Leigh Hunt at the Library: A Birthday Evaluation

Happy 235th birthday to English poet, journalist, and literary critic Leigh Hunt, born this day in 1784! Though not often remembered for his own writings, Hunt had a major influence on British literature of the 19th century. Hunt introduced the wider public to the Romantic poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley by publishing an essay titled "Young Poets" in The Examiner, a weekly literary newspaper he edited with his brother John, in December 1816. In the 1830s and 1840s, Hunt developed important friendships with Victorian writers like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Carlyle. Some remarkable materials from the New York Public Library's Berg and Pforzheimer Collections highlight Hunt's many literary relationships.

The first issue of The Examiner appeared in 1808. Hunt’s liberal opinions aroused so much hostility among supporters of King George III and opponents of reform that between 1808 and 1812 the government made three unsuccessful attempts to prosecute and silence The Examiner. One of these failed attempts at censorship deserves mention. Hunt was prosecuted for an 1810 article titled “One thousand lashes!!,” which condemned military flogging (the original printing, now scarce, is available in the Pforzheimer Collection). After Hunt's acquittal, Percy Bysshe Shelley, then an undergraduate at Oxford, was moved to introduce himself with a note of “sincerest congratulations” on a “triumph so highly to be prized by men of liberality.”

On May 5, 1816, about one year after Hunt was released from Horsemonger Lane Gaol for publishing a libelous article about the Prince Regent (later George IV), The Examiner published "To Solitude," Keats's first poem to appear in print. The Examiner continued to publish the work of Keats and Shelley in the ensuing years, including Keats's "On first looking into Chapman's Homer" (December 1, 1816) and two of Shelley's better-known poems: "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (January 19, 1817) and "Ozymandias" (January 11, 1818).

Even though mutual exposure in The Examiner never led to a more substantial relationship between Keats and Shelley, Shelley quickly became Hunt’s trusted friend and benefactor. In 1821, Shelley, having exiled himself in Italy, convinced Hunt to move to Italy too, along with his large family. Shelley helped pay for the move, but only a week after the friends were reunited in Leghorn, Shelley drowned in a boating accident. With only lukewarm support, The Liberal, a new journal founded in Pisa by Shelley, Hunt, and Lord Byron, folded after only four issues.

After Shelley’s death, Hunt began to mentor the younger generation of emerging English writers, among them Dickens and Thackeray. In an undated letter inserted in Hunt’s own copy of the Dickens classic Oliver Twist (1838)—now in the Library’s Berg Collection—Dickens writes: "I send you herewith one of the earliest copies of Oliver Twist ... I should like to have a note from you when you have skimmed over such part of Oliver as it new to you." In another letter in the Berg Collection, Thackeray welcomes Hunt’s critique of his acclaimed novel Vanity Fair (1847-48). Regarding a particularly emotional scene (where Amelia Sedley gives her son George into the care of his paternal grandfather and aunt), Thackeray begs: "tell me if there isn’t a little delicate fiddle-playing in the last chapter...."

Although he wished to be one of the Romantic movement’s great poets, at the time of his death Hunt’s poetry was not widely read, save his most anthologized poem “Jenny Kiss’d Me” (1838), the manuscript of which is preserved in the Pforzheimer Collection. Hunt’s 1850 Autobiography, however, remains an important primary source for the study of late Romanticism. The Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle called it “an excellent good book, by far the best of the autobiographic kind I can remember to have read in the English language.” The Berg Collection holds the very copy of Hunt’s Autobiography that he presented “with respect and love” to Carlyle.

Hunt's friendship with Carlyle is also on display in the Pforzhiemer Collection in the form of its plaster bust of Shelley, viewable through the glass door to the Collection's reading room. The bust was sculpted by Hunt's wife, Marianne, from memory, 14 years after the poet's death. The Pforzhiemer copy of the bust (one of only a few that remain) was given to Carlyle by the Hunts in 1836. The remains of Hunt's rhyming presentation inscription to Carlyle—now mostly worn away—are written on the lower right base of the bust: "Coul[d] . . . [?] . . . you would have seen a smile / . . . [?] . . . [C]arlyle. / L. H."

See here for a complete listing of the nearly 500 Leigh Hunt manuscripts available in the Pforzheimer and Berg Collections.

For more on Hunt's life see recent biographies by Nicholas Roe and Anthony Holden.