, most importantly, his relationship with Leigh Hunt. The largest body of evidence is provided by the series of letters between Hunt and Clarke from July 1813 until December 1818 used by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke in the preparation of Recollections of Writers (1878). This early part of the life-long correspondence between Hunt and Clarke gives details of the two men's relationship during Keats's life. Full