Born on 19 October 1784 to British loyalists who moved back to England owing to their political opinions, Leigh Hunt was the youngest of nine children, and his parents’ political and social views coloured his development as a poet, literary critic, and journalist. Hunt’s father, Isaac, a Church of England minister, was frequently in debt, and Hunt grew up sickly and nervous. However, he began school at Christ’s Hospital, London (Coleridge and Lamb had also attended) as a charity boy, and his fascination with mythology and fine arts led him to begin writing poetry, publishing his first original collection, Juvenilia, in 1801. He met his wife‐to‐be, Marianne Kent, in 1802 (they married in July 1809) and steadily continued to publish poetry in journals such as the Morning Chronicle, while also working as a clerk to his brother Stephen, a lawyer, for a spell in 1803, and from 1805 to 1808 in the War Office. However, his essays on the theatre, written from 1805, reveal Hunt’s critical acumen and campaigning stance, and they were later collected as Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (published early 1808). ‘This book’, writes Nicholas Roe, ‘has not received the attention it deserves as a formative statement of Romantic ideas of drama and theatre’,1 but it was with the immensely popular weekly newspaper, The Examiner, set up with his brother John in 1808, that Leigh Hunt made his name.
Hunt and his brother set themselves up in opposition to the abuses of power by the monarchy and the increasingly repressive government and its protracted war against Napoleon. They were successfully defended by Henry Brougham against three prosecution attempts between 1808 and 1812, but finally the government won, sentencing the Hunts to two years in prison and a hefty fine for libel in relation to Leigh Hunt’s article of 22 March 1812 which denounced the Prince Regent. Attracting sympathy from many quarters, including Shelley, Hazlitt, and Haydon, Hunt was allowed a great deal of liberty at Surrey Gaol, permitted by his gaoler to live with his family and receive visitors until 10 p.m., and to furnish his cell with luxurious fittings and his books. He and John continued to publish their paper from prison, and Hunt also continued to pursue his poetic ambitions. Once released in February 1815, Hunt completed The Story of Rimini and published his masque, The Descent of Liberty, which he had written while in prison. The Story of Rimini was appraised by Shelley as housing a story of ‘a very uncommon & irresistible character, – tho it appeared to me that you have subjected yourself to some rules in the composition which fetter your genius’,2 a view suggestive of Hunt’s distinctive poetics which emphasized a jaunty liberality and freedom from Augustan decorum. Such poetics incited the rage of John Gibson Lockhart in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a Tory publication, and Lockhart repeatedly published attacks on Hunt and his ‘Cockney School’.
Shelley showed warm affection for Hunt and made efforts to help his friend and literary patron, who was often in financial distress. It was Keats for whom Hunt’s influence would be the most crucial to his poetic development. Though Keats later repudiated his mentor’s assistance, Hunt made a lasting intervention in Keats’s poetic development, one that Shelley would note in his elegy for Keats, Adonais. Foliage, published in 1818, was an ambitious collection that sought to create a poetic coterie in its sonnets addressed to Shelley and Keats. A three‐volume Poetical Works (1819) and four issues of the Literary Pocket‐Book, or, Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art (1819–22) showed Hunt fashioning himself as a literary rather than political writer. The Examiner had become gradually more literary than political on Hunt’s release from prison, and Hazlitt and Hunt collaborated on a series of ‘Round Table’ articles that would be reprinted in 1817 as a collection of essays. After repeated invitations from Shelley, the Hunts relocated to Italy on 15 November 1821, and they began to publish The Liberal, which contained work by Byron, Hunt, and Hazlitt. However, Shelley’s death in July 1822 divided the group, with Byron moving to Greece and Mary Shelley going back to England. The Hunts were left in Florence until they returned to England in 1825. In the later decades of his life, Hunt remained an active writer, penning many works, including his grief‐stricken Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries (1828) and his well‐judged Imagination and Fancy (1844), which stand as two of his most important achievements. Leigh Hunt, though hardly the most widely read poet of the Romantic period, is one of its central figures, uniting the disparate personages of Hazlitt, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, amongst others.
Nicholas Roe, ‘Hunt, (James Henry) Leigh (1784–1859)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, October 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14195, accessed 6 September 2015]; Duncan Wu, ‘James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784–1859)’, in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th edn (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), pp. 816–19.