James Leigh Hunt was born in Southgate on 19 October 1784 and died in Putney on 28 August 1859. He was named after James Henry Leigh, nephew of the 3rd Duke of Chandos, to whom his father, Isaac Hunt, a popular preacher, was a tutor.
Following eight years as a pupil at Christ’s Hospital School in the City of London, and the publication of his Juvenilia, which his father saw through four editions, Leigh Hunt began a life-time career of journalism in 1805, making his precocious mark as a writer of theatrical criticism in The News, edited by his brother, John. In 1808, the brothers launched their best known weekly paper, The Examiner, with an editorial stance of liberal reform.
A year later, Hunt married Marianne Kent. Seven of their eleven children reached adulthood. Of these, the eldest, Thornton, published a collection of his father’s letters after his death. The youngest, Vincent, Leigh Hunt’s favourite, died seven years before his father at the age of thirty-one.
In 1813 and for the next two years, Hunt and his brother were obliged to edit The Examiner from separate gaols and to pay fines of £500 each for Hunt’s alleged libel upon the Prince Regent. Hunt’s wife and baby daughter were permitted to join him in Surrey gaol, where he seems to have been comfortably accommodated with wallpaper of his own choosing, his piano, and unlimited visits from admirers and friends, including Byron, Thomas Moore, Hazlitt and Lamb. Before his release he had written the greater part of his longest poem, The Story of Rimini, and a masque celebrating the downfall of Napoleon, Descent of Liberty.
The next three years were spent in Hampstead, where Hunt established his friendship with Shelley and Keats, commending their poetry to readers of The Examiner in 1816. In 1819, Hunt wrote a further appreciation of Keats’s poetry for The Indicator, a weekly that Hunt sustained for a year and a half. In the same year, Shelley, of all Hunt’s friends the most admired, dedicated The Cenci to him.
By 1821, the year in which Shelley and Byron invited him to Italy to launch a quarterly magazine, Hunt’s reputation was at its peak amongst his own contemporaries, as poet, essayist, writer of political journalism, biographical sketches and literary criticism. His concern then, as throughout his career, was to refine the literary tastes of his readers, to cultivate their sensibilities and to extend their social sympathies. After a much delayed sea voyage, requiring Hunt and his family to winter in Plymouth, Hunt reached Leghorn on 1 July 1822, a week before Shelley was drowned.
The proposed quarterly, The Liberal, survived for four issues only. Relations between Hunt and Byron cooled and, after residing in Florence, in 1825 Hunt brought his family back to England and a series of lodgings in London. Eventually they settled in Upper Cheyne Row, Chelsea, where they were neighbours and friends of Thomas and Jane Carlyle from 1833 to 1840.
These were years of indigence and domestic disorder. Hunt was not in the best of health and his reputation had suffered through the publication of a candid appraisal of Byron, based on personal experience, in Lord Byron and his Contemporaries. Twenty years later, he was to stand by his myth-undermining observations, though conceding that their publication had been ill-timed.
Hunt’s Collected Poems were published in 1832 and in 1844, the year in which he published his most substantial works of literary criticism, Imagination and Fancy and the essay, What is Poetry? By then he was almost at the end of his versatile though not very distinguished career as a poet. He had shown himself to be a modest innovator in narrative style with a commentator’s keen eye for detail, a vigorous slapdash writer of burlesque and satire, a competent sonneteer, an easy exponent of conversational epistolary verse and an able translator of Greek, Roman, Italian and French poetry. In Rossetti’s judgement, he was ‘the greatest translator England had produced’ . In addition, he had turned his hand to playwriting with A Legend of Florence, a verse drama staged with success at Covent Garden in 1840 and revived ten years later at Sadlers Wells and, by royal command, at Windsor Castle. His late comedy, Lover’s Amazements, was performed at the Lyceum in 1858, and seemed set for success, but the theatre went bankrupt.
In 1847 Hunt’s domestic situation was relieved financially by the award of a pension of £200 a year, initiated by Lord John Russell, and the receipt of £440 raised by Charles Dickens and other friends, the profits of two public performances of Ben Jonson’s Everyman in his Humour.
In prose, Hunt’s later years were given over largely to his Autobiography (1850) and The Religion of the Heart (1853), the enlargement of earlier work to form a devotional handbook, which was widely read and valued. The Autobiography, Hunt’s best known prose work, is an engagingly narrated memoir, the greater proportion of it dwelling upon his life prior to 1825.
The Hunts came to the last of their numerous residences in London — Cornwall Road, Hammersmith — in 1853, the year in which Vincent Hunt died and in which Hunt suffered the social embarrassment of identification with Henry Skimpole in Dickens’s Bleak House. The breach was healed privately and three months after Hunt’s death, Dickens made a public denial of intent in an article entitled Leigh Hunt: A Remonstrance. Marianne, who had been bedridden throughout her years in Hammersmith, died two years before her husband. During these last years, Hunt shared his home with two of his daughters and grandchildren. In 1859, he died peacefully in a friend’s house in Putney at the age of seventy-five.
Though his talents were not of the highest order and were too widely dispersed, Hunt’s unflagging commitment to humane social values and to the sharing of his literary insights and enthusiasms with receptive companions merit him the title of Ambassador Extraordinary of Literature during the first half of the nineteenth century. He outlived all the poets and essayists of his generation who, in reputation and distinctiveness, over-shadowed him: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt, Lamb. But all owed a debt to his advocacy and editorial facility, as indeed did the leading poets of the next generation, Tennyson and Browning. When, if ever, his letters are collected and published, the range of his interests and the warmth of his friendships will be more fully appreciated.
While writing for The Indicator, Hunt admitted: ‘Hard is it for one who has grown up in the hope of being a poet, to confess that the best things he has done have been written in prose.’ A modest conclusion and a sound one, though there is much pleasure to be had from his diverse poems. As for ‘the best things’ in his prose, not the least is his ready ability to share with his readers this enjoyment of literature and the pleasures of being alive. His aims were well summarized by his son, Thornton: ‘To promote the happiness of his kind, to minister to the more educated appreciation of order and beauty, to open more widely the door of the library, and more widely the window of the library looking put upon nature, — these were the purposes that guided his studies and animated his labour to the very last.’
In literature, he holds a unique if not outstanding place as poet, Critic, translator, journalist, essayist, anthologist and mediator to his reading public of literary values, enthusiasms and taste.